organized chaos

Since I have a baby in the house again, I find it hard to tend to my gardening as I have in the past. It’s really too hot to do much right now anyway, but yesterday morning I said poop on the book work for school and took the gremlins out to my little ornamental pond for some algae harvesting.

Yep, I’m growin’ me some algae.

You should try it sometime. All you need in a small body of water

this size’ll do. Then make sure you have a couple of flood type rains.

(sorry for the blur. it was a downpour, after all)

And your small body of water takes in all the run off from the ground above it.

Then follow that with mind numbing heat from the depths of Hades: the kind that keeps the ground from ever really drying out and brings forth from it’s yawning mouth mosquitoes the size of Tallahassee.

By now, you should have some beautiful green floating algae. And boy, did I grow quite a crop this year. The best ever.

So if you have gremlins, put them to work. Otherwise, they’ll be awake until midnight, and we all know what happens then! If you don’t have gremlins, just get your bad self out there and get to work!

Stop looking at my pale, colorless legs and focus on that gorgeous blob of greatness. I’ll be using it to make tea later. So once you take out the pump, that black thing there, and take out the pretty, yet highly impractical water lilies

It’s not so pretty once you see beneath the surface, is it? And aren’t we all a little like that? Trying to be so pretty on the outside, but underneath lurks a tangled mess of ugly. I’m glad God can untangle anything, because I know my insides look like that from time to time.

So. Now you need some buckets, because it’s time to put those gremlins to their labors. Here are two of mine, hard at work while I stood aside and tried not to get my camera wet.

The pumps can only get out so much water, and if you’re harvesting algae, one must be in the pond gather it.

It’s important to get water everywhere.

oops. We have a victim. This time it wasn’t my fault. I just bought this guy the other day and we found at least 5 of them dead. It’s a risk you take when growing algae. The upside is that your gremlins will ask important scientific questions like, “Why do dead bodies float?”

Just get your nice blue net,

and throw him in the alley for the neighbor cats. They look too skinny anyways.

And speaking of cats, you might be wondering where my girl Zoe was during all this.

In the house with our not so skinny cat who got let back in from fear of him getting worms from our skinny neighbor cats. He’s a manipulator, that one.

And it’s too bad Zoe didn’t help with the harvest. Just like the story of The Little Red Hen, since she didn’t help with the work, she won’t be getting any of this for dinner.