Charles Town Update

We have had three uninterrupted weeks in Charles Town, perhaps our longest stretch in three years without a trip somewhere.  It has afforded us the opportunity to do a lot of work in the yard since the weather for the most part has been quite temperate. I’m indoors now because it is 98°, muggy and bug nasty outside and will stay that way for five days, but there is plenty to do inside as well.

Italics here and there are added by Cindy!

The new garden has occupied almost all of Cindy’s time and far too much of my time.  I’m a firm believer in taking the hundreds and hundreds of dollars (he exaggerates) that go into the garden and using it to purchase fresh produce from roadside stands, which are as plentiful as fresh air around here.  Cindy on the other hand was raised around farms and still thinks that the only good vegetable is the one you handpicked in your own garden that day.  So we divide the labor, I do the grunt work while she does the hard work.  As of today, we have two Japanese eggplants and three grape tomatoes ready for picking, and we ate a nice serving of fresh peas the other night.  The beans are just days away from initial harvest and the million or so tomatoes, large, small and smaller should start coming in soon.  We have tons of herbs that we have been using almost daily and all of the flowers are in full bloom making the place look glorious.

For Cindy’s birthday I gave her two ultra romantic gifts: a self-winding hose box and a 271-liter rain barrel.  She was thrilled, really she was thrilled. (It helped that I took her to San Francisco for a week of fun and frolic, but I think I could have gotten away with just the garden toys.) I loved SF but he’s right, those gifts were perfect! I set up the hose for her and it really is kind of cool how it works.  Once extended you just flip a lever and the water is redirected to the gears that rewind the hose, like a water wheel and that water is then diverted to the herb garden via a long hose. No fuss, no muss and no wasted water.  The rain barrel was a different story. I could tell from looking at it that it was going to be a bit more work to install than the water hose, so being a well-educated man, I called up my grandson and told him I had a job for him!  Patrick is almost fifteen and quite sharp so I just presented him with the barrel and instructions and told him that I would do the grunt work and he was the supervisor/engineer/foreman/boss and that if it didn’t work, he would get the blame.  I like being able to instill real life challenges on my grandkids.

He was more than up to the challenge and I like to think it was a real educational experience for him.  The job entailed lots of thinking, measuring, leveling and plumbing and he did it all.  We had a rainstorm about three days after the job was completed and the barrel filled in forty minutes.  Cindy loves being able to get free, fresh water to sprinkle on her fruits, vegetables and flowers. She even uses it to fill the birdbath.  Since we have a need for a lot of water, I purchased another rain barrel, this one is 325 liters, called Patrick, and bingo we are all up and running and waiting for the next rain.

One of our projects was to build a mailbox garden to help beautify the neighborhood.  We live in an area that has a Home Owners Association (HOA), which is code for Dirty Rotten Nasty Nazi Dictators (DRNND) so we had to submit a request for approval to build this garden to the Architectural Review Committee (ARC) of the HOA. This request had to include a written description, diagram, measurements and building materials to be used. Cindy did all of that and we submitted the request on March 22^nd.  In late April one of the members of the ARC saw Cindy in the yard and told her that since this only involved landscaping, no permission was required from the HOA and that she could go ahead with the project.  Yesterday we received a formal letter from the DRNND, complete with a picture of our mailbox garden, telling us that we need to remove it since it is not compliant with HOA policy.  Geez, these folks have no idea with whom they are dealing!!  We’ll keep you posted.  Meanwhile here is a photo of the offensive garden.  Ciao, William

My goodness, what an eyesore!