I didn’t get outside to do some work until past 8pm, when it finally started to feel cooler. Thankfully, the days are still getting longer, because it was just past 10pm when I was done, and pretty much full dark by the time I finished putting things away.
There wasn’t time to work on the big stuff, but there was some small spaces I could work on.
The first area I worked on were the 4 empty blocks in between the gourds and Zucca melon. I had some potting soil mix left, so after digging around in the blocks and pulling out any roots I could find, I added a bit of the potting soil to top up each block a bit. There were a total of 5 Little Finger eggplant seedlings, but two were still quite small, so I planted them together. We’ll see how they do and if one will need to be thinned out. I had plenty of new grass clippings to mulch around them, too. I collected a wagon load, and when the eggplants were mulched, I used the rest to finally give the asparagus bed a deep mulch. Until now, only the strawberries in between them were mulched. I was happy to see one new spear of asparagus, already at the fern state, had showed up. That makes 5 out of 6 crowns in this bed that survived last spring’s flooding… if barely!
Our spinach is just starting to get big enough to harvest a few leaves here and there, even though they were planted so long ago. As they will likely bolt quickly in this heat, my daughter went ahead and harvested the largest plants earlier today. In between the spinach, I started transplanting some Red of Florence onions. We grew these last year and really liked them. These are the first of this variety that have been transplanted, and they’re going to be shoved in every place we have room, as we go along planting other things.
Next, I worked my way across the retaining wall blocks, clearing and weeding. Every other block had mint transplanted into them, to contain them. It will be a battle to get the rest of the mint that’s growing in the old kitchen garden, but these were originally from my late grandmother, so I don’t want to get rid of all of them. They don’t seem to have handled last winter very well, and one block’s mint seems to have died (!!! who ever heard of mint dying on its own? 😄). A few other blocks got onions that survived the winter, that I found while prepping the area. Some stayed in the blocks they were found in, while others got transplanted, so that each block had 3 or 4 onions in it. In the end, I found a total of 6 blocks were free. Those got dug into to remove roots, topped up with the last of the potting soil, and then I transplanted some Spoon tomatoes into them. Each tomato got a bamboo stake they can be clipped to as they get bigger, then mulched with grass clippings. It’s not the area I wanted to grow these in, but at least we’ve got some in the ground. At this point, we could give away all the remaining transplants.
Not too bad for just a couple of almost cool hours before things got too dark to see!
After the hours spent in the heat yesterday, my older daughter was a sweetheart and fed the outside cats in the morning, and I got to sleep in a bit before doing the rest of the morning rounds. Though I watered things last night, I watered some garden beds more this morning.
Including this one.
Last night, I was just starting to see some green Lewis bean seedlings breaking soil. Overnight, both yellow and green beans have emerged, and some of the green beans already have their true leaves. It’s always amazing, how fast beans can grow!
While watering the bed with the carrots protected by boards, couple more frogs jumped out. The cool damp conditions the boards create for the carrots are conditions the frogs like too! We are thinking about what to use to make little shelters for them to use, once the boards are removed. Frogs are a good thing to have in the garden!
While the Irish Cobbler and Red Thumb potatoes are emerging, there are still not Purple Peruvians showing up in the grow bags, and those were planted first. When we used the feed sacks and grow bags before, they did really well, but now I’m thinking they might be getting too much sun and heat, where the bags are set up now. We didn’t really count on having such a hot start to spring this year!
I’m glad I tended the garden as much as I did this morning. I’m back from bringing my mother here for a visit, then driving her home again, and I am pretty wiped out. Being with her for about 3 hours took more energy out of me than working outside in the heat for 8 hours, yesterday.
That, however, is a conversation for a different post! 😄
I was able to head outside this evening and finish the transplanting I didn’t get to do this morning.
My daughter had mulched the tomatoes with shredded paper for me while I was out. I made a trench in the mulch and transplanted the Red Wethersfield onions. Almost the entire tray of onions made it into the bed. All the other beds are bordered with the yellow Talon onion. That leaves the Red of Florence onions to transplant, and there are a lot of those! We’ll squeeze them in where we can, where they can help protect other plants from insects and deer.
I hope.
So this bed is now done!
Now we have to get other beds prepared. I’m really hoping we get a good rain tonight, to help cool things down and reduce the humidity!
It’s barely 3:30pm right now, and I could easily call it a day and go to bed right now!
I tried to get out early to beat the heat, but by 7:30, it was already feeling hot and muggy. The humidity is very high, and the uncut grass is covered with dew. Which means that, when the outside cats come over for breakfast, they tend to be completely soaked!
