To many Memorial Day weekend is part of a long three day weekend marking the start of summer.  It’s a time for going to the river, lake or beach.  Hope you stopped for a moment to reflect on the sacrifices of those who died for you right to have fun today, ship our jobs overseas or over the border, or protest burn the flag they died for.  And one right which I’m totally appalled at is that you have is to protest at their funerals and disturb the privacy of their grieving families.

Saturday, since the house was half way still clean from my high school reunion visit and the daylilies, oriental lilies and Japanese iris were all in bloom, I scheduled an open garden brunch.  Here lately, everything I’ve done has been like a rerun of I Love Lucy.  I can’t decide which episode, the one where Lucy tries to ship herself to Europe in the trunk and locked herself in, or Lucy and Ethel wall paper hangers, or Lucy and Ethel candy makers.  Remember what Lucy had to sing to her old teacher in order to get her birth certificate?  Anyway, we had straight line winds Wednesday that did a lot of damage to the area. I was out of power for over 12 hours and broke a toe in the middle of the night walking to the bathroom. Something I’ve done in the dark for years.  I had to work late three days, so I didn’t get a lot of work done. Friday night I had the riding mower out mowing the front yard until dark.  I chewed the belt up on the finishing mower the Saturday before and had to order one, so the lower forty looked shaggy. The making of the bourbon balls was definitely Lucy and Ethel candy makers, a story which 

Everyone had a good time and those who were strangers were friends by the end of the visit.  Those out on the screen porch were treated to numerous visits by hungry ruby throat hummingbirds.  We could have done without the cicadas though.  The hooligans have been eating them like chickens after bugs in the garden.  Blackie has been jumping up on the trees grabbing as many as she can get until she could hardly move. 

Monday I went to the Memorial Day program at the Colbert County Courthouse in Tuscumbia, AL conducted by The American Legion Post # 31. The main road leading into town had flags flying and a large number of homes had flags or decorations to honor those fallen. Today’s pictures are from that program. I’ve also included pictures of some of those who have served our country.  Some of the guys I know their names, but have chosen to let them represent all of those who have served our country.  More pictures may be found on my Wordpress blog.  A memorial was dedicated to the Purple Heart recipients at the end of the program and a wreath placed at the flag pole.   

I’m a big fan of tomatoes, not just any tomatoes, I have to have heirloom tomatoes.  The taste and scent has been bred out of the hybrids.  The hybrids just don’t smell like tomatoes.  Google heirloom tomatoes and you’ll find literally hundreds.  Some of the ones I have tried are Black Krim, Brandywine, Black Brandywine, Mortgage Lifter, Beefsteak, and German and Mennonite Pink, but my most favorite is Cherokee Purple. 

 Cherokee Purple: mature in 80 days, tomatoes are large 10-14 oz. with a very dark red flesh, shows good disease resistance, a problem with the old favorites. It’s a very good producer, and has an excellent flavor. It is said to have originated with the Cherokee Nation.  The skin is a dark maroon color with green shoulders. It has a fantastic flavor.  Last year it was the only tomato that bore heavily during the crazy summer we had, of alternating drought and too much rain.

I grow my heirlooms from seed every year that I saved from the finest large tomato of each variety.  This year I purchased new seeds as my Cherokee Purple seems to have crossed with some of the other varieties.  I’m also trying a yellow brandywine and  a  German Pink. 

Tomato cages for these plants can’t be wimpy.  If you use those little wimpy tomato cages for heirlooms, they won’t support the massive height and weight of heirlooms. Thirteen years ago I bought a 100 foot roll of concrete wire and made cages about 2.5 to 3 feet in diameter.  Some I use for my cucumber vines. They’ve held up all these years and even survived an escaped herd of horses thundering through a stack of them one winter. I don’t see how one didn’t break a leg.  The concrete wire is expensive for a roll, but you figure up the cost of replacing these little rinky dink store bought cages every year or so and they’ll pay for themselves in short time.  Mine still have many more years of life left in them. 

I usually wait until my tomatoes are a foot to foot and half tall before planting in the garden.  I dig a hole to a depth that only an inch of the plant is showing.  You need a strong root system for tomatoes.  I strip all but the top leaves off.  In the planting hole, I’ll sprinkle some 3 month time released fertilizer and a little of Epsom salt.  One thing I’ve tried the last couple of years is putting some of the water retention crystals in the hole.  Cover up the plants leaving just the top few leaves out. After planting I put a layer of newspaper down and about 3 to 4 inches of mulch on top of the papers.  Using this method, I hardily watered my plants, even during a severe drought for the last couple of years.  The newspaper and mulch are tilled in the next fall to add organic matter to the soil. 

