Sunday is normally our day of rest, though of course work still needs to be done. Today, however, is going to be more of a day of rest than I’d hoped. We had rain overnight, and everything is still wet, so finishing the mowing is out. We’re also still getting all sorts of weather warnings, from severe thunderstorms to high water levels from rain falling elsewhere. At least we’re not getting tornado warnings in our area.
The garden, at least, if finally seeing some grown spurts. I’m most happy to see how this bed is doing.
That Kulli corn has been staying small for so long, I was starting to be concerned, but it is finally kicking in. I hope the beans planted with them are helping!
Hungry kittens are brave kittens! Nice to see them actually inside the kibble house, instead of hiding under the cat house.
There was an unexpected harvest this morning. Just a tiny one.
I checked on the wild strawberry patch, and could actually see the red berries from a distance!
The berries are so tiny, they are hard to pick! Many were already over ripe, but there are still lots of under ripe ones. This is the most we’ve seen since we found the patch while cleaning out the maple grove.
At some point, I would like to prepare a bed for them and transplant as many as I can, so they’re not fighting with grass and weeds to grow.
While moving things over to the burn barrel, I found another surprise in the branch pile.
One of the other litters of kittens has emerged! I had no idea there was another litter of kittens in this branch pile. Definitely the largest litter we’ve seen, too. There are six of them.
So adorable!
The cats are going to miss this pile of branches when we finally get it chipped!
We got another, far less pleasant surprise.
Our first spring here, one of the things that suddenly gave out was the drain on one side of the kitchen sink.
Well, the other side has finally given out, too. I heard some dripping a couple of days ago and asked my daughters to check it for me, as I can’t get under to look properly. My younger daughter found where it was leaking. When examining it from below, she was actually able to push the whole thing upwards!
So today, I’ll be making a trip to the hardware store to get the kit to replace it all. They open in about half an hour, so I’ll be heading out soon. At least we know, since we’ve already had it happen before, what we need to fix it! :-)
This is the flower of an apple gourd. Usually, the flowers are some shade of yellow, leaning towards orange or white, but these are almost brown in colour!
While doing my morning rounds and tending the garden beds, I can’t push back on a feeling that everything is really “wrong” this year. Added to that, I’m seeing people in my zone 3 gardening groups posting pictures of how far along their gardens are right now, and they are WAY ahead of ours.
So I just went and looked at garden posts I made around this time, last year. I did a tour post on July 3 or last year, but mostly I compared to posts closer to 1 year ago today.
This year, our purple Kulli corn is starting to grow more enthusiastically, but last year’s purple Mountain Morado corn, which was also started indoors and transplanted, where producing silk by now.
Last year, we had bush beans starting to bloom, and the King Tut purple peas were blooming and growing pods, in spite of the heat. This year, even the first bush beans we planted with the Kulli corn are not yet blooming, and the peas are really just starting to actively grow. The King Tut peas we started indoors are much larger and climbing the chain link fence, and there are a few flowers on those.
Our summer squash is all pretty small, though some are starting to bloom, anyway. Last year, I posted a picture of our first yellow pattypan squash that was of a size we would normally harvest.
Last year at this time, the Crespo squash was looking as big as the Giant Pumpkin plants are this year, and just days later, things were starting to eat it, but this year’s Crespo squash is still quite small.
This year, our beets are just a couple of inches high. Last year, we had lush leaves we could harvest for salads, and had to use a row cover to keep the critters from eating it all.
This year, we have a tomato bed that was started indoors very early, and those determinate varieties are growing fruit. Of the tomatoes we started indoors at about the same time as what we started last year, the Yellow Pear are starting to bloom but nothing on the Chocolate Cherry yet. Last year, the cherry tomatoes already had sprays of fruit forming.
So it’s not just in my head. The garden really is far behind, when compared to our own garden last year. A summer of heat waves and drought, no less. This year, things that should have been planted before last frost didn’t, because everything was under water, and even things that needed to wait until after last frost date were a bit on the late side.
We’ve got rain and hotter temperatures coming up, with a possible thunderstorm tonight. Conditions that are actually better than at this time last year. I hope this means that what we’ve got will start catching up soon, though from the looks of the melon patch, I think we’ve lost most of them. Especially the Kaho watermelon, which has actually gotten smaller instead of bigger, and it looks like something ate a few of them.
