garden plans

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

Our 2021 garden: haskap and corn plot status

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The girls were able to come out and give me a hand this afternoon, so things got done a lot faster. Especially for me, when they booted me out of the garden and into the house. Apparently, I was looking pretty sun burned! Not feeling it, though. ;-)

In my focus on watering, I’ve been eyeballing the haskap bushes. The male is doing quite well.

It’s even beginning to show flower buds!

We planted these two summers ago, so this year should have been a year with good production.

That’s not going to happen.

I wish I knew what was going on with this poor female haskap! The only leaf buds are on the very tips of branches, and not even all of them. I’d expected to get more of them by now, but I haven’t seen any yet. We might have to order more online for next year, instead. We shall see.

With all the watering they’re getting, my mother’s yellow flowers in this bed are already starting to come up strongly in places. We’re not watering the entire bed as thoroughly; just the haskaps and the lilac bush. I expect the lilac to do better this year, now that the maple tree that was shading it has been cut down.

Meanwhile…

My daughters and I marked out a block for the corn we will be planting soon. This block is to the West of the peas, so it can actually be reached with the hose. One of my daughters worked on soaking the area while the other helped me with chopping up straw with the lawn mower to lay down in the block.

The rows are two feet apart, and the corn needs to be planted 1 ft apart. We just have one packet of these seeds, so this should be more than large enough. The variety being grown here is called Dorinny. While I found them at Baker Creek, apparently they had largely disappeared for decades, until they were rediscovered and reintroduced by Wood Prairie Farm. They are a Canadian heritage breed, can handle cold soil, and matures in only 75 days. I’m quite looking forward to them! These are a type that I hope to save seeds from.

One of the bonuses of these being planted earlier and maturing so quickly is that the chances of cross pollination with the Montana Morado we’ll be planting at the other end of the garden will be greatly reduced, even with our winds. They will mature at completely different times.

We know this area is low in nutrients, especially nitrogen, which corn needs a lot of, so we’ll have to take extra steps to ensure they have enough. The fresh, nutrient filled garden soil mix will be the first boost. We picked up a water soluble vegetable fertilizer that has higher nitrogen levels, but in cleaning out the old kitchen, we found a water soluble fertilizer that’s even higher in nitrogen. We also found a pump sprayer, still in its box, so we’ll be able to use it to feed the corn, even in the furthest plots, where the hose doesn’t reach. We do plan to pick up more hose but, for now, the rain barrel and watering can are working out just fine.

The chopped straw was also added to the rows of peas as mulch. Being able to run the lawn mower over the straw a couple of times really makes a big difference. I find myself thinking that I wished we’d thought of it earlier, but then I remember that when we were using the straw previously, we were having problems with the push mower that was here. I did use the new push mower to do it last fall, but that’s when it stopped working completely. I’d chopped up just enough to mulch the garlic for the winter.

One thing’s for sure: we’ve made a huge dent in that straw bale! We’ll need to get another one by the end of the season, for sure. :-)

The girls went on to thoroughly water everything for the evening. Tomorrow, we start hauling soil again… after soaking the ground some more, and stomping down the chopped straw. I do wish we had enough cardboard to lay over the grass, but there isn’t enough in our recycling to cover even a single row. I supposed that’s a down side of our bulk-buying, low packaging shopping habits!

Once this block is planted, we can move on to preparing the beds for everything to be planted or transplanted out here, after June 2. After the girls kicked me out of the garden so they could finish, I checked how things were growing in the sun room, and am very happy to see more summer squash and melons have germinated. It doesn’t look like any of the winter squash or pumpkins have started yet. Still nothing on the rest of the gourds, either. :-( I’ll be keeping a close eye on the climbers over the next couple of weeks. How many germinate will tell me how big of a squash arch we will be building.

The day after tomorrow, we should be getting our first batches of items in the mail from Veseys, including the mulberry tree. I am thinking of planting it in a grow bag this summer, though. There are too many dead trees in the area it will be going in permanently that need to come down. I’m hoping they are solid enough that we can use them for building materials.

