Today was much cooler than the last little while, and I took full advantage of it!
Which means it’s now almost 10:30 and I’ve only now been able to settle down to start writing some posts. They will be much shorter than my usual rambling! 😄
Things are looking quite good in the garden right now.
The sugar snap peas are developing all sorts of pods, though none are ready for eating yet. Some of the plants are starting to die back at the bottoms already, though. I had hoped for a longer growing season with them!
In the next image, there’s the largest of our developing kohlrabi. I am so thrilled with those! I will most definitely be getting more seeds and planting a bed of them in the fall for next year. Winter sowing worked really well for us with those!
The next image is of the Hinou Tiny bok choy. These are from seeds we managed to collect from the couple of plants that survived being smothered by elm seeds a couple of years ago. The seed pods were really tiny. These are huge, in comparison! Amazing what not being smothered by elm seeds and choked out by elm roots will do, eh?
I neglected to get a photo, but the radish seed pods are starting to develop. I’ve got several different types of radishes now producing pods, and some are large enough to give them a taste. I don’t like radishes in general, mostly because of their bite. The pods have a mild radish flavour and just the tiniest bite. I’ve started to snack on the pods when I work in the garden now. Not very many, though. I do want to have enough to harvest and try pickling, as well as eating fresh.
The last photo is of our grape vine friend. I wasn’t sure if I’d find any of them again (I found two, before). I was able to get hold of the collapsing trellis the grapes are on and tip it away from the storage house. I don’t want it climbing the walls and getting into the exterior blinds again. I’d also like to be able to get around the back of it to get rid of the spirea that’s invading, but everything’s just too big right now.
With today being cooler, I didn’t water the garden this morning, but I did give it a watering this evening. Of the summer squash I thinned by transplanting, we have definitely lost the one that was transplanted into the high raised bed. There’s another among the winter squash that may not make it but, we’ll see. It looks like most of the transplanted strawberries will survive, too, though I don’t expect to get anything from them this year.
The second sowing of beans in between the corn has come up, with a high germination rate. I don’t know what happened to the first sowing, but at least the second one made it! The seedlings are large enough now that I scattered more stove pellets over the bed of corn and beans, as well as the tomatoes and beans bed. I went ahead and added some to the Arikara squash and corn bed, too. The corn in that little bed is getting really big, compared to the ones in the corn and beans bed!
Tomorrow, I need to snag a daughter to help me get the protective netting off from around the trellis bed. It will still need protecting from the cats, somehow, but it needs a serious weeding, and I have temporary trellis netting to add to the back for the Red Noodle beans.
All in all, things are doing pretty good. I can’t help but feel we’re quite behind on things, except for the winter sown stuff. I should check my photos from last year and see how things were at about this time and compare.
Last year, we planted a little plot of Albion everbearing strawberries. They did fantastic!
Until they got eaten by deer.
Repeatedly.
They even tore through the net barrier I’d put around them, and I ended up having to use some leftover pieces of chicken wire. By then, there wasn’t much of the season left, but the bed did get heavily mulched for the winter, with some chicken wire draped over the whole bed for protection.
I did remove some of the mulch in the spring, but in the end, the bed got severely neglected this year.
Amazingly, some strawberries survived.
The strawberries I’d planted in front of the new asparagus bed, however, did not. Not a single one made it. I had simply taken too long before planting them, I think.
We do, however, now have a third Jersey Giant asparagus fern growing! So I still have some home for the rest of those, and the purple asparagus.
The first thing to do was to find and dig up the Albion strawberries and see how many there were.
I’m afraid I had to be pretty rough with them. The crab grass rhizomes were bad enough, but I was also finding new elm roots invading from below. When I planted this bed, I’d dug up as many roots as I could, then covered the bottom with several layers of carboard before adding fresh soil on top, in which the strawberries were planted.
You’d never know I’d done all that, from the roots I was finding!
Those elm trees have got to go.
I actually found quite a few more strawberry plants than I expected! In the end, I found 10 plants, plus a runner with fresh roots in it, though no leaves yet.
All of these went into a bucket with some water while I worked on where to plant them.
At first, when I thought there were just a few, I had expected to plant them at one end of the bed with the Spoon tomatoes, but there were enough that I decided to reclaim the space I’d planted bare root strawberries in that failed. The shallow trench they were planted in were, of course, filled with elm tree seedlings, along with plenty of other weeds.
