Early Mother’s Day

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My morning rounds includes checking the various growing things, and I finally got a decent photo of my daughter’s tulips emerging!

The leaf mulch has made it hard to see them in photos, but at this angle, you can see quite a few! There are more, out of frame. We’re so happy they survived their first winter! :-)

This morning, I headed out to be part of a surprise for my mother. My older brother was able to acquire a nice scooter, and he wanted to bring it over for her to see and try driving. While getting her to test drive it, he was going to get her to a nearby park, where we siblings were planning to surprise her with a picnic lunch together.

The problem was, we weren’t sure where the picnic tables were, so we weren’t quite sure exactly where to meet. We also weren’t sure the park was officially open for the season, yet. People could walk in any time, of course, but the entry gates get closed to traffic in the off season. So I left early to check it out.

I think we timed it just right. Not only were the gates open, but there was a crew of people doing all sorts of maintenance and clean up started. I was so focused on looking at where the picnic benches were, I didn’t realize I drove right past my brother! He’d had the same idea I had, and come early to scope the area.

There were quite a few clusters of picnic tables, including a whole bunch under a shelter. There was one that was closest to the entry that we considered moving closer to some buildings, because of the wind. As we walked around, though, we realized there would be no point. The wind was swirling in all directions. There was no shelter from it, anywhere! It was a warm enough day, but we knew the wind would be an issue, so my brother was going to make sure my mother dressed warmly.

My mother loves her fried chicken, so my contribution for the day was picking some up. We were so early, though, I had time to play some Pokemon Go, first! :-D I didn’t want to get it too early, even though I had an insulated bag to keep it hot. I still ended up back at the park early. Which worked out okay, because I soon saw my brother and mother making their way down the road. It was fun to sneak around the building and wait for the opportune moment to step out and surprise her! :-D

My mother, being my mother, was determined to be miserable. She makes a big deal about not liking surprises (except for those times when she tells us how much she likes surprises…), so she was already giving my brother a hard time. She refused to get a warmer coat or a hat, and wouldn’t even put on shoes; she was wearing house slippers! Then she saw me, and that was another surprise she didn’t like. :-D But then we got to the picnic table and I started setting food out. It turned out she hadn’t had lunch yet, and … well … there as fried chicken and wedges to be had! :-D My sister had the day off, so she was able to join us, so that was one more surprise for my mother. By then she was eating, so she skipped being miserable. ;-) Among the things my sister brought was a big thermos of hot tea, and today was certainly a day for it! I’m glad I had my picnic backpack; not only did we have real plates and cutlery, but I had room for actual cups. If we’d gone the disposable route, everything would have blown away!

We managed to have an excellent picnic outside, even with the wind. Plus, we brought enough food that my mother would have enough for another meal or two. :-)

As for the scooter, because my mother has been waffling back and forth between wanting one, because her knees are hurting so much, and not wanting one, because apparently, someone has told her it would be too much for her to take care of (apparently, plugging in the charger would be more than she can handle?) and too much responsibility. So my brother made sure to tell her that it was his, he was not leaving it for her, but he wanted her to try it out and think about it. If she does decide she wants one, it would mean getting rid of her couch (which she doesn’t use, anyhow), and probably at least one shelf. Her apartment is very tiny, and she would need to be able to turn around with it in her living room. I know quite a lot of people who use motorized wheelchairs or scooters, and they tend to have very little furniture, so they had room to maneuver – and they had much larger apartments than my mother’s! She wouldn’t miss the couch, but she does love her little tchotchke!! And not-so-little ones. I forget. She’s even got a garden statue of an angel in her living room, and that thing’s pretty darn big!

But now that she’s had a chance to drive this one around a little, she can think about it, and decide what is more important to her; maintaining independence as her knees get worse, or her bulky furniture and bric-a-brac.

I do think she’ll eventually agree to taking it. Especially as we assure her that she just needs to plug it in to charge the battery; any other maintenance is stuff my siblings and I can take care of, for her. It’s not something to load up like her walker (I have ramps and can load it into my van, but it’s very hard for her to get in and out of it), but it’ll let her make runs to the shops in town as needed.

