Gardening

Stripped bare, and heavy traffic day

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It’s working out to be a very unpleasant morning, weather wise! Thankfully, I was out earlier to do my rounds outside, so I could make sure the gate was open. We’ve got a septic company coming in to clean out our tank for the winter, some time this morning.

Checking on the sunflowers this morning, I just had to get some pictures to share.

The stalks have been stripped bare of any leaves under about 6 1/2 – 7 feet!

From the fresh pile of deer droppings visible at the bottom of the above photo, you can guess why!

The leaves were mostly frost damaged and already drooping. You can’t see in the photo, but the ground in places was littered with stems left behind after the soft parts were eaten.

It’s looking like we’re not going to get any actual seeds out of these. This seed head is one of the best that’s out there. Many never had the chance to fully open and get pollinated. Even the two I harvested and brought inside to dry are looking no different, really, than this one. I plucked a seed out of one of the dried ones, and it had pretty much nothing in the shell. I’m leaving these outside for now. The weather is going to cool down for a few days, then warm back up again, and the sunflowers are pretty much the last thing we’ll be cleaning out. Mind you, their role as wind breaks are rather defeated by the lack of leaves!

Our sunflowers may not be doing well, but it’s been a great year for farmers’ crops this year. After such a horrible year last year, this is wonderful news. A lot of people planted corn again, including our renter. Yesterday, we were hearing and seeing a LOT of traffic by our place. Checking the trail cam files this morning, I was seeing gravel trucks, hay bale trailers, trucks full of fire wood and farm equipment. It wasn’t until I’d gone through a number of images that I realized what I thought were dump trucks full of gravel were actually full of corn. Or, at least, they couldn’t possibly be gravel. The images aren’t very good at that distance and speed of subject! :-D I have one of the trail cams now set to stills instead of video, and going through that one, I counted 23 full loads going by! Those are just the ones that were captured. There could easily be more that got missed by the camera delay. At one point, the road was so busy, two dumpt trucks had to squeeze past each other in front of our driveway. That road is barely wide enough for two cars, never mind two dump trucks!

Sometimes, I kinda wish we lived even further into the boonies. Too many neighbours! Too much traffic! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting; Bulls Eye Tulips

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I needed to head into town today, and when I got back, the girls were just finishing planting the last of the bulbs we had. Bulls Eye Tulips.

These have more finicky requirements. They are larger bulbs that need lots of sun, good drainage, and if we want them coming back year after year, deep planting; about 12 inches.

The area selected is in the West yard, among some crab apples and plum trees. This area was cleaned and cleared out of debris two summer ago. With all the dead trees and branches cut away, the ground does get good sunlight, while the remaining branches and surrounding trees protects it from hard rains.

While digging the holes, they found plenty of rocks – so they used them to mark out where the bulbs were planted!

The package came with 8 bulbs in total. When the back ordered items come in, there will be more tulips, which will also be planted in this area. I contacted Veseys, and we can expect our back order in the first or second week of October. Weather Canada has said to expect a long and mild fall and, from the looks of the long range forecast, we should still be good when they come in.

The girls got these in just in time. Shortly after, the winds started to pick up, and it’s blowing pretty good right now. We might be getting another rainfall tonight.

Drainage will definitely not be an issue in this location. In digging the holes for planting, they found the topsoil was only about 6 – 8 inches deep. Then they hit sand and gravel. As far as I know, this whole region is like that. I can remember when the will was dug by the house, after the well in the pump shack failed, and we finally got running water. A trench was dug towards the barn, and pipes laid to provide water to the barn and a couple of drinking fountains for the cows, plus the pipes that got diverted to the septic field. I was pretty young, but the top soil did look quite shallow, and I remember the trench being all through gravel and clay.

Another reason we want to build our soil up. Literally!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting: iris

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I needed to make a run into town today, and by the time I came back, my daughter had selected a place to start planting, and gotten started.

She had selected Eye of the Tiger Iris, and I must say – Vesey’s really missed an opportunity for a punny name! :-D Eye-ris of the Tiger? Eye of the Tigris? :-D

But I digress!