At least most of the potatoes are finally coming up, though there are some blank spaces. As these are in groups, I think they ended up in water for too long and rotted before they could sprout.
There is little I can do about things. All I can do is be glad for what growth is happening, and pray we will have another long, mild fall to make up for the cold, wet spring.
We do the best we can.
In other things, while putting the kibble out, I’ve started to leave some in front of the pump shack door, and on the metal table in front of it (where the skunks can’t get at it). As I came around towards it, I saw the black and white kitten, the tuxedo and a tabby looking kitten, just as they say me and dashed into the pump shack. Which is encouraging, as I was concerned most of the litter didn’t make it. I also saw the tiny little calico, playing in the big branch pile, by itself.
Yesterday evening just kept getting hotter and hotter, but I decided to head out and see if I could get the new clothes line up. I was able to remove the tightener from the old line, then had to set up a step ladder at the post opposite the laundry platform, to be able to reach the pulley. Then I walked both ends of the line back to the laundry platform.
Except… not.
100 feet was not enough.
I got to about 10 feet short of the post. Which means I’m about 20 feet short in clothes line.
I don’t want to start splicing ends, so I’m just going to get another 150 feet. They sell them in 50 ft rolls that are still attached to each other. I’ll get 3 rolls and should have roughly 30 ft extra. Plus I’ll have a spare 100 ft of clothes line. I don’t mind having extra. I’m sure we’ll find a use for it at some point.
I was also able to finally undo and re-wrap the excess cable from our StarLink dish. When my brother helped install it, there was still a lot of snow on the ground, so he just quickly wrapped up the excess and used zip ties with screw holding heads (I forget the proper name for them) to hold it all together against the outside wall. It was pretty tangled and messed up. I finally picked up more of those zip ties. After removing what my brother used, I re-wrapped the cable nice and neat, making sure there was slack available in strategic places, just in case. Since I didn’t want to leave holes in the wall, I use the same number of zip ties that my brother did, then screwed them into the same holes as before.
It looks much better now!
Unfortunately, in the few minutes it took me to do that, I was just baking! The hottest part of the day has been hitting well after 6pm.
Keeping that in mind, I tried to go to bed early last night, so that I could get up much earlier and get things done before things got too hot.
Instead, I ended up having a sleepless night with all sorts of distractions, issues, and just plain not being able to fall asleep.
Which means that right now, when I should be doing things outside, I’m sitting here typing, and trying not to fall asleep on my keyboard. I’m feeling to tired, I actually feel ill.
*sigh*
Well, at least I got some things done this morning, but right now, I’m feeling pretty useless.
We’ll see what I manage to get done before the thunderstorms start. If they even hit us at all, rather than going around like the often do!
Today was forecast to be a hot one, and getting even hotter tomorrow, so my morning rounds including watering the garden beds. The nice thing was being able to use a nice, full rain barrel to water the old kitchen and south garden beds, while the soaker hose was going under the big tomato bed in the main garden area. There was even enough water in the barrel out by the trellises that I could use to start watering there.
Once the hose was available again, though, I watered them some more. Especially the pumpkins, gourds and cucumbers.
A few of the cucumbers are getting bigger, though most seem to be stagnating. I took a picture of one that is blooming, but didn’t see the baby cucumbers until I uploaded the photo to my computer! There are not a lot of flowers, so I don’t know if there are any male flowers around to pollinate them. The Baby Pam pumpkin that I found never did, and fell off the vine this morning. I spotted two other female flowers, and the little pumpkins under them were already yellow. It seems very odd for female flowers to develop first, like that. At least to me. I have never grown cucumbers before, and none of the Baby Pam we tried to grow last year germinated.
By the time I came in, at about half past noon, it was 24C/75F out there, with a “real feel” of 29C/84F. At least according to the app on my phone. The thermometer outside my husband’s window was at 25C/77F. That window was just getting out of the morning shade.
While I was watering, however…
Yeah. The bean tunnel thermometer was reading 41C/105F already!
That’s quite a discrepancy!
