The girls headed outside this afternoon, and were excited to ask me if I’d seen the tulips.
I had, when I did my rounds this morning, but clearly, something had changed.
The tulips have exploded with flower spikes!
Most of my daughter’s tulips were planted in this spot. Over 50 bulbs in 6 varieties were planted here. We haven’t tried to count how many have come up. I think, by now, any that haven’t come up were casualties of February’s polar vortex. :-(
While just to one side, another group of very different tulips were planted. These are Bull’s Eye tulips (which Veseys apparently no longer carries). Of the 8 bulbs that were planted, it looks like only 3 survived the winter.
I can’t believe how quickly these flower spikes shot up!!
They are not the only ones.
The flower spikes in the grape hyacinths are a bit harder to see, but they are certainly there! Pretty much all of them that we can see have these tiny spikes emerging. Once they start blooming, we’ll finally be able to get a better idea of how many of the 200 we planted survived the winter! :-D
Meanwhile, the winds have only gotten stronger – I had to fight just to open the door to go outside and get these photos! – and the temperatures are still rising. I look forward to the cooler weather and, hopefully, rain to come!
Wow, what a windy day we’ve got right now!! I headed out early to do my rounds, so I could finish with the potatoes before it got too hot. It was a lovely 14C/57F when I started.
After all the watering was done and it was time to start with the potatoes, I brought over some extra bags, just in case. I’m glad I did.
I ended up adding one more bag for each type of potato. These didn’t have their bases sewn to make them flat, and you can really tell. They’re more floppy looking than the other ones. Two rows is as deep as we can go to reach the bags along the fence, but I can straddle the extras that got added and reach as far as I need to.
Planting the little fingerling potatoes was a bit weird. There were so many really tiny ones! Where the Yukon Gem and Norland got 3 larger potatoes per bag, or 4 little ones, the fingerlings would have 6 or 7 bitty potatoes.
It took a few more trips with the wheelbarrow for soil to get the new bags started, and all the potatoes topped up. Each bag got a handful of mulch on top, followed by a thorough watering. I’m happy to say that drainage will not be an issue with these bags. I could see the excess moisture soaking through – and it was NOT taking any of the soil with it. It was quite clear.
Thinking ahead to when we will be harvesting from these bags, I figure we’ll probably end up dumping the soil right where the bags are now, and turning the area into another garden bed. There are maples growing on the other side of this fence – they used to be part of the inner yard, when I was a kid – but the area does still get an adequate amount of sunlight. It’ll get more as we finally start cleaning up around those maples, cut away the dead stuff, and prune things back.
By the time I was done, the temperatures had crossed the 20C/68F mark, and the winds were even higher. I took all the transplants we’re hardening off back inside, so they wouldn’t blow away! We’ve got a predicted high of 31C/88F, with a “real feel” of 32C/90F, along with the same heat and air quality warnings we got yesterday. We may get thunderstorms by tomorrow morning. That would be nice!! After today, the temperatures will finally start dropping to a more comfortable range, which should last into June. That will make finishing the last of the garden beds much easier! The next couple of weeks are going to be very busy. :-)
With the potatoes now planted, that’s one more thing to check off the list!
Today, we definitely heated up fast! I was outside early to do my rounds, the watering, and hardening off the seedlings, managing to finish before things started getting too hot. We easily reached 30C/86F and probably went a bit higher. We even got heat alerts, and air quality warnings for those places dealing with wildfires right now. We’re supposed to hit 30C again tomorrow, then the temperatures are expected to drop to highs below 10C/50F, with overnight lows of 2C/36F, so frost is still a possibility!
Our order of potatoes came in. It was expected to come in tomorrow, but when I checked the tracking number, I found out they had arrived on Friday! So they sat at the post office over the weekend. I was going to chit the potatoes this year, but it looks like I won’t have to!
We got only one box of each type, so we are not expecting to have a long term supply, even if they do turn out to be very productive. The Yukon Gem, which we tried and enjoyed last year, are likely a type we will grow more of in the future. We shall see how the others do. To have enough to last the winter for 4 adults who really like potatoes would require a lot more seed potatoes!
This afternoon, my daughter and I braved the heat to do some transplants.
The new lady haskap is now in. You can see the other two in the photo. The other female haskap is harder to see, since it has so few leaves! At least it is growing. Watering everything twice a day is making a big difference all over, but it’s really helping with the struggling haskap.
