I was able to zoom in to get a shot of Brussel and Sprout, sharing the tray under the water shelter. When I first came out this morning, I saw only about a 14 cats, but more kept showing up, including these two. I think I counted 22 in total, with some of them skulking around in the distance, waiting for me to leave the food area.
While doing my evening rounds, I took the winter mulch, which was corn stalks, off the asparagus and sunchoke beds. There is still no sign of the sunchokes or the asparagus, but…
… the four strawberry plants that share the asparagus bed were looking great! I wasn’t sure if they’d survive the winter. Not only did they survive, but they are looking better now than they did at the end of the season, last year! I’m hoping they’ll put out more runners this year, that we’ll transplant elsewhere. Strawberries are among the plants we want to have a lot of. They’re so incredibly expensive in the grocery stores!
Of course, I had to check on the crocuses and found this little guy.
The very first yellow crocus! There are a lot of purple ones blooming this morning, and a lot of white buds showing up, but still just the one yellow buds visible.
I should make a point of checking the bed I inoculated with morel spawn more often. May is the time of year they usually fruit. It would be cool if the giant puff balls emerged, too, but if they do, it’ll be later in the season.
It’s a good thing today is Sunday, which I try to keep as a day of rest. I didn’t do a lot when reclaiming the bed to plant poppies yesterday, but it was enough to increase the pain levels. It’s turning out to be a really windy day, too. So, tomorrow will be my day to really get into the manual labour needed in the old kitchen garden. Hopefully, at the very least, the winds will die down!
I’m back from doing the Costco shopping today, but before I post about that painful trip, here’s some good news!
While doing my rounds, I found new growth in various places!
There are more purple crocuses up and blooming, plus more white crocus buds are up.
There is no sign of the muscari/grape hyacinth yet, but I did have a wonderful surprise nearby.
Okay, I know they’re hard to see, but there are at least 14 tulips coming up here! Before resizing the photo to post here, I looked at it at full size to try and find them all. Some of the green is blades of grass, but I spotted the leaves of a few tulip plants piercing through the dried leaves above them. I’ll have to keep an eye on those. I remember last year, seeing some of them getting taller, but not able to break through the leaves they’d grown through, so they were all squished together. Once they get taller, and I know where not to step, I’ll go in and pull the dead leaves off, so they can spread out and grow properly.
I had another pleasant surprise in the old kitchen garden, too.
We have one Egyptian walking onion that’s been trying to grow every year since we moved here. Last year, it actually survived long enough to form bulbils. After building a new, little raised bed, I took those bulbils and planted them in front. Here, you can see two of them have sprouted! There were several more, too. I can’t remember how many were planted, but I’m pretty stoked that they survived the winter and are now emerging through the mulch. I didn’t see if the “parent” onion has started to emerge, but think I might have seen, maybe, possibly, leaves from one of the flower bulbs my daughter planted along the edge of this garden. Last year, some leaves came up, but none bloomed. There’s another spot, at one end, where she planted daffodils which did bloom last year but, so far, no sign of them.
I did also check the carrots, and there are no sprouts that I could see, but I was just peaking under the edges of the plastic and couldn’t see very far in. I need to put a priority on building covers for those beds, as the current set up is very temporary, and not as functional.
We’ve got highs of 9C/48F predicted for today and tomorrow, with a bit of rain now and then. After that, we’re supposed to warm up a bit more and have sun for at least 5 days. Great weather to get work done out there!
But maybe not today. City trips three days in a row has sucked all the energy out of me! Right now, I just want to crawl into bed and sleep for a week.
When doing my evening rounds today, I decided to do a walkabout, which I will post about separately. I was just finishing up when I got a message from one of my daughters, who had gone out while I was going in, with a picture of purple snow crocuses! She said there was garlic up, too.
They were not there when I did my morning rounds!
So I went back outside and checked it out.