The tunnel gets no shade this time of year. Thankfully, the pea trellis at least gets morning shade. The other two trellises also get morning shade, but not as long, and the silver buffalo berry were still mostly shaded when I headed in. The beans and gourds planted at the tunnel, plus the hulless pumpkins planted near it, would be just baking in the sun! The pumpkins have a nice deep mulch around them, but the beans are large enough that we should start adding more than just the wood shavings and stove pellet sawdust they were planted in.
Where we live is certainly an area of extremes. Long cold winters and short hot summers. It would be nice if we could have something in between! Ah, well. Such is life on the Canadian prairies! We’ll deal. ;-)
I just got back from the wonderful person who is letting me take cardboard from her food waste deliveries.
This filled most of the back of the van, with room for me to still see through part of my back window.
The stack looks so small, on the ground! :-D
The next step will be to douse ourselves with bug spray, then go through each of the boxes to remove any tape, plastic labels, etc. Once that is done, we can start laying them around the saplings as a weed suppressant. Priority is around the saplings, but the space between them will also be covered. The cardboard needs to be thoroughly soaked – rain would be very handy right now! :-D Once we have it, it will be covered with wood chips.
I will easily need at least one more load of cardboard to cover the area, so no hurry on the wood chips right now.
We also got a bonus with this load!
These boxes are corrugated plastic. From the looks of it, they mostly held corn. After they get cleaned off, these will work very well for when we need to store potatoes and other things in the root cellar over winter. :-) Plus, as you can see, they easily fold flat for storage. I think I got 10 or so of these. I think they will be very handy for a lot of things!
An extra bonus is, I got to see their baby chickens and turkey, pigs, donkeys and alpaca. They’re already doing a lot of things we are working towards and, once we get our chicken coop built, we’ll be able to buy chicks from them!
I am so happy to have found this family. :-)
In other things, my husband got notification that my new keyboard was ready for pick up, on Monday. I went to the post office to pick it up and there was no card in the mail box. Today is Thursday, and I stopped by on my way home, but still no parcel.
Once I got home, my husband looked up the order.
It was sent by Purolator.
So while I was unloading the van, my husband called the nearest drop off location, since we are not in their delivery zone. Normally, we would have received an automated call from Purolator, if it was being sent there. When I got back inside, he was on hold – with Purolator. It wasn’t at the drop off location, either.
It turned out to be in the city.
How we were supposed to know that, I have no idea. This information was not included in the delivery notice. It just said that it was delivered.
It’s now being rerouted to the drop off location, and we’ll get a call when that happens.
Places that don’t deliver to PO boxes are a real pain in the butt.
Though we have been grabbing lettuce and spinach leaves, as needed, this morning we our first harvest from the garden!
One bed with onion sets planted around it got a hair cut. They were trimmed down to about 6 inches, and that almost filled the colander. I did see one that was starting to form a bulbil, so I left that to go to seed. Onions are bi-annual, but with sets, their time in dormancy has them acting as if they are in their second year, instead of their first. With the onions we grew from seed, I would like to leave some to overwinter, so we can get seed next year, but I have to figure out how to do that and have them actually survive the winter.
I also gathered the very last of the scapes in the big garlic. The other garlic that is behind is not yet showing signs of scapes.
In the high raised bed, the first spinach we planted was starting to bolt, so I pulled them all up, before they could get too bitter.
After trimming off most of the leaves, the remains were laid along either side of a row of onions to act as a mulch. They are more on the wood chips than against the onions. These onions are from seed, and are looking like they could use a trim, too, though they are quite a bit smaller than the onions from sets.
The other row of spinach looks like we’ll be pulling it fairly soon, too.
Once those are out, we can plant something else. I still have radish and chard seeds that would work. Most likely, chard will be planted. We’re not big on radishes and, if the conditions had been better, they would have been planted much earlier to try their pods, rather than for their bulbs. It’s too late in the season to grow radishes for their pods, I think.
We’re nowhere near the stage where we can be harvesting something out of the garden every morning, so it was really nice to be able to have something like this now. What we don’t use fresh right away will be cleaned, trimmed, chopped and either frozen (at least the onions), or dehydrated (that worked really well for the spinach, last year).
