Morning rounds are so much more enjoyable, now that it’s warmed up, and I don’t have to slog through snow, slush or mud. 😂
First, the cuteness!
Broccoli let me pet her today.
She is so very round.
I counted 32 yard cats today, including 5 that were following around one of the white and greys that was obviously in heat.
*sigh*
Of all of them, the least feral one was Shop Towel!
I tended to the raised bed that was planted in yesterday.
In the first photo, you can see that the stove pellet mulch has absorbed moisture and broken apart into sawdust. The second photo is after I gently spread it around. I like using stove pellets as mulch when direct sowing because even things with small seedlings, like the spinach, can easily push their way through the light and fluffy sawdust.
I also managed to get a picture of an emerging snow crocus!
We’re not seeing many, yet, and the few we do see tend to be too far from the path for me to get a decent photo. Looking at the forecast, I was happy to see rain, but a closer look at the hourly forecast shows that we have an only 4% chance of rain, so… none. At best, we’ve got a 25% chance of rain some time tonight.
After finishing my rounds, I headed to the post office to pick up a couple of parcels. One was a courier delivery, so timing wasn’t an issue, but the other was to our postal box, and I wanted to pick it up before the post office closed at 11:30.
There was nothing there.
Strange, but okay.
My husband was surprised, as he got email notifications for 4 different parcels, instead of just the 2 I was expecting. When I had the chance, I went online to check the tracking, which has timestamps on it.
Two showed “attempted delivery” times that were shortly after I left. Two others had time stamps that were after the post office was closed. A fifth (!!) simply said “delivered today”, which would have been a courier.
One of the packages that came in has our sulfur in it; last I checked the tracking information, that one was supposed to come in on Thursday, so it’s three days early!
The post office opens up again at 2, so I’ll head out again this afternoon.
Then it’s back to work in the garden beds! Woohoo!!
Okay, so I’ve scattered seeds and such, but today is the first day for direct sowing. It was such a gorgeous day for it, too!
I planted all the edible pod peas from the package, minus the ones that split apart as they soaked between damp paper towels overnight. Not a lot of carrots were planted; I’ll include them between other things, over the next while. I’ll probably do the same with more spinach. Basically, they’ll be space fillers and ground covers until it’s too warm to plant them anymore.
The box frame cover got worked on first, then set aside, since I put in the old salvaged T posts to hold netting for the peas to climb. I couldn’t drive them in very far, so they will need to have support added to them before any trellis netting is added, so they don’t get pulled into the bed by the weigh of the peas – or the net, for that matter! I intended to add a third post in the middle, but hit something hard. Possibly one of the branches set at the base of the bed, when it was first built and filled. Or a rock that got missed.
I found my pH meter and did a reading. No surprise the pH is still at 8. I even stuck it into the compost heap nearby, and the needle barely moved. I had a bit of an ah-ha moment earlier today. Well, more like a “duh, of course” moment. Maritime Gardening did an April garden tour video and was taking about how acidic his soil is, and mentioned that liming the soil can make the soil more alkaline.
Liming.
Lime.
Garden lime.
Which is made out of limestone.
Which is what we are sitting on top of.
Our area has limestone quarries and commercial gravel pits – we even have our own little gravel pit – with limestone based sand and gravel below a very narrow band of topsoil.
Of course our soil alkalinity is maxing out the pH meter. How could it be any different? *smacks forehead over what should have been obvious*
Increasing the acidity is going to be a challenge, that’s for sure. The use of raised beds will make it easier, at least.
Our order of sulfur is supposed to arrive by Thursday. Once we’ve got that in, we’ll be able to start amending the various beds with it, to increase the acidity. My husband actually ordered 2 different bags. One bag is 90% sulfur, 10% betonite clay. The other is guaranteed 99.5% elemental sulfur, but both are supposed to be broadcast evenly, then worked into the top 6 inches of soil, at a rate of 250g/10m² (0.5lb/100ft²). These low raised beds are 27ft², so they shouldn’t need much but, from what I’m reading, the more alkaline the soil, the more sulfur is needed (which makes sense), plus our soil type would also need more, for it to make a difference. Even so, it won’t actually do much for us this year; if we were treating a field, we’d be adding it to the soil a year before planting a crop. Any amending we do this year will mostly benefit what we grow, next year. Once we’ve started incorporating it into our soil, though, we should test the soil every few months to see how much difference it has made. Still, every little bit will help.
