We’ve got a much cooler day today – as I write this, it’s coming up on 1pm, and it’s still only 6C/39F, with a high of 13C/55F by about 6pm expected. I took full advantage of the cooler temperatures to get some things done! We’re supposed to start getting rain tomorrow, have more rain, off and on, over the next few days, so the more we can get done out there, the better!
The first job, of course, was to feed the yard cats. I counted 28 in total, I think. Knowing that we have kittens in the junk pile, I now put food out under the shrine, and even on the bench nearby. Which the Blue Jays appreciate… 🫤
Stinky, Hypotenose and Syndol were all pushing each other around, trying to get at pets!
I spotted Broccoli at the food bowls, so I interrupted my usual morning rounds and dashed to the garden shed.
I started taking out as many things as I could think to grab – garden stakes, hoses, netting, etc. I had to get under where the kittens were, so I lifted them all up in the self heating mat and set them on the ground as I worked. Once I got the stuff I thought I would need right away, I returned the tarp and the felted grow bags Broccoli has made her nest in, made sure it was flattened in such a way that no kittens would accidently roll off and get stuck somewhere, then carefully put them, still half snoozing, back in in their soft, fuzzy and warm mat.
By this time, Broccoli had come around the house and was watching me. When I was done and continued my rounds, she followed me around the garden. I’m hoping she will be okay with what I did, and not take her kittens away and hide them. By removing the stuff I did, I’m hoping we won’t need to open the door and disturb her and her babies for a while. I’ll still check on the, of course, but will try to do it only when I know Broccoli isn’t in there with them.
That done, I started doing garden related stuff. While rain may be on the way, we can’t count on it actually reaching us, so I did the watering. It looks like we finally have carrots sprouting, so I’ve moved the protective boards off of them. The German Butterball potatoes got the grass clipping mulch returned. I’m still putting the cover with the plastic on it over them, to keep the cats out. The garlic also got their mulch returned, now that they’re bigger, and watered.
After all the watering was done, I checked on the grapes. The false spirea growing nearby is trying to spread into them again, so I got some pruners to cut them away. Normally, I’d try to pull them up by the roots, but I can’t do that when they are right in with the grape vines.
Then I started clearing other spirea to clear more space around the grapes.
Before I knew it, I’d gone through the entire corner, clearing away dead false spirea, trimmed dead branches and last year’s flower husks, finding and clearing around a perennial flower that gets buried by the bushes every year, and really opening things up and cleaning them out.
The cats are very happy with this! They like to go under there. When they are in full leaf, it’s a shady spot they can hide in, and now it’s nice and clear of dead branches and twigs.
While the false spirea is leafing out, and the grapes are showing leaf buds, other things are further along. The “Mr. Honeyberry” haskap is in full bloom right now. I even saw a bumble bee among the flowers! The “Mrs. Honeyberry”, however, might have some leaves, not no flower buds yet. There’s no way proper cross pollination can happen, which means no berries.
*sigh*
The plum trees are blooming; they always bloom before they get their leaves. Quite a few tulips are showing flower buds, which is pretty awesome. The trees are also getting very green. So nice to see!
I look forward to getting back to work, when I get back from running errands!
Today, finally, we planted the German Butterball potatoes.
Orders of perishables like this get sent out in time for planting, which means we could have planted them weeks ago. The Purple Caribe had to wait until the bed they were intended for was redone. We hadn’t quite decided where to plant the German Butterballs, but today we decided to use one of the prepared raised beds in the West yard, where we also needed to tend to the bed with peas, carrots and spinach planted in it.
The first thing we did was weed the bed, again. My daughter went digging around with the garden fork first, pulling out the bigger stuff she found, while I followed along and dug deep with my hands and pulled out the smaller stuff. Once again, we were finding lots of tree roots from the nearby Chinese elm. We went over the bed twice, finding more roots, each time!
I did remember to use the pH meter to see if there was any change, before we topped up the bed. At this point, the bed was amended only with the sulfur granules. I was thrilled to see the needle was actually, ever so slightly, moved. It’s still pretty much at 8, but the needle is now just barely touching the green colour at the 8, instead of about as far as it could possibly go on the alkaline side.
We then added a wheelbarrow load of soil left over from amending the previous beds. This soil has more sulfur granules in it, plus peat. Once that was spread out, we worked it into the bed with our hands – and pulled out more roots. Then, while my daughter went to fill watering cans from the rain barrel, I used the stirrup hoe to stir and level the soil – and pull out more roots – before using my hands to create a broad trench down the middle.
There turned out to be exactly 32 potatoes, so we laid them out evenly in two rows. Yes, they are probably being planted too close together, but this is the space we have available, so it’ll have to do.
Once we had the potatoes set out where we wanted them, I went around with a garden trowel and dug a hole for each one, while my daughter followed along and watered the holes, then I followed along behind her, planting each potato into the watered holes. Once she was done, she went to get more water from the rain barrel, while I covered the potatoes and used the soil from the sides to create hills over them. They got a final watering in the trench between them, then we put a cover over the bed, so the cats won’t go in and use that nice soft soil as a litter box!