My daughter chose a spot for her raspberries. They’re now in front of the row of trees in the old garden. The ones that self seeded among my mother’s raspberries that she transplanted. I still don’t quite understand why she moved them from a full-sun location, into the shade. No matter. We now have our first two raspberry bushes planted! As we add more, we will build trellises for them, but that will slowly happen over the next couple of years.
Before we headed in, my daughter and I checked out where the potatoes and their grow bags are going to go. This is near an area of the chain link fence where we are allowing vines to grow. We’re tearing them out, everywhere else we find them, as they are so invasive. Right now, there’s last year’s dead vines on the fence, and we found a tiny little surprise.
This old nest was only about 2 or 3 inches across! We don’t have many birds small enough to have a nest like this. In fact, I can only think of one, and I find myself wondering if it was a hummingbird nest. What a delightful surprise!
After finishing the transplanting, we headed into the cool of the indoors for a few hours. My husband recently picked up a Roku media streaming device. We have Amazon Prime for the free shipping, but now we can watch shows on the big screen TV. That thing hasn’t been turned on in months. :-D I’ve been watching Poirot lately, and settled down to watch an episode while having breakfast… er… lunch… whatever. Which is when I got another surprise.
A bright, yellow, feathered stalker!
It stayed there for a surprising length of time, watching me through the window!
This is not the first time we’ve had a goldfinch decide to perch on a window sill and check out the humans inside. The last time it was last summer, and the bird was trying to look in at my bedroom window. Too funny! And very adorable.
After things started to cool down (which is a relative statement; it’s past 11pm as I write this, and we’re still at 23C/73F), I started setting up the home-made grow bags for the potatoes.
We’ve got 4 bags for each variety. For now, they’ve just got a few inches of soil on the bottoms, which I hosed down thoroughly, after this picture was taken. Tomorrow morning, before things start to heat up again, the potatoes will be added to the bags and topped off with a few more inches of soil. As they grow, we’ll keep adding either soil or straw mulch, and the bags can be unrolled as more height is needed. Hopefully, this will give us a better yield, as well as protecting the potatoes from slugs. We shall see!
Once this was done, I did the evening watering.
I had company.
Rolando Moon kept following me around, then settled herself in the middle of our “found object” art display to watch me. :-D She is so funny!
Once back inside, I had less fun things to deal with; a call with my brother, talking about the upcoming court date this Friday for the restraining order against our vandal. Last time, my brother took a day off work for the court date, only for us to discover everything got cancelled again, due to the province increasing restrictions again. We just had Mother’s Day and have a long weekend coming up, so the province increased restrictions again. :-/ I will call the court office on Wednesday to find out if court dates are cancelled again. It’s hard to know what will happen, but we’re trying to be as prepared as possible. Most likely, our vandal’s lawyer (which he can somehow afford, while claiming I’ve put him almost $200,000 in debt…) will just try to delay things to a trial date. If we are offered a mutual restraining order, I would only accept it if he agrees to stop drinking, and relinquishes his guns for the year the order applies. If possible, I’d request a psychiatric assessment, too. He’d never agree to any of that, though. In past experience (granted, in another province, but I really don’t expect this one to be any better), a lot will depend on whether we get a judge that’s able to set aside his/her own personal biases or not. The hard part is going to be staying focused on the matter at hand, and not allowing the lawyer to distract away with our vandal’s many imagined grievances. A judge, of course, would have no way of knowing that they’re imagined. Nor would his lawyer, for that matter. We shall see how it goes. If it doesn’t get cancelled again, of course. :-/
At least we’ve got lots of hard physical labour in the garden as a distraction and stress reliever!
After getting the Dorinny corn planted yesterday, we could take a break from manual labour in the garden for a day or two. Which makes this the first Sunday I’ve been able to take as a day of rest for a while.
Well. Sort of.
For some reason, I did not sleep last night. At all. At 4am, I found myself chatting with my SIL. She had been driven out of bed by pain, so she got up to watch the sun rise. Which is why I ended up outside by 5:30 am, doing my rounds and watering the garden beds, haskaps, the newly planted mulberry and the nearby cedar. We did get some rain during the night, which was wonderful, but it still wasn’t enough to skip the morning watering. Most of the rainfall missed us, it seems. We’re supposed to continue to get rain over the next while, and possibly even thundershowers, but we’ll see if any of it actually falls in our area.
