The mood strikes...

As is often the case, I ended up doing some gardening this evening without really thinking about it.

I was called out to the garage to put some air in a basketball and before you know it I was attending to some long neglected tasks. First, I repaired the little hose stub that connects the big hose reel to the spigot. It is merely a piece of old hose stubbed out with replacement ends. One of the collars that holds the hose end place had split. Whenever there was a buildup of pressure in the hose, it would shoot off in a dramatic fashion, soaking anyone nearby.

With the hose fixed, I could easily mix upa few gallons of liquid fertilizer that I picked up a week or more ago. I have found that when using drip irrigation and saoker hoses, the traditional ganular fertilizers don't break down fast enough. It is ok when we have some rain, but during the summer months I have decided to switch over to liquid fertilizers to get more of the food into the ground right away. As is my typical, low-tech want, I use an old (but well marked) 1-gallon milk jug to make mixing and application a cinch. I fed all the roses, some other bedding plants and the entire patio bed before I was done. It took about 5 gallons of the mixture (1 tsp to 1 gallon of water) to do it all. Now I will watch to see if this makes a difference.

Finally, we inherited a large, but somewhat sad looking, aloe plant from a friend when she moved to Hawaii. I had been neglecting it for a while, but I knew it needed a bigger pot. It kept tipping over at the slightest touch. Sure enough, the plant was entirely rootbound. I potted it up, with the last of my potting soil, in a larger recycled nursury pot and soaked it down throughly to seat it in the pot. I'll keep an eye on this one, as well, in the coming weeks.

Sometimes the slightest nudge can get me gardening. I just need to listen more often to the little voices pushing me out into the garden