That was some serious rain on Monday afternoon and evening. There were several inches in various buckets on the property. I read once in an old book entitled The Gardener’s Bed Book that it is an abhorrence to the Earth to freeze dry. Guess there is no danger of that happening this year.

My folks told me that in 1942 in the neighboring town of Smethport, Pa. three feet of rain fell in one day. This fact came up many times around the supper table. Clearly, it was and still is memorable.

Huge thanks goes out to Peter Goodale for the second time in a year he needed to send a front-end loader to haul me out of a hole in my dump truck. I did not follow the old advice — if you are in a hole stop digging. I tried in vain to get myself righted.

Because I’m still behind in my end-of-the-season tasks, we spent last week raking snow and slush in order to plant hundreds of daffodils for a customer. Honestly, there are things a person simply cannot make up.

I have a lamp near my sink at the kitchen window. In the evenings the window is covered with winter moths attracted to the light. I hope I remember to do a bit of spraying for them in the spring. The spray is similar to DiPel and is not actually a poison. It gives the larvae a stomachache until they die but does not affect birds that may eat that worm. Spraying should occur at dusk so that a bee will not inadvertently carry it back to the hive where it could endanger bee larvae.

I just reread Organic Gardening for Health and Nutrition by John and Helen Philbrick written in 1971. The Philbricks follow the bio-dyanamic method developed by Rudolf Steiner. The question was asked, why go to all the bother of raising vegetables when it is so easy to buy them? I love the answer (remember this was 1971).

“Important to human being is the actual experience of cooperating with soil, sun, air and growth forces to produce something to feed oneself out of the earth itself. One does not have to explain this to gardeners, and perhaps non-gardeners will never really understand. Personal attention and nurture adds something intangible which is missing in crops grown on large scale. An observation buy Nikita Khrushchev that communal farms were not producing enough but small farm units operated by tenant farmers for their own use are producing a far larger percentage of food per unit of space. Food produced in small quantities by growers with real concern for their creative work, has superior nourishing qualities for both animal and man.”

The House of Representatives drew up Articles of Impeachment against Donald Trump on Tuesday. That same day he hosted the Russian foreign minister at the White House. It would be like Bill Clinton on the day he had articles drawn against him taking Monica Lewinsky out for lunch.