Gardening and Grilling with Our Grandson

I drove LI to the Walmart Saturday Morning Meeting. Often a musical act will perform. This time it was the Distinguished Men of Brass. The Pea Ridge Marching Band opened the meeting, giving a fine performance.

Normally I grill at our family events. Lately our grandson Alex has been learning to prune roses while the grill heats up. This time he pruned and adjusted the vents in the grill. What works best is a hot grill with bacon on the top shelf, meat below. The bacon cooks and flavors the meat by dripping on it. All the bacon fans are happy to have grilled bacon. LI said, "Bacon should shatter when it's done." Ours did.

We also had hickory smoke this time. In Phoenix I trimmed mesquite from the trees in the yard. Hickory smoke works best when the chips are soaked during the lighting of the grill. Damp chips offer a lot more smoke. Between the bacon fat smoke and the hickory smoke, we almost needed Hazmat suits at the grill. The results were very good.

Our daughter-in-law Tammy made cheesecake - lime and coconut.

After lunch, Alex wanted to go in the backyard, and I wanted to dig a hole for the bushes. Just before we had rock hard clay soil, which I watered to soften for digging. They came over after 5 inches of rain in two days.

The backyard was soggy but the rain had stopped. Alex said, "I need a shovel." We brought the two out to the digging site and later got the branch cutters to slice the underground roots.

Alex and I opened up a big hole in record time. The clay was like Pla-doh, soft and easily scooped away. Every so often I reached into our excavation with the Fiscar cutters and pruned the roots of the nearby trees.

I dumped a bag of mushroom compost in the hole because the bushes would not come for a month. This avoided the problem of digging in frozen or dried clay, and it gave the soil creatures a head-start in getting an area ready for the Butterfly Bush. I topped it with soggy newspapers and soil to hold them in place. That would hold moisture in and attract fungi and earthworms.

I had a little clay on my shoes but Alex had about a pound on each shoe. I had some creative suggestions for cleaning his shoes. I scraped large amounts off with a knife and washed them thoroughly. Even then he left prints on the tile (not that we cared). It reminded me of our granddaughter Josie running into the garden years ago and standing there grinning - in her new white socks. No shoes. I mentioned the episode and Tammy said, "I remember that."

I told everyone, "Alex and I built a hole." We had this debate outside, and it continued.

"We dug a hole," Alex countered.

"Built one," I affirmed.

"Dug it," he said.

"Built."

"Dug!"

"Built." We went nose to nose, but he did not budge and neither did I. We have so many laughs together, which remind me of similar debates when his dad was young.