Before we’d gone outside, I set the sugar snap pea seeds I bought yesterday to soak. Unfortunately, I’d put them in the bowl last night, and it got knocked over by the cats. My older daughter and I found most of them, but from the 24 seeds I’d counted when I opened the packet, we were down to 21 – and only because I found one more this morning.
I’m not impressed with the inside cats right now! It’s been no end of them getting into things they shouldn’t, lately!
Once the potatoes were done, my daughter went to get the peas while I used a bamboo stake to make a row of holes for them. I planted the previous two rows of snap peas, so I knew where I could do that, and not be on top of the previous rows. There may, possibly, be a single pea from the first planting emerging, but I’m not sure, yet. Last night, I found that something had dug into the bed over where some peas had been planted, and there was no sign of any peas when I pushed the soil back. I think most, if not all, that first planting of peas died off for some reason.
Once that was done, I went to the garden shed to get the trellis netting. That’s when I spotted Broccoli’s babies! I got the netting out, as a tiny calico hissed silently at me, then called my daughter over to look. She had already finished planting the peas by then. We paused for a bit to move the babies to a carrier, then my daughter went on mama-baby watch while I continued. I gave the bed a watering, first, then set the netting up on the T posts. Then it was back to the shed, partly to see if Broccoli was looking for her babies, and partly to get some netting to put around the bed. I’d already grabbed a bundle of supports and set six of them up around the bed. Unfortunately, the bundle of netting I grabbed was not long enough to go all the way around. There’s about 2/3 of one side that’s not shielded by netting. The netting is there to keep things from eating the spinach that’s coming up, as well as to keep the cats out. We’ll have to go through our other bundles of netting to see if we have either something short enough to fill the gap, or long enough to go all the way around, and replace what I put up today.
Eventually, we will need to set up something outside the beds to secure the T posts. If the peas actually start to grow, their weight will pull the T posts inwards, so we’ll need something to keep that from happening. There’s no hurry on that, though, since we’ll only need it if the peas survive in the first place! I don’t assume anything, at this point.
So we did manage to accomplish the goals we had for before things got too hot – we’re now at 26C/79F. 28F/82F, if I go by the website instead of my phone app.
For all the warmer highs we’re getting, over the next week to ten days, our lows are expected to dip to 1 or 2C/34 or 36F, which means we could get frost. If the long range forecasts are at all accurate, we’ll start to bed overnight temperatures consistently 6C/43F or warmer, which is about the minimum we’d need for the soil to get warm enough for direct sowing anything that isn’t cold hardy, like the peas and spinach. Mind you, with plastic covered covers for the raised beds, we could plant things and the covers will protect them.
What we really need to get working on is harvesting logs to build the raised beds we need. It’s too windy to try and cut down dead spruces, but we can process the ones that are already down.
We’ll have to make sure we use plenty of bug spray before going into the spruce grove. Not for mosquitoes. Those aren’t out yet. For wood ticks! It’s been a really bad year for them, already. So far, I’ve only pulled them off myself before they’ve attached themselves, but I’ve been pulling lots of them off of Syndol. With his long fur, he can’t get them off his neck or near his ears on his own. The short haired cats that let me pet them have no ticks. Just Syndol. Which makes me wonder about the other long haired cats, that don’t let us handle them like Syndol does.
Also, while I was writing this, Broccoli has been seen around the kibble house and walking around the sunroom, to the back of the house, but she has not gone into the sunroom. With her babies sleeping peacefully and not meowing, she would have no way to know they are there!
Moving them was a big risk. I hope she finds them, soon!
While we no longer have cat food bowls in the sunroom, we do still allow them in, and I keep an eye on things through the critter cam.
I checked it shortly before heading out this morning, and had an unpleasant surprise. The extra board we put over the cat cage was on the floor. From what I could see, so was at least one of the bins.
I rushed out to see what could be salvaged and didn’t stop to take any before pictures. Thankfully, it was just the one bin on the floor – the one with only two pots with the Crespo squash in it. There was a tray that had a couple of pots knocked over, but the damage was nowhere near as bad as I feared.
The Crespo squash that has a pot to itself had a bent stem. I was able to use a couple of sticks and some plant wires to make a splint around it. I think it will survive. We’ve had one with worse damage last year that survived.
The cats did not actually damage the plants directly. The problem is that we have to keep one of the sawhorses holding the table at an angle. The board is there to cover the cat cage, but also gives them a ledge they can lie on, and not try to squeeze in between the trays and bins. One of the heavier cats must have jumped up onto the corner of the board that doesn’t have the sawhorse under it, and knocked the whole thing off. As it fell, it took the one bin down with it, but only jarred another tray, knocking over a couple of pots. One squash and it soil was almost completely out of it’s pot. Hopefully, it will survive being put back. A peat pot had a piece broken off and lost a bit of soil, but is otherwise fine. I will find a plastic pot of an appropriate size and pop the whole thing in, to hold it together. A couple of other pots are broken above the soil line, so they should be okay. It could have been a lot worse! I rearranged a few things so that, if the board gets knocked off again, it won’t take any trays with it.
