Our 2021 garden, interrupted

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Today being Sunday, I normally avoid all unnecessary work. With the weather turning nice, it became a day to get back to hauling dirt, so we’ll have something to direct sow and transplant into, so that counts as necessary work! Tomorrow is supposed to get quite hot, so I wanted to get as much manual labour done today.

I had a couple of distractions.

One of them was the mock orange at the clothes line platform. I was starting to wonder if it had survived our deep freeze in February. We’ve been including it in the watering, and parts of it have started to leaf out, so I figured it would be a good time to prune it, now that I could actually see which parts were still alive.

I did accidentally snip one branch that had leaves, but otherwise, this is all of what got killed off this past winter.

A lot of little twigs and tips got snipped away, too. There’s not a lot left, but I know it will recover quite well. These are remarkably resilient plants!

It was also a nice enough day that the transplants could be set out to harden off again.

This is the first day of hardening off for all the Mongolian Giant sunflowers, and most of the Montana Morado corn. Some of the cups got left in the bin, as they either didn’t have anything sprouted in them, yet, or had only recent sprouts. I’ve been watering them in the bin from below, and I noticed many of the cups had roots coming through the drainage holes, so I put them in other cups to protect the roots while they were outside.

That done, it was time to start hauling soil.

I had company.

Nutmeg really wanted attention!

He and Ginger share many mannerisms. Ginger has a habit of hunching down and flopping a certain way that I just figured was because of the missing leg, but Nutmeg does it, too!

He’s such a cutie. :-)

This was the progress I made before I headed in. I couldn’t figure out why I was starting to feel kind of light headed, but then I realized I’d had only 4 pieces of toast for breakfast – and it was past 3pm!

You can see the corn block that had been done before the rains started, in the back. I’d finished a sunflower block, another corn block, and over half of a sunflower block, before heading in for some sustenance.

Not straight in, of course, because there’s always something to do first, right? :-D The seedlings went back into the sun room, and various garden beds got checked. It’s so nice to see so many seedlings, even if they are still really tiny!

After a couple of hours, I headed back outside. On my way to where I’d left the wheelbarrow by the garden soil, I paused to check on my daughter’s tulips. They have not opened, yet, but we can now see the colours of petals beginning to show in most of them.

Something didn’t seem right, though. In fact, something seemed very wrong.

Were there fewer flower buds?

Yes, indeed! Among the tulips closest to the edge, the flower stalks were cleanly snipped, and the flower buds missing.

It seems the deer were enjoying some appetizers!

I am not impressed. I didn’t expect them to squeeze between the plum and apple trees to get at these.

I left them for the time being, and continued working on the corn and sunflower blocks.

One of the down sides of setting up these beds in the area we intend to plant food trees later on, is that they are very close to the road, and today was a high traffic day. Thankfully, with all the rain we’ve had, I didn’t have the clouds of dust blowing in that we usually do. At least that won’t be as much of a problem for long, as the lilac hedge is leafing out quite nicely. It does a great job of stopping the dust cloud. One of the ATVs that passed by turned out to be our vandal, studiously and resolutely pretending not to see me. ;-) Which is fine. At least he’s stopped giving me the finger as he goes by.

During one of my trips back to the pile of soil, I saw him heading back, then could hear him slow down and finally stop on the road. I decided to see why, and found that he’d crossed paths with someone and they both stopped to talk on the road. So I continued with getting the load of soil, then heading back to the last of the corn blocks I was working on. I could hear the vehicles part ways, and our vandal’s ATV driving onto his property. As I was placing the soil, I could hear the ATV getting closer again, though clearly not on the road. Eventually, I heard it stop and the engine was shut off.

Then I started hearing gun shots.

By the 4th shot, I decided it was time to go inside. I have no idea what direction he was shooting in, but I wasn’t going to take chances with a stray bullet. It wasn’t a high powered rifle he was using; it was likely just a .22 I had only a row and a half left to do, but that can wait until tomorrow!

It was shortly after 8pm when I went inside, but I did head back out again about 10 minutes later. I dug out what was left of the yellow rope we found while cleaning up and tied it around some trees by the tulips.

It might be a bit too high, but I hope it will still discourage the deer from going under the bright yellow thing. We can hand dangly things off of it, to further discourage the deer.

As you can see by the spots of colour, there are still quite a few tulip buds. Thankfully, none of the Bull’s Eye tulips – the little ones in the foreground – were harmed. I counted the other ones, and all 54 bulbs have come up, but only half of the Bull’s Eye tulips (I found a fourth one had emerged, though it’s not visible in the above photo).

While I was doing this, I heard our vandal’s ATV start up again, so I headed over to where I might be able to see something. I did eventually see him off in the distance in his field. I can’t imagine what was out there that he would be shooting at. Normally, I would guess a skunk or some other potentially troublesome creature small enough that a .22 would be useful, but that would be an issue closer to his house or outbuildings, none of which we can see from our place. Out in the field like that, I might expect a bear, but if that were so, I would have expected to hear a higher caliber rifle!