We shall see.

I’m glad we were able to get together today. Our province has decided to lock down even harder again, starting tonight at midnight. I’m not entirely sure why, but we were already listed as “critical” (even as our Schrodinger’s Virus numbers, which were never all that high to begin with, continue to go down as the season progresses). Not sure what word they’ve come up with to be scarier than “critical”. Anyhow, it was already illegal for more than one person visiting at a time – and even then, only because my mother lives alone, so she has an exemption. That was why we met at a park, though my mother’s apartment is so small, we couldn’t have all fit comfortably in there, anyhow. More than a few people have noticed that these intensified lock downs and restrictions happen right before every special date or holiday, regardless of what the actual data is, or that the lock downs themselves have been completely ineffective. I’m quite content to be a hermit, but for people like my mother, who thrives on social interaction, it’s making life more … well, like no life at all. Today’s visit will, I hope, provide a bit of relief from the malaise I’ve been seeing in her lately. She tried to be critical and miserable about the surprise, but I could see that she was really enjoying herself – even with the wind!

When I got home, it was early enough that I considered getting some more gardening in, but not only was it still quite windy, the girls convinced me to back off a bit. It’s a good thing I’ve got them watching out for me, because I have a terrible habit of overdoing things, then ending up out of commission for several days. :-D

So I made mocha chocolate truffles, instead. Not the best I’ve ever made, but good enough to satisfy a craving! I did accidentally make a double recipe, though. The recipe I was found called for 1/2 pound of one type of chocolate, and 1/2 pound of another. I didn’t have fancy chocolate, but I did have lots of chocolate chips that were suitable, so I broke out the scale. It’s in metric, and 1 pound total of chocolate is 2.2 kg, so I started weighing it out. It was an awful lot of chocolate, so I decided to do a half recipe. It wasn’t until I’d poured the hot cream into the chocolate to melt it that I realized I had it backwards. 1 kg is 2.2 pounds, not the other way around! I’d weighed out 1.1 kg.

Oops.

Thankfully, part of the reason I was making it was to use up the cream before it expired, so I just doubled the rest of the ingredients.

It worked. :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: outdoor planting – eventually. Also, we have flowers!

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Today was the day to start planting our onions. I wanted to get the transplants out, to make room for the squash in the sun room, and get the onion sets in.

The plan was to have onions on either side of the kale that has already been direst sown, in the bed on one side, then plant the rest of the onions in the bed at the opposite end, with kohlrabi in the middle (those don’t get planted for another week). Deer don’t like onions, so we’re hoping that between those, and the flashy windmills, they will stay away from the things they do like, such as the spinach.

This is one of the beds we made last year, that we simply topped up with new garden soil. I realized that the soil was starting to wash away on the sides, so I brought over more logs to act as walls.

Thankfully, these logs have been sitting out for 2 years, so they’re quite dry and light.

I didn’t have any short enough to use as end caps, though. We’ll have to take care of that later.

Once the logs were in place, I brought over more soil to fill in the sides, so I’d have room to plant into, without anything collapsing down into the logs.

My younger daughter joined me when I was just finishing up the first bed, so she continued to bring soil to add to the sides of all the beds, while I brought more logs to shore up the other bed from last year, that didn’t have any yet.

We’d used up the smaller logs when we first starting building the new beds, so the more logs I brought over, the bigger they were getting! Which is good, I suppose, since these are deeper beds than the new ones.

My daughter continued adding soil to the beds while I started transplanting the Nostar onions we started from seeds. There were three very different sizes! The ones that were in peat pellets ended up being the largest ones, while the ones in the K-cups had started out larger, but did not retain moisture as well, until I moved them onto their own tray, where they could be watered thoroughly without drowning the onions in the pellets. Then there were the ones that were started some weeks later. There are still some seedlings in the cups they were sown in; I only took the biggest ones to finish off the row.

On the other side of the kale, my daughter and I planted a three row grid of the Red Karmen onion sets that arrived in the mail yesterday.

