I’d crocheted an amigurumi squid, years ago, trying out a new pattern. When I realized we’d closed the other cats out for the night and Ginger had no toys in the room, I decided to see if he would like it.
He did.
Squidly is now Ginger’s favourite toy! The other cats like it, too. :-D
Speaking of other cats…
His sister, Cabbages, and Keith were pretty adorable, cuddling together! :-)
This morning, as I put kibble out for the outside cats, most of them eventually made their way over.
I did not see Butterscotch.
I have my suspicions that she’s tucked away with somewhere, with new babies.
If my suspicions are correct, I hope her nest is nice and cozy, because they’re now predicting another 7 inches (almost 18cm!!) of snow on Sunday! We’ll have more snow in April than we’ve had the entire winter.
The slow melt we’re having now is perfect, except with the overnight temperatures going below zero, the freeze-thaw cycle is destroying the roads! I had to run some errands today, picking up our newly sharpened and tested electric chain saw while dropping off a lawn mower for servicing, then going to another town to drop some stuff off, and the gravel roads in particular are just awful. The paved roads and highways are going to be crumbling even worse than usual in the next while.
I don’t mind the snow while we’ve got these milder temperatures. I think most people on the farms out here will happily put up with rough roads, if it means they will have enough moisture when planting their crops.
I must admit, though, it’s rather disjointing to read other people’s blogs where they talk about all the stuff growing in their gardens, or their latest transplants. :-D
Speaking of which, we did decide to start one of the squashes we’ve got now, rather than later. The Crespo squash is the only one of them that grows large fruit. In trying to find the “days to maturity”, all I can find is “harvest the the skin is very hard”. Which doesn’t tell me much at all! I’ll just assume large fruit means longer time needed to grow them, and will give them a bigger head start. I set the seeds to soak last night, and will plant them later today.
I’m not finding a lot of information about this specific variety at all, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens with these.
And now I have to de-cat myself (hello, Susan) and get some work done! :-D
After seeing how much the K-cups were drying out, I had to find a way to move them out so they can be watered thoroughly, without over watering the Jiffy Pellets.
At our last city shopping trip, I picked up a couple of cheap little baking sheets, to make it easier to move the red solo cup transplants later on. I wasn’t sure if it would fit on the shelf with the other tray, but I figured I’d give it a shot.
It fit. :-)
Because I have a heat source below, both trays need to be on the same shelf, so I’m glad it worked out.
I discovered an unexpected potential problem after taking out the K-cups.
As you can see, trying to keep the K-cups hydrated left the Jiffy pellets really damp. The algae growing on them should not be a problem, though. The potential problem is that, protected by the larger K-cups, the seedlings have roots growing through the mesh of the Jiffy pellets – and you can see where one seed grew out the side!
With the K-cups moved away, those roots are now exposed and will dry up.
What to do? I didn’t want to move them and cause more damage to their roots.
Well, it’s a good thing I don’t like to throw away anything that might be useful. Even old Jiffy pellets.
When I started squash and gourds last year, with their large seeds, I planted one seed per Jiffy pellet. I ended up with a lot that did not germinate, and they’ve been sitting, all dried out, in an old ice cream pail, ever since.
Except for the ones the cat dig out. They really, really like to bat them around and tear them apart. Which is disconcerting, in the wee hours of the morning and I don’t have my glasses on, but I can see enough to tell there’s a pile of brown on the floor. :-D
Well, it turns out I had juuuuusssttt enough left to fill in the spaces.
Two spaces were bits and pieces of Jiffy pellets, rescued from the cats. :-D
I added more water to the reservoir below for them to absorb and expand a bit, and the roots can grow into them.
I did transplant the one growing out the side of a Jiffy pellet into another one that didn’t have anything in it.
I didn’t expect growing onions from seed to be this troublesome, but I guess that’s to be expected when resources and options are limited! The water also has half-strength vegetable fertilizer dissolved into it, so I hope that helps.
Thanks to some feedback from Kensho Homestead, I decided to go ahead and trim our bulb onion seedlings this morning.
Though our temperatures dipped below freezing lat night, the sun room remained nice and warm. I didn’t even bother putting the plastic cover over the mini greenhouse to keep more of the heat from the ceramic heater bulb in.