If we do any dehydrating, though, we’ll be doing small batched in the oven, rather than using the screens. All the mint we had dehydrating, and by the time they were done, there was only enough left to barely fill a small jar. The cats wrecked the rest! At least with the mint, there is still lots in the garden.
I headed outside earlier than usual, to try and get some work done before things got too hot. My goal of the day was to take the weed trimmer to where the berry bushes are. Tomorrow, I’m getting another load of cardboard and plan to lay it down around them as a weed barrier.
This is how it looked when I started.
I shoved the stick into the ground as a post to mark the end one of the rows of bushes.
Can you see the silver buffalo berry?
The row on the left, you can see the sawdust mulch around several of them, but the row on the right just disappears in the trimmed weeds and grass.
I ended up using sticks that were used to hold trellis lines last year, to mark where the saplings are. A few of them got two. They were so buried and trimmed material, I didn’t want to risk accidentally hitting them with the weed trimmer! I’ll be looking to make sure they all have at least two sticks marking each of them, when the cardboard get laid down.
From this end, the two saplings marked in the foreground are the two highbush cranberry.
It took adding one more length of extension cord, but I was able to trim around the sea buckthorn, too.
Since I had the trimmer in the area anyhow, I used it around all the trellises, the hulless pumpkin patch, and the bean tunnel.
The goal was to beat the heat, but I failed. By the time I was working on the bean tunnel, the thermometer attached to it was reading 30C/86F in the sun. Our high of the day is supposed to be 25C/77F, and we are now under a severe thunderstorm watch. When I headed out this morning, we were being warned of possible thunderstorms on the weekend, and just possible showers later today!
I kept at it, though, and was able to use the trimmer around the crabapple trees. The one I’m standing next to, to take this picture, died over the winter and will need to be cut away. There are a couple other sickly ones down the row that need to be removed, and the others need some pruning, but that will have to wait.
I’m hoping to be able to head out again with the lawn mower, set as high as it can go, to finish around the garden area. Even the lowest spot near the branch pile in the background is finally dry enough to mow.
The metal ring in the foreground was something I brought to do burns over old crabapple tree stumps that were infected with a fungal disease. It’s over a taller one that hadn’t been burned completely away. Currently, the ring is full of an ant hill!
We have SO many ants this year!
In other things, whatever happened to our phone last night was no longer an issue this morning. We can use our land line again. I did get an email response from the phone company to try disconnecting all but one phone and seeing if it was still an issue, which I’d done (there’s only 2 lines to disconnect; the extra handset for the cordless phone doesn’t connect to the land line on its charger base). I wrote back to explain that it was working again this morning.
It sounds like there is a short somewhere. Possibly due to rodent damage somewhere. I’m guessing the cause of the problem is outside the house itself. If it’s a short, we could lose our connection again, at any time. In my email response, I did include that possibility. It would require a tech to come and test the lines, though. They’d be able to do that at the pedestals at the fence lines, one of which is hidden by trees in the first two photos at the top of this post, at first. From there, they would know if they have to come to the house and test again or not.
For now, I’m just happy the phone started working again on its own!
While doing my rounds this morning, I actually did a bit of watering – something we have done just a couple of times, this year. While working on the squash patch, I found a lovely little surprise.
We have quite a few squash and gourds blooming or showing buds, but the first flowers are almost always male flowers. To see a female flower so early was unexpected. The problem is, I don’t see any male flowers to go with it. Which means there may be nothing to germinate this one, and that beautiful little budding pumpkin won’t have a chance to grow. I’ll check again later, and if I see any male flowers starting to open, I’ll hand pollinate it.
Pretty much everything in the garden is still really, really small. It feels like everything is so far behind this year. And yet, for our area, it probably isn’t. I think part of the problem is I see to many blog or social media posts from people, and their gardens are so much further along. It’s one thing to see that from someone living in a climate zone with a longer growing season. It’s quite another to see people in my Zone 3 gardening groups posting pictures of their lushly growing plants. Just this morning, I saw someone posting pictures of their cucumbers, asking if they were ready to harvest yet or not.
They were.