I did, at least, get a nap in after I finished my rounds. Unfortunately, as I’d somehow thought yesterday was Friday instead of Saturday, I hadn’t phoned my mother as I’d intended. I woke to a message my brother had sent a couple hours earlier, telling me he’d called our mother and she was talking about going to the grocery store with her walker. By the time I called and got through to her, she had made her trip. It was just a little one, though, so I will be going over later in the week to help her make a larger trip.
We needed to make our own trip to do some shopping; it should have been done yesterday, but I just wasn’t up to the drive. I still wasn’t up to it, today, but my daughter was able to do the driving, so we headed out this afternoon to the smaller city, where they have a tiny little Walmart. Cat food was one of the things we needed to get more of. It seems people have been making a run on the big bags of kibble, because there was almost none in stock! At least, not of the affordable stuff. I grabbed 2 of the last three bags on the shelves. While there, I also took a look in the gardening section and discovered that all the hoses longer than 10′ were completely out of stock too.
One thing they didn’t have was the hardwood pellets we are switching to, in place of cat litter. All but two of our litter boxes have been switched to the pellets. The cats have gotten used to the pellets already, which is great. Using the pellets has meant no more dust, and no more smell! They also need to be cleaned out less frequently, since they don’t get scooped, but emptied completely after several days. We just have to figure out how to dispose of the pellets during a burn ban.
Getting more of the pellets meant going to Canadian Tire. I haven’t been to this location since before the restrictions, and had heard they didn’t accept medical exemptions, or even Mingle Masks. I’m happy to say that I had no issues at all. At least not with my medical exemption. Finding the pellets was something else entirely! I found the type I’d picked up before in the seasonal section, but in one of the groups I’m on, people talked about switching to the pellets and mentioned getting them at Canadian Tire – but the ones they were talking about were much cheaper. Even the bag I did get was cheaper than litter, but it wasn’t what people were talking about. My daughter tracked down an employee who said they were by the cash desks on the way out, so we went and looked. That’s where the automotive section was, so we were confused. We looked around some more, then finally found a different employee. She looked it up on her phone and found exactly what I’d seen people talking about. It turned out we had to go through the cash desk first, pay for them, then someone would bring them to us.
Once we knew that, we made a side trip to the garden centre, first. My daughter has a birthday next month, and I wanted to pick up an early birthday present for her. She’s been really wanting to have raspberries, and the ones my mother had transplanted in the old garden are not doing well. I’m still not sure why she chose to plant them under the apple and chokecherry trees, and in the middle of flowers. They’re not getting anywhere near enough light. We weren’t going to get more until next year, but she has been wanting them so much, I decided to surprise her. :-)
Once in the garden centre, we found their raspberries and I got my daughter to choose which variety she wanted. There was only two to pick from, and she chose a heritage variety that produces a small yield in June, then a larger yield in September. We got two plants for now. While there, I was very happy to find lady haskaps, and picked one up.
We will harden these off a bit before we transplant them. We’re not sure, yet, where the raspberries will go. Over the next while, we plant to pick up varieties that have different coloured berries, so these will be the first of many! The lady haskap will be planted between the two we have now, though off to one side of the bed, to maintain the spacing they need. The male haskap has opening blossoms, while the struglling female is finally starting to open its leaf buds. We definitely won’t be having any berries this year! With this new female plant, though, we will hopefully start having some next year.
After finding the plants we wanted, we went to pay for them, and asked about the hardwood pellets. We didn’t have someone bring them to us, because it turned out the stack was in the exit vestibule. No wonder we couldn’t find them! The 40 pound bags were only $7 each, so we got two. We’d taken my mother’s car for the trip, since it hasn’t been driven enough. Next time, we’ll be using the van, so we’ll have the space to get more and be well stocked.
While doing my rounds this evening, checking the garden beds, giving the newly planted corn an extra watering (my other daughter had watered while we were gone, but it’s pretty much impossible to over water in this area), and checking out how well my daughter’s tulips are growing, I found the plum trees are in full bloom, now!
The rain we got was enough for them to fully open. It’s remarkable, how much of a difference even a little bit of rain can make, when things are as dry as they have been!
Last night, the girls had popped outside after dark and called me over to see the sun room window. I had the aquarium lights set up vertically on the inner side of the shelf our seedlings are on, and it was causing confusion!
