Okay, so today, we didn’t end up hauling dirt. Partly because we need to take a bit more of a break from that. We’ll just have to make up for it, tomorrow. The Dorinney corn can wait another day or two before direct sowing.
Before I get into another reason why hauling dirt wasn’t going to happen today, I finally remembered to take photos of our seedlings, while I was spritzing and rotating them this morning.
We’ve got some summer squash, winter squash and melons growing. The melons are almost all the Halona variety, but one little Pixie melon is starting to push its way through!
They were too small to even try for a photo, but the pink celery is starting to sprout, too. Still nothing with the gourds.
I did have quite a surprise, though.
Quite a few of the Mongolian Giant Sunflowers were starting to show! That’s the photo on the left. On the right, those two, tiny, barely visible specks?
Those are the Montana Morado corn! I can’t believe how quickly they’re starting to sprout!!
While watering outside, I pulled the plastic back on the carrot bed in the big garden to give it a bit of a soak and thought I might have seen some sprouts. I put the plastic back, but made sure to ask the girls to check again when they were doing the evening watering. Sure enough, there were sprouts, and they took the plastic off. The Strawberry Spinach was checked, and they had sprouts, too. I’m not positive, but I think I could even see flashes of green in one of the spinach beds while I was watering it this morning. :-)
After we were done with our evening garden tending, the girls and I went to look at the crocuses, hyacinths and tulips. There are so many tulips pushing their way through the leaf litter now! They were planted under some plum trees, and I noticed the trees are starting to bud!
I love trees that bloom before they start forming leaves. They are so dramatic and spectacular in full bloom!
I aaallllmost got the camera to focus on the minuscule spider in its web!
In between all this, my younger daughter and I made a trip into town, which included a stop at the post office on the way home. We got packages!! More on that in my next post. :-)
The girls were able to come out and give me a hand this afternoon, so things got done a lot faster. Especially for me, when they booted me out of the garden and into the house. Apparently, I was looking pretty sun burned! Not feeling it, though. ;-)
In my focus on watering, I’ve been eyeballing the haskap bushes. The male is doing quite well.
It’s even beginning to show flower buds!
We planted these two summers ago, so this year should have been a year with good production.
That’s not going to happen.
I wish I knew what was going on with this poor female haskap! The only leaf buds are on the very tips of branches, and not even all of them. I’d expected to get more of them by now, but I haven’t seen any yet. We might have to order more online for next year, instead. We shall see.
With all the watering they’re getting, my mother’s yellow flowers in this bed are already starting to come up strongly in places. We’re not watering the entire bed as thoroughly; just the haskaps and the lilac bush. I expect the lilac to do better this year, now that the maple tree that was shading it has been cut down.
Meanwhile…
My daughters and I marked out a block for the corn we will be planting soon. This block is to the West of the peas, so it can actually be reached with the hose. One of my daughters worked on soaking the area while the other helped me with chopping up straw with the lawn mower to lay down in the block.
The rows are two feet apart, and the corn needs to be planted 1 ft apart. We just have one packet of these seeds, so this should be more than large enough. The variety being grown here is called Dorinny. While I found them at Baker Creek, apparently they had largely disappeared for decades, until they were rediscovered and reintroduced by Wood Prairie Farm. They are a Canadian heritage breed, can handle cold soil, and matures in only 75 days. I’m quite looking forward to them! These are a type that I hope to save seeds from.
One of the bonuses of these being planted earlier and maturing so quickly is that the chances of cross pollination with the Montana Morado we’ll be planting at the other end of the garden will be greatly reduced, even with our winds. They will mature at completely different times.
We know this area is low in nutrients, especially nitrogen, which corn needs a lot of, so we’ll have to take extra steps to ensure they have enough. The fresh, nutrient filled garden soil mix will be the first boost. We picked up a water soluble vegetable fertilizer that has higher nitrogen levels, but in cleaning out the old kitchen, we found a water soluble fertilizer that’s even higher in nitrogen. We also found a pump sprayer, still in its box, so we’ll be able to use it to feed the corn, even in the furthest plots, where the hose doesn’t reach. We do plan to pick up more hose but, for now, the rain barrel and watering can are working out just fine.
