Taking advantage

I just told Walt that it's amazing. We had three or four dry, fairly warm days. When we saw the forecast last weekend, we told ourselves we'd better get some work done outside. And we did. Now, it's supposed to rain for the next three or four days — not much, but enough to keep us inside. A lesson constantly relearned is that you have to take advantage of every nice day here if you want to accomplish anything.

Walt did the mowing. You can see him pushing the mower around in the photo above (top left corner). The yard looks great. My job was the tilling, and I got it done. I tilled up a patch of tough grass to enlarge the vegetable garden plot. I also ran the tiller over a lot of the area that I had worked on back in March, to uproot weeds and grasses that were starting to take hold.

Above, you can see the tiller and the new greenhouse tent. There are a couple of rogue rhubarb plants growing in it. When we arrived here years ago, we got shovels, picks, and hoes out of the garden shed and tried to dig up this section of yard manually to prepare it for our first vegetable garden. That was the spring of 2004.

We quickly realized that we would never get anything done unless we invested in a rototiller. We drove up to a garden-supplies store in Blois, found a tiller that looked like it would be up to the job, and somehow managed to fit it inside our little Peugeot run-about to get it down here. So it's been going strong for 12 years now.

Those first three photos are ones I took with an Android tablet. Just because. The colors are different. The last photo, just above, is one I took with my new old Lumix camera from a back window of the house yesterday afternoon. Soon the linden tree will be covered in leaves and we won't be able to admire the garden without going out there. Of course, watering and weeding will keep us out there all summer.