21-V-2016.
Long day in Klincaid. We were spreading the nylon foil over the left side rows, wherever we left off last year. The foils work well. Mulching the rows with 10cm layer of hay worked fine first year or two, but then the hay was spent - earthworms would eat it, wind would blow it away, it would rot. We'd have to replenish it in many places, too much work. This is the garden for lazy bums. It's much easier with the foil - it holds water even better, and the soil warms up earlier and the plants follow.
We kept the paths between the rows, and stuck the foil ends into the paths' edges. The foil comes in a roll of about 1,4m width, exactly the proper width, and we dug the edges in. What was improper was the chaos on the market, everyone sells what they can, and the couple, in whose shop we bought it, didn't bother to check what they sold. So we bought a biodegradable foil, which is bullshit for a medal. It's not eaten by any bacteria and not reduced to harmless ashes, it just gets shredded when exposed to ultraviolet light, i.e. sunshine, and the strips are unusable but still made of the same plastic. Manufacturing garbage, but call it environment friendly.
Which they might not have done intentionally, the outer layers on the roll weren't so bad, but coming closer to the inner winds it got gradually worse. That fell apart into strips within a few weeks. We put a second layer over that later, also didn't do much good. We never visited that shop again, there's a better one right across. You can do this to us exactly once, and you've just used that once.
I brought the little lumia for a shooter, and thought to make a long cadre how I make the coffee (usually, at home, she makes coffee or we each make for ourselves; at the garden it's my job) and carry it. So I parked the two chairs to sit on, and the little red stool as a table, with the cups, under the big walnut tree, went inside, filled the džezva, aimed the camera, started recording when the water boiled...
The cadre lasted longer than intended, because I forgot to open the bag of coffee in advance, so almost half a minute went on that. We have these long coffee spoons, but as it takes high heaped up ground coffee to make turkish, it's unwieldy to pull it out of the bag, something always snags and falls back into the bag. So we soon brought one of her painted jars and started keeping coffee in it.
And then I went on, finely balancing the camera and džezva to keep the latter onscreen whenever possible, from the kitchen, through gonk, rear shed, yard and under the walnut. I concentrated on shooting so much that I failed to notice when the cup filled.
The neighbor behind the left side of the garden has this habit of hooking herself on the fence, and then can talk and talk. She's got time, husband dead, son in the city, also a widower. One can collect such stories pretty much whenever one has time to listen.
Luckily, the lumia has this insane zoom, this was shot this side of the arcs, so at least 25m. Not shaky at all, I must have leaned it on some fruit tree.
In the evening, skype on her phone. Saw Nina, Go and the grandkids again :).
Next day we held the thirthday... i.e. a common birthday party for Lena, Nina and Violet. Brought dad, Lena came, had some loza that dad made for their weddings - Nina's from 1990, Lena's from 1998. Probably the best loza there is, I still don't like it. She made a cake.
In other news, Donald is fighting again for... um, genetic reasons. He's full of scars and fresh wounds. In the summer he's this thin, looks like four pencils glued to a marker. In winter, he gets so much fur that his volume practically triples.
Mentions: Donald, gonk, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Klincaid, loza, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Violet, in serbian
26-V-2023 - 25-III-2026