While trying to find the purple crocuses she took a picture of, I found a couple of white ones. They’re so small, it was hard to get a good photo while zooming in, so this is the only one good enough to post.
I’m so thrilled to see them!
As for the garlic, I had been thinking about whether it was time to move the winter mulch aside, or to wait a bit longer.
Well, now’s the time!
I found the one garlic that had pushed its way through the mulch and began clearing.
Marking each end of the rows with sticks when we planted helped a lot!
In the process, I found quite a few more garlic sprouting. They will do much better, now that they will be getting more light and air circulation.
I had a few pleasant surprises this morning. Such as some new crocuses that exploded into bloom overnight!
When I checked them this morning, there was only this one cluster of purple crocuses. I just got back from walking around the yard with my daughters, and a second cluster was blooming, next to it!
There may be only a couple of clusters of purple crocuses, but the yellow ones burst into bloom all through the area we planted them – and there are more spikes of leaves that we can see that haven’t developed flower buds yet. It’s going to be so beautiful, once they all start blooming!
There was another wonderful surprise this morning, in the sun room.
The very first Tulip tree has emerged! I was really wondering how these would do, as there is so much mold on the soil and pots.
Meanwhile, in the big aquarium greenhouse, there are now 4 out of 8 watermelons germinated, and another Apple gourd is breaking through.
Oh, and I have to make a correction about those peppers in the sun room.
I really out to read my labels. They’re eggplant. The peppers are still in the mini-greenhouse in the living room! :-D
I’m seeing a lot fewer cats around when I put the food out in the morning.
Only 3 came to the kibble house.
The Distinguished Guest is still limping, but he is putting weight on that injured leg again. He’s pretty skittish right now and I wasn’t able to come near him.
Speaking of skittish, there were 4 at the tray under the shrine, and I had to zoom in from quite a distance to not scare them off from the food.
After doing my morning rounds, I headed into the city to finally do our second shop that we normally would have done a week ago. We’re able to pull the van into the yard to unload now, which is much nicer!
After things were put away, the I joined the girls to look at things outside. They wanted to see the new seedlings (there are SO many Kulli corn coming up, too!), and we found a potato.
Or should I say, a Potato Beetle.
This is partly why I wanted to put a platform for the transplants above the swing bench. Last year, we had bins right on the bench. The platform is high enough that any cats in the sun room can still use the swing bench as a bed.
He’s really liking that roll of mosquito netting!
It’s 20C/68F right now, and tomorrow is supposed to hit 22C/72F. The sun room gets warm enough, we leave the inner door open with the screen window in the outer door open all the way, the ceiling fan on, and even the inner door of the old kitchen open, and the screen window of the outer door open, too. It’s a lot cooler in the the old kitchen, so it should help cool the sun room down, while the sun room should help warm the old kitchen up a bit. We wouldn’t want things to get too hot in the sun room for the plants – or for Potato Beetle!
Gosh, he’s adorable.
While checking things out, the girls and I went into the main garden area, where there is another garlic bed mulched with straw. They helped me remove the straw just over to the bale nearby, and we had a very pleasant surprise.
Almost all the garlic is coming up already! They’re mostly yellow from lack of light, and uncovering them will help with that. This bed warmed up much faster than the other ones. These are the Porcelain Music garlic.
We checked the other beds and, with their straw mulch gone, they are no longer frozen in the middle. We should be seeing garlic coming up there soon, too.
Before heading inside, I checked one more thing – the cat’s house! I’ve looked through the windows a few times today, and usually saw two adult faces looking back at me. The adults happened to be out this time, though.
It is very hard to see through the smudged up window, but I am positive there are now two litters in here.
That tuxedo in the back is one of the first kittens I saw. The grey tabby and the grey and white it’s using as a pillow are its siblings. I could never tell how many more there were, but thought there could be 4, or even as many as 6, but we just couldn’t see them well enough. I was pretty sure there was at least one more dark, possibly black, kitten.