There were moths all over the window, trying to get at the lights, including this beauty!
They won’t have as much light to attract them tonight, though. In checking and watering the seedlings (and finding a whole bunch of new sprouts, including another Crespo squash!), I noticed the Montana Morado corn and Mongolian Giant sunflowers, in their long bin, were getting leggy, reaching for the light coming through the Western windows. I set the brighter of the aquarium lights up above the bin, which should help with that problem. At the rate these are growing, I might have a problem keeping the light high enough above them, that they won’t get too close to the fixture; this one actually puts off some heat, too. With what I’ve got to support the light fixture right now, it’s about as high as it can go, unless I can find something else to hold it in place. We will have to figure that out!
Even on my “day off”, I just can’t stop thinking about the gardening! I can hardly wait to continue setting up the rest of the beds we need and, now that the peas are starting to sprout, finish their trellises and build the squash arches.
I suppose I should let the girls have some of the fun, too… ;-)
My goal for this morning was to get the soil over to where we’re planting the Dorinny corn, before things got too hot. Normally, I don’t have breakfast until after I’m done my morning rounds, but I cut those short to quickly eat before I started hauling dirt. I probably should not have taken the time to eat, first! I got just over two rows done before I had to go inside. I couldn’t believe how quickly it got so hot!!
I didn’t get back to it until well into evening. While one daughter took care of the evening watering, and the other helped me prepare the corn block, things went much faster, too.
Once the soil was in place, my daughter dragged the hose over to give it a soak, while my other daughter and I checked out different locations and decided on where to plant the mulberry tree. It’s going in the strip between the garage and the road. Since we’ve already started cleaning up there, this spot will have the full sun it needs, while still being surrounded by enough mature trees to protect it from the harsher winds. We found a little cedar there, when we first started cleaning up in the area. Like the mulberry, it is not a zone 3 three. Nothing has been done to protect it over the winter, but it has survived, though it’s still very small. This, at least, tells me that the mulberry will have a chance of making it, in this location.
After picking a spot and raking away the thatch, my daughter started digging and immediately hit a huge root!!
So we moved the hole over a bit. :-D
While she dug the hole, I got the mulberry sapling, along with the rest of the pre-soaked peat we still had in the sun room, and a bucket of water. When I got back to my daughter, she had already hit gravel and was struggling to get out a larger rock. Between me with the spade and her with a trowel, we managed to get it out. Thankfully, it turned out to be wide and flat, which made it much easier to get out. Of course, for some reason, it got moved and didn’t end up in the picture. :-/
We certainly won’t have to worry about drainage here. Like everywhere else, there wasn’t a lot of topsoil. After that, it’s gravel.
We filled half the hole with the damp peat, added more water, planted the sapling with more peat, and placed a pair of bamboo stakes beside it for supports. The soil was returned and the cardboard packing material the mulberry came in, including what was keeping the root ball damp, was placed as a mulch. We even put the bigger rocks around to help keep things in place. Then I wrapped some cord around the sapling and the supports. Hopefully, this will also make sure no deer will eat it! I also picked the yellow rope deliberately. I’ve read that using ordinary yellow rope like this, strung in a rope fence around a garden, has worked to keep deer out, even though they can easily get by it. Apparently, there’s something about the yellow rope they don’t like. I figure it’s worth a try to use it, since I happened to find some in the sun room. If not the colour, then the stakes, should act as a deterrent.
By this time, my daughter that was watering things had brought the hose over as close as she could. We gave the mulberry a final watering – and then watered the cedar, too! Since we’ll be tending the mulberry now that it’s here, we’ll take the time to tend the cedar, too. Later on, I’ll bring some garden soil to place around both of them.
While I stayed to water things, my daughters put things away for the night, but I decided to go ahead and plant the Dorinney corn tonight, rather than wait until tomorrow.
After setting the seeds in water to soak, I used the handle of a trowel to make holes about a foot apart. Though my daughter had been able to set the sprinkler over the area for some time, the soil was still pretty dry further down, so I used a watering can to give the rows a deep soak before planting the seeds.
By deciding to put the soil over the grass clippings mulch, instead of the chopped straw, we lost a row – and it turned out there were enough seeds in the packet to need it! Since I’d soaked all the seeds, and I didn’t want them to go to waste, I made another row, instead. Once all the seeds were planted, I gave them another watering.
By then, the water barrel was needing a refill, so I set up the hose and hung around while it filled.
