Welcome to another Chaos Friday post. I was up early because we had another cool night for sleeping so had gone to bed at a reasonable time. The morning chores were done and I tried to get the milk order done. But Tom had gone to Las Vegas on business and his family had been out late to a musical, Pippin, and no one was up to do the order. So I moved on.

My helper friend was here and he got started on the foliar sprays. My backup helper was also here and we went out to the Big garden to start cleaning that up. It had really been abandoned since the garlic harvest and needed a lot of work.

First we got the pea fences up, rolled, labeled, and then hung up in the garden shed.

Next I wanted to build the onion table. I needed 2 sawhorses from the barn. We went up and found the horses and got them outside. Then I went to get the truck to move them. The battery was dead as a doornail, again. I’d had enough of it doing that so I decided a new battery was due.

But first I had to get the battery out of the truck. This was the problem. The bolt’s head was completely rounded out. We tried to get it off, but to no avail. So I went and got my helper friend and he said we needed vice grips. Vice grips are something hard to find around here.

So we headed into the barn disaster in hopes of finding some. And lo and behold! I have taken to putting things back in their places when I must venture into the mess. And I must have found the vice grips at one point and they’d stayed put.

By the time we got back to the truck, my backup helper had managed to loosen the bolt with pliers and we finally got the battery out. She was going to take me down to get a battery. I’d looked up where my husband had bought the battery and it had been Walmart in 2018. I didn’t feel I knew enough about batteries to go buy one for myself. Trying to reach the store by phone to find out if they took cores for discount didn’t help as they weren’t answering the phone. So I decided to go to the auto parts store even though it would be more expensive.

So off we went and the auto parts guy came out to look at the battery. I’d seen a sticker on it that said 2/22 and assumed that was expiration. He said no, it was bought date and it should be easily exchanged at Walmart. So off we went.

Well, turns out, it was one Tom bought in February and he was in Las Vegas with his card, which they wanted to do the exchange. After a bit of discussion, they decided they would exchange it so I went back and found another one, just like it (last one on shelf, same 2/22 sticker) and went back to the service desk.

Well, they ran the numbers on both batteries and announced they couldn’t exchange it because the UPC codes had been changed since February. Sigh… They decided they could refund onto a gift card, then use the gift card to pay for the new one, but it would cost more. I had an old gift card in my purse and it was enough for the difference. So we headed home and my helper friend got it into the truck nice and tight and the truck started.

It’s rather sad for me to deal with this. First, it would never have happened if my husband was here because he would have been driving the truck a lot. And if it had happened he would have figured out why. (I suspect a wire is shorting and draining the battery.) And third he would have dealt with it as that was his department, as the gardens are mine. Now it’s all my department, and it’s a bit overwhelming and makes me sad.

And if he’d been here, by now I probably would have had a new picnic table to work on instead of this temporary table. But I got the table put together while my backup helper finished the milk spraying. My helper friend had to leave.

She finished just as I did so we went to the garden to get it cleaned up. I got all the row strings up and she collected all the stakes that weren’t in use. By then it was after 11:30 and I was getting pretty hot and tired. We’d lost an hour of cooler temps messing with the truck.

I had a stake shortage so we sorted out the broken ones for kindling and the rest by size so they’d be easier to use. It also freed up another 5 gallon bucket. I seem to have a shortage of those these days.

We went inside as it was time for her to leave and I managed to get the milk order finished and called in 4 hours late.

One thing that has to happen soon is to get the garlic area weeded and mulched. I mulched as much of it as I could as we harvested, using the old mulch, But it was thin and I’d had to double it up, so there wasn’t enough to finish mulching. I never got back to do it and this is the result since late July.

My helper friend had found this zucchini when spraying and I’d hoped to make zucchini bread. But I was too hot and tired.

In the New Herb garden I had 2 sunflower volunteers. One was in a bed and was left alone to grow there. It was small and flowered a few weeks back. This one in the walkway had been accidently uprooted in the weeding and replanted. It had looked really sad for a week and then seemed to recover. Now look at it! It’s got a flower bud too.

The rest of the afternoon I was on the couch. The front from Canada arrived and the humidity dropped and the temps would be in the 50’s at night. Good sleeping weather! Supposed to be a great weekend. I think I will do the onions on Saturday, as they need several days to cure and rain is forecast for Wednesday.