While it will be slow going to increase our soil acidity, using sulfur is supposed to be one of the quickest ways to do it!
Anyhow…
In the early evening, the girls and I went around the yard, checking things out and enjoying the longer daylight hours and warmth. We blew past our predicted high and reached 16C/61F! Plenty of trees and bushes have leaf buds showing. It took some searching, but we were thrilled to find a few shoots of snow crocuses and grape hyacinth emerging through the leaf litter. We even spotted the leaves of two tulips that had emerged near the saffron crocuses! These were not there, this morning!
We are getting into that period when everything starts to just explode into new growth.
Before long, we’re probably going to be complaining over how hot it is! 😂😂
For now, I’m just really happy to get some progress done outside. We’re supposed to get some rain next week, but we should have plenty of lovely days like today, to get things done outside!
Well, I ended up doing a bit more than I expected to, yesterday evening!
The first thing I did as plant a few more pre-germinated Wild Bunch winter squash seeds. To make space, I changed out what the pots were sitting in.
They are now in a baking pan, over a cooling rack, to allow air to circulate under them. This is a recommendation from Gardening in Canada, as a way to keep the pots from getting moldy or starting to fall apart. The problem, though, is they can’t be bottom watered while on this, which means they’ll be watered mostly by misting.
I would love it if Costco got another shipment of these baking pans. They are basic, 9×13 pans and were very affordable. I didn’t realize just how good the price was, until they were gone and I tried finding more, elsewhere, only to find they cost 4 or 5 times more! Even the restaurant section of the wholesale store I checked out was ridiculously expensive.
Also, that’s the last of my 3″ biodegradable pots from last year. The new ones I got are 4″ pots, which is what the green plastic one is.
Speaking of “biodegradable” pots. The last thing I potted was the coffee tree I got for my daughters. I repurposed a pot that we’d planted thyme in, last year. The thyme had been started in one of these biodegradable pots and the whole thing was potted up. Unfortunately, the indoor thyme got forgotten about and died. It was set aside until tonight, when I finally went to remove the dead thyme – and pulled out a pot! It was completely whole; only brittle from being so dry. No degradation occurred while the plant was still alive, at all. That is not how these pots are supposed to be! When it comes time to plant these outdoors, I will most likely break the pot up so that at least the roots won’t be constrained. If I can remove them completely without damaging the roots, I will!
But I digress…
After potting the pre-germinated seeds and rearranging the aquarium greenhouse to fit them, it was time to work on the San Marzano tomatoes. I decided they needed to be done, even though they are still recovering from their accident, as they were just getting too crowded. I used another deep cell tray to transplant into, but instead of filling it with seed starting mix, I use a Pro Mix potting soil I picked up today. As usual, I premoistened the soil, first.
Good grief, there were a lot of sticks in it!
I can’t even say it’s a brand problem. My second bag of Miracle Grow seed starting mix was full of sticks, too. The first bag of Miracle Grow had them as well, though not as bad. The first bag of seed starting mix I got – Jiffy, I think, but I can’t remember for sure – was probably the best of the lot, with only a few sticks in it, but it was also a much smaller bag.
Once the new tray was full of potting soil, I went through the San Marzano seedlings. A couple were pretty much dead, so I just pulled them. After removing and potting up the “spares”, I top dressed the ones left behind with vermiculate, then set it back at the window.
They are definitely still in rough shape. I hope that, now that they have more room, a bit of fresh soil and the vermiculite, they will recover faster.
As for the spares I transplanted out, there were only 9 strong enough to transplant to the new tray, plus one that got transplanted into a cell in the original tray that lost its seedlings to the fall.
I’m honestly not sure these will all survive. 😞 We shall see!
That left 12 cells available. I had the small tray with 12 cells planted with three different types of tomatoes in them, so I decided to thin those by transplanting. With the Chocolate Cherry and the Black Cherry, there were 4 “spares” to transplant out, but with the Forme de Coeur, a couple of cells had 3 seeds sprouting when I thought I’d planted only two, giving me 6 “spares” to plant out.
Once I started working on them, though, I realized I would have to plant all of them out of the little tray, so once these were done, I planted the remainder into 4″ plastic pots.
The outside rows of 4 pots are the Black Cherry and Chocolate Cherry. I didn’t have room for all the Forme de Coeur, though…
… so the last one went into the bin with the peppers and thyme.
