How Not To Toss a Salad

Do you ever have one of those moments when you just KNOW that your actions are going to cause a catastrophe? You know. You can see it coming. One half of your brain is telling you what you should do differently in order to avoid that catastrophe. Yet you just keep following the same course of action as the other half of your brain reminds you that so far you have been successful and so it will work this time too!

I had one of those moments yesterday morning.

And it wasn’t pretty.

I was watering my outside plants with the garden hose. I was all done and just dragging the hose back across the patio so I could stretch it out, drain it of water, and coil it up into its container. And the hose kinked and caught under the edge of the 6-tiered planter, my tower of green as my friend Crystal called it in a comment earlier this month.

Six-tiered planter, photo from Wandering Wednesdays post earlier this month.

You know what you do to unkink a hose, right? You sort of bounce the hose up and down in hopes that it will unkink? Same thing when it catches on the corner of something. And thus I did, bounce it up and down until it loosened up from under the bottom wheeled plant holder. Of course, the whole tiered structure is less than stable – the steel rod through the middle does help stabilize, but only to a degree – and while I was bouncing the hose, the tiered structure was rocking ever so slightly. Well, maybe more than just slightly.

So far, so good. I pull the hose a bit more and it catches again. Another kink. Now, by this time, having watched how much the structure swayed the first time, my brain is telling me,

“Karen, walk over there and pull that kinked hose away from the bottom by hand. Do not, I repeat, do not try to unkink it by bouncing the hose again or the whole thing is going to fall over!”

Uh-huh, as my daughter would say.

Meanwhile, the other half of my brain is saying,

“Go ahead, bounce the hose to unkink it. It worked last time. It will work again this time. I know it will!”

It didn’t.

Radishes and lettuce, tossed.

I was too far away to catch it as it toppled over. The steel rod did help keep it sort of in one unit as it fell over, and it made a good “grabber” to try to pull it back upright, but the individual units were so heavy that I could not hold the rod with one hand and reposition the units with the other. The best I could do was pull them off the rod, one by one, and set them aside.

I quickly decided that having two three-tiered units might be a good thing. For one thing, it will give more available planting space by having two of the top tiers, which are fully open, so I can have twice as much lettuce. So, I have rebuilt as best I can, but I need to make a trip to town to get more soil tomorrow. And then I will do some more replanting. I do not know if the lettuce is going to survive or not.

I repotted some of the flowers that were growing too tall for the container, moving them to a window box. And one of the sage plants (the pineapple sage) was growing so fast that it needed a bigger container also.

Pineapple Sage

I definitely need more soil for this container, and probably I need to move the forget-me-nots to a larger window box or directly into one of the flower beds. They were much too large a flower to plant there anyway.

So, there’s my tossed salad from yesterday. Sad thing is, I was going to harvest my lettuce before I watered everything in the morning, but I was in a hurry and decided to harvest later in the afternoon for the supper meal.

Tossing the salad out in the yard was certainly not a good way to harvest anything!