Now that they’re trimmed, you can really see the difference between those in the Jiffy pellets, and hose in the K-cups. They’re both peat, so the growing medium is not the reason.
This tray was designed for the pellets, and to water from below. The bottom of the tray has channels for the water, with a felted mat on top, then a molded tray that holds the pellets, while also keeping the bottoms in contact with the mat below. The K-cups have drainage holes, but they don’t seem to have enough contact at the bottom for watering from below to work well, and they dry out much faster. At first, the ones in the K-cups were doing better, but now it’s the ones in the Jiffy pellets that are noticeably stronger and healthier.
I did water them after this photo was taken, making sure to get the K-cups thoroughly wet. I’m trying to think if I have something I can transfer the K-cups to that will let me water them from blow. I think it’ll be the only way to keep them well watered, without over watering the rest.
Lesson learned: don’t mix two very different starter “pots” in the same tray. I used the K-cups because I only had enough Jiffy pellets to fill half the tray. I should have just used half the tray with the Jiffy pellets, and found something else to put the K-cups in. The K-cups do work well – as long as they can be adequately watered.
Meanwhile…
The luffa are coming in strong and healthy, and doing very well!
Perhaps too well!
I used these pots, so they can be buried directly into the ground when it’s time to transplant them, with no root disruption. Which means we’re going to have to reduce each pot to just one, strongest plant. It seems like such a waste to discard strong seedlings, but if we separate them out to plant more of them, that will create the root disruption we’re trying to avoid!
Three plants should be more than enough for our needs. Especially since we don’t even know if they’ll get the time they need to reach full maturity before first frost in September.
I bet they’d do great if we could find a way to grow them in pots in the sun room! LOL Pretty sure they’d overgrow that corner rather quickly, though. ;-)
I remembered to get a photo of our onions in their new location in the sun room.
I ended up removing the plastic on the mini-greenhouse frame, so it wouldn’t get too warm, and so there would be air circulation from the ceiling fan.
This is early enough in the morning that the room is still “dark”, but once the sun comes around, it gets many hours of sunlight. The ceramic heater is just enough to keep the seedlings from getting chilled overnight. We’re supposed to get snow starting tomorrow night, at with point I might put the plastic cover back on.
There should have been trays for three types of onions in here by now, but the shallots died off and I had no seeds left to try again, and the reseeded bunching onions are still in the aquarium greenhouses inside, for a while longer. By the time those are ready to be moved over, we’ll be bringing the tomatoes and gourds into here, too.
I have a question for those who grow onions from seed.
Should I trim these?
I’d read that onion seedlings should be trimmed when they reach about 6 inches, to about 3 inches, while they await transplanting. I would have done it by now, however, I’ve since heard from people who say to NOT trim them, because then you get smaller bulbs. They were pretty adamant about it, while others were just as adamant about the opposite.
I’m inclined to trim them, but I wanted to hear from anyone with more experience than me with growing onions from seed. I am more than eager to listen to the advice of others!
They tend to show up near the end of the day, when the light makes is hard to get good photos! You can still see, at least a little, the growing antler nubbins on the deer on the right.
If all goes well, this will be the last bag of feed for the deer that we buy until the fall. Looking at the long range forecast, we’re expected to dip below freezing again, with snow on Monday (three days from now). They’re predicting 3-6cm. After a couple more days, the temperatures will be back above freezing during the day, though we’ll have below freezing temperatures overnight for a while longer.
I’m hoping we actually get that snow, and that it slowly melts. The deer should have fresh growing things to eat after that. We were supposed to have rain over the past couple of days, but once again I watched on the weather radar, as the system moved right past us. We didn’t even get a sprinkle.
Yesterday was a very lazy day for me. There is something about it being overcast that leaves me feeling like I’m ready to fall asleep, all day. Plus, with the cooler temperatures and hopes of rain, I didn’t want to be working outside with power tools. ;-) I did make a trip into town, though. Our darling daughter treated us to pizza for our anniversary. My husband and I celebrated 33 years together this month. :-) While driving into town to pick it up, there actually was a bit of rain, but it was nothing but a tease!