Once that was fixed up, I did my morning rounds and checked the garden beds. The garlic continues their growth spurt!
I can see gaps in some places, particularly in the larger rectangular bed, that shows some cloves didn’t survive the winter, but most of them have made it.
The walking onions in front of the tiny raised bed are looking really strong and healthy. This is the second year for the bulbils I’d planted there. They produced their own bulbils that are just resting on the ground; we didn’t try to plant them, and are letting nature take its course with those. The only thing is to keep them from spreading into where my daughter had planted some irises, though we don’t know if they’ve actually survived. We’ve seen some try to grow, then disappear. It would seem they didn’t make it, but we do have those tulip bulbs that we thought had died, suddenly emerge this year, so it’s possible they survived, too!
The rhubarb in the south corner is also getting pretty big. Those ones always do better than the ones at the north corner. One of these years, we should transplant the lot of them, away from those apple trees, so they have better growing conditions. We typically get just one decent harvest per season, out of them.
By the time I was finishing up my morning rounds, my daughter was outside and starting on our project for the day, but that will be for my next post!
The store in our little hamlet has a very small display of seeds every year, and at first I thought I was out of luck. They had two varieties of pod peas, and that was it.
Then I noticed one of the displays of flower seeds had several types of seeds mixed together. So I took another look at the peas.
Hiding in the back of one of the shelling peas display was a single package of snap peas!
I could feel there weren’t a lot of seeds in the packet. I’d have bought two, if there were two to be had! There turned out to be 24 seeds in the packet. Just enough for one row down the middle of the bed they will be planted in. The snap peas we bought before had more seeds in the packet, but the packet also cost more.
Then I got some nasturtiums. I suspect the ones included with the seeds I scattered along the side of the driveway aren’t going to make it, since the area ended up filling with water soon after. There’s still some standing water around there, which could be a good thing, or a bad thing, for the scattered seeds. I really can’t guess right now! Maybe something from the different varieties I scattered will grow, but just in case, I figured I’d get these. These will be direct sown, after our last frost date, probably in the main garden area somewhere, to attract pollinators and act as a trap crop. Plus, if they actually grow, the flowers are edible, and the flower buds can be used to make “poor man’s capers”.
According to the Window 11 weather icon on my new computer, it’s 15C/59F out there. According to the other weather app that came with my computer (why is there two of them?), it’s 17C/63F. According to the app on my phone, it was 19C/66F, but has already cooled down to 18C/65F. The thermometer on the wall of the sun room says it’s 20C/68F in there.
I don’t think any of the apps are right, because when I walk out the sun room door, it’s like walking into an oven. The sun room is cool, in comparison!
We have high winds today, which suggests that it would feel even hotter outside, without it!
My plan to get to bed early then start outside before things got too hot, did not succeed. The longer I lay in bed, the more awake I became. By the time I finally fell asleep, it was starting to get light out. *sigh*
My younger daughter and I were talking about this, and how the temperatures are expected to continue to be about the same for the next while. She had the same plans that I was trying to accomplish; to go to bed early, then get up and work outside while it was still cool.
She’s been as successful at it as I have been.
Still, that’s what we’re going to try doing. Maybe it’ll work out better if we encourage each other about it!
I did manage to get some gardening related stuff done, though.
The last two trays of tomatoes have been moved out of the living room and into the sun room. I ended up rearranging the transplants a bit. The Crespo squash are getting so big, they were shading the luffa and drum gourd sharing their bin, so those got moved to a tray and are now in the window, while the Crespo squash have a bin to themselves. I also moved the Black Cherry and Florme de Coeur tomatoes in individual pots out of the plastic tray they were in, and onto a metal one. The plastic tray was just too wobbly, while carrying them. For now, I’m using the plastic tray for the luffa and drums, but I’ll switch that out to metal trays later on. We’ll be starting to harden things off, soon, and I don’t want to risk dropping any because of a bendy tray!
I also moved a tray of winter squash to the sun room, leaving the onions and shallots in the mini greenhouse frame. I was going to set the Summer of Melons tray out of the aquarium greenhouse and to the window, but decided to take them straight to the living room, instead. I put them on the bottom shelf at the window, where they would get the best sunlight – with the overhang of the roof, the lower shelves get more sun than the upper shelves. I’m trusting the cats will leave them alone.
The makeshift table under the lights got rearranged a bit to use the space more effectively. There is a wall about a food wide between the east facing windows, casting a shadow across the table, so I’ve left a gap between the trays and bins, moving one bin of peppers and thyme to the shelf between the south facing windows, next to the mulberry and the Butterfly Flower.
Oh, we might have some oregano, after all! When they didn’t sprout, I returned the seed starting mix to the big bowl I use to pre-moisten the mix before filling pots and cells, mixing it all together. Now, some of the tomatoes look like they have oregano growing with them! They’re looking pretty leggy, but I’m leaving them be for now. They’re not big enough to be a problem for the tomatoes. If the survive, we’ll just transplant them at the same time we transplant the tomatoes.