By this time, we were done for the day!!

This bed is where the rest of the onions and the shallots will be planted, with the kohlrabi to go in the middle. The bed to the left is the one that’s half-planted with carrots. A second variety will go in the other half as soon as possible.

Oh, I almost forgot. When I was doing my rounds this morning, I took another look at some of the old corrals and other things around the barn and outer yard, hoping to find something we could salvage and build raised beds out of. There was nothing! Everything out there is just too rotted out. There’s possibly usable material that was stacked in an old shed, but the shed has collapsed on top of it, so we’d have to remove an awful lot of stuff, just to see one way or the other. It’s such a mess, just getting into there to move stuff has a high risk of injury. It’s unfortunate, but there’s pretty much nothing to salvage at all, never mind to build accessible raised beds with. Ah, well. It was worth a look!

After putting things away, my daughter stayed out to tend other things while I transferred the squash to the sun room and set up the lights as best I could. They are long aquarium lights, so I can only set them up vertically along the shelf. It will be good when we can invest in some grow lights, that we can hand over each shelf. At least the sun room does get a lot of natural light through much of the day.

While I was working on that, my daughter made an exciting discovery.

The crocuses have started to bloom!

They are so tiny!!!

I wasn’t able to get a photo of the third type, which are purple and white.

I will have to make sure to check these tomorrow morning, so see how much they open!

My daughters are just thrilled to see them. I don’t think either of them expected them to survive February’s Polar Vortex, having been planted just this past fall. So they are really excited right now!

An excellent note to end the day on. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: planting day, indoors – and that didn’t work!

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Today’s priority was to start the last of the seeds indoors. I’d been preparing a bin with toilet paper tubes, as something that would allow the least root disruption when transplanting (at least, so I’ve read). After a couple of days, it was time to start planting the Montana Morado corn!!

Aren’t they gorgeous?

The seed packet said “at least 75 seeds”. That’s a lot more than 75!

I started puttering with the peat filled tubes in preparation of planting in them, but something felt wrong. Ever after a couple of days, some of the tubes were still floating on a layer of water, and as I made holes in the medium, it seemed really dry below the very top.

I didn’t want to take a chance, and decided to crack open one of the tubes.

I am very glad I did.

It was completely dry inside!

Well, so much for that idea. If the peat didn’t absorb the water after all this time, it wasn’t going to happen.

For the next while, I opened every one of those tubes to empty them.

Once that was done, I kneaded it like bread dough, to work in the water. Then added more water and kept working the mixture until it was completely wet.

I should have done that right from the start!

I did work in the last of the sifted garden soil, too. The soil absorbs the moisture faster than the peat, so I thought that might help. The amount was quite small, compared to the quantity of peat!

As for the toilet rolls, they will not go to waste. These were dumped into the old kitchen garden, where they be composted directly into the garden, as we add soil.

The bin is still being used, though.

After punching holes into the bottoms of more cups and filling them, I ended up quite quite a bit of unused peat mix.

I made sure to water them from the top again, just to be sure, and left them to drain for a while.

For small seeds, I like to use a bamboo skewer to handle the seeds, but for larger seeds like this, I find a straw works great. It’s just the right size to push holes into the medium, and is perfect for pushing the seeds down to the right depth.

I knew I wouldn’t use up all the cups, so I didn’t cover up the seeds until they were all done, so I could easily see which cups were planted, and which were not.

Then I used some twine to wrap around and between the cups, to mark between the planted and unplanted cups.

I ended up with 33 cups with corn in them; 31 with 4 seeds each, and 2 with 3 seeds each.

I have some concerns about doing it this way, but starting corn indoors has been an active topic of discussion on several cold climate gardening groups I’m on. Most of the experienced Zone 3 gardeners say all corn should be started indoors (my mother never did; I would say the varieties make a difference!). Some insist that corn is too tender for transplanting, but the few who say that usually have many others commenting, saying they start their corn indoors all the time, and have never had issues with transplant shock.

So I’m hoping this works out. I really want to successfully grow this variety here!!