The chopped straw was also added to the rows of peas as mulch. Being able to run the lawn mower over the straw a couple of times really makes a big difference. I find myself thinking that I wished we’d thought of it earlier, but then I remember that when we were using the straw previously, we were having problems with the push mower that was here. I did use the new push mower to do it last fall, but that’s when it stopped working completely. I’d chopped up just enough to mulch the garlic for the winter.
One thing’s for sure: we’ve made a huge dent in that straw bale! We’ll need to get another one by the end of the season, for sure. :-)
The girls went on to thoroughly water everything for the evening. Tomorrow, we start hauling soil again… after soaking the ground some more, and stomping down the chopped straw. I do wish we had enough cardboard to lay over the grass, but there isn’t enough in our recycling to cover even a single row. I supposed that’s a down side of our bulk-buying, low packaging shopping habits!
Once this block is planted, we can move on to preparing the beds for everything to be planted or transplanted out here, after June 2. After the girls kicked me out of the garden so they could finish, I checked how things were growing in the sun room, and am very happy to see more summer squash and melons have germinated. It doesn’t look like any of the winter squash or pumpkins have started yet. Still nothing on the rest of the gourds, either. :-( I’ll be keeping a close eye on the climbers over the next couple of weeks. How many germinate will tell me how big of a squash arch we will be building.
The day after tomorrow, we should be getting our first batches of items in the mail from Veseys, including the mulberry tree. I am thinking of planting it in a grow bag this summer, though. There are too many dead trees in the area it will be going in permanently that need to come down. I’m hoping they are solid enough that we can use them for building materials.
Next week, the potatoes will be arriving, and we’ll set up the grow bags we made from feed bags for those. We settled on having them along the chain link fence near the storage house, where they’ll be out of the way, yet easy to access and tend to. Plus, full sunlight. Hopefully, using the grow bags will alleviate the slug problem I found we had, last year.
It feels so good to be getting so many things into the ground! Now we just have to wait and see how many will actually grow! ;-)
I’m taking a bit of a break from working outside, to avoid the hottest part of the day. We’ve reached 22C/71F, and our high is supposed to be 23C/74F.
One of the things I’ve been trying to do early in the day is water all the beds that we’ve planted. I’ve been concerned about them, since we are so incredibly dry right now. It’s hard to give the beds even a shallow watering, never mind the deep watering they need. The problem is that the surface dries out so quickly. What we need is a mulch. The only thing we have for mulch right now is straw. Which is fine if I’m mulching around larger plants, like when we transplant our squashes, etc. Not so good for things like greens.
What I do have, however, is a lawn mower.
So after I planted the last of our beet seeds – three types all mixed up – in the L shaped bed in the old kitchen garden, I brought out the mower.
We already had some chopped up straw that had been on top of the garlic beds; we’d removed most of it and it’s been sitting in the kiddie pool, waiting for use. I chopped all that up a couple more times with the mower, then filled the wheelbarrow with more straw and chopped it up several times, too.
The finished mulch, which now included leaf litter that was on top of the lawn, went back into the kiddie pool, which made it very easy to drag around to where it was needed.
The mulch is so light, I could let the wind distribute most of it for me!
The L shaped bed is all beets. I had thought to put some carrots along the edge of the bed, but there was no room! In fact, I ended up broadcasting the last of the seeds in another little spot.
The patch of mulched soil near the plastic and the tree is where the last of the seeds went. Almost all of these beets are last year’s seed, so who knows how many will germinated.
I then scattered mulch onto the poppy bed, too.
After thoroughly watering everything, I moved on to the big garden.
Once again, I could let the wind lightly cover the beds for me. The beds at each end, with the onions, got fully covered. The spinach beds have their first sowing in the middles only, so I just focused on that area. When we sow more in another week, we can add more mulch then.
Everything got another thorough watering. All the beds will be watered again this evening, when it starts to cool down.
Until then, my next job is to mark off and start preparing the block to direct sow the one variety of corn we have that needs to be planted before last frost. That’s going to be out by the peas, and that’s where we’ll be working on for the next while, as we prepare beds for the beans, corn and radishes, sunflowers, squash and gourds. Then, last of all, the block at the opposite end of the garden, where the Montana Morado corn will be transplanted. None of the sunflowers or corn starts have germinated yet, but it hasn’t been very long yet. I’m just impatient! :-D
We will also use the lawnmower to chop up more straw for more light surface mulch. That, at least, I’ll be able to work on in the shade this time! :-)
So my darling daughters did some planting, while I fell asleep in a bed full of cats. :-D
The plastic covered bed in the foreground is two types of carrots, plus the kohlrabi seeds from last year.
