From the trees, dog days

I neglected to mention that this week the majority of my harvest came from the orchard instead of the garden.  The garden right now is entering it’s least productive time, summer.  The soaking rains, brutal heat and relentless attack of insects makes trying to maintain a productive garden quite difficult in SW Florida.  The only thing I am getting out of the garden right now is kale.

The orchard on the other hand produced a full colander of apples, a couple dozen blackberries and has enough myer lemons to make a couple gallons of lemonade.  That being said, the orchard really could use an overhaul.  There are couple trees in there that produce nothing and just look like shit.  I should go through the effort of digging them out and starting over with something new in those spots.

Part of the problem is unlike the garden, which is filled with pristine garden soil in raised beds, the orchard never had it’s sandy soil amended other than whatever it gets from the mulch breaking down.  I compounded the problem by not fertilizing the trees regularly.   I am trying to address this by adding an Outlook calendar reminder that will visually cue me it’s time to get out there and feed the trees.

So the dogs got through yesterday without any excrement collateral damage which I was glad to see/smell.  Nicki however is still not eating as consistently as she should.  Her new thing seems to be not eating well when Ali is away.  When she does eat she doesn’t clean her plate like she used to and sometimes she won’t touch it at all, like this morning.

Part of it probably is the schedule difference between when the dogs are with Ali versus at the house.  I probably am plopping breakfast down three hours earlier than they normally see it.  Whatever the reason, I pulled up Nicki’s food before leaving.  Sadie has started doing sneak attacks on Nicki’s food bowl if noone is watching.  I am hoping when my mom goes out to the house today and puts Nicki’s food back down, she will be more interested in it.

Nicki goes back and forth with her moods a lot.  Last night when I shot this workout video you can see she appeared happy and wanted to play.  Later in the night she goes into sad/mopey mode.  If there was a little word balloon above her head I am pretty sure it would say “Getting old sucks…”