The remaining cups were planted with Mongolian Giant sunflowers. There isn’t a lot in the package, but the remaining 13 cups all got 2 or 3 seeds in them. I think there was a total of 33 seeds in the packet.

They all gone one last watering when all the planting was done.

The cover can be placed over the bin to help keep the moisture and warmth, if necessary. I think it should be fine, without, but we’ll see.

That done, it was time to plant the Hopi Black Dye sunflower seeds, and the cucamelons.

Again, there weren’t a lot of sunflower seeds in the packet. I’d forgotten how small the cucamelon seeds are! :-D

Since these were going into Jiffy pellets, the sunflower seeds each got their own pellet. It still filled less than half of the tray. There were 28 seeds in the pack, and I used the twine to mark between the two seeds. The cucamelons each got several seeds per pellet. I didn’t keep track of those. We still have the tubers from last year’s cucamelons, so it should be interesting to see which do better after they are planted out in June.

After these were done, we did the onions outside, which freed up shelves in the sun room. All the remaining seeds in the aquarium greenhouses are now in the sun room. I’m starting to be a bit concerned. Not a single squash or gourd has sprouted since the one Crespo squash germinated. That one is doing well (as are the dancing grouds), at least. I know gourds take a long time to germinate, but I would have at least expected more Crespo squash to germinate by now. I’m hoping the warmth of the sun room will be what they finally need to get them going. We shall see!

Starting the seeds indoors – and having to change plans on how to do some of them – took a lot longer than expected.

So did planting outdoors. Because, of course, things got changed up there, too!

You can read about that in my next post! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Morning kitties… and more, somewhere

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Mornings can be difficult with so many cats in the house.

Cats that like to sleep across my legs or braced against my back, then don’t want to move when I try to roll over!

Ginger has become one of those cats. The problem is, he likes to lean against me on the outside of the bed. Then, because he refuses to move when I roll over, he ended up falling off the bed!

Silly thing.

His big sister, Nicco, is also a silly kitty. :-D

Cousin Susan, however, can be a mean bugger! She’s one of several that, for some reason, tend to go after Nicco. :-(

It’s been interesting to see how Ginger’s fur is growing back. One of the scars is now the demarcation line between the white fur on his chest, and the orange fur on his shoulder. The orange seems to be growing in much darker than the rest of his fur, though. We are curious to see if he’s going to have a dark patch on his shoulder.

Ginger is now, I believe, a big brother.

When I came out to feed the outside cats, Butterscotch was waiting at the door for me, looking considerably less round.

I can’t tell with the other cats. They all look thicksome at the best of times. I’m just going to assume the females are pregnant. We still are sure if Ghost Baby is male or female. No sign of Junk Pile today. If she were also pregnant, it’s entirely possible she’s busing having kittens right now. They tend to all give birth within days of each other.

I even saw a skunk this afternoon. I was working in the sun room when I heard what sounded like a bird hitting the window. I went outside to check and startled a skunk away from the kibble house. They don’t usually come out during the day like that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a hungry mama, taking a chance.

Today was a planting day, but things didn’t turn out as expected (does anything ever turn out as expected?? LOL). More to come in my next posts! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: an experiment, plus the jiggler is in!

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Today I took my mother to her doctor’s appointment, so I got very little garden stuff done today. Last night, however, I was able to start prepping the toilet paper tubes we’ll be using to start the Montana Morado corn in.

I picked up this coolant funnel long ago, because it’s perfect for jobs like this! :-D

I neglected to take photo of the next step. After filling all the tubes with peat, I used the 1/4″ hardware cloth I still have a piece of, laid it over the bin, then sifted peat over everything. Aside from topping up the tubes, I wanted it to get in between the tubes and fill the gaps to hold them in place. Especially in the spots where the wheels of the bin are, with a “fender” on the inside that I couldn’t put tubes on because it was too uneven.

After that, a whole lot of water was poured over all the tubes using a watering can. It would have been much easier to use a hose on “mist”, but by then it was night and too cold to use the hose.