Today, I finally made the trip to the smaller city to pick up the last few things I wasn’t able to get during my Costco trip. They were actually sold out of cat litter, of all things! While there, I started chatting with another customer, who is also feeding a lot of cats. Mostly outside cats. He estimates he spends about $3000 a year on cat food – and spent another $5000 to get 40 cats fixed. !! That’s through some sort of program, where getting a female done is only about $80-$100, instead of the $350 we’re paying. I’ve had all sorts of organizations recommended to us, but either we can’t get through to them, or they don’t operate as far out as we are. :-(
(Oh, just got a phone call. The people who are adopting Two Face are on their way to pick her up. :-) )
While talking to the other customer, he mentioned using wood pellets instead of litter. I’ve heard of people using them, and talking about how much better it is, so I asked him more about it. It turns out that these are just the wood pellets sold as fuel for pellet stoves. He told me that when the cats use the pellets, they absorb all the moisture and break apart into sawdust. They also absorb the odor, so the only thing you smell is wood. When cleaning the litter pans, you simply dump out all the pellets in the pan and replace it with fresh – and the old pellets can still be burned. !! I don’t know that I’d want to do that. At least not in the fire pit (or a pellet stove, if we had one!), but we do still have a burn barrel. Or compost them, while burn bans are in effect. That would save us from having to haul those heavy bags to the dump. He told me the pellets are a lot cheaper, too, and they come in 40 pound bags, so they last a long time, too.
I think it’ll be worth trying it out. Maybe start with just a few litter pans, first, and see how the cats like it.
The conversation got me thinking about just how much we spend on critters. With the cats, it’s about $350-$400 a month in wet and dry cat food, plus litter. So, about $4,800 a year, on the high end. Plus the deer, which we do only for about 6 months, which works out to about $300 a year. Then there’s the bird seed, which we do all year, and works out to about $1000 a year.
Which we’re doing my husband’s disability payments.
Thank God for private health insurance!!
There are a lot of things we are doing without, to keep the critters fed. We include it all in our grocery budget. If, however, we were just setting that money aside, we’d have been able to save enough to replace the roof in only 2 years.
Now, we’re not going to stop feeding the animals, but we really need to find a way to address that expense. This is not sustainable. The problem goes back to my not simply being able to go out and get a job, since any income I would make would get deducted from my husband’s disability payments. If I ever made enough to bring that replace my husband’s disability payments, he would lose his insurance entirely (since he would no longer “need” it) – and he’d no longer have coverage for his prescriptions. So it’s a lose-lose situation. That’s why we had to be so careful when fund raising for Ginger’s vet care. We can accept gifts. We can’t have additional income.
*sigh*
Reducing the costs will help, which is why I want to try the wood pellets instead of cat litter. Cat food isn’t going to get any cheaper, though. It’s another reason why we want to grow and preserve as much food for ourselves, as well.
Slight interruption in writing this, as the people adopting Two Face arrived. As a thank you for Two Face, we were gifted with a bag full of brand new, still in their wrappers, Tupperware! Looks like the lady is a distributor. :-)
I hope Two Face is happy in her new home. We’re going to miss her!
Well, with the weather getting colder again for the next while, we’ll be slowing things down as well. At least, outside. Not so much, inside. The tray of bulb onions are now in the sun room. It’s warmer in there, but with the cooler temperatures coming, we’ve got them heated from below. By the time things warm up again, we should be ready to move more seedlings from the aquarium greenhouses to the sun room, then use the aquariums to start the summer and winter squash.
If all goes to plan, we should be ready to start direct sowing some things near the end of May, then do the final direct sowing and transplanting after our last frost date of June 2.
Oh, my goodness, but our internet connection has been bad tonight! It’s taken me forever to finally be able to load the editor to start this post! It’s not done giving me grief yet, either!
Still, I wanted to get this posted before calling it a day, since I’m basically using this blog as a journal that I can reference later on, if I need to.
The last 4 varieties of gourds have been started!
The luffa are the three pots together on the right. The one sprout at the top got visibly bigger, just today! You can see a second one coming up at the bottom. The pot inside the red solo cup is the Tennessee Dancing gourd. On the left are the Ozark Nest Egg, Thai Edible and Birdhouse varieties. The light fixture inside the tank is, as before, just there for its warmth.
Next on the list to start indoors are the summer and winter squash.
While tending the seedlings last night, I finally remembered to take one of the tomato pots out, so I could actually get a picture.
