It had been my intention to work on clearing out that last low raised bed in the main garden area, at the very least, but once I got outside I changed my mind. There was less standing water in the yard, and the grass was getting out of control, so I decided to try mowing.
We have a large yard.
I was also using the collection bag to save those wonderful grass clippings to use as mulch. It doesn’t hold much, so there was a lot of stopping and starting to empty the bag.
After several hours, pretty much the entire inner yard was done. There was just one place that still had so much water that, even with the mower set higher than usual, it was just too deep. I even opened up the gate in the fence near the fire pit and mowed into the outer yard. I like keeping a lane in the grass to the back gate mowed, as an extension of the driveway. There’s too much water do to it in the usual areas, but I was able to clear a lane from the fire pit area, to where the lane would be. If we absolutely had to use the back gate, we would be able to drive through the inner yard to access it. We certainly wouldn’t be able to get through, the usual way!
Another of the goals will be to trim away some small trees taking over a corner, then mowing the areas where we will be planting the Korean Pine.
But not today!
Did I mention we have a large yard? :-D
The rest of the main garden area should get a once over with the mower, before going over it again with the weed trimmer, as close to the ground as possible, but I was just too exhausted to work on that today.
The ornamental apple trees are starting to bloom. So are the sour cherry trees, and all the lilacs are developing buds. Finally! That shows me that things have finally really warmed up, hopefully enough. I don’t know that we ever got frost last night, but the sweet potato slips are fine. I’m leaving the covers on them for one more night, though. Tonight is supposed to be the last cooler night, though I’ve noticed the forecasted overnight low has changed to quite a bit warmer than before.
Tomorrow, we start transplanting everything. The sun room is turning into quite the jungle!
We’ve had a very high germination rate this year – a huge improvement from last year! Even the Yakteen gourds, which I restarted, have a few seedlings. Some things had seeds germinate weeks apart, but they still made it. We even have a second tulip tree sprouting! We’d pretty much lost all expectation of any more tulip trees, or any paw paws, germinating, so that was quite a nice surprise.
Another nice surprise is that all the turnips have started sprouting already! My goodness, that was fast.
Today, the girls finished transplanting the silver buffalo berry, and prepped to plant the sea buckthorn tomorrow. After that, it’s just the Korean Pine for this year’s food forest additions.
My priority tomorrow will be to get the newest low raised bed next to the compost pile topped up and ready for planting. The Kulli corn will be going in there, and I want to get that done as quickly as possible. They really need to be transplanted soon. If we start them indoors again, I won’t do the toilet tube pots. It worked well enough, and it certainly saved space, but the seedlings quickly needed more room to thrive. Even if they were in just the red Solo cups, they would have fared well longer. Once the corn is transplanted, we’ll have to make sure to put a net around it right away, so they don’t get eaten!
The girls will start transplanting tomatoes along the chain link fence in the south yard. We have more tomatoes than will fit there, though, so others will be planted in the low raised bed that I finished prepping yesterday. There are so many, we might have to the last one that still needs to be weeded, too.
It’s going to be a flurry of transplanting over the next few days. The sun room is going to look so empty when we are done! :-D We will also be direct sowing the pole beans at the squash tunnel, along with the 2 canteen gourds that are trying to claim their way out of their pots right now. Then there are the two types of corn to direct sow, and I honestly don’t know where we’ll be planting those. We’re really behind in preparing beds, but once those trees came in, they became the priority. Mowing and using the weed trimmer is also going to higher on the priority list, since the winter squash is going to be planted throughout the old garden area, not in prepared beds. Basically, we’re going to dig holes, add some garden soil and the transplants, and mulch around them. The grass is so tall right now, though, we couldn’t possibly get that done until it’s cleared.
Yay! A day without rain! We finally got to get some serious work done outside!
I had a few goals for the day, but before I could even start on any of them, I had to get the weed trimmer out. The grass is getting out of control, but it’s still too wet to mow in most places. In the main garden area, the ground is so rough, it’s just easier to use the weed trimmer.
Easier on the lawn mower, that is. Not on me! Particularly since I was trying to trim as close to the ground as possible, as well as under the logs framing the beds. It’s pretty much all crab grass, with some dandelions thrown in for good measure, so it’s all going to come back, but at least it’ll take a bit longer, this way. :-/
Once that was done, I decided on where I would put the purchased grow bags we are testing out this year. I picked up a couple at Canadian Tire, mostly because they were on clearance. My original plan was to try growing some sweet potatoes in one of them, then have the remaining slips planted in the ground. The bed I was going to use for that now has the white strawberries in it, so I figured they could all go into the grow bags.
I decided to place them near the small potato bed, where they will get full sun, and be sheltered from the winds at least somewhat. I did put some straw in the bottom of the bags. The straw will act as a sort of sponge to hold moisture, but it also held the sides of the bags up, making it easier to add the soil.
The truck load of garden soil by the main garden is mostly used up, but so far it has been enough for what we need. The problem is that, after a year, it’s so full of roots, it’s actually hard to stab the spade into it!
We really need a soil sifter. I don’t have the materials to make one right now, so I rigged one up.
This steel mesh is what we use on the burn barrel as a spark catcher. I used it to sift soil last year. A couple of sticks to support it over the wheelbarrow, and it worked all right. Some roots still got through, but at least the big stuff was kept out.
It took a couple of loads to fill the bags. They’re not that large, but even with the straw on the bottom, they hold quite a bit of soil. I decided not to fill them to the top. I figure, once sweet potatoes start to form, they’re going to need some space. I’ve never grown them before, so we’ll find out!
Also, you can see that one of the handles has already torn off on one side!
These bags are probably too small for sweet potatoes, but this is a bit of an experiment, anyhow, so we’ll see.