Some of the other melons and watermelon we pregerminated have emerged from their soil, so I moved those ones off the heat mat and into the mini greenhouse frame with the onions and shallots. I checked the remaining seeds set to pre-germinate. Still nothing on the remaining two Zucca melon seeds, but one of the Pixies had its radical, and another was open, so I planted both. Those got added to the tray on the warming mat, along with the other pre-germinated melons that haven’t emerged yet. I ended up adding water to the trays under the cardboard and peat pots a couple of times. The pots were drying out, and I didn’t want them sucking the moisture out of the growing medium, and wow did they ever absorb the water from the trays fast! These are needing to be watered more often, because of the pots. The transplants in the plastic pots don’t have this problem.
Tomorrow morning, the plan is for my daughter and I to prep one of the empty raised beds in the West yard, next to the peas, carrots and spinach, with the peat and sulfur amended soil left from other beds, and finally get those German Butterball potatoes planted. We then want to set up netting of some kind around the other bed, to protect the spinach from hungry critters, as well as from the cats walking all over it, but in such a way that we can easily left the netting to tend to the bed. There are still no peas emerging, but it would be a good time to add trellis netting to the support posts set up for it. By now, I’m guessing they all failed, and I don’t know why. We do have shelling peas to plant, but I think I might buy another package of edible pod peas for that bed. It’s starting to get too hot to plant peas, though!
Hmm… I just looked at the time. The post office is open for the afternoon, and my husband’s medical grade latex tubing arrived early. They have a seed display. I’ll check and see if they have any edible pod peas! We might even plant them tomorrow morning, after planting the potatoes.
What we try to do next will depend on the weather. If it’s not still windy, we might even try to take down some dead trees!
I got to bed “early” (which, for me, is anything before midnight), got actual sleep, and was outside and working while it was still cool out!
I even made sure to have breakfast before I headed outside, so that I could get right to work after finishing my rounds, though I did upload and check the trail cam files, first. Now that the weather is nice, I’m seeing our vandal going by fairly regularly, rubbernecking towards our place as he drives by on his quad. *sigh*
Anyhow.
My goal for the morning was to get the chimney block planters along the chain link fence ready to plant into, then maybe move on to the ones that form the retaining wall in the old kitchen garden. I thought I might have time to do both, before things got too hot for that sort of work.
Ha!
I should know better by now.
I took progress pictures and posted them on Instagram, since I don’t have the storage space to upload so many images onto Word Press anymore. I didn’t think to set up the tripod and take a time lapse video, as I do for other projects, because I thought this would be done quickly. I did consider taking the stills and making a brief video, with narration, but decided against it.
Let me know, though, which you would prefer. I know not everyone can see the images when I embed them from Instagram, without having to click on the embed area and go to Instagram to view them. Would you prefer a short video, even if it’s just a bunch of stills, and making a vlog post out of it? YouTube doesn’t have the storage limitations that WP does.
I remembered to take a “before” shot, too. There’s a bit of crab grass showing through the grass clipping mulch, but things didn’t look too bad. I figured, maybe an hour to get it done, give or take.
Then I removed the grass clipping mulch and tried weeding the first block.
At first I thought the soil was strangely compacted, but even using some tools to loosen the soil, it was still a struggle. There were quite a lot of roots in there… Way too many roots. I set the sifter up over the wheel barrow and started trying to lift handfuls of soil out, but it just wasn’t working. Finally, I just grabbed the entire block and tipped it off the soil.
Leaving behind a packed cube.
A cube filled with tree roots.
Yup. Just like with the grow bags near the row of trees my mother allowed to grow after she transplanted her row of raspberries, roots from the nearby Chinese elm had made their way into the growing space from below.
After that first one, I just pulled the next block over, without even trying to dig into the soil, first. The soil cube stayed behind, held in place by all the roots below. Others came loose with the block, as the soil was so filled with roots, it stayed packed into the block, even as the roots were being torn from the ground below, and I had to force the soil cube out. Then there was breaking up the blocks on the sifter, pulling out handfuls of roots. There were some crab grass rhizomes, but even they seemed to be choked out by the tree roots!
Now we know why all the vining gourds that we planted there last year, failed so miserably. They were completely choked out by invading tree roots.
While I was working my way down the row of blocks, there was something else that was unexpected.
The distinct sound of kittens, mewing!
One of the other mamas has had a litter, and it sounds like they are in the old freezer lying on its side in the junk pile. I didn’t see any of the mamas, though I did eventually see a black cat come out of that area. I didn’t think we had a black cat that was female. I certainly didn’t notice any that looked pregnant. Not even the one tuxedo that I figure is female, after seeing the boys going after her. Mind you, the cat I saw might not have been a mama. All the cats like to take shelter and climb around the junk pile.
After a while, though, I guess they all fell asleep, because I no longer heard the mewing.
Once the blocks were all moved off and the soil sifted, I did as much weeding as I could in the soil underneath where the blocks were, but there were just too many tree roots. The best I could do with a lot of them was simply severe them.
Then I took a rake to the area, getting rid of the weeds and roots, before leveling where the blocks would go. We’ve been saving our cardboard that’s suitable to use in the garden, so I took some of that and laid down a double layer. Hopefully, it will be thick enough to discourage the roots from growing up into the blocks.