I got company.
Rolando Moon came for a visit today! I haven’t seen her in about a week, but this evening, she decided to keep us company. She even joined us while we were planting the Mulberry tree – and kept trying to drink the dirty water! At least here, she’s drinking the clean water that’s in the watering can. It’s kept filled, so it doesn’t blow away, and she had her head stuck right into the opening. Silly girl! :-D
With the corn planted here, we are done with the early planting, until the potatoes come in next week! Since those are going into grow bags, there are no beds to prepare for them. Everything else doesn’t get planted until after June 2.
As for the other garden beds, the girls checked under the plastic covering the beets and carrots in the old kitchen garden and saw sprouts, so those got taken off. The lettuces are also coming up; the seedlings are still tiny, but big enough that we can be sure they are lettuce sprouts, and not weeds! LOL My daughter planted her Black Form Iris near the poppies, which is right along where she planted her other irises in the fall. I was also able to confirm that we are seeing pea sprouts in all three beds. Just a couple, here and there, but they are clearly not weeds that have made their way through the straw and soil. There are some of those, too!
Looking at the long range forecast, we’re going to keep getting hotter for the next few days, then the temperatures will drop down to a more sane level for the last couple of weeks of May. If those temperatures keep steady through to June, there will be no frosts at all. Still, we will wait. We will use that time to finish preparing the other beds. The climbers will be doing in a bed next to the corn that was planted today; this is where we will be building a squash arch. It looks like the only gourds will be including there will be the dancing gourds and luffa, as there is still no germination in the other three types of gourds. It looks like we’ll have plenty of Halona melons to transplant. I’m seeing quite a few sunburst squash have germinated, but not very many of the other summer squash yet. I’m really excited by how quickly the Mongolian Giant sunflowers and Montana Morado corn have germinated! There are so many things sprouting in the sun room, it’s going to be a challenge hardening them all off at the same time. I’ve got the platform set up where the cats won’t get them, but there’s not that much room on it. We’ll have to work something else to use as well.
Well, it hasn’t really cooled down all that much, but I wanted to at least get the asparagus planted.
The first thing was set the crowns to soak in water before covering the cardboard with a layer of soil, and laying out the sod around the edges to make a sort of wall to support the height of the bed. The base got a very thorough watering. Then we mixed a load of soil with peat, thoroughly soaking it in the wheelbarrow while mixing it with a spade.
That took a while. :-D
The wet peat mixture was used to create the hills for the crowns. They’re supposed to be planted 2 feet apart. With the bed being longer than 6 feet, they were staggered a bit.
They look a bit like facehuggers. :-D
The crowns were then covered with a rather deep layer of soil, and a light layer of mulch. From what I’ve read, they may need more soil added later.
We will have to make a point of watering it deeply over the next while, just to get the top layer wet through to the crowns. Wetting it in layers should help prevent them from drying out until that’s accomplished.
It’s past 8pm as I write this, and we are finally starting to cool down again. I’m going to see if I can get to bed before 3am for a change. I tried to do that yesterday, and ended up still wide awake at 4am. *sigh* Anyhow, I’d like to get out earlier in the day to continue working on the block for the corn.
Meanwhile, the girls and I have been talking about finding a different permanent spot for the mulberry. One of the best suggestions was to plant it along the north side of the big garden; we intend to plant fruit and nut trees in most of this area anyhow, so why not start now? Then I remembered that the location we were talking about has buried telephone wires somewhere in there. I had tried contacting the phone company about the location and was given the contact information for the Call Before You Dig organization. I ended up sending them an email with our longitude and latitude.
I’ve discovered why people have such a hard time finding our place in the process.
I tried several different map sites to pinpoint our location, but our physical address would not work. I finally just found us manually, and discovered that the road that goes past our place is not labelled. At all. This road has two names; one is the numerical grid number, and the other is my family name. Neither are on the maps.
All but one of the stop signs along our road with the name on them have disappeared. There had been one on one of the stop signs at the intersection near our garden, but not long after we moved here, someone broke the stop sign and the street sign on it disappeared. I am pretty sure this was no accident, since this happened after our first falling out with our vandal, but whatever. The road number was on the other stop sign, so it’s still there. I’d asked about having the road signs with the name replaced at all the intersections that are missing, but I think the councilor I spoke to (who also happens to be the guy renting most of this property) forgot about it. Anyhow. Now that I know that the road that runs past our driveway is unlabelled on any of the maps, I’ll have to find out how to get that fixed.