These needed to be planted in a location with plenty of sun and good drainage. She decided they would make a good border on the south edge of the old kitchen garden. She had been digging holes with a trowel for each of the 15 bulbs in the bag. She had forgotten that I found a good spade, buried in the garden shed! Things went much faster when I could just dig a trench for her, instead.

She just had to contend with a few rocks, instead!

We should now have a border of irises extending from the laundry platform, to the chives at the edge of the retaining wall corner.

The only thing left to plant now (until the back ordered items come in) are the Bulls Eye Tulips. These are a little more complicated. They need hard winters (we’ve got that), hot summers (we usually have that) and full sun (we can find that) but they also need to be in a dry location and NOT watered or fertilized in the summer. So we can’t plant them around anything we will be watering or fertilizing. One of the areas we were talking about planting in was by the stone cross, but that’s an area that collects water when the snow melts, so that’s out.

Pretty much the entire West yard is quite dry, though. We might plant them in where the crab apple and plum trees are, south of a row of lilacs. One end of that area does get full sunlight.

We have to decide soon, though. Those bulbs need to get into the ground!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting: snow crocus

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Of all the stuff that we ordered for fall planting this year, the garlic and the grape hyacinth were the two things I wanted. The rest were chosen by my daughters. Especially my younger daughter, who is really interested in flower gardening.

No surprise that she was eager to get out there today, and plant the snow crocuses!

This is the area we worked on today.

The first thing we needed to do was rake and clean up the space.

When I cleaned up in this area, two summers ago, I had to take out a lot of dead trees. I deliberately left really tall stumps, after discovering (the hard way!) what a tripping hazard they were if I didn’t. This year, I have a reciprocating saw, which does a great job of cutting level to the ground.

I took advantage of that.

It took more than a year longer than planned, but most of them are now trimmed. There are just a few further out that I didn’t bother with, yet.

While I was working on that, my daughter finished off the raking, then started scattering the bulbs.

Some of them are so tiny! Like little hazelnuts.

The snow crocus mix my daughter chose included Dorothy, Blue Pearl, Tricolour, Snowbunting and Spring Beauty.

Interestingly, when I looked up the mix on the Vesey’s website, it now has 4, not 5, varieties. It no longer includes the Snowbunting.

After the were all planted, my daughter watered all the areas we planted in, including the grape hyacinth, while I placed more logs to border where we planted.

Here is how it looks now.

It’s too windy to burn the debris from the first rake, which is mostly dead leaves, so that will wait for another day.

This section will have a walking path on both sides. Further north, it’s so shaded under those trees, almost nothing grows under there. Even the row of crab apple trees I found buried under the branches is still struggling – though one branch on one tree did get enough sun to produce some apples! :-/ Anything we end up planting there has to be able to handle a lot of shade, and not much moisture. But that is probably still years from now.

So for this area, we are done with planting for the year. Everything else we’ve got, plus the stuff on back order, will be planted elsewhere. We’ve got another week, at least, of warmer weather, so we will work on keeping these areas well watered.

All of the crocuses are supposed to bloom very early in the spring. I look forward to seeing them! I expect they will be rather spotty for the first few years, until they naturally begin to spread. Until they do, we’ll have to make sure they don’t get overtaken by other things. We can also think about what we might want to plant with them and the grape hyacinth that have different blooming seasons, once we get a good grasp on how they are doing.

At the same time, we’ll be looking into a ground cover in the pathways. By the time this area is done, it should have almost no grass and need no mowing.

One thing we do have to keep in mind as we fill these areas, though, is that we still need to have at least some access into them. If nothing else, we’ll need to pick up fallen branches or remove dead trees!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting grape hyacinth, day two, and planning ahead

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The girls were sweethearts; by the time I got outside, they had already planted at least half of the second bag of grape hyacinths. One daughter was still using the broken trowel to dig the holes! It’s really unfortunate that the auger couldn’t be used. :-( That would have made the job must faster and easier!