The carboard got a soaking, but it takes a lot to saturate cardboard. I got it decently wet, then put the blocks back.
This is where I really appreciate steel toed shoes! After lining the blocks up first by hand, the final touch was to kick them into place.
I’ve gotten way too used to wearing steel toes all the time. Every now and then, I’ll be out somewhere, forgetting I’m wearing normal shoes, and almost break my toes kicking at something! 😄
Once the blocks were in place, I walked back and forth over them a few times, using my own weight to settle them into place, then took the hose to them. The blocks helped by actually holding the water and letting it start to pool, rather than running off the sides, allowing the cardboard to become better saturated.
The next step was to start amending the soil.
The wheel barrow was pretty full, so adding the peat and sulfur granules was done in batches; enough to fill a couple of blocks before the next batch of soil was amended.
Since the peat made for greater volume, there was soil left over in the wheel barrel after all the blocks were filled. Each block then got topped with a couple of handfuls of stove pellets to act as a mulch. The blocks got a watering, then left for the pellets to absorb moisture and start swelling, while I watered the potato bed and haskaps, nearby. The one “Mr. Honeyberry” haskap has all sorts of flower buds, with some of them even starting to bloom! The two “Mrs. Honeyberry” aren’t anywhere near that point.
*sigh*
That took enough time for the stove pellets to swell to the point that the sawdust could be spread around a bit, before getting another thorough watering.
The very last thing to do before clean up was to return the support posts – they had to be hammered through the cardboard. We need to put something similar along the bed with the potatoes, so we can place netting of some kind over them. This will be to protect the beds and anything growing in them from being suffocated by the Chinese Elm seeds, when they start dropping in their millions.
What I thought was a job that might take me about an hour, ended up talking almost 3 hours – though I did take a hydration break, part way through.
By then, it was starting to get pretty warm, too; the perfect time to be done!
After that, my daughter and I headed into town. We had some parcels to pick up on the way home, but the post office closed shortly after I finished working, so we had to find extra things to do. That way, we could time our trip home for when it reopened again. We ended up going to the beach; something we haven’t done in at least two years! The lake is mostly clear of ice, but there were a few patches being blown against the beach by the winds.
It was all candle ice, and in places, you could hear it tinkling like wind chimes in the waves! I tried to capture the sound with my phone.
That area of the beach has quite a lot of rocks, making it our favourite part. We spent the entire time, trying to find interesting ones. We found quite a few, including some that sparkled amazingly in the sun. I tried to capture the sparkle in photos, but the camera just couldn’t pick up the glitter.
We had no problem at all, taking up the extra time we needed to, on the beach!
From there, it was a stop at the grocery store. I just needed to refill a couple of the big water jugs and get some eggs. My daughter had her own shopping list. That done, it was back home, with a stop at the post office to pick up a parcel.
Which turned out to be five parcels!
One was for my daughter, which arrived faster than she expected. A couple more for my husband arrived early as well, plus there turned out to be another with the courier company packages. I didn’t know anything about that one, but the store owner stopped me on the way out to give it to me.
There was one parcel that would have been great to arrive early but, alas, it isn’t expected until next week. My husband needs to replace the face part of his CPAP set up. He’s been able to replace the hose the runs from the machine to the face mask, and he was able to get new nasal prongs. The part of the mask he can’t get has the latex tubes that attach to the sides of the nasal piece. Over time, the latex starts to harden, turn yellow and, eventually, begin to crack. My husband tends to wait way too long before replacing them, so they’re at that point, now. The problem is, it’s not in stock, and hasn’t been for months. It’s starting to look like they’re not being made anymore. So he’s simply ordered medical grade latex tubes to attach to the fittings, which are still fine.
What he really needs is a new machine. Medicare doesn’t cover CPAPs. His insurance does, but it’s by reimbursement, so he’d have to have the funds to buy it first, then submit a receipt. Medicare does cover BiPAPs, though, which would be better for him, anyhow. For that, however, he needs to get a new prescription. It’s been so long, he’ll need another sleep test, first. Which his new doctor has started the process of getting done. When he was diagnosed with severe obstructive sleep apnea, we were living in this province (for the second? third? time) and he spent the night in a lab at the sleep research centre. They actually interrupted the sleep test after a couple of hours and put him on a CPAP, because they were afraid he would die on them. That lab is no longer there. I don’t know if it moved to another hospital or city or province, or simply no longer exists. Now, they usually do home tests. Which should be… interesting.
However he ends up getting tested again, he’s on a waiting list, and has been for a few months now. Who knows when he’ll finally get tested.
Until then, he has to find ways to make do with what he has and, right now, it looks like he needs to buy parts and pieces to replace the worn out ones. He can’t even use a different style of mask, as they are made for specific machines, and the fittings can’t cross over. At least, not with the machine he has now.
Hopefully, the tubing he ordered will fit. He did order some earlier, but it turned out to be the wrong size for the fittings. It’s something we can find a use for, though, so no loss there.
Meanwhile…
As I finish this up, we’re coming up on 6pm, and it’s still 18C/64F (the high was 19C/66F), with the humidex putting it at 22C/72F. Unless I look at my other map, which has us a couple of degrees Celsius warmer!