Meanwhile, I’ve not heard back from the Call Before You Dig people.
Until we do, we’ll avoid planting trees along that strip. There’s already a self sown chokecherry tree there. Those don’t get very big, so we should be able to leave it. The mulberry, however, gets much bigger, so we’ll have to think again about where to put it. It needs to go into the ground right away, so we can’t dilly dally about the decision!!
My morning rounds now includes watering all the garden beds. Though we have had rain in the forecast, so far we’ve only received the lightest of smatterings. Hopefully, over the next few days, we’ll get some real rain.
I had a lovely surprise when I came into the sun room this morning.
SO many more of the Mongolian Giant sunflowers and Montana Morado corn are germinating! The corn is just little points of green, barely visible in most of the cups.
In the pellet tray, I think I even saw a cucamelon sprout starting to break through.
It’s getting close to time to start hardening off our bigger seedlings for transplanting. :-)
I can now say, with absolute certainty, that all three spinach beds have sprouts. :-) I might even have, just possibly, maybe, seen our first pea sprout this morning, too! :-D
When done checking the trail cam files, I headed back outside until it got too hot for manual labour in the sun. My computer’s weather app says we’re at 16C/61F that feels like 15C/59F, while my phone’s app says we’re at only 9C/48F with a RealFeel of 12C/54F! There is no way we are only 16C out there, never mind 9C. I have no doubt it’s at least 20C/68F out there right now. I’m thinking of picking up another outdoor thermometer to set up at the pea trellises.
One of the areas we needed to work on is the block for the Dorinney corn. I was loath to just start adding soil on the chopped straw. It would end up in the paths in between and we’d end up walking on it, and I just don’t want to waste that precious dirt! :-D
Then I remembered all that mulch I put around the sunflowers last year. A thick layer of grass clippings I kept adding to throughout the summer. I figured that would work well to put on the paths as a mulch to walk on, while it would also serve to hold the soil in the rows.
Once I started gathering up the grass clippings and laying them down, I realized this partially broken down mulch would work much better under the soil, than the straw.
So this bed will now be reversed. The grass clippings will have the soil added on top, while the chopped straw will serve to hold the soil in place, and keep the grass/weeds down in between, as well as helping keep any moisture. We lost a row in the process, but I wasn’t sure we have enough of these seeds to fill the entire block, anyhow. If we have more, we can just add another row to one side. Before we add soil, though, the area will get another thorough soaking. We can just reach this area with the hose. I should see if I can set up the sprinkler. I don’t think we’ve got enough hose to set that up where it can water the whole block, though.
In the background, you can see the row of sunflower stumps, where I took the mulch from. I didn’t even get as far as where the rows of sunflowers overlapped in the middle, and after finishing laying down mulch in the corn block, I still had enough mulch in the little wheelbarrow to add it elsewhere.
The girls saw carrot sprouts and took off the plastic covering this bed, so I added a light layer to the surface to protect it. Especially if we do end up getting that predicted rain.
I also put a light layer over the Strawberry Spinach bed.
In preparation for planting the asparagus crowns, I soaked the trench, put the cardboard back to discourage any of those roots we didn’t clip or dig out from growing, then soaked it again. Later today, we’ll put the crowns to soak while we start adding soil and preparing it for planting.
We’ve reached that point in the season, where we are switching from going out in the afternoon, when it was finally warm enough to work in the garden, to splitting our days between the cooler mornings and evenings, while avoiding the hottest parts of the afternoon. The problem with that is, the hottest part of the day tends to be around 5pm, so we’re easily losing at least 6 hours of daylight productivity. Long range forecast says we’ll be hitting 30C/86F in four days – and we’re still in May! At least it’s expected to cool down gradually after that, but we’re still going to be in the high to mid 20’s for another week. We’re also supposed to get rain. I’d say “more rain”, but what’s been predicted so far has been missing us, as usual. :-/ We shall see how it goes.
The hard part is going to be waiting until after the last frost date before planting/transplanting. I think direct sowing a bit earlier would be safe, but after losing so many transplants last year, I don’t want to take that chance again, this year!
We still need to take down a whole lot of dead trees in the area we want to plant this, and we’re thinking that for this year, we’ll plant it in one of the grow bags we made for the potatoes, then maybe keep it in the sun room over the winter. Either that, or find another place for what will become a fairly large tree that needs full sun, and zone 4 protection to survive in a zone 3.