There was still some soil left in the old kiddie pool we used as a planter last year, so once the weeds were cleared out, I used that to fill in the shallow trench the strawberries had been planted in. This was more for the asparagus, since I didn’t feel I’d been able to cover the crowns properly on that side.
While clearing the weeds out, I did not find a single sign of the bare root strawberries that had been planted there.
Totally my own fault. They should have gone in the ground as soon as I got them. Instead, they sat for about a month.
Then I decided to take some short logs from the old kitchen garden retaining wall and set them along the little wire fence, to prevent erosion and water run off.
That done, I thoroughly watered the newly added soil. It was bone dry in that little pool. Once everything was well hydrated, I spaced out the strawberry plants in between where the asparagus crowns were planted.
Once those were in and watered again, I went and got more grass clippings to mulch both the strawberries and the asparagus.
Then, because I had enough for it, I got more loads of grass clippings and mulched the potatoes.
They’re not as big and juicy as they could be; we haven’t had a lot of rain, and the undergrowth is starting to crowd them again. We need to get under them with the loppers and clear it all out again.
All in all, things are going pretty good in the garden. At least, for our region. I have to keep reminding myself of that when I watch gardening videos, and I see all these people posting about their huge plants and amazing harvests. They all tend to be at least a month ahead of us!
I’m happy I got as much done this evening as I did. I’m not sure how much I’ll get to go tomorrow. Not only will it be hotter, but I’ll be driving my husband to his appointment. Thankfully, the AC in the truck works fine, because that heat is going to be brutal on him.
After tomorrow, the highs are supposed to drop a bit for the next while, then get right back up to the “heat warnings in effect” level again.
On the plus side, the peppers and eggplant will be just loving these temperatures!
The first image is of the Spoon tomatoes in the main garden area. I’ve been seeing tiny tomatoes developing for a while now. I had expected them to get much taller before forming tomatoes – when we’ve grown these before, they always got really tall and lanky. This year, they seem to be staying short and bushy. I’m not bothering with pruning side branches away, after seeing some videos about that from Gardening in Canada, so I was expecting them to be bushier. These are still indeterminate tomatoes, though, which are more of a vining type. Which is why I made sure they had a nice, sturdy trellis to climb. We’re just into July, though, so maybe they’ll still get taller. We’ll see.
In the second image, we have our first sugar snap peas developing. There are quite a few more flowers blooming now, too. Most definitely the biggest, strongest and healthiest peas we’ve ever grown, this year. I don’t know if it’s the location, this year’s weather, or what, but I’ll take it!
The final photo is my morning surprise. There are Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes forming! Yes, these are super short season tomatoes but, like the Spoon tomatoes, the plants haven’t really grown much since being transplanted. The plants are so short, the developing tomatoes are inside the protective collars!
The Chocolate Cherry and Black Beauty tomatoes are getting taller, at least, and getting to the point that I’ll need to start clipping them to their supports, soon. Those, we’ve grown before, and I am expecting them to get quite a bit taller – but then, I was expecting the Spoon tomatoes to get quite a bit taller, too! There were flowers blooming on all the tomato varieties when I transplanted them, but I remember that the Black Beauties took a very long time to ripen. The plants had loads of tomatoes, and I remember they tended to crack and split a lot, long before we had any ripe enough to pick.
It should be interesting to see if there is any difference in how quickly they ripen, this time around.
I can appreciate mornings. The cooler temperatures and softer lighting are great. Especially for working in the garden. Unfortunately, my body just can’t handle it. I’ve never been a morning person. The absolute best scheduling I ever had was when I worked the night shift at a gas station. I was alert and motivated all night, slept well all day; physically and mentally, I was at my best!
Unfortunately, I’m not able to do that now, and this time of year, I find myself being awakened earlier and earlier, no matter what time I make it to bed. This morning, I was up at 4 – 4:30 and just could not get back to sleep.
Still, I managed to get some thing done in the garden after doing my morning rounds.
I finally got this bed weeded. I had to wait until things got bigger. I still had to be really careful, and pulled only what I was 100% sure was a weed. In the first photo above, you can easily spot the nasturtiums and Cosmos. In the second photo, there are little sprouts of what I hope are the asters. I’ve never grown asters from seed, and I’m not sure what they are supposed to look like at this stage. I’ve even looking at photos online and am still not 100% sure. There are just too many things that look like this at this stage!
