Why I Was Somewhat Glad to Bail Water

A quick aside before I get to today's little story.


We fixed the flag pole this last weekend and got the flag back up. As you can see this afternoon is breezeless. Quite warm, but my house is very cool for not being air conditioned. A great day for a couple of girls to lug a washing machine around. I hope to soon get back to gardening but I'm not sorry for the mess and that brings me to today's story...

So I know I left you hanging yesterday, dear reader, when I dashed out to get a new clothes washer. I left you thinking that I perhaps wished for such a tragedy as the one I had to deal with in my laundry house on Monday and I must admit it very well could be seen as a blessing.

This last winter I changed from trying to hold over fuchsias and geraniums in my well house to holding them over in my laundry house. I also had purchased a heat mat for starting seedlings with some bottom heat. But there was just too much going on in the laundry house. Many times I found that the girls had busted another branch or dumped another pot while trying to take their saddles out.

I also found that while nothing froze or dried out while being held over, I actually had most of my plants growing quite well by mid January, something I didn't really want to have happen. I had done my best to prepare everyone to go through a good dormancy, allowed the seed pods to develop to signal to the fuchsias to stop producing, stopped fertilizing, tapered off the water, let some light frosts push the sap back towards the roots naturally pruning tip growth, pruned branches back to 6 or so inches, then hauled them in. But I noticed that within a few weeks I had good sturdy regrowth starting on the plants directly across the room from the sliding glass door. The sun for most of the winter months reaches all the way to the back wall and up it a couple of feet. The sun in the late spring and summer barely comes in the laundry house a foot or so as you can see in this picture of Dirt checking my installation job this afternoon before he even got out of his leathers.

I weathered this miscalculation on my part and worked at keeping everyone at a moderate rate of growth. It really would have been a great boon to an early start if all that growth hadn't got froze off early in May when I was to sick to get up and cover my plants.

But all in all it caused me to have a eureka. I have been needing a hot house. A place that stays good and warm all winter without to much expenditure of energy and a good source of light so that I don't need to supplement with a lot of artificial light and I believe I found it this winter. The only problem is that this other half of the south facing wall needs a window for the laundry house to really serve this purpose. And of course even though everyone can see
the good of the change getting to it is a whole nuther story.
I'm not so sure I was even looking forward to emptying everything out and reorganizing the refrigerators and freezers that until yesterday were on the wrong walls.

BTW washers aren't that heavy and the girls are ready for the crash and the hard work coming down everyone's pike in the next year (yes, I listen to crazy radio at night).

So the freezers and frig are moved, Phil's wine supplies in a different corner, and the lights and heat mat moved to the adjoining wall, the saddles are out and the girl's have been put on notice that they need to build their own tack shed somewhere, of course we'll help cause we could also put lawn furniture in it over the winter.





Phil has already begun scoping out what will need to happen to get a window or another sliding glass door on the west side of the south facing wall. So we are well on our way, yahoo! Some things remain because there really is no better place for them and really I can't use the loft for anything else besides our banquet stuff.