(un)Natural Selection

The first week of decreased sugar (I'm going cold-turkey for the next three weeks) went satisfactory, though it will be a long road ahead.

This is a conversation that happened the first day:

Daniel: "You are grumpy!"

Laura: "I am not grumpy, I am suffering from sugar withdrawal."

Daniel: "Eat some ice cream, I do not want to deal with your grumpiness for the next month."

That pretty much sums it up.

This weekend was a mix of sunshine and rain, but I was determined to get some serious gardening done. First job on the docket: transplanting my tomato starts. I used my trusty power drill to make holes in the bottom of used yogurt containers which are unrecycable in our city (I am such a handy woman) .

When I was my seeds I put a few in each starter section, thinking that not all the seeds would germinate. However, in a weeks all the sprouts were at least two inches tall. I realized that tough decisions needed to be made. Having 20+ tomato plants did not seem like a good idea, unless I wanted to set up a farmer's market stand (wait a minute...that doesn't sound too bad...). So I had to sacrifice baby tomatoes for the good of the garden. I felt very bad condemning them to death (Note: Atticus sniffing the fallen soldiers).

The good news was that I have 14 healthy tomato, 3 cantaloup, and 6 pepper plants left, that now have to room to develop healthy root systems. To celebrate making it through the selection process, I took my seedlings on a field trip to the sunshine in the side yard.

In other news, as reported before, the RWAs (robins with attitudes) ate half of my pea plants. The picture below demonstrates the devestation that occured. I am planning on planting additional rows next weekend. Anyone have any suggestions what I can do to scare away the birds? Moses is a useless guard cat!

The rest of the gardening chores accomplished were: aerating and thatching the front yard (if you don't know what this is, be thankful), Daniel "moding" his sprinklers (he likes to take parts off the new sprinklers and modify them into Frankenstein sprinklers), and cutting back the rose bushes further than the WA state legislature can cut back teacher's LID days (just kidding, they already cut back all of our LID days. I just thought of that joke when I was pruning and chuckled to myself). All in all, I felt like I had accomplished a good deal this weekend.

Cheers to week one of no/less sugar and sunny spring weather!