I couldn’t get everything, of course. I’ll be weeding those awful elm seeds all summer, I’m sure.
I had a surprise when I got to the winter squash bed. I’m not sure what these are.
Those are insects of some kind. They were only on the blossoms, and only on the squash. They’re so tiny, I can’t make out any identifying features. I tried asking in a gardening group and did get a response of one possible thing, but on looking them up, they seemed much bigger. Pretty much anything would be bigger! The solution was to spray with soapy water, so later in the day, I tried that. The blossoms were closed by then, though, so I don’t know how much good it did.
They’re smaller this year. When picking them, I tuck the coils over a finger to carry them. Last year, I was putting them around my wrist.
After I was done my rounds, I headed inside for breakfast and planned to go back out to start working on the trellis bed. In the end, I didn’t make it. I was falling asleep in my chair. I finally gave up and went for a nap. Something I’ve found myself having to do fairly regularly.
I get better sleep in those 1-2 hour morning naps than in an entire night! It is a bit disorienting to wake up and it’s still morning, though. 😄
My goal for today was to get started on the remaining vertical supports for the permanent trellis bed.
As good as I felt, this put me outside at the hottest part of the day.
My goals got shifted, and progress was made. Just on something else!
I just got back from giving the garden beds a watering for the evening. Tomorrow is not supposed to be as hot as today, but we haven’t gotten any of the rain that hit other parts of the province, some of which got serious thunderstorm warnings!
When I got to the trellis bed, I was rather blown away by how much bigger the noodle bean sprouts were, even compared to this morning.
In the first image, you can see four of the five collars around pumpkin seeds – and they are all sprouting! Nothing in the fifth one, yet, but these were the very last seeds I planted, and they’re already up! I remember last year, being amazed by how fast these free pumpkin seeds grew, too.
I have also confirmed, and you can see in the next photo: we have sunflowers! Not a lot, but the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers are starting to sprout. I wasn’t sure if these seeds were still viable or not, so anything we get of those is bonus!
While watering the new asparagus and strawberry bed, I got another pleasant surprise. I am pretty sure I planted the bare roots and crowns too late; I had not expected it to take so long, or I would have stored them properly. And yet, I found a single Jersey Giant asparagus, sprouting along the stake I place to mark where the crowns were planted. It’s so adorable!
I spent a fair bit of time working on the snap pea bed, carefully using the hose to pull weeds without also pulling the peas and tiny carrots out. As I worked my way from one end to the other, I was startled to find a bean sprout. Several of them. I had completely forgotten that I’d planted the last few bean seeds in the gaps between pea plants in one row! Gosh, the red noodle beans germinated fast!
Meanwhile, the Royal Burgundy bush beans I’d plant much earlier, beside the spoon tomatoes, have finally shown signs of life. All of two beans have sprouted. Hopefully, this means more will show up.
I didn’t bother trying to get a photo, but I also saw more corn seedlings showing up in the corn and yellow bush bean bed. Still very few, while the leftover seeds that got planted with the Arikara squash have more sprouting, and the earlier ones are getting quite big!
The Black zucchini has been doing really well. I planted three seeds in three spots, and 8 out of 9 seeds are now sprouted! With so many sprouting, I will probably have several to thin by transplanting, later. Even where the White Scallop square are planted, one seedling has appeared. Last year, those ones took three tries and a much longer time before any germinated, so that makes me very happy.
So far so good! I have to keep reminding myself that I finished planting everything such a short time ago. It just feels so late in the season. Probably because we had that heat wave in May.
On a completely unrelated note…
We seem to be missing three kittens.
Caramel’s tabby, Li’l Rig, and her tortie, Wormy, are nowhere to be seen. Yesterday, I spotted Caramel “luring” Li’l Rig into the maple grove on the north side of the inner yard. I strongly suspect she has taken them across the road. I was really hoping that, after I brought Li’l Rig back to the sun room yesterday evening, she wouldn’t try again. Caramel has been hanging around the house, which seems very strange for her to do, if she took her babies onto the property across the road.
Their brother, Havarti, is the biggest of the litter, is still very much around. He is so active and independent, I doubt he’d follow his mother anywhere right now. The other two are much smaller and were both recovering from oogey eyes. I can’t find them to check if their eyes still need washing.
The third missing kitten is Zipper. He was the sickest and the last on the road to recovery. He did seem much improved but, to be honest, in looking for him, I was looking for a body. No sign of him, anywhere. I do hope he’s okay. I can’t imagine he would have followed Caramel across the road.
