The Weekend List

Every weekend I make an ambitious list.  This weekend the list included hacking at more grass around more taro, doing the FAFSA for my two college kids, starting my taxes (so I could do the FAFSA), transplanting papaya seedlings, and making potting soil with leaves and compost.  I wanted to make a month worth of dinner menus based on what was already in the ground growing, in my freezer, or in my cupboard to minimize the shopping I needed to do. 

I didn't get all of it done, of course.  I did get the potting soil done - we used the chipper to grind up waiawi leaves and mixed the result with compost and cinder in the cement mixer.  It's lovely stuff, very fluffy and it was free.  I hacked at taro and got most of a row done.  Two more rows to do.  I got three more corms out, and realized that I have a whole other tank of propane, so one of these nights I will bust out that pressure cooker and cook all that taro up and run it through the grinder. 

We planted 5 papaya plants - which is a job and a half.  It entails hacking at the kikuyu grass (aka steel cable disguised as grass), digging out huge basalt rocks (dumped to make a pad to build the garage on years ago) and shoveling in compost, some of my new potting mix and coffee grounds  just because we have a lot of them.  I hope they grow.  We have had limited success with transplanting these seedlings.  Two trees are growing, and covered with papaya, but many have died. 

One of the papaya was growing closely with a coffee seedling, so I had to re-pot that little guy.  They just aren't big enough to plant out, yet.  I have some lilikoi that I want to move out of pots, too, but I am not sure where they should go. 

I also got the month of dinners menu done and figured out what I need to buy for the next month, but I didn't do the cooking ahead that I wanted to do, so that will have to happen after work and next weekend - which makes me tired to think about.  There is a lot of flu and sickness around, and the kids at school keep hacking on me - and I think I am just running a low-level fight against all the germs.  Just enough to make me tired and not enough to (thankfully) make me really sick. 

Back to work tomorrow - it feels like a break!