One more time.

A little over a year ago, I was on a walk with Susie along the Rio Grande river in Alamo, Texas when I felt a slight twinge in the calf of my right leg.

I thought I had hurt it somehow and as the twinge eventually became a pain, I did alittle self diagnosis and determined it was a pulled muscle. It did not get any better over the spring and summer so by early fall, I went to the chiropractor to see what was wrong and get some sort of exercises to make it better. This visit, of course, led to some open heart surgery, three months of rehab  and a winter in Indiana.

The leg still hurts so tomorrow I am going to undergo another surgical procedure to hopefully clean up some veins in my leg that are plugged up.  This is apparently the problem and has been all along.  I debated about having it done because it is not a pain that I can’t live with but all the medical people I talk to keep bringing up the ‘quality of life’ issue.

I actually think my quality of life is pretty good but who am I to argue with these people?  Incidentally, this is not the first time that quality of life business has come up. When I had prostate cancer some 18 years ago, that phrase was also tossed around like M & M’s by two different doctors. One said my QofL was going to suffer and the other said just the opposite.

Enough of this.

One potato, two potato, three potato, four

I have been remiss the last couple of years when it comes to planting potatoes in my garden. I have tended to ignore those little tubers because it is much easier (and probably cheaper)  to just buy them 10 pounds at a time. There are also the problems commensurate with storage and the potato bug. 

When it comes to home grown potatoes, it seems as if I have forgotten that a major benefit of gardening is  it’s  satisfaction quotient.  Gardening is good for the soul.  This year, I planted potatoes for that reason and one other.  I found a part of a column that I had written a couple of years ago and then never used.It was about 500 words so it seemed a shame to let it go to waste just laying around on my hard drive. I drug it out and added a bit about Good Friday and there we had it. Being a firm believer in the axiom that ‘the truth will set you free’, I felt compelled to plant potatoes after bragging to the people of Martin and Morgan Countys that I had done just that.

It was almost dark by the time I had prepped the dirt so I enlisted the help of my granddaughter, Riley Marie.

Being of an advanced age, planting potatoes is a hands and knees effort for me. Unfortunately it is time consuming, dirty and hard on your knees, not to mention that method plays havoc with your jeans.  Luckily, Riley Marie, being a budding gymnast and with her seven year old bones, came up with a better way to cover the seed potatoes.

 

There was a time when I was a cheerleader captain that I could have done something similar to this but planting potatoes was about the furthest thing from my mind in that period of my life. The only planting I was interested in had to do with……., well, never mind.

 

Incidentally, the photos are courtesy of Julie Lesh.

one more feather in my cap.

I have been gardening for upwards of thirty years, planting potatoes in probably 25 of those growing seasons. We have always had pretty good luck with this, one year even producing enough potatoes to keep half the population of Irish Hill supplied with a daily potato diet. In that year, I mixed cow manure with the dirt and later dressed the hilled up potatoes with another round of the stuff. 

All of this success has been in spite of the fact that I never planted the potatoes on Good Friday, the day the Farmers almanac (or maybe the Bible)  tells us gardeners to plant those little tubers. Yesterday, I bought 3 different varieties of seed potatoes in preparation for planting them tomorrow, Good Friday.

look at those eyes.

I selected these scientifically, paying particular attention to their shape, size and consistency of..of.., for lack of a better word, feel. An old potato farmer knows when the potato feels just right. I figure that using this selection process, A dollop of manure and the Good Friday planting will have me at the State Fair picking up my Blue Ribbon later this summer.

Now, all I have to do is keep Susie out of the garden. She loves to dig up potato plants to see how the potatoes are doing. Even though I have told her time and time again to stay out of there until the potatoes are ready to dig, her curiousity gets the better of her. If I’m not careful,  she will start digging a week after the plants first show their faces.

I may have to put a scarecrow in my garden to frighten her off.

Is blogging already dead???

When I logon to wordpress to do a little web logging, I notice that there’s a site that will tell me how to add Twitter to my web log. If you don’t know what Twitter is, it’s the latest fad in the social networking world. Folks are scrambling to become twitterers  but don’t count on me to be joining the crowd.

I am trying to learn my way around Facebook because it now appears as if most of the people who read my blog are now Facebook mavens who no longer visit the blogosphere. GAAAAhhhhh. I swore some time ago that I would never , under any circumstances, use the word ‘blogosphere’ and now I’ve went and done just that.  

Anyway, it appears as if Twittering may overrun Facebooking as a way to communicate.  (I can’t believe I just typed that. My mom would disown me and the fellas in Monrovia, Indiana would quit talking to me if they knew I peppered my conversation with words like that.)

These social networking changes are beginning to wear me out.  I may have to just resign from the blogosph….. Damnit, change that to the internet.

I can’t keep up with all these advancements (??). I may have to go back to real, live talking to people.