Gardening

Update, up and broken things

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First, an update on the kitties!

Beep Beep came half out of her baby nest to have a bit of food while I was there, with the babies peacefully snoozing in a pile. I was even able to get a picture, despite her best efforts to use her butt to block my attempts. :-D

She was more co-operative later.

That is one happy, contented bunch of wormies!

Beep Beep looks ticked off at the flash. :-D

While I was outside, doing my rounds, Butterscotch and her boys followed me around.

Creamsicle really, really wanted up – and not just with me!

He does love climbing things!

Including my leg. :-D

Potato Beetle was more polite about it.

Just look at that face!

He has a terrible habit of running in front of us as we are walking, then flopping down on the ground, right in front of our feet. It can be very hard not to step on or trip over him! :-D

He likes to go up on the roof and watch the girls through the upstairs window. I’m told he even falls asleep with his forehead against the glass! :-D He is such an affectionate boy. :-)

Butterscotch not only let me pet her this morning, but even let me pick her up, if only briefly. This let me get a quick feel of her belly. The one teat that was very swollen yesterday is still swollen, but already getting softer. This is good, since her not suckling could potentially lead to mastitis.

Before heading outside this morning, I checked on the seeds I’d started earlier, and found there are some seedlings sprouted among the fennel, so I took the dome off the tray. They are already really leggy. I need to get them set up in the sun room soon. The main concern I have for there is how much the temperatures drop during the night. We can’t get a good sense of that with the doors propped open all the time, so I was going to close the outer door, leaving the inner door with its much smaller window, open. We could then keep an eye on the temperature through the bathroom window, throughout the day.

Unfortunately, the door can’t close.

Even when we first moved here, this door was difficult to close. I had to lift it and basically force it shut. Now, not even that works.

Not that it matters anymore. We need to replace the door.

A part of the door’s edge appears to have changed shape and just hits the frame. That’s the part that prevents the door from closing. If this had been the only issue, I could just use one of the planes we found in the basement and shave it down. However, as you can see in the photo, the door itself is coming apart at the bottom, and the window is no longer attached along one side. The caulking is old, brittle and has been breaking off all long that side.

Theoretically, I could take the door off its hinges and repair all of this, but it’s really not worth the effort. I’m pretty sure this is a standard sized door, and we should be able to switch it out with one of the doors we’ve found in a shed.

It’ll be worth a try, at least.

If that doesn’t work… we’ll have to figure something out, or I won’t be able to use the sun room as a greenhouse. I need to be able to protect the trays from the cats.

So that’s something I hope to get done this afternoon.

Wish me luck! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Spring clean up started

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I finally got to get outside and start doing some dedicated clean up around the house.

But first, I must share this adorableness.

Two Face is getting all of the love from her siblings as she recovers from her visit to the vet.

Speaking of visits to the vet, we discovered our inside mama cat has been throwing up, so we are stopping the pain killers the vet gave us to try with her.

Dang.

My goal for outside had originally been to go around with a wheelbarrow and pick up all the little branches scattered all over the yard over the winter. Once out there, however, I changed tack completely. Instead, I removed all of the rigid insulation we put around the bottom of the house for the winter, removed the straw from over the septic tank area, and cleaned things up around the house.

When our septic failed earlier in the year, and we had to get the tank emptied, I had moved the straw covering the lid over to the side, on top of snow and other straw. As I cleaned away the straw, I uncovered a snow drift! :-D

That’s okay. The straw got moved over to the old kitchen garden, and the straw that was stuck in clumps of snow and ice will just add moisture to the garden. Plus, some of it was already starting to decompose quite nicely. Bonus! :-)

This is all just the straw that was covering the septic tank area. Later, I plan to cover the rest of this little garden with more straw from the bale we still have in the old big garden area.

The sheets of insulation around this side of the house were held in place with whatever was handy. Bricks, chimney inserts that will never be used (now that is an electric furnace) and little benches we found while cleaning up in the maple grove. They all fit quite nicely together to make a little seating area. :-)

In the future, we plan to make a path along the house, and a small garden of shade tolerant plants in this area.

On the topic of planting things, I was able to cover a future planting area with black tarp this morning.

The ground here is soft enough that I could actually use tent pegs to secure the corners. Unlike pretty much everywhere else, which is still frozen hard.