For these, I decided to use the stove pellets as mulch. In the above photo, the one on the right had its first watering, and you can see they’re already starting to swell and soften.
After wetting them both down, I left the pellets to absorb the water and moved on to our other experiment.
I got a pair of these at The Dollar Tree to test out. The fabric they’re made of is a thick felt.
Hmmm… Did I mention I got these at The Dollar Tree?
You get what you pay for! The first one I opened, and it had a hole in it!
Some of the stitching looks like it simply came undone, but the opening was about a third of the circumference!
The other one was fine, though, so I gave the first one to my daughter. She’s been doing a lot of sewing, so she’s got all the supplies on hand and was able to stitch it up for me.
While she worked on that, I filled the second one. As with the others, I added straw to the bottom, using it to help hold up the sides. In between loads of soil to fill it, I watered the pellets in the first bags a couple more times, before smoothing out the sawdust, then repeated the process on the smaller fabric bed.
It looks so small compared to the other two!
The sweet potato slips I ordered was a 5 pack, and I decided to plant 2 in one of the green bags, then 3 in the black felt bed. I wanted to see if the black fabric, which would absorb more heat, would be better. We did get a short season, cooler climate variety, but they are still a heat loving plant.
Well, would you look at that!
We have extras!
After breaking up the bundle of slips (there was still ice in the packing medium!), the green bags got two each, while the shorter but wider black fabric bed got three.
Sweet potato slips, I’ve learned, are the only other plant that share a trait with tomatoes, in that you can bury them up to their leaves, and new roots will grow out of the buried stems.
I’m sure these bags will be too small, but with how sweet potato vines grow, I think I will let them spread onto the ground. Where the vines touch the ground, they can root themselves, and grow more sweet potatoes. So we might get some growing in multiple places. :-)
Once those were in, I got to work on one of the low raised beds that needed to be weeded (again) and prepped for planting.
It was actually a bit worse than the remaining bed that needs to be weeded. I got as many of the rhizomes and dandelion tap rooms out that I could. I know I didn’t get all of them, but at least I got most.
We’re running low on the canopy tent pieces I’m using for supports. This bed got only 6 of them. The other beds got 8. There are 4 left of these longer ones. After that, there are only some really short pieces. Short enough that I’m not sure where we can use them in the garden at all!
By the time I got this bed done, I really needed a break, so I popped inside for lunch … er… lupper? and a rest.
When I sat at my computer, one of the first things I saw was a flashing red alert on my task bar’s weather app icon.
It was a frost advisory.
*sigh*
Pretty much everything else we’ve got going right now is frost tolerant. These sweet potato slips, however… yes, they’re supposed to be a cool climate variety, but they just got planted!
I decided to play it safe.
We hang on to more of our water bottles, rather than putting them in recycling, and this is one reason why! They can be used as cloche over smaller plants.
Such a hot day, and we’re supposed to get frost. Ugh.
Okay… “hot” is relevant. It was only 16C/61F out there! It certainly felt hotter while working outside. I got a wicked sunburn on the back of my neck. My daughters chastised me for not wearing sunscreen, while one of them applied some aloe vera gel on the burn for me. :-D We do have sunscreen. Somewhere. I just forgot sunscreen existed, and didn’t even think that I might get sunburned!
Tonight, we’re supposed to dip to 2C/35F. Tomorrow’s high is expected to be much the same as today, while the overnight low is supposed to be 4C/39F. After that, our overnight lows are supposed to continue to slowly increase over the next couple of weeks.
Which means that we have one more night before we can start transplanting our warm weather crops. Even then, though, we will start with the ones that are most likely to handle colder overnight temperatures. There is still lots of work that needs to be done, including a repair on the squash tunnel – one of the screws holding a bottom cross piece snapped. Likely because of the winds we’ve been having.
There is still so much to do! The extended cold and the rains have really set things back.
Once everything is in, though, I expect we’ll have quite a good growing season. I look forward to not having to water all the garden beds, twice a day, almost every day, like we had to last year.
Between the weather and the critters, though, nothing is ever a sure thing!
Oh, my goodness, what a day. And it’s not even 4pm as I start writing this!
Since I was heading to my mother’s early, my morning rounds were on the short side. It was pretty chilly out there, with rain expected, so I didn’t take the plants outside, just in case. I’m glad I didn’t, because the “light showers” we were expected to get turned into a series of downpours. :-/
A grader had made its first pass before I left, which made it easier on my mother’s car on the gravel roads, including where the water is crossing over the road again, in two places. I left early enough to put some gas in the tank of her car. That was painful. Just the other day, the prices in her town went from 188.9/L to 197.9/L One US gallon is 3.78L, and at the current exchange rate, that works out to US$5.94/gallon. Other parts of Canada are now above $2/L, so we are by no means the most expensive gas in the country.
Still, it makes for a painful fill at the pump! Most of which got used up by the time I got home again.
The visit to the doctor went all right. Medical facilities are still forced to have mandatory masks. I probably would have been okay if I just needed to go to the clinic, but I also needed to go to the lab, and they aren’t allowed to accept exemptions. Which is illegal, but that hasn’t stopped our current government from doing whatever it wanted before, and they’re not stopping now. I wore my Mingle Mask. One of the receptionists – who had her own mask pulled down every chance she could – complimented me and said she missed being able to read lips. I got my bloodwork requisition then went to the lab, and they were fine with it, too. My mother, who shouldn’t be wearing a mask either, wore hers under her nose. No one said a thing. Not even while in the examination room.
My mom was very confused when we came in to see a young woman, and thought we were taken to the wrong room. It turned out she was a student who is working with our doctor as part of her training. I’d helped my mother make a list of what she wanted to talk about, then took a picture of the list. I’m glad I did, because she didn’t bring it, though she did bring another, completely different one. By the time the student was taking my mother’s blood pressure, my mother was saying, “so… Dr. ___ didn’t want to see me, then…” The student reassured her that the doctor would be seeing her; he was just with another patient.