The sun room was nice and warm still, though!

Adding the water had two unexpected effects.

The first was, the tubes started to float! I should have expected that. The problem was, you can’t actually see that it was floating. I’d added another watering can of water before I reached out to even the tops of some tubes, and the whole thing sank!

The peat may have been all light and floating, and it takes a long time to absorb moisture, but the tubes are a different story! They not only quickly absorbed water, but some of them started to come apart at the seams. Thankfully, they’re packed tightly enough to hold each other in place.

It did make be wonder if this would work at all.

I think it will. Here is how it looked this morning.

The cardboard actually seems to be helping the peat absorb more moisture. I went over the surface with a spray bottle. You can see in the photo that some of them still have dry areas. This is all being absorbed from bottom, though, so they should have been mostly moistened through. Normally, I would have premoistened the peat, but there was just too much needed for this job.

I’ll check it again tonight and see if I can start planting the corn, or if it will wait until tomorrow. There is still enough water in there that the tubes in the middle are still floating a bit, as the bottom of the bin is sagging from the weight of the water in that area.

After I got home from helping my mother, I made a quick run into town and made a special trip to a dollar store. I picked up some hula hoops. We haven’t been able to find row cover supports, so my daughter thought of cutting hula hoops and using those. If it works out, we can get more later.

I also cleaned the store out of pinwheels (they only had 6 left), plus I got some spinners and wind vines. When I did my rounds this morning, I found birds digging in the dirt in the bed we planted carrots in. :-( All those beds now have shiny metallic pinwheels in them. I’ve set up wind vines at the strawberry spinach, and as close to the garlic beds as I could. I put spinners in the ornamental apple trees over where the spinach was planted. We still have a few more of those, but we’ll save them for later. I will probably get more pinwheels after the store restocks. It would be good if we could replace the plastic grocery bags on the pea trellises with things like that. I noticed there was a solar motion sensor floodlight that would be good for startling deer, but it was out of budget. :-/

The girls and I were quick about putting the bird scarers out. I had hoped to cover the beds with plastic, but it was just too windy. So I watered the beds again. The water will help regulate the temperature in the soil as temperatures dip overnight. At least, that’s what I’ve read! I didn’t get any photos because, to be frank, I just wanted to get back inside again! When I checked the weather once I was inside, it said we were at 2C/32F – but the windchill was -6C/21F! It certainly felt like it was below freezing. Meanwhile, the thermometer in the sun room was reading about 28C/82F.

One of the things I made sure to do before I went to my mother’s was to get the mail. The last of our onion sets were in, but so was another pleasant surprise!

The kit to convert our pressure canner to use a weighted gauge (aka: jiggler) is in!!!

I can hardly wait until we can test it out!

That might be a while, though. We’ve got lots of outside stuff that needs to get done, and we won’t be in a position to continually monitor the canner while it’s being tested.

I’m really looking forward to it! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: planting day!

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We had another change in plans, today.

I was supposed to take my mother to a doctor’s appointment, but the clinic called and it got rescheduled to tomorrow.

Which meant I could change into my grubbies and go play in the dirt! :-D

Today, we finally got most of our cold hardy seeds in the ground. :-) The first to go in were the lettuces.

We’ve got 4 types of lettuce; three are dark reds/purples that we ordered, plus a packet of buttercrunch that we got as free seeds. :-) These were alternately planted in the chimney block retaining wall.

Also, the plastic containers from things like sour cream and cottage cheese make excellent label markers! :-)

We’ll sow more in a couple of weeks somewhere else. We haven’t decided where, yet.

Then it was off to the newly finished garden beds.

The bed on the far left of the first picture has a single row of purple kale down the middle. These were other free seeds from Baker Creek that we got. :-) Later, that bed will have onions planted on either side.

The three middle beds each have a double row of spinach in the middle. In a couple of weeks, we’ll sow more along the sides.

The last bed, that is half watered, has carrots in it. We got one kind as pelleted seeds, which made it very easy to plant and space them properly. They’re supposed to be 1 1/2 – 3 inches apart, and they’re planted in roughly a 3 inch grid. Sort of like square foot gardening, but without bothering to mark out square foot plots. We’ll plant the other three varieties in similar density.