While talking to my daughter earlier about what needs to be worked on next, we were both rather depressed at the thought of getting the low raised beds in the main garden area clear. The crab grass is taking over with a vengeance and, in one of them, Creeping Charlie is also invading. The only way to really make a difference when it’s that bad is to either use an herbicide, or sift it all. Since we also need to amend the soil with peat and sulfur, sifting it would be the best choice. Which basically means, every one of those beds needs to be redone – and these are all beds we want to make into higher raised beds. My daughter suggested we just skip ahead to making the beds higher, if we’re going to have to remove all that soil, anyhow.
Which means, we need to shift gears and start harvesting more of those dead spruces. We currently have only two downed trees to process. We need more. Lots more, even if we’re just doing middle height beds, like with the trellis beds we’re working on. Those are only two logs tall, which means we need four 18′ logs for the sides and four or five (depending on the width) 4′ logs for the ends, per bed. With the largest of the dead trees, the bottom 10′, which would be too thick for a garden bed, will be set aside for the vertical supports for the outdoor kitchen we will be building (we need 10 of those). Depending on how straight and tall the trees we harvest are, that means 2 or 3 trees per raised bed. We need to rebuild… hold on… let me look out the window and count… five low raised beds. One of those has the onions growing in it, so that one won’t be done this year; it’ll just get weeded for now. So, four that need to be rebuilt. Plus the other 3 beds we need to make to make two trellis tunnels (two beds per tunnel). So we’re looking at a minimum 7 new beds at 2 logs high. If we assume 3 trees per bed, we’re looking at about 21 trees that need to be harvested. I’m pretty sure we do have that many dead spruces that need to be cut down; I’d counted 22 before we cut down the ones we’ve done so far, but there are a couple that have fallen on their own and are stuck against other trees that we probably could use, plus I’m sure there are others in an overgrown area we can’t walk through. If worse comes to worse, there are more dead spruces in the old hay yard. It’s further to drag the logs but, at that point, we can use the truck to drag them out.
Which means, weather willing, we need to start cutting down all those dead spruces in the spruce grove. If we focus on cutting the dead trees down first, then processing them to the sizes we need and dragging the logs over, building the beds themselves won’t necessarily take long. Prepping the spaces usually takes longer.
That electric chainsaw is going to get quite a workout.
Hmm… I wonder if I can talk to my brother into coming out with his gas chainsaw? He’s so busy with so many things, though, I hate to ask him. Especially since we’d have no way of knowing if the weather would be good on a day he can come out.
Well, I guess tomorrow, I’m getting the chainsaw out and making sure it’s working after a winter in the garage!
It’ll be good to finally get those dead spruce trees cut down. Then we can start transplanting new ones!
Especially Syndol. He loves that baby jail! I did have to add an extra board next to the closet door on the saw horses, though. I found one in the garage, just wide enough, and cut it to match the length of the closet door. The cage is wider than the door, and I didn’t want the cats jumping up on it, like they normally would, as it was a favourite place for some of them to sleep. One sawhorse is angled, to allow access to the shelf at the south window. Unfortunately, that extra board does get in the way, but we can work around it without risking knocking the sawhorse right over!
We’ve started to move more of the heat loving seedlings in, what with the thermometer in there reading almost 30C/86F! It didn’t actually feel quite that hot, though – the ceiling fan certainly helped – so I got out the temperature gun to do some spot checks.
The ceiling was right at 30C/86F, while the floor was 20C/86F! At table height, the temperature ranged from about 24-27C/75-81F, depending on where I aimed the gun. Overnight, we’re supposed to drop to 3C/37F, but the sun room should remain adequately warm.
With the evening sun coming through the West windows, I put the trays on the table for now, then gave them a misting with the hose. In the morning, I will move some onto the shelf in the south facing window. I’ll also bring the two remaining tomato trays. I might leave the onions in the living room, as they prefer cooler temperatures. The Summer of Melons tray could probably be moved, too. The last pot’s seedling showed up today, so all 21 seeds from that packet are now growing. They just have their seed leaves, but melons are heat lovers, so they’ll probably do better in the sun room than even in the aquarium greenhouse.
I was going to work on the other half of the sun room once things starting cooling down, but… well, things haven’t really cooled down, yet. To top it off, instead of getting to sleep early last night, I ended up awake most of the night, and I’m falling asleep at my computer right now. So my daughters will do what they can in there, later on. My older daughter has commissions to work on, but they should be able to get at least some clean up done in there, once things cool down.
As for me, I’m mightily resisting going to bed right now. It’s barely past 6pm, as I’m writing this, so it would end up just being a nap, and that would really mess me up!
I definitely want to try and get an early night and an early morning, though. There’s lots to do out there, before things get hot again. Tomorrow’s high is supposed to be 20C/68F again – and a couple of days from now, we’re looking at possibly 24C/75F, with things cooling down a little bit after that. Looking at the low raised beds this morning is downright depressing. We pull so many rhizomes out of them, every fall, but you’d never know it from all the crab grass popping up in them right now! It’ll be easier, once they get converted to higher raised beds, though some crab grass will still find a way through.