He did come in later, and we talked for a while longer. Then he made sure to explain to me what he wanted to change up, because there’s no way my mother would remember any of it – and might even choose to ignore. I’ll pass it on to my siblings, and between us, we should be able to get my mother to understand. It just takes a while.
That done, with a quick side trip to the lab for my mother, we headed out. I had fasted for my bloodwork, so we were going to go for lunch, but we made a quick stop at a hardware store. I picked up a box of bed bug traps. Other apartments in the building she’s in have been sprayed for bed bugs, and now we’re finding out she has them, but she cleans her bed really, really well, so she’s fine… *sigh* The more I talk to her about it, the more details she brings up, the more horrified I am. Meanwhile, she’s all proud of herself for being so thorough in cleaning her bed and mattress, and squishing so many of them… *sigh* The traps are mostly as a check to confirm, and won’t get rid of them, but it’s a step forward. She’ll have something to show. My brother and I have been really stressing that she needs to call the housing department that owns her building so her apartment can be treated, but she thinks she can handle it herself.
After picking up the trap, we had lunch – breakfast for me – then started home. I had mentioned to her that I had live trees to pick up at the post office, but suddenly she was wanting to make side trips to other towns. I said no; if we’re going to do stuff like that, we have to plan for it ahead of time. I started getting the lecture of how when I am with her, I need to make it a “holiday”, to spend just with her. By which she means, do anything and everything she wants to do. It’s not “holiday” for me at all, nor do I want it to be. I have too much work to do to lose entire days at her beck and call. At least today, it was rainy, so there’s little we can do outside right now, but those trees need to be picked up, and we need to get at them as quickly at possible, even if the holes we dug for them are too full of water to do any transplanting today.
She still got me to stop at another hardware store and pick up some soil for her, to top up her houseplants. The bags are all in outdoor garden centre displays, in the rain, which meant I got my nice white hoodie and new coat all muddy. :-/ Ah, well.
Once I got her home, I set up the traps, then went over her medications with her before finally heading to the post office, driving through a few more downpours along the way, then home.
Can you believe there are 41 trees in here? !!! I’ve got it next to the box that the highbush cranberry, sunchokes and sweet potato slips came in, for perspective.
Looking at the forecasts, we’ve got three more days where the overnight lows will be too cold to transplant any of our vegetables, but we’ll be able to work on these trees, instead. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get them all done in one day.
So much to do; so little time to do it! Especially with the weather not co-operating!
That meant, time to catch up as much as possible in the garden!
My main goal was to get the potatoes in, since the beds for these were all prepped and ready.
The first ones were from the 1kg package; Caribe.
There just happened to be exactly 20 potatoes in the 1kg package, so this bed got 2 rows of 10 potatoes. For each one, I dug into the mulch to the cardboard below – which was very wet, from all the rain we’ve had since this bed was prepped! – cut an X into it and pulled it back, added a potato so that it was in contact with the ground below, then covered it with a couple of scoops of garden soil.
For this bed, I followed up with a watering, to settle in the soil, then covered each spot very lightly with some straw.
Then it was time to do the 5kg potatoes.
The first ones I did were the Bridget. They were planted the same way as the Caribe, though it wasn’t as easy, while having to walk on top of the straw mulch! I also didn’t bother covering them with straw after the soil was added. The hardest part was cutting through the cardboard. Some of those boxed were made of a very heady duty cardboard, and even while soaking wet, it was hard to get through. Which will be excellent for weed suppression, so it’s worth the extra effort.
It’s a lot longer doing it this way, then the first time we grew potatoes the Ruth Stout way. We didn’t have any cardboard, so the potatoes were laid out on the ground, then simply covered with straw. They did okay, but weeds got through the straw mulch as well as the potatoes. This time, we have a thick layer of cardboard, so that should take care of that problem, but it does make it more tedious! It would have been easier if I could kneel down. A lot of head rushes from being bent down so much!
This morning, I checked the tracking for our shrubs and trees, and they were ready for pick up, two days early! By the time I finished planting the Bridget potatoes, it was past 2pm, which is when the post office reopens after lunch break, so I headed out.
Wow.
All that rain we’ve been having, and the road is washed out right at the patch from before – and this is after the water has gone down quite a bit. There’s actually 2 washed out areas. Not as bad as before, though, and I’ll be able to get through with my mother’s car tomorrow, when I had to take her to her doctor’s appointment.
What I forgot, however, was that today was Wednesday.
The store the post office is in, closes at noon on Wednesdays.
Hopefully, the order hasn’t thawed out yet, and they’ll be fine. With tomorrow’s appointment, I am hoping to be able to pick them up after I’m done with my mother’s medical appointment, but it’s hard to say right now.
Not getting to the post office wasn’t a wasted trip, since I did at least confirm the roads are passable.
Once at home, it was back to work.
The next potatoes to do where the All Blue.
This time, I had a daughter able to come out and help. With the Bridget potatoes, with the larger potatoes being cut into smaller pieces, there was a total of 67 to plant, so I had 6 rows of 10 and 1 row of seven.
Having the potatoes chitting in egg trays makes it easy to count them. The flats hold 30, and the carton holds 18, plus extras in the lid. There were 81 in total, so I made 8 rows of 10, with two little ones planted together.
Here are both beds of potatoes done. I have bamboo stakes marking where the potato rows end. These beds are the size of the traps that we lay on the ground to start killing off the grass and weeds. The Bridget potatoes took up half the bed, while the All Blue took up just over half of the second bed. That means we have space to transplant into, in the rest.
While my older daughter and I were working on that, my other daughter worked on the strawberries.
