Kayaks and rodents, and trucks

My truck and J's

It looks like I won't be posting much this summer, too busy. It seems I had more time on my hands last summer to keep posting here, but this summer not so much.

My main activities are kayaking and swimming, with a little gardening on the side. July is my low gardening month, I fertilize and plant in May, weed a lot in June, and then in July I figure my plants are established enough to let the weeding slide. Whatever is not doing so well I shrug my shoulders and think, "I guess it's a bad year for <whatever is not doing well>". And I start picking and eating whatever is doing well. So far it is peas and green peppers and a single cucumber. Green peppers! I have never successfully grown green peppers! Makes up for all the lettuce, kale, chard and squash that failed to sprout or grow.

The garden is overrun by volunteer potatoes, apparently my potato harvest last year was not so efficient. Even so I got a lot of potatoes and had enough left over in the spring to replant this year. The potatoes may be why the squash failed to grow, their alloted space was taken over by the volunteer potatoes.

A friend and neighbour has been organizing daily kayak trips. The county bought a bunch of little plastic kayaks and set them up at a public beach on a local lake for county residents to use for free. All you have to do is book a one-hour time slot and then show up for it. My friend is a great organizer (if she was a dog she'd be a border collie!) so she books the kayaks a week in advance and then herds a bunch of us to the lake to paddle. We carpool because it is a 45-minute one-way trip. My friend does not have a car but she also gets a ride out of it to her favourite golf course on the way home from kayaking (busy girl!).

All told we are in the car for an hour and a half every morning for one hour of paddling. You may think that much driving is not worth it, but it is. It is glorious to be out on the water in a tiny little kayak! On really hot days we go for a swim afterward. At that hour of the day the beach is not crowded, and it is nicely set up with change rooms, port-a-potties, a little kiddie playground, and lots of grass and picnic tables, some of them under cover for shade or shelter from the rain. The beach is more pebbly than sandy so most people sit on the grass when not in the water.

In the junkyard

Lately my afternoons are taken up with my truck project. J found a cap for my truck at a local junk yard, so we went there to buy it and the junk yard guys helped transfer my tonneau cover to J's truck and install the cap on mine (photo at top: my truck and J's with the tonneau cover transferred to J's truck). J has no money but wants to pay for the cover which he says is worth $100 or more, so he's going to pay it off with work on my truck. 

Isn't she handsome?

I now need a slider window at the front of the cap and a roof rack. I won't find those at a junk yard so I will have to pay a bunch for them new and wait a while for them to come available. In the meantime J is going to clear coat the cap and do a couple of small repairs on it, it is otherwise in very good condition. It was pretty filthy when we retrieved it from the junk yard, but a couple of good rain downpours and a bit of scrubbing has done wonders for that. It had been sitting on the ground for at least a year so stuff was starting to grow on it and at least one critter had made a home for itself inside.

Speaking of critters making homes for themselves, I've been finding holes in my potato patches. It looks as if something was trying to dig up my potatoes, but no potatoes showed any damage. Also tunneling into the compost bin. Then one day last week J and I were in my driveway discussing next steps on my truck project when J spotted a critter diving into the window well of one of my basement windows. I looked into the well and saw that there was another tunnel dug in there. A few moments later a head popped up at the edge of the window well. It was a chipmunk! It spotted us a few feet away and immediately dove back down. Since then I have seen it running between my garden and the window well a couple of times.

I am not going to chase out a chipmunk. If it was a grey squirrel or a rat I'd take steps immediately, but a chipmunk? Can't do it. I will put up with its ravages in my garden.