Hopefully, I didn’t want too long to transplant these from those little trays! This one’s looking particularly rough. 😞
I hadn’t planned to be filling an extra fourteen 4″ pots, so these ones were filled with a mix of seed starting mix and potting soil.
The other small tray with the peppers in it will need to be potted up, too. I’ll probably use Red Solo cups for those, since I only have 4 or 5 of the green pots left, and the new biodegradable ones I got, I’m saving for the winter squash. For the peppers in the small tray, I don’t think I’ll thin them by transplanting, though. Instead, I’ll just keep the 4 strongest seedlings of each variety.
Speaking of room, I need to make a decision on these guys.
These are getting large enough they’ll need to be moved out of the aquarium greenhouse. The question is, do I try to thin by transplanting, or do I just thin them?
Who am I kidding. I can’t bring myself to just yank and kill off so many strong, healthy seedlings! However, transplanting them means 7 more pots, on top of the 6 already here. I can fit them in the mini greenhouse frame at the window, if I can move out the onions and shallots.
Hmmm… onions are a cool weather crop. I could start hardening them off and transplant them outside.
Speaking of planting things outside, the last thing I did for the evening was set the snap pea seeds between wet paper towels for the night. Tomorrow, they go into the ground!
I love having cool weather crops that can be planted so early – earlier than usual, this year. I’m hoping the long range forecasts are at least close to accurate! Even if things end up cooler, this is stuff that should survive anything but an unseasonal deep freeze. Hopefully, we’ll soon be seeing our garlic coming up, as well as the snow crocuses.
I caught Peanut Butter Cup being adorable in her sleep.
She has quite settled in, and I’ve even woken up to find her curled up on me! The only down side of that is, she’s got… digestive issues. Little Miss Leaky Butt has inadvertently created much laundry. She’s gotten better, but not as much as the others. For a while, we had a whole lot of cats having… liquidity issues. We had been using the Kirkland brand of cat food before changing up to other brands, including the donated kibble. I try to have different brands and flavours as much as is affordable (plus wet cat food, which we’ve been giving them more of, for other reasons), but when it comes to price per kilogram, the Kirkland brand is still the best deal, so that’s the dominant brand of kibble they all get. I wouldn’t have made any sort of connection until I read a blog post about the Kirkland dog formula changing, and the effect it had on their dog. I haven’t been able to confirm, but found that others have wondered if the cat kibble formula has also changed. Since our own cat problems reduced when they started eating mostly other kibble brands (when the bins are topped up, they can get mixed together), I am now suspicious as to the cause. PBC, however, is still a messy girl at times, even on the other brands.
I’d hoped we wouldn’t have to make another trip before our stock up shopping, but we ran out of kibble. For the prices, it was worth the cost of gas to go to the nearest Walmart to pick some up, and still have budget left over for other necessities. My younger daughter came along with me to do some of her own shopping.
Our first stop was at Canadian Tire, where we were able to sanitize and refill two of our 18.9L water jugs. Since we were there anyhow, I picked up 4 more of the deep cell planting trays, plus a couple more base trays to replace some cracked ones. I need to pot up some tomatoes. My daughter found a couple of replacement spatulas that we hope won’t melt like some of the others we have! We went through most of the store just looking at things and talking about what we need to pick up over the next few weeks/months. In the process I was very happy to find a campfire coffee percolator on clearance! I’ve been on the lookout for one, to include with our other firepit cooking supplies, but they’ve always been so insanely expensive. Now we have a very basic 9 cup coffee percolator that includes an extra handle for hanging over the fire, for just under $18.
Once done there, we headed to the Walmart, split up and got our necessities. I got the cat food we needed, plus some items for the pantry. Canned, flaked tuna, packed in water, dropped in price to 97¢ per can, down from $1.97 per can. Canned meats and seafood of all kinds seem to have almost tripled in price over the past few years (depending on where you shop, of course), so to see a price actually go down to something close to pre-illegal-lockdown was a nice surprise. Mind you, only the girls like canned tuna, so it’s just for them, but anything extra for the pantry is always a good thing.
My daughter and I caught up again at the Walmart McDonalds, where I’d ordered lunch (my daughter hadn’t had breakfast before we left!), so she took the cart and loaded the truck while I waited for the food. While heading back to the truck, I remembered that I wanted to go to the Dollarama that shares the parking lot. My daughter had just finished bagging our stuff and loading it into the truck, so we left the food for later and she went into the store with me. While there, I found a few more things I wanted for starting seeds indoors. My daughter found some stuff, too – and got a present for me. A new hat for my collection!