The asparagus, at least, are decided on. While the girls did the evening watering, I started on trenching.
We’ve been keeping this space near the Strawberry Spinach bed covered with cardboard and regularly soaking it. The grass below was dying off quite nicely, and the ground was good and soft to dig in.
Well. Except for the big roots.
And all the rocks.
After the girls finished the watering and uncovering the sprouted beds, they came over to give me a hand. Most of the roots we could cut out with the loppers.
As with the other beds, this is going to be built up, so all I really wanted to do was take off the sod and get rid of the bigger roots and rocks.
Except for that really big root running across the trench, near the middle. Once we realized how big it was, we just left it.
One of my daughters took on stacking the rocks.
In a nice little display! :-D
There were too many to balance on the stump, so she stacked the rest nearby.
All these rocks, just from removing the top 3 or 4 inches. We could have pulled out many more!
Tomorrow, we start bringing in the new garden soil and plant the asparagus. The sod that was removed will be laid upside down along the sides to stabilize it. When we’re done, it should match the Strawberry Spinach bed in depth.
In two years, we should be harvesting our first purple asparagus! Before then, I expect to get more for planting elsewhere. My husband doesn’t care for asparagus, but the girls and I all like them, so that is reason enough to plant more than just these ones. :-)
Since none of what came in today will be planted until tomorrow, they are all sitting in the cool of the old kitchen.
I need to think about that mulberry. This is what it says on the Veseys page about planting them.
Planting:
Unless you have heavy clay soil, there isn’t much to do in terms of soil preparation. You can add amendments such as compost or peat moss to the soil and/or a layer of mulch over the root area after planting will help retain moisture, especially during the first year. While it may be tempting to add fertilizer or manure to your freshly dug hole before planting your new tree, PLEASE resist! Fertilizer or manure in close contact with the root system could chemically burn the roots and potentially kill the tree.
Mulberry trees can grow quite large, up to 15-20 feet tall. Avoid planting near walkways and driveways as the fruit will drop and create stains. Mulberries are self-fertile and require full sunlight.
Our new garden soil has three types of manure and compost in it, but it is thoroughly broken down. Would it still be too much to plant it in? That’s what we would be using in a grow bag, if we did it that way for the first year. Maybe it would be better to just find a different spot and plant it permanently. I can think of a good area that would work; the only downside is that it would be more difficult to get water to it.
Whatever we decide to do, it’ll have to be done quickly!
Okay, so today, we didn’t end up hauling dirt. Partly because we need to take a bit more of a break from that. We’ll just have to make up for it, tomorrow. The Dorinney corn can wait another day or two before direct sowing.
Before I get into another reason why hauling dirt wasn’t going to happen today, I finally remembered to take photos of our seedlings, while I was spritzing and rotating them this morning.
We’ve got some summer squash, winter squash and melons growing. The melons are almost all the Halona variety, but one little Pixie melon is starting to push its way through!
They were too small to even try for a photo, but the pink celery is starting to sprout, too. Still nothing with the gourds.
I did have quite a surprise, though.
Quite a few of the Mongolian Giant Sunflowers were starting to show! That’s the photo on the left. On the right, those two, tiny, barely visible specks?
Those are the Montana Morado corn! I can’t believe how quickly they’re starting to sprout!!
While watering outside, I pulled the plastic back on the carrot bed in the big garden to give it a bit of a soak and thought I might have seen some sprouts. I put the plastic back, but made sure to ask the girls to check again when they were doing the evening watering. Sure enough, there were sprouts, and they took the plastic off. The Strawberry Spinach was checked, and they had sprouts, too. I’m not positive, but I think I could even see flashes of green in one of the spinach beds while I was watering it this morning. :-)
After we were done with our evening garden tending, the girls and I went to look at the crocuses, hyacinths and tulips. There are so many tulips pushing their way through the leaf litter now! They were planted under some plum trees, and I noticed the trees are starting to bud!
I love trees that bloom before they start forming leaves. They are so dramatic and spectacular in full bloom!
I aaallllmost got the camera to focus on the minuscule spider in its web!