I did find another trowel among the odds and ends we found while cleaning out the sun room, but it was so cheap, and the soil so hard, it kept bending. I used a weeding tool to loosen the soil, first, then I could gently dig a tiny little hole for each tiny little bulb. :-)

Then, while one daughter watered both sections we planted the bulbs in, my other daughter and I used pieces from the trees that were cut away from the power lines to mark things off.

At the far end it where a walkway will be. Eventually, there will be a sort of V shaped pair of walkways leading from the fire pit area to the broad path that runs down the middle of the grove. At the dead tree, near where the rolling seat is, we marked around a spot where wild strawberries are growing. There are more of them near a tree to the left of that spot, but with the bulbs planted on either side, we didn’t bother going in to mark them. At some point, I’d like to transplant those strawberries to somewhere they won’t be choked out by grasses and wildfowers, but wild strawberries are not the sort of thing that takes to being handled well. It does make me wonder how they ended up here! I used to find them only deep in the bushes, during very damp years, when I was a kid.

This is the next section we will be working in.

We have 20 bulbs each of 5 different types of snow crocus. This area is very narrow, so it should be quite enough to plant the length of this. These were my daughter’s choice, so I will leave it to her, whether we will plant each type separately, or mix them all together.

The crocus bulbs are even smaller than the grape hyacinth! They need to be only 3 inches deep into the soil.

Weather willing, we should be able to get this done tomorrow. After that, we might be done in this section for this year. We still have a double tulip collection on back order, with a total of 58 bulbs, but I’m not sure where they will be planted. I think they will need more sunlight than they can get in this area. The product info says “partial sunlight”, while the further we go in this area, the more “full shade” it gets! They might do quite well in the old kitchen garden, as long as they are planted closer to the house and away from the ornamental apples.

Something we still have time to think about!

Meanwhile, we will work on keeping these well watered while it’s still warm out, to make sure they are established before winter sets in.

I do hope the back ordered items come in soon. I really want to get the garlic in!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting grape hyacinth, day one

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So a few things we’d talked about before have changed a bit, as we decided where to start planing the grape hyacinth (muscari).

This is the area we settled on, before clean up.

Two summers ago, this area was quite overgrown. Some of the lilacs and carigana I cut back have started to encroach again. I deliberately did not mow around here, because I wanted to see what would come up.

Not much, it turns out. Lots of crab grass, and a few of a type of wildflower we have all over the place.

In this area, there are rows of trees planted varying widths apart, with a path to the old garden that splits it into east and west sides (this is the west side we are working on). After clarifying where we wanted to keep walking paths, one of my daughters and I started raking, and I also cut away some of the encroaching lilacs, caragana and the maple suckers that were coming up.

The row of elm and maple on the left has a narrower space between them and another row of trees to the north. Then there is a wide space that will be kept open as a walking path, followed by several more rows of trees planted way too close together.

We will be planting a bag of bulbs on either side of the row of trees on the right of the photo, and not too close to the lilacs and caragana. We want to encourage them to spread outwards from that row of trees.

There was quite a lot of debris, so we ended up using the firepit to burn it. When my other daughter was able to come join us, they continued the hard physical labour, while I tended the fire. :-)

This sort of stuff makes for a very smoky fire!

After the dry debris on the surface was raked away, they went over it with a thatching rake to get even more up, and try and loosen the soil. The piles from what were not appropriate for burning, so they’re going to be used as a sort of mulch, elsewhere.

The girls even kept going and raked up the next area we’ll be planting in.

Just not today!

They also remembered that auger I bought, intending to use in the old garden area. On realizing how much rockier it was than expected, we never did.

So I got it out, attached it to our drill and tested it.

Yeeaahhh…

No.

That didn’t work. Too many roots! The auger would jam and stop turning, almost immediately! Those circles you see where as deep as I could go before it got hung up and starting making some very unfortunate noises.

Which may well have been a good thing, I guess.

After scattering a bag of bulbs fairly randomly in the prepared area, the girls got to work, digging 4 inch holes manually (the recommended depth for muscari) and planting them, while I continued to tend the fire.

We are now down a trowel.

There it is – with the rock that broke it!

We have another one, but no one can remember where it ended up, so they found another tool and continued.