There are no food bowls in the sun room right now. I checked the critter cam a few times during the night, and would sometimes see a cat wandering around where their platform and cat beds used to be, seeming lost! This morning, there was a whole crowd of them, milling about, waiting for their breakfast. They were all over the baby jail, inside and out, but there are no beds or blankets inside it right now, either.
As I fed them, I counted only 17, though.
With yesterday’s high winds, while checking around the yard, I was surprised to find just a couple of fallen branches, and just one broken tree.
The trunk of a poplar snapped off and will need to be cleared out. There’s also a live spruce tree nearby that has been slowly falling over, but it’s been doing that for years now. I’ve been keeping an eye on it. The only reason it’s not on the ground already it because it’s leaning against another tree. The dead trees around it, however, are all still standing straight!
It looks like we won’t be getting any haskaps again this year. The one “Mr.” haskap is leafing wonderfully, and even showing flower buds. The “Mrs.” haskap that was purchased and planted the same year is barely showing leaf buds. The smaller “Mrs.” haskap that was planted the following year is actually further ahead, but is really small compared to the other two. There’s just 1 year’s difference between them, so it should be much closer in size.
We’ll see how they do this year. I keep saying we need to transplant them to a better location, but every time I talk about it with the girls, they are concerned that moving them would damage them too much. Considering how poorly they are doing now, I don’t see what difference that makes. For the length of time we’ve had them, we should be getting plenty of berries every year by now, but there’s just no possibility of proper cross pollination to happen.
Of course, I checked the bed with the peas, carrots and spinach planted. I think I might, maybe, possibly be seeing a carrot sprout or two, and there are no peas coming up yet, but we’re finally seeing spinach!
The garlic, meanwhile, is seeing an absolute growth spurt, in all the beds they are planted in!
Syndol was following me around this morning, and he is frustrating me to no end! He kept going into the garden beds as I was checking them. I’ll have to put something around the bed with the spinach to keep him out! We can’t put a cover back on it, because of the T posts set up inside, which will have netting set up for the peas to climb, later on. The tiny raised bed that has its own cover is closed at the ends, so cats can’t get inside. Instead, Syndol climbs on top and uses it like a hammock! He’s the only cat I’ve seen that does that, but I’m sure there are others. I have to put another support hoop in the middle, plus a cross piece at the top, because there’s no way we’ll be able to keep the cats from climbing it.
But not today.
Today, the focus is back on the sun room. First, the windows in the plant corner need to be cleaned, then the second light hung back up over where the makeshift table will be set up. After that, we can set up the plant table over the baby jail, and bring the cat beds and blankets back.
Washing those was quite the thing! We split them all into two loads, and both loads had to be washed twice. Actually, I think my daughter washed the second load a third time, during the night. The amount of debris that had to be cleaned out of the washing machine’s tub was rather shocking, too. Some of the bedding needed a lot of mashing and bashing, as the layers inside got all messed up and bunched up. There’s one large cat bed that was donated to use that I’ve just not been able to get flat and even again. I’m serious considering opening up a seam so I can reach inside and break up the filling. The cats hardly even use it, because gets so lumpy after being washed.
So that’s my main goal today. Getting the plant side of the sun room done. Then the tools and storage side can be worked on.
That side, I’m afraid, it probably going to have a lot more messes hidden among the stuff they’ve knocked about. Now that everything’s thawed out, there’s an unfortunate smell, and it has to be coming from somewhere on that side.
At least it’s got a concrete floor that makes it much easier to clean!
Taking a break from manual labour yesterday seems to have done the trick. My right arm is feeling find again. So fine, in fact, it makes me suspicious! 😄
Today, I was thinking to use the amended soil pulled from the bed the potatoes are now in and starting on the chimney block planters along the other section of fence. Once I got outside, however, I remembered that getting the sun room cleaned out and set up for the transplants is a higher priority.
The outside cats are not happy with me!
When we set it up for them for the winter, one side of the room was set up for them, the other side was set up to store our gardening supplies and tools. I did put a sheet of rigid insulation on the top of the counter shelf – the top is metal and would get quite cold on their little toe beans – and left them space to sit on the shelf between the two windows on the storage side.
They, of course, trashed everything. They even managed to knock the sheet of insulation off the counter and get it stuck between the counter and the broken and now single pane window it’s covering. Boxes of screws scattered all over the floor, plant pots and garden supplies knocked out of the shelf opposite the window… just a disaster.
Getting the room cleaned out is something that needs to be done in sections, as we can’t empty everything outside. The only thing that physically can’t be removed is the baby jail that used to be in my room, when we had Decimus and her kittens. We might be able to squeeze it through – I honestly can’t remember if we had to partly dismantle it to get it from my room to the sun room, which would take it through three sets of doors.
Mostly, though, it’s because of the weather. The wind is insane right now, and we’re expecting rain. There is a large system blowing towards us and, from the weather radar, it does look like we’ll actually get some heavier rain, though the worst of it looks like it will miss us.
The first thing to do was get the floor mats out, hose them down and scrub them as best we could. They’re not hanging on the chain link fence. I think they’re heavy enough to not blow away!