These are the Spoon tomatoes (from Baker Creek). I planted three seeds in each of four cups, and so far there is one that has not shown any growth at all, while all the seeds have sprouted in the others, for a 75% germination rate – though it’s still possible something might show up in the fourth cup. The Mosaic Medley seeds (a mix of cherry and grape tomatoes from Veseys) were also planted with three seeds in each cup. Three of them all sprouted at close to the same time as the Spoon tomatoes, and all look pretty much identical in size and health. In the last cup, two finally did sprout, though they are looking much weaker than any of the others.
I would be happy with only 3 plants from each seed pack, since only half of us actually like tomatoes. We’ll see how they look when it’s time to transplant. In the future, we plan to grow varieties suitable for making tomato paste or maybe for drying, but not so much for fresh eating or even canning. A lot of gardeners in groups or channels I follow get so excited about growing massive amounts of tomatoes. I don’t see us ever going that far with tomatoes! We hardly even use them as an ingredient.
Last night, we broke out the rest of the gourd seeds.
We had seven of the Jiffy pots left, and four types of gourds. We decided we will do the Tennessee Dancing Gourd in just one cup (each cup will get three seeds). Someone on the Baker Creek website had left a review stating that their one plant had at least 250 tiny gourds on it. If they’re that prolific, I think we’re good with fewer plants! :-D
We’ll be planting two cups of three seeds of the other varieties. I had to do some searches to find the maturity information for them, as there’s nothing on the seed packets (they’re all from Baker Creek). It’s different with the Thai Bottle Gourd, as they are meant to be eaten like zucchini, while very young, though some will be left to fully mature. I’m sure the other varieties could be eaten while very young, too, but those are all intended to be dried out and used for crafting purposes.
The peat was saturated with water already, and added to the Jiffy pots at the same time as we set the seeds to soak, so the pots themselves would absorb excess water. After finding how much the cardboard egg cartons sucked the moisture out of the growing medium with our bunching onions and shallots, we don’t want any chance of that repeating, and I want to make sure these pots are in trays or containers to allow watering from below. We’ll be wanting to keep those pots damp.
So these will be planted later today. Until then, they are inside an under-bed storage container with a lid, to protect them from cats.
Meanwhile…
… when the girls went out for a walk last night, they managed to extricate this old wooden ladder from where it was sitting by the storage shed. It was a bit difficult to get to, and it’s been there for so long, I was sure it would fall apart if we tried to move it. It turns out to be surprisingly not-rotten!
It’s interesting to see how each step is supported by steel wire!
The girls are thinking it could be used as a trellis. I’d like to find some way to preserve it, if we can, so it doesn’t degrade too much. At the very least, find a way to protect where it will be coming in contact with soil. I’m sure the only reason this thing didn’t rot away is because it was sitting on top of other things, well above the ground.
I think the girls are pretty excited about gardening this year. :-D
It was very exciting last night! We spotted our very first luffa seedling!
I am not surprised that it is closest to the light we’ve got in there for its heat!
There was just one this morning, but when I turned the tray so the others would get a bit more direct warmth, just before starting this post, I found a second one, in a different pot, had broken ground!
Tomorrow, I will start planting other gourd seeds.
Today, a daughter and I headed into the city for our monthly shop (except some things we needed were out of stock, so we’re going to have to make another trip). I made sure to pick up a shelf for the sun room. It’s time to transfer the tray of bulb onions to the sun room, to make room for more seed starts in the aquarium greenhouses. The tomatoes and the new batch of bunching onions to replace the ones that failed will stay in the aquarium a bit longer.
When we got home, we quickly unloaded the van, then I headed out again to the post office, where I could also pick up more deer feed and bird seed. My new monitor arrived in the mail, and I’m using it now. What a difference! Unfortunately, there are still some pages that do the weird colour thing that is why the monitor was replaced. It’s better, but not gone. Which means the monitor was only part of the problem.
I must say, though, I’m glad to have it. It’s quite a bit bigger than my old one! Meanwhile, my husband tested my old monitor, and it worked just fine while hooked up to his computer. My younger daughter has been wanting to have a second monitor for a while, so she’ll be able to use it.
Which all means it was a while before I could set up a corner of the sun room in preparation for our seedlings.
While Ginger was in isolation in here, we used the frame of the mini-greenhouse to hold the terrarium heater bulb above the bed we set up for him, since it still got pretty chilly in the sun room overnight. I didn’t realize until I put the plastic cover back on that the cats had torn it at the back. It will still work, though.
