2025, gardening, home, Nature, Seasons

It’s Not Nice….

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This year is my fifteenth anniversary of straw bale gardening.  I happened upon this way of growing veggies while I was looking for workable alternatives for growing tomatoes.  In yard wasn’t working (dog and bunny damage), pots didn’t work for me at all (never did figure out why) and one year I even tried something called Topsy Turvy which was more or less a hanging basket for tomatoes.  Believe me when I say that was an unmitigated disaster.

Anyway, in all these 15 years, I planted my bales mostly on Mother’s Day, occasionally a few days later, like this year.  But in all this time I think I’ve gone out and covered my plants due to low overnight temperatures…. maybe five times.   And I’ve never had to cover them more than once in a season when it’s happened.

So I’m not all that happy that with the overnight temps dropping below 45°F the last two nights, I’ve been out there with my assorted “dog towels” and clothespins twice.  And this is also the first year in quite some time that I’ve had six bales, so I had to scrounge up a couple more crappy towels.

I understand that climate change is creating bigger swings in weather but it chaps my shorts that we had three days in the very high 80s last week and now I’m covering plants.  Looking at the forecast, I may have to cover two more nights this week as well.  It makes me think of one of my all-time favorite commercials from decades ago:

My little neighbor Marie came over to the fence as I was draping the towels to find out what I was doing and letting me know that some of towels are funny looking. I have to agree.

Any “special” towels at your place?

38 thoughts on “It’s Not Nice….”

  1. we have four distinct towel groups and they shall not be mixed. We have Debbie’s two large bath towels, something about the size of those giant beach towels that you see they are both beige and both huge. Then we have the towels in my son‘s shower downstairs by the garage. I believe they were gifts from my mother-in-law. They are brown like the color of Tootsie rolls, normal sized towels, but triple thickness there is also one monster, pale, yellow towel in that bathroom that I have tried to climb on numerous occasions to no avail then there are the towels that have been demoted to being the towels for cleaning up messages that spill on the floor or the carpet. The fourth group of towels is what I call the shit towel collection. Debbie’s dad worked at the local Chicago suburban swimming pool in the summers for a couple years and when peoplr would leave towels, he would bring them home and give them to Debbie when we visited in Chicago some of these towels are OK but most of them are the ones where when you wrap them around behind you and do the shoe shine on your back the seam starts pulling apart and the towel starts ripping so you have to flip the towel over and use it from the other side and stop pulling on that one part or you will end up with a towel that is 6 inches shorter we have 20 of these and they are all placed in the girls bathroom
    no, Spencer and the girls are gone, but it is still Spencer‘s bathroom down by the garage and the girls bathroom is the one with the tub. The bathroom in the master bedroom has a shower and Debbie‘s two jumbo beige towels hang there. I usually have four or six of the towels from the girls bathroom in the master bathroom shower and I have one hanging behind the door in the girls bathroom. I have tried to upgrade to use one of the brown towels from Spencer‘s bathroom or maybe that monster yellow towel from Spencer‘s bathroom but those get recalled quickly run through the wash and put back in the bathroom where they belong. I am relegated to the shit towels. It’s kind of funny because I’d like to play work up, but it is not possible. I have thought about buying new towels at Costco when they go on sale, but we have so many functioning towels already that to waste the money and add more towels to our towel collection seems like a backwards way to handle the situation, but in the meantime, 20 years of shit towels is about all that I can stand. Thank you for letting me vent my towel status in life.
    by the way, I always use sheets for covering outdoor plants when frost is coming

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    2. This is a long shot, but if there still people who weave throw rugs and placemats out of spent clothing and fabric, could you have that done with your unwanted towels?

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    1. Good to know. Hopefully the forecast for a combination of very cold 40° and rain won’t actually come to pass. I’m thinking wet cold towels will not be any fun at all.

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  3. We may have rain mixed with snow tomorrow. We never plant tender plants until after Memorial Day, but we are a lot farther north than you are.

