Basboy’s Weblog

We finally had a very typical summer weekend in a year of cooler-than-usual weather. The sun was out, and it was hot! As per usual for a Teebi Sunday, we had our breakfast today and sat afterward with our tea, chatting while Food network is on, planning for our day (and coffee).
However, as Leith was joining us this morning, we decided to adjourn our coffee session to the outdoors, so that he may play with his toy trucks and shovels in the open. The sun blared down on us, and I actually felt annoyed by the insect life that had come out in full force while I was wishing for the cooler air of a few days past. Meanwhile, the palest among us was having a great time playing with his toys next to the mint plants.
After our little sit we began our gardening for the day, much to the joy of my mother, who even in the presence of back pain likes nothing more than to to tend to the greenery. Because we had the little one with us, we began by picking the ripe strawberries, which were actually quite small due the “organic” upbringing they have had! Leith had his busy play-face on, as I pointed out the ripe fruit to him so that he may yank them and add them to the mound on his truck. His smile at every little berry picked almost made kneeling down in the hot air enjoyable…
Our work was cut out for us as we moved to the main event: finally clearing out the vegetable compartment in our yard of all the weeds and making it ready for the actual plants. The problem is, much of those weeds were quite prickly and allergy-inducing, and there were a lot of them. On a previous weeding expedition, I had devised a way of not having to manually handle the weeds while preserving the dirt on the ground. The weeds seem to have come back with a vengeance with the rain that had fallen in the days that followed, but the technique I used was still good: laying out a meter of plastic crisscross-style tree wrap on the ground and using the shovel to dig out the roots of the weeds and throwing them on it, after which you rock the wrap back and forth as to sieve out the dirt to leave the enemy greens behind. I know it is not ingenious, but I was proud of it, and with more helpers around this time, it was really easy and rather painless. Leith, of course, insisted on helping me at first by holding the shovel with me as I dug out the weeds. I convinced him that using his own small shovel would be much more productive, and he humored me for a few minutes before going back to holding the big shovel with me; and then losing interest in that and helping Tata actually yank out weeds in the periphery and clear out the pine cones and such.
As we finished up and added the topsoil to welcome the tomato plants and seeds we were to inject, Leith gave us the signal to go inside by actually going quiet! This meant that he was both thirsty and tired, and wanted to go to sleep. This would be our excuse to go in and have our lunch. My mother, being who she is, stayed behind to ensure proper plant integration and watering, but I for one was happy to be back inside the cool, but mosquito-filled house.