Like this bedraggled beast.
Decimous is so matted and full of burrs! Today, however, for the very first time, I got to give him ear and neck skritches – and he let me! He even started purring. He wasn’t sure about the situation, but he did let me reach out to give skritches – not pets – a few times. His fur is so full of lumps, burrs and mats, I’m sure petting him would be somewhat painful.
I was even able to confirm something.
He is a she.
Yup. Decimous is female.
She doesn’t look pregnant, though. I’m trying to think of how we can catch her and bring her inside, so we can lavish her with love (and wet cat food) and socialize her enough to get those mats cut out of her fur!! The problem, of course, is we already have too many cats in the house. I’d have to bring her into my room and have her in baby jail for a while. That is Marlee’s favourite hangout, though, and Marlee typically isn’t too keen on other cats.
We’ll figure it out.
My priority for this morning was to get as many of the Roma VF tomatoes transplanted in the last available bed as I could.
I focused on getting the largest ones in, first. I didn’t want to do three rows, since it’s harder to reach the middle, but … well, it is what it is. I’m sure I planted them closer together htan they should be. I staggered the rows to use the space more efficiently, and was able to get 41 transplants in It took a couple of hours. I didn’t have time to transplant tomatoes around the perimeter of the bed, nor mulch it right away. My daughter shredded more of our collected fliers and other garden safe paper while I was doing this, and brought out a couple of bags. As I write this, I honestly don’t know if she was able to get back outside to lay the shredded paper around the tomatoes. After that, they’d just need to be dampened, because the tomatoes were deeply watered while being transplanted.
Speaking of which…
These are the mystery squash that showed up with two of the tomatoes. I’d reused seed starting soil from pots where things did not germinate at all, and somehow missed that there were still viable seeds as I pulled out the sticks and rocks I was finding in the mix. We’ll see if they survive. If they do, I’ll find somewhere to plant them, after we get more beds ready. Right now, aside from a couple of scattered spots, we have nowhere left to put any transplants – including the more than 20 Spoon tomatoes, none of which are out, and another 20 or so leftover Romas!
So much work to do!
Today is our average last frost date, but in some places, we’re breaking 30 year heat records. I took some garden tour videos yesterday that I’ll put together and upload later. Lots of heat warnings and warnings for thunderstorms, with possible hail, etc.
The question is, will any of that rain reach us?
Once the transplants were in, I headed out early to my mother’s, stopping to pick up some Chinese food, which was my breakfast. Previously, my mother has started to say not to get rice, because rice makes her cough. She said to get her just lemon chicken. Unfortunately, the timing was off, and I was at her place on the one day of the week they closed. Then she mentioned some of her neighbours would get just onion rings from the restaurant; they have a small North American menu along with Chinese food menu. After that, she started saying she wanted onions rings. So today, I picked up both lemon chicken and onion rings for her, and a combination platter for me.
When I arrived with the food, she was first taken aback that I came early, but I told her I’d been working in the garden, and hadn’t and breakfast. I came early so we could eat together. Then she chastised me for not calling her first, because she’d had a large breakfast (she later mentioned what she had, and it was not a large breakfast. Just not typical breakfast fare). I hadn’t planned to do this, though, so calling ahead was not an option. After I set out the food, setting hers aside on the table while I sat down with my breakfast, she started nibbling on the onion rings anyway, then suddenly demanded to know why I got the lemon chicken, too, instead of just the onion rings. I reminded her that she’d talked about wanting lemon chicken in the past, and she didn’t have to eat it all at once if she didn’t want to . She then started talking about how it’s a “temptation” for her, and if there’s food in the fridge, she eats it…
…
I’m pretty sure that’s what food in the fridge is meant for.
I think she was trying to say that she had little self control when it came to food, but had a hard time coming up with the words for it!
After I’d eaten, and she nibbled, I suggested we head out earlier. She didn’t seem to want to go out and procrastinated. It wasn’t until we were in the car and on the road that she mentioned that, next time, she would give me a list and let me do her errands for here. Her knees are increasingly giving her grief. There’s one errand I can’t do, though, and that is to go the bank for her.
So we got her errands done and her groceries put away. She wanted me to take a couple of trees home with me, along with her vegetable peelings and a plant she’s decided is blocking her window too much (it isn’t).
I did have a bit of a surprise while checking on her air conditioner, next to her plant table. For some reason, it was set to go off at 26C, which is just way too hot. I lowered that, and it turned on and starting cooling things down, but for some reason, I was also feeling heat.