Looking at the photo above, it looks like there are two much smaller kittens! And possibly that 4th dark, possibly black, kitten I can never be sure I’m seeing.
If it wouldn’t result in the mamas moving the kittens and hiding them somewhere else, I’d be popping up the roof to check on them, and start socializing them.
And clean the inside of the windows, so we can see them better! :-D
At it is, I’m concerned just looking through the windows might scare the mamas away with their babies. After I checked in them, I started heading to the sun room and found a matched set of cats – Junk Pile and the ‘iccus that’s been hanging out with her – coming around the corner of the cat house. They froze in matched poses, with matching expressions of alarm, staring at me. Even when they finally moved, it was like they were synchronized! Too funny.
I quickly headed in so they could go in to the babies. If my guess is right, these two mamas are taking care of both litters together, as we would sometimes see Butterscotch and Beep Beep do. Well. Mostly Beep Beep. Butterscotch spent as little time with her kittens as she could!
While doing my morning rounds today, I made a point of visiting the old kitchen garden. The girls had gone out to see the sprouting crocuses and tulips yesterday, and checked out the side of the old kitchen garden, where they had planted irises and daffodils. We have some of both coming up!
They took some scrap boards and lay them on the ground outside where the seedlings are, to make sure no one accidentally walks too close to the new sprigs. These had done so poorly last year, only partly due to the drought, so we’re really amazing to find they survived.
Also in the old kitchen garden, I checked the rhubarb. One patch is next to where the irises and daffodils are planted.
It looks like something has been eating them! Rhubarb leaves are toxic, but is that true of emerging leaf buds? I don’t know, but these have been chewed on.
The other patch is on the opposite side of the garden.
I moved some snow to uncover the emerging rhubarb on the right. Some of the ones on the left were chewed on, too.
Very strange.
More snow had melted away in the area we planted grape hyacinth, so I checked there, too.
Yes! There are some grape hyacinths sprouting! I’m so excited about these. I just love grape hyacinths. :-)
More of the area the crocuses were planted is snow free, too, so I checked that out.
Some snow crocuses are actually showing flower buds! They’re barely out of the ground, yet, and already trying to bloom! Awesome!
Things are sprouting like crazy in the big aquarium greenhouse, too.
Just look at all those melons sprouting! Only the Halona melons are from purchased seed. The rest are seeds saved from grocery store melons.
The toilet paper tube pots were supposed to get one seed each, but I see an extra Halona melon seed snuck in. :-D
Only the watermelon and the Zucca melon, which is a type of birdhouse gourd, have not had any seeds germinating yet.
Meanwhile…
We now have a second Tennessee Dancing Gourd sprouting, and two types of hulless pumpkins. Last night, there was one Kakai in the back) and one Lady Godiva (in the foreground), but this morning, another Lady Godiva sprout exploded out of the soil.
I am so looking forward to seeing how these turn out!
We have just a few more things to start indoors, and that should be done soon.
If all goes well, we’ll be direct sowing into the garden in a few weeks, with cold hardy seeds that can be sown before last frost.
While heading out to feed the outside cats, I heard a noise from an unusual direction.
I had startled Nicky the Nose on the sun room roof!
I always get a giggle out of how he pancakes himself like that when he’s startled. As if he can somehow make himself small. :-D
Our cats never go on the sun room roof, that we’ve seen. They’ll go onto the new part roof, where they can look at the girls through the second floor windows, but it’s quite a leap to go onto the rest of the roof from there. It was a surprise to see Nicky there!
My daughters had a Mother’s Day treat planned out for me. In our tiny little hamlet, we have a small hotel with a bar and itty bitty restaurant. Well, with all the restrictions in place, they’ve had to change things up. About a month ago, the separate bar and restaurant was reworked as a single country style pub, and quickly got a good reputation for their excellent food. It’s a small menu for a small town, but we’re just excited to have options at all.
Of course, the government promptly pulled the rug out from under restaurants again, so they’re limited to take out, only. I guess the government isn’t done killing small businesses, yet. So we wanted to give them some support!