The plastic covered bed in the background is the beets, including seeds from last year, so there are 4 types of beets in there, all planted in short rows. They also planted the purple kohlrabi in between the yellow onions and shallots. I’m quite excited about those!
While the girls finished up watering the seeds and covering them, I filled the paths with the old flax straw and, when that ran out, the wheat straw we still hadn’t moved off the septic tank, right around the corner or the old kitchen. I tried to pile it more against the sides of the beds than the middles, for erosion control. I think it’ll do the job for this year.
The L shaped bed has nothing in it!
There are still beet seeds from last year. I think maybe I’ll mix them up and scatter them, and we’ll have beet surprise! My daughter didn’t want to plant beets in there because she’s thinking the deer will get at them. We can protect the ones by the retaining wall more easily, but I’m sure I can come up with something to help protect them from hungry deer. Especially right in the middle of the garden like that. We still have pelleted carrot seeds left. The deer don’t like carrots, so interplanting the two might help as well.
Hhmm. We even still have some Merlin beet seeds left over from planting by the garlic beds. I could mix those in, too. I know the girls really like beets, so having lots will not be a problem. :-)
Speaking of the Merlin beets.
The plastic was blowing loose from the hoops over the Merlin beets, so we fixed those up a bit.
We cut about 1/3rd of the hoops off, then put them back on their sticks. The excess plastic on the sides were then wrapped around a couple of boards from the junk pile, to keep them from blowing around. Much better than the small rocks I was using before. It meant not needing the lengths of hose on the centre hoop, so those got added to secure the ends more.
This plastic is really, really thin – not at all the kind of plastic one would normally use as row covers – but it seems to be holding out okay. We’re even reusing pieces from last year, plus we still have quite a bit on the two rolls we found while cleaning up, if we need more.
After this, we prep a block for the corn that gets planted early, then I should be able to take a day or two off from hauling loads of soil. :-D
The old kitchen garden beds are done and ready for planting.
These beds were made fairly deep, as they will have root vegetables planted in them.
The only problem is that the soil is going to fall into the paths without something to support the sides. For now, the flax straw I’d taken out and was going to chop smaller with the lawn mower is going to be laid down in the paths, along with straw, until we can get pavers or something to make more permanent paths.
After these photos were taken, I watered everything, including the poppies that were sown last night, and the lilacs, honeysuckle and roses. I do hope that little pink rose survives!
For now, the beds are sitting and warming up in the sun. Later on, the girls will do the planting. There’s a second type of beet, plus two types of carrots, to go in here. I also dug out the seeds left over from last year, which includes beet seeds left over from the variety pack we got last year. There was even some green kohlrabi left. So the girls will plant those, too. The purple kohlrabi is going to get planted in between the shallots and the yellow onions (I almost forgot about those!), which they will take care of today, as well.
Next, a block needs to be marked out and prepared for the one type of corn we have that needs to be planted before last frost.
Absolutely nothing we’ve planted outside so far has started to emerge. I know it’s too early, but I still can’t help but wonder if we did something to kill them off or something! :-D At least I’m finally seeing some summer squash and melon seedling starting to emerge in their cups in the sun room. Not very many, still, but at least I can be sure we’ll have a couple of varieties to transplant and a few weeks!!
My entire body aches from hauling all that soil and spreading it (yes, the girls helped – and they’re feeling it, too!!), but I’m so happy with how things are looking so far!
After finishing planting the carrots and beets, it was time to get back to the old kitchen garden. We’ve done almost nothing there, since we ended up building the path instead of hauling soil over and planting.
Here is how it looks before I started.
The first thing that needed to be done was to get rid of the lump of soil near the new path. A thatching rake did that job well, as I spread out the soil and mulch down the slope, or around the lilac, honeysuckle and rose bushes.
The long row of mulch on the grass in the background was removed from one end of the garden. It was excess flax straw from inside the cat shelter, and was added as mulch last fall. It’s not breaking down very much, so I plan to go over it with a lawn mower.
I also pruned a large branch from one of the ornamental crab apple trees. That poor little pink rose bush will finally get more light!