Next week, the potatoes will be arriving, and we’ll set up the grow bags we made from feed bags for those. We settled on having them along the chain link fence near the storage house, where they’ll be out of the way, yet easy to access and tend to. Plus, full sunlight. Hopefully, using the grow bags will alleviate the slug problem I found we had, last year.

It feels so good to be getting so many things into the ground! Now we just have to wait and see how many will actually grow! ;-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: planting day!

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We had another change in plans, today.

I was supposed to take my mother to a doctor’s appointment, but the clinic called and it got rescheduled to tomorrow.

Which meant I could change into my grubbies and go play in the dirt! :-D

Today, we finally got most of our cold hardy seeds in the ground. :-) The first to go in were the lettuces.

We’ve got 4 types of lettuce; three are dark reds/purples that we ordered, plus a packet of buttercrunch that we got as free seeds. :-) These were alternately planted in the chimney block retaining wall.

Also, the plastic containers from things like sour cream and cottage cheese make excellent label markers! :-)

We’ll sow more in a couple of weeks somewhere else. We haven’t decided where, yet.

Then it was off to the newly finished garden beds.

The bed on the far left of the first picture has a single row of purple kale down the middle. These were other free seeds from Baker Creek that we got. :-) Later, that bed will have onions planted on either side.

The three middle beds each have a double row of spinach in the middle. In a couple of weeks, we’ll sow more along the sides.

The last bed, that is half watered, has carrots in it. We got one kind as pelleted seeds, which made it very easy to plant and space them properly. They’re supposed to be 1 1/2 – 3 inches apart, and they’re planted in roughly a 3 inch grid. Sort of like square foot gardening, but without bothering to mark out square foot plots. We’ll plant the other three varieties in similar density.

I have to say, by the time my daughter and I finished planting these, I was really, really looking forward to when we have the accessible raised beds! My knees are shot, so I can’t squat like my daughter could, so I was bending from the waist. Not only did that get painful after a while, but I was getting head rushes every time I straightened!! Meanwhile, my daughter has a bum knee, and a messed up shoulder, so she kept having to alternate positions to be able to reach, too. We really need to find materials to build the raised beds. We’re hoping to make a trip to a salvage yard this summer, so hopefully we’ll be able to find some good materials there.

Meanwhile, I’ve now got shipping confirmations for several other items from Veseys, including the mulberry tree! Which means we need to find some way to take down several dead trees in the area it will be planted in. We might have to just do it manually. :-/

The only thing we don’t have shipping confirmation for yet are the potatoes. It might be another couple of weeks before those get shipped.

The onion sets we ordered from Veseys should arrive in the mail tomorrow. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to pick that up, depending on how things go with driving my mother around. Which means we should be able to start planting onions the day after, including our surviving transplants. It should be interesting to see the difference between onions from sets, and from seed.

We’re going to need to pick up netting to protect the beds from birds and deer. Even for the garlic beds. The birds are digging around in the dirt, like they dig around in the leaf litter in the trees. I don’t know what’s in there that they’re after. They’re not going for the garlic, but they’re messing up the soil enough that some get partially uncovered, and kicking it up far enough that it’s covering up the paths!

We also need to get more seeds started indoors over the next few days. These will be the last ones to start indoors.

We saved up just enough toilet paper tubes to fill the under-bed storage bin. Once they’re filled, we’ll start the Montana Morado corn. Then, with whatever’s left, we’ll start sunflower seeds until they’re all filled, then move on to the Jiffy pellets. Then there are the cucamelons. If there is enough room left in the Jiffy pellet tray, they’ll go in there. Otherwise, we’ll do the double cup method for them.

Once the onions are planted out, we should be able to move all our starts to the sun room. It’s much warmer in there than the aquarium green houses right now. In fact, I’m considering moving some of them over, now. We can move the lights over, later, though I’m not sure how we would set them up. The ones for the big tank are quite long. I might set them up vertically. We’ll see. The other gourds in particular have not sprouted yet, and neither have any more Crespo squash (the one that did is already in the sun room, along with the dancing gourds). I think they really need that warmth.

It feels so good to be planting outside!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: seed planning, a furry mushroom, and oops!