I saw them post a photo on their Facebook page for a platter that is not on their menu, so I had to ask about it. They were able to put together an appetizer platter for us, including deep fried mushrooms, which are also not on the menu yet. It was awesome! Even with 4 of us, by the time we were done, I could only manage one slice of the pizza I got for myself. My daughters ordered their cheeseburger platters, and were thoroughly impressed just by the size. There was enough there for two meals! And yes, they tasted really good, too! It’ll be much nicer to be able to order food from just a few miles away, instead of having to go to another town. Unless we want Chinese food. ;-) I’m glad we were able to order there today. Driving by over the past month, I was always seeing vehicles and people out front and, on nice days, people sitting and eating at the tables outside. Today, with the increased restrictions kicking in at midnight, there was nothing. Just two employees, and me, and I only heard the cook, but never saw him. So we’ll be trying to order food from there as often as our budget allows. Hopefully, lots of other people will be doing the same. Considering how few people live here, that still won’t be much, but it might be enough to keep them going.
In other things…
I had hung on to the soil samples from the tests done in them, and today I finally got some photos before getting rid of them. Here are the jars from the first two tests we did.
The first sample was from the soft soil uncovered when the old wood pile was cleaned up. The water is still very distinctly orange! The second sample is from the new garden soil we purchased.
These are from the third and fourth tests we did. The one that’s more orange and still cloudy is from where we’d planted potatoes using the Ruth Stout method, while the other is from the unamended soil that has never had anything planted there before. I find it interesting to see how clear – or not! – the water became, after letting the samples sit undisturbed for so long.
Later this afternoon, my daughters and I went out to do some watering, and to plant onion sets in the last of the beds in the old garden area. The 2 bags of shallots had only a dozen sets each, so they were planted in one row along one side, while the yellow onions were planted in a three row grid on the other. Later next week, kohlrabi will be planted in between the two. Besides that, there’s still half a bed left that will be planted with carrots. Aside from successive sowing the spinach, that will be it for those beds.
There were still maybe a dozen onion sets left over, so I’m thinking of interplanting them with the beets that will be planted near the garlic beds. Hopefully, they will help deter deer from going after the beet greens. If all goes well, that will be completed tomorrow.
Before heading back indoors and out of the high winds we were having, the girls and I checked on the flowers we’d planted in the fall.
We’re finding more and more of the teeny, tiny crocuses blooming! I know these are not large flowers, but I didn’t expect them to be this minuscule! I suspect, after they’ve had a year to establish themselves, they will come up a bit larger, next year.
I then spent some time tending the seed starts in the sun room. The gourd pots got moved to the sun room awhile ago, but there is still nothing of the Ozark Nest Egg, Thai Edible Bottle gourd, and birdhouse gourds. I am hoping it’s just because they take so long to germinate normally. I probably should have started them earlier. It’s the squash and melons that I’m eyeballing more. They haven’t been in the sun room long, but I was hoping the increased warmth would help. I’m happy to say that I did see a couple of seedlings trying to push their way through, but most show no sign of any germination. I keep second guessing myself about what we used to plant them in and all the things we did differently this year, thinking that maybe I’ve gone and killed them off somehow. :-/ It’s still just under a month before we can transplant anything outside, so there’s lots of time yet for them to germinate.
At least, that’s what I keep telling myself!
Oy. Today has been a really bad day for internet connectivity – as happens every time we have high winds. This post took forever to get done! Time to stop trying to do internet things for a while.
Hmm… I still have lots of my Mother’s Day pizza left. Maybe a late snack is in order? :-D
Today was the day to start planting our onions. I wanted to get the transplants out, to make room for the squash in the sun room, and get the onion sets in.
The plan was to have onions on either side of the kale that has already been direst sown, in the bed on one side, then plant the rest of the onions in the bed at the opposite end, with kohlrabi in the middle (those don’t get planted for another week). Deer don’t like onions, so we’re hoping that between those, and the flashy windmills, they will stay away from the things they do like, such as the spinach.