I’m probably going to go outside one more time and do a walkabout. Maybe I’ll find him then.
As I write this, at almost 6:30pm, we are at 25C/77F with the humidex putting us at 28C/82F
I’d watered the garden beds last night, and they were still fine this morning, but by the evening they were definitely in need of more water. I knew we were expecting rain tomorrow, but too many things were getting baked!
It was only on checking the weather app as I wrote the above that I found the rain expected tomorrow, is now expected tonight. Only a 32% chance of rain, though, and for a shorter time. *sigh* A good overnight rainfall would be a wonderful thing right now, but it doesn’t look like it’ll happen!
While checking on the in-progress trellis bed, I was expecting to see more of the barely visible sprouts that were starting to come up yesterday. I was NOT expecting to see the entire row and basically exploded!
So… finishing that trellis is going to be a priority! These are the red noodle beans, and they’re going to need something to climb.
What is odd is that these beans are coming up, but none of the others beans I’ve planted have. I planted a row of them in the same bed as the Spoon tomatoes, and there’s nothing. Right now, only the Chinese elm is sprouting. Those were the Royal Burgundy bush beans, and they really should be up by now. The tomatoes and melons in the same bed area also struggling, so I wonder of there’s a correlation, there?
Oh, and I think, maybe, possibly, there are some sunflowers starting to come up. I’ll need to wait until the seedlings get bigger before I can be sure that’s what I’m seeing, and not some weed.
While watering in the old kitchen garden, I saw flashes of colour hidden by the leaves, and discovered the strawberries we grew from seed a couple of years ago now have berries ripening! These are the small wild? Alpine? strawberries we got in a kit meant for children, and there was nothing on the package to say what kind of strawberries they were. They are absolutely thriving. Too bad the berries aren’t particularly good.
I had a bit of a surprise with our corn, too. In the last image in the slide show above, you can see a row of corn sprouts.
These are the ones I planted with the Arikara squash. There are sprouts coming up all over in that bed!
Those were left over seeds from running out of room while planting in the nearby low raised bed. In that bed, there’s only one corn sprout visible. !! What is it about this little squash bed that has almost all the seeds I planted sprouting already, while the bigger bed has only one, so far?
No sign of any of the yellow bush beans, yet. With those being older seeds, I would not be surprised if none of those came up.
I don’t expect to get much, if anything, done in the garden tomorrow. In the morning, I’ll be heading to my mother’s to get her to a lab for her monthly blood work, then do her grocery shopping. We’re running low on wet cat food, plus we are now down to just one hose nozzle that doesn’t leak, so a trip to Walmart is in order for the afternoon. After that, my week is clear of appointments, so I should be able to get some work in the garden done. I want to get those vertical supports for the trellis bed secured, and whatever horizontal supports we decide on. For this year, we might just use temporary plastic trellis netting we already have, then put something more permanent on, next year.
Our plans are very loosey-goosey, and prone to change! As long as the final goal is achieved – in this case, permanent trellis tunnels joining pairs of low raised bed – I’m rather indifferent as to how it gets done! 😁
Well, I’ve got an early start and a long day ahead of me. Time to start winding down and get to bed early.
Ha!
I told myself that last night, expecting to be in bed shortly after 8pm. By the time I finally got to bed, it was past midnight.
Last year, I picked up the free pumpkinfest seeds early enough to start them indoors. I picked them up just a few days ago, so there’s no time for that, this year!
While we have been getting a few rainfalls, off and on, and don’t expect more rain until tomorrow morning, our province is actually getting special weather alerts for possible funnel clouds. I got messages from my brother, saying they had rain pretty much all day, with occasional massive downpours. It’s been knocking his internet out often enough that he ended up linking to his phone to access the internet, so he could work.
From home.
On a Sunday.
Because my brother just never seems to stop working. Ever.
He’s always been like this, even as a kid. How he hasn’t burnt out, long ago, I have no idea!
While I had completely forgotten about the pumpkin seeds when I was working on the bed earlier, it was probably a good thing, in the end, given that I started to get rained on before I finished what I did remember to plant!
The row with the transplanted onions had enough empty space for four seeds, and the last one was planted in the remaining space of the sunflower row. I used the plastic collars to mark where the seeds would go, then planted one in each collar. They may not all germinate. Last year they have out 3 seeds per packet. I pre-germinated them, and they all sprouted within a day, so I do know they give out very healthy seeds.