I have to say, by the time my daughter and I finished planting these, I was really, really looking forward to when we have the accessible raised beds! My knees are shot, so I can’t squat like my daughter could, so I was bending from the waist. Not only did that get painful after a while, but I was getting head rushes every time I straightened!! Meanwhile, my daughter has a bum knee, and a messed up shoulder, so she kept having to alternate positions to be able to reach, too. We really need to find materials to build the raised beds. We’re hoping to make a trip to a salvage yard this summer, so hopefully we’ll be able to find some good materials there.

Meanwhile, I’ve now got shipping confirmations for several other items from Veseys, including the mulberry tree! Which means we need to find some way to take down several dead trees in the area it will be planted in. We might have to just do it manually. :-/

The only thing we don’t have shipping confirmation for yet are the potatoes. It might be another couple of weeks before those get shipped.

The onion sets we ordered from Veseys should arrive in the mail tomorrow. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to pick that up, depending on how things go with driving my mother around. Which means we should be able to start planting onions the day after, including our surviving transplants. It should be interesting to see the difference between onions from sets, and from seed.

We’re going to need to pick up netting to protect the beds from birds and deer. Even for the garlic beds. The birds are digging around in the dirt, like they dig around in the leaf litter in the trees. I don’t know what’s in there that they’re after. They’re not going for the garlic, but they’re messing up the soil enough that some get partially uncovered, and kicking it up far enough that it’s covering up the paths!

We also need to get more seeds started indoors over the next few days. These will be the last ones to start indoors.

We saved up just enough toilet paper tubes to fill the under-bed storage bin. Once they’re filled, we’ll start the Montana Morado corn. Then, with whatever’s left, we’ll start sunflower seeds until they’re all filled, then move on to the Jiffy pellets. Then there are the cucamelons. If there is enough room left in the Jiffy pellet tray, they’ll go in there. Otherwise, we’ll do the double cup method for them.

Once the onions are planted out, we should be able to move all our starts to the sun room. It’s much warmer in there than the aquarium green houses right now. In fact, I’m considering moving some of them over, now. We can move the lights over, later, though I’m not sure how we would set them up. The ones for the big tank are quite long. I might set them up vertically. We’ll see. The other gourds in particular have not sprouted yet, and neither have any more Crespo squash (the one that did is already in the sun room, along with the dancing gourds). I think they really need that warmth.

It feels so good to be planting outside!

The Re-Farmer

Soil tests three and four

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Well, I finally got around to doing two more soil tests.

You can read how the first two tests went, here, here, here and here. (Links will open in new tabs)

One of the areas I tested was the soil under where we planted potatoes last year. The other sample was from the northwest corner of the garden area, where we will be planting blocks of corn and sunflowers, and where no one has ever tried to grow anything before.

Here is the potato bed soil. We tried the Ruth Stout method of simply putting the potatoes on the ground and topping it with a thick layer of mulch. Straw mulch, in our case, because that’s what we had. In the fall, I had removed the mulch to find the potatoes, turning the soil a bit in the process, then put the mulch back again. Though I’d done nothing to the ground other than put mulch on it, the soil was quite soft and easy to dig into to get the potatoes. It was still very soft when I dug down to get my sample.

As with the other tests, the soil is very alkaline. That green is darker than the darkest green on the scale, which is a pH of 7.5. Like all the other soil samples, our pH is probably 8.

The orange is potash (potassium), and the blue is phosphorus. Both tested at about the medium range; almost, but not quite dark enough to rate a “high”.

The purple is nitrogen, which is as low as it goes!!

Now for the soil that has had no amendments of any kind.

This area gets very hot, with only a couple of hours of shade at sunrise. There is more grass and green at the south end of this area, but in the north corner, even weeds have a hard time growing.

I think we can see why!

As with the other samples, the soil is very alkaline. There is some potash (the colours appear darker in the photo than in real life), but basically nothing for phosphorus (blue cap) and nitrogen (purple cap)! And we’re going to be growing corn there!