Some seed trays will be moved here after being started under the lights of the aquarium greenhouses, but later in the season, less delicate things can be started in the sun room. This room gets long hours of sunlight, so while I will probably have to rotate trays, I shouldn’t need to add supplementary light. The lights we have are designed to fit over fish tanks. I might be able to rig them up, if necessary, but it would hardly be ideal.
As for temperatures, the thermometer in the sun room has been reaching as high as 30C/86F during the day. Granted, the thermometer is hanging at the top of a pair of windows, so it would be hotter there than head height, but it’s still quite roasty toasty in there. If for some reason we feel the overnight temperatures would be a bit too low for the seedlings, we do have the ability to warm things up at least a little bit.
So the luffas are started already, which I now know should have been started back in January (we’ll see how those turn out!), which leaves the remaining gourds to start. I know they’re supposed to be started “late April”, but gourds have such long growing seasons, and our frost dates can be so early, I’m going to take the chance and start them a bit early.
Starting the summer and winter squash should be interesting. With the gourds, we’ll be planting just a few seeds of each, but with the squash, we intend to plant most, if not all, the seeds in their packages. We have two packages of the patty pan squash, which we enjoyed so much last year, and intend to plant all the seeds! :-D
If all goes well, we’re going to have squash coming out of our ears. ;-)
By late May, if all goes well, we’ll have our garden soil in and will be able to direct sow those things that can be planted before our last frost date.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how the gardening goes this year! Right now, as we start things indoors, we’re also praying for some rain! Fire bans are already in effect (and likely were in effect before the grass fire that started near our place last week), and not a lot of farms were able to do controlled burns.
A while back, I wrote about two areas we were considering building a permanent, accessible raised bed garden outside the inner yard, and asked for feedback. You can read about that here.
While walking with my daughter this evening, it occurred to me, we could start in a very different location.
I hadn’t considered this area before, because I had something else in might for it.
This is the space.
This is the area in front of the garage, where I’ve been able to keep up with the mowing. As you can see by the tire tracks in the foreground, there is traffic here. The red lines mark where we tend to drive, either as part of our turning radius to get in and out of the garage, or in the access lane to the barn, and the “gate” in the fence beside it. The opening has a chain across it, as well as the renter’s electric fence. I found the remains of the barbed wire gate that used to be there, buried in the tall grass. :-/
This is actually where I was thinking we’d want to build a new fire pit/outdoor cooking area. Our current fire pit is too near trees and a collapsing log building. A wide open space like this would be much safer for a fire pit. With the winds we get, we were thinking of building a sheltering wall of around the fire pit, as well as making sure the ground around the pit was fire proofed with bricks, stone, gravel, sand or even just bare soil. I’d also like to build an outdoor clay oven, and a shelter of some kind, and turn the whole arrangement into an outdoor kitchen. The practical purpose is to have somewhere we can cook if power is lost.
These plans, however, won’t come into fruition for some years yet, and can either be moved, or be integrated into any garden layouts we end up doing. I’ll go further into that in a bit.
The most obvious advantage of this location is that it’s flat and dry. There are also no buried pipes we need to work around, no rough soil to level, and now low spots that gather water in wet years. While the one shed, with the wide open front, is not worth salvaging, it can still be sort of used until it finally collapses, or we take it down. The other shed is worth salvaging, and we can use it for storing garden tools and equipment.
There is that pile that needs to be dealt with. While it has branches on top, those branches are on top of what I was told is a pile of insulation. !! I believe my late brother salvaged it from a demolition job or something, and had plans for it that never came to fruition. We need to clear it out. However, there is enough space that we could probably build a few raised beds around it, even taking into account the dimensions needed for accessibility, until we can figure out what to do with it.
Getting water to it will be a bit harder than the area to the west that I was thinking off, but not as difficult as the area even further west that we were considering. Plus, it’s an area we can see from the house.
We will still need to figure out how to deal with deer, of course. In fact, as I started writing this post, I saw some movement on the security camera, flashing through this area. A look out the door, and I could see two deer standing by the pile. The deer cut through the old hay yard at the fence between the two shacks, as well as going through here to reach the “gate” by the barn. That’s one downside to this space. It’s a higher traffic area, both for humans and animals!
