Sleep drought

You know you've been in a sleep drought when you wake up in the morning, finally gather the courage to roll over to look at the clock, and are overwhelmed with relief to find that it is 4:13 in the morning. For awhile this week, I was waking up almost exactly one hour earlier each consecutive day. Prior to the sleep-in of this morning, I was up (back?) to 12:34 am. I mean, really, pretty soon I wouldn't need to go to sleep at all.

Judging by the monsoon sound of the rains outside, drought is not something to worry about in the garden for awhile. We went from near-record snow fall accumulations over the past couple of weeks and northern Minnesota-like temperatures, which had us farm-bound for 11 solid days to near-immediate melt and now heavy rains. From frozen roads to swollen rivers almost overnight. Our little farm is situated nicely for both of these weather pecadillos. If snow is likely, we are high enough to get it and all the lovely bright whiteness it brings and that same elevation allows us to pass on the flooding worry to our further down neighbors. We have a sweet, year-round creek which flows through our property down below the garden, but that is surrounded by naturalized forest and bog. It would take flooding of Noah proportions to reach the house. Sometimes I feel a little guilty, but then I remember my (lack) of tomato harvest. Maybe that's our trade-off. For the third year in a row, I have sworn off tomato planting until I get a greenhouse. At least any tomatoes that I could actually do anything with. Luckily for us, those teeny-tiny tomatoes that are so sweet and delicious to pop off the vine and right into your mouth do pretty well. And then there is that new garden spot right in front of the house. I ripped out a house-length portion of deck this past summer so I could create more of a garden feel to the front of our house. It was all lumber and gravel and non-native, misplaced rhododendrons that burned in the intense heat of summer. Ah-ha! Intense heat of summer........ and now with the house as a backdrop, I could really plant some heat-loving annuals there. Now if I can just figure out a way to keep our afraid-of-the-dark dog from doing her business there.