Have I mentioned how glad I am we were able to buy so much garden soil?

I think I’ll be mentioning it more than a few times, over the summer! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: old kitchen garden, part two

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Part One here.

After the girls finished planting the Strawberry Spinach, they went ahead and spaced out the concrete blocks to they would run from end to end across the garden. The gaps in between were fairly large, so they had the idea of filling them with bricks and brought a bunch over.

I liked the idea, so I ran with it. With a bit of adjustment on some blocks, I could fit three bricks in between each block. Then, because we have them, I used only red and white bricks, alternating with 2 red and 1 white, them 1 red and 2 white. Soil needed to be added under them, so they would be the same height (more or less) as the blocks.

That done, I finished filling the space against the wall with larger rocks. I ran out, so I took the wagon to various spots around the old garden, where rocks had been pulled out and left against trees or posts, etc. Once those were in, small rocks were added. When I ran out of those, I just walked around the garden with the wagon, picking them as I went along, and had more than I needed in no time at all. The hard part was not picking too many bigger rocks, because I had nowhere to put them.

Once that was done, I filled gaps between the bricks with soil, and pushed more soil up against the blocks and bricks, then used a hose to clean them off. This is how it looked when it was done.

The path is uneven and lumpy, but it serves its purpose!

Of course, the cats were already using the dirt as litter. *sigh*

We haven’t even finished clearing that soil of roots, and it’s sitting on soil that wasn’t loosened. The next step will be to spread the piles of soil out, taking out as many roots as we can. At least we got what I think are the last of the big roots out. They were all under where the blocks and rocks are, and spreading away from the house, so they were getting smaller as they got further out. The ground slopes slightly downward from the house, which is why we added the retaining wall. We’ll be building up more soil at the wall, to level things off a bit, so shifting this soil downwards will just help with that.

This is what we cleared out so far. They will go into the burn barrel, since much of this is from invasive plants. We’re under a fire ban, but burn barrels should still be okay. I’ll have to check, first.

There will be another path running through roughly the center of the garden, towards the retaining wall. We have more of those concrete blocks. There were two stacks, but I found more, half buried under grass and weeds. I think we have at least 5 more of them out there. Maybe more. Hard to say what we’ll find once we start moving things!

Then we can start adding new garden soil, and finally start planting in some sections. There are flowers on the north side of the garden that I want to dig up and split, but I’m not sure where I want to put them yet. Then there are those flowers my mother now wants me to keep (I checked before I started laying cardboard down that first summer, and she’d told me there was nothing she wanted to keep. The next summer, she changed her mind!). In the photos, you can easily see them, as they’re the only green in there right now. They are invasive, but pretty, so I want to transplant some into a contained space, then get rid of the rest to free up garden space. Or maybe I’ll find someplace to plant them as a ground cover. We’ll see.

Long term, this will be our kitchen garden, and will have a combination of herbs and quick growing vegetables and greens, nice and handy for quick picking as needed. It will be a challenge, with the two big ornamental apple trees, the double lilac, the honeysuckle, and the roses. There’s a rose that was struggling, but actually bloomed last year, after we pruned the tree above it. It’s a lovely pink rose – and it got broken! I think by a deer. I’d like to transplant it somewhere where it can get full sun. The white roses are lovely, but remarkably invasive. Then there are those vines that keep making their way through the mulch and spreading!

We’ll work it out slowly, over the next few years. For now, the poppies will go in the corner near the new path, and the lettuces will go along the west end, where they will be lightly shaded by the trees for much of the day. We’ll see what else we can fit in, if needed.

For now, I’m really wishing we had a hot tub. Or one of those tubs for old people, with a door and a seat. I could really use a hot soak, but if I try to take a bath, I am not sure I’d be able to get up again without help. Being broken sucks! :-D I’ll just have to borrow my husband’s bath chair and take a not shower, instead.

Getting a hot tub really would be a good idea. It would be very therapeutic for my husband’s back, too! Not that we have anywhere to put one right now. I’m sure we could figure it out, though!

