Saturday, June 4

The tummy bug has continued to circulate around -- D woke up sick in the middle of the night and spent a lot of the day on the couch.  R was sick again.  I think A might be fighting it off; he randomly gets cranky, whiny, and clingy, sometimes grabbing at his stomach and pulling his knees up.  

I went out to the garden to water the seeds & sprouts, and I ended up planting some more lettuce mix.  I read an idea in The Urban Homestead for planting greens.  You take a variety of types and sizes and seed them evenly across the area you have.  Then as they come up, you thin them, eating the baby greens.  You just kind of keep up with it, eventually leaving a few heads of lettuce and thinning the stuff around them so they can have room to grow fully.  The smaller greens continue to grow around them.  So, I spread the lettuce mix out around my cucumber plants.  Hopefully, they will have time to grow before the cucumber spreads too much.

N went to Home Depot for a deck building tutorial.  In the afternoon, my dad came by with a chipper and a chainsaw and took down two cedar trees in the corner of our yard.  (Well, they start out as one, but the trunks start splitting right away so it looks like two full trees, and he took them down one at a time.)  The kids enjoyed watching Grandpa work.  So did the neighbours who gathered around.  The garden gets a bit more sunlight now.

One of the neighbours brought over an armload of rhubarb for us.  I should have been starting dinner, but instead for some reason I decided to make banana bread and rhubarb crumble, and then make pancakes, bacon, and asparagus for dinner.  We ate so late and the kitchen was such a mess and I was so tired by the end of it.  Ugh.  And R and A were both still feeling blerg.

R and I saw a neat fly when we were out by the garden.  It had the shape and wings of a deer fly, but it was bright orange.  It hung out on the sorrel for a bit, then landed on me a couple of times, then seemed annoyed by my attempts to get a picture of it and flew off.  We also saw a june bug digging in the ground, though I couldn't tell if it was digging out or in.  Maybe it was laying eggs; it kind of reminded me of a turtle laying and burying eggs.