Yes, her heat was also on!
I checked her thermostat.
It was set to about 26C.
So she was heating and cooling her apoartment at the same time.
I turned that right down for her!
I didn’t take any plants from her, because I didn’t want them baking in the car while I did my own errands after I finished with hers. I had to ask her where the trees came from. Basically, she’s got a little maple and an elm in the pot together, and it looked odd. Turns out she’d found them in the few feet of garden space where she has some garlic growing – pretty much the only “gardening” she does right now – so she decided they should go to the farm and stuck them in a pot.
*sigh*
She has also been gathering linden seeds and is trying to get them to grow. She’s got at least a dozen that I could see, scattered at the top of a pot of soil. Something else she has in pots and plans to send to the farm.
This from the person that was laughing at me when I showed her pictures of the garden, because I had some herbs in a pot.
Somehow, my mother has got it in her head that, because the trees around her building drop seeds, she MUST gather then, give them to me to grow, or start growing them herself, so the trees can go to the farm, because they are “free”.
I’m getting a better understanding of why we have so many problem trees right now.
Also, we have GOT to get rid of the Chinese elms. There are millions of seeds drifting everywhere, and every bit of bare soil where I’ve planted seeds or transplanted something is getting filled with them. They have very deep tap roots, even as tiny seedlings, and are so hard to get rid of! There are other elms here that don’t do this, and they’re just fine, but the few Chinese elms are just horrible to deal with!
A job for another time, though.
Anyhow.
Even though my mother basically abandoned the farm a decade ago, she still wants to control what happens here, including giving me trees to plant that are basically weeds out of her own garden space.
She brought up when we can bring her out to the farm to see things – she still has seen only photos of the new roof. I told her that, weather willing, my brother and his wife are hoping to come out this weekend with their lawn mowing equipment to do the lawns. Right now, she wouldn’t be able to get through the grass with her walker! After that, we’ll see.
Once done at my mother’s, one of my errands was to go to the egg lady’s place. While driving out there, I went through several sections of driving rain! It was so good to see! There were a few times I was sure the car was being hit with hail. It wasn’t raining at the egg lady’s homestead, though, and they sure could have used some! She just finished processing 40 chickens, and was dying in the heat!
My next errand was back at my mother’s town, and I drove into rain again. It was awesome! The temperatures dropped about 10 degrees almost instantly, from 31C/88F (“feels like” 34C/93F!), to 20C/68F. It was still coming down so hard when I was ready to come home, I sent a message to let the family know it might be slow driving. And it was.
For a little while.
Then I drove out of the rain, and the closer I got t home, the drier it got.
As of this writing, we still have had no real rain at all. There might have been a few drips here and there, but nothing more.
*sigh*
Looks like our climate bubble is back in action.
We’ll see how things turn out. If it stays dry and keeps cooling down with the wind, I might be able to get more weed trimming done. I need to focus around the garden beds, and where we need to build up the squash patch and where the permanent trellis beds will be built.
Meanwhile, my poor daughter has been busting her butt, cleaning the kitchen and trying to catch up on the dishes, in this heat!
I think I need to shut down my computer, though. It’s starting to act up in the heat. It’s a good thing I know how to touch type, because I’ve been typing entire paragraphs, without anything actually showing up on the screen for almost a minute.
So if there are a lot of typoes or strange sentences in this post, it’s because I’m typing blind right now!
Once things started to cool down, I went out to do some weed whacking. I especially wanted to get the outside of the chain link fence cleared, because the grass was getting so tall, it was interfering with the garden beds on the inside.
While trimming the grass by the gourds, I realized I was seeing something new!
This is our very first Zucca melon flower!
When we tried to grow these last year, we had four transplants, and they all got flooded out. One did start to recover, but by the end of the season, it was still smaller than this one was when I transplanted it here. And now we have a flower!
This was not the only surprise flower I saw today. While trimmed around the outhouse and the raised box beds, I saw a tree deeper in the spruce grow in full bloom. It looks like another rather large apple tree. There is another one nearby that we had uncovered while cleaning the edges of the spruce grow that had already bloomed and is done. The nearby cherries have also bloomed and are done. It should be interesting to see what we find in there in the fall!
While moving closer to look at the flower tree, I walked through the tall grass of an area we’ve been able to clear so far. It’s quite overgrown with crab grass and some of the poplars we cleared are trying to come back.
I found flowers among the grass and weeds.