Ah, well. Gun shots in the country are not all that unusual. The only reason it was a concern is because I had no way of knowing what direction he was firing, and I would not expect him to care where his bullets might end up, if he missed hit his target, whatever that may have been.

So that was it for my garden work today. Tomorrow, I’ll finish those last rows in the last corn block.

Oh, my goodness. I just checked the weather. The predicted high for tomorrow has been increased. We’re now expected to hit 27C/81F tomorrow afternoon! I’ll have to make sure I finish up much earlier in the day. The expected low tomorrow is 15C/59F. then temperatures are expected to drop right down again. We’ll have overnight lows just above, or at, freezing for three nights. After that, overnight lows are expected to range between 11C and 14C (52 – 57F) and stay in that range, well into June. Theoretically, that means we can start transplanting things outdoors by the 28th.

Which is what I did last year, when we got a frost on June 2. So while we will do the direct sowing we have left to do, the transplants will wait a bit longer!

Once I’m done with the corn and sunflower blocks, we will be done with all the areas that will be direct sown into. The next job is to work on the bed the winter squash, melons and gourds will go, since we will have to dig post holes for the squash tunnel we’ll be building to support them. Once that’s built, it’s back to hauling soil for the beds all the transplants will be going into.

I forgot to take a picture of the pile of soil. It is much depleted! I suspect we will be finishing it off and bringing soil in from the pile in the outer yard, by the time we’re doing the last of the beds.

I am so glad we were able to get two loads!!

The Re-Farmer

Garden pause

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The much needed rain we are having right now has been accompanied by some pretty chill temperatures! The furnace even turned on, this morning. As I write this, my desktop weather app tells me we are at 4C/39F, but it feels like -1C/30F. But then, it also says we’re raining right now, and we’re not. As I thought might happen, the weather system is passing us by to the south, and some areas are getting storm conditions, but we’re just getting the edges of it.

A couple of days ago, our neighboring farm was rushing to get their crops planted. One of my daughters and I had gone out past midnight to investigate the smell of smoke. There are several wildfires burning in our province, most under control, but none nearby, yet we were still getting smoke! While out, I noticed lights through the trees that looked like vehicles in the rented field beyond the barn, so we went to check it out. It turned out to be farm equipment in the next property over, where they had worked their way close to the property line. Checking the trail cams the next day, I saw the farm equipment going past our driveway after 2am! They got their seed sowed, just in time for the rain.

Looking over all the garden beds this morning, everything is looking fine so far. Even if we dipped low enough to get frost, the things we have planted won’t need to be covered. Which is good, because we don’t have anything suitable to cover the beds we have. Meanwhile, the seedlings in the sun room remain in the sun room. That will set back the hardening off process a bit, unfortunately. Ah, well. It is what it is!

The work outdoors has had to take a pause. The girls did as much as they could, but it was just too cold and wet to continue building more beds for the corn and sunflowers, nor add to the pea trellis. That, at least, we still have plenty of time for.

The blocks for corn will all have 5 twenty foot rows, while the sunflower blocks will have 3 twenty foot rows in them – though we might not have enough sunflowers to fill the blocks. At least not of the purple ones. If the half we started indoors still haven’t germinated in such ideal conditions, I don’t hold much hope that the direct sown half will germinate, either. :-(

With today’s weather, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to get more progress in building beds, but hopefully we’ll be able to get more done over the next couple of days. I don’t mind the delay. We need this rain so much. For all the watering we’ve been doing, it can’t compare to the deep soak that several days of rain can do! Even with the chillier temperatures, I think what we’ve got sprouting right now is going to thrive for it.

The Re-Farmer

Dragging on

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

Let’s talk about pleasant things, first!

Here is an adorable photo of Ginger for you. :-)

Doesn’t he look so sweet and peaceful?

Not at all like the mischievous bugger I had to stop from trying to attack one of the trunks of the big jade tree in the living room! :-D

I did very quick rounds this morning, since I had to head out early, but I did manage to check on the mulberry tree.

It clearly has handled being transplanted just fine!

It’s also doing very well with the cooler, wet weather we’re having right now.

I haven’t been able to get much done for the past couple of days, and not because of the weather.

Yesterday, I called the court office to make sure today’s court date was still on. As expected, with the long weekend, our provincial government increased restrictions even more than they did before Mother’s day. They don’t come into effect until midnight tonight, though, so…

Well, I could only leave a message, as there was no answer. I had to go to my mother’s, on a related matter, so I quickly headed out in the afternoon. Of course, that’s when I got a call back, but not with an answer to my question. I called back, left another message, but never heard from them by the end of the day.

Thankfully, my daughters were able to continue working on things in the garden while I waited for the call. There’s one area ready for one corn variety, then they began working on a trellis for the peas. The plan was to do more clean up in the spruce grove, and use the poplars we’re cutting down to make an sort of A frame on the existing supports, but we haven’t been able to work in that area at all, lately. So they decided to use what we’ve got now and made pegs to hold the twine we were going to attach to the frame, instead. They didn’t get to finish it before they had to come in as the temperature dropped, but it’ll be a while before the peas will be big enough to need the support. I didn’t get any photos yet.

