gardening and bunnies

We went to both the local spots looking for those handy pre-made raised gardening bed thingies yesterday on Wax's day off, and they were out, so now we probably have to make our own if we want some. The question is, will we get around to buying lumber and making our own? Particularly since waxjism is scheduled to work Saturday AGAIN, meaning the next time she has 2 days off in a row where we're both free and likely to finish a carpentry project is several weeks off? Perhaps we should just plant some lettuces directly in the ground this year instead.

If we could afford a proper glass greenhouse with heating and sunlamps, which is what would be necessary to grow lettuce and herbs all winter here, we could easily make use of one, because we go through a tremendous amount of salad greens and herbs year round because each bunny eats a bowlful of them each day. Admittedly it's not a LARGE bowl, but it's still more than you'd use for two people because bunny salads need to be almost entirely made out of leafy greens, but NOT anything in the cabbage family or parsley or spinach in high quantities. Root vegetables including carrots and most fruits have too much sugar to be given to them as anything but occasional treats and snacks, so all winter we have to keep stalks of celery at all times for when we unexpectedly run low on herbs and lettuce, so they don't become sad at having extra-small salads. The majority of the bunny diet is and should be made up of grass/hay, so the salads are for variety, flavor, treats, etc, but they are the highlight of the bunny day for sure.

Our tenant suggested we should build one of those pyramidal tiered thingies that lets you grow greens up and down the sides. Certainly a good idea to avoid using up too much footprint in the sunniest part of the yard... but that's an even more elaborate carpentry project, so I'm guessing we might get around to it, what, next year? We bought some herb and lettuce and arugula and sorrel seeds yesterday and we have the remainders of several that the bunnies have recently eaten all the leaves off of as well, and surely it would be more time saving to just stick them in the ground. We bought four bags of potting soil and we've got a ton of garden compost, hay, and bunny poop (an even better fertilizer than chicken poop, and utterly dry and odorless inside, so very convenient too, although I do feel guilty that we've thrown so much of it away over the years when we didn't have a garden and were too lazy to collect it).

We have a HUGE yard, with a lot of mostly flat area in the back, but it's rather... sheltered... by very tall hedges on all sides (that we failed to get professionally trimmed in time this year so we have to live with them looking wild and abandoned another year) and a row of enormous birches and evergreens along the back of the property and a mushrooming of ugly midcentury apartment buildings across the street to the southeast, which means that the part of the yard that deserves the designation "sunny" is actually rather limited and probably only has room for, say, five or six of those standard raised bed boxes left (we put in a couple of rows of berry bushes there last year).

babies are morons! they don't know anything!

Tristana knows nothing and is frequently surprised or unwise, so this is what we've started saying like, all the time. (I KNOW it's a quote from somewhere but I don't know where and I can't find it with google now so like... it's either a comedy film or a sitcom or any one of like twenty some youtube channels. BONUS: Have I got it slightly wrong? Is it actually 'idiots'?)

For example, every now and then a bee gets in - there are lots of them in the backyard - and while the other cats have shown themselves a little too eager to chase, she goes right for them. I've seen her gently pat a bee against the window under the pad of her paw. She's just lucky that it wasn't hard enough to hurt the bee but too close for it to move around and sting her. When we briefly let her into the unconditioned porch space after emptying it, she found two dead bees so far in the corner that the broom apparently couldn't reach them when we swept it out and promptly started playing with them. She was about to eat one within five seconds and had to be arrested, and then later the SAME DAY had to be arrested trying to eat a live (but sick) bee that had landed on the floor. So while the original context of the meme "Remembering the bees" is remembering the international plight of the bees, we have taken to suggesting that she is remembering the bees and wondering why she isn't allowed to eat them.



(The above is appropriately in KWZ Honey, an ink I love to bits. The top one is in Sailor Souten, but it isn't showing to best advantage there: it's not just a beautiful azure, it has dramatic shading effects and a pretty red sheen in the proper light - I haven't photographed it properly myself, but you can see it in ink reviews like this one.)