There are strawberries in there! Because they are surrounded by the crab grass, the plants are a lot taller and thinner than the ones we planted with the asparagus, but they are most definitely not the very fine wild strawberries we have growing elsewhere. I have no idea why there would be strawberries in here. There is also a path of some kind of lily that started to grow after we cleared away the area of dead trees and other detritus.
You’d think, after being here for more than 5 years, we wouldn’t still be finding surprises like this, yet there they are!
Eventually, I would like to transplant the strawberries I found to someplace where they won’t be competing with crab grass to grow!
As for weed whacking the edges of the yard and around some garden beds, I didn’t finish the job, yet. There is still lots to do, but it will have to keep. It likely won’t be tomorrow; as I plan to head into the city to do our second Costco shop. I’ll be making a couple of stops along the way, and just arranged to meet my SIL for lunch, since the Costco I go to is a fairly short drive from their place.
It’s been a long day for me, even though I did end up taking a nap (woke up to find Cheddar using my hand as a pillow!), and it’s going to be a long one tomorrow, too, though in a very different way. The girls were able to put things away, bring in the plants, and close things up for the night for me while I took a break and hydrated.
With the weather we’ve been having, I have been feeling really anxious about getting the garden in “in time”, when we physically don’t have places prepared for everything yet. I feel like I’m falling behind, and everything is being planted late.
Then I remind myself.
Today is May 29. Normally, I wouldn’t be transplanting or doing a lot of direct sowing until after June 2.
Still, with the weather forecast being what it is, the more we get in the ground now, the more time we’re adding to our short growing season.
I headed out shortly after 7am this morning, to beat the heat, and didn’t come back in until almost 11. It was already feeling too hot by 8am, but I stuck it out as long as I could. My main focus was to finish planting in the beds the tomatoes were transplanted into, and get something into the high raised bed.
I’m still bordering everything with the yellow onions. I decided to plant bush beans in the high raised bed. That will make harvesting so much easier on the back!!
There wasn’t a lot of space left in the low raised beds, though that is partly because of the boards protecting the tomatoes. Once those are removed, it will open things up.
In the bed on the far left, with the Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes, I sowed all the Gold Ball turnips in one half, and Merlin beets in the other. These were densely planted in many short rows, more Square Foot Gardening style. When we planted the Gold Ball turnips last year, something ate them pretty much as soon as they germinated. I’m hoping surrounding them with onions will help keep away whatever ate them – I never saw any hint of what it was. I had intended to put a floating row cover over the turnips to protect them, but the space is too narrow for that.
In the bed with the Black Beauty tomatoes, I planted one long row of Uzbek Golden carrots. There was only space for the one row, which I then covered with boards. I will check under the boards daily and remove them as soon as I see carrots sprouting.
Both beds got a thick mulch of grass clippings along the outside, next to the onion transplants. Aside form helping keep the soil cool and moist, and slow down the weeds that come up from under the log boarders, the grass will also help prevent soil runoff while watering. I’ve basically used the last of our grass clippings at this point. We haven’t been keeping up with the mowing, unfortunately. Not only are the dandelions now all going to see, but in a lot of places, so is the grass!
With the high raised bed, I planted the yellow Custard beans – a new variety for us – on the left in the photo, and the green Lewis beans – a variety we’ve grown before – on the right. At each end, I stuck in a few more onion transplants. By this point, only the smallest yellow onion transplants are left, and I was planting them a bit closer to each other than usual, but I was still left with may 10 little transplants left. They’re so small, I probably shouldn’t bother transplanting them, but I’m sure I’ll find someplace to shove them into the ground!
(As an aside, while working on all this, I was happy for a breeze that kept away the mosquitoes. It wasn’t enough to keep away what turned out to be horseflies! Thankfully, they didn’t seem interested in bighting me today. Just in dive bombing my head.)
The large low raised bed you can see on the right is still completely empty. I’m considering using it for the Roma tomatoes, which are growing much faster than expected – one bin in particular is has plants so big, if it weren’t for the labels, I’d have thought they were Black Beauties or Indigo Blues that were started so many weeks earlier! Why that one bin of Romas is so much larger than the others that were started at the same time is an interesting question. I was originally wanting to plant peppers in that bed, but the Roma tomatoes need transplanting more urgently. I wont’ be able to fit all of them in there, but if I can at least get the biggest ones transplanted, that would be a good thing.
