An Awesome Day, and growth explosion

May 27, 2018May 27, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

Today, all four of us made it into the city for a family get together. It made for a very long and painful day for my husband, but he hasn’t seen his sister in 4 years. She flies home soon, so he wasn’t about to miss this chance. It was so great to see everyone and spend time with them. It is a rare thing for everyone to be together at the same time, these days.

With all this wonderful rain we’ve been having, it’s just fantastic to see everything so GREEN, everywhere. Even the drive into the city looked completely different.

A short time ago, the trees were just showing green leaves, while everything else looked like the dead growth from last year that you can still see in the ditch. Now, it’s like the trees all just exploded in green.

(Also, I’m amused by the fact that there is a reflection of me driving, hovering in the sky. :-D )

When we got home, we found all sorts of cats had missed our company!

The inside cats were very curious about Nasty Crime boy.

It was a shared curiosity! :-D

I’m loving the long daylight hours, too. Though we didn’t get home until past 8pm, there was still plenty of light, so I did a quick walk around the yard to see how things were.

The crab apple trees north of the spruce grove are finally blooming. My sister and her husband pruned them back quite heavily last summer, but I can see that there are some dead branches that will need to be cut away. These might have died off over the winter.

A few days ago, these linden leaves were just barely new leaf buds!

I had a chance to ask my mother about the linden tree, because it looks so different than I remember it. So much so that, until the leaves unfurled, it looked like two different trees! She told me that she used to cut back the suckers every year, but no one continued that after she went to the senior’s centre she now lives in. That would explain why they look so different. The growth at the base – where these leaves are – is only about 4-5 years old, whereas the trunk in the middle is more like 30-35 years old.

These lilies had been showing in green clusters but after the rain, they shot up several inches and threw out flower stocks and buds virtually overnight!

Rolando Moon approves.

I also did a basement check this evening, and the old part basement is bone dry, though there is some water in the sump pump reservoir. Well below the level of the float.

We still need to get the old hot water tank out of there. It’s much bigger and heavier than modern ones!

I was just thinking, as I wrote this, how I can’t remember the last time the old part basement was still dry this far into spring, and I remembered one year when it flooded. This had to have happened before the new part was built, so I was probably about 6 years old, give or take a year or two. I remember going part way down the stairs to see. The water was a couple of feet deep – deep enough to cover several steps – and perfectly clean and clear.

Then, as I was looking, a frog went swimming past the bottom of the stairs!

I will never forget that frog! :-D

I hadn’t thought of that in years!

Funny how things trigger old memories of growing up in this house. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Flower Garden Progress: cardboard layer

May 23, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 8 Comments

The ornamental apples in the flower garden are very enthusiastically blooming right now!

While working under it last night, I could hear a constant hum of bees over my head!

I worked on layering cardboard onto the cleaned out flower garden for as long as I had light. Most of the time was spent taking tape off the boxes.

That’s one way to use up all those boxes from moving!

I was able to clear out most of the boxes in the Old Kitchen that my sister gave me to pack up my parents’ stuff before the movers arrived. I kept the strongest ones for packing the books and whatnot that are in the sun room when we finally get to it. Then we started on our own moving boxes. Getting those up the stairs from the new part basement was surprisingly dangerous. We have to close the door behind us because it’s not safe for our cats to go down there until we start cleaning the basements out. The door opens inward, over the steps. There’s just no good way to open a door from a steep set of stairs while clutching a bunch of boxes that are busily working on sliding out of your grip and falling down the stairs! :-D

At least the stairs are not as steep or skinny as the ones to the old part basement!

I could really tell which boxes were ones we packed, and which the movers packed. I was reminded, again, of what a terrible job they did. :-( The ones packed by the movers were a lot easier to remove the tape from, though, since there was hardly any, and they didn’t make any effort to make sure it stuck to the cardboard. :-/

So this is what the flower garden looked like last night.

When I ran out of boxes again, I just stopped. By the time I brought up more and removed the tape, it would have been full dark.

The temperatures were just perfect, though. :-D

I actually stayed out after taking this picture and started spraying the cardboard with water, more to add the weight of water, just in case a wind picked up. The hose we were using was too short, so I found a much longer one in the garden shed (using a flashlight) and set that up.

It wasn’t until hours later that I remembered that there is another tap on the other side of the Old Kitchen. Without the sun room to go around, that tap is much closer to the garden.

Oops. :-D

I brought up more boxes this morning – I even managed to bring up more than I actually needed. Which is good. More boxes available to pack up the sun room and the Old Kitchen.

This is what it looked like this morning, after I finished layering the cardboard.

Next thing to do was saturate the cardboard.