I headed out to the courthouse this morning, leaving early enough to get some fuel and still have time for delays, like road construction (there was some, but just a short stretch) and meet with my brother, who booked the morning off work so he could be with me. We deliberately set a time to meet an hour before court was supposed to start. Just in case.

When we got there, I saw security guards, so that was hopeful. From previously visits to the building, there were security guards only when court was in session.

Well, not this time. It turned out they were there for the court office! The first guard we spoke thought that court had gone virtual, so he went into the office and talked to someone for us, then came back with a number for the crown office, in the bigger city, for us to call. While we were still talking to him, the woman he spoke to came out with a printout for him, and it said everything was delayed until June 18, because of the increased restrictions.

So my brother and I went to his car and I called the crown, only to be told they knew nothing about any virtual court dates; that would be with lawyers only, and the court office of the city we were in to schedule. She was quite frustrated when we told her we were just at the court office, and they told us to call the crown!

We went back to the court office. I wasn’t allowed to go in until I emptied my pockets and they scanned me with a metal detector, while I got the usual covid questions. I did get asked about my Mingle Mask, but when I said I was medically exempt, they were fine with it. My brother had to quickly dash back to his car while I went in (only one person allowed into the court office at a time, anyhow). When I asked about the virtual court session, she told me only lawyers could call in to those (?!?!?!), but that they weren’t doing restraining orders, anyhow. After we talked for a bit, she got my name and the name of our vandal to look up our file. She remembered talking to someone about it and asked if I’d called a couple of weeks ago. I had not. I called yesterday. It had to have been our vandal. Or, more likely, his wife. My voice may be low, but not low enough to be mistaken for our vandal! She then went to look things up while I went to wait in the lobby.

Shortly after, my brother got back and, even though we were only going to wait in the lobby, the security guards still had to scan him, and we both got our temperature checked on our wrists.

When the woman came out again, she told me she’d got through to our vandal’s lawyer, and he agreed to a court date of July 9 – if the courts are open then.

Our vandal’s vindictive civil suit against us is scheduled for July 12.

*sigh*

I do, however, now have the name and phone number for our vandal’s lawyer – something I should have had long ago, but it’s not like anything it working the way it’s supposed to right now. The worst of this is that this is for a retraining order. It’s a safety issue for us, and it just keeps getting delayed. This is now the fifth time!

She said that, if I chose to, I could call the lawyer myself and potentially work something out privately and bypass the courts completely.

Well, I suppose that’s an option, but I really don’t think there’s anything our vandal would agree to that didn’t involve completely dropping the whole thing. Considering that he’s still calling my mother with his bizarre rants about how we’re all laughing at him, his mental state is clearly a concern.

So that was another wasted morning – and another day my brother booked off work that was wasted, too. At least we were finished early enough that he could still make a meeting.

*sigh*

I made sure to call my mother before I headed home, because I knew she’s be concerned. As you can imagine, she wasn’t happy, either, but is having a hard time understanding why the court office isn’t calling us to let us know about the cancellations. It’s almost as if she thinks ours is the only case they’ve got, or that there are very few of them. Meanwhile, they probably had a couple dozen files or more, just on this morning’s docket, all cancelled. The extra frustration is that they DO call the lawyers (more likely just their firms, really), so there’s a sort of two tier justice system. People who can afford lawyers (or are willing to go into debt for one) and those who can’t. Though to be honest, it’s always been like that, so nothing’s really changed, there.

Once I got home, I contacted my LegalShield firm. That membership has more than paid for itself! It’s been so long, the file was actually closed, but it was reopened, and the lawyer assigned to my file will call me. Given that today is the Friday before a long weekend, I don’t expect to hear from him until Tuesday. It’s possible our membership will cover some action between our lawyer and our vandal’s.

I also looked up our vandal’s lawyer. There is a Canadian website that lists all lawyers, and I found his profile – with no photo, and a different phone number from what I have. It listed him as “in good standing” and included the name of a firm. I looked up the firm, which was not linked from the profile, which turns out to specialize in criminal defense. This lawyer was not listed on their website. It’s not even a matter of there being more than one person with the same name. The guy has a somewhat unique surname, and only one in Canada showed up in my search. This is also not the same lawyer or firm our vandal has worked with before. I wouldn’t be surprised if they found a way to drop him from their case load. Still, it all comes across as very strange.

So now I wait for a call back from my lawyer. We’re also somewhat stuck indoors today. We’re getting actual rain right now. From the weather radar, the worst of the weather will be hitting the southern regions of our province, but it’s big enough that we’re getting at least some much needed precipitation. We might even get some of the storms they’re predicting to happen overnight, though I doubt it. What has been happening, though, is repeated loss of our internet. As I am writing this paragraph, we have no internet connection at all. Again. Hopefully, we’ll get enough of a connection that I can publish this, soon!