Meanwhile, most of our cucumbers are barely bigger than they were when they were transplanted. Only a couple of plants are looking much bigger and lively, and even they are still really small. Looking at our peas and beans, I start off thinking they’re doing great, then I see Zone 3 gardeners posting pictures and their peas and beans are easily 5 times the size of ours, blooming and starting to develop pods. I remind myself that these climate zones cover a massive area, with different frost dates within the same zone. In the end, though, I’m never quite sure if ours are so far “behind” because of our microclimate, or because of our poor soil, or because things were so wet, or because… there are so many possibilities!
Well, all we can do it work with what we have, and try to improve things as we go.
Meanwhile, I still need to water the beds in the south yard. This afternoon, however, I called up my mom about heading over. My brother had let me know she had shut off her AC because it started making water noises. She has the portable type that is on wheels with a hose out the window. I asked my mother if she wanted me to come over, and she started to say she didn’t want to bother me, didn’t want me to come out for just that, etc. At the same time, she told me she was expecting my brother to come over. Something he did not mention to me when we spoke, even as I told him I would be able to go over and drain the AC for her. I live the closest to her, and it’s the easiest for me to pop over there, and she’s talking about not wanting to bother me. My brother has an hour an a half drive to her place, but she was expecting him to come over and do it.
*sigh*
I went over.
I got it unhooked and rolled it into her shower to drain. While it was doing that, I got her little hand-held, cordless vacuum and used it to clean up the dead bed bugs in the corner. She was completely surprised they were there, telling me she thought they were “supposed to” stay in the bed. I explained to her (again) that they can be anywhere, including under the pictures on the wall, under outlet places, etc. She acted completely amazed, even though I’ve told her this before. I don’t think it’s so much that she forgets what I told her before, as her refusing to accept t and refusing to believe it. She still thinks we were too concerned about it.
Well, it’s done, and that’s the most important part.
On a completely different note, while chatting with my mother later, she started to bring up some issues she was having involving my siblings. Issues that should not have been issues at all, so I had to ask a lot of questions before she finally told me about something she’d done. The something that hurt my brother so, so much. I was not impressed and told her outright that she’d stabbed my brother in the back. The one person among our siblings that has done the most for her, and she threw him under the bus.
She doesn’t get it. At all. It’s so incredibly frustrating. All I can say is, I am so incredibly glad the property was signed over to my brother, because if it hadn’t been, her actions could have lost the property completely. She’s starting to be confronted with the consequences of her actions, and cannot grasp her own part in it. I don’t know if I was able to get through to her in any way, but I did try. This is not even something that could be blamed on her age or cognitive abilities. She’s done stuff like this for longer than I’ve been alive, and others around her have had to pick up the pieces and fix the damage. This time, however, no one else can fix the damage except her, and she doesn’t understand that there is any damage at all.
My poor brother. And there’s really nothing I can do to help, other than try and explain things to her, over and over.
Bah!
Enough of that.
It’s starting to cool down a bit, so now is a good time for some garden therapy!
With company coming tonight, I headed out this morning to do a couple of errands.
I’m glad I was able to do at least a bit of mowing around the driveway yesterday, so our guests will have someplace to park. Even if the grass had not gone to hay, I couldn’t have mowed all of it, as there is still open water along one side of the driveway.
Definitely a place to dig a drainage ditch.
As it was, just mowing along the edges took quite a bit of going back and forth, even though I had the mower set higher than I usually do. The rest will have to be done with the scythe.
Since all the dandelions have seeded and died back, we could actually keep the hay we scythe for mulch in the garden, now. As long as we cut it before the seeds are fully developed. Otherwise, we’d just be planting lots of grass in our garden!
My errand of the morning was to head to our little hamlet’s general store/post office/gas station/liquor store to pick up some booze for our guests. We’re all out of our home made hard cider (looking forward to making more!).
They have a small seed display from Lindenberg Seeds Ltd, and I ended up picking up a couple of packets.
The spinach we planted in the high raised bed is doing well. The spinach we planted in the low raised beds, not so well. In fact, they’re barely there. I can’t tell if they’ve been eaten by insects, or if it was just too wet for them. I know they haven’t been eaten by critters, because the beds have onions planted around them, and if anything had gone through, the onions would be flattened in places. They care completely undisturbed.