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After hauling to many loads of soil over the rough, rough ground, none of us were up to doing it again today.

So our Sunday remained a day of rest!

We did still go out to soak down the beds we are working on, though, along with other watering and checking of things. There is fresh new growth on the grapes, which was good to see. I wasn’t sure they’d survived February’s deep freeze. We’ve got rhubarb coming up, and the one haskap is leafing out nicely. The other is still struggling. :-( The garlic is looking awesome. Unfortunately, the birds are digging into the soil, as they have been digging into all the leaves on the ground all over the place. They’re not after the garlic, but they’re scatting soil all over, and some are getting partially uncovered in the process. We’re going to have to come up with a way to cover those!

While checking out the snow crocuses and grape hyacinths (so many are coming up now!), we found a strange, furry, orange mushroom in a tree.

Rolando Moon found a perfect spot to settle down and groom herself! :-)

The girls and I talked about where we are going to plant things; the space we have to work with is turning out very different than we expected while working with the satellite image, and we’re going to have open spaces where we had expected to have garden beds.

Which is okay. Nothing is written in stone, and most of the beds are going to be temporary.

We then went through our seed packets, sorting out the ones that need to be planted before the last frost date.

There are a lot of things that should have been planted “as soon as the ground can be worked”, but we aren’t ready for all of them.

These are the ones that should be in the ground right now.

Two of the three beds for the spinach collection are not ready yet. The kale will be interplanted with onions, and one of those beds is ready. The bed for the strawberry spinach is ready. The beets will be going into the new bed beside the garlic, and that one’s not quite ready. It’s a small bed, so we will probably be planting one type there, and another somewhere else. The poppies will be going in the old kitchen garden, which also is not ready yet.

We still aren’t sure where the carrots will go. They need deep soft soil, so I think they will be going where the potato beds were last year. We are making those longer, so only the part that was used last year will have the soft soil needed. Some might end up in the old kitchen garden, too.

Then there is the next batch.

We can start planting lettuces now, with successive sowing every couple of weeks until about the middle of June, before it gets too hot. These will go in the old kitchen garden, with some of them going into the retaining wall blocks, which are ready now, and others further into the garden, once we’ve worked out where the paths will go and add more soil.

These can be planted in the middle of May. It’s a bit surprising for a corn to be planted before first frost. Once we’re done with the beds that need to be direct sown right away, I’ll be marking off the block the corn will be planted in. At the same time these are being direct sown, I will be starting the Montana Morado corn indoors, along with half of the sunflowers.

The kohlrabi will be interplanted with onions. Onions are supposed to repel those beetles we had issue with last year.

While going through the seed packets, we discovered an oops.

The pink celery should have been started 8-12 weeks before last frost!!

So we quickly planted them now.

The seeds are absolutely minuscule! They are surface sown, so they just needed to be scattered on the soil and pressed down, so we used a take-out container as a mini-greenhouse. The sun room is warmer than the house, and there’s no room in the aquarium greenhouses, so we set it up with the tomatoes and luffa. We still use the ceramic heater bulb at night, but according to the thermometer in the sun room, it reached almost 30C/86F in there today!

They’re getting less than half the time to start than they should, but we’ll see how it goes. Who knows? We might have a long summer this year.

Everything else that needs to be direct sown has to wait until after our lost frost date. Especially the Peaches ‘n Cream corn collection. The radishes (two varieties) will be interplanted with some of them, to help break up the soil. They mature very quickly, so being overshadowed by the corn will not be an issue. The sunflowers will be a mix of transplants and direct sowing, to see which works better. And finally, there are the three varieties of bush beans.

If all goes well, we’ll be transplanting all the squash, gourds, cucamelons and tomatoes at about the same time. The potatoes and asparagus should be in and ready to plant by then, too.

The first few weeks of June are going to be very busy, and we’ve got a lot of manual labour to get done ahead of that!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: killing grass, and first one!

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While doing my rounds today, I brought out one of our black tarps and headed over to where we will be planting the Montana Morado corn.

