One of the things I wanted to get back to today, was to work on the garden beds again. It’s getting a bit drier out there, though mowing the lawn is still out of the question, but I want to get at least something done.
There were plenty of kitties coming out for breakfast, though I counted “only” twenty. Shop Towel came around, and his face is looking so beat up!! I did manage to let me get a big wood tick off the side of his head, and a few more around a wound on his side that looks like some fur was pulled out in a fight. No major injuries. His presence does make a few of the other cats very nervous, though.
I did get to visit Broccoli’s babies, straighten out their bedding, and leave food for her. They are getting much more active, which is a bit of a concern. There is a lot of stuff in there they can get into, and they’re getting mobile enough to climb out of their bedding. I’d like to set up some sort of box or bin for them to nest in, but I’m afraid if I do that, she’ll move them away completely.
The cherry tree near the house is in peak bloom now. It looks so pretty, nestled in between the lilacs and their purple flower buds.
Once the morning rounds were done, I came inside for breakfast, and was planning to head outside. Part of the problem is, I’m just not feeling well. I wasn’t able to get to sleep until past 3am – I can only partially blame cats for that! Butterscotch has finally stopped spending her days hiding under the chair, and is back to sleeping on the bed, though any time she sees Susan or Fenrir, she starts snarling. Mostly, though, she has decided that I am her bed! Which is fine, until she starts wriggling and squirming.
Meanwhile, the high humidity we’re having lately has been brutal on my osteo-arthritis. Usually, that’s not been an issue since we moved back to the prairies. When we were living on the West Coats, I could barely walk. Now, it’s all acting up again. The worst is an old elbow injury. Back in… 2010? 2011? I developed the equivalent of tennis elbow. I actually quit my job as a banquet server at the time, because I was afraid I might drop a plate of food or a pot of hot coffee on someone. It got so bad, I couldn’t even turn a door knob, and had to stop crocheting for a year. With physiotherapy, it did improve, but it’s never healed completely, and flares up every now and then, and has developed into OA. It’s my left elbow, and I’m left handed in a lot of things – like turning door knobs! It’s been flaring up a lot since we’ve had the rains, making some of the simplest actions, painful and difficult. At least it doesn’t really stop me from doing big things; it’s the small motions that are affected the most, but I should still be able to handle a garden fork.
But then I started getting messages and had to make phone calls, and then there were other unexpected tasks to get done. To top it off, my younger daughter is feeling even worse than I am right now. For other reasons, but she’s pretty much out of commission for most things.
We are quite the household of gimps!
I’m really fighting the urge to take more painkillers and take a nap right now.
Well. I can at least take the painkillers!
The frustrating thing is, if we don’t get things done today, it won’t get done tomorrow; tomorrow is our first stock up shopping trip in the city. The day after, we’re supposed to get more rain. Then we’re back in the city again, to meet up with a friend that’s back in Canada. Then another trip to the city to do the second stock up shopping trip… on the weekend? After the weekend? Somewhere in there, we’ll be getting contacted about the flat tire I dropped off at the garage, and if all goes well, we’ll be getting that put back on, and the spare stored again. By the time all that is done, we’ll probably be past our last frost date and need to start planting things!
So those beds have got to get done!
At least we do have some spaces ready to plant in.
As I write this, the video I made is still uploading, so I’ve scheduled this to be published tomorrow morning.
One bed is prepped and ready for logs to be placed around it. My younger daughter is working in the spruce grove to get them for me, but has to clear away pieces of trees and branches that have fallen in high winds, and other debris, just to reach them. She handles heat even worse than I do, and the humidity sure didn’t help. She ended up needing to use a cane to get around the house until the painkillers kicked in.
She’ll have tomorrow to recover, though. The rain started up again this evening, with thunderstorm warnings. It’s supposed to keep raining all through tomorrow (meaning today, by the time this is published). A good day for me to be helping my mother out with her errands.
Sunday is supposed to be sunnier, though rain is expected to start again in the evening, so we might get a few hours of work in during the day. Then the rain is supposed to be back on Monday.
