That's two loads of s***!

James and I took a break from working on the livingroom walls to enjoy this lovely unseasonal weather. We spent the afternoon working in our t-shirts (no jackets!), moving manure, shovelling sh**, distributing dung, (laying out garden beds) and coming up with different ways to describe what we were doing.

Sheet-mulching is a project that's been on our list since at least August, but we've been limited by not having a pick-up truck to collect the nitrogen rich component (manure) we needed. We used the truck belonging to the parents of one of Liza's friends to move their manure pile, but don't know them well enough to ask to borrow it to retrieve fertilizer from someone else's barn. Since our friends moved to Texas and took their truck with them (the gall!), everyone else we know with a truck is a young adult male with concerns about the damage we might do to his precious vehicle. . .not terribly conducive to the project.

Even Google wasn't much use trying to locate someone who'd bring us several cubic yards for a reasonable delivery fee, but I persisted in asking gardeners, and finally found a link to someone who would deliver!

Two loads were delivered today. Most of the first went to covering the soon-to-be asparagus bed- a very high priority since asparagus is a perennial crop, and James had already ordered 30 crowns to be delivered as soon as we can plant them here. Got to have their bed ready when they get here! The second load wasn't spread as thickly, so we got the base layers for sheet mulching the beds inside the three frames James built earlier and last season's bean beds, scattered some over herb hill, and the big bed in the back-now if we can just figure out what we're going to plant there!

The seeds are here, and I'll be starting some of the early vegetables as soon as I finish painting the living room.

Somehow, the twins haven't seemed interested in either of these projects. What's up with that? They have had fun playing tennis together. Tennis is Samuel's new sport, and he begs people to play with him whenever the weather is nice enough- and he has a much more liberal definition of "nice enough" than I do! Miriam seems to be joining in on this interest, but wants her own racket. She's borrowing mine, but says the grip doesn't fit.

Funny Liza story I forgot to include last time: Liza's Hungarian fluency is improving, but people still want to use english much of the time. So, she was talking about something, and the word "ameliorate" came up. Telling me about it, she says even her bright friends rarely use it, and that's the only word she's ever stumped her dad with, so she can't figure out why she thought she could use it with non-native speakers, but she tried. Quite a vocabulary she has developed over the years! (We miss you, Liza! I had to remind James to buy an adverb last night! "-ly") A bit of perspective, such strange vocabulary may actually appear in second language situations, because an unusual word in english, for example, may be the best translation for a common word in the primary language, but not in this case. This is just a Liza-ism.