I drafted my daughter again!

Last year I planted vining crops through holes in woven barrier. It left a lot of dead vines behind that needed to be cleared before I plant this year! Also, during the winter we folded back the plastic so that the right of way could be cleared for the Utility workmen who will be putting up new lines.

They appear to have chosen where they will be working, and it is well away from the garden so I had DD put two of the woven plastic strips back, and I weighed it down with bricks and with metal pins. We also cleared away the dead vines from last year and made everything tidy. There is now an 8 foot by 50 foot strip of garden waiting to be planted!

Because my feet and ankles are the most affected, I did the lower level work, crawling along the edges of the plastic on my hands and knees and re-inserting pins and placing bricks, My daughter used the rake to remove and take away the dead vines.to give me a clear field so that I could work.

We are also stripping the floor of the old linoleum so that we can have a new floor. I was told that due to the age of the house that I would need to either have an asbestos test done or strip the old stuff ourselves. I thought, how hard could it be to remove the old linoleum? It was already cracked and broken in two spots!

HA! It is a BEAR! To make it worse, the kids lack patience with it and their attention keeps wandering. As a result, I am doing 80% of it. They help some, and I pay them for it, but if I keep them at it for TOO long they get not very productive. So I try to keep them motivated for an hour at a time and then release them to enjoy their spring break. I have the patience to keep coming back to it and so I have done most of it.

The kids WERE invaluable when it came to empty and move the refridgerator: they attacked the job  with energy and they did not stop until it was done. Teenagers just seem to do best when you give them an active job instead of a fiddly one. Patience seems to be a gift of middle aged people, just as energy and enthusiasm is a gift to teenagers.

I should have had the asbestos test done. It would have meant $35 and there is a fair-to-middling chance that it would have come back positive, but I really HATE sitting on the ground and scraping the old backing off that has been glued to the floor. Stripper helps and boiling water helps, but it is still a positively GRUESOME job!