It’s the absolute blingy-est adult sized hat I could find! Not only does it sparkle, it’s fluffy. 😂 It was actually the only blingy adult sized hat they had, but I’m absolutely giddy over it.
It doesn’t take much to make me happy.
We need to make something for our entry wall just for hanging up our hats. We have so many of them! 😁
Today we reached our high of 10C/49F, with some lovely sunshine. The only unpleasant thing was the winds were high enough to buffet us on the drive home. We’re supposed to continue being nice and warm – even reaching as high as 18C/65F next week, which is going to feel down right tropical.
Since potting the pre-germinated winter squash seeds I’d made a video of, 2 days ago, I potted up 2 more yesterday, and this morning I found more had germinated, so I’ll be potting those tonight. I will also be thinning by transplanting the San Marzano tomatoes, now that I have more of the large celled trays. The seedlings are a bit beat up from their fall, but almost all survived. I also need to pot up the other tomatoes and peppers in the small trays. That can be done over the next few days. With the pleasant upcoming weather, though, I want to set my snap pea seeds to soak, then tomorrow I want to plant them, along with some of the Uzbek Golden Carrots I made seed tape out of, plus spinach, in the bed that’s ready for them. I’ve decided to plant the snap peas in this bed, instead of the shelling peas, since we have fewer snap pea seeds, and it’s a relatively small bed.
Tomorrow, I also want to check on the bed that is solarizing right now and see how it’s doing, after today’s warmth and sunshine. We ended up ordering some sulphur pellets online, to increase the acidity of our very alkaline soil. I will wait until those arrive and add some to the bed that’s solarizing, before I plant the purple caribe potatoes in it. Potatoes like a pH of 5-6, and ours is 8; probably higher. Our test trips and pH meter don’t go any higher. I’ll probably be adding it to all our beds – or as many as possible, before we run out. From what I’ve been reading, our high pH may be more responsible for some of our troubles than anything else, including the relatively low NPK in all our soil tests. The two dump truck loads of garden soil we purchased years ago had adequate amounts of NPK when tested, and that’s been used in all our garden beds, but even the purchased soil tested as alkaline.
We are supposed to be heading into another drought this summer, so anything we can do to improve things is going to help. The first year we tried to grow melons was a drought year with heat waves, and we had a surprisingly good harvest from them. This year, I plan to grow several types of melons, so I hope it works out for them again.
Tomorrow is 6 weeks before our last frost date and, if I can manage to make space in the aquarium greenhouse, I plan to start pre-germinating another batch of seeds. I’ll be looking closely at days to maturity to decide which ones I will be starting, but I expect we’ll start more seeds pretty much weekly, if not more often, at this point.
I really need to figure out how to make space for all the pots, though. We may have to kick the yard cats out of the sun room a bit early! We won’t be able to leave the sun room door open overnight anymore once we start putting plants in there. I’m not worried so much about the cats; they tended to ignore the bins and trays of seedlings last year. It’s the skunks and racoons that we need to keep out!
Well, it stayed cold enough that the snow we got is still there – with a bit more. We might get more flurries later today, and then the wind is supposed to pick up.
It’ll all be gone by tomorrow.
I counted 33 yard cats this morning – but I didn’t see Sad Face anywhere! Which means there’s another new one in the bunch.
I plugged the heat lamp in the sun room back in. They had really enjoyed the warmer temperatures and only a few continued to hang out in the sun room, but now that the temperatures have dropped again and the snow is back, every time I look out the bathroom window, there’s a crowd. Several crowds, actually, on and under the platform.
They will not be happy when they loose their platform so I can set up for my plants. 😁
Breakfast in the snow!
I got a good shot of the cat with the damaged eye. The hematoma doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller, that I can tell, but he seems to have no vision issues. He’s certainly more lively and active now, after having spent several days being quite lethargic and shivering in the sun room. I’m glad he sought out the warmth and shelter when he was feeling sick. Now that he’s improving, the down side is, he’s no longer letting me touch him. I managed to sneak pet his back while I was petting Driver (on the far right of the photo), but he quickly moved away. He is less skittish then he used to be, at least. The cats were all very hungry this morning, so I let him be rather than interrupt his breakfast.