I’d grabbed a lawn sprinkler from the garden shed last night, only to have 3 others come with it. Turns out they were tied together. This morning, I went through them to try and figure out which was the least broken and hooked it up.

The adjustment was jammed in one position, so I took advantage of that and started from close to the house and left it there a while. It didn’t quite reach the opposite side, plus there were voids here and there from the bushes and the clothes line platform. After a while, I moved it to the other side.

There were still some voids, but I got more coverage in more areas missed.

After some fighting with the knob, I did eventually get the sprinkler on the “full” setting, so I could put it in the middle.

I left it there for maybe half an hour, so the whole thing got probably an hour or more of watering.

It wasn’t enough, but things were starting to heat up fast.

I didn’t get pictures yet, but after clearing out the hose, I started moving over the flax straw that was used to cover the septic tank cover for the winter, plus the straw that was in front of the cat house by the old kitchen, then started working on one of the piles of leaves my daughters had left by the garden for me.

For all the soaking it got, by the time I stopped, the cardboard was already starting to dry in many spots!

After I finish covering the cardboard, I will set up the sprinkler and have it run for the night, to make sure everything it thoroughly saturated. Well. At least as much as the sprinkler can reach.

This is some of what I’d pulled out of the flower garden while using the weed trimmer.

No wonder the rake kept catching on things.

I’d made the mistake, yesterday, of doing a bit of raking without gloves. This was the result. :-(

I have learned that this is a very bad place for an open wound. It seems everything I try to handle with my left hand (being left handed, that’s most things) hits it.

Nothing a bit of aloe vera and open air can’t handle. :-)

It’s not even 11am yet, and already we’re at 16C, with a “real feel” of 21C. Our high is supposed to be 23C today.

No more yard work today until things cool down.

Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter, with a possible thunderstorm. Which works out, since my husband has medical appointments both today and tomorrow.

While working on the garden and cleaning up today, I couldn’t help but notice all sorts of areas that we need to get into, and think; that job is going to be SO much easier, now that we have a working weed trimmer! :-D Having the right tools makes all the difference!

The Re-Farmer

We… don’t have rain. :-(

May 18, 2018May 18, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

So much for weather forecasts.

For all the lower temperatures and overcast skies, and forecasts of 80% chance for rain, there has been none today. Going into town with another errand, my daughter and I played a bit of Pokemon Go. In the game, which is linked to local weather in some way, showed pouring rain on our maps. In the real world, there wasn’t a drop.

Once home again, I did a quick check around the yard and garden area. After talking to my mother yesterday, I learned that the trees in the flower garden are not cherry trees, after all, but ornamental apple trees. The cherry trees, she tells me, are in the spruce grove, behind where the wood pile used to be. No sign of blossoms there, yet. I am not sure why edible cherries would be planted among spruce trees, while ornamental (I assume that means they don’t produce anything edible) apples are planted next to the house.

The apple trees in the flower garden are leafing and budding up nicely, too. The row of apples (all varieties of crab apples, as I recall) are barely in leaf.

Planted on the north side of the spruce grove, they wouldn’t have anywhere near as much sun as the ones in the flower garden, which is the most likely reason why they are so much slower to revive for the season.

On the far side of the garden, along the fence line, the lilac border is showing flower buds already on some bushes. I was looking for a sign of the chokecherry tree that used to be there. The lilac border runs the entire length of the fence line now, but when I was a child, it was only about half the distance, and the chokecherry tree was at the end of the row, about the middle of the length of the garden at the time. I may have found it, but can’t be sure, as it’s behind lilac bushes. The tree I saw that might be it also seems to be dead; likely the chokecherry tree was choked out by the lilacs. :-( I will see if I can confirm that with my mother one of these days.

This is part of a row of what appears to be raspberry canes, though it’s hard to identify them among the scrub and without any leaf buds to be seen. On one side, it’s almost right up against a row of spruces. On the other, I can see that it was plowed within inches of the stems. They would be getting light only in the early hours of the morning, now that the sun is rising so much farther to the north than it did in the winter. By about 9 or 10 am, they would be in shade until sunrise. We’ll see what raspberries we get this year, if any. Most varieties of raspberries have canes that produce in the second year, before dying back. At that point, the spent canes should be cut away, but that is something my parents never did, as far as I can recall; they just let them be until it was decided to transplant them. I remember when they were planted on the far side of the garden, beyond where a row of trees is now planted. At the height of raspberry season, we could pick several ice cream pails’ worth of berries in the morning, then come back by evening and have more ripened berries to pick. On our list of things we eventually want to plant are three different varieties of raspberries, each with a different harvesting period, so we could have raspberries from July through September.

Whenever that happens, we will be sure to plant them somewhere that actually gets full sun.

The Re-Farmer

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