Gardening

This is the layout for our garden

I haven't posted for almost a month now. No need to worry. My condition seems to still be steadily improving. I am still on prednisone that seems to make me feel weak. I work for a few hours until I feel tired and then relax for a while before going back to work. By the end of the day my feet are so sore I can barely stand. My skin is very sensitive to the sun. I need to cover up and slather lots of sunscreen. I still get red where I get sun in spite of spf 100 sunscreen. I need to stay out of the sun at least for another two or three months so as not to aggravate my immune system and set off a GVH reaction. Small insults to my skin could snowball into a case of full blown GVH. I noticed recently from just a minor exposure on the back of my hands, my skin blistered in a few places. After meeting with my doctor today we decided to stay indoors from 10:00 AM until 04:00 PM. I have been given more freedom

In spite of all that I have been doing a lot of bike rides and this past week I have been working on getting a garden in for the spring. I built a nice fence with a gate to keep the dogs out. The fence has chicken wire to let light through and to give climbing plants like cucumbers a place to grow. Old redwood fencing will be made into raised beds that will be laid out in a grid. I visited a stable and brought back a truckload of fresh manure to make a huge compost pile for my raised beds. That was a long day. I didn't want the subject for the next day at the clinic to be a debate about the safety of pitching manure so I steered Billie out of the backyard until after the clinic. When she did see the pile it didn't dawn on her right away that it was mostly manure. It just looked like a pile of straw the first day.

This is the pile on the first day

This is the pile after three turns and a week.

The squirrels were competing too well for the remainder of the oranges so I picked all the oranges and brought them inside. At the rate the squirrels were eating them they would have been gone in a couple days.

The end of the oranges.

The summer navel orange tree in the garden area had grown very fast and gotten away from us in the past few years. It was already a great producer in just six years. We cut it back severely to give it a longer trunk and to keep the oranges out of reach of the dogs. Before it made a nice shady canopy that Tempo liked to sleep under during the hot summer days. She likes to dig and make nests in the cool dirt.

Tempo's nests under the orange tree.

Working in the garden has exposed me to a little too much sun in spite of covering up. I thought I was doing enough but I was wrong.

An old t shirt scrap covers my ears and neck but I still got too much sun.