With the chill and snow out there, I wanted to share something more spring like, so here is a video from MI Gardener to enjoy.
Some of these “hacks” are things I’ve already been doing, or trying to do. The first one is to have hose guards on his raised bed corners. That’s something I’ve appreciated about the higher raised beds, as the beds themselves are the hose guards. The only problem is that I typically have several hoses joined together, and the couplings tend to get caught on things. I’ve seen people use curtain rods they picked up at thrift stores; the round kind, where one half slides over the other to adjust the width. Setting them so the outside half is on the top allows it to rotate as the hose is pulled around it, which keeps things from getting stuck.
In the comments under the video, someone described how they’ve put permanent hose guards in their beds, made from small fence posts – then topped them with tennis balls for safety, so their grand kids are less likely to hurt themselves on them. What a great idea!
Using a board across the beds is something else I do, though I don’t have the knees to get right on one and squat to reach the soil! Mostly, I use them to lean against and support myself with one hand, while using the other to do what I need to do. Handily, we’ve got quite a bit of scrap boards that can be used for that, though they tend to be pretty rotten and damaged, and I’ve had more than a few of them crack and break up!
I’ll have to remember the “using the pot to make a transplant hole the right size”, tip.
With the carrots, I’ve used scrap boards to cover the seeds until they germinate. Only because I tend to have plenty of those, but not cardboard! What’s fun is to move them aside to check for germination – and finding frogs sheltering under them! Slug eating frogs must always be encouraged. 😁
I like his pretty dibbler tool. Since mobility is an issue for me, I tend to use something longer. Some days, I’ve used 4′ long support stakes as dibblers. Those are handy to mark out shallow trenches for smaller seeds, too. If I need larger holes to plant in, we’ve got lots of sticks or tree branches that will do!
Another commenter mentioned a tip I’ve heard of before that I definitely want to try, for the low raised beds. Get a piece of PVC pipe and use it to drop seeds in place. That would solve both mobility/pain issues, and short-people-like-me reach issues!
Just a side note, when it comes to reach; the lower the bed, the harder the reach. So for a low raised bed, accessible from both sides, like what he has, I’d recommend going no more than 3′ wide, but with a high raised bed, 4′ wide works just fine.
I’m really looking forward to winter finally being done with us!
This morning, when checking on the Wild Bunch winter squash seeds, I spotted one seed with a root showing.
By this afternoon, there were several more.
So I potted them up.
So far, it’s 6 out of 25 seeds, but I can see that the rest will start germinating very quickly.
Outside, the rain finally settled into snow, and we’ve got a light dusting of it out there right now. We’re just getting the tail end of a system that dropped a foot of snow, elsewhere in the country! The only thing I’m really concerned about outside is the saffron crocuses. I took their mulch off and the ground they were growing through was still frozen, but I’m not sure how the newly exposed leaves will handle these temperatures.
They are now saying tomorrow will have a high of -1C/30F, but the day after is supposed to reach a high of 10C/50F!
Until then, it’s a good time for inside stuff – like getting the germinated seeds planted in pots!
We got quite a bit of rain overnight! Enough to completely fill the rain barrel I’d returned to the corner of the sun room. When I came out this morning, I had to put the diverter back on!
It was still raining ever so slightly while I was out (I counted 31, maybe 32 cats this morning). The only garden related stuff I did was to take the mulch off the sunchokes and asparagus beds – the last beds that needed to be uncovered – so they can thaw out faster.
The rain looks like it has stopped, but it’s too muddy and chilly to do the work I had intended to do outside today. I did end up setting out the Purple Caribe potatoes to chit in the old kitchen.
A couple of them were large enough that I cut them in half, and those ones are perched on the carton in such a way that they will have air flow under them, so the cut areas will dry out.
Looking at how many 1kg give us, I’m rethinking where we will put the 2kg of German Butterball potatoes. My thought had been to put them where the squash were planted last year, but that’s a huge space. I’d basically just have one row of potatoes. So now I’m thinking we might use one of the low raised beds, instead, where the soil should be softer.