I had some stove pellets left in the bag I’ve been using in other garden beds, and I finished it off here, including adding a few into the collars as well. Then everything got watered, even though it just rained. The collars got partially filled with water a couple of times, to make sure the pumpkin seeds got thoroughly soaked. The watering was also to get the stove pellets to absorb moisture and start breaking up into sawdust. They will do as a light mulch for now. Later in the season, after things are fairly big, more mulch will be added.
I don’t expect to use the mulch that I pulled off this morning. In the photo, you can see it raked onto the taller grass. That is where this bed’s twin is going to be built. Once things are dry enough to drag out the weed trimmer, I’ll clean out that area, trimming it as close to the soil as possible, then lay cardboard down on it, in preparation for building the next bed. The mulch I’ve set aside will eventually get buried in the new bed.
So I think I can NOW say the garden is officially in! 😄😂 There’s still lots of work to do, of course, but what needed to be planted is now in the ground.
I woke at my usual time, which is basically when it starts getting light out (about 5-5:30am, these days), but was in massive pain. I did manage to get outside to feed the yard cats, but wasn’t able to do the rest of my morning rounds. Instead, I took some painkillers and headed back to bed.
I didn’t wake up again until about noon!
I did feel a lot better by then, though, which is good, because – as always – the job I needed to do took more than expected!
The bed I need to work on is where I had eggplant and hot peppers growing, last year. These had been mulched first with cardboard, then grass clippings on top of the cardboard. In the fall, I just did a chop and drop, leaving it pretty much as it was for the winter.
What you see in the first photo is what was able to grow through the openings in the cardboard where the peppers and eggplant were growing through, and areas around the edges where rhizomes in particular were able to work their way up the side walls of the bed.
The box frame was secured to hold plastic I’d set around the eggplant and peppers to form a sort of open top greenhouse. The twine wrapped around was there to reduce billowing in the wind. If the wind were not an issue, it would have worked out quite well, but it was a pretty constant battle. Even the cover with the wire that is stored on top of the box frame would get blown off, and it was there to weigh down the tops of the plastic, and didn’t have anything else over it! Which is why it got lashed down with paracord, later on.
Removing the mulch and remaining bits of cardboard did clear a lot of the elm seeds off, but there were so many seeds, the mulch can’t be used again, nor would I want to put it on the compost pile. Instead, I put it around the base of the box on the outside, to hopefully smother any weeds that would come up through the gaps.
Then it was time to fluffify the soil and pull the weeds, including the roots.
Which was absolutely brutal. It was like concrete.
I normally would have gone over it with a garden fork, first, but with the box frame in place, that wasn’t an option. So I was just using my little hand cultivator.
That has got to be my favourite garden tool right now. It really does the job! It was still pretty difficult. In the end, I spent more than an hour, just breaking up that soil. There weren’t a lot of weeds to pull, thanks to that mulch, but getting the roots out was almost impossible. Even after breaking up the soil first, if there were any clumps at all, the roots and rhizomes would just break apart.
I keep water with me while I work but, once the soil was prepped, I had to head inside for a sit down and hydration break. Thank God for cooler temperatures! Unfortunately, I’m out of any amendments that would help reduce this sort of compaction.
For this bed, I wanted to plant the Orchard Baby corn, which has only 65 days to maturity, with some beans. I had some yellow Custard bean seeds left. Which is a bit funny because, a few years back, we grew a different variety of corn in this bed, with beans from this same packet, in between!
Given that the beans are a few years old, I don’t expect a high germination rate, but bean seeds last a lot longer than other things.
Using the end of one of the larger plastic coated plant stakes, I marked off 5 fairly deep lines in the soil – three for corn, two for beans – then filled the resulting little trenches with water. Then I ran the stake over the lines again, and this time used the hose on the jet setting, to drive the water deeper in the planting areas.
In the slide show above, right after the photo of the seeds, the seeds are laid out in the rows. Even the bright pink inoculated bean seeds are hard to see, but they’re there!
The beans were planted pretty far apart; there were enough that I knew there would be plenty left behind. They’re more of a “bonus” crop.
The corn was supposed to be about 50 seeds per packet, and I did hope to get them all in, but there just wasn’t the space, even setting them pretty close together. They will be thinned later, if the germination rate is high.