We have broader plans for this part of the outer yard, as we work towards getting rid of most of the fencing around the inner yard, making the inner and outer yards are one, large, usable space.
This is the other area we want to work on, in the short term.
In these photos, I am at the North end of the old hay yard. In fact, we never had hay stacked this far from the barn, and it was used as pasture. When hay wasn’t being store here, this area was used as a corral and/or pasture area. The orange lines in the above photos mark the fence around the area that is functional. The black lines mark a collapsed fence line. I believe this second fence line was added after some trees were planted, to keep the cows away from them. Here and there, I can see the dead remains of trees that look like they were planted in a row, rather than self-sown.
I want to get rid of the fence marked in orange, but that can’t be done until we have something to replace it. In the short term, I want to put temporary fencing where the fallen fence marked in black currently is. It needs to be strong enough to hold back the renter’s cows, but it will eventually be removed, too.
This is an area I want to get worked on.
The blue is a low area that used to be a dugout, and should be filled with water right now. It’s so dry this spring, there isn’t even mud in there. One of these years, I want to hire someone with an excavator to dig it deep enough to be a pond in all but the driest of years. It’ll be a nice water feature, and the intention is to allow bull rushes (aka: cattails) and other aquatic plants to grow, and hopefully have a little haven for other creatures.
Trees would be planted along the property line in the background for privacy from the road, to keep out road dust from vehicles driving by, and as part of a shelter belt from those wicked south and south-easterly winds. The trees that are there now just aren’t enough to shelter from those winds!
The black lines in these photos mark more or less where a permanent fence would go.
As you can see, some clean up needs to be done behind the shed. What the shed hides is the space in front of the barn, where the fence surrounding the outer yard ends, and where there is a collapsing ramp for loading cattle onto a truck.
Shelter belt trees would also be planted along or near these lines, though not all the way to the barn. There would likely be a gate of some kind, there, too. We may shift the whole line so that it lines up with the corner of the barn, instead of lining up with the shed. That decision can be made when we are in a position to start building the fence, which will be a few years from now.
So if we build the permanent fence here, there will be plenty of room to build the outdoor kitchen/fire pit area, if we wanted it to be closer to the future pond site. Or, as mentioned before, we could integrate it in with the garden beds, which I think it more likely to happen.
So, what do you think? Is this a better idea than what was written about here?
Ooh… I just had an idea. That old shed that’s starting to fall apart will eventually need to be cleared out. It could some day be replaced with a greenhouse! Again, no need to level or raise the ground. It’s already flat and dry.
My older daughter and I headed out for a walk, and we decided to go ahead and remove the plastic covering our garlic beds.
When looking up how to plant winter garlic, all the resources said to cover the garlic with a heavy layer of mulch.
What none of them did was mention when to take off the mulch in the spring. I knew the mulch was removed, because all the videos and photos I saw that were taken later in the growing season showed the garlic growing out of bare soil. No mulch in sight. It took some dedicated searching, but I finally found resources that said to remove the mulch after overnight temperatures were consistently above -6C/21F. Looking at our long range forecasts, we seem to be at that point, as overnight temperatures are generally supposed to stay above freezing. We’ve started by just removing the plastic for now, though. We’re supposed to get some much needed rain tomorrow, and have decided to leave the mulch a bit longer. Right now, it’s keeping the beds from drying out, like everything else has done this spring. With so little snow over the winter, and very little precipitation so far this spring, every little bit of moisture is precious.
When I dug these beds out, I moved the soil to one side, put the contents of our compost heap on the bottom, added straw on top, then put the soil back, including the soil that was in what are now paths. I dug those areas down to the gravel, using it to raise the garlic beds higher, then filled the space with scrap wood to create the paths.
I won’t be adding another path on the other side of the third bed, which means I’ll only have what soil I take off the top. I’ll be emptying out our compost heap into the bottom, then add in the mulch from the garlic beds, before putting the soil back. I don’t think it’ll be as high as the other beds, but hopefully we’ll have our loads of garden soil delivered soon, so I’ll be able to top it off with that. The mulch will probably be removed before then, and I’ll just move it onto the paths at first.
We’ve had quite a few warm days. I think I’ll call the company up in the next day or two and see if their soil is thawed out enough to load into their trucks or not.
I might be just a little bit excited about getting that soil! :-D
