This Week

I have testing fatigue

You may already recognize this from your's or a family member's health tests. It's the heart monitor I wore for the last week. It was adhered to my chest and had to stay on 24/7. It also could not get wet, so no showers, and I had to be especially careful when bathing not to splash it. I took very shallow and brief baths. It goes without saying, that some parts of me didn't get terribly clean for the week, as this little device had to stay dry and couldn't be moved. I got to take it off late yesterday. So today I got the first proper bath in a week. Although I'm growing weary of all of these tests, I do know that I'm getting closer to answers and a diagnosis.

I washed all of the dirty bags today 

The jar where we put dirty bags was full, and the box where we keep the dried clean bags was empty. A good time to wash them all. And now they're hanging to dry on the clothes drying rack.

Free pile in front of a store

I forgot to show these to you last month. These stones were on a free table in front of a plant store that was moving to another town. I also picked up some free plant food, and my daughter got 2 free, hand-thrown mugs. I love these carved stones. Right now they're on my desk holding down to-do papers. I see them every day.

Turning cold here

The weather turned especially cold this afternoon. I went walking in the morning and wasn't particularly cold. But by the time I retrieved our mail, it was so cold outside. I guess we're now into the cold weather season for my area and won't see really warm days for months.

How crazy is this? Roses are blooming while the birch tree has lost nearly all of its leaves. Its yellow leaves carpet the ground and walkway up to the front door. Looks like someone will need to get out the leaf blower this week. With this cold weather, I don't  imagine the roses will hang around too much longer.

Yay! Both daughters are home again

One daughter was dog-sitting for 9 days and came home today. Yay! We did get to see her during that period. We did Zoom dinners several nights, she also came by to pick up needed things a couple of times, and she came over for dinner and movie night last Friday. One of the days, I drove her back and got to pet the dog -- sweet doggie. Animals may be in our future at our own house, I predict.

Easy Day

Today was my easy day, so I made an easy scratch dinner (yes, there are such things). I made tomato soup from tomato paste, herbs, onion, garlic, and a bit of kale, plus water and salt and served it with herb and Parmesan focaccia. It was delicious, and I was able to make it all in advance so I could take it easy in the late afternoon. When you're going through a difficult period, I think you need to create an easy day in your schedule. Having a lighter day refreshes us, so we have the strength and stamina for the tough days to come.

Tomorrow, we're going shopping for pumpkins and trick-or-treat goodies. Looking forward to that!

What's been happening in your week?

A Lesson From Growing Potatoes

I finished digging all of the potatoes over this past weekend. 

I planted 3 varieties of potatoes in 2 beds last spring, purple fingerling (seed saved from last year's crop -- I don't recall the variety name), Yukon Gold, and Red Norland.  I gave the different potato varieties similar treatment, light, water, soil amendments. I was hoping for a lot of the red and yellow potatoes. As it turned out, the purple fingerling ones out-performed the other two by a huge margin. All of the red and yellow ones fit into 1 box, while the purple potatoes took up 3 similar-sized boxes.

What lesson did I learn from my experience? Well, it isn't that purple fingerling potatoes will out-perform all other varieties for all people. In fact, where you live, perhaps the Yukon Golds would be the prolific potatoes, or the Red Norlands, or some other variety. The lesson I learned is that if a variety doesn't pan out, I should try a different variety next time, or change the soil conditions, or change my watering schedule. By changing things up, I can often find what works for my situation. If I had only planted Yukon Golds this past season, I might have thought potatoes just don't grow well in my area. In my opinion on gardening, it's always worth trying again with a change in variety or controllable conditions. Gardening is something of an experiment every year. Some experiments succeed and some fail. Hopefully for those of us gardeners, more of our gardening experiments succeed than fail. In this case, I learned that those purple fingerling potatoes will likely do better for me than some of the other popular varieties.

Many of you don't keep gardens, or if you do, don't bother growing potatoes. Why would any of this matter then to you? Trying again but changing conditions is a lesson that can be applied to many endeavors. It's by trying and tweaking how we approach a task that often leads us to success. And even if we find out we just can't grow potatoes, we will know that we did try as many ways and varieties as was reasonable.

I remember my first few pie crusts. Those things were tough as cardboard. I didn't give up, however. We had a yard full of fruit trees to utilize in the rental in which we were living. I searched out and tried several different pie pastry recipes until I landed on one that worked for my mediocre pie-baking skills at the time. 

Another example comes from when I went to repaint all of the rooms in our house when we first moved in. For doing my first room, I bought the cheapest brush at the store. After all, I was painting the interior myself to save money. I didn't realize some better brushes would make the job not only look better, but the paint would go on the walls more smoothly, making my job easier. When I finished the walls in that room, I headed back to Home Base (our Home Depot-type store at the time) to buy paint for the trim. The paint guy chatted with me for a while, uncovering that this was my first "big" paint job. I told him all about the troubles I'd had, and asked for tips on how to make the next room go more smoothly.  His first question was about the brush I was using. I showed it to him on the rack. He informed me that that grade of brush was really best for staining fences. He got me set up with a couple of better brushes. He was right -- making this one change made the paint go on more smoothly and the end result was a better look. Tweaking that one thing, the tool I was using, made all the difference. Had I not had that conversation, I might have thought I just wasn't cut out for house painting.

So, that's my lesson with this tale of potatoes, pie crust, and painting. I've learned that instead of giving up, changing one or two elements of a project can mean I have success the next time around. With gardening, I will always be tweaking what and how I plant and grow. I don't think there will ever be an end to gardening lessons for me.

As far as how many pounds of potatoes we harvested this year -- it looks like our harvest was around 32 pounds in total. It's not as much as I had hoped, but still enough for a few months for my family. 

Have you had projects or endeavors that you needed to rethink before you found success? It isn't always about skill level. Sometimes we're just going about something in the wrong way or with the wrong tools.