Happy thanksgiving to you, too, Alexis! The poem made me tear up. Thanks for sharing it.

Enjoy your babies. Their childhood goes so quickly.

Alexis, I love that poem!

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. I bet Thanksgiving is twice as fun for you and Mike now with two babies instead of one. I hope life is treating you all well.

We miss you, but we know you're busy with your precious little ones as many of us already have been through that stage in our lives. My gardening didn't take off and get out of control until my baby hit high school. (grin) Of course, it helped that we moved here at about the same time, so suddenly I had lots of gardening space instead of having to fight a very shady lot with little sunshine like I had when we lived in town.

There is a time and a season for all things, and y'all are in the growing babies stage for sure right now! I happen to think that stage of life is as much fun as gardening. Okay, actually it is more fun than gardening, and just as exhausting, if not more so. Before you know it, you'll have two toddlers out there in the garden helping you, although we can debate just how helpful they'll actually be. I'm thankful I had a dad who let me help him even when I was so young that I am sure I was more of a hindrance than a help, because my love of gardening started when I was barely old enough to toddle around the yard "helping" him. The earliest memories I have of my dad involve green St. Augustine grass and roses. Those are great memories! You know, more than plants grow in a garden---children and pets grow in a garden too, and love definitely grows in a garden. I wish you and your precious babies a lifetime of gardening together and that you'll always have an abundance of reasons to feel so happy and thankful, not just on Thanksgiving Day but every day of the year.

Am I the only one who looked at the calendar yesterday and said something to myself like "Woo hoo, one more month and then Christmas will be here, and then it will be over and done and I can get on with the beginning of the 2018 gardening season?"

Dawn

I hope everyone had a lovely day. So good to see you Alexis. I got to hold my 3 mo old grandson a lot yesterday.

You do cheer me up, Dawn, when you say things like it will all be over and gardening will begin! What kind of prep work for gardening can I put DH to while he's on vacation....

Yes, indeed, good to hear from you, Alexis! I do remember how busy the little dear ones keep us, and it is SO worth it, as they are all SO precious to us. The most important job we'll ever have in life, if we have children.

The poem was exquisite.

I trust you had a lovely Thanksgiving!

And no, Dawn, you're not the only one! Haha!

Amy, I guess it depends on what y'all need to do. Dang it. Fire on our road. Gotta go

Amy, I'll try again. If the garden beds haven't been weeded, he could do that. Or if compost hasn't been layered on top or worked into the soil he could do that. I like to have a thick, thick layer of mulch, compost, shredded leaves (any or all) on top of the beds all winter in order to prevent soil erosion, hold in whatever soil moisture we do have, and prevent weeds from sprouting and growing. Or, y'all could sow a cover crop in the beds (or in even in the pathways) because it certainly is warm enough for some cover crops to germinate even this late in the season. Is everything (trellises, cages, etc.) taken down and stored away for winter? Same for garden stakes and such. If there are weedy areas or disease-ridden areas that vex you, y'all could cover them with heavy clear plastic (I prefer 4 mm or 6 mm) to solarize them It would need to stay on for several months in our cooler temperatures (4-6 weeks is enough in the summer heat). I don't know what else is standard for y'all to do in fall/winter in advance of planting season. I don't know if you remove all your dead/dormant plant material in the fall, or if you leave it until the spring to allow beneficial insects to have it for shelter and/or possible food sources, but if you do remove stuff normally, and it isn't done yet, he could do that.

A person could mow and catch all the grass clippings to add to the compost pile or compost bin. This is my favorite time of the year to do that because I get leaves mixed with grass clippings so it decomposes more quickly (and even faster than that if I add a little bit of chicken manure/chicken bedding from the chicken coop).

Do you have asparagus? If so, have y'all cut it back to the ground, added the plants to the compost pile and added a new layer of mulch to the asparagus bed? Thick mulch helps keep my asparagus bed from sprouting weeds before it can sprout fiddleheads.

