She arrived and her first words were. “Are you so excited to see me Nan?” Of course I was, we both were, and E and I quite happily set aside our usual routine for her, ‘cause when a three year old wants to do a puzzle with me, the chores in the garden can wait.

But the garden and its issues didn’t go away during the two weeks we were grandparenting. We have had no rain in forty days, and there is none anticipated in the near future. Plants are going to die and it is just a fact. I have stopped watering the flowers and the onions and the potatoes and the, well, let me make it simple. I am only watering the tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins and the few live cuttings in the nursery.

Next year, we will again try to have enough water to eliminate these worries . We work so hard in the winter catching our maximum 8500 gallons through rain catchment but we have never had a spring where we didn’t have human error reduce the full tanks. The summer weather isn’t likely to get cooler as we move forward over the years so our mistakes need to be fewer. At the end of the day, it’s all for fun, so I am not going to cry when I see my flower garden looks so desperately sad. There will always be next year.

We estimate we are pumping maybe fifty gallons a day from our well and still have maybe 2400 gallons left in storage from our rain catchment system. There will be a time very soon when we won’t get anything from the well for a few months. So we are pretty careful. Worst case scenario I will only water the tomatoes and then if it gets even more dire I will live with a lot of fried green tomatoes rather than my much loved tomato sauce.

Then there are the bunnies. Or as I like to call them the friggin’ bunnies. Oh, and the voles and the mice! Good lord we need our American neighbours to return with their cats ‘cause the eagles have gone fishing at the island rivers and won’t be back ‘til winter. The owls are obviously useless and the friggin’ bunnies are proving to be particularly randy. They are everywhere and that is fine, they are cute but they need to keep the F#$k out of my garden.

We thought we had fixed the garden fencing but the bunny still mocks us on the camera every morning. The dogs are convinced he is living in there but they can’t find him. We are going to get more fencing, even smaller fencing and try again on the weekend. I would be up there with my gun if he ate the tomatoes but right now he is just eating all the lilies and they will come back no worse for wear next year, so he won’t get shot, yet.

She was here two weeks and her parting words to me were “it’s ok to miss me when I am gone Nan”. I will but we don’t drink when we are grand parenting ‘cause, well I don’t know, we just don’t. And if I don’t have a glass of wine in hand there is no blog. Guess what? Glass is in hand. My dear friend sent me this lovely gift and I hang them proudly in my kitchen. She

knows me well