After leveling the ridge of soil from the path at the back, I worked out where more paths would go, and raked those areas clear. I was almost done with that when my older daughter came out to help, and she started bringing over loads of soil. It’s hard to see, but along the retaining wall is a bit of green. That’s a flower that managed to work it’s way through the layers of mulch and bloom last year. We ended up transplanting it to a corner near the rhubarb, where it’s too awkward to plant anything that requires tending.
We were not going to finish the job today, but we did get quite a bit done! Here is how it looked, when we stopped for the day.
The area next to the retaining wall is filled to the edge of the path and ready for planting. A small “island” at one end was made, and that’s where we ended up planting the poppy seeds. Flowers next to the flowers! The bulbs my daughter planted there are just starting to emerge. :-)
Here is where the paths will be, marked in grey.
We will continue adding soil to finish the “island” around the little rose bush, which will be extended to the stone patch. Another path runs through about the middle of the garden, joining the stone path and the one that runs across the garden. In the one corner, the path runs around a patch of rhubarb. More soil will be added to border the path, but we will not be putting soil all the way in. There are flowers in one area that we will eventually transplant, but most of that area is crowded by the lilacs, honeysuckle and white roses, and not a good place to plant things anymore, so we’ll just stick to the border of the path. More beets and carrots will be planted in the fresh soil.
It may not be done, but the poppies are now planted, and it shouldn’t take too long to finish adding soil.
We haven’t figure out what we’re going to use on the paths to walk on. We need to put something there, if only to have something to keep the soil from spilling onto the paths. We’ll have to figure that one out.
So that is now done and soon, the rest will be ready for planting in.
This morning, I wanted to get that half-bed planted with carrots. I was happy to discover that the Kyoto Red carrots I’d ordered were pelleted seeds (I’m sure I knew that when I’d ordered them, but completely forgot!), so they could go in right away. Before I did, though, I cooked up some cornstarch gel, and set the other two varieties of carrot seeds to soak. Last year, we used the technique described in the video below to plant carrot seeds, and it worked very well, so I wanted to do it again.
Those will wait until tomorrow, though. For now, the carrot bed in the old garden area is fully planted, and I covered them with plastic after watering them.
They’ll be checked often, and as soon as green can be seen, the plastic comes off.
The next job was the new garden bed beside the garlic.
Before topping it with fresh garden soil, I found what I could to shore up the sides, so things wouldn’t erode. This is a pretty small bed, so it only took two loads of soil to cover it.
Then began my experiment.
After planting the middle with Merlin beets, then surrounding it with the last of the yellow onion sets, I cut small lengths of poplar that were fairly thin. I’d opened up the three dollar store hula hoops I’d bought and removed the bits of what looks like decorative rocks that were inside, to make a rattling noise. The sticks were of a size to fit snugly into the openings of the plastic. I also cut lengths of old garden hose and split them lengthwise and grabbed some plastic that was used to cover one of the garlic beds over the winter.
I suppose I could have cut the plastic tubes from the hula hoops shorter, but I really didn’t want to fuss with it. I was able to fit the ends over the sticks and push them down quite far, even though some of the sticks were nubbly from twigs I’d cut off.
I used the pieces of hose to hold the plastic sheet to the hula hoops. Then I used packing tape to gather up the loose pieces at the end and pull things taught. I ended up getting a couple more piece of hose and used them to attach the plastic to the sides of the center hoops as well.
This thing is going to blow away in our next stiff wind! :-D It is by no means durable! This is more about keeping the deer away than anything else.
One of the wind socks we got to help deter critters ended up being spun so much in the wind, the twine I used to tie it to a tree broke. It’s in the shape of a spiral, so I hooked it to the top of a bamboo stake, then wrapped the spiral around the bamboo. It won’t get blown around as violently anymore, but still moves around the stake, so it should still help startle critters away.
So that bed is now done and planted!
In between watering the new bed, I made sure to water the strawberry spinach bed, and covered that with plastic, too. Though we’ve been diligent about watering, these are almost surface sown, and the surface dries out very quickly. I’m hoping it’s not too late to put the plastic over them. :-/ We shall see!
So that worked out rather well. Tomorrow morning, I’ll see if the hoop cover is still there, of it it blew away during the night. :-D
The next job was much larger! But that will in in my next post.
While heading out to feed the outside cats, I heard a noise from an unusual direction.
I had startled Nicky the Nose on the sun room roof!