In between all this, my younger daughter and I made a trip into town, which included a stop at the post office on the way home. We got packages!! More on that in my next post. :-)
The girls were able to come out and give me a hand this afternoon, so things got done a lot faster. Especially for me, when they booted me out of the garden and into the house. Apparently, I was looking pretty sun burned! Not feeling it, though. ;-)
In my focus on watering, I’ve been eyeballing the haskap bushes. The male is doing quite well.
It’s even beginning to show flower buds!
We planted these two summers ago, so this year should have been a year with good production.
That’s not going to happen.
I wish I knew what was going on with this poor female haskap! The only leaf buds are on the very tips of branches, and not even all of them. I’d expected to get more of them by now, but I haven’t seen any yet. We might have to order more online for next year, instead. We shall see.
With all the watering they’re getting, my mother’s yellow flowers in this bed are already starting to come up strongly in places. We’re not watering the entire bed as thoroughly; just the haskaps and the lilac bush. I expect the lilac to do better this year, now that the maple tree that was shading it has been cut down.
Meanwhile…
My daughters and I marked out a block for the corn we will be planting soon. This block is to the West of the peas, so it can actually be reached with the hose. One of my daughters worked on soaking the area while the other helped me with chopping up straw with the lawn mower to lay down in the block.
The rows are two feet apart, and the corn needs to be planted 1 ft apart. We just have one packet of these seeds, so this should be more than large enough. The variety being grown here is called Dorinny. While I found them at Baker Creek, apparently they had largely disappeared for decades, until they were rediscovered and reintroduced by Wood Prairie Farm. They are a Canadian heritage breed, can handle cold soil, and matures in only 75 days. I’m quite looking forward to them! These are a type that I hope to save seeds from.
One of the bonuses of these being planted earlier and maturing so quickly is that the chances of cross pollination with the Montana Morado we’ll be planting at the other end of the garden will be greatly reduced, even with our winds. They will mature at completely different times.
We know this area is low in nutrients, especially nitrogen, which corn needs a lot of, so we’ll have to take extra steps to ensure they have enough. The fresh, nutrient filled garden soil mix will be the first boost. We picked up a water soluble vegetable fertilizer that has higher nitrogen levels, but in cleaning out the old kitchen, we found a water soluble fertilizer that’s even higher in nitrogen. We also found a pump sprayer, still in its box, so we’ll be able to use it to feed the corn, even in the furthest plots, where the hose doesn’t reach. We do plan to pick up more hose but, for now, the rain barrel and watering can are working out just fine.
The chopped straw was also added to the rows of peas as mulch. Being able to run the lawn mower over the straw a couple of times really makes a big difference. I find myself thinking that I wished we’d thought of it earlier, but then I remember that when we were using the straw previously, we were having problems with the push mower that was here. I did use the new push mower to do it last fall, but that’s when it stopped working completely. I’d chopped up just enough to mulch the garlic for the winter.
One thing’s for sure: we’ve made a huge dent in that straw bale! We’ll need to get another one by the end of the season, for sure. :-)
The girls went on to thoroughly water everything for the evening. Tomorrow, we start hauling soil again… after soaking the ground some more, and stomping down the chopped straw. I do wish we had enough cardboard to lay over the grass, but there isn’t enough in our recycling to cover even a single row. I supposed that’s a down side of our bulk-buying, low packaging shopping habits!
Once this block is planted, we can move on to preparing the beds for everything to be planted or transplanted out here, after June 2. After the girls kicked me out of the garden so they could finish, I checked how things were growing in the sun room, and am very happy to see more summer squash and melons have germinated. It doesn’t look like any of the winter squash or pumpkins have started yet. Still nothing on the rest of the gourds, either. :-( I’ll be keeping a close eye on the climbers over the next couple of weeks. How many germinate will tell me how big of a squash arch we will be building.
The day after tomorrow, we should be getting our first batches of items in the mail from Veseys, including the mulberry tree. I am thinking of planting it in a grow bag this summer, though. There are too many dead trees in the area it will be going in permanently that need to come down. I’m hoping they are solid enough that we can use them for building materials.
Next week, the potatoes will be arriving, and we’ll set up the grow bags we made from feed bags for those. We settled on having them along the chain link fence near the storage house, where they’ll be out of the way, yet easy to access and tend to. Plus, full sunlight. Hopefully, using the grow bags will alleviate the slug problem I found we had, last year.
It feels so good to be getting so many things into the ground! Now we just have to wait and see how many will actually grow! ;-)
The Re-Farmer 