To actually plant the seeds, I cheated, and used the end of the plant stake I used to make the rows to push the seeds into the soil, which you can see in the next picture. For each one, I’d give the stake a spin to make sure no seeds stuck to the end, before moving to the next one! Then I gently dragged the stake over the rows to cover the seeds before finishing off with a gentle watering, which further ensured the seeds were well covered.
I still had those leftover corn seeds, though. I didn’t want to hang on to such a small amount, but what to do with them?
Well, there was this little bed nearby, with the Arikara squash in it.
So I opened up the mulch, where there seemed to be the most room, including right in the very middle, and planted the leftover seeds there. These beds are close enough that wind pollination between them should work out fine. For now, though, the mosquito netting cover got put back on until the squash is large enough I won’t have to worry about something getting at them.
Then I went to the tomato bed and, using the plant stake to make holes in the soil, planted more beans down the middle of the bed, plus the gap between the Black Beauty and Chocolate Cherry tomatoes. Bonus beans, plus they will act as a living mulch later on.
That done, I brought out the stove pellets for the corn and beans bed. I scattered them all over the bed, then misted them with water. After the pellets had a chance to expand and start breaking up into sawdust, I sprinkled some more pellets on and misted it again.
As there is nothing in this bed with protective collars or anything like that, it was going to need something to keep the cats out. A few years back, my daughter bought us a large roll of netting. I’ve been reusing pieces of it in other areas but, for the amount I needed, I brought the remaining roll out. You can see it in the second last photo of the corn and beans slideshow. The netting on that roll is actually folded in half. I left it as it was, though. Using ground staples to fasten the netting to the wire above the box cover, I unrolled it all the way around, with a decent amount of overlap, before cutting it. Roughly 25 feet, in total. There is still lots on the roll.
About this time, I got a notification on my phone for a voicemail message. Turns out my Wi-Fi calling had shut itself off. Why I was still able to listen to the voicemail message, but not get the call itself, I have no idea.
It was home care, letting me know that there would be no one available for my mother’s bed time med assist.
It was almost 6pm when I got the message, which means she would have just had her suppertime med assist.
I had time to finish setting up the netting. The top was secured with ground staples to the wire cover at several points. This netting catches on everything, so I was able to make use of that and got it “stuck” at each corner. Then, just to be on the safe side, I used more ground staples to secure the netting between the box frame and the walls of the bed. The box frame is tied down tight enough that it was hard to make the space to slide the ground staples through. Those aren’t going anywhere! The netting would rip, first.
Once that was finished and everything cleaned up and put away, I got a daughter to take over and do the watering of the rest of the garden, while I washed up and changed, before going to my mother’s.
It’s been almost a week since I did my mother’s grocery shopping, and I have an appointment in town tomorrow, so I left early enough to hit the grocery store, first. I knew she’d be running out of milk, at the very least – she is always running out of milk, but refuses to buy more than one 2L carton at a time – so I got that, plus a few other things I thought she might be running out of by now. Since I was there anyhow, I spotted some excellent sales and picked up some stuff for ourselves, too.
When I got to my mother’s she was so very happy when she saw I’d brought her more milk! She had told me, she even considered asking me if I could pick some up on the way, but had decided against it.
I was early for her evening pills but, once everything was put away, I opened up the lock box and got them ready for her. Which gave her time to tell me why the cover was missing on the tiny tagine shaped bowl I gave her to put her pills into, so they could be double checked and counted before she took them.
It turns out that, a couple of times now, someone would open the bowl to put in her dose for the time, only to find one of her half pills from the previous med assist, still sitting in the bowl. It had been counted out, but she missed it when she took them – and clearly, the home care aid didn’t double check to make sure my mother had actually taken all the pills!
So it was decided that she would tuck the lid away so that, if a pill got accidentally left behind again, it could actually be seen and she could take it right away.
Good thinking, but really, part of the home care aid’s job is to make sure my mother takes her pills properly. That’s why they’re there, and the pills are in a lock box, after all!
I did get a bit of a visit in before I headed home, much appreciating the longer daylight hours! I’ve made these trips in the winter, when it was dark by the time my mother was supposed to get her suppertime visit, but this time of year, I was driving home in full light. Much easier to watch for deer!
Tomorrow, I’ve got an appointment in town, but my afternoon is free. I’m waffling between working on the bed at the chain link fence, or the bed that will have a permanent trellis built into it.
