Sore and Sunburned

This post seems completely untimely now, but the picture is still a little funny so I thought I'd share it anyway. Last Friday, in preparation for the new siding project that Chad and Dad started over the weekend, we moved a bunch of perennial flowers from one garden to another, so that they wouldn't get trampled during the job. Chad had expanded the main garden over the summer to make room for these transferred flowers, and we also pulled up some stuff that we really didn't like in the first place. In all this moving, I decided to dig up my daffodil bulbs and replant them in the newly extended garden. I knew that daffodils divided, but I had no idea how much! I had planted about 8 bulbs about 8 years ago. When I dug them up, I had at least 80 bulbs. It was crazy!

Of course I didn't have room to plant all of the bulbs even with the expanded garden, so I gave some away and started planting as many as I had room for. Unfortunately, the soil I was trying to bury them in had never been turned over, since it was previously part of the lawn. Everything underneath the one inch of topsoil was solid clay, sometimes as hard as a rock! I had to dig about 8 inches deep, then loosen up the bottom layer and mix in some peat moss to make it usable soil. I dug a trench along about half of the front border of the garden, working and enriching the soil as much as I could so that the bulbs could actually grow there. It was an exhausting job, and by the end of the day my back ached something fierce. The next day, my legs were super sore from squatting and my hands and wrists were sore from digging with the hand trowel. The most obvious painful side effect from my day of gardening, however, was this:



You'd think that at my age I would have learned to put on sunscreen, but seriously, who gets a sunburn like this in October? I know it was a very warm day, but aren't the sun's rays supposed to be less potent when fall gets here? What's up with that?!!!