How about the area where you will plant onions and potatoes? Now is a nice time to prepare for planting by rototilling the soil deeply, removing all weeds, etc. (unless you are no-till). My potato beds and onion beds are no-till but I do remove weeds at this time of the year and add mulch on top. I try to stay on top of cool-season weeds that sprout in those beds because onions, in particular, do not like weedy competition.

Then there's sharpening all the tools, oiling them, putting them in a bucket of sand for storage so their metal tool heads don't rust.

There, that's all the chores I can dream up for your DH to work on in the garden while he's off work for a few days. Is that enough? Do you want him to pour concrete pathways in between the beds so you'll never have weedy pathways again? I can keep on daydreaming and think of more.

Dawn

Ha, Dawn, I can come up with plenty for him to do, but it seems I can't get him to do things. I want a greenhouse. He's resisting, but hasn't told me WHY yet. Maybe he doesn't like where I want to put it. I have room for one more 4x8 bed. I would put in more flower beds. There's plenty of clean up to do. We have to figure out how to keep the dog out of the beds. She KNOWS its a no no, but it doesn't stop her. I've never put up the weather station I bought. He HAS to install the dishwasher. And he has 2 drawers to repair in the kitchen. And, mostly, I expect he'll want to do nothing.

Ha, Amy, I have a husband like that, and it gets worse every year. We always have different priorities on our To Do lists.

Tim is good at doing stuff unless he walks into his office and turns on the TV. Then he becomes mesmerized by something like a kids sports movie he has watched at least 1, 875 times before and it is impossible to get him out of the office and back to whatever he was supposed to be working on. Oh, and when he does start working on a chore, the fire pagers go off and he has to leave. It happened yesterday. It happened today. It likely will happen tomorrow. I'm not saying he is at fault there---but if he wasn't trying to work on something from our lengthy To Do list, the fire pagers absolutely would not go off. It is like a Murphy's Law thing. My best way to get him to do something is to tell him "Never mind, I'll do it myself." Hey, guilt really does work---especially if power equipment is involved and he's afraid I'll cut off my own hand or something.

Five of us spent all morning getting our tired, balky fire equipment cleaned up, filled up, fueled up, reorganized, restocked and totally, totally, totally ready for the day. When we were done, we said goodbye at the station, laughingly insisting "we don't want to see y'all again today", and all along, we knew the pagers would go off and ruin everyone's afternoon plans. Which they did, and I guess it was less than an hour after we came home from the station. So, tomorrow Tim and I will try again with tiling the mudroom floor, but the odds are that within 30 to 60 minutes of us starting, the fire pagers will go off. It happens every time and it is maddening. It is a wonder that we ever get one single item scratched off the To Do list.

Your DH really does need to get your dishwasher installed sometime before its warranty expires. (grin) I was in appliance hell at this time last year, and I hope we never have all the appliances go belly up one after another after another ever again. It is stressful to be dealing with things that don't work well, don't work at all or which are sitting in the garage uninstalled. I feel your pain.

The only solution that's ever worked for me with dogs and a garden is fencing. Otherwise, they think every raised bed of soft, diggable dirt is meant for them. In fact, some dogs we've had also would dig big shallow holes in the pathways so they could lie down in the holes. I cannot tell you how many times I fell or stumbled in dog-dug holes. I love my dogs, but they are banned from the garden, now and forever. Being dogs, they know they are banned and won't even go into the garden thru the open gate. Normally the gate is not open---largely because I've had too many skunks, stray dogs and bobcats just randomly pop up in the garden while I'm in there myself---and that taught me to close the gate. Oh, and to have a second gate in a different part of the garden so I can escape if an unwanted creature joins me in the garden.

In a perfect world, you could/would have a raised garden with beds on legs at, let's say, waist height or slightly higher. You could work standing or seated in a chair, the plants would be above Honey's line of sight, and the chickens might leave the plants alone and dust bathe in the shade from your raised beds on legs. My raised salad table bed is my favorite bed because it involves no bending and very little weeding. I wish my whole garden were like that, but it's never going to happen.

How do you solve a problem like Honey in the garden? Without a fence to keep her out, I have no idea.

Dawn