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Friday I drove down to West Texas Nursery near Idalou east northeast of Lubbock to pick up the seedlings I ordered last November, I think it was. Maybe earlier. I could have had them shipped and would have saved money if I had but I like to get out sometimes, see the country-side, bleak though it may be, so I opted for the pickup. Planting seedlings during a drought might not seem like the smartest thing to do but it will take a decade to have much to show for planting them, if they survive, so one doesn’t want to wait. This is the first time I’ve been able to find piñon seedlings so I decided to go for it. I also ordered four-wing salt bush seedlings just because. Both came in units of 25, so I was faced with planting 50 seedlings, which seemed like a better idea when I ordered them last fall than it did when I got home with them Friday. As she has done many times before, my good wife saved me from myself, though, by rallying the troops to help me. Between her, Jill, Kari, Chris and I, we got 48 of the 50 planted Friday afternoon where I had figured I’d have to plant them over several days by myself. I am extremely grateful. Using a rolling hose reel with 200 feet of hose on it, I can water the seedlings, which are planted along the southwest perimeter, in 20 minutes or so. They’ll need to be watered several times a week until they get established, but both are natives of this part of the world and should stand up OK to the dry, cold, wind, heat, etc. of the Texas Panhandle. We shall see.
Jill and the gang spent the week with us. The weather cooperated and they had lots of opportunity to play on SA. The neighbors left early Saturday week for a little jaunt to see the Grand Canyon while the Wylies didn’t arrive till Saturday afternoon. The former got back home late Tuesday and the real pandemonium set in Wednesday when all the shorties got together to shriek and gambol. The Abster spent a lot of time with them but she doesn’t shriek that much anymore. I think they all had a pretty good time.
While the neighbors were gone, I tended their dog Tino, the slobber slinger. I can usually duck out on that sort of thing and let Joyce handle it, but in this case I couldn’t. Tino is so strong and lively it’s all I can do to keep him restrained. It would be too hazardous for Joyce to try. I managed, though, and Tino and I were both glad when the family got back home.
Chris took the week off and when they got back from the Grand Canyon tour, he set to work building some additions to his hives. He has a new hive he’ll get the bees for when the weather is warmer, which will make three. The additions he built for the hives are called super something. They are like adding a second story to a house. There is a plastic grill that goes between the lower hive and the super which the worker bees can get through but the queen, which is larger, can’t. The idea is that the workers will build honeycombs in the lower and the super. Chris will leave the honey in the lower portion alone so the hive can use it for nourishment and he’ll harvest the honey from the super. That is, the bees will render unto Chris that which is Chris’s and to the queen that which is the queen’s. We need to plant as many flowering plants as we can because there isn’t much in the way of wildflowers growing these days. That’s all right with me. I like to have flowers.