Traditionally, a lot of people put their gardens in on the May long weekend, but from the looks of the weather this year, few people will. Particularly those living closer to the Rockies, where they have been getting snow! From the zone 3 gardening groups I’m on, quite a few people had taken the chance and started transplanting outdoors, and are now struggling to save their gardens. Thankfully, everything we’ve planted so far is frost hardy. They should be okay, even without being covered. Hardning off our transplants is getting delayed, though I can at least open the inner door to the sun room. Between the screened window of the outer door, and the ceiling fan, the seedlings will get exposed to differing temperatures and some wind. Rotating the bin the purple corn and giant sunflower seedlings are in seems to have made a difference, too. The sunflowers that were looking all floppy and leggy, yesterday, are now standing tall under the lights. That’s encouraging. Now, if only the purple sunflowers would start germinating!!!

Oh, our internet is back! Time to see if I can publish this before the signal is lost again…

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: growing and blooming

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Wow, what a difference a day makes! After yesterday’s heat, our 9C/48F (feels like 5C/41F) is a welcome, if slightly chilly, reprieve. Welcome especially for the rain we got last night! I didn’t have to do any watering this morning!

These are the purple pea seedlings. Definitely not a high germination rate, but it’s possible more will sprout yet. With these, the entire packet was planted, but with the others, we still have lots left. If there are still lots of gaps left in a week, we can successive sow more.

The forecasts have, of course, changed again. We’re supposed to stay wetter and cooler for the next while, and next week, there’s even an overnight low of -1C/30F predicted. But just on the app on my phone. The weather app on my desktop still predicts a low of 5C/41F for that day. We shall see.

It was cool enough that I did not plant the beans this morning. It will wait till later in the day.

The Saskatoon bushes are in full bloom right now! I haven’t seen a lot of pollinators yet, but I hope we’ll have lots of berries this year.

It’s too cool and blustery to more our transplants outside. I want to harden them off, not kill them! The inner door to the sun room has been left open, though, and the window is open in the outer door, so that will cool the sun room down and, along with the ceiling fan, allow for more air circulation.

I rotated the bin the sunflowers and purple corn are in, and adjusted the lights above them to a higher level. I don’t know what to think of the sunflowers. They look really leggy, but these are also a giant variety of sunflower, so this might actually be normal for them.

The corn next to them is doing quite well. Here are the rest of them…

There are still 10 cups that have no germination yet. We are still seeing new seedling popping up, though, so they may still come up. They really responded well after I found a way to put the aquarium lights above them.

The purple sunflowers still have zero germination. These are the ones that were planted in the tray of Jiffy pellets. I don’t know what to make of that. Especially with how quickly the Mongolian Giants germinated. At least the other seedlings are doing well, overall, and more of the squash and melon seedlings are slowly emerging. We should have a decent amount to transplant next month!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: bean beds ready

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Temperatures were supposed to cool down today. I suppose they did, since we didn’t reach 30C/86F , however as I write things – at almost 7:30pm – the temperatures have dropped to 25C/77F, from 27C/81F, earlier. :-/ At least we did get a bit of rain early this afternoon; between that and the wind, it was enough that our seedlings that are being hardened off had to be brought back indoors. Still not the thundershowers we were promised. Those have been pushed back to the end of the week.

Then the sky cleared, and the heat returned. *sigh*

The crazy thing is, the weather system that’s coming our way has already brought snow and overnight temperatures of -5C/23F in other areas. Other zone 3 gardeners in the groups I’m in have been scrambling to save their gardens. Meanwhile, our long range forecast now goes as far as June 2 – our last frost date – which has an overnight low of 12C. The lowest overnight low before then is 5C/41F, an increase since the last time I looked.

Well, no matter. Today, we had to work on the beds for the beans, regardless of the heat. They can be planted any time now, since they won’t sprout until after our last frost date, so they should be safe.

We have three areas marked off at 3′ x 20′ (just under 1m x just over 6m). We’ve managed to scrounge enough cardboard to line one of the areas, plus a little bit more. The rest was covered with a layer of grass clippings, all of which was watered down before we started adding soil.

We will be planting double rows of bush beans in each strip. The trench in the middle is to help hold water. It turns out we can just manage to water even the furthest strip with the hose, so we won’t be needing to use watering cans from the rain barrel for these. Though we marked off 3′ wide strips, the soil is only about 2′ wide (about half a meter).

I’m tempted to go out and sow the beans now! I will wait until the morning, though.

The next area we need to work on is where the sweet corn and sunflowers will be going, which is to the left of the bean beds in the above photo. This is going to be the farthest we’ve had to haul soil, so far, and I’m still not even sure how we need to space things. We started half the sunflowers indoors, and none of the purple sunflowers have germinated yet. Only the Mongolian giants. Of the packets we will be direct sowing, neither have a lot of seeds in them (which is why I’d ordered two of each). So the areas needed for the sunflowers will be smaller. The packets of corn seeds, however, have plenty in them, so we’ll be looking at blocks at least the same size as the one the Dorinny corn is planted in, which is 20′ long by about 14′ wide (about 6m x 4 1/2m).

We have some calculating to do.

Either way, that’s a lot of soil that will need to be moved, and we don’t want to waste any of it. We don’t even have anything to put under the soil as a barrier and amendment anymore; not in any useful quantities.