None of our corn can be planted until well after our June 2 last frost date. Covering this area now will give us about 5-6 weeks to kill off the grass as much as possible, before the corn can be planted. There’s a lot of crab grass around here, so I don’t expect to kill those off completely, but we should be able to pull up a lot of the rhizomes later on.

The Montana Morado is the only corn we will be starting indoors, as we are not sure how well they will grow in our zone. If things go to plan, we will save seeds from these and, over the years, it should develop hardiness to our local climate. But first, we have to get a successful crop! I’m really looking forward to how these turn out.

Of course, while continuing my rounds, I checked the areas where we planted in the fall. There are more tiny little muscari showing up, as well as the snow crocuses. This was my morning surprise, though.

The very first of my daughter’s tulips has emerged! So exciting! The tulip bulbs they planted here needed to be buried quite deep, and heavily mulched. While they need cold winters, we didn’t know if they survived the extreme cold we got in February. If they had been established, I would not have been concerned, but this is their first winter after planting, and they were more vulnerable. Hopefully, this means we will be seeing the other tulips, and the irises come up soon.

We did see something coming up that we thought might have been an iris, though my daughter didn’t remember planting that far out. It turned out to be an onion! When we moved here, the old kitchen garden had a fence around it, and my mother had some onions just outside the fence line. One or two have been coming up every year, but they never reach full maturity before dying back, so I’m really surprised to see one coming up.

It makes me think about transplanting our bulb onions in the sun room soon. The ones started in the Jiffy pellets are getting really big. :-) We still need to add soil to the beds those will be going into, though, which means I should probably start hardening them off now.

We’re going to have an awful lot that needs to get done, all at once, pretty soon!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: marking spaces

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After working things out and making some decisions on where we want to plant things, we are ready to mark out beds in preparation for planting. We have seeds than need to be direct sown before our first frost, and those are the areas we want to focus on.

We’d decided to mark off blocks at 20′ x 20′ (about 6m x 6m) for the corn and 20′ x15′ (about 6m x 4.5m) for the sunflowers, and then make 3′ x 8′ (about 1m x 2.5m) beds for most of the rest.

With that in mind, I figured the easiest way to mark off blocks would be with knotted cord. I used 2 lengths of paracord with a loop at one end. From the loop, I tied knots at 3′, 8′, 15′ and 20′ We have a bundle of small marker flags, and I grabbed those to mark the corners of the plots.

The first thing I did was mark off a 20′ x 20′ block in the furthest corner, from which everything else would be lined up.

I decided to start the rectangular plots roughly 4′ (just over 1m) away from where the corn will be. Once I started marking off the first one, though, I quickly threw away the idea of making them only 8 ft long. For this space, that is just minuscule!

I made them 20′ long, instead.

In the above photo, there are 4 plots marked off, with 3′ paths between them.

I added 1 more and ran out of flags, so I used a stick from the pile of branched I’d pruned a few weeks back.

Then I went back and made more marker sticks. We’ve got the bright orange marking paint, so I used that on one end of the sticks so they would be more visible.

Using the two knotted ropes to find where to place the markers worked really, really well. With the looped ends at markers or flags, lining up the knots to find the next spot to mark also made it easy to keep straight lines and right angles at the corners. It’s not perfect, of course. The rough ground alone made that impossible. They don’t need to be perfect. All of this is just temporary, anyhow, until we plant trees here.

I took the time to make more markers from sticks, spraying one end with the bright orange paint, then made another row of plots.

This is how it looked when I was done.

Yeah. I know. Hard to see!

So I edited it to as close as I could match the lines.

The big block by itself is where the corn will start. It’s hard to know how much space we’ll actually need, but at least we have the general area worked out.

With just the rectangular plots, this is an area that’s 15′ wide and 66′ long (about 4.5m x 20m), including the paths in between.

We will be marking more of the rectangular plots, as well as another corn block at this end.

Our three varieties of bush beans will be planted in the plots nearest the corn, though I’m already rethinking that. The peas, which need to be planted right away, will need to be trellised, so they need to be to the north, so they don’t shade other plants. We have only 2 varieties, but one of them is a bag of 200 seeds, while the other is a typical seed envelope, so having two sections of the green peas and one of the purple should work out. The three varieties of beans can take the next three sections.

