by 
We spent Saturday in Lubbock watching Abigail’s last tournament of the season. We’d had a longish break since the last one, what with spring break and all. The Abster and her compadres acquitted themselves well though they didn’t come out on top in the end. All season Kari has soldiered on attending games and tournaments, delivering Abigail to practice and so on. She allowed as how she was tired of volleyball and not sorry to see the season end. Since we hit the road about 5 .m., we felt entitled to a nice dinner at Jazz, the cajun-food joint across from the Tech campus before driving home.
It’s almost April so those of us who feel the call start haunting the nurseries. The program at our gardening course Thursday night was about container gardening and flower gardening in general. The woman who delivered the presentation moved here 30 years ago from Austin, only intending to stay for three years or so, and was told she couldn’t grow flowers in Amarillo. The pictures she showed of her house, probably in the Amarillo College area, were proof that isn’t true. Her little gingerbread house was surrounded with beautiful flowers. Nevertheless, the nature of the challenges here did come through when she showed pictures of all her beautiful flowers on October 31st one year and the same shots showing them under a foot of snow on November 1. But she also showed pictures of a woman’s beautiful flower garden out on the prairie with nothing between it and the wind but a wrought iron fence. It just shows what can be done if one has the will.
One of the things we’ve learned in our gardening class is how to make tomato cages out of concrete reinforcing wire, otherwise known as remesh. We bought a roll at Home Depot and on a wet and windy Wednesday we spent the day in the shop building cages. The wire is heavier than the tomato cages for sale at the nurseries which makes for a sturdier tomato cage but is not easy to cut. Despite that, we put eight together, with another 12 to go. One of the master gardeners during here presentation on vegetable gardening suggested planting tomatoes the first of April so they can get a good start before it gets hot. She also said to be sure to rotate plantings. Since Joyce scattered tomatoes all over the garden last year, we decided to reconfigure the beds on the south side of the shop and plant them there. That took a couple of days and the soil in those beds needs a lot of plant matter added to them but they will have to do for now.
Though we got rain this week, it was no more than a wetting. The drought continues but the weather weenies think we’ll have a more normal spring. That is, there will be thunderstorms. Here’s hoping we avoid the hail and worse.