Ah, well. We’ll work it out!

Meanwhile, on a completely different topic, while we were working in the garden, I got an email notification from a family member. It had a link to a news article. Someone in our little hamlet won a Lotto jackpot! I read the article and realized I know them! (The article only mentioned the husband’s name, and it’s his wife that I know from years ago.) I am so incredibly happy for them! It couldn’t have gone to a more deserving family! It’s also wonderful to hear that someone local has had such a great blessing.

Maybe I should start buying lottery tickets again? :-D

But I digress.

Time to go back to figuring out our corn and sunflower area!

The Re-Farmer

A tulip explosion!

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The girls headed outside this afternoon, and were excited to ask me if I’d seen the tulips.

I had, when I did my rounds this morning, but clearly, something had changed.

The tulips have exploded with flower spikes!

Most of my daughter’s tulips were planted in this spot. Over 50 bulbs in 6 varieties were planted here. We haven’t tried to count how many have come up. I think, by now, any that haven’t come up were casualties of February’s polar vortex. :-(

While just to one side, another group of very different tulips were planted. These are Bull’s Eye tulips (which Veseys apparently no longer carries). Of the 8 bulbs that were planted, it looks like only 3 survived the winter.

I can’t believe how quickly these flower spikes shot up!!

They are not the only ones.

The flower spikes in the grape hyacinths are a bit harder to see, but they are certainly there! Pretty much all of them that we can see have these tiny spikes emerging. Once they start blooming, we’ll finally be able to get a better idea of how many of the 200 we planted survived the winter! :-D

Meanwhile, the winds have only gotten stronger – I had to fight just to open the door to go outside and get these photos! – and the temperatures are still rising. I look forward to the cooler weather and, hopefully, rain to come!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: potatoes are in!

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Wow, what a windy day we’ve got right now!! I headed out early to do my rounds, so I could finish with the potatoes before it got too hot. It was a lovely 14C/57F when I started.

After all the watering was done and it was time to start with the potatoes, I brought over some extra bags, just in case. I’m glad I did.

I ended up adding one more bag for each type of potato. These didn’t have their bases sewn to make them flat, and you can really tell. They’re more floppy looking than the other ones. Two rows is as deep as we can go to reach the bags along the fence, but I can straddle the extras that got added and reach as far as I need to.

Planting the little fingerling potatoes was a bit weird. There were so many really tiny ones! Where the Yukon Gem and Norland got 3 larger potatoes per bag, or 4 little ones, the fingerlings would have 6 or 7 bitty potatoes.

It took a few more trips with the wheelbarrow for soil to get the new bags started, and all the potatoes topped up. Each bag got a handful of mulch on top, followed by a thorough watering. I’m happy to say that drainage will not be an issue with these bags. I could see the excess moisture soaking through – and it was NOT taking any of the soil with it. It was quite clear.

Thinking ahead to when we will be harvesting from these bags, I figure we’ll probably end up dumping the soil right where the bags are now, and turning the area into another garden bed. There are maples growing on the other side of this fence – they used to be part of the inner yard, when I was a kid – but the area does still get an adequate amount of sunlight. It’ll get more as we finally start cleaning up around those maples, cut away the dead stuff, and prune things back.

By the time I was done, the temperatures had crossed the 20C/68F mark, and the winds were even higher. I took all the transplants we’re hardening off back inside, so they wouldn’t blow away! We’ve got a predicted high of 31C/88F, with a “real feel” of 32C/90F, along with the same heat and air quality warnings we got yesterday. We may get thunderstorms by tomorrow morning. That would be nice!! After today, the temperatures will finally start dropping to a more comfortable range, which should last into June. That will make finishing the last of the garden beds much easier! The next couple of weeks are going to be very busy. :-)

With the potatoes now planted, that’s one more thing to check off the list!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: beating the heat, transplants, potatoes and … stalking goldfinches?

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Today, we definitely heated up fast! I was outside early to do my rounds, the watering, and hardening off the seedlings, managing to finish before things started getting too hot. We easily reached 30C/86F and probably went a bit higher. We even got heat alerts, and air quality warnings for those places dealing with wildfires right now. We’re supposed to hit 30C again tomorrow, then the temperatures are expected to drop to highs below 10C/50F, with overnight lows of 2C/36F, so frost is still a possibility!

Our order of potatoes came in. It was expected to come in tomorrow, but when I checked the tracking number, I found out they had arrived on Friday! So they sat at the post office over the weekend. I was going to chit the potatoes this year, but it looks like I won’t have to!

We got only one box of each type, so we are not expecting to have a long term supply, even if they do turn out to be very productive. The Yukon Gem, which we tried and enjoyed last year, are likely a type we will grow more of in the future. We shall see how the others do. To have enough to last the winter for 4 adults who really like potatoes would require a lot more seed potatoes!

This afternoon, my daughter and I braved the heat to do some transplants.

The new lady haskap is now in. You can see the other two in the photo. The other female haskap is harder to see, since it has so few leaves! At least it is growing. Watering everything twice a day is making a big difference all over, but it’s really helping with the struggling haskap.