My tomato sandwich recipe: I like multi-grain bread spread with honey mustard salad dressing, add one thick slice either of the Cherokee purple or Beefsteak or other large heirloom. Sprinkle with just a little pinch of salt or garlic salt and chow down.  Oh and plenty of napkins are needed. 

The cicadas are still raising racket that sounds like a whole neighborhood burglary alarms going off and covering the trunks and limbs of all my trees.  A fried of mine called the police not knowing what the noise was thinking some one was up to no good at a neighbor’s house. Friday, while I was moving grass, I got tired of being popped in the back of the head and hearing a screech over my ear protection.  The weekend I tried to finish mowing until the belt shredded on my 5 foot finishing mower. It’s the same brand as the four foot one that I had for over 12 years and had the original belt on it when I sold it with my old tractor. This mower is a year and a half old and the belt shreds.  I can’t complete that job, so I put the tiller on the tractor to plow Mom’s and my garden.  She’s wanted to plant her sweet potatoes for several days.  First I had to remove the cedar tree I had wrapped around the tines the last time I used it.  That took over an hour to do around the hooligans licking me in the face and laying on top of me wrestling with each other.  

Next job was burning up the last of Mom’s Bradford pear tree which she lost the morning of our tornadoes.  She called me at 5 AM while we were in a series of tornado warning that she had lost it.  I told her that’s what they do that in a big wind.  I had re-injured my knee, so I sat on my tractor seat watching the fire and listening to the woodpeckers, doves and another bird I didn’t recognize.   Occasionally I would re-stack the stack with the loader and get the fire started again.  Once during a quiet moment I started to doze off until I got popped between the eyes with a cicada that decided to hang from my glasses.  Four more weeks of these annoying critters. If you don’t have them yet, you will as they are slowing hatching northward. Levi has gotten so fat off from eating them, that I’ve had to cut his food back.   The last of my iris have bloomed, and my Japanese iris, daylilies and oriental lilies have started.  I just love this time of the year, but I could do without the locusts.

  With the hummingbirds migrating back into the US, everyone is putting up feeders.  With the abundance of fire ants in my area, I like many was having problems with ants getting into the feeders and ruining the sugar water. I priced some of the store bought ant barrier containers and they were very expensive.  I found one at the end of the season at a very deep discount. I looked at it and said to myself, I can make this.  I came up with a couple of designs for making home made ones very inexpensive. 

One design uses a heavy gauge wire, such as electric fence wire, which I also had on hand for making homemade plant tags.  Another design used a screen door latch which I had on hand after replacing a screen door on the back porch.   

# 1 RULE, USE GLOVES WHEN DOING THIS PROJECT.

Other materials needed are a cap off of a spray can, a nail or ice pick or drill bit, a pipe or pipe or broom handle, pliers, and water proof caulking.  One advantage of using wire is that if you don’t quite get the hole in the center, you can bend the wire after hanging to level the cap. 

Punch a hole in the middle of the cap. 

Cut a length of wire around a foot long and file down the sharp edges on each end.

Wrap one end around a pipe or broom handle, rod or whatever you have to make a loop.

Take the pliers and twist the end of the wire around the length of wire. Push the other end through the cap.

Make another loop as you did with the first end.

Caulk and let dry and put to use.  

For the screen door latch, punch a hole in the middle of the cap.  

I cut the smaller eye screw shown off of the screen latch either with a bolt cutter or hack saw.

Take a hammer and bend the latch part down to make a hook. Push the latch end through the bottom of the cap.   Caulk around the hole and let dry a day or two. Hang the feeder and put water in the cap.   

Don’t use the colored dye sugar water. Make your own by using 1 part of sugar and 4 parts of hot water. Cool and place in your feeder.  The red on the feeder itself is enough to attract hummers.  Check out one of my four posts of my hummingbirds at my feeders last September. 

The 13 year cicadas started hatching a couple of weeks ago and are slowly hatching out to the north.  They get more numerous and louder each day.  You can’t hear yourself think when you are outside.  The hooligans have been extremely stinky even from six feet away.  I finally figured out what was causing the odor when I saw Blackie, the most aromatic of the three rolling in something.  The cicadas, what the dogs haven’t eaten, they’ve rolled in.  I hope the birds are having a feast right now.  I’ve saw a bluebird carrying one to her nest, but haven’t seen many other birds after them.  

Saturday it was too wet to plow the garden, and my crooked neck and Zapallo scallop squash needed to be planted.   I had planted some several weeks earlier but only had one come up.  I took some single ply toilet paper and lined up my seeds down the middle and rolled it up length wise and put the wad into recycled yogurt cups and moisten the paper daily until the seeds started sprouting.  I had almost 100% germination this time, and I’ll have enough squash to feed an army.   

