Once things cooled down a bit, I did manage to get a bit more done in and around the garden.
The main thing was to get the netting up around the trellis bed.
While I went around, unrolling the netting, my older daughter fussed with getting it up on the supports. They were too tall to leave the netting folded as it is on the roll, so she had to carefully open it up and get the excess over the tops of the support stakes. It turns out the netting isn’t folded in half, but in thirds! That made opening it up rather more difficult for her.
Once I got the netting all the way around the bed, remembering to go behind the vertical trellis supports, I left the roll near the starting point and went to get a bunch of ground staples and ties. That gave my daughter time to finish opening up the netting and setting the excess over the stakes. After that, we used the ground staples to try and get it as taut as we could. On the side I was working on, it was easier, because I was securing the netting to the ground. The side my daughter was working on is the one with the lower log that’s curved into the bed around the middle. The ground staples pulled up very easily around that area!
We just need to get it secure enough that the cats can’t get under it. In a few places, we used tied to tighten up any slack, and that’s about it.
One thing I’ve noticed about this netting. The frogs seem to be able to go through the mesh just fine. Even the larger ones.
Like this one.
This one was almost 3 inches long, from nose to tail bone.
The frog is looking quite damp because, after we were done with the netting, I gave the garden beds another watering. There were SO many frogs popping out of the mulches while they were being watered! Quite a few big ones like in the photo above, but also the teeniest, tiniest frogs! Dozens of them, all over the place. This has been a very good year for frogs and bees. Especially bumble bees. Which makes me very happy!
There was one thing I have been seeing all over the place not that does NOT make me happy!
See those tiny pairs of leaves?
Those are sprouting elm seeds.
They. Are. Everywhere.
At this point, they’re almost too delicate to weed. While they look so small on the surface, these things have ridiculously long tap roots. I did try pulling some of them while I was watering, as it’s easier to get the entire root out when the water is flowing. The tap roots are over an inch long. The exposed stems break off easily, leaving the tap roots, which tend to just throw up new shoots.
These elm trees are the bane of my gardening existence. My daughter mowed the lawns today, and I can’t even use any of the grass clippings for mulch, nor put any in the compost pile. There are more elm seeds than grass clippings.
These elms need to go. Their seeds suffocate everything from above, their capillary roots take over garden beds, choking out plants from below, and the one my mother planted to make shade for the kitchen window is not only lifting and tilting the patio blocks, but causing cracks in the basement wall. That one needs to go, first! We try to keep it cut back, but its branches are a danger to the roof, too.
When I was looking through the garden sections while waiting for my daughter’s workshop to be done, I was seeing pots of Chinese elm, spirea and Virginia Creeper being sold. All of which are wildly invasive, and almost impossible to kill. Any time I see them, I feel like I should be leaving warning signs up for people.
Tomorrow, the only thing I have planned for the garden is to water everything again, early in the morning before it starts getting really hot. We’re supposed to hit 26C/79F tomorrow. (Yes, I can hear you folks in southern climes, giggling at me for thinking that’s hot. I totally get it! 😁)
It’s also Father’s Day. Since my daughter already sprung for pizza for her sister’s birthday, tomorrow we’re planning to do ice cream. Or anything else cold that catches our fancy!
Thankfully, on Monday, we’re supposed to start cooling down – and get rain in the afternoon/evening! Hopefully. At most, we have a 50% chance of rain. We’ll see. Every drop we get is something to be thankful for! There’s still that big fire across the lake that’s out of control. Almost 219,000 hectares/541,160 acres have been burned so far, in just that one fire. There are several others burning out of control up North, including one that has burned more than 370,000 hectares/914,290 acres, and another that’s burned more than 554,000 hectares/1,368,964 acres.
This isn’t even an unusually bad wildfire year, other than some of them requiring towns and small cities to be evacuated. There aren’t a lot of people living that far north, so that is unusual. From what I’m seeing on the weather radar, though, the system that’s moving our way has a few scattered thunderstorms with lightning in it. Lightning is the last thing we need right now!
We’ve got it pretty good, right where we are, and for that, I am grateful.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 