My daughter chose a spot for her raspberries. They’re now in front of the row of trees in the old garden. The ones that self seeded among my mother’s raspberries that she transplanted. I still don’t quite understand why she moved them from a full-sun location, into the shade. No matter. We now have our first two raspberry bushes planted! As we add more, we will build trellises for them, but that will slowly happen over the next couple of years.

Before we headed in, my daughter and I checked out where the potatoes and their grow bags are going to go. This is near an area of the chain link fence where we are allowing vines to grow. We’re tearing them out, everywhere else we find them, as they are so invasive. Right now, there’s last year’s dead vines on the fence, and we found a tiny little surprise.

This old nest was only about 2 or 3 inches across! We don’t have many birds small enough to have a nest like this. In fact, I can only think of one, and I find myself wondering if it was a hummingbird nest. What a delightful surprise!

After finishing the transplanting, we headed into the cool of the indoors for a few hours. My husband recently picked up a Roku media streaming device. We have Amazon Prime for the free shipping, but now we can watch shows on the big screen TV. That thing hasn’t been turned on in months. :-D I’ve been watching Poirot lately, and settled down to watch an episode while having breakfast… er… lunch… whatever. Which is when I got another surprise.

A bright, yellow, feathered stalker!

It stayed there for a surprising length of time, watching me through the window!

This is not the first time we’ve had a goldfinch decide to perch on a window sill and check out the humans inside. The last time it was last summer, and the bird was trying to look in at my bedroom window. Too funny! And very adorable.

After things started to cool down (which is a relative statement; it’s past 11pm as I write this, and we’re still at 23C/73F), I started setting up the home-made grow bags for the potatoes.

We’ve got 4 bags for each variety. For now, they’ve just got a few inches of soil on the bottoms, which I hosed down thoroughly, after this picture was taken. Tomorrow morning, before things start to heat up again, the potatoes will be added to the bags and topped off with a few more inches of soil. As they grow, we’ll keep adding either soil or straw mulch, and the bags can be unrolled as more height is needed. Hopefully, this will give us a better yield, as well as protecting the potatoes from slugs. We shall see!

Once this was done, I did the evening watering.

I had company.

Rolando Moon kept following me around, then settled herself in the middle of our “found object” art display to watch me. :-D She is so funny!

Once back inside, I had less fun things to deal with; a call with my brother, talking about the upcoming court date this Friday for the restraining order against our vandal. Last time, my brother took a day off work for the court date, only for us to discover everything got cancelled again, due to the province increasing restrictions again. We just had Mother’s Day and have a long weekend coming up, so the province increased restrictions again. :-/ I will call the court office on Wednesday to find out if court dates are cancelled again. It’s hard to know what will happen, but we’re trying to be as prepared as possible. Most likely, our vandal’s lawyer (which he can somehow afford, while claiming I’ve put him almost $200,000 in debt…) will just try to delay things to a trial date. If we are offered a mutual restraining order, I would only accept it if he agrees to stop drinking, and relinquishes his guns for the year the order applies. If possible, I’d request a psychiatric assessment, too. He’d never agree to any of that, though. In past experience (granted, in another province, but I really don’t expect this one to be any better), a lot will depend on whether we get a judge that’s able to set aside his/her own personal biases or not. The hard part is going to be staying focused on the matter at hand, and not allowing the lawyer to distract away with our vandal’s many imagined grievances. A judge, of course, would have no way of knowing that they’re imagined. Nor would his lawyer, for that matter. We shall see how it goes. If it doesn’t get cancelled again, of course. :-/

At least we’ve got lots of hard physical labour in the garden as a distraction and stress reliever!

I like manual labour! :-D

The Re-Farmer

This is me, taking a break from the garden…

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After getting the Dorinny corn planted yesterday, we could take a break from manual labour in the garden for a day or two. Which makes this the first Sunday I’ve been able to take as a day of rest for a while.

Well. Sort of.

For some reason, I did not sleep last night. At all. At 4am, I found myself chatting with my SIL. She had been driven out of bed by pain, so she got up to watch the sun rise. Which is why I ended up outside by 5:30 am, doing my rounds and watering the garden beds, haskaps, the newly planted mulberry and the nearby cedar. We did get some rain during the night, which was wonderful, but it still wasn’t enough to skip the morning watering. Most of the rainfall missed us, it seems. We’re supposed to continue to get rain over the next while, and possibly even thundershowers, but we’ll see if any of it actually falls in our area.

I did, at least, get a nap in after I finished my rounds. Unfortunately, as I’d somehow thought yesterday was Friday instead of Saturday, I hadn’t phoned my mother as I’d intended. I woke to a message my brother had sent a couple hours earlier, telling me he’d called our mother and she was talking about going to the grocery store with her walker. By the time I called and got through to her, she had made her trip. It was just a little one, though, so I will be going over later in the week to help her make a larger trip.

