Energizer Bunny

I’m sitting in my camper on this weird day in May. I’m writing this one on May 10th, when it rained for 8 hours and the temps never got above 64 degrees. The nighttime temps for the rest of the Mother’s Day weekend will be in the upper 50’s! I don’t know when the last time that happened in May was. Mother Nature is going to allow Mimi and I another couple of nights in the yurt before we go back to our regularly scheduled program - heat, hot and humidity.

We might as well get all we can out of this deal before reality sets back in. This article won’t come out until after Mimi gets her Mothers Day surprises from me and the kids. Unfortunately, we won’t see the kids (kinda hard to still call them kids) since they are off living their lives. They are both doing great and have had Mimi’s gifts and cards to the house in plenty of time that she will be able to wake up in the yurt Sunday morning and see how much we all love and need her. We will probably have some zoom or FaceTime calls with each other.

I boogied down to Duling Hall where Just Vanilla Bake Shop lays out some delectable pastries and more. They open at 7am so I was able to get there and still be at Garden Works by 7:30. My problem is that I want one of everything but our appetites won’t handle it. I walked out of there with a box of great looking chocolate almond croissants, banana bread, and something with custard on it. We will start our morning with that and a French press coffee and probably with our Big Buddy heater on low. Mia sent a box of flourless chocolate cake from a deli in New York, what a cool idea and she knows that Mimi has a warm spot for that somewhere in her belly. Max is going to drive Mimi out to the Bluefront Cafe in Bentonia for some blues music and, mainly to spend some one on one time with his favorite mom. I plan to unzip the yurt door and have her present in view and close to the pond. I got her a pair of Blue heron statues that I hope will look great pond side. I wrote about our relationship with Henry the heron and I’m hoping that Henry will not be deterred by the addition to the pond. Some people say the statues can act as a decoy to shoo away herons that are causing problems by eating fish out of their Koi gardens. The other half of the people say it won’t have any effect at all. Only one way to find out.

We will spend the afternoon with our giant family celebrating all the great moms we have in our family, should be good and loud and fun. I am a lucky son of a great mom. Rita Martinson raised us four or five if you count my dad. She somehow made it all happen while working along side my father running their businesses, the farm, and four of us trying to get away with everything we could. Mimi also has the mother of all mothers, raising Mimi and her brother Joe Dan Robinson (another farmer) while supporting her husband Joe Robinson while he farmed massive amounts of land in the Mississippi delta. Farmers wives often carry the heaviest part of a farmers farm. They go for parts, keep people fed, and generally stay on their toes and radios for whatever might come up in the crazy days of farmers. Just about anything can happen.

My hat is off to Hilda and all the wives of farmers who do the behind the scenes work that it takes to keep things rolling. My Mimi is, in my opinion, the best mother a kid and a husband could ask for. Mimi relentlessly started and kept our new family traditions going strong. I don’t know where she finds the energy sometimes, she never relents. Mimi makes all of our events special and memorable by making sure that every detail is just the way she envisioned, it’s magical. Even when we tell her that we don’t need a special dinner after coming in late and bushed she insists every time that we are going to eat a good, square meal no matter what.

Her love language is my favorite language. When the kids were at home she raised them right in every way and we have two well adjusted kids due to her relentless work she puts into every thing she does. This work ethic spills right over to our business and for everyone that works and shops there. I’m a lucky guy and I am very aware of this every day. Mimi instilled our lifestyle into our kids and they have chosen to follow in our footsteps in ways that we couldn’t imagine. They are both gardeners and conservationists and good stewards of their surroundings, that is all we could ask.

Somewhere in this busy weekend we plan to get some planting done so we will be in tip top shape for a big group of gardeners coming to tour our grounds in early June. This weekend we will prune our roses for the first time since their bountiful bloom flush they gave us this spring. I doubt they will be in full bloom by the time this group comes in June but we have plenty of other things that will be in bloom by then. We just pulled up our Snapdragons and poppies and foxgloves and plan to replace with summer bloomers as we can. My sweet peas are blooming so well I will leave them till the last drop. Right now we have some great blooms in our cut flower area. Calendula, Bells Of Ireland, Bachelor Button, Cosmos, flowering tobacco, Clarkia and Gomphrena are stealing the show. Our veggies are looking great and producing some veggies.

I will attribute the beautiful plants to our using a lot more Mushroom compost than we used to upon the advise of a gardening friend of ours. I always thought it might be too “hot” to plant directly into. Turns out that plants roots love that stuff and it’s good and cheap so I love it. By the time this article comes out we should be in the 90’s with lots of humidity. Time to be ready for that by working smart and keeping hydrated so we can last long enough to get the job done. Have fun in your garden and be safe.