This weekend is a long weekend, when many people will be putting in their gardens. While we could probably direct sow some things, our area still has a while to go. Looking at the 14 day forecast is frustrating, since it seems to change every time I look at it, but at one point I was seeing predictions of overnight temperatures dropping below freezing in the last few days of May. When I look at it now, though, it shows a few chilly nights, just above freezing, and then overnight temperatures are predicted to be considerably warmer. Once I look into June, the daytime highs are all supposed to be 20C/68F or higher, for the entire month!
Of course, that might change completely, the next time I look.
Well, whatever ends up happening, we’ve got a lot of hard work to do before we can plant in the main garden area.
The low raised beds have been wildly overrun by crab grass in particular, with some beds heavily invaded by dandelions, and at least one has a pretty bad infestation of Creeping Charlie. Since they all need to be heavily reworked anyhow, we’re going to go ahead and redo them. Or, more specifically, I’ll be doing the weeding and shifting. My daughter will be harvesting and processing the dead spruces to build walls around them. This late in the game, I’ll be happy if we build them just one log high. They just need to be done! We can add more height to them, as time goes buy. Once these low raised beds are reworked, we can switch our focus back to building the trellis beds. Those will require even more work, since we’ll be bringing soil in from what’s left of the purchased garden soil pile, as well as layers of organic material at their bottoms.
For transplants, we’ve got the winter squash and melons, which will take up the most space, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, onions, gourds, some thyme and Orange Butterfly Flower (a milkweed) plus the mulberry saplings to transplant. Depending on the space available, I want to direct sow summer squash, shelling peas, bush beans, pole beans and more carrots, plus the dwarf nasturtiums. If we really do well for space, I’d like to plant at least one variety of corn, but I don’t expect that to happen. There will be a fair bit of intercropping, plus we plan to have things growing vertically as much as possible, so that should help with space. Still, there are quite a few things I expect to skip entirely this year, like cucumbers, beets, radishes, chard and lettuces, simply because I don’t expect to have the prepared space for them. Mind you, things like radishes and chard can be planted later, after the garlic is harvested and those beds are freed up.
Weather willing, I hope to be able to get at least one of the low raised beds weeded and shifted over in a day. With one done today, there’s four left to do. If the weather forecasts are at all accurate, that means they should be done by the end of next week. Then the log walls need to be placed and secured, and the soil amended with sulfur granules. Hopefully, that will also get done by the end of next week, because the week after has me doing a lot of driving around, from getting my mother to a medical appointment, to our monthly stock up shopping, to hopefully being able to connect with a friend that is back in Canada for a while.
First, thank you for the kind words I received after my last post yesterday. I’m happy to say I did actually get sleep, and am in much less pain today. I’m going to take it easy for a day or two, so I don’t have a relapse, but I did take the last step in preparing the bed I’ve been working on.
I got a couple of hoses set up to give it a soak and grabbed the first nozzle I found.
It promptly broke. The threaded portion cracked right off!
I couldn’t find the new nozzle we got last year, but I did find another older one (these were nozzles we found when we moved here, and they outlived others I’d bought new!) and that one got the job done.
I took all the plastic off again. There was condensation built up under it, as we had a touch of rain last night, but the soil beneath was still dry. I spent about 20 minutes going back and forth, giving it a deep watering. With the melting snow and water actually being absorbed by the soil instead of washing away, I know there is moisture close to the surface, so the amount of watering I did should be enough.
I ran out of ground staples while putting the plastic back, so I had to find weights for the last section.
The bricks being used to retain the soil is temporary. We will be gathering materials for something more permanent. I’m thinking something about 3 times the current height with the bricks. When that’s done, we’ll take the extra time to make sure everything is in a nice, straight line. In the process, we’ll replace the boards that are holding the soil from falling through the chain link fence with something better. The path itself will eventually have bricks or something, so it’s not to muddy.
A path we will make sure doesn’t get buried like those sidewalk block chunks I’ve been finding!
Looking at the forecast, I’m thinking the earliest we can plant the Purple Caribe potatoes in here will probably be next weekend. We’ve got a couple of warm days, then the temperatures are supposed to drop to freezing, then take a few more days to warm back up to double digits (Celsius).
I’m already feeling time slip away from me. Half of April is almost gone already!