This area is where we had potatoes in grow bags, last year. The soil they grew in was used to create this new bed. I was thinking of planting some of the sweet potato slips here, but we’ll put all of them in grow bags now, so this one can be for the white strawberries.
It needed a bit of weeding, then my daughter planted the white strawberries, which had 10 root stocks in the package. They are lightly mulched for now, and will get more mulch after they have grown fairly large.
She also planted the red strawberries.
I’ve read the strawberries and asparagus grow well together, so they went into the purple asparagus bed. This had a heavy straw mulch which got pulled off completely. After finding where the asparagus were (you can see some of them in the photo; the heavy mulch blanched them somewhat), my daugher weeded around them as best she could, then transplanted the strawberries where she could be sure that no asparagus would be growing through them.
One of the strawberries has already started blooming!
The bed got mulched with wood shavings, then some of the old straw mulch got places around it, partly to keep the weeds down, partly to hold the soil in place, and partly because the soil around the bed is so buddy. It will get more mulch later on.
After all the potato planting, I was tired, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to do one more.
The bed next to the asparagus was planted with strawberry spinach last year, but all we got was weeds. I pulled as many of those as I could, then grabbed the package of sunchokes.
It was a package of 10, with some of them quite large, and others being just little nubbings!
Some were starting to sprout already.
These got planted at a depth of 3-4 inches.
They also got a layer of wood shavings for mulch, and the rest of the old straw mulch from the asparagus and strawberry bed got placed around the sunchoke bed. For this spot, not only was the surrounding soil muddy, there was standing water in places!
These beds are planted with things that can be largely ignored. The sunchokes can be treated as a perennial, depending on how we harvest them, and need little care and maintenance. We hope to propagate the strawberries over time but, for now, we can allow their runners to spread a bit, around the asparagus. We’ve got two more years before we can harvest any asparagus, so the whole bed is pretty low maintenance right now.
It’s supposed to start raining lightly tonight, then all through tomorrow. If I’m able to pick up the trees on the way home from my mother’s, we might get them in right away, even in the rain. It depends on whether they’re still frozen or not. We also need to get the grow bags ready for the sweet potato slips, which really need to be planted soon. We might be getting a rained on a bit, tomorrow!
Over the next few days, we are expected to warm up, but the overnight lows are still expected to be just above freezing. That will give us time to prep a few more beds, though we could start transplanting some things, as long as we include something to protect them from the chill nights. The heavy mulch in the beds the potatoes are in will also help protect anything we transplant into them.
There is still so much to do! But I’m glad that we at least had today to catch up a bit.
Since I was wanting to go to my mother’s early, my morning rounds were cut a bit short.
That and the ground was just too wet for all of my usual checks.
It wasn’t raining quite yet, but I decided to NOT put our transplants out. With all the pots in bins and trays to water them from below, the bins already had more water in them than they probably should have, just from what rain we got yesterday. Some of them are on baking trays, which are easier to tip and drain at least some of the water out. With the bins, we’d have to remove all the pots to be able to drain it, and I would rather we didn’t knock them about too much. Especially the pots that are made to be planted directly into the soil. When they get wet, they are a lot more fragile and basically fall apart.
So today, they stay indoors.
I did remember to grab the bag with what’s left of our wood shavings to put a light mulch where the peas were planted yesterday. After switching out the memory card on the corner cam, I popped through the barbed wire fence to check on things.
The most obvious was that the “road closed, local traffic only” sign is gone.
The stand is still there. Just the sign has been removed. The stand had already been blown to the side of the road by wind, heavy as it is. I guess they’ll come back for it later. I don’t think the road has been repaired, though. I think the water levels have just finally dropped low enough.
The area in front of where the corner cam is, is where I’d sown a western wildflower mix in the fall, and I was hoping to see if anything was coming up.
I’m still not sure, but…
… we have strawberries! There are quite a few, all around. We don’t mow this area often, but I’m sure I’d have noticed strawberries if I’d seen them before, and deliberately not mown there. There were a few other things growing that didn’t look familiar, but it’s hard to say. With last year’s drought and heat waves, following even more years with lack of spring rains going back well before we moved here, it’s entirely possible that our current wet conditions mean that things that had been dormant are now finally sprouting. When I had the chance, I looked up the description for the seeds I got. It has 16 varieties native to Western Canada, but only 7 are listed.
Well, we’ll find out eventually! I’m just happy to see strawberries growing there.
I then checked out that really bad spot on the road that’s close to us. It was very muddy, and it’s getting longer, but it still looked like I could drive around it on one side. It did convince me to use our van instead of my mother’s car. Her car is lower to the ground, and I didn’t want to drag her undercarriage on some of the muddy ruts left behind by heavy trucks.
The funny thing is, I got a call from my brother later this morning. He was at work but, he knew I planned to go to my mother’s. Having driven through that spot himself just a couple of days ago, he called to recommend I take the van instead of my mother’s car, because it’s so much lower and we wouldn’t want to catch anything in the undercarriage on those ruts…
I love my brother. :-D
I also wanted to leave early enough to hit the post office first. While at the store, I picked up another bale of wood shavings and some black oil seed for the birds. Then I remembered to ask about bale twine. We’ve been using some light sisal cord for most things, but I wanted something more durable. There wasn’t any bale twine in the store, but the owner went to check in the house behind the store (I guess inventory is stored there now; the previous owner used to live there), which gave me time to load the big stuff into the van. While I did that, a Canada Post van arrived. As I went back to the counter to wait, the post master brought a package to me that had just come in, even though she hadn’t had a chance to process all the deliveries yet! That was very sweet of her.
It was also sweet of the owner to go check for me, as she came back with a pair of bale twine rolls. I hadn’t realize that size came in pairs. I’d always seen the larger ones. I asked for the smallest size; only 2800 yards. :-D
We’ll be set for a while!
