Weekend at the Farm August 10 - 11, 2019

• Saturday morning Bert drove to Papescapes and got me a yard and a half of their mulch / compost mix.  
• I spent the morning weeding in the Rose Garden, watering, fertilizing and spreading the soil mix.  I made good progress.
• For most of the morning while weeding, I made the mistake of trying to pull up the day flower by the roots which is extremely difficult to do.  Never have a I known a living thing so determined to survive.  It takes all my strength to pull up each day flower.  With a scourge as bad as I have, I think you should just yank up the tops so that it does not root at the joints or spread its seed.  But time after time I get absorbed in the task and try to be thorough.  Then hours have passed and I've only cleaned out a few beds. 
• There is a barely discernible change in the roses.  The days are getting shorter which means the average temperatures are getting gradually lower.  And the roses are responding.  The days are hot as blazes, but I can sense the change. 
• The zinnias and morning glories that I sowed last weekend have popped up.  I just love the miracle of seeds.  It gives me a little thrill that I have never stopped experiencing regardless of the many years that I've seeded my beds.
• I spent a little bit of time weeding in the Orchard.  I cleared out the only bed in the Orchard that does not have a fruit tree in it.  And I spread the seed from several dried out zinnia heads.
• I weeded the bed underneath the apple tree, a painstaking process since I have a hundred or so lily seedlings growing in that bed.
•  Jeff came over for dinner.
• Sunday.  I worked in the Rose Garden again.  Watering, weeding, fertilizing, mulching.
• I watered in the Long Border.
• I weeded in the bed where the hydrangea is gasping in the Star Garden.  The hydrangea is gasping for water, but the weeds were as happy as could be.  I cleaned out the bed and spread mulch.
• While I was in that part of the Star Garden, I pruned my blue Vitex trees pretty hard to remove all the seed heads.  
• Watered in the dry parts of the Star Garden.  Just a few more weeks dear plants, and we will be past the worst of summer!
• I weeded next to Peggy Martin rose with the intention of planting two blue mist flower plants that I bought ages ago and never planted.  But another weekend passed without getting them in the ground.  It's just as well.  The armadillos are so vicious, they would probably root them up.
• Cleaned up and drove to town to pick up my phone.  I left it in the grocery cart at HEB on Friday.  I stopped at Home Depot and bought some bamboo stakes.
• When I got home I started working in the Vegetable Garden.  With the soil mixture that I had left after mulching the Rose Garden, I filled up the long bed that Bert built for me last weekend.  I only had enough dirt left to fill it up about a quarter of the way.  But I used all the soil I had.  It is a very deep bed.
• I worked into the evening weeding and weeding and weeding.
• I sowed calendula and zinnia seeds in the Rose Garden and trained the sprinklers on them.
• Drove in to work on Monday morning.