12 days ago I sowed seeds of pumpkin (aka winter squash) 'Crown Prince' and 'Buttercup' in the only greenhouse my disability still lets me use
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Me too! As you saw last autumn (N Hemisphere) on my own LJ, my crop was truly excellent. We're still eating it.
This year my partner made a mistake, liming the soil where the pumpkins are to go, but a few months later she fed that soil with compost too and now she's ordered horse muck. Fingers crossed, we'll eat pumpkin again next year. Such a prolific crop that gives me reason to be proud of the years I had the physical strength to dig and build up my soil.
"Such a prolific crop that gives me reason to be proud of the years I had the physical strength to dig and build up my soil."
This is the reason why I'm such a fiend after raked leaves each fall: I know that I only have a limited amount of time left that I'll still have the physical strength to do the heavy work of building up my soil. (Old age is rapidly catching up with me and my bad knees.) :}
Alas, I'm already having to hire some muscle. Jollyson's been doing a lot of digging for me this spring. Everytime I get to feeling guilty about it, I remind myself what recovery from knee surgery is like. :}
My partner (retired farmer) advised me that paid staff will usually do 80% of what you ask them to do. That was a shock to me - 80%? Why not 95%? - but she's right. 80% is about what you get. My land is better for the hired muscles' input and I've learned not to be uptight about it.
Actually I'm not surprised at the 80% figure. Between watching grade school kids perform their classroom lessons and watching Jollyson perform his work, I think that most bosses over-assign work to be done. I know I always did. It takes longer to get stuff done than you, as boss, think it should. Sometimes it's simply a case of not explaining what you want clearly enough and sometimes it's a case of your workers (or students) being slow to catch on or lacking all the talent necessary. Jollyson, for example, lacks both the knowledge and the talent to be good gardening help. So I wind up having to over-simplify what I want him to do for me. He truly doesn't know which plants are weeds and which are valuable plants so if I assign him some weeding to do, I have to show him a dandelion or a dock and then tell him to dig those up for me. This is one reason why I usually have him doing the digging or other grunt work. It's also why I stay outside with him, supervising. Takes a lot of patience on my part. :\
Oh yes. Several years ago my partner threw out all my containers because my primroses had 'died'. Er... they'd simply died back after their flowering season.
Hope that they make a lot for you.
:)
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This year my partner made a mistake, liming the soil where the pumpkins are to go, but a few months later she fed that soil with compost too and now she's ordered horse muck. Fingers crossed, we'll eat pumpkin again next year. Such a prolific crop that gives me reason to be proud of the years I had the physical strength to dig and build up my soil.
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This is the reason why I'm such a fiend after raked leaves each fall: I know that I only have a limited amount of time left that I'll still have the physical strength to do the heavy work of building up my soil. (Old age is rapidly catching up with me and my bad knees.)
:}
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Everytime I get to feeling guilty about it, I remind myself what recovery from knee surgery is like.
:}
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Between watching grade school kids perform their classroom lessons and watching Jollyson perform his work, I think that most bosses over-assign work to be done. I know I always did. It takes longer to get stuff done than you, as boss, think it should.
Sometimes it's simply a case of not explaining what you want clearly enough and sometimes it's a case of your workers (or students) being slow to catch on or lacking all the talent necessary.
Jollyson, for example, lacks both the knowledge and the talent to be good gardening help. So I wind up having to over-simplify what I want him to do for me.
He truly doesn't know which plants are weeds and which are valuable plants so if I assign him some weeding to do, I have to show him a dandelion or a dock and then tell him to dig those up for me.
This is one reason why I usually have him doing the digging or other grunt work.
It's also why I stay outside with him, supervising.
Takes a lot of patience on my part.
:\
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:{
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