Then some of the cat bedding on the floor got moved out before I could detach the heat lamp and remove the platform we made for them. The platform was basically a way to store the screen door we made to fit the old basement doorway, which allows us to have cool air circulating from the basement during the summer, while keeping the cats out. That had a sheet of insulation attached under it, then we had another small piece on top, along with a couple of cat beds, so they weren’t trying to walk on the half inch hardware cloth.
Both the frame and the sheet of insulation got a hose down and a scrubbing!
More cat bedding was removed from out of baby jail. All the food bowls were taken out, as well as the heated water bowl. The extension cord to the cat house was also pulled in and wrapped on its hooked on the wall for storage, as we no longer need to heat the cat house or the other heated water bowl outside.
Bins that were knocked out of the shelf at the window had to be cleared our. Plant clips, tent pegs, trays… all sorts of things they pushed off the shelf, so they could sit at the window, had to be picked up. I’d dragged the folding table we made a while back, over, and a number of things are now stored under it to be protected from any rain.
After finally being able to clear the shelf away from the window, I could move the baby jail, and take the interlocking mats out from under it. Those also got a hose down and a scrubbing on the lawn, just in time for some rain to rinse them off. 😄
Of course, there were cat messes to clean up, but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it has been in previous years!
Still, the concrete floor did need some mopping up in a corner. We’re now at a point where we have to let that dry before we can continue.
For now, I’ve put the shelf back at the window, but we’ll need to pull it out again to clean the glass before we finish setting things up. I’ll also take the second shop light that’s in the living room right now and hang it back next to the one that’s in the sun room.
I moved the two trays of plants off the window shelf. The poor tomatoes. It looks like the cats have been walking all over them, to get to the open spot I left for them to sit in, instead of walking in the space next to the trays! We’ve lost a few, for sure, and they’re not doing anywhere near as well as the ones still inside. We had to move them out of the living room, but the overnight temperatures in the sun room were probably still to chilly for them, I think. The gourds, peppers and eggplant seem to be fine, though!
Since the interlocking floor mats are still outside and likely to get rained on again before they can finally dry and be brought in, this is likely as far as we can get for today. Last year, we rigged a table on the sawhorses using an old folding closet door we found in a shed somewhere, and we’ll be using that again this year. The saw horses are tall enough that it’ll clear the baby jail, so we’ll be able to leave that under it. Last year, we did allow the cats into the sun room while the plants were there, and they left them alone.
All the cat beds and blankets are currently being washed right now. When the time comes, we’ll set some up inside the baby jail for them. Who knows. We might even have a mama decide to have her kittens in there! Unlikely, but you never know!
After I took this photo, I gave the cats a light feeding, with no food or water bowls in the sun room at all right now. We also brought the mulberry saplings out of the living room and into the sun room. They really need to be in bigger pots, but they also need to be transplanted soon. We need to start hardening them off, and they could probably go into the ground, now. They are supposed to be a zone 3 tolerant variety.
It will be good to get the transplants out of the living room and into the sun room! We’re not starting anywhere near as many seeds indoors as we did last year – we were expecting to have a lot more growing space ready for them! – but it’s still pushing the limit as to what we can fit in the cat free zone inside. Unlike the cats outside, some of the inside cats would quite happily destroy all the seed trays, just for fun!
We definitely made good progress in setting things up on this side.
The other half of the room, however, is not going to be this easy, that’s for sure!
Ah, well. That’s what we get for being such sucks for the cats!
I just finished doing my evening rounds – it is so gorgeous out there right now! – which gave me a chance to see how far my daughter got on the garden bed she was weeding.
Before I left this morning, she asked me which beds needed to be worked on, and if there were any surprised to watch out for, like fall plantings of some kind. I said no, we did the fall garlic in the old kitchen garden beds this year, and those were the only fall plantings we had.
The bed she started on is where we planted the Roma VF and Red Wethersfield onions, last year. The tomatoes ended up not very healthy, and seemed to get blight near the end, but the onions… they just disappeared. The seedlings I transplanted around the perimeter seemed to be doing well at first, and then they were gone. Not dug up. Just died away. So I definitely had plans for amending this bed, and we were most definitely not going to be planting tomatoes in it, again.
Imagine my surprise – and probably hers! – when I looked today and saw this.
All along the perimeter, Red Wethersfield onions are growing! There are so many crab grass rhizomes in there, my daughter has basically been digging them up and transplanting them.
I am totally amazed. Onions I thought had died off, with no evidence of them to be seen when that bed was harvested and the diseased looking tomato plants pulled for burning, had been there, all along, and survived the winter!
We started more Red Wethersfield onion seeds this year, too. I was going to give them one more try before giving up on them, at least for a few years. Now, it looks like we’re going to have plenty!
The bed is only about a quarter finished; it took my daughter a lot longer then usual, since she was both weeding and transplanting all the onions she was finding. Even through the crab grass growing around the edges, I can see more little onion bulbs pushing their way through!
Onions are biannual. Which means that these onions, if left alone, will go to seed, which we should be able to save.
The Re-Farmer 