Recovery

The thumb surgery is over and although typing is still a bit slow, I appear to be healing quite well. Thank you so much for all the well wishes!! I have learned that you can never fully appreciate the awesomeness of opposable thumbs until your dominant hand has to spend a week or so opposable-thumb-free. Instead of adapting like a pro, I dragged around a useless paw for a week and found a long list of things that became impossible like taking tops of jars and bottles, buckling kids in and out of carseats, writing, drying my hair, tying kids shoes, etc. Luckily I got my stitches out today so I'm just dealing with the leftover discomfort from a healing incision. The doc said in a couple of weeks I'll be good as new. I suppose I'll be able to hitchhike like a pro soon!


But good things can come out of something like this. My mom came up and cooked dinner and washed dishes for a few days, which as any stay-at-home-mom can tell you, is as heavenly an experience as one can have. I also got a wonderful bouquet of roses from her that really made my day. It shouldn't be a surprise to any of my regular readers that I don't get a lot of flowering plants around here, so seeing a dozen gorgeous roses on the counter was a nice experience.

Farmer B got me the best get-well present a gardener could ask for. I received my very own copy of the SFG book!


And if that wasn't good enough, he cleared all the overgrown weeds from our garden and cleaned up the whole area. Then he went to the hardware store and bought all the supplies AND built me two SFG 4 x 4 boxes. I realize we're starting very slow with only 2 boxes, but we're hoping to add two more in February for the next planting season, so we'll be up to four. We're both very iffy on anything growing with only 6 inches of depth, but we're going with what the book says and can always make deeper boxes next time if we need to. Thanks to all of you who encouraged me to go the way of the box and give up my flooded rows!


We haven't been able to find five different bags of compost as the book suggests. We went to three places and were only able to come up with two different brands of compost - one is Black Kow compost and one is a mushroom compost. I'm hoping that mixing this with our "real" compost from our compost pile will be good enough. Figuring out how much "real" compost we have in the math of "Mel's Mix" should be interesting, but we're going to give it a shot and hopefully plant by the next week.


Farmer B also spent much of the week building the roof on the chicken run and it just needs shingles now. He did it without any help and I can't believe he pulled it off so amazingly well considering he says he has no carpentry skills whatsoever. The chickens have repaid us by laying two to three eggs a day, which has been wonderful! We've been sucking down fresh omelets like they're going out of style!


So I'm recovering. The garden is recovering. The chickens are laying. I'd give all that two opposable thumbs up!