The tornado clean up continues in Hackleburg and Phil Campbell.  Hope is that Wrangler will rebuild it’s factory in Hackleburg as it is the largest employer in town. Phil Campbell’s prom was held in the Shoals last weekend, and the hospital group I work for is sponsoring their sports award banquet this week. Another group is trying to replace music instruments; volunteers spend their weekends going to these two towns and also to Moulton and other parts of Lawrence county to help. And the list goes on. Everyone in the area is trying to help bring some normalcy back into their lives.. 

I  purchased a small Golden Shadows Pagoda dogwood at the Huntsville Botanical Gardens a few weeks back and have been looking for a nice visible shady spot for this variegated dogwood which needed to be an understory tree.  I decided to put it on the north side of one of my Heritage birch trees in the front yard and of course put a hooligan cage around it.  After digging in compost and getting the hole dug, I pulled the tree out of it’s container and sat it in the hole. Levi who’d been picking on Blackie again was running for his life and ran to me to save him and sat on my tree before I could stop him.  Luckily the tree only sustained a broken off leaf and no other damage.  Advanced thinking had a hooligan cage just a few feet away, which was quickly placed over the tree before other damage occurred.  

I’ve been wondering if I’ve pulled a Rip Van Winkle and slept through summer and fall.  It’s been cold with misty rain the last few days.  Monday’s high was 60 beating the old record low high of 61 in 1926.  Lows have been in the low 40s, and I turned on the heat last night to warm up a bit.  My iris are finishing up and clematis, oriental lilies, daylilies and Japanese iris are starting to bloom. Usually the irises are finished by the end of April and the oriental lilies don’t start until the middle of June. My daylilies usually start in April. Plants are screwed up this year with all the snow we’ve had. Check out some of the new petunias on the market this year on my personal blog along with some of my flowers in bloom this week.  

Hope all Moms had a happy Mother’s Day this past weekend.  My Mom was born in Yugoslavia.  Her Dad was German and Mom Hungarian.  After WWII broke out a German officer rode up to the door of their house and told my Grandfather that he was to report for duty, and if he didn’t, they would come back and shoot him. After much discussion with my Grandmother, he decided to report. He came home a few times, but is listed as MIA in the area of Yugoslavia now known as Bosnia.  In the mean time, my Grandmother was taken to a Russian concentration camp. Mom at seven years old was left to fend for herself, begging for food, after her Grandfather’s death, her brothers took off for Germany.  After a year on her own, she eventually found her Mother, who was rented out by the Russians to work in farmer’s fields during the day.  She was then also placed in the concentration camp with her Mother for 18 months until they paid to escape with a group of 60 from the camp. 

After going to Austria, somehow they were united with my two uncles and came to the U.S. as refugees aboard the troop carrier USS Hanselman. How did Mom and Dad meet?  My Dad requested a family to come and work for him through the Catholic Relief Services. Another family was to come and work for him, but their children developed the measles, so Mom’s family was selected.  After a brief courtship, mostly hiding and kissing behind a stack of milk crates, they were married and had five children. 

Mom is one tough lady. She recently had an aortic aneurysm repair.  Her doctor told her she was not to get on her riding mower for six weeks.  I had to hide the keys to her mower to keep her from getting on it before the six weeks were up. 

The hooligans have been busy chasing the 13-year cicadas that started hatching this weekend.  They are everywhere and raising a lot of racket -- like a bad water pump.  Patches has been breaking out at night and waiting at the end of the driveway for me to let her back in when I go to work in the morning.  I checked her new collar and for some reason, it only gives a warning a few feet from the line.  I swapped collars with Levi, and she sat for the longest time just staring disgustedly at me.  She’s staying at home as of this moment. They sat and watched me plant my tomatoes yesterday, and before I turned in for the evening, I put newspaper down and mulched them and placed a hooligan cage around each. My tomatoes were still there today in great shape.

This evening they kept stopping in front of my tractor while I was trying to mow and fussing at the horses in the pasture next door.   I’m not used to having a roll bar yet on this tractor. I keep forgetting that minor point when I try to mow under my fruit trees. The black mulberries are nice and juicy, and my clothes are full of black spots from those knocked off by the roll bar.  Being bombed by green plums doesn’t feel great either.   My last of my late blooming iris are finishing up. Oriental lilies are starting to open and some of the daylilies will be open within a week. Last week temperatures were 15-20 degrees below normal; this week they will be 10 degrees above normal.  The morning sunrises have been spectacular.

