garden preparation

Garden pause

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

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: morning progress, and changes in plans

/ Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

My morning rounds now includes watering all the garden beds. Though we have had rain in the forecast, so far we’ve only received the lightest of smatterings. Hopefully, over the next few days, we’ll get some real rain.

I had a lovely surprise when I came into the sun room this morning.

SO many more of the Mongolian Giant sunflowers and Montana Morado corn are germinating! The corn is just little points of green, barely visible in most of the cups.

In the pellet tray, I think I even saw a cucamelon sprout starting to break through.

It’s getting close to time to start hardening off our bigger seedlings for transplanting. :-)

I can now say, with absolute certainty, that all three spinach beds have sprouts. :-) I might even have, just possibly, maybe, seen our first pea sprout this morning, too! :-D

When done checking the trail cam files, I headed back outside until it got too hot for manual labour in the sun. My computer’s weather app says we’re at 16C/61F that feels like 15C/59F, while my phone’s app says we’re at only 9C/48F with a RealFeel of 12C/54F! There is no way we are only 16C out there, never mind 9C. I have no doubt it’s at least 20C/68F out there right now. I’m thinking of picking up another outdoor thermometer to set up at the pea trellises.

One of the areas we needed to work on is the block for the Dorinney corn. I was loath to just start adding soil on the chopped straw. It would end up in the paths in between and we’d end up walking on it, and I just don’t want to waste that precious dirt! :-D

Then I remembered all that mulch I put around the sunflowers last year. A thick layer of grass clippings I kept adding to throughout the summer. I figured that would work well to put on the paths as a mulch to walk on, while it would also serve to hold the soil in the rows.

Once I started gathering up the grass clippings and laying them down, I realized this partially broken down mulch would work much better under the soil, than the straw.

So this bed will now be reversed. The grass clippings will have the soil added on top, while the chopped straw will serve to hold the soil in place, and keep the grass/weeds down in between, as well as helping keep any moisture. We lost a row in the process, but I wasn’t sure we have enough of these seeds to fill the entire block, anyhow. If we have more, we can just add another row to one side. Before we add soil, though, the area will get another thorough soaking. We can just reach this area with the hose. I should see if I can set up the sprinkler. I don’t think we’ve got enough hose to set that up where it can water the whole block, though.

In the background, you can see the row of sunflower stumps, where I took the mulch from. I didn’t even get as far as where the rows of sunflowers overlapped in the middle, and after finishing laying down mulch in the corn block, I still had enough mulch in the little wheelbarrow to add it elsewhere.

The girls saw carrot sprouts and took off the plastic covering this bed, so I added a light layer to the surface to protect it. Especially if we do end up getting that predicted rain.

I also put a light layer over the Strawberry Spinach bed.

In preparation for planting the asparagus crowns, I soaked the trench, put the cardboard back to discourage any of those roots we didn’t clip or dig out from growing, then soaked it again. Later today, we’ll put the crowns to soak while we start adding soil and preparing it for planting.

We’ve reached that point in the season, where we are switching from going out in the afternoon, when it was finally warm enough to work in the garden, to splitting our days between the cooler mornings and evenings, while avoiding the hottest parts of the afternoon. The problem with that is, the hottest part of the day tends to be around 5pm, so we’re easily losing at least 6 hours of daylight productivity. Long range forecast says we’ll be hitting 30C/86F in four days – and we’re still in May! At least it’s expected to cool down gradually after that, but we’re still going to be in the high to mid 20’s for another week. We’re also supposed to get rain. I’d say “more rain”, but what’s been predicted so far has been missing us, as usual. :-/ We shall see how it goes.

The hard part is going to be waiting until after the last frost date before planting/transplanting. I think direct sowing a bit earlier would be safe, but after losing so many transplants last year, I don’t want to take that chance again, this year!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: order in, and digging trenches!

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

Our Veseys order arrived in the mail a day early!! We are so thrilled!

One of the boxes was the Purple Passion Asparagus (6 crowns), and Black Form Iris.

The other box was our Illinois Everbearing Mulberry.

It even has leaf buds!!

We still need to take down a whole lot of dead trees in the area we want to plant this, and we’re thinking that for this year, we’ll plant it in one of the grow bags we made for the potatoes, then maybe keep it in the sun room over the winter. Either that, or find another place for what will become a fairly large tree that needs full sun, and zone 4 protection to survive in a zone 3.

The asparagus, at least, are decided on. While the girls did the evening watering, I started on trenching.

We’ve been keeping this space near the Strawberry Spinach bed covered with cardboard and regularly soaking it. The grass below was dying off quite nicely, and the ground was good and soft to dig in.

Well. Except for the big roots.

And all the rocks.

After the girls finished the watering and uncovering the sprouted beds, they came over to give me a hand. Most of the roots we could cut out with the loppers.