This is one of the beds we made last year, that we simply topped up with new garden soil. I realized that the soil was starting to wash away on the sides, so I brought over more logs to act as walls.
Thankfully, these logs have been sitting out for 2 years, so they’re quite dry and light.
I didn’t have any short enough to use as end caps, though. We’ll have to take care of that later.
Once the logs were in place, I brought over more soil to fill in the sides, so I’d have room to plant into, without anything collapsing down into the logs.
My younger daughter joined me when I was just finishing up the first bed, so she continued to bring soil to add to the sides of all the beds, while I brought more logs to shore up the other bed from last year, that didn’t have any yet.
We’d used up the smaller logs when we first starting building the new beds, so the more logs I brought over, the bigger they were getting! Which is good, I suppose, since these are deeper beds than the new ones.
My daughter continued adding soil to the beds while I started transplanting the Nostar onions we started from seeds. There were three very different sizes! The ones that were in peat pellets ended up being the largest ones, while the ones in the K-cups had started out larger, but did not retain moisture as well, until I moved them onto their own tray, where they could be watered thoroughly without drowning the onions in the pellets. Then there were the ones that were started some weeks later. There are still some seedlings in the cups they were sown in; I only took the biggest ones to finish off the row.
On the other side of the kale, my daughter and I planted a three row grid of the Red Karmen onion sets that arrived in the mail yesterday.
By this time, we were done for the day!!
This bed is where the rest of the onions and the shallots will be planted, with the kohlrabi to go in the middle. The bed to the left is the one that’s half-planted with carrots. A second variety will go in the other half as soon as possible.
Oh, I almost forgot. When I was doing my rounds this morning, I took another look at some of the old corrals and other things around the barn and outer yard, hoping to find something we could salvage and build raised beds out of. There was nothing! Everything out there is just too rotted out. There’s possibly usable material that was stacked in an old shed, but the shed has collapsed on top of it, so we’d have to remove an awful lot of stuff, just to see one way or the other. It’s such a mess, just getting into there to move stuff has a high risk of injury. It’s unfortunate, but there’s pretty much nothing to salvage at all, never mind to build accessible raised beds with. Ah, well. It was worth a look!
After putting things away, my daughter stayed out to tend other things while I transferred the squash to the sun room and set up the lights as best I could. They are long aquarium lights, so I can only set them up vertically along the shelf. It will be good when we can invest in some grow lights, that we can hand over each shelf. At least the sun room does get a lot of natural light through much of the day.
While I was working on that, my daughter made an exciting discovery.
The crocuses have started to bloom!
They are so tiny!!!
I wasn’t able to get a photo of the third type, which are purple and white.
I will have to make sure to check these tomorrow morning, so see how much they open!
My daughters are just thrilled to see them. I don’t think either of them expected them to survive February’s Polar Vortex, having been planted just this past fall. So they are really excited right now!
My daughters and I regularly check the areas we planted things in the fall. Especially where we planted so many corms and bulbs.
For those new to this blog (welcome! I’m very happy you’re here!), last fall we planted 200 grape hyacinths in one area (day one, day two). In another, we planted about 100 snow crocuses. My daughters also planted some Iris, Bulls Eye Tulip, plus a variety pack of other tulips, in other areas. We also planted three varieties of hardneck garlic. (all links will open in new tabs, so you won’t lose your place. :-) )
Today, we actually found sprouts!!!
This is a snow crocus. We found one other sprout a few feet away, too. We were so excited!!!
There’s still no sign of anything else, but it’s the crocuses that are supposed to be the earliest to emerge, so this is pretty awesome! We probably won’t see any of the others for some weeks, yet.
We also found…
… a garlic emerging through the mulch!
