Happy Hopping

I'm happy to report that the garaging scene here in Salem is looking up. The proof? I managed to spend a whole $1.50 on Friday!

I was flying solo and promised myself that if I started to get too hot wearing a mask, I'd pack it in for the morning. This is definitely not an issue I've ever had in close to half a century of garaging! It turned out I had no problem getting through my list, which I had limited to the south part of town. Most of the sales again were meh, just nothing that needed to come home with me and not much conversation either. My first purchase was this book.

You can see its original bargain price, but that pales in comparison to the 50₵ that I paid! A couple of stops later I picked up a DVD for a buck.

Price-wise, the deal of the day had to be this stack of free magazines.

The real highlight of the morning was unexpected. I was heading toward the final stop on my GPS route, when I passed a house with something in the yard that made me turn around and go back for a better look.

Aren’t these hoops terrific? I've been trying to come up with some kind of inexpensive arch for a trellis over the wide double gates into my yard, so my first thought was maybe this was something I could copy. Turns out these are made from galvanized pipe, which is not something I have the wherewithal to bend. As I was about to return to my car, I noticed a woman in the back yard, so I called hello and she came out. (Holding a colander full of strawberries she had just picked!) We had a nice conversation and she showed me around her garden, including the flock of young chickens and the guinea pigs who live under the deck. She and her husband have spent the last 3 years turning the former lawn into a productive food and ornamental garden. They made the hoop trellises themselves, and she confirmed it was quite a lot of work. Those vines you see climbing up are hops vines, which also grow on their back fence.

It's always delightful to visit someone’s garden. But it was all I could do not to grab those fresh-picked strawberries and run!