We do have seeds from one variety of spinach left, if I remember correctly, but I decided to pick up two more. Bloomsdale and Hybrid Olympia. It’s getting too for spinach now, though. These will be planted at the end of July/early August for a fall harvest. Hopefully, we will have generous quantities like we had last year, that we can dehydrate for later use. It was very handy to be able to add a spoonful of dry spinach to dishes every now and then. We’ve been out for a while, though, and I miss it!
Spinach is definitely one of our favourite greens, for all of us.
Ever since I found that one giant pumpkin plant with a broken stem, I come out in my morning rounds, expecting it to be yellow and withering away.
Which is most certainly NOT happening! Even with an ant hill almost right up against it, that pumpkin is still green and growing!
How remarkably resilient!
This morning, I decided to fill in gaps by the sweet corn. There is no sign at all of the green bush beans that were planted along one side.
These are the beans I picked up to replace them; Stringless Green Pod. Odd to have a description instead of a variety name, but this brand does that a lot. At only 50-55 days to maturity, there is no issue at all with direct sowing this late. With the other beans we’ve planted, we’re still in the window of successive sowing for our area. There were also enough seeds to plant them on both sides of the sweet corn rows, which is what I’d intended with the seeds from last year we’d planted. There just wasn’t enough of them left to do both sides.
With all the water that got into this area, I’m actually a bit surprised we got as much corn sprouting as we did, but both the Latte and the Tom Thumb corn have plenty of seedlings. While planting the new beans, however, I could see the soil was crusting at the top.
Time for mulch.
I used roughly half of a 40 pound bag of stove pellets. The Tom Thumb corn got a slightly thicker layer of pellets, since there is nothing else planted with them. After the beans start coming up, we’ll see if more needs to be added there or not. The beans themselves are intended to act as a mulch for the corn, so it may not be needed.
Normally, after soaking down a layer of pellets, I’d use the back of a fan rake to spread the sawdust evenly. Not an option when added around seedlings like this. I gave them a good soak, then came back later and used different pressures of water to break up the pellet shapes and spread the sawdust out more. This should both help keep the soil from drying out and crusting on the surface, but also absorb and hold water if we get another deluge.
My next goal of the day is to do some mowing in parts of the outer yard. The area I did with the scythe can now be done with the push mower, and I want to at least clear along the sides of the driveway and in front of the chain link fence. My BIL and his family are coming out tomorrow evening, and it would be nice for them to have somewhere to park. :-D
I get to break in my new boots in the process. Not that they seem to need breaking in! My steel toed shoes have been falling apart for a while, but I have the hardest time finding footwear that fit my wide, messed up feet. I usually get a men’s size 9, triple wide, just to be able to get my feet in, but a lot of styles rub or pinch in the wrong places, because they’re made for the average man’s foot. My feet are shorter and wider than average. Just like the rest of me. ;-) The end result is that even if I find a pair that fits, the shoes bend with my feet in places they were not designed to bend. With the stress in the wrong parts of the shoe, they always end up cracking and splitting in the same places.
I wreck shoes rather quickly.
My husband, darling that he is, ordered a pair of work boots for me online. He chose a men’s size 9 1/2, triple wide, lace up boots with zippers on the inside, so they can be removed without undoing the laces.
They came in yesterday.
I was really not expecting much. I figured they would be too big, but there is no consistency in sizing at the best of times. Online shopping is much, much worse.
Much to my shock, not only did they fit, but they seem to fit perfectly! It actually feels bizarre to wear them. I’m just not used to this. Not only are they wide enough for my feet, but they’re not too long; there isn’t a huge empty space in front of my toes, like there usually is. They are even bending in the right spots as I walk!
There are only a couple of issues. The first is that I can’t lace them up all the way to the top, because of my over developed calves. Which is fine. I can’t even lace up my snow boots all the way, so I’m used to that.
The second issue involves the zipper area. There is a gusset under the zipper, and the top of it rubs against the skin of my leg. More on the left leg than the right, and to the point of considerable pain. I ended up stuffing my pantlegs into the top of the boot to stop it.
The solution to that is, I have to wear them with tall socks.
I never wear tall socks.
Usually I wear ankle socks. If I wear sport socks, I fold them down to the ankles, like Bobby socks. If they don’t get folded down, they fall down, anyhow. It’s those overdeveloped calves again.