The package I got was our perishable stock order from T&T Seeds, including two highbush cranberry trees. As I was writing the above, my younger daughter came by to talk about them, and now she’s outside in the rain, transplanting them!
What a sweetheart!
Once I had everything bought and paid for, it was off to my mother’s, picking up some fried pierogi for lunch (it was too early for the usual fried chicken I get as our lunch treat) on the way. My mother was already waiting for her telephone doctor’s appointment! The appointment was at 11:50. She thought it was at 10:50. When she realized we still had about an hour for the call, she dove right into those pierogi – all the while telling me she should probably stop eating pierogi, because the last time she did, that night she had severe stomach pains. Which as never happened before, but every time she has some sort of physical discomfort, she blames it on whatever food she most recently ate. :-/
Then the phone rang. The doctor called almost an hour early!
It turned out to be a fairly short call. My mother’s back is feeling much better now, though she insists the painkillers she was prescribed, have not been helping her at all. The doctor asked the expected questions about if she had twisted it, lifted something heavy, or done anything that might have triggered it. He was looking at her Xrays and couldn’t see anything that would explain the pain. The way he described it, she just has a 90 yr old back! He mentioned arthritis, but I don’t think she heard him.
Ultimately, though, he wants her to come in, in person, as it’s been a long time since she’s been to the doctor. My mother was already talking about doing exactly that. Normally, she would have to phone the clinic and talked to a receptionist to book that – though I would have been the one to actually make the call – and he did start to say that, but then changed track and simply named a date and time. It worked for us, so in a few days, I’ll be driving my mother in for that.
Hopefully, using her smaller car instead of my van, though!
Once that was booked, that was it. We were done, and much earlier than expected.
So we finished our lunch, then headed out to run errands. My mother had three places to go, and was a real trooper about climbing into our van! Especially since the van has no hand grips, like her car does. Getting out was a lot easier, but I had to insist, each time we stopped, that she wait until I brought the walker around before trying to climb out. The last stop was the grocery store, and for that I go in and get a shopping cart and bring it over for her to use as a walker, instead.
Having looked at the weather forecasts, I took advantage of being there to pick up a few little things, too, just in case I’m not able to make the rest of our stock up shopping in the city. That should be tomorrow, but we’ll see.
You know what I didn’t buy today?
Tinned meat.
Because, WOW the prices have gone up!
Cdn$4.49 is currently US$3.54 Those tins are 156 grams, or 5.5 ounces Cdn$4.99 is $3.94 Those are 213 grams, or 7.5 ounces Cdn$6.49 is US$5.12, for 340 grams, or 12 ounces
Small town grocery stores tend to be more expensive anyhow, but this is almost double what I last saw them at.
When my mother was almost done her own shopping, I quickly went through the till with my own stuff to get those put away in the van first. While chatting with the cashier, the increase in prices came up. He told me the prices have been going up daily! This store is affiliated with a larger franchise, so they don’t control the prices, but the whole point of being affiliated with a franchise is to be able to get inventory at lower wholesale prices, so retail prices can be lower.
Which means the wholesale prices have jumped significantly.
Thankfully, my mother only needs to buy enough for herself, and with me there to help out, she got extra in a lot of things, to stock up. She didn’t even look at the meat section, though. She’s convinced herself that meat, especially red meat, is bad, but she’ll buy deli meats or sausages instead of fresh meat. *sigh*
The main thing is that she is now stocked up for the next week or so. With her back giving her grief, she might supplement with Meals on Wheels every now and then, too.
It was raining every so slightly when I left my mother’s, but I found myself driving through several areas of heavy rain on the highway home. I’m so glad I didn’t take the transplants out this morning! The gravel roads were just soaked, and I wouldn’t be surprised if more sections degraded until they were like the bad patch near our place. I messaged the family before heading out, and the girls were waiting for me at the garage with the wagon to help bring things in, since it was too muddy to drive up to the house to unload.
Just a few minutes ago, the girls came in – soaking wet! – to let me know they finished transplanting the highbush cranberry, as per the instructions that came with the trees. They planted them at the opposite end of the rows originally planned, because it has somewhat less water there, though they still had to shovel out as much water from the holes as they could. The holes they dug were mostly gravel, so the wheelbarrow of garden soil I had ready for something else was used instead of putting all the gravel back in the hole. The last of the bag of wood shavings I’d used to mulch the peas was used to mulch the cranberries. Hopefully, they will take root well enough.
It may be a couple of days before we can plant the sun chokes and sweet potato slips. The forecast says “light rain”, but it’s also supposed to be chillier than today. The sunchokes could probably handle it, but I’m not sure the sweet potato slips will. These are supposed to be a variety suited to our climate zone, but they’re still not a cool weather crop.
And we still need to get those potatoes in, but the package said not to plant them until temperatures are above 10C/50F. Looking at the 14 day trend, we won’t have overnight temperatures above that until June 7 – over a week from now! They will be under deep mulch, though, so that should protect them. I hope.
So much to get done, in a very short time, and the weather is not cooperating!
Well, we’ll do what we can. Little by little, it’ll get done.
Before I get into how the rest of the day has been going – aside from “wet” – the rest of our order from T&T Seeds came in! You can read about the whole order, and why we chose what we did, here.
We got our forage radish seeds a while ago, and it was the perishable stock that had to wait to be shipped in time for planting in our zone. I never got a shipping notification. I’d actually gone to the website a few days ago to look up my order and see if there was anything to tell me when it would be shipped, so we could be ready for it. There was nothing. Not even anything to say that the seeds got shipped already. So I tried their live chat function. I ended up getting an automated reply, apologizing for being really busy, and giving me the option of leaving my email with my question, and they’d respond later. I did that, but the only thing I got in my email was a transcript of the chat that didn’t happen.