Clean up and searching for the missing continues in the areas hard hit by last week’s tornados. The stories of the survivors have been amazing.  Stories told by some of the first responders put a lump in your throat. The Phil Campbell & Hackleburg area have a large number of chicken houses that were destroyed, and now the task of disposing of three million dead chickens is underway.  The number of volunteers from surrounding communities as well as from other areas of the country helping with the clean up makes you proud to be an American. 

Wednesday, April 27, brought a series of tornados which hit the Southeast, my state of Alabama was particularly hard hit.  Small towns of Phil Campbell and Hackleburg in Northwest Alabama essentially were wiped off of the map.  The death toll in Phil Campbell was 28 with a similar number in Hackleburg. Many home owners in Hackleburg lacked insurance to replace their homes if they survived. The number of people volunteering and the amount of help given locally has just been amazing. Please keep them and the other areas of that have made national news in your prayers.

My area of the Shoals suffered a lot of tree damage.  I was awakened that morning with a call from Weathercall, a weather warning service from a Huntsville station that tornados were spotted in my neighborhood. My next door got the same call, which was repeated three more times during the day. After listening to the weather radio going off constantly, I took out the subscription and have it set just for tornados in my immediate area.

After the first rounds of storms, I got back to getting ready for my Deshler high school XL reunion garden visit. The local John Deere dealer came to picked up my tractor and the driver asked if I liked flowers when he pulled in the driveway. I think when he first got on the tractor, he thought, This woman doesn’t have it in gear or has the parking brake on.  When he couldn’t get it to go forward or backwards, he said hummm.  Then he noticed I had a broken bracket attached to the hydrostatic drive pedals and hauled it off. Win one for this woman.

My next chore since it was raining again was housecleaning.  Between one of the storm bands, I decided to run to town and get a haircut. As I was backing out of the garage the warning siren up on Colbert Heights went off, and I pulled back into the garage. Man that system formed fast.  This system is the one which caused most of the causalities and destruction across the state. 

After another tornado warning call, I went back to my house cleaning and crawled up on a chair to replace a couple of light bulbs in the ceiling light in the kitchen. My knee went out, and I’m standing there in pain trying to figure out how to get down without falling.  I couldn’t put any weight on it and hobbled to the closet to get my crutches. By this time my knee was three times its normal size.  What’s going to happen next I wondered? Now my garden and my house won’t be ready.  The next day I called for an appointment at the orthopedic clinic and was told that it would be next week (after the reunion) before I could get in as all the doctors were out of town or at the hospitals helping tornado victims.  "That’s okay," I told her. "I’ll take the appointment for next week."

Mom came over and mopped the kitchen floor, helped clean, made cookies, cakes and lemonade, and mowed the front yard, fussing that she’ll be glad when my reunion is over.  Moms are delighted when they are needed, but like to make you think otherwise. 

My neighbor Lasonia made cookies and helped with some cleaning in the kitchen and replaced the light bulbs in the ceiling light. I worked on things I could do such as making more lemonade, and tea, furniture dusting, sink and toilet cleaning. My Auburn sign I had one of our patients husband made to get my visitors still hadn’t been mounted on the arbor at the end of the house, and I found a large hook and between Mom and myself, we got that hung temporarily. Leonard came Friday afternoon and worked on weeding the bed at the end of the house. Friday evening I got my tractor back and crawled up on it and started mowing the lower forty leaving my crutches where I could retrieve them when I parked back in the garage. I had about a half acre left when I noticed I was almost out of diesel.  I pulled up beside my can of diesel and called Mom and asked her to come over and hand it up to me.  I expected a lecture, but she just grinned and said, “Well you have your toy back don’t you?”

Saturday, the day of the reunion, some of the flower beds still hadn’t been weeded, the daylilies I said would be in bloom weren’t, but at least the yard was mowed.  The iris and peonies were in bloom later than usual. Over three inches of rain had washed away the walkway I was working on, but nothing could be done now. Gracie, my long time friend from work came and brought brownies and helped set up the tables and helped out during my class visit.  I was still on crutches and she was a blessing. In the end we had a great crowd, and they really didn’t care what things looked like. Some of our classmates we hadn’t seen since graduation. They just had a good time visiting with old friends.

I had decided that my knee wouldn’t be able to take the walking needed to get to the building that our dinner was located in and wouldn’t go to Tuscumbia for it.  Peggy one of my classmates and her husband George came to the rescue and picked me up and brought me home afterwards.  A great time was had by all, and some of us at our age can still get down and boogie.  Lasting friendships are what it’s all about. Oh and some of us still can get down and boogie.