We cannot be trusted. Not for a moment.
Today was the day we bartered to toil in the fields for dinner and a hot soak. We promised to arrive to help plant Bonfire Gardens by noon, but we got distracted by weeding, sweeping the deck, and trying to clean the mildewed and stained deck chairs, and didn't even leave the house until an hour later than we were supposed to start working. We had barely arrived, when I mentioned a tomato frame I'd seen just this morning, where a gardener had built a six foot tall A-frame, and used twine to weave closely-spaced tomato plants along taut vertical strands. We volunteered to run to the store for poles and a fresh spool of twine, as well as stopping by the grocery store for sides for dinner. They should have known better than to let us run off to play at a garden center on a sunny afternoon. We couldn't find a sufficient number of good bamboo poles to make a taller frame, but the man selected some shorter stakes that will work for now. And then all the pretties distracted us. It started when a little raspberry pot literally called out my name. Then a pack of snow pea seeds snuck their way into the cart. I had found the red calibrachoa was still alive in my red-white-and-blue planting up front, so I needed some sort of blue replacement to use alongside white petunias I already have, thus a lithodora got added. The man couldn't walk away from a twelve-pack of dianthus for a good price, much as I couldn't miss a few marigolds, for just a buck and a half per pot. Eventually, the man recognized how far down the enabling rabbit hole we had fallen, and he started pushing me by the shoulders to the registers at the front, and we made a break for it. The bedding plants are nestled snugly in my hatchback still, away from the cool night air. Tomorrow will be a big workday for us.
Once we finally turned back up at Bonfire Gardens, we had missed out on the actual tomato planting. After our discussion, the Bonfire leader decided to plant her tomato couplets more closely spaced, ten plants straddling deeply buried plastic buckets in pairs. I am excited to see how well this works for her, between the new root-watering method and the A-frame supports. The man planted a row of about seven kinds of peppers, and a patch of onions, before he got distracted by another project that no one expected him to tackle. He disappeared, and came back to announce that he had cleared out the drainage ditch on the front half of the property, where heavy rains had allowed sediment and grass to clog it up. Remind me someday to explain how we all feel about this guy when he has access to a shovel. A late season cold front arrived tonight, and by the time we finished dinner, we had to hurry up and cover all the freshly planted vegetables, plus all the unplanted herb pots, with plastic. Hopefully that is enough to ward off a frost advisory. It's not a guaranteed hard freeze, but between four and nine tomorrow morning will be trying times for the tender bedding plants.
Tomorrow the challenge will be to see whether the man and I can egg each other on to get more planted and weeded (mostly him inspiring me, less is needed the other way around), as much as we feed off of each other when it comes to filling a cart at the garden center. We are excellent at buying. Placing and planting are much less fun.
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