I’ll see what I feel up to, after I get home!
For now, it’s time to take some pain killers and get to bed. Maybe even before midnight!
I decided to plant the all the remaining winter squash into one bed. With these ones, I’m not looking to save seed, so it doesn’t matter if they cross pollinate. The bed I decided to put them in has been solarizing for quite a long time now.
The first thing to do, though, was get in with the weed trimmer and clear around the bed.
There were clouds and clouds of dandelion seeds!
The plastic did a great job of protecting the soil from that, though.
Once the weed trimming was done, I removed the boards and bricks holding the plastic down. One of the boards had been used to roll the plastic up for storage, and I used that again.
It’s amazing what can survive under the heat of that plastic – and the lack of any moisture!
So my first job was to break up the compacted soil and so what weeding needed to be done.
I was finding elm tree roots at the end furthers from the elms.
It was while I was working on this that we got company. My brother came over today. He had some stuff he needed to get done, so I just went over to say hello before getting back to my own work.
The first thing he did was comment on how I needed to not die on him! Apparently, I was extremely red and flushed from the heat! I did make sure to sit in the shade and hydrate, often, but after his comment, I made a point of going inside and sitting in the air conditioned living room for a while before getting back at it.
As I was working, I thought about how to bed protect the bed. Seeing how, even with logs added to the sides, the peas and carrots bed was eroding on one side, I wanted to prevent that right from the start.
So, once the soil was weeded and fluffified, I decided to make use of the boards that had weighed down the plastic, and make temporary walls.
I first raked the soil in from the edges. In going through my supplies in the garden shed, I brought out a bundle of metal stakes that were salvaged from the Walmart market tent we had a tree fall on, several years ago. I’d used these to mark out where to shift the garden beds last year, and this particular bundle all had pinwheels – or the remains of pinwheels – taped to them. A pair of them still had twine wrapped around them, so I put those two at opposite ends of one side. I then used the last of some small bamboo stakes I had to fill in the gaps a bit, to support the boards, as they are all different lengths and some are pretty rotted out and broken on their ends. Once the boards were in place, I raked some of the soil against them to hold them in place and create a shallow trench in the middle.
The soil was insanely dry. Once the boards were in place, I gave the trench a thorough watering. The water just disappeared! Eventually, I got it to the point that the water would actually sit for a little while before getting sucked away.
I used the plastic collars to work out the spacing, setting them into the soil just deep enough to not blow away, but not so deep that they would restrict root growth. Then, each collar got a handful of manure mixed into it. The soil around each collar got shallow trenches made around them, too. Then everything got another thorough watering.
The metal stakes handily divided the bed into three sections, and there were three varieties of squash to transplant. There were six Mashed Potato squash, and I decided those would go on the end closest to the elm trees. I figured, if the elm roots started crowding into the bed, it would be better to have the variety with the most plants at that end, in case we lost one or two. There were five Baked potato squash, which went in the other end, and four Sunshine squash were planted in the middle section.
After being planted into the collars, everything got another watering. Then I grabbed the wagon and went into the outer yard, where sections have been mowed, and raked up dried grass clippings to use as mulch.
While working on this, I could hear various noises and saw my brother driving around in the zero-turn lawn mower, using it as transportation. One of the things he did today was add a ball hitch, so he could use it to tow a small trailer.
Then he came to get me. He even set up a stump of a log I had in the shade of the trees, on the trailer as a seat for me! A seat is why that log was set up in the shade in the first place, so that was rather funny.
I did need his help to steady myself to get onto the trailer, though. 😄
One of the many things he got done today was replace the long screw eye we’ve been using as a pin on the slide bar for the gate. He got two different possible replacements for it and wanted me to choose one of them. After we got that figured out, he gave me a ride back to the garden.
That was really fun!
Meanwhile, the wind has been picking up through the day – and the elm trees are dropping their dried out seeds.
There were times when it was like a snow storm of seeds. Our lawn is thick with them and, in mere minutes, the soil in the garden bed I’d spent so much time clearing out was getting filled with seeds!
Mulching around the squash was as needed to keep those frickin’ seeds off as much as anything else! I even tucked a light mulch of grass clippings inside the collars, carefully setting it around the stems.
