An untimely rain and tab-clearing

There I was, carefully placing seed potatoes into the row. One-two-three. Move. Another one-two-three. Move. One foot apart. Skin-side-up. The potatoes probably don't care about the precision but I do.

Then, from the south a rumble that sounded like thunder. Could have been a truck, though.

A few seconds later. More thunder. Definitely thunder. It sounded closer.

Crap.

293-294-295. Move. 296-297-298. Move. 299, 300. Stand up. Stretch. Move the bucket of cut seed potatoes into the shade and tip it over so it will not fill with water.Start the tiller and run it into the barn. Roll the push mower into the barn. Walk toward the house in a sprinkle of rain.

The sprinkle turned into rain. We picked up about 0.2". I went out after the rain and the ground was to wet to do any more planting. Just barely too wet.

The grass was too wet to mow.

I didn't hit any of my goals yesterday.

Some days are like that.

The good news

I seemed to have cracked the code for staying peppy.

It was the lack of salt.

I was drinking powdered Gatorade + 1/4 tsp of salt per quart at breaks and I felt peppier after my second and third hours than I did after my first hour. I probably should have loaded up on the electrolyte before I went out working.

I drank about 28 ounces of the mix at each break but nothing during the hour of work. 

Some tab clearing

Fencing: The garden I planted the broccoli in has a 4' woven wire fence around half of it and a 52" fence made of feedlot panels around the other half. At the bottom there is 1" poultry-netting that is 24" tall attached to the taller fence. In some places I have 1" plastic netting which the rabbits have turned to Swiss Cheese. I need to upgrade that.

Yes, deer can easily jump over 4' fence. But most of them are lazy and don't do it when forage is abundant and they are not frightened.

Storing potatoes: Last year was a "Fail" in terms of the ERJ household storing potatoes. 

Digging the potatoes had been sort of a last-minute thing. Some of them had frozen. Some of them had only the thinnest bit of their top surface frozen.

Back in the day, there was a story of a disgruntled employee who tossed frozen potatoes underneath the hanging files in a dozen file cabinets shortly before he quit. Two weeks later there was a noticeable but difficult to find odor. A week after that the office was uninhabitable due to the stench. The potatoes had autolysed to slime which in-turn had dripped through the slots in the bottoms of the drawers and impregnated the paper filled hanging-files below them.

Yes. All of our stored potatoes got pitched. I went through the buckets a few times and sorted out what I thought were the good ones only to be wrong and have to start over. By the third sorting...Mrs ERJ suggested that potatoes are not expensive and maybe I could write it off as a lesson-learned.

And now it is a lesson-shared.

Miscellaneous

Yesterday, we had a kid slowly come putt-putt-putting up the driveway on a quad. He was wearing a helmet, which is unusual around here. He came ALL the way up the drive and SLOWLY turned around. My spider-senses tell me that he was scoping out the property for stuff to steal. He was going VERY SLOWLY as he looked inside the garage (the door was open).

It is probably time to display the gas can filled with water and with a 1/2" of gasoline floating on top. I prevent accidents by tying several wraps of red baling-twine around the handle of the decoy gas can. Red means "do not use". Blue means "mixed gas".

Just sayin'. Ain't the first time we have had this problem. Two-gallon gas cans seem to be the most popular with thieves. Five full gallons is too heavy and awkward to carry. One-gallon isn't hardly worth stealing.