Saturday Meanderings

It has been an interesting week. What started with a lovely, relaxing Mother’s Day and ended with a flooded basement. The good news is the governor’s quarantine is over and life in Arizona is slowly getting back to the new normal.

Garden Update

The garden is abundant with artichokes, eggplant, fennel, cherry tomatoes, shishito peppers and fresh herbs ready to harvest. However, I have a garden mystery and hope someone can help me solve it.

Kale usually does very well here, even during the warmer months. We enjoyed one green and two purple healthy and producing kale plants over the last several months. But last month, my gorgeous kale plants went from this….

To this, literally overnight.

What kind of creature would have done this amount of damage? None of the other plants have been touched, just the kale.

This week, my husband created a fortress around the green kale plant, in hopes it may produce again.

Another, very big and disappointing discovery this week occurred in the bulb garden. You may recall that last fall, I planted hundreds of bulbs and rhizomes. This spring we enjoyed the fruits of my efforts.

During my walkabout, I was shocked and stunned to see that someTHING has stolen/eaten? all my tulip and hyacinth bulbs! There are hundreds of little holes with nothing in them. The bulbs have vanished!

I’ve have never seen anything like this! The irises have not been attacked, I hope, but maybe this critter is eating everything from below ground? Help.

New Projects

Well, this one is not so new, but we are finally making some progress on the back staircase. I posted about this last August (click here), but the project obviously stalled. The sisal carpeting is past its prime and what a dirty and smelly job it is to remove the rug and the excessive amounts of dried glue underneath. Not to mention, possibly old lead paint too.

Using a heat gun to get rid of the glue is nasty business, but the most time consuming part is taking out hundreds of carpet staples. Since I never want to glue down a rug here again, I’m debating what to do. Perhaps just staining and finishing the treads and painting the risers? We still have the final 6 steps to go. Ugh.

So excited about receiving this gorgeous green tile from Home Depot. We will use it as a backsplash behind the outdoor barbecue. It is 9 3/4″ x 9 3/4″ porcelain Monteca Encaustic tile. Quite surprising, but Home Depot has many beautiful tile selections online. Click here for link. It also comes in blue.

It was easy to order online and then curbside pickup at the store. My favorite tile man, Rick, will be doing this project in June for us.

After a rather significant meeting at City Hall yesterday morning, I had hoped to spend Friday afternoon relaxing or painting or just having “me” time. Well, that didn’t last long. While washing the lunch dishes, we suddenly ran out of hot water. Taking my daughter to the basement to show her how to re-light the water heater, we discovered a flood in progress. One of the 75 gallon water heaters split. What a mess!

I am SOOOO happy I cleaned the basement last year (click here to read that post) or this would have been much worse. Fortunately the Christmas room items were off the floor and on shelves so we did avoid a bigger disaster. To see our Christmas room, click here.

We will be spending the weekend cleaning up and replacing the water heater. These are the moments when living in an apartment sounds attractive. Sigh.

Wishing you a stress-less weekend.