Once the bed was mulched, I brought over the rolling seat and settled down for one last watering. The grass clippings are bone dry, and it needed to be soaked all the way through. This way, the damp grass clippings will keep the soil both damp and cool, and is more likely to allow water through. When it’s completely dry, the grass can act as a thatch, and prevent moisture from reaching the soil, instead. So I took my time and made sure the mulch was completely soaked.
By that point, it was time for supper, and I was done for the day! It was 34C/93F and holding. I didn’t catch what the humidex was, but it sure felt hotter.
At the moment, the high forecast for tomorrow is “only” 20C/68F, which is going to feel blessedly cool after the past couple of days! We might even get a bit of rain at around 7am.
Hopefully, I’ll get there rest of the transplants in tomorrow. I have both tomatoes and melons blooming right now! So those have priority.
I’m going to be pretty much living on painkillers for the next few days, but it needs to be done!
Once the garden is in, I want to just sleep for a week.
Which won’t happen, but I can still fantasize about it! 😄
I’ll be paying for it tonight and tomorrow, but I’m very happy with how much I was able to get done in the garden today. Those winter squash could have been planted a couple of weeks ago, at the size they’re at! I noticed some even had flower buds already on them.
Of the four types of winter squash we have this year, there is one type that I specifically want to save seeds for. That is the Arikara squash, which was listed as extremely rare.
That meant they needed to be planted well away from the other squash, to avoid cross pollination.
I decided to put them in the new little bed I successfully grew Crespo squash in, last year.
As you can see in the first image, we have been rather behind on clearing things lately! My daughter was able to do the main lawn mowing, but this area needs the weed trimmer.
So that was my first step. I cleared around all the beds and, since there are two more that need to be cleared for planting soon. One of them will have tomatoes in it. The other will have direct seeded corn and beans.
The small bed was fairly compacted, so it took a while to loosen the soil enough with the garden fork, just to be able to pull the weeds. That one little space, and I was pulling the usual crab grass, creeping Charlie, dandelions, white clover and thistle. There was also lambs quarter and a weed with leaves I keep mistaking for while strawberry, until they get bigger.
There was one surprise in there. I pulled up something with very distinctive spike leaves of a flower that look like a small version of the irises we have growing near the house. I set it aside by the transplants, with the roots in water, until I decide where to transplant it. I’m very curious as to what it is!
One the soil was clear of weeds and the clumps broken up, I added some manure and mixed that in thorough.
There are only three Arikara squash transplants, and I had considered planting something with them, like I did with the Crespo squash last year. In the end, I decided against it.
As we are expecting a dry year, the bed got a lot of watering. It was incredibly dry, so that took a while. Once the soil was damp more than just on to top, I set the transplants with collars around them, then created trenches around the collars, to collect as much water towards the roots as possible. The collars do a good job of holding the water and allowing it to slowly seep down.
I had a bin nearby, with grass clippings for mulch, from last year. It turned out to be exactly enough to thoroughly mulch the entire bed around the collars. Earlier, I had cut the sets of 3′ plastic coated metal plant stakes in half, and set one in each corner. I had pipe for hoops I intended to set in an X over the bed, but they are 5′ long, and that’s not long enough to reach from corner to corner. So I set the hoops at the ends.
I had a piece of mosquito netting to put over the hoops, but I didn’t want it to come in contact with the squash plants – and they’re already pretty big! So I joined the hoops with three 4′ plant stakes. The one in the middle hangs under the hoops, but I put the ones on the sides on top of the hoops, to keep the mesh off the leaves.
The netting was more than long enough, but not quite wide enough. The ends got rolled up in more plant stakes and pinned down with ground staples. I could just reach the top of the mulch on the sides, and those are secured with a couple more ground staples and rocks.
This covering is temporary. Once the transplants are well established and bigger, I’ll remove the cover. When they start blooming, I’ll be hand pollinating them as well as letting the insects do the job, just to be on the safe side!
By the time I finished here, it was 26C/79F, with the humidex putting it at 32C/90F. It was also coming up on noon, and my daughter was sweetheart and had lunch ready for me. She has been feeling quite sick today, and has spent much of the day in bed, yet she still made me both lunch and supper!
I am so grateful for that AC my brother set up for us in the living room. It was downright heavenly to take a break and cool down!
I still had a lot of work to do, though, so I was soon back out. By this time, I knew I wasn’t going to get all the transplants in, but I needed to at least get the rest of the winter squash done.
Yeah. That one turned out to be a big job, too. I did, however, have a bonus for the day!
The Re-Farmer 