We really need to think about increasing the acidity of our soil. It is very alkaline, and pretty much everything we are growing needs soil that is at least a little acidic. We should pick up a bale or two of peat, but that has a very minor and slow effect on acidification. A lot of the usual soil amendments, like adding compost, actually increases the alkalinity, which is the last thing we need. I ended up running errands in the small city yesterday and was looking for Sulphur, but saw nothing. We do have a box of fertilizer we found when cleaning out the old kitchen years ago that is for acidifying the soil; it’s meant for azaleas, but should work for other things, too. If it’s still good. Does water soluble Miracle Gro have an expiry date? I have no idea how old this stuff is. The box was opened but, based on how full it looks, it may only have been used once!
Since today was an indoor kind of day, I started pre-germinated some winter squash.
We’re at just under 7 weeks before last frost, which I hope is enough time for these. Not knowing what varieties are in this mix means we will have different days to maturity among them. I’m still hoping to be able to start some other varieties of winter squash as well – ones we actually know what they are! I’m just not planning to grow entire rows of each. With pre-germinating the seeds, I can start just a few of each and not have to be as concerned about germination rates like when they’re sown into pots or pellets.
I’ll need more pots, though.
Among the last seeds I want to start indoors, by about 3 weeks before last frost, are several types of melons.
Last year, we started so many squash and melon seeds, then had entire trays where nothing germinated. A real waste. I think we’re going to have a much better success rate using the pre-germination method. It should be interesting to see how much of a difference it makes, as time goes by.
The next few days are supposed to continue to be colder and wet, with possible snow, with Friday having a high at, or just below, freezing (it’s Tuesday as I write this). By Sunday, we’re supposed to be back up to the double digits (Celsius), but our overnight lows will be staying close to freezing through most of May. We don’t expect to be direct seeding anything until June, but there are quite a few cold tolerant things we’ll be able to direct sow once the current cold snap is done.
May will be our month for building more raised beds, and harvesting more dead trees to build with.
There is so much that needs to be done!
Weather willing, we’ll have more prepared garden spaces than we had last year, but I’m not sure we’ll reclaim enough to match what we were growing in – well, trying to! – the year before.
With the current conditions, and the melted snow quickly disappearing, I decided to do some wild sowing.
I’m also going to do a test, since I’m almost out of storage space for files on my WP account. It now allows images to be uploaded from Google Photos, so that’s where these are from. Please let me know if you can also see them!
A friend sent me a whole bunch of old seeds. These are all the flower seeds from the stack. Not all the packages had years on them that I could find, but one of them was dated 2020.
I dumped all the seeds into an old spice shaker with very large holes in the lid. The old prescription bottles with Icelandic Poppy seeds from 2018 form the majority of these.
This is where they went.
This low area on the North side of our driveway still has a bit of standing water and the soil is still saturated in places. It gets full sun and. It’s an area that’s too rough to mow, so it’s as good a place as any to sow some random seeds! I simply broadcast the seeds as widely as I could over the area.
The chances that such old seeds would germinate at all is low to begin with. They will also have to contend with birds finding and eating them. How many will even have enough contact with the soil to take root is another factor.
Still, who knows? We might have ourselves quite a mix of flowers growing here this year.
Now, since this way of posting photos seems to be working (at least as far as I can tell on my own computer!), here’s a bonus.
I eventually counted 29 cats this morning, though not all together at the kibble bowls.
Hypotenose really, really wanted attention this morning!
Well, it finally got done! At about 1am, the video I meant to post yesterday was finally uploaded to YouTube, which then was going to take another hour to process it, in three different quality options. I waited until the lowest quality one was done, so I could select a thumbnail, then went to bed!
The question is, was it worth it?
I’ve watched the video myself, selecting the highest quality option, but I really can’t see much of a different.
Here is the video in question.
Could I ask a huge favour?
Could you please watch this video on YouTube, selecting the highest quality option, then compare it to this one…
… also on highest quality option?
Then let me know in the comments how you watched it, and if you could see any difference in quality or play.
I’m using my new desktop to watch these, and the YouTube settings for both allow me to watch them at 2160p/4K.
When exporting the older video in my software, I used the default “good” quality setting. There is little difference in file size with either “good” or “high” options, so it should not have taken so very long to upload. I don’t know if it was an issue with our internet, or with YouTube itself. Or both. I’ve had this happen before where the upload took so long. it was basically stopped. I gave up and started over again. The problem with doing that is, no matter how far along the upload was, trying again starts at the beginning, not from where you left off. In that case, when I tried it again, it uploaded much faster and without any problems the second time around. I seriously considered doing that again with this one, and probably should have.