We started out the garden year hopeful, but restrained, planning to reduce the number of tomato plants to eight, shorten the kohlrabi row, and stick to twelve pepper plants and the same number of peas, beans, cabbages, beets, and herbs from last year. We agreed on two hills of cantaloupes.
We neglected to factor in Husband’s anxiety. He is in charge of our church vegetable garden, and we have had to replant some things there due to extreme wind and unfavorable conditions. Husband is always planning for the worst, and that means that he scouts out bedding plants and seeds “just in case” we have to replant. Of course, he always purchases many times the number of replacement plants that he needed. I have taken excess bedding plants the work three times to pawn them off on my coworkers
At the present time, in our home garden we have fourteen tomato plants, fourteen pepper plants, and a bush cucumber plant (“Renee, those cucumber plants needed good homes”). There are six eggplants stuck in odd places in a flower bed on the south side of the house, five hills of cantaloupes, and three butternut squash plants. It looks very silly, with the odd vegetable stuck here and there quite haphazardly. I was lucky to find eight dozen Ball canning jar lids on Amazon, preparatory to what could be a real avalanche of produce needing to be canned.
When have you had too much of a good thing? How does anxiety make you do silly things? When have your plans not worked out like you wished?
Trail Baboon 
Covid killed the possible teaching flooring installation to inmates at the county prison.
Covid stalled my retirement plans. A tour of Europe is out of the question for now. A revisit to Madrid and Rome will have to wait.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Wessew, I just saw the article you posted about soybeans, a timely coincidence. My favourite magazine, in fact the only one I still subscribe to, is “Antique Power,” a US tractor magazine. It is beautiful, perhaps Ben knows of it? I’m not specifically interested in American tractors, though I do like Allis Chalmers, for instance. But, as I say, it’s beautiful, way ahead of the last English vintage tractor magazine I read. I said to Jane this morning, You know it’s been bothering me nore and more, there don’t seem to be any black tractor collectors. We did come up with possible reasons. I really didn’t want to think it was editorial policy at Antique Power. But this article goes a long way towards explaining it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Critical Race Theory is being hotly debated now. For me, the article demonstrates how deeply rooted racism is in the United States. Progress is being made but a long way to go.
LikeLike
Yes, I was very naive when I came over on honeymoon in 2002. And left, still naive, even after travelling down through Mississippi. A female tour guide said yes, it can get scary. But until I started watching the follies of the Trulunatic following the election six months ago, I had no idea what was going on over there.
LikeLike
Do you have any idea how many morels there are in two pounds? A lot! Last time I went foraging for them, that’s how many I came home with. We were eating morels with everything you could possibly pair them with for over a week. That’s not a complaint, it was an embarrassment of riches, short lived though it was.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Wow!
LikeLike
Er-what is a morel?
LikeLike
Fenton, a morel is a wild (not cultivated) mushroom that has an almost fanatical following. Morels have a distinctive look. Their popularity is partially explained by the fact they are difficult to find and occur only in a short time each spring.
I had a friend who was a millionaire until he decided to create a cultivated morel operation. The money’s all gone now.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Steve, I’d never heard of them. And you’ve given me the push I needed to explain to the Baboons about my name. So to everyone : I do use the name Stewart to save confusion at times. It’s my Christian name. My name used to be Stewart Fenton…….
and a surname which I may eventually admit to. It’s a silly name. I eventually, legally dropped it, and am now Stewart Fenton. I’ve actually been familiarly known as Fenton all my life. I always stress to people that my mother called me Fenton. Evryone close to me always has. I gather Steve found it tough, to call me by what is now my last name, but he now calls me Fenton, which I do appreciate. Maybe he was forcing my hand here, though I’d guess he wasn’t. But please, call me Fenton.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Hello Fenton.