The actual dimensions of the area, compared to what we thought we had on the satellite image, means we’ve got three plots at the end that does not have anything specific planned for them. It’s hard to see in the photo, but even the furthest plots are still far enough away from the apple trees that they will still get full sun.

We’re out of cardboard, and we’ll be running out of straw very quickly. It’s going to be a challenge with all that grass, until the plants fully mature. By planting densely, they should shade out and choke out the grass and weeds. When we do add the soil, we will have to be careful in how we use it, or we’ll run out very quickly! One of the things to keep in mind, as always, is that this is meant to be temporary. When it comes to food trees, they take so long to reach productions stage, we really need to get those planted quickly. If we can swing it next year, that would be amazing, but even if we can only afford to do a few a year, rather than a whole nut orchard, all at once, that will be a good start.

Until then, we’ll be breaking up and amending the soil with vegetables. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: new, layered bed

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The forecast for today has changed, and we are expected to be even warmer than originally predicted. Before trying to get my husband to the lab in town for his blood work (he never even got to the counter to get his requisition; the line up was out the door, and was moving so slowly, he ended up leaving, due to his pain levels), I saw we’d already reached 13C/55F, which was originally our predicted high. The new high for the day was listed as 18C/64F. As soon as I could after we got back, I headed out to get the new bed done, before things got too hot.

Yeah. I know. It’s not really “hot”, but we’re not acclimatized yet!

This is what it looked like before I started.

I would like to point out how deep into the soil the spade is. This is actually really, really impressive. Pretty much anywhere else in the yard, I would not be able to get the spade that deep, even while standing on it – and I’m no lightweight! Typically, I’d shove the spade into the ground, turn around to do something else, only to have it fall over, moments later. What a difference with soil that has been buried for decades under where the wood pile for the furnace used to be.

The first thing to do was remove that lovely soft soil.

And more roots.

We’ve de-rooted this area three times, and I was still finding old cherry roots!!

Also, worms. Lots of worms!

I dug down until I hit gravel. Which was not as deep as the other two beds that our garlic is planted in.

You can see a root sticking out that I couldn’t remove. I decided it wasn’t worth going back to the sun room to get something to cut it with. Some of the other roots I pulled out went under the boardwalk on the side! I’d dug those areas down to the gravel, too.

Being near the compost ring, this bed is narrower than the others, as well as shallower.

Being right next to the compost ring came in handy, though.

I pretty much emptied the compost ring, then walked back and forth on it to stomp it down.

Using the contents of our compost pile like this, we aren’t getting a chance to get any finished compost! Which is fine. It’s still organic material for our garden beds.

Speaking of which…

Next came a layer of straw.

Unfortunately, the wind was really picking up, and things were blowing away, so I made sure to tromp all over the straw, too.

When it came time to return the soil, I did much of it by hand. This allowed me to break up lumps, remove rocks, old tree roots, weed roots, and gently cover the worms.

This is where a soil sifter would make things a lot easier.

Well. Except for the “gently cover the worms” part. That would be more of a “bash the worms to bits” thing. So I don’t mind doing it by hand!

With the previous beds, I returned the soil that was dug up, plus added the soil from where the paths are. I’m not making a path on the other side, so it’s just the soil I removed. I’d used that side area to pile grass clippings last year. Most was used elsewhere, but there still was some left, and that got added to the bed as well.

We will be adding some of the lovely new garden soil to this, but not yet. By this point, it was just too windy to keep working on it. Hopefully, it will calm down a bit, later. After today’s high of 18C/64F (it’s already 17C/62F), we’re supposed to drop to -3C/26F, with “isolated flurries”. Tomorrow’s high is only 2C/35F, so if I can get this finished today, that would be great.

I do want to break out the soil testing kit first, though. I want to compare soil samples from this area, with the big garden area, and with the new garden soil. That should be quite interesting!

So there is the new, layered, garden bed, almost complete. This will be a good bed for root vegetables. I think we’re planning to put a variety of beets in here, though maybe it would be better for carrots. We have several varieties of both beets and carrots, so we might even do one of each. We shall see!