Hitting a rock like that with the auger probably would not have broken the auger.

It would most likely have broken my drill, though!

Here is one section they worked in. It’s hard to tell where they planted the bulbs from the ground scuffed as they worked! It was a very difficult job, with many roots and rocks in the way. The soil is very hard. I know, however, that grape hyacinth can handle that, since I’ve seen them growing in much worse conditions!

The entire area has been watered and, tomorrow, we will work on the next section.

The crocuses will also be planted in this side of the maple grove (the east side still has piles of dead branches waiting to be chipped), but the iris and tulips will go someplace much more prominent and visible. They don’t have the spreading habit the grape hyacinth and crocuses do, so we’ll be more particular about bulb placement, too.

I’m so happy! When I was a kid, going through catalogs, grape hyacinth were among the things I always wanted to grow. When living in Victoria, BC, where they grew like weeds on the sides of roads (which is how I know they can handle the hard soil of this area just fine!) that only solidified my desire to have them. Now we finally do! And with a couple hundred bulbs planted, I think we can be assured of a decent number of them sprouting next spring.

As long as the skunks and squirrels don’t dig up and eat the bulbs!

The Re-Farmer

Morning cuteness, and a sad little gourd

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Before heading outside to do my morning rounds, I spotted 3 kittens out the window…

… playing on the roof of their cat house!

Of course, as soon as I went outside, they ran off, but mystery kitten stayed to spy on me.

It was so funny to see her hide behind the frame, pop her head up, hide, peek, hide, peek… watching me as I brought out some kibble for the outside cats.

In checking out the squash bed, I just had to go looking for our one birdhouse gourd that was developing.

The one, sad, squishy little gourd!

The frosts have completely decimated all the squashes, so it’s time to prep the beds for the winter. I don’t know that we’ll plant squash in the same places next year, but we will definitely plant them again. With what we learned this year, I hope to be able to do more to protect them for late and early frosts.

The squash beds will not be cleaned up today, though. After lunch, we will be planting flower bulbs in the maple grove, in areas that are the hardest to mow around.

I’m really looking forward to it! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Guess what we’re doing this weekend!

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A package I was expecting next week, came in today! Our first shipments of bulbs for fall planting.

Which the cats found very, very interesting…

That’s better!

Mostly. :-D

We’ve got 2 packages of Muscari (grape hyacinth) of 100 bulbs each. There are 5 bags of crocuses. I believe we were planning to mix these all together and plant them randomly. There are also an iris and tulips. We still have some on back order, including a fall garlic mix. The long term weather forecasts show no temperatures dipping low enough for frost over the next too weeks. Hopefully, the rest of the order will come in before things start to cool down that much again.

The Re-Farmer

Cat crowd and sad sunflowers

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We had another frost last night, and today is going to be distinctly chillier. We’ve already had a smattering of rain, which is supposed to continue off and on.

Then, on the weekend, we’re supposed to go above 20C again!

The outside cats seem to be taking it in stride. In this weather, they will be growing in their denser winter coats.

How is this for a lovely family picture!

Starting from the top left, we have Rosencrantz’s baby. Next to her is the mystery kitten; I am unsure which mom she belongs to! Next is Rozencrantz herself – who as even been letting me pet her! Until the food is out, of course. :-D

Next in line is Tabby, then Little Braveheart (her head is hidden behind her mom), and finally, Junk Pile cat.

Junk Pile cat was the one kitten of Rosencrantz’s that we were unable to catch. Keith and David, with their leaky, glued shut eyes, were caught and treated and are now both indoors.

This means that Rosencrantz’s babies are siblings to Junk Pile, while Junk Pile’s kittens are the grandkittens of Rosencrantz. Which means Rosencrantz’s kittens are also the aunts/uncles of Junk Pile’s kittens! :-D

I did see Butterscotch around when I first came outside and started getting the cat kibble. I have put the container for her and her kittens at the side of the house, near the steps I have been seeing them play around most often, lately. She went past me as I was filling it. Later, as headed towards the old garden area, I could see her kittens, playing among the squash beds.