Okay, so I’m really a week early for this, but I decided to start more seeds, anyhow!
It was also an excuse to finally get my video making software up and running on the new computer. That was far more complicated than it should have been, but once it was all set up, everything went well.
Plus, PBC makes a cameo appearance.
This time, I started the three varieties of short season bell peppers left over from last year; Early Sunsation, Dragonfly and Early Summer. When it comes time to transplanting them outdoors, we need to try a completely different location. Definitely well away from those trees along the north side of the low raised garden beds! Hopefully, by starting them indoors this early, as well as planting them in a better location, we will actually get ripe peppers to try. With the peppers we started last month, this will make for 6 varieties, only one of which was able to ripen outdoors last year. None of the seeds are new.
I ended up starting 4 varieties of tomatoes. We were intending to only plant a couple varieties, originally; one paste tomato variety and one cherry tomato variety for fresh eating. Then we got some free seeds I wanted to try, too. When going through the tomato seeds we had, I decided to grow the Chocolate Cherry tomatoes again. I used the new seed starting trays for the tomatoes, which have only 12 cells, so I’m going for more variety over quantity of plants. I know the cherry tomatoes should be prolific (if they do well this year), but the free Forme de Coeur we got are also supposed to be quite prolific. I planted only 2 seeds per cell. If we end up with only a few plants of each variety, all together should be adequate to our needs. If we do end up with a high germination rate, I’ll might thin by transplanting, but we’ll see when the time comes.
The San Marzano tomatoes went into my remaining new style of tray I got this year, with the larger, deeper cells. There weren’t a lot of seeds in the package, though, and I used them all up. I filled the cells only half way for now, and will top them up as the seedlings get bigger. With this, if we do have a high enough germination rate that they’ll need thinning, I will definitely thin by transplanting. As it is, I only had enough seeds to plant a pair of seeds in two rows, and the last row got only one seed each. It’s entirely possible that thinning won’t even be an issue.
Last of all, I started some Butterfly Flower, which is an orange variety of milkweed. That one had plenty of seeds, so I might also try direct sowing in the spring, too. I had a small tray with Jiffy Pellets left over from last year, so I used that. The seeds are pretty big, compared to all the others I started today, and each pellet got only one seed each. That’s still a dozen seeds, so not bad. Since these are perennials, we will need to be selective on where we transplant these.
Starting these seeds meant a bit of rearranging needed to happen. The seeds starting in the Red Solo cups were still in the big aquarium greenhouse, and that was going to be needed for the large tray of tomatoes.
Zero oregano seeds germinated, so I took those cups out completely. With the Purple Beauty bell peppers, one cup had all 4 seeds germinate, while the other had none, so I transplanted two of them into the empty cup. The German Winter Thyme doesn’t seem to be growing much bigger. I’m not sure what to make of that. The bin with these went into the mini greenhouse in front of the window. The two trays with the LED grow lights on them went into the mini greenhouse as well, and are now plugged into their USB cables. For now, I can still use the remaining three lights to supplement the tray with the eggplants and hot peppers.
The trays with the tomatoes and peppers are set up above the heat vent. Hopefully, that will be enough, because we’ve only got one heat mat, and that’s now being used with the San Marzano tomatoes. The milkweed is in the big aquarium greenhouse, too, but off on the side. These shouldn’t need the extra heat, anyhow, but the warmth from the lights themselves should be adequate for them.
Now I’m really going to be getting antsy. We are at 11 weeks before last frost and with these seeds started, the seeds I have left don’t need to be started until 2-4 weeks before our last frost date. Unless I decide to start some gourds, but even they all are recommended for starting at 2-4 weeks. That means having to wait until the start of May, at the earliest!
Well, before then, I’m sure some things will need to be potted up or something, so I should still be able to get my gardening fix! 😂😂
Another gardening video from Gardening in Canada, about whether you need light to start seeds or not.
Considering the differences between our big aquarium greenhouse and the little one, light is definitely an issue. Unfortunately, we’re not in a position to invest in lights – especially not full spectrum lights or red grow lights – right now. The bright LED shop lights I was able to get at Costco, however, do seem to be helping a lot, once the trays move out of the aquarium greenhouses.