A lot of our seeds packets say to direct sow “as soon as the ground can be worked.” Which, obviously, can be done now. With the predicted overnight temperatures, though, I don’t think I’d be willing to chance it for another week even if we cover them with plastic. Even cool weather crops have their limits! That will just give us more time to prepare the beds. We’ll have to go over the seed packets and figure out just how big some of them will need to be and start marking them out. That will help us make some decisions on exactly where different things will be planted. Especially those that will need trellises and other supports.

We have lots of work to do, and I’m so thankful to finally be able to get at it!!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: new bed built

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It was an absolutely gorgeous day today!

My younger daughter and I took advantage of it and built a new garden bed in the area we plan to plant tomatoes.

The tomato seedlings are doing well, as are the luffa.

They have roots starting to show out the bottoms of the pots already!

The onions in the sun room are doing well, but not to much the ones planted more recently.

As for the gourds, none have sprouted yet but, from what I’ve read, they do take a long time to germinate.

Here is where the tomatoes will be going.

We did absolutely nothing to the ground before we started. There really wasn’t any point of even trying.

The first step was to cover the grass.

Actually, the first step was to cut down that maple. I’d already noted that it was creating so much shade when in full leaf, that a unique lilac in the flower bed beside it was being killed off. The stump was left high and will become the support for a seat. The main trunk and some of the larger branches are being kept for future projects.

We’ve been saving the cardboard boxes from cat litter, and their flaps were placed against the fence as a short barrier to hold in the soil.

Well… after spending some time removing all the tape. It took more time to get all the tape off than to lay out the cardboard!

Those and some moving boxes were enough to cover the entire space between the flower bed and the fence. :-)

Then, we broke out the new soaker hose! :-)

We will likely be going below freezing tonight, so the water will still need to be shut off from the basement when we’re done, but for a warm day like today, we could use the hoses for a while.

The soaker hose is 50 ft/15m, so we’re looking at approximately 25 ft/7 1/2m for the new bed.

While letting that soak, my daughter and I began bringing loads of straw over from the bale in the big garden area.

We probably could have left the water running all day to soak it thoroughly, but we didn’t bother. We did move the soaker hose over by the haskap berry bushes, though, and left the water running while we moved on to the next step: spreading the straw.

Actually, I spread the straw while my daughter filled a couple of wheelbarrows of soil and brought them over. Once the cardboard was covered, we tromped back and forth on it, stamping it down, then lay the soaker hose back over it.

We left that to soak and took a walk around the big garden area and talked about changing a few things.

The above image shows the existing beds from last year’s garden, in green. The three smaller beds in the middle were going to be where our three varieties of spinach would be planted. I was thinking we might change those up completely. Instead of three short beds oriented East-West, it would probably be better to have two longer beds oriented North-South, like the two we already have. One of the North-South beds was supposed to have shallots planted in it, but the shallot seedlings failed, so we’ll still have three beds available to plant spinach (and whatever else we interplant with them).

Eventually, we will be building accessible raised beds here, so nothing is permanent at this point, anyhow.

There’s also the two small beds – the shorter green rectangles in the above pictures – where we’d planted potatoes last year. There’s nothing stopping us from making those longer, stretching into the skinny bit that’s marked in orange.

So that’s what we’ll do with those areas.

By the time we went back to the new bed, my older daughter was done work for the day and was able to join us.

The first thing they did was stop using the larger wheelbarrow, because it sucks. :-/ Actually, they both do. We need to get a new wheelbarrow! Just one good one is enough. :-)

So one daughter had shovel duty, filling the smaller wheelbarrow, while the other brought it over and dumped it, then I spread the soil until a new load was brought. The job was done very quickly!

The area of straw left uncovered will be a pathway. At some point, we’ll put in some pavers or something, but for now, the straw and cardboard will keep the weeds and grass down. That and lots of tromping it down with our feet. :-)

Each of the haskaps got a load of soil around them, too.

Then, because the hose was handy, the soil got a brief watering, more to keep it from blowing away than anything else.

