Friday, September 18, 2009

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!

15 comments:

Darla said...

Glad you are doing better and that everyone helped you!! You just don't know how much you do until you can't do it!!!!

Daphne Gould said...

I'm happy to hear you are doing better. Don't you love when your mom comes to take care of you? My mom did that right after the birth of both of my kids oh so many years ago. No one can take care of you like your mom does. Of course now it goes the other way too.

Annie*s Granny said...

Kate, it's good to hear you are on the road to recovery!

I'm not actually a square foot gardener, more of a "SF-raised beds-Victory-put it wherever it fits" gardener, but I planted everything in straight dairy compost from my nursery. It took quite a few yards to fill all my boxes, so I'd never have been able to afford Mel's Mix! I think the composted cow poo grew stuff just fine. I do, however, have 12" deep beds (except the strawberry bed), and they are all sitting on good sandy loam, so the roots can go down forever if they wish. I am glad to see you going with the raised beds. Next year you are going to have a real productive garden, with no drainage issues!

Jeff Vandiver said...

Kate, I'm so glad you're healing well. You'll be back to your old self in no time. Good for you on the raised beds - and book. I know you'll love the method, but worry about the box depth for your climate. Mine is subjected to the same hot climate, and will be increased from 8" deep to about 13". Don't worry about the 5 different kinds of compost - Mel was smoking a big fatty while writing that book. Ha!

Ribbit said...

You'll just love that book. You'll love those boxes. Build more and LONGER! You'll get some good trellising space, but do as EG did and put the trellis in between two rows so you can plant on either side. I did that this fall and it's amazing.

You with your thumb and the man with his eye....Here's hoping you won't ever get on a first-name basis with the hospital staff. ;)

Momma_S said...

Glad to hear your thumb is doing better. Out of the blue the other day, my 7yo asked me why we needed thumbs. I hadn't even thought about using tying shoes or writing as examples LOL...

I think your 6" beds will be fine, especially since the ground below it has been tilled (or so it looks in the pic). Looking at some of the peeps following you blog, you may have been by GardenWeb.com, but if not, they have a great SFG forum section... http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/sqfoot/

Kelly said...

I did a long post but my computer went wacky so I am not sure if it made it through.....anyway, the short version is a suggestion to do 8 or 10 inch boxes for your other two. I was just thinking your flood issues may require deep boxes all around, how deep is the standing water typically?

(Feel better soon!)

Lo said...

yay!!! Im so glad you are recovering, so glad you got a break from cooking and cleaning, so glad 2 of your SFG beds are built, and glad the chicken run is coming along. :)

Lo said...

oh yeah. we have 12" beds too and remember if you are doing root veggies to raise those squares higher.

also, We did not like the mel's mix so next year we are going to go with a compost and some kind of peat mixuture.

Stefaneener said...

Oh, I'm so glad.

I remember how lovely it was to be waited on post-partum. It can only be better post-thumb surgery! (More sleep.)

Hooray for opposables and spouses with drills!

donna said...

Good to hear that you're recovering nicely. Your mother giving you roses...that's sweet. After I saw the picture of your absolutely adorable beautiful son holding the SFG book, I could no longer focus on the rest of your post. You have seriously cute boys. Luv their long hair.

D said...

Looks amazing. I hope mine will look that good too.

Anonymous said...

I don't know where in Central Florida you live. I live in Winter Park. You can find a few other kinds of compost at Miller's Hardware on Fairbanks near Park Avenue. I love reading your blog. I can commiserate with the perils of gardening in Central Florida. Feel better soon!

Erin said...

congrats on your new beds! Don't get too tied up in the book that you don't experiment though. I started with that book and it has great info, but you will find that you need to tweak things a bit until they work for your needs. Make sure you lay cardboard down on the bottom before you fill...it will encourage worms to come up from below surface and suffocate weeds, the result is that your soil will break up below a bit without tilling and you will actually have deeper beds since your plants can easily root down deeper if they have to! I started with 4 beds and was inundated with veggies so I think you will be pleasantly surprised at how productive just 2 beds can be... have fun! Plus...don't worry too much about the right mix, mine were filled with 100% compost since it was cheap to get it delivered and the results were stunning with no veggie soil added!

Kathryn said...

First of all thank you so much for your reply on my blog. It is getting a little easier to cope each day. And I finally have him home, which I couldn't believe how much of a comfort that is. Take care of that thumb, and I'm still jealous of your chickens!!! I'll be watching to see how your SFG goes as I am thinking of doing the same thing - although by boxes worked pretty well for me. Take care. K (aka Mad Beach Maven)

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