All in good time. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: old kitchen garden, part one

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A change in plans.

Today, I wanted to get started on the old kitchen garden, where we intend to plant the poppies.

This is how it looked at the start.

The hose is from the sump pump in the old basement.

It has not turned on in ages. It’s simply been too dry.

You can see a path has started to form, a couple of feet from the wall. This is mostly from the cats crossing the garden, though we sometimes walk through there, too. The plan was to add new soil against the wall, to plant the poppies, and put in a stepping stone sort of path where one naturally formed. We found some concrete blocks out near the barn that we decided to use for the paths.

But first, it needed to be cleared.

Our first summer here, we did a major clean up of this old garden, removing a fence, cleaning it out as best we could, laying down cardboard, then covering it with straw, grass clippings, kitchen waste, and any soil from various places that we could get it. You can read about the clean up we did here, here, here and here. Yeah. It took a while! (all links will open in new tabs)

My mother had flowers growing here, and quite a few of them made their way through the layers. So did the crab grass and a vine we’ve been fighting continually since moving here. So the first thing I had to do was rake away the mulch, down to what was left of the cardboard layer. You can see lots of roots that were uncovered!!

Most of the biggest ones were from that invasive vine. It used to cover the entire wall until my brother and his wife pulled it down while painting the house, the summer before we arrived. They were causing damage, so we don’t want them growing back.

Speaking of damage, that crack is in the foundation under the old kitchen, which was tacked on to the log cabin portion of the house at some point. There’s a crawl space under there.

My brother told me about fixing the broken attic window above the old kitchen. It never occurred to me that the glass would still be on the ground! We’d laid cardboard over it, and never new it!

Finding glass from a broken window, I can understand. But this?

Why a spoon?

At this point, I was breaking up the soil with the fork and pulling out lots of roots.

Lots of roots.

So many roots.

Which created a problem I did not expect.

I was pulling roots out from under the old kitchen foundation, and the concrete floor of the sun room. In the process, soil started falling out from underneath.

No wonder the windows in the sun room are cracking as it shifts!!!

This required a change in plans. There was no way I was going to turn this into a garden bed, where watering it might continue to undermine the concrete. I needed to get those roots out, then shore up the sides.

It’s a good thing we have a nice big rock pile over by the power pole. We also had piles of smaller rocks we’d gathered from the garden, though not very many.

Large rocks were placed against the wall, soil put back to fill gaps and support the rocks, smaller rocks are added on top, and the concrete blocks were placed to begin the path.

We brought those blocks over in the wagon, which is rated to 300 pounds. I don’t know how much they weight, but with three blocks, the wagon didn’t want to roll. My daughter pushed while I pulled. After that, I only put in two blocks at a time.

The wagon was used to bring rocks over, too.

After a while, it started to get hard to find smaller rocks. There is decades of detritus that has decomposed on them, with a very strong layer of crab grass rhizomes!

As we worked our way down, still clearing away roots, we got hung up by an old rose bush. It took a while, but I finally got it out!

That is one weird looking root clump!!

My daughter was just coming back from a break (we were very careful not to overdo it; the last thing we need is to injure ourselves!!) as I put it in the wheelbarrow with all the other roots. She was checking it out when she suddenly dropped it in alarm.

This thing had been exposed and wriggled at her!!

I don’t know what this grub is, but considering it was burrowing in the rose roots, I’d say it’s not a beneficial creature to have in the garden. :-/

This is where we stopped for a longer break. Sustenance was needed!

There are enough larger rocks to line the wall. My daughter used some to make a little wall around the power cables that run under the old kitchen. We also found a cable running along the wall to the corner, which is going to be carefully covered with rocks.

There are two more of those blocks in the wagon. They will be spaced out from one end to the other, and the gaps filled with soil and rocks.

As for the poppies, they will now be planted on the other side of the path!

Meanwhile, as I’ve been working on this post, the girls have gone back outside and are planting the Strawberry Spinach. :-)

The Re-Farmer