Before heading in, I made sure to water the corn bed, too. There are corn seedlings popping up now! I’m quite happy to see them. I was afraid that, with the heat and minimal rain, they might not make it. Checking the raised box beds in the East yard, I was happy to be able to see more carrot seedlings showing their true leaves, without having to look close and wonder, are those seed leaves carrots, or a weed? It’ll still be a while before the carrots are strong enough that we can safely weed around them. Right now, weeding mostly involves removing the biggest leaves from the weeds, and pulling and dandelion flower buds, and being careful not to disturb any carrot roots.
I was thinking of doing more transplanting later today but, at this point, I think the mowing is a more urgent priority. Not just because of how overrun both the inner and outer yards are getting, but because I need the grass clippings!
I also want to get in and around the garden beds and where the squash will be planted with the weed wacker.
When I came in, my weather app said it was 23C/73F. I think it felt quite a bit warmer than that! We’re supposed to reach a high of 26C/79F, with chance of a 43% chance of thunderstorm at about 4pm. I suspect I will have no problem getting out and doing the weed whacking when it’s cooler.
For now, though, it’s time to stay inside, stay cool, and hydrate!
It’s not even 11am as I start this, but I’ve already put in several hours in the garden, trying to beat the heat. Which wasn’t easy, since it was already feeling too hot when I was doing my rounds, first. The weather app was saying 18C/64F, but it felt hotter. It would be good to set up a thermometer in the garden area again.
My focus today is to get the Indigo Blue Chocolate done, and as many of the Black Beauty as I can fit, plus an edging of yellow onions. There are only 11 Indigo Blue and, at about a foot apart, they will easily fit in one row in the bed I chose for them. This bed is somewhat narrower, so it will be able to fit one more row, plus the onions around the edge.
The problem?
There are 26 Black Beauty transplants.
I also counted the Roma tomatoes as I set them out. There are 61, though the plant that broke in the wind yesterday is looking like it probably won’t make it.
Then there are the 30 Spoon tomatoes.
Right now, we have 2 more low raised beds, which are about 15ft long, for about 14ft of growing length. Then there is the high raised bed, which is 9′ x 4′ on the outside, so about 8′ x 3′ of growing space. Aside from a small section in the wattle weave bed in the old kitchen garden, and 4 blocks between the gourds at the chain link fence, that’s all we have left for prepared beds. The squash patch needs work and, of course, we need to get those trellis beds built.
Meanwhile, the lawn is getting out of control, we still need to cut down the dead spruce trees that will be used to make the trellis beds, as well as pre-cut and drag over the trees I cut down for the trellises.
As it is, I did as much as I could this morning, then had to head in to get out of the heat. We are at 24C/75F right now – yes, to me that’s way too hot already! – and we are supposed to reach 30C/86F this afternoon.
I got the Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes in, after setting up three of the salvaged T posts to hold their vertical supports, then transplanted some of the yellow onions along the outer edge. The tomatoes were starting to wilt already, so I added a grass clipping mulch around them and along the outer edge of the low raised bed on the one side, being careful not to cover the onions before giving them a final watering.
I was planning to plant the Black Beauty tomatoes on the other half, but I think I will put them in another bed, instead, and direct sow something else with them.
Unless I fill an entire bed with just Black Beauty tomatoes, I will have room for only about half of the transplants. And I don’t want to fill an entire bed with them. A dozen plants is more than enough for fresh eating. The Romas are the only variety that I’d be willing to dedicate an entire bed to, since those are being grown specifically for preserving.
Meanwhile, we’re still getting storm warnings for tomorrow evening. We’ll see if the system reaches us or not, but be ready to protect the garden beds, just in case.
For now, I will be staying out of the heat! Maybe get a nap in, since I will likely be working outside once it starts cooling down, and staying as long as daylight holds.
Yeah. That sounds like a good plan. I didn’t get much sleep last night!
I headed outside when things started to cool down and gave the garden beds another watering. I also snagged the trays of Spoon tomatoes and “potted them up”.
Which was just taking off the lower leaves and adding more soil to the cups. These were all so tiny when they were transplanted from the Jiffy pellets, the cups were barely half full of soil. Even now, a couple of them are so small, the cups still couldn’t be filled to the top. A few of the largest ones, however, actually seem to be showing the beginnings of blossoms!
We’ve got 30 of these, plus the Romas, and I still don’t know where they will be planted. It all depends on how much progress there is on the new trellis beds that still need to be built!
Next, I transplanted the lemongrass.
I treated the pot a bit like filling a raised bed; on the bottom, I put a layer of grass clippings, which got a good soak, then potting soil. The potting soil was really dry, so it took quite a bit more soaking to get it moist.