We needed to make our own trip to do some shopping; it should have been done yesterday, but I just wasn’t up to the drive. I still wasn’t up to it, today, but my daughter was able to do the driving, so we headed out this afternoon to the smaller city, where they have a tiny little Walmart. Cat food was one of the things we needed to get more of. It seems people have been making a run on the big bags of kibble, because there was almost none in stock! At least, not of the affordable stuff. I grabbed 2 of the last three bags on the shelves. While there, I also took a look in the gardening section and discovered that all the hoses longer than 10′ were completely out of stock too.

One thing they didn’t have was the hardwood pellets we are switching to, in place of cat litter. All but two of our litter boxes have been switched to the pellets. The cats have gotten used to the pellets already, which is great. Using the pellets has meant no more dust, and no more smell! They also need to be cleaned out less frequently, since they don’t get scooped, but emptied completely after several days. We just have to figure out how to dispose of the pellets during a burn ban.

Getting more of the pellets meant going to Canadian Tire. I haven’t been to this location since before the restrictions, and had heard they didn’t accept medical exemptions, or even Mingle Masks. I’m happy to say that I had no issues at all. At least not with my medical exemption. Finding the pellets was something else entirely! I found the type I’d picked up before in the seasonal section, but in one of the groups I’m on, people talked about switching to the pellets and mentioned getting them at Canadian Tire – but the ones they were talking about were much cheaper. Even the bag I did get was cheaper than litter, but it wasn’t what people were talking about. My daughter tracked down an employee who said they were by the cash desks on the way out, so we went and looked. That’s where the automotive section was, so we were confused. We looked around some more, then finally found a different employee. She looked it up on her phone and found exactly what I’d seen people talking about. It turned out we had to go through the cash desk first, pay for them, then someone would bring them to us.

Once we knew that, we made a side trip to the garden centre, first. My daughter has a birthday next month, and I wanted to pick up an early birthday present for her. She’s been really wanting to have raspberries, and the ones my mother had transplanted in the old garden are not doing well. I’m still not sure why she chose to plant them under the apple and chokecherry trees, and in the middle of flowers. They’re not getting anywhere near enough light. We weren’t going to get more until next year, but she has been wanting them so much, I decided to surprise her. :-)

Once in the garden centre, we found their raspberries and I got my daughter to choose which variety she wanted. There was only two to pick from, and she chose a heritage variety that produces a small yield in June, then a larger yield in September. We got two plants for now. While there, I was very happy to find lady haskaps, and picked one up.

We will harden these off a bit before we transplant them. We’re not sure, yet, where the raspberries will go. Over the next while, we plant to pick up varieties that have different coloured berries, so these will be the first of many! The lady haskap will be planted between the two we have now, though off to one side of the bed, to maintain the spacing they need. The male haskap has opening blossoms, while the struglling female is finally starting to open its leaf buds. We definitely won’t be having any berries this year! With this new female plant, though, we will hopefully start having some next year.

After finding the plants we wanted, we went to pay for them, and asked about the hardwood pellets. We didn’t have someone bring them to us, because it turned out the stack was in the exit vestibule. No wonder we couldn’t find them! The 40 pound bags were only $7 each, so we got two. We’d taken my mother’s car for the trip, since it hasn’t been driven enough. Next time, we’ll be using the van, so we’ll have the space to get more and be well stocked.

While doing my rounds this evening, checking the garden beds, giving the newly planted corn an extra watering (my other daughter had watered while we were gone, but it’s pretty much impossible to over water in this area), and checking out how well my daughter’s tulips are growing, I found the plum trees are in full bloom, now!

The rain we got was enough for them to fully open. It’s remarkable, how much of a difference even a little bit of rain can make, when things are as dry as they have been!

Last night, the girls had popped outside after dark and called me over to see the sun room window. I had the aquarium lights set up vertically on the inner side of the shelf our seedlings are on, and it was causing confusion!

There were moths all over the window, trying to get at the lights, including this beauty!

They won’t have as much light to attract them tonight, though. In checking and watering the seedlings (and finding a whole bunch of new sprouts, including another Crespo squash!), I noticed the Montana Morado corn and Mongolian Giant sunflowers, in their long bin, were getting leggy, reaching for the light coming through the Western windows. I set the brighter of the aquarium lights up above the bin, which should help with that problem. At the rate these are growing, I might have a problem keeping the light high enough above them, that they won’t get too close to the fixture; this one actually puts off some heat, too. With what I’ve got to support the light fixture right now, it’s about as high as it can go, unless I can find something else to hold it in place. We will have to figure that out!

Even on my “day off”, I just can’t stop thinking about the gardening! I can hardly wait to continue setting up the rest of the beds we need and, now that the peas are starting to sprout, finish their trellises and build the squash arches.

I suppose I should let the girls have some of the fun, too… ;-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: first corn block and mulberry are planted!

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My goal for this morning was to get the soil over to where we’re planting the Dorinny corn, before things got too hot. Normally, I don’t have breakfast until after I’m done my morning rounds, but I cut those short to quickly eat before I started hauling dirt. I probably should not have taken the time to eat, first! I got just over two rows done before I had to go inside. I couldn’t believe how quickly it got so hot!!

I didn’t get back to it until well into evening. While one daughter took care of the evening watering, and the other helped me prepare the corn block, things went much faster, too.