Our last frost date is June 2, so this will have more than a month for the straw to settle. We’ve got one more warm day, then we’re supposed to get snow. Long range forecast sees more snow and rain into the first few days of May. Any precipitation we get will help settle it more, and we’ll be able to see if we need to add more soil or not.

If all goes well, I will use tomorrow to dig a new bed next to the garlic beds, before things cool down again. That one will be a lot more physical labour than this one was!

I’m looking forward to it. :-)

One area done, many more to go! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: Checking the haskap and planning ahead

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This morning, none of the kitties were cooperative about getting their pictures taken, so I had to settle for something that didn’t move.

Much.

;-)

While doing my rounds these days, I check all the areas we planted things in the fall. I found more garlic coming up under the mulch, but we’re still leaving them covered. Ideally, we’d have plastic row covers over them, but we don’t have any sort of hoops or frames to hold it up right now. They’ll be fine; a cover would just kick start them a bit more.

This morning, I decided to clean up the old flower stalks in the bed our two haskap bushes are in. Those flowers are among the things my mother insists we keep, but I wanted to open up the space around the bushes more, so if a few fresh roots came up with the flower stalks, I didn’t mind.

This meant I finally got the first good look at how the haskaps were doing.

I had to hold the branches to get a photo, because of the wind! :-D

This is the male plant, and it’s starting to leaf out quite nicely! It did well last year, too.

It’s the female plant that I am more concerned about.

Last year, I was sure it had died, but it did grow and even managed to produce a couple of berries. It’s still very weak and spindly, with branches so thin, the camera on my phone couldn’t focus on them! There’s the tiniest bit of green showing, though, so at least I can tell it’s still alive. We need to pick up a couple more of the female plants. I never saw any last year, so we will likely have to order them in.

I want to side dress the ones we have with our nice, new garden soil, but probably not today. It started to snow while I was out there. The snow has already stopped, but it’s going to stay chilly today. We’re supposed to warm up a lot over the next two days, then get snow again. During those two warm days, I’m hoping to start prepping the areas at the chain link fence, so we’ll be able to tend the nearby haskap at the same time.

We’ve been saving our cardboard for the past while, and will be laying that over the grass between this bed and the chain link fence, then adding a layer of old straw before topping with soil. This is where the tomatoes will be planted, with the fence to use as support. On the other side of the person gate, we’ll lay cardboard down as well, but that side is where we’re planning to put the remaining old chimney blocks to use as planters. This year, they will be used for the cucamelons but, in the future, they will be good for anything we need to keep contained. We still need to get those blocks out of the old basement. We ended up having to use them to barricade the screen “door” we made over the opening between the two basements. The cats were managing to push their way through, so we’ll have to find an alternate way of bracing the frame before we can remove the blocks. Unfortunately, the opening is basically just a hole that was cut into the wall around the time the new basement was built, so it’s oddly shaped, plus the floors are at slightly different levels. It makes creating a barrier the cats can’t push through much more challenging! Once we figure that out, we can haul the blocks out. I do want to keep one in the new basement, though. I found it was the perfect height to use as a hard surface to brace on while I was rough shaping wood to carve. The rest will be set up along the chain link fence. We want to transplant the grapes to the chain link fence, where they will get more sunlight, but not this year.

I keep forgetting that we also have some chain link fence on the other side of the vehicle gate. Just a short stretch to the garage. Part of it is shaded by the garage in the morning, but it does get full sun overall. It’s another area we can keep in mind for any future garden plots for things than need support. There’s a lot more of the chain link fencing towards the west, but that stretch doesn’t get much sunlight. Once we clean up the dead branches and trees on the outside of the fence, it’ll be better and we’ll have more options.

It feels great to finally be able to start these preparations now, even though we can’t plant anything for almost another month, at the earliest. Getting the soil delivered yesterday means we can work on different areas a little at a time, rather than rushing to get it all done at once, later.

Little by little, it’ll get done! :-)

The Re-Farmer

I got dirt!

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Oy, what a day today has been!

Of course, the best part was getting the garden soil in. I figured I’d call and it would be brought in after a few days or something. I never imagined they’d be able to bring it so quickly!