    We have Husband’s towels, which are white towels and are only in the bathroom he uses, my towels, which are brown and tan in in the bathroom I use, and the dog’s towels, which are white towels that are too worn for human use. When he sees us take them down from the rag basket, he excitedly races into my bathroom. He loves baths and knows that when the towels are out, he gets put in the tub.

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      2. No kidding. Every dog we have had will blithely jump into any dirty body of water–mud, algae, gutters–with glee. But a bath followed by a clean towel instigates whining, shaking and barking/squealing. Go figure.

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  4. I very blithely referred to these towels as dog towels, but it occurs to me that we actually have a further breakdown. Some of those towels in the picture above are actually gardening towels, and one particular gardening tarp that I’ve had for years. Two of the towels are actually car towels — hese are technically YAs towels. The rest are the dog towels.

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  5. I thought our average frost-free date was around May 15. Gardening started a little early this year due to the warm weather, and I heard someone say they were late getting theirs in. I guess some people think the garden should all be in by Mother’s Day, but I think that’s risky. I used to wait until Memorial Day weekend to plant tomatoes, but these days that IS a bit late around here. I’ve heard master gardeners say that southern MN is now in zone 5.

    The National Weather Service forecasted 37 for an overnight low here a few nights ago, so I put some towels over my plants, but it only got down to 40. I don’t usually cover plants if it’s 40 or above. It’s cold, but I think it makes them hardier. I could be wrong, but I haven’t lost one due to frost yet.

    I don’t really have any special towels. I have some of those bath towels that are very large. I use them for swimming at FiftyNorth, something I haven’t done in a while. I rarely buy new ones, and you can find gently used towels in a thrift store. Some of my towels are very old. I have some that were once my dad’s, and he’s been gone since 1992.

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  7. When Sandra went into care, I did two things. I donated to the thrift store all the crusted towels, as I call them, as opposed to crested. Ones with designs woven into them that were for the towel bars and not pleasant to use. And I bought her a distinctive extended set of wash clothes, hand towels and bath towels on which I wrote her name before I sent her off to camp, it seemed like. The display towel bars have nothing on them.

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  10. I’m not now, nor have I have ever been, a fancier of thick, luxurious bath towels. My hands are too small, and I can’t really get a good grip on thick towels to dry myself off. I prefer the large in size but rather flimsy beach towels. I only have two, and I have used them for years and years. One is blue with dolphins on it, the other bright and orange in an abstract pattern.

    My friend, Tia, on the other hand, has a towel fetish. I swear she has spent a small fortune on bath towels in her lifetime.

    I’m with tim, I use sheets for covering plants. Or rather I did, when was the gardener.

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  11. Better Late than Never, Baboons,

    I have a collection of towels,sheets,and blankets, all of which have seen better days, but I keep them for utility. This is for covering plants, certainly, but also mopping up spills, covering things while painting, or moving furniture (where you put the towel under the legs of the piece, then pull it to where you want to go without scratching the floor). The week my DIL was here after my surgery she used a sheet on the couch because she is allergic to the dog, and the couch is covered in dog dander. One cannot operate a proper household without the utility collection of towels!

    This weather has been hard on me. The big sweeps of temperature have triggered several migraine headaches and muscle aches. Maybe I should take up residence under VS’ towels–would that prevent the aching? I will have to try it. I had 30 minutes of PT today. Then I came home and slept for an hour. How does that work?

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  12. OT, but phenomenal. Since last Wednesday we have had a little more than 5 inches of rain. It comes down between .10 to .20 per hour. It is soaking in to very parched land. It is predicted to keep on until this week Thursday.

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  13. OT. Blevins update (Blevins page updated as well)

    July 13
    2 p.m.
    Occasional Caroline’s

    Cannery Row (John Steinbeck)
    &
    The Florist’s Daughter (Patricia Hampl)

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  14. (Started to write earlier, got distracted and it disappeared)
    Husband and I each have our favorite large bath towels, with spares for laundry day – mine is a luxurious minty green, his is purple. So much for a color scheme in the bathroom.
    There are a couple of hand towels inherited from my mom that do blend with the colors…

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