Lost my wallet, plowed it under

Somewhere out there is my wallet. (and this is just a small part of what I tilled under)

7/1/10 Thursday (and Friday)
It’s been another wet day. Sure nice to have some rain and it gives me some hope that some seed I plant will come up. Sam has worked for me for three days and that helped to catch up with the weeds some. I fired the tractor up and spent a few hours pulling the disc over areas that needed it. Unfortunately my wallet worked it’s way out of the back pocket of my jeans and fell out while I was doing that. We carefully walked every inch of where I disced up the soil but there was no sign of it. It’s buried somewhere out there and odds are it’ll show up. Might be a couple of years from now but the wind will blow and, behold, there’s my wallet.

Meantime I must apply for a new driver’s license, social security card, VA Id card, and get new bank cards ordered. There are phone numbers and business cards in the wallet that I can’t replace but that’s not the end of the world, just a big inconvenience. I don’t think there was very much money in it cause we don’t have much money at the moment. Today was Sam’s last day of working. He so wants to keep working and I so need the help. He knows that when we are blessed with more funds we’ll have him come back. Till then it’s just me again.
Just some of the piles of weeds we hoed up. There's about 20 more like this

7/2/10 Friday
It’s hard not to get depressed when I work on the farm. It just slaps me in the face, all the things I haven’t kept up with and understanding that I can’t keep up with it all by myself. Plus there’s the fact that I really don’t know what I’m doing. I know a lot more than I did five years ago, when we moved here, but there is so much more I need to learn. It would be nice to have a friend who understood what it takes to grow farmer’s market type crops and could give me advice. I’ve met people who do but they have busy lives and one of my big weaknesses is that lack of social skills, an inability to develop close relationships with others that has plagued me my whole life. I’m guessing that’s a reason. Don’t really know for sure. What I know is this lack of closeness that exists for me here. A big part of that is probably due to the depression I must always fight. In Toledo I had two close friends, my secretary and Bernie, the glass artist, they are both dead now. I have other friends up there but not close ones.


Today I’ll work outside when it’s not raining. It’s raining this morning and the weather forecast says I can expect it to continue off and on all day, plus tomorrow too. This is rain from the hurricane that has made it’s way up here. Sam got all the weeds chopped down from one garden plot. That took two straight days of work to do. There is still one more area that needs to be cleared. We’ve been hoeing down the weeds and raking them up in piles that I will allow to dry and burn. The idea is to capture as many of the sticker seeds as possible so they don’t grow more sticker grass but that’s a lost cause now. The sticker grass has matured to the point that the seeds/stickers fall off the plants as we rake it up and cover the ground. If I’d gotten to this earlier it would have beaten the making seeds cycle, but that’s just another thing I haven’t kept up with. So at this point it’s a lost cause. I’m not physically able to hoe this all down by myself so I’ll till it under with the tractor despite the fact that in doing so I’m essentially planting weed seeds.
Squash bugs. Because they are still white and haven't developed their black and red skin I can tell they are young, thus susceptible to pesticides. Hate to use pesticides but these critters will quickly destroy what little managed to grow. So I'll compromise my morals in this instance.

I discovered that the squash bugs are back. They have infested the spaghetti squash pretty badly. I’ll look in the fridge that is in the garage, where I store seeds and chemicals, to see if I have anything to kill them with. That fridge no longer cools but I keep it plugged in and running anyway, hoping it at least keeps things from getting real hot inside. The idea is to keep seeds and things from going bad. It was free from the widow because it didn’t work for her so I brought it here to use as a worm bin, but when I plugged it in it worked. It might just need a recharge of Freon or something but we don’t have the money for that right now.

Time to get to work. Hopefully I’ll get lots of seeds planted. Don’t have a lot of confidence in that. Don’t have a lot of confidence in much of anything right now. I’ll try my best and see what happens. Part of today will be spent applying for replacement driver’s license and other things lost with my wallet. At some point I might run the disc over areas I disced yesterday with the hope it might bring the wallet to the surface. That’s a lot of area as I spent about three hours doing it.
This is the area that I'll just disc under. You can't see it but it has carefully plowed furrows with drip irrigation tape installed. I'll pull of the tape and start over.
Went out and took these pictures. It started raining again. The soil is too wet to run the disc over again so that idea is out, the one about running the disc to see if it brings my wallet to the surface.

Posted a picture on Burr’s Sibley Nature Center site of a plant that was mixed in with the weeds I pulled. Come to find out it’s called “devils claw” that has a wicked looking seed pod I’ve seen in various places. Burr put a link to a photo essay they have at Sibley’s website on it. Cool plant that has many uses from food to basket weaving material. Hard to believe this delicate looking flower can produce such a nasty looking seed pod. Don’t have time to look up a picture of the seed pod but it has wicked long curved hooks on it designed to catch a ride on passing BIG critters.

Cherie’s got some nice clothes out for me to wear when we go to town to start replacing lost wallet stuff. She’s going to drive cause I don’t have a license with me. Normally I wear whatever nasty clothing I’ve been working in because I’m not terribly worried about how I look to others and don’t feel like changing clothes every time I go somewhere. I’m sure that just gives the gossips something to talk about.


We use this area of the driveway as our rain gauge.