Once the soil was in place, my daughter dragged the hose over to give it a soak, while my other daughter and I checked out different locations and decided on where to plant the mulberry tree. It’s going in the strip between the garage and the road. Since we’ve already started cleaning up there, this spot will have the full sun it needs, while still being surrounded by enough mature trees to protect it from the harsher winds. We found a little cedar there, when we first started cleaning up in the area. Like the mulberry, it is not a zone 3 three. Nothing has been done to protect it over the winter, but it has survived, though it’s still very small. This, at least, tells me that the mulberry will have a chance of making it, in this location.

After picking a spot and raking away the thatch, my daughter started digging and immediately hit a huge root!!

So we moved the hole over a bit. :-D

While she dug the hole, I got the mulberry sapling, along with the rest of the pre-soaked peat we still had in the sun room, and a bucket of water. When I got back to my daughter, she had already hit gravel and was struggling to get out a larger rock. Between me with the spade and her with a trowel, we managed to get it out. Thankfully, it turned out to be wide and flat, which made it much easier to get out. Of course, for some reason, it got moved and didn’t end up in the picture. :-/

We certainly won’t have to worry about drainage here. Like everywhere else, there wasn’t a lot of topsoil. After that, it’s gravel.

We filled half the hole with the damp peat, added more water, planted the sapling with more peat, and placed a pair of bamboo stakes beside it for supports. The soil was returned and the cardboard packing material the mulberry came in, including what was keeping the root ball damp, was placed as a mulch. We even put the bigger rocks around to help keep things in place. Then I wrapped some cord around the sapling and the supports. Hopefully, this will also make sure no deer will eat it! I also picked the yellow rope deliberately. I’ve read that using ordinary yellow rope like this, strung in a rope fence around a garden, has worked to keep deer out, even though they can easily get by it. Apparently, there’s something about the yellow rope they don’t like. I figure it’s worth a try to use it, since I happened to find some in the sun room. If not the colour, then the stakes, should act as a deterrent.

By this time, my daughter that was watering things had brought the hose over as close as she could. We gave the mulberry a final watering – and then watered the cedar, too! Since we’ll be tending the mulberry now that it’s here, we’ll take the time to tend the cedar, too. Later on, I’ll bring some garden soil to place around both of them.

While I stayed to water things, my daughters put things away for the night, but I decided to go ahead and plant the Dorinney corn tonight, rather than wait until tomorrow.

After setting the seeds in water to soak, I used the handle of a trowel to make holes about a foot apart. Though my daughter had been able to set the sprinkler over the area for some time, the soil was still pretty dry further down, so I used a watering can to give the rows a deep soak before planting the seeds.

By deciding to put the soil over the grass clippings mulch, instead of the chopped straw, we lost a row – and it turned out there were enough seeds in the packet to need it! Since I’d soaked all the seeds, and I didn’t want them to go to waste, I made another row, instead. Once all the seeds were planted, I gave them another watering.

By then, the water barrel was needing a refill, so I set up the hose and hung around while it filled.

I got company.

Rolando Moon came for a visit today! I haven’t seen her in about a week, but this evening, she decided to keep us company. She even joined us while we were planting the Mulberry tree – and kept trying to drink the dirty water! At least here, she’s drinking the clean water that’s in the watering can. It’s kept filled, so it doesn’t blow away, and she had her head stuck right into the opening. Silly girl! :-D

With the corn planted here, we are done with the early planting, until the potatoes come in next week! Since those are going into grow bags, there are no beds to prepare for them. Everything else doesn’t get planted until after June 2.

As for the other garden beds, the girls checked under the plastic covering the beets and carrots in the old kitchen garden and saw sprouts, so those got taken off. The lettuces are also coming up; the seedlings are still tiny, but big enough that we can be sure they are lettuce sprouts, and not weeds! LOL My daughter planted her Black Form Iris near the poppies, which is right along where she planted her other irises in the fall. I was also able to confirm that we are seeing pea sprouts in all three beds. Just a couple, here and there, but they are clearly not weeds that have made their way through the straw and soil. There are some of those, too!

Looking at the long range forecast, we’re going to keep getting hotter for the next few days, then the temperatures will drop down to a more sane level for the last couple of weeks of May. If those temperatures keep steady through to June, there will be no frosts at all. Still, we will wait. We will use that time to finish preparing the other beds. The climbers will be doing in a bed next to the corn that was planted today; this is where we will be building a squash arch. It looks like the only gourds will be including there will be the dancing gourds and luffa, as there is still no germination in the other three types of gourds. It looks like we’ll have plenty of Halona melons to transplant. I’m seeing quite a few sunburst squash have germinated, but not very many of the other summer squash yet. I’m really excited by how quickly the Mongolian Giant sunflowers and Montana Morado corn have germinated! There are so many things sprouting in the sun room, it’s going to be a challenge hardening them all off at the same time. I’ve got the platform set up where the cats won’t get them, but there’s not that much room on it. We’ll have to work something else to use as well.

What an excellent problem to have. ;-)