One of the things I want to do in this area as soon as the ground is thawed enough, is dig through it a bit more to make sure I’ve cleared out as many roots as I can. There were so many cherry roots running through there, it’s very likely we’ll end up with some trying to grow through our plantings, if I’ve missed any! Of course, we’ll have to be on the look out for any rusted nails and whatever else may have been missed when we cleaned this area out.

Also, the Potato Beetle decided to be part of my “found object” display. :-D

Him and his filthy, filthy nose! :-D

My other goal of the day was to start some seeds, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. It’s time for me to pain killer up again and take it easy, so that I’m not too wiped out to continue tomorrow.

Ah, the things you need to think about when you’re broken. :-D

The Re-Farmer

Starting seeds indoors

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Well, I’m glad I’d already written out which seeds needed to be started indoors and when. For some reason, I thought I’d need to be doing 3 starts, but I will only need to do 2.

At about 4 weeks before last frost (give or take a few days, depending on which town I look at), I had 2 things to start. Cucamelons and fennel.

I’ve never grown either, so this is a complete learning experience.

I got a couple of those domed seed starter trays with the pellets. These are self watering trays with a capillary mat between the pellet trays and the main trail.

For this seed start, I don’t need to use an entire tray.

The cucamelons will be planted in the chimney blocks currently sitting in the old basement. I have 8 of those left. With the spacing needed, I could plant 1 cucamelon per block. Maybe 2. So I am starting seeds in 16 pellets and will hopefully get at least a 50% germination rate. If I get more, I’ll figure it out when the time comes! It’s a completely new plant for us, so I don’t even know if we’ll like them, so I didn’t use the whole packet. I know we like fennel, so I kept more pellets for those. Then I added water to start hydrating the pellets while I looked at the seeds.

Hhhmmm…

With how few pellets I’m doing for the cucamelon, there are enough seeds even if I put in a couple in each one, but fennel packet turned out to have fewer seeds than I expected.

So I took a few of the pellets out.

Then I had to wait for the pellets to hydrate. I was also waiting for a call from the garage (more on that in another post), etc., so I kept myself busy with something that could handle interruptions.

I crocheted a basket. :-D

Once the pellets were hydrated, I used a pair of shorter bamboo skewers to lift up the mesh at the top, because I know my clumsy fingers would just tear things. *L* Then, I used the blunt end of a skewer to push the seeds to the right depth into the loosened pellets.

If I felt the need, I could have marked the skewer for different depths, but I was only doing two. The cucamelons needed 1/2 – 1 inch, while the fennel needed 1/4 inch.

I made sure to mark the packets for their seed status, because I know I’ll forget. :-D While I had extra for the cucamelon, I used up all the fennel seeds, and most of the pellets have only 1 seed in them. Hopefully, they will all germinate and be strong little seedlings.

Though the tray comes with its own cover, it will still go into the mini-greenhouse my daughter bought for me. That’s more to protect it from the cats, at this point!

My daughters and I ended up finally rearranging the living room, since my husband moved his computer set up out, before setting the mini-greenhouse up where we knew it would get direct sunlight.

Which is basically in the middle of the living room! :-D

I will eventually move the mini-greenhouse outside, but it’s still way too cold for that.

In one week, I will start the squash and gourd seeds. The remaining seeds we have will be direct sown outside, once it’s warm enough.

While I was working on this, my husband did some research and found a relatively local company that sells gravel and soil, with a price calculator on their website. Using that, we calculated that the amount of garden soil we would want to get, which is quite a bit, we are looking at about $650. We could probably get away with about half of that amount, though, and get more in another year. In time, we’ll have enough organic material to build up the soil ourselves, but we’re just not there yet, and probably won’t be for another couple of years. Buying garden soil would be a short cut.

Then we looked up their driveway gravel.

To get enough gravel for the driveway from the road to about the gate into the yard, including all of the front front of the garage, we’re looking at about $2100.

Ouch.

The main thing, though, is that the first batch of seeds are started for our first attempt at growing food since we’ve moved out here! It took a lot of work to get to this point, so it’s pretty exciting. :-)

Now, if we can just have a good weather year, this year, and not another drought!

The Re-Farmer