Not much choice, though. If I don’t wear them, I’ll ended up bleeding.
So far, I’ve just been wearing them for normal walking around. We’ll see how they do with the constant walking while mowing the lawn. So far, the boots seem to be keeping the socks from falling down like they usually do.
This morning, after finishing my morning rounds, I headed over to a town north of us to pick up our freezer pack of beef that we ordered from a local rancher. I had a chance to chat with her about the flooding this spring. The town had some massive road damage, and it’s still being repaired. Their farm, however, is slightly elevated from the town, so they had no flooding. The way she put it, if they ever got flooding where they are, the town would be under water.
The moisture and rains have been both a blessing and a challenge. Because of the weather, their cattle got put out to pasture later than usual, but for the first time in many years, the grass was already high. Last year at this time, there was almost no pasture at all, and everything was crispy. They grow their own feed as well, and her husband finally got out to finish seeding just today. It’s late, but if we get another long fall, that should be fine.
We also talked about our arrangements to get a quarter beef in the fall again. Ordering so early helps them plan things out. As for the monthly payments, my thing is, if I’m going to have to set the money aside anyhow, I would rather the money go to them, to help feed the cow we’re going to be eating! :-D It’s a win-win, for sure. :-)
Since we met in the grocery store parking lot, I quickly popped in to pick up a few things. We are confirmed for company in a couple of days, and I’m still hoping for a cook out. Then I took the opportunity to go to the hardware store. I’m happy to say, I was able to find the trellis net I was looking for!
I got three, just in case, and I’m glad I did.
The nets are 12 ft long, but these rows are about 20 feet long, at the centre poles. The actual planting area and the A frame uprights are a bit less than that, but not much. With the second trellis I wored on, on the right, I’d had one trellis to lay out on one side. It’s long enough to reach across 4 upright poles, with twin to lash them taught. With the first one I worked on, on the left, I hadn’t had enough poles to do the cross pieces on the bottoms at first, so I put two on each side, alternating which pair of poles they were attached to. When I put up the 2 nets we had left over from last year, so that they were attached to the bottom poles, that meant the empty gaps were at opposite ends.
For the trellis on the right, I was able to put up a new net across from the one I’d put up before, leaving the space between the last poles open. That allowed me to take a second net and wrap it around the end, where the big rock is.
With the other one, I had to got the last net in half to cover the gaps at opposite ends. I’d much rather have not had to do that, but the alternative would have been to undo and move one of the trellis nets that were already up.
They are VERY thoroughly lashed in place.
I wasn’t going to do that. :-D
The trellises are now ready for the pole beans, peas and gourds to start climbing!
One of the things I did while in town was pick up a package of green bush beans. The ones we planted with the sweet corn are not coming up at all, so I decided we can replant them. With bush beans, we can get away with planting this late. That’s something I’ll be doing later today.
My other project outside was to see if I could get my daughter’s old market tent frame useable again. A couple of summers ago, we had it set up near the fire pit in preparation for a cookout when we suddenly got high winds. A couple of pieces that were joined in the middles at a pivot point, snapped. It’s a really good tent, so even though it was broken, we kept all the pieces.
We used the frame to support the surface used to harden off our seedlings. I’d made an insert to join the snapped ends and keep them from bending too far, then duct taped the ends together. Today, I took a couple of very short metal pieces from the canopy tent I dismantled once things thawed out enough to remove the tree that fell on it, and taped them to the broken bars to support them even more. Then I dug out the tent roof and set it up near the fire pit. Once the roof was on, the tent fully set up and I confirmed the patch was holding, I folded it all closed again. It was too windy to leave out. However, it is now ready for us to use near the fire pit. I want to set the picnic table up inside it, and have at least two of the walls hung, so we can set up some citronella candles to help keep the mosquitoes at bay!
The big problem with that plan is, the picnic table is on it’s last legs. Every time I’ve moved it, some other part either bends, or pops off it’s screws. Which is to be expected. We cleaned it up and painted it, but it was still very rotten, and we knew it wasn’t going to last much longer. We can still use it, as long as we’re gentle with it.
Which means no more moving it around with just one person!
The Re-Farmer 