LikeLike
Yesterday the head of our local college agriculture department emailed Husband to say the Ag Department had 4 tomato plants for the church garden. It had started out as 12, but 8 died, and Dr. P, who attends our church, is an expert in ranching, not horticulture, and has no idea what kind of tomatoes or if they can grow in containers. Husband asked if we had room for 4 more tomatoes in our garden. I said absolutely not.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oh, dear. Gardeners and their “Baby Plants.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Replying to Ben, actually. Thanks Ben, don’t forget to subscribe to Antique Power!
Fenton.
LikeLike
Rise and Shine, Baboons,
My plans do not work out almost daily, usually because I run out of energy and focus by the end of the day. Right now I have way too many weeds in the garden. The (welcome) rain over the weekend seemed to re-activate every weed shoot and seed in every garden. They have until the weekend to grow unchecked. However, those are not not too much of a good thing. Soon I will be after them.
This last weekend, when I was in Iowa for the 50th reunion, I felt like after all of the social isolation of COVID, I had too much socializing. It really was not that much, but I am not used to living with 6 people in one house anymore. Nor am I used to Happy Hour with the class or a meal and program in a big, echo-ey reception hall. We also got too much sun and wind out on the lake when we got a tour of Lake Okoboji, which has become a teen and young adult party lake, a la Minnesota’s Lake Minnetonka.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Husband has been diligently laying down newspapers and top soil to foil the weeds between the rows and along the edges of the garden beds. Now the weeding will be manageable. He has decided we have plenty of room for new tulip beds, so choosing new bulbs is our next order of business. Of course, my plan for new irises is completely reasonable and necessary.
LikeLike
The magazine I once edited had a shaky start because when it was just a tiny startup the owners made a gross error. Far, far too many issues of the magazine were printed. Because it was a monthly magazine with a date, hundreds of boxes of the magazine were left over with no prospect of selling or even giving them away. They occupied considerable space in a warehouse.
The folks who created the magazine were passionate gardeners. They ended up using those old magazines as ground cover. For that one issue, Fins and Feathers was a really useful publication for gardeners.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I love it.
LikeLike
My Spanish farming plan didn’t work. I figured out how to irrigate the whole place(maybe an acre), and was slowly planning a rotation with corn, sunflowers, chickens and a vegetable garden. The corn and sunflowers were to feed the chickens. I had a good plan, I’m good at thinking things out. But never did get to take over ownership gratis, the owner finally handed the land plus adjoining house to my in laws. Not as much a bargain as it sounds, with the mess of Spanish property laws. They’ve spent money on it and have to sell it lock, stock and barrel, to get their money back. Nobody’s fault, but I had my heart set on it.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Well I don’t normally have too much of anything unless you’re talking about my art supplies. Then it’s just an embarrassment.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Do you mean you don’t use them up fast enough?
LikeLiked by 1 person
That would be one way to look at it. The other way would be that I just can’t keep from adding to my pile of crafting stuff
LikeLike
This is good! Stuff is good!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sherrilee is creative, especially in her ability to make lovely hand crafted cards. Her stock of supplies is probably pretty generous.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I thought you had enough “Zorries” to shod a village. Maybe that’s not “too much” for you!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Exactly. I actually added an olive green pair and a rainbow pair this year.
LikeLike
And you still have just two feet, I’m betting.
LikeLiked by 2 people
A small village. 46 pairs currently
LikeLiked by 1 person
I once saw an article about a woman who opened a creative workspace where people could come and work on their creative pursuits. She also has a lot of miscellaneous stuff that was available for purchase. The slogan was “We hoard so you don’t have to.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Now there is a true artist.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The art of hoarding is not to sell any of it.
LikeLike
This is old news, but I have more books than I could ever read in my remaining lifetime and Robin has more yarn than she is likely to ever knit, but neither is the result of anxiety.
The books are the product of curiosity and the yarn is the product of enthusiasm. No embarrassment.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Thanks to some diligent cleaning out the last few years, I don’t have that many books that I own that I haven’t read. If I would quit getting books from the library, I might actually even be able to get the ones I own read. Are you all laughing now??
LikeLiked by 1 person
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
– Mae West
LikeLiked by 3 people