Yesterday was damp and chilly, so some outside stuff had to be postponed again. One of the things I did get to, inside, was de-kerneling the popcorn cobs. I’ve had them drying in a cardboard box until now. So I popped on the Roku and found a show on food history to watch. Sadly, there was a fair bit of modern projection inserted that made some claims patently false. It frustrates me when people reframe the past to suit their ideological stance.
Anyhow.
I got through 3 episodes, so that is about 1 1/2 hours to get the corn done. Doing all those tiny cobs started to get rough on the fingertips, but it did allow me to keep just the good kernels.
I got more than I expected, to be honest! Almost exactly 6 cups.
Yes, I did test pop some, but almost none popped. They need to dry more. I currently have them in a container with a desiccant, since the oven still has peppers dehydrating in it. Those are ready to put away. We just haven’t gotten to it, yet.
In other things, we still have no hot water. It’s Thanksgiving weekend, so unless I call an emergency service number, we aren’t going to get a plumber for a while. No hot water may be inconvenient, but it is far from an emergency.
Today and the next few days are supposed to be a bit warmer and, more importantly, dry. A good time to catch up on things outside.
Last night, the forecast was for just above freezing, but I covered some things, anyhow. I’m glad I did. Before one of my apps updated, I saw we had actually dipped below freezing. The peppers and eggplant I covered seem okay. With the volunteer tomatoes, any parts that had grown above their plastic rings had frozen, but the parts below look fine. How long those survive is just a curiosity, since they will not have time to mature.
I have no complaints, though. Our first Thanksgiving here got a blizzard. It’s not at all unusual to get snow in October, so I am appreciating even the rain that delays some jobs.
Okay, this is a first. Planting something in April!
We had a bed prepared and covered with plastic over hoops for the soil to warm up more, so that is where I started. All of the carrot seed tape we made fit into the bed, with even a bit of room to spare. After that, another bed was finally prepared and covered with more plastic, and in a couple of days, it will get spinach planted in it.
I tried an experiment this time, setting up an old phone to take a time lapse video of both jobs.
Plus some random cat appearances.
The time lapse made for a short video. I hope you enjoy it!
Yesterday, we made some seed tape, and – best of all! – were able to do some outdoor garden prep. While the main garden area is still buried in snow, the south yard’s garden beds are almost completely clear of snow, and even thawing out a bit.
I was going to post progress pictures, but I need to conserve storage space on WordPress until I go back and resize more old photos. I might do a start-to-finish photo video, instead. Until then, here it is! The L shaped wattle weave bed in the old kitchen garden is DONE!!
The insides of the woven walls were first lined with grass clippings. It turned out to be a very windy day, which made that job more challenging then it should have been!
Next, I used a hoe to make a trench down the middle, pushing the soil up against the grass clippings. The cardboard from the sun room I’d set aside for the burn barrel came in handy, as it was suitable for lining the bottom of the trench. With the bed being so narrow, the size of the boxes didn’t matter as much, since I had to cut them to fit, anyhow. The cardboard then got a soaking.
Next came a layer of corn stalks reserved from the garden clean up, which got a soaking. I raided the compost pile of half rotted kitchen scraps to put on top of the corn stalks, followed by a soaking. Then I raked some leaves off the grass nearby and added that on top, which then got a soaking. At this point, I climbed in and walked back and forth over it, to crush the organic materials. Whatever we decide to plant here next year, I don’t want the roots to be finding big gaps in the soil and drying out.
Finally, I headed out and uncovered the pile of garden soil we bought a couple of years ago. The cover kept the pile from washing away, but didn’t keep the light out, so the pile was covered with a matt of weeds!
I also realized the “tarp” I’d found to cover the pile had channels in it. We’d noticed them when we first dug it out, but only recently did I find the carport support peaces my brother said was in the hay loft. Some time after that, I’d dug out a tarp I thought we might be able to use to cover the hole in a shed roof, but when I unrolled it, I saw it was part of the carport. I figured it was a roof sheet or something, since it isn’t that big. Now I realize that this piece was part of it, too. So I dragged it off and lay it out on the lawn, with weights to keep it from blowing away. We’ll hose it down and see what we can do with it. The first sheet I’d found had a row of tears in it. This one does not.