Well, something must have happened, because suddenly, here they are!
We have decided the highbush cranberry will be added to one end of the rows of silver buffalo berry, where we’d grown corn and sunflowers last year. The sweet potato slips will be split between a grow bag and a bed where we’d grown potatoes last year. The sunchokes are still not 100% decided, but I think there’s really just one spot for them; in an unused bed near the garage. We’d tried to grow strawberry spinach there last year, but that didn’t work. There are invasive that keep trying to take it over, but sunchokes have a reputation for being somewhat invasive, too, and I think they’d win out on that battle. ;-)
I also got a shipping notification for our TreeTime order. You can read about what we ordered and why, here. We’re expecting a total of 41 trees and shrubs that will need to be planted right away.
Which is going to be difficult. What came in today needs to be planted as quickly as possible, but it’s been very rainy off and on, all day today, and it’s expected to continue through tomorrow. In fact, we have started to get weather alerts.
There’s another Colorado Low on the way.
At least it’s bringing rain and not snow, though we’ve have a rather cool May, and it’s looking like June will be, too.
The warnings for our area is for heavy rain falls. Once again, the south end of the several provinces are expected to get the worst of it, as the system swirls its way east and west. There are even tornado warnings!
The transplants did not get taken outside today. They are probably okay with the temperatures by now, but being in pots, and the pots in trays and bins where they get watered from below, it doesn’t take much for rain to accumulate too much in their containers.
For the stuff that can’t be planted until after last frost, it’s looking like we won’t be able to get them out until after June 5, because of the overnight temperatures. Once they’re in and established, if temperatures dip again, we can try protecting them with row covers, but not while they are still undergoing transplant shock.
One good think about everything being in at least low raised beds: the paths may be full of mud and water, the the beds are still good.
Somewhere in there, we need a break in the rain – or at least the heavy rain – and get our T&T Seeds order into the ground!
We got some gardening done! There was a break in the rain and we quickly headed out.
My daughter had the bigger job to get the peas in. We’ll be using the pea trellis we used for the purple peas last year, as we still need to do some work on the other trellis frames. The ground was prepped in the fall, but she had to work through it to pull weeds that were trying to reclaim the space, first.
Now it just needs to have some of the wood shavings, or maybe the stove pellets, added to protect the soil surface from crusting. It’s a light enough mulch that the seedlings won’t have trouble pushing through.
The edible pod pea packet turned out to have very few peas in it. Those are between the two labels on the front left side of the trellis. The rest has pod peas in sown. There are still some seeds left of those, which will probably be planted in with the corn.
This should be the last year this trellis, and the nearby beds, will likely be used for gardening. If all goes to plan, next spring, we’ll be planting food trees here. :-)
While she worked on that, I seeded the bed that was already prepped and mulched with the stove pellet sawdust.
My priority was to get more carrots planted, as they should have been started a while ago. I marked out short rows (making things more like square food gardening), as well as a perimeter line. I started with the Black Nebula carrots. The packet had a nice amount of seeds, and it filled about half the bed, which is about 14-15 ft long. Next, I planted the Uzbek Golden Carrots, which came as a freebie from Baker Creek. There were very few seeds in the freebie packet, and I was only able to plant 4 short rows. For the rest, I planted the Gold Ball turnip, which we got as a freebie from Heritage Harvest seeds, and the Purple Prince turnip at the far end of the bed. I still have some Purple Prince seeds left, but the others in the bed got used up.
We planted the last of our onions started from seed already, so for this bed I used the onion sets I picked up at the grocery store as back ups. I got two boxes of yellow onions – no variety name is on the box – and it took almost all of them to fill the perimeter at 3-4 inches apart. The bed got hosed down to settle the soil over the seeds and onion sets, then support posts were hammered into the ground to hold the netting, after cord is strung through the holes in the posts, and crisscrossed over the middle. This bed will not be getting anything else added to it, so it can be covered sooner rather than later. The other beds have room for transplants in their middles, so they will get their net covering once that is done.
In planting the onions, I naturally was able to grab the biggest sets, since they tended to be on top, so when the bed was completely surrounded by onion, I had a pile of tiny onion sets left behind.
Well, we can’t let those go to waste!
They went into the retaining wall blocks. Two already have shallots in them. After pulling weeds and roots from the empty blocks (the others that look empty had mint transplanted into them in the fall) and adding the wood shavings, I had 6 blocks ready. I was able to fill 5 of them; 4 with 4 onions each, and one with only 3. That one block at the side is still empty. There is a matching block at the other end that doesn’t have anything planted in it, but it looks like it has chives coming through!
We have one box of red union sets left. Depending on where they end up being planted, if we have any left over, I’ll be finding space of them here, too.
The bunching onions planted in the bed along the retaining wall are still looking wimpy after transplanting. Hopefully, all these onions will make things too stinky for the grogs to want to go after the lettuce and beets. A groundhog could easily tear through the net, if it really wanted to. It’s going to be the big garden area that will be the most difficult to protect, however.
~~~pause for real world interruption~~~
My older daughter and I just finished bringing the transplants in. We have so many strong, healthy tomatoes! It’s going to be a challenge to plant them all, since they’ll mostly be going into new beds. Maybe that’s where those grow bags and fabric raised beds will be the most useful!
We’ve got our work cut out for us, but I don’t know how much I’ll be able to do tomorrow, as I’ll be heading to my mother’s to help her run errands. She is suddenly taking her back no longer hurts – I guess it took that long for the meds to have their effect, but she still says that when she takes them, they do nothing. She feels up to going out for her errands, though. She has her telephone doctor’s appointment, so I will probably go over there early enough to be there for her appointment, in case she needs things explained to her.