We now have a load both in the outer yard, and by the old garden area, near where we were be doing most of our gardening this year.

It’s absolutely gorgeous soil! I’m so incredibly happy with it!

I want more.

:-D

In truth, we probably will end up using both piles up this year. We will be using it judiciously, but once a load was no longer in the truck, it suddenly looked very small! :-D We were already expecting to finish on one load and use at least part of the second, so this is not too unexpected. For the price we got it for, we will be able to get more if we need to, when the permanent raised beds are built.

Just a little while ago, my daughters and I scrounged around in the barn and found a tarp that could mostly cover the nearby pile. Then we brought over some of the old tires that were stacked behind the pump shack after I cleaned up there and fixed a window. May as well get some use out of them! There’s also a rock pile with some trees growing out of it, nearby, so we grabbed some of those. Hopefully, it’ll be enough to keep the tarp from blowing away – and the tarp will keep most of the soil from blowing away! We’ll cover the other pile, too, but not tonight.

Along with the soil delivery and the septic tank getting cleaned, we kept getting phone calls. One was from the place I’d bought our baby chainsaw from. The spare battery I’d ordered had come in! Which was a very pleasant surprise, all things considered. I was fully prepared for it to take weeks, or even months, before it came in.

Then we got an odd call from the tax preparer. We’d dropped off my older daughter’s papers. We did TurboTax last year, but they are so messed up this year, we just gave up. My daughter does her transactions through PayPal, and the Excel spreadsheet she downloaded from there was not something that could be printed out and make any sense, so I put it on a memory card and included it.

The tax preparer had no idea what it was. Her computer doesn’t have a port for it. That never even occurred to me!

So we were going to put it on a thumb drive and bring it over, but my daughter went back to her PayPal to try and find something that made more sense. She ended up finding a sales summary that we could print out. So my younger daughter and I headed out to run some errands and I swung by to drop off the printouts.

I ended up talking to the tax preparer, who seemed totally lost. She had a hard time understanding that everything my daughter does is digital and online. She took some notes and said she would call if they had any more questions.

By the time we got to our next errand, we got a text that the tax preparer had called and left and exasperated sounding message, but no details.

I don’t get it. This should be a very simple return.

*sigh*

We’ll call them back tomorrow.

We ran the rest of our errands in town, including picking up the spare battery – it’s a good thing we had to drive by the place because I almost forgot! – then paid for the garden soil on the way home.

After we got home, my older daughter was finished work for the day, so we went outside and ended up covering the one pile of soil. My younger daughter has already started to move soil over to the old kitchen garden! :-D This is one of the areas we can start adding soil to right way, as we’ve already been building it up for the past couple of summers.

The chives we transplanted into two of the old chimney blocks making up the retaining wall are coming up quite strongly. Which is nice, because they’d been pretty spindly, before. Prolific, but not a lot of substance! The rest of these blocks, where we had planted cucamelons, were topped up with soil last fall, so they’re already good. :-)

Along the south edge of this garden, my daughter planted bulbs, and it looks like one or two of her irises has emerged! It’s hard to tell with one of them, they’re so small, still. We also found more garlic sprouts, and my daughter found more snow crocuses. Everything is so tiny, but it’s still very exciting to see them coming up.

While checking the areas we planted all the grape hyacinth and snow crocuses, we can also check out the wild strawberries.

They have been visible through their leaf mulch for a while. Such tiny, delicate things, yet very hardy! They get quickly overgrown with wildflowers, so the plan it to transplant them as soon as we can.

It was good to get all these big things done, but I usually like to have them more spread out, not all in one day! :-D The one thing that didn’t get done, was taking my husband to the lab for some blood work. He’s been in too much pain to go to the clinic, so late last week, I asked and they faxed the requisition to the lab that’s closer. With so many things going on, we’ll just do it tomorrow. It’s already a few months late. One more day isn’t going to make a difference! :-)

For now, I think it’s time for a nice pot of tea, while I daydream about dirt, and plan all the things we’ll be doing with it!

It doesn’t take much to make me happy. :-)

The Re-Farmer