(dawg, cooking, garden, health)

[elainegrey]

Some gratitude: Carrie seems to be healing quickly with large rims of fresh skin around the sores. She's tolerating her muzzle and is a model for us to wear our masks to minimize the odds of me coming down with COVID.

Reading yesterday gives me the impression that household transmission of COVID is less prevalent than i would have expected, with one article indicating that relatively few people shed large amounts of active virus.

This past weekend i made biscuits. I'm not sure what i did wrong that they didn't really rise up much. I'd made a first draft of a poppy filling (didn't remember to heat the milk before soaking the seeds, didn't read a recipe) and i slopped it over a slab of biscuit dough, rolled it up and then cut the log into poppy twirl buns. It was a lovely indulgent use of the poppy seeds that i collected last year. I picked most of this year's poppies, and the heads seem small compared to a dried poppy head from some years ago. I wonder if it's soil fertility or that the poppy volunteers are self selecting for smaller heads.

I have a large quantity of conventional fertilizer i bought early in our stay here, and i think i am going to use it up this year. Our compost piles just melt away and so we've been putting less than ideal things in them (Weeds, pet poop). I think once the conventional fertilizer is used up i will split our compost and see about getting the worm bins running again. And i need to be better about cover crops: the horrible stilt grass does not count.

Chapter 4, better gardening? I definitely haven't done good vegetable gardening in Chapter 3 (aka the past three years). On the other hand, getting the sochan/cutleaf coneflower established has produced a remarkably easy greens crop.