It wasn’t until I uploaded the photo and was resizing it that I realized there was a second one in the back, the tip just barely visible! I had been checking the garlic beds every now and then, since we took the plastic off, pulling the mulch back to see if there were any sprouts. I had done that earlier, but in a different spot and completely missed the bit of green poking through! Even when my daughter pointed it out, it took a while for me to see it.
These ones are Purple Stripe. After finding them, I checked in the Porcelain Music bed, pulling back the mulch, and I did find a sprout there, too. I put the mulch back. The overnight temperatures are still too cold to take the mulch off.
We are really, really excited to see these!! We have sprooooooots!
*doing the happy dance*
Meanwhile…
After putting some seeds to soak for 24 hours, we planted some Crespo squash seeds.
We planted only 2 seeds in each of 3 double cups. We’ll see how many germinate. They went into the small aquarium greenhouse, along with the more recently planted gourds (still no seedlings sprouting there, yet), and the light fixture that’s there to keep the tank warm.
I keep catching Saffron lying on the screen cover, directly over the light! The little bugger has discovered it’s even warmer than sitting on the light fixtures of the big tank. At least she’s tiny and light!
As you can see in this image from Baker Creek, Crespo squash can get quite large! The only information I can find about these is from the Baker Creek site, and it’s new for them, so there isn’t very much information, and there are no reviews at all. There isn’t even a “days to maturity” available. The package just says to harvest when the skin is very hard. ??
These are from Peru and Bolivia, which do have areas that are the equivalent of our Zone 3 climate, but I have no idea if these are from any of them. Probably not. :-D
Still, I couldn’t resist these amazing looking edibles!! It would be really something, if we could grow these to full maturity.
The luffa have joined the tomatoes and onions in the big aquarium greenhouse. They are big enough now that I’m not as concerned about keeping them extra warm.
I really hope these work out!
Thinking ahead, while the girls and I were walking around, we went by the other area we are considering to put our permanent garden beds and talked about it.
We have decided that this will be it. Our future permanent, accessible raised bed garden.
One of the hesitations about this spot is that it’s always been a high traffic area – that’s why it’s so flat that I’ve been able to mow it! There is a gate to the old hay yard next to the shack by the barn. On the other side of the shack is the ramp that was used to load cattle onto trucks. The gate, however, has had other wire placed across it and it can no longer be opened, and even if that old cattle ramp wasn’t rotting and falling apart, we don’t plan to have cattle. At least not so many that we’d be sending them off to auction. We still drive through parts of it, to access the garage, the barn, etc., but that still leaves a huge area that no one drives through anymore.
In our shorter term plans, we were talking about putting a temporary fence up in the old hay yard, where the remains of another fence still sits.
It’s marked in black in the above photos. This would allow us to remove part of the main fence (marked in orange) and still keep the renter’s cows from getting through.
But if we’re going to put permanent raised beds by the old hay yard, we will want to plant a wind break even sooner, and that was going to be along a permanent fence.
Which would be about where the black lines are in these photos.
If we do that, we can get rid of a lot more of the fence around the old hay yard, much of which is in terrible shape, anyhow. That, in turn, will open up more of the hay yard area to other options. Right now, with that gate blocked off, the only way we can get into the old hay yard that doesn’t involve clambering over a wire fence is either through the barn, or through the electric wire fence at the gate by the barn, then go around the back of the barn, and through the collapsed rails of an old corral.
We will have to do some work on the fence around the outer yard, though, to fill in any areas the renter’s cows can get through, if his electric fence fails again. It wasn’t an issue before, because we could close up the gates to the inner yard, but if we have a garden out there, the cows would make shorter work of it than the deer!
The advantages of this area compared to the others – mostly that it’s already nice and flat – also means that we will probably be able to build the permanent garden beds here sooner than in any of the other locations.
On top of everything else in favour of this area, it’s visible in live feed from the garage security camera. We will be able to see if there are any deer getting into the garden.
Well. Not when we’re asleep, of course, but it’s a start! :-D
The Re-Farmer 