The question for me will be, can her car make it through that one muddy spot on the road? I might have to take the van, even if my mother will need a stool to get in and out!
It started to rain again, while I was doing my morning rounds, but there were some bright colours to make an otherwise gloomy and overcast day a bit more cheerful.
The grape hyacinths are reaching their full maturity. At some point, I hope that they will take over this area, replacing the invasive greens that are already there. I don’t mind them too much in this area, and they don’t seem to be choking out the hyacinths, but they sure do take over when growing among less resilient plants!
Then there was this little bit of sunshine.
The very first of my daughter’s daffodils have finally bloomed! After last year’s failure to thrive, and not being sure they’d survive the winter, my daughter is quite thrilled at how well they’re doing this year.
I got the transplants outside, but for a while there, I thought we’d have to bring them back in. The rain started coming down pretty hard, but it slowed down and now seems to have stopped for a while, so they should be fine. Mostly, we don’t want too much water accumulating in their bins and trays.
Unfortunately, with how wet everything is, that means no progress on the garden. Everything is just too muddy. It’s frustrating, because we have so many things that should already be in the ground, like the peas, the potatoes, and the strawberries, as well as more cool weather things to direct sow. Then there are more beds to prepare for the warm weather crops to direct sow, as well as areas for all the transplants.
One of the things I did this morning was check out what’s in the barn. I’m eyeballing the remains of salvaged and scrap wood, trying to think if there’s enough to start building a chicken coop.
I also popped my head up into the old hay loft, climbing the ladder as high as I dared. My brother says there is a car port frame up there, but I can’t see it. There are still some bags of insulation left behind – there was a lot more, but it grew legs and walked away, along with so many other things. It’s the kind of insulation that’s like a powder and gets blown into the walls. They’re scattered about and I can’t see the corner my brother says it’s in. What I did see, however, was what temptingly looked like a stack of lumber. I will have to come back with a daughter or two, as I don’t dare go up there on my own. With my knees, will have difficulty getting back down again, and parts of the floor up there are rotted out. If there is salvageable material up there, I want to get it out and stored someplace more accessible. Even those old bags of insulation might come in handy at some point. Who knows.
Oh! A daughter just came by. There’s a break in the rain, so she wants to do some gardening. Let’s see what we can manage before the rain starts up again!
With a steady rain all night, we’ve got a lot of standing water and mud in the yard again. The straw mulch where we will be planting our 5kg bags of potatoes got well soaked, though, so I don’t mind.
This afternoon, I finally had a chance to work on the garden again, and I’ve got some thing figured out, too.
The spinach sown in the high raised bed has started to sprout. There was room for one more row of spinach, so that got planted today.
Then it was time to work on the low raised beds.
We are well behind on direct sowing our cool weather crops, so I focused on the 2 1/2 low raised beds that my daughter and I had gone through, pulling out as many roots and rhizomes as we could. A few that we missed started growing again (there will always be some of those!), so I pulled out some more, before leveling the beds out. I decided to use the stove pellets as mulch for these beds. After leveling the soil in one bed (the back of a fan rake is great for leveling the soil), I’d scatter some pellets as evenly as I could over the bed, soak them with the hose, then work on the next bed. It generally took about 3 soaks before the pellets had expanded and broken up enough to be spread evenly with the back of the rake.
It always surprises me just how much sawdust is packed into those tiny pellets!
Once those were done, I gave them one last spray with the hose, then moved on to what will be a deep mulch bed for the 1kg package of potatoes. We had considered planting those in the low raised bed by the compost heap, but have decided the kulli corn will go in there. It’ll be easier for us to put a barrier around the wooden frame to keep the critters out. Potatoes need no such barrier.
In our second summer here, we started preparing an area for future gardening by mulching the area heavily with straw, and trying to kill off as many weeds as possible. You can read about those preparations here, here, here, and here.
Yeah. It was a big job, spread over months.
The next summer, we had our first garden, and all along the north side, we planted a row of birdhouse gourds. We’d started them indoors, but I thought our last frost date was May 28, the same as a town to the east of us, only for us to get hit with a frost on June 2 – which was the last frost date for a town to the north of us (our own little hamlet is too small to be on any of the frost date lists). The gourds didn’t really survive, and since then, this particular area has not been planted in.
The straw you see raked aside in the above photo has been there for 4 years.
The area was still mostly clear of crab grass, though I spent some time pulling those out. With the straw layer, the rhizomes tended to be running across the surface of the soil, so that made it easier to get them.
I knew we had a few moving boxes left in the basement. I thought there was three left, so I cleared an area to roughly match how much I thought those three boxes, opened flat in a single layer, would cover.
I was wrong.
There was 5 boxes left, so I laid them down folded in half, to get a double thick layer. This should be more than enough for the smaller amount of potatoes.
After soaking the cardboard, I put most of the old, wet straw back, then topped it with some newer straw to get a good, thick later.
This bed is now ready for potato planting.
While I was working on this, the girls got the fire pit going, and I finished just in time for a wiener roast. :-D
We’ve used that fire pit in the past month, almost than we’ve been able to in the past 4 years. No fire bans, this spring!
After the girls made sure I was fueled up, it was back to the low raised beds. Time to do some planting!
Look how big that garlic is!! They are just thriving, here.
For this half-bed, I marked out a grid, but planted in rectangular boxes. I started with some spinach – a variety called Space – planted around the middle of the bed. There are still some seeds of this spinach variety left, if we want to sow some for a fall harvest.
One those were in, the outer perimeter, I planted some onions. These are Red of Florence; the last of the onions we started from seed.
The centre of the bed was left empty. Later on, we’ll put in plants that we won’t be harvesting leaves from, or harvesting many times. Perhaps we’ll put some eggplants or peppers in the middle. There’s room for only a few plants in this half-bed.