I’ll have to find something else to cover the garden soil pile with.
It took 4 1/2 wheelbarrow loads of sifted soil (to get as many weed roots out as I could!) to cover the whole thing. In the process, I had to stuff more grass clippings higher up the wattles, so the soil wouldn’t fall through the gaps.
No, this time I did NOT give it a soaking! I didn’t want to compact the soil.
By this time, several hours had passed, so I took a break for a lunch the girls prepared for me, then it was back to work. There was a little bit of grass clippings left, so that got scattered over the soil – at least what the wind didn’t blow away while I was trying to spread it evenly! I then raked up and added a mulch of leaves. That did get a soaking, to keep the wind from blowing it away. Finally, I grabbed the wagon and filled it with as much wood chips as it would hold without spilling as I pulled it back. It turned out to be just barely enough to cover the entire bed with a thin layer.
Once that was done, the entire bed got a very thorough soaking. I wanted all the layers to be good and damp. I might even soak it a couple more times, before our highs start dropping below freezing. We hit a high of 18C/64F today (though with that wind, it didn’t feel like it!), but tomorrow our high is expected to be only 6C/43F, and that’s the warmest day we’ve got left. We are expected to have less than a week with highs above freezing. Which isn’t too bad, for November.
Anyhow. The more the bed gets moistened before things start to freeze, the better it will be for spring. With all the layers, the bed got filled to the top of the shortest walls. My intention was to have it a bit lower, and that will happen as the layers settle and the organic matter decomposes. I expect it to drop at least a couple of inches over time.
While working on this bed, I spent a lot of time going over and around the rectangular bed we’d planted beets in. Once the L shaped bed was done, I decided to work on that one, too. It is framed with logs, and I’d like to raise it a bit higher. This is how it looked, at the start.
The first year we had a bed in this space, it was a sort of triangle shape that was too wide at the end near the house. My daughter and I changed the shape of it, then grabbed some pieces of smaller dead spruces that had been cleaned up, to frame it on three sides and keep the soil in place. We planted carrots here last year, which the groundhogs decimated repeatedly. Amazingly, we still got a crop out of it. This year, we planted beets, which failed. Sort of. I’ll talk about that in a separate post!
There is a pink rosebush on the left, and this year – after pruning away more branches from the ornamental apple trees – it finally had substantial growth and huge numbers of flowers.
It’s amazing what a little sunlight will do!
This year, when we covered the rectangular bed, I had a board across the end by the rose bush to hold the mesh down, but otherwise, there’s nothing there. The ground slopes downwards from the house, so that end is lower than the end closer to the house.
That will be built up.
The first thing I did was dig a shallow trench across the bed near the rose bush. I still had some short logs I’d brought over for tiny log bed and border that didn’t get used (you can read about that here, here and here. Links will open in new tabs, so you don’t lose your place. 😊) I placed one of the shorter logs across, in the trench. Then I pounded in three stakes at each corner, to create upright supports. When I find logs long enough, they will be placed between the stakes. I want the long sides to go on top of the cross piece closer to the house, with a second cross piece to fit in between them, but have it the opposite way on the low side. One of the current side logs is a fair bit shorter than the other, but I think I find find something to fill the gap.
Though I plan to make the bed only one log higher, with the rose bush getting so big, the wall beside it is probably going to be three or four logs high to keep the branches out of the garden bed. I forgot to take a picture, but I’ve already added another log to that end. It’s slightly longer than the one in the photo, so that it is overlapping the longer side log. When I find a gap filling piece for the bottom, it will be tucked under that second log. The second log isn’t as thick as the bottom one, so I tied off the pair of uprights on either side of the ends, to secure them, and will do the same with each log that gets added. I made sure those pairs of upright supports where the tallest and strongest, since they’ll be holding the most logs.
And that was enough for today! I need to go hunting for long enough logs for those sides. If I can’t find any that are suitable, we might add more of those support stakes and use shorter logs instead. We have plenty of short ones that couldn’t be chipped, that were cut to roughly four foot lengths. The bed, however, is about nine feet long, so that might not work. We’ll see.