I always get a giggle out of how he pancakes himself like that when he’s startled. As if he can somehow make himself small. :-D
Our cats never go on the sun room roof, that we’ve seen. They’ll go onto the new part roof, where they can look at the girls through the second floor windows, but it’s quite a leap to go onto the rest of the roof from there. It was a surprise to see Nicky there!
My daughters had a Mother’s Day treat planned out for me. In our tiny little hamlet, we have a small hotel with a bar and itty bitty restaurant. Well, with all the restrictions in place, they’ve had to change things up. About a month ago, the separate bar and restaurant was reworked as a single country style pub, and quickly got a good reputation for their excellent food. It’s a small menu for a small town, but we’re just excited to have options at all.
Of course, the government promptly pulled the rug out from under restaurants again, so they’re limited to take out, only. I guess the government isn’t done killing small businesses, yet. So we wanted to give them some support!
I saw them post a photo on their Facebook page for a platter that is not on their menu, so I had to ask about it. They were able to put together an appetizer platter for us, including deep fried mushrooms, which are also not on the menu yet. It was awesome! Even with 4 of us, by the time we were done, I could only manage one slice of the pizza I got for myself. My daughters ordered their cheeseburger platters, and were thoroughly impressed just by the size. There was enough there for two meals! And yes, they tasted really good, too! It’ll be much nicer to be able to order food from just a few miles away, instead of having to go to another town. Unless we want Chinese food. ;-) I’m glad we were able to order there today. Driving by over the past month, I was always seeing vehicles and people out front and, on nice days, people sitting and eating at the tables outside. Today, with the increased restrictions kicking in at midnight, there was nothing. Just two employees, and me, and I only heard the cook, but never saw him. So we’ll be trying to order food from there as often as our budget allows. Hopefully, lots of other people will be doing the same. Considering how few people live here, that still won’t be much, but it might be enough to keep them going.
In other things…
I had hung on to the soil samples from the tests done in them, and today I finally got some photos before getting rid of them. Here are the jars from the first two tests we did.
The first sample was from the soft soil uncovered when the old wood pile was cleaned up. The water is still very distinctly orange! The second sample is from the new garden soil we purchased.
These are from the third and fourth tests we did. The one that’s more orange and still cloudy is from where we’d planted potatoes using the Ruth Stout method, while the other is from the unamended soil that has never had anything planted there before. I find it interesting to see how clear – or not! – the water became, after letting the samples sit undisturbed for so long.
Later this afternoon, my daughters and I went out to do some watering, and to plant onion sets in the last of the beds in the old garden area. The 2 bags of shallots had only a dozen sets each, so they were planted in one row along one side, while the yellow onions were planted in a three row grid on the other. Later next week, kohlrabi will be planted in between the two. Besides that, there’s still half a bed left that will be planted with carrots. Aside from successive sowing the spinach, that will be it for those beds.
There were still maybe a dozen onion sets left over, so I’m thinking of interplanting them with the beets that will be planted near the garlic beds. Hopefully, they will help deter deer from going after the beet greens. If all goes well, that will be completed tomorrow.
Before heading back indoors and out of the high winds we were having, the girls and I checked on the flowers we’d planted in the fall.
We’re finding more and more of the teeny, tiny crocuses blooming! I know these are not large flowers, but I didn’t expect them to be this minuscule! I suspect, after they’ve had a year to establish themselves, they will come up a bit larger, next year.
I then spent some time tending the seed starts in the sun room. The gourd pots got moved to the sun room awhile ago, but there is still nothing of the Ozark Nest Egg, Thai Edible Bottle gourd, and birdhouse gourds. I am hoping it’s just because they take so long to germinate normally. I probably should have started them earlier. It’s the squash and melons that I’m eyeballing more. They haven’t been in the sun room long, but I was hoping the increased warmth would help. I’m happy to say that I did see a couple of seedlings trying to push their way through, but most show no sign of any germination. I keep second guessing myself about what we used to plant them in and all the things we did differently this year, thinking that maybe I’ve gone and killed them off somehow. :-/ It’s still just under a month before we can transplant anything outside, so there’s lots of time yet for them to germinate.
At least, that’s what I keep telling myself!
Oy. Today has been a really bad day for internet connectivity – as happens every time we have high winds. This post took forever to get done! Time to stop trying to do internet things for a while.
Hmm… I still have lots of my Mother’s Day pizza left. Maybe a late snack is in order? :-D
The Re-Farmer 