There will be more room in the next bed.
The centre row was marked, but nothing is planted in it. On one side of the centre line, a third variety of spinach, Lakeside, was sown. On the other side, Tokyo Silky Sweet turnips were planted. Then, all around the perimeter the last of the Red of Florence onions were planted.
The onions being planted around the perimeter like this is to dissuade critters at least a bit. That is not our first defense, though.
These will be covered with netting. I’m not sure the bamboo stakes will hold those hoops very well, though. Trying to push them into the ground, I kept hitting rocks. In one spot, right at a corner, I just couldn’t get around a rock, so that one is more shallow than I would prefer. A couple of stakes broke while I was trying to push them into the ground. Since I couldn’t get them very deep, I ended up having to break the tops off of the rest, to be able to put the hoops on them.
Later, bamboo poles will be tied to the centre of the hoops to hold them steady and hold up the netting when it’s added on. Not until after something has been transplanted in the middle.
For the long bed, I grabbed pieces from the canopy tent that was dismantled. Those were easier to pound into the soil. Literally. I had a piece of would I could use as a mallet, and got them in pretty deep.
With the logs bordering the bed, the supports aren’t spaced very well. For the ones in the middle, most had to be squeezed into the spaces between logs. Which is fine. After something is transplanted in the middle, cord will be strung through the holes in the supports around the perimeter, then criss crossing across the middle to support the netting. With them so oddly spaced, it’ll be wonky, but it’ll work.
The ground staples will be used to tack the net down , but we still want to be able to easily life the sides, to harvest greens as needed.
The third bed was left for tomorrow. We have 2 more varieties of turnips to plant, or I might do carrots, first. They should have been sown about a week or more ago!
Beds will continue to be bordered by onions from sets. I’ve got 2 boxes of yellow onions and one of red onions, so there is plenty to go! :-)
The other thing that really needs to get done are the two varieties of peas. Hopefully, it won’t get too hot for peas over the next while! Meanwhile, we need to get those potatoes into the ground.
The next few weeks are going to be very busy in the garden! Lots to go in, in a very short time.
The most predictable thing about plans seems to be that they don’t tend to last very long! :-D
I didn’t get anywhere near as much accomplished today as I’d hoped. I did, however, manage to finish planting the garden bed with peas, carrots and onions. At least until it’s safe to transplant out the tomatoes.
The row of onions and shallots, started from seed, that I transplanted yesterday made up only half the length of the bed. I had two boxes of shallot sets and decided to use those to finish the row.
Some of them are already starting to sprout! Which means the yellow (2 boxes) and red (1 box) onions need to get in the ground as soon as we can, as I’m sure they’d be much the same.
Of the two boxes of shallots, by the time I was done, there was only 5 shallots left. We decided to plant those in a couple of the retaining wall blocks along the old kitchen garden.
Which means that right now, all our shallots, both the sets and the ones grown from seed, are planted.
I noticed by the end of the afternoon that the plumb flower buds were starting to open! It was quite a warm one.
One thing I did manage to accomplish was a much needed trip to the dump. I’m glad we waited; from the condition of the road to it, it got flooded over, too. It did mean we had a lot more than usual to dump off.
While I was putting our glass into the separate bin they have for it, I noticed something very odd.
Canning jars.
Canning jars with the metal rings still on them.
Canning jars with glass lids!
They were in excellent condition, too!
I was sorely tempted to take them as they were, but we already have a lot of those old style canning jars and glass lids. It’s the rings that are getting as rare as hen’s teeth. I checked with the custodian about doing a bit of dumpster diving, and he leant me his reaching tool. In the end, there were only five rings that I could see, though there were quite a few more canning jars. What a waste. Especially with canning supplies being increasingly hard to come by in some places. These old style jars may not be considered safe for canning anymore, but they can still be used for dry canning, and the rubber rings are still available.
Between these and the ones I found in a bucket in the storage house, I think I have about 15 or 20 of these rings in total, and all in very good, useable shape.
In other things, I’d called the clinic on behalf of my mother and got a telephone appointment for her at just before noon. After letting her know about the appointment and talking about her pain situation, I got busy with other things and didn’t get a chance to call her back until much later. Just before 4pm, in fact. That’s when I found out the doctor hadn’t called her! The clinic stops answering the phone at 4pm, so I quickly called them again to find out what happened.
It turns out the appointment I made for my mother wasn’t for today. It was for Monday. I swear, I never heard a date. Just a time. We’d talked about a few things, and I was so focused on getting a doctor to call her as soon as possible, I must have simply missed it.
So that got straightened out, and I called my mother back to let her know. I was happy to hear that she was feeling a bit better. She says it improves if she doesn’t move at all. !!!
I’ll have to call her on the weekend and see about doing a grocery trip for her. She insists she’s well supplied… then starts talking about being almost out of milk, and maybe there’s something else?…
:-D
Tomorrow is out, as I should be making the trip into the city for the monthly shopping. At least the Costco portion of it.
One of the things on my to-do list was to contact a local electrician about our fried outlet. I know he works in the city, so I was going to wait until later. Then I got a phone call from my brother. He’d been thinking about what happened, and the photo I sent him, and was considering coming over to look at it himself. He’s done most of the new wiring here and is every bit as qualified an electrician; he just never bothered to get his ticket. If all goes well, he will be coming here on Saturday morning to see what he can do.
Meanwhile, my daughter was able to get her old laptop going again. She can’t work on her commissions on it, but she can at least get online, and can contact her clients about the delay.
And that’s about as much as I managed to accomplish today, and yet I’m feeling so very tired and sore, you’d think I had actually finished filling that low raised bed I’d intended to do today. *sigh*
I’m also falling asleep at the computer. I think an “early” (as in, before midnight) bed time is in order!