That done, I had time to work on emptying the rain barrel, which had enough water still in it to do the Korean Pine and Ash tree seedlings in the outer yard, as well as the haskaps and a currant bush in the south yards. So that’s now empty and ready for winter. Usually, I tuck it away in the old kitchen garden for the winter, but I think this time I’ll leave it where it is. It’ll get snow in it, which should be fine. I just don’t want to be chipping it out of the ice and snow again, to set it up to catch the snow melting off the roof in the spring.
While I was doing all this, I had the attention of so many yard cats! Even the ones that don’t like people, like to hang around while I work.
While I was putting things away for the night, I spotted this…
He was napping in the wheelbarrow at first, but I interrupted him while taking a picture. 😊
What a handsome boy! We have managed to pet him every now and then, but he isn’t a fan of attention.
I did get to give the bitty baby a cuddle, though! He came out to explore, and after several attempts, I was able to cat him. He put up quite a fight until I got him into snuggle position and started scritching his ears and he finally calmed down. I hung on to him for quite a while before putting him down, and he didn’t run away. Hopefully, he will become more accepting of cuddles as time goes by. We’ve had others that became less accepting of cuddles and attention over time. Ah, well. We do what we can!
After finishing up my morning rounds, I did as much as I could with the wattle fence, using what materials we had been able to gather. There wasn’t much I could do with the longer sections. With the shorter part of the L shape, I was able to use a few single lengths, but even there I had to start combining them in pairs.
The girls had gathered some really nice, even pieces of maple suckers, though, and they were the perfect length for the wider end bit.
The red barked lengths are the maple the girls had gathered. When I used those up, I went to the pile of small willow branches I’d set aside and brought over the pieces that were close in size to the maple. Those are the greenish coloured branches. Last of all, I topped it with two thicker pieces of maple that I’d pruned from the nearby maples that are now clear of the branch piles. Those are are lot tighter, and will lock everything in place. I didn’t trim the top one to size yet, as I might need to move it out while the other section of wall is worked on. However, as it is now, that is as high as I intend to go for most of the bed.
It would be great if the whole thing could have been done like this! It looks so much prettier, with smaller gaps and more consistent sizes. The only down side is that such small pieces will also break down faster than the larger ones. It will likely still take a few years, but it’s something to be aware of.
I used more of the maple suckers I had gathered at this end, along with more willow that was left, and locked it down at the top with two thicker pieces of maple.
This corner looks a mess right now! It will be built up, end to end, until they are the same height as the walls at the ends. After that, it will be build up higher to match the heights of the debarked posts. By time I’m working on just the three tallest posts, I’ll be working with much shorter pieces, and should be able to tidy up the whole thing a lot more. Right now, it’s looking quite the mess!
That piece of 2×4 is my mallet.
At this point, I am out of useable materials. I think I will go hunting around the spruce grove for more material, before I start wandering father afield. The Red Osier Dogwood that we have would make excellent, flexible pieces, but that’s something I’m trying to encourage as undergrowth. I might still be able to harvest some, though. There might even be some young poplar I can harvest. Mostly, I just want to find enough material to finish this back wall. The remaining sections can wait until spring, if we have to. Once the back wall is done, the soil that has eroded into the paths can be hoed back into the bed and tidied up. I will likely use grass clippings that we still have all along the bottom of the wattle wall to keep the soil from falling into the gaps. Slowly, this bed will be built up to the height of the lowest sections of wattle, which will make growing in it MUCH easier on the back!
That’s about all I’ll be able to get done today, though. We’ve had another change in plans, with company coming tomorrow. We’re hoping to be able to have a bonfire with the remains of the big branch pile that got chipped, but it will depend on the weather. The forecasts keep changing. Just in case, we need to be prepared to move indoors, so we’re going to have to start moving things like our canning supplies back into storage, and all that other stuff that just sort of takes over every flat surface! We’ll need to be able to expand the dining table, too, which will take up twice the space.
We are terrible house keepers. 😂
But I’m really looking forward to seeing my BIL and his family, and really appreciate that they are willing to make the long drive out here, knowing that my husband can no longer go to their place. It’s going to be awesome!
The Re-Farmer 