Which confirms that Butterscotch has moved her kittens again.

Across the road, to the neighbouring property! No one lives there, but there is still the house, barn, garage, and various sheds and equipment used by the current owner.

*sigh*

She has done this before, and when her kittens grew bigger, they did stay at our place on their own, but I don’t like that she and her kittens are crossing the road like that. That one is a main road, and gets a lot more traffic than the one our driveway leads to.

I really wish Butterscotch wouldn’t do that. :-(

The frost we’ve been having seem to have finally done in the sunflowers.

The leaves are drooping on all of them, and even the unopened seed heads are drooping. I don’t expect many of them will ever open, even as we warm up again.

With the ones that are already open, I’m sure they can better withstand the frost. The problem is, it’s too chilly for the pollinators. No pollinators, and the seeds will never develop. I’m hoping they will be out again as things warm up.

Not all of them are tucking down for the winter. The wasps on the tree outside the kitchen window – the tree we need to cut back in hopes of establishing an internet connection for the second satellite – is still buzzing. As chilly as it was this morning, I could see a few flying around, too.

It’s hard to know how much longer it’ll be, before we can safely cut that branch down. Meanwhile, we’ve already got our 90% data usage warning, with 2 weeks before the account flips. We’re still rationing our internet usage, but we’d have to basically stop using the internet almost completely, to avoid going over the limit. Our service won’t be interrupted, but we will be charged double per gig once we do.

I really hope taking that branch down works. The tech already checked everything and replaced everything he could, and it still got zero signal. If it’s not the branch blocking the signal, there’s really nothing else left to fix. Yet, if it was just the branch, we would have had at least an intermittent signal, rather than no signal at all.

Ah, well. We’ll find out, one way or the other, once those branches come down.

The Re-Farmer

Fall clean up: cucamelon surprise

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The frosts we have had didn’t quite kill off the cucamelons, but they are certainly beyond being able to continue producing.

There were still a few left on the vines that were big enough to withstand the frost, though!

They were still tasty, too. :-)

After taking down the yarn net I made for a trellis, I started pulling each of the plants up.

Which is when I found a surprise.

They have tubers!

When I looked up how to grow cucamelons, I found one site that said, if you lives in a colder climate, you could dig up the roots and pot them. Kept in a cool, dark place over the winter, they could be started indoors for better transplants in the spring.

I don’t remember the site mentioning the roots were tubers!

When I kept finding more, I decided I would try it.

These are the biggest ones that I found. After trimming away the vines, I filled a couple of deep buckets with peat (we still have most of a bale) and planted the a bunch. I fit about 9 tubers between the two buckets. That left a few littler ones that I decided not to bother planting.

The buckets are now being repeatedly watered, to get as much of the peat to absorb moisture as possible. Then, they will go into the old basement (where the cats can’t get at it!) for the winter.

The next thing to do was to prepare the retaining wall blocks. When I placed them last year, which you can read about here and here, I filled the bottoms with mulch, then topped with peat. As expected, everything settled a couple of inches, so they all needed to be topped up.

For that, I wanted to use the soil from the remaining tire planter, so the retaining wall waited for a bit, while I dealt with that.

Which will get it’s own post.

It turned out to be a pretty big job!

Once I had the soil, I loosened and broke up the peat layer, topped off all the blocks with soil, then watered them thoroughly, to help it settle in.

After giving each block a thorough soaking, my daughter and I made a dump run, giving the soil plenty of time to absorb the water and settle. Once back, I topped up the soil again, then gave them another soak.

The cucamelons are now all cleaned up, and the retaining wall is ready for whatever we decided to plant here next.

Oh, I almost forgot!

One of the other things we transplanted in the area where the surviving fennel seedlings.

This is the biggest and strongest of the 4 that survived.

I admit, all I did with them over the summer was water them. I suppse they’re still edible. If nothing else, I think the fronds can be used as an herb, and there are plenty of those! :-D

The only thing left in the blocks are the two with chives in them. I will be leaving them for now, but before winter, those will get topped up with soil, too.

Another job off the list! :-)

The Re-Farmer