For the lemongrass, I decided to break them up and plant them individually, instead of in groups. That meant breaking up the biodegradable pots. These had been started in smaller, square, biodegradable cells of the same material, so when I potted them up, I just put the whole starter cell into the bigger pot.
For biodegradable pots, they sure don’t break up easy. They were still pretty rootbound in the original cells! So I pulled those pieces out, too. Considering how much handling the roots got, I really hope they survive!
Once transplanted and watered, I very carefully mulched with grass clippings. This pot is set up on the concrete landing of the stairs in front of the main doors. A good, warm microclimate for an herb that needs much warmer temperatures than what we usually grow here. It’s going to get pretty baked, though, so the clippings will help moderate the temperatures as well as protect the soil and transplants. Once the clippings were in place, I was going to give it one last watering.
The handle broke off the sprayer.
*sigh*
I bought is at part of a 2pc set, so I did have another nozzle I could use. I just don’t like it very much. It’s the kind where the spray is adjusted by turning the tip of the spray head. It doesn’t spray very well. Ah, well. Something else for the list of broken things to replace!
Then I finally!!! finished the cover over the shallots bed.
The ends are now closed off, so no cats can walk through and use the shallots as a bed!
As I was finishing this off, I could hear thunder that seemed to be coming closer, so my daughters and I quickly got the rest of the transplants inside. According to them, we did have smatterings of rain today, while I was in the city, and even had a very brief downpour last night! I never heard a thing. There sure wasn’t any sign of it when I watered the garden beds this morning.
Whatever system I was hearing this evening, it passed us by. A good rainfall really would have been nice! It got so very muggy out there!
Tomorrow is supposed to be another hot one, with no expectation of rain at all, so I plan to get an early start. The largest tomatoes need to be transplanted, but I want to put in the supports for the indeterminate Indigo Blue Chocolates first. The Black Beauties can be staked individually.
Which means an early bed time for me, and hopefully a good sleep!
Well, the heat is really kicking in. Last night, in the wee hours of the morning, I checked the temperature, and we were at 20C/68F
That was somewhere around 3 – 3:30am
As I write this, it’s past1:30pm, and we’re already at 31C/88F. We are now above the 30 year record high for today, set back in 2015. I’ll still take that over the record low of -3C/27F! We’re getting heat warnings all over the place. Winds are high and we’re looking at possible thunderstorms this evening.
Pain levels were high for me this morning, so the girls took care of feeding the outside cats and setting the transplants out on the picnic table, under the old market tent and sheltered from most of the wind. Then my younger daughter did a fantastic job of cleaning up the branches from when I harvested trees for the permanent trellises we will be building. I just asked for the branches I tossed over the fence to the driveway side to be picked up, but she cleared away the big branch pile in the trees, too! Even sorted out longer pieces that we can potentially use, others suitable for the fire pit, and the rest went into the big branch pile we still have just outside the gate by the fire pit.
She was still working on it, when I finally made my way outside.
I started watering things, before it got too hot, and was able to mostly empty the rain barrel. If we do get some rain this evening, it won’t be enough to need to add the diverter to prevent it from overflowing.
While watering in the old kitchen garden, look what I found!
Our very first potato has broken ground!
This is one of the Irish Cobbler potatoes, which were the first ones planted.
I am very happy!
While watering further afield, I found the Crespo squash was very wimpy and made sure they got a super deep watering. These plants grow very big and, if they survive long enough, are supposed to produce very larger pumpkins, so they are going to need a lot of water. The nearby leaking rain barrel that I filled with a hose still had some water in it, so I was able to use that, while refilling it with the hose, at the same time, to water the raspberries, cranberries and sea buckthorn, too. I filled the barrel to almost half way, and hope to be able to see where the leak is. It may be more than one spot.
Things are looking quite lovely out there! The crab apple trees near the house are in full bloom, and the ones along the north side of spruce grove are almost there. The common lilacs and the double lilacs have sprays of buds that are starting to open. Of course, we have a sea of dandelions blooming and starting to go to seed, but the mowing will have to wait.
There are a few outside jobs that I want to work on, but will have to work around the weather conditions. Thankfully, the days are getting long enough that, if I time it right, I can get some good productive hours in the early morning and the evening. I’m not good with mornings, though! So far, at least, the house is not over heating, but we’re going to have to set up the screen “door” at the top of the old basement stairs, so we can leave the real door open to help cool the house down.
Here’s hoping all this heat and, if the long term forecast for June is at all accurate, rain will mean a healthy garden and a good harvest!
The Re-Farmer 