As with the other beds, this is going to be built up, so all I really wanted to do was take off the sod and get rid of the bigger roots and rocks.

Except for that really big root running across the trench, near the middle. Once we realized how big it was, we just left it.

One of my daughters took on stacking the rocks.

In a nice little display! :-D

There were too many to balance on the stump, so she stacked the rest nearby.

All these rocks, just from removing the top 3 or 4 inches. We could have pulled out many more!

Tomorrow, we start bringing in the new garden soil and plant the asparagus. The sod that was removed will be laid upside down along the sides to stabilize it. When we’re done, it should match the Strawberry Spinach bed in depth.

In two years, we should be harvesting our first purple asparagus! Before then, I expect to get more for planting elsewhere. My husband doesn’t care for asparagus, but the girls and I all like them, so that is reason enough to plant more than just these ones. :-)

Since none of what came in today will be planted until tomorrow, they are all sitting in the cool of the old kitchen.

I need to think about that mulberry. This is what it says on the Veseys page about planting them.

Planting:

Unless you have heavy clay soil, there isn’t much to do in terms of soil preparation. You can add amendments such as compost or peat moss to the soil and/or a layer of mulch over the root area after planting will help retain moisture, especially during the first year. While it may be tempting to add fertilizer or manure to your freshly dug hole before planting your new tree, PLEASE resist! Fertilizer or manure in close contact with the root system could chemically burn the roots and potentially kill the tree.

Mulberry trees can grow quite large, up to 15-20 feet tall. Avoid planting near walkways and driveways as the fruit will drop and create stains. Mulberries are self-fertile and require full sunlight. 

https://www.veseys.com/ca/illinois-everbearing-mulberry-37812.html

Our new garden soil has three types of manure and compost in it, but it is thoroughly broken down. Would it still be too much to plant it in? That’s what we would be using in a grow bag, if we did it that way for the first year. Maybe it would be better to just find a different spot and plant it permanently. I can think of a good area that would work; the only downside is that it would be more difficult to get water to it.

Whatever we decide to do, it’ll have to be done quickly!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: haskap and corn plot status

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

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: progress in the old kitchen garden

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

After finishing planting the carrots and beets, it was time to get back to the old kitchen garden. We’ve done almost nothing there, since we ended up building the path instead of hauling soil over and planting.

Here is how it looks before I started.

The first thing that needed to be done was to get rid of the lump of soil near the new path. A thatching rake did that job well, as I spread out the soil and mulch down the slope, or around the lilac, honeysuckle and rose bushes.

The long row of mulch on the grass in the background was removed from one end of the garden. It was excess flax straw from inside the cat shelter, and was added as mulch last fall. It’s not breaking down very much, so I plan to go over it with a lawn mower.

I also pruned a large branch from one of the ornamental crab apple trees. That poor little pink rose bush will finally get more light!

After leveling the ridge of soil from the path at the back, I worked out where more paths would go, and raked those areas clear. I was almost done with that when my older daughter came out to help, and she started bringing over loads of soil. It’s hard to see, but along the retaining wall is a bit of green. That’s a flower that managed to work it’s way through the layers of mulch and bloom last year. We ended up transplanting it to a corner near the rhubarb, where it’s too awkward to plant anything that requires tending.

We were not going to finish the job today, but we did get quite a bit done! Here is how it looked, when we stopped for the day.

The area next to the retaining wall is filled to the edge of the path and ready for planting. A small “island” at one end was made, and that’s where we ended up planting the poppy seeds. Flowers next to the flowers! The bulbs my daughter planted there are just starting to emerge. :-)

Here is where the paths will be, marked in grey.

We will continue adding soil to finish the “island” around the little rose bush, which will be extended to the stone patch. Another path runs through about the middle of the garden, joining the stone path and the one that runs across the garden. In the one corner, the path runs around a patch of rhubarb. More soil will be added to border the path, but we will not be putting soil all the way in. There are flowers in one area that we will eventually transplant, but most of that area is crowded by the lilacs, honeysuckle and white roses, and not a good place to plant things anymore, so we’ll just stick to the border of the path. More beets and carrots will be planted in the fresh soil.

It may not be done, but the poppies are now planted, and it shouldn’t take too long to finish adding soil.

We haven’t figure out what we’re going to use on the paths to walk on. We need to put something there, if only to have something to keep the soil from spilling onto the paths. We’ll have to figure that one out.

So that is now done and soon, the rest will be ready for planting in.

It was a good day’s work!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: an experiment, plus the jiggler is in!

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Today I took my mother to her doctor’s appointment, so I got very little garden stuff done today. Last night, however, I was able to start prepping the toilet paper tubes we’ll be using to start the Montana Morado corn in.

I picked up this coolant funnel long ago, because it’s perfect for jobs like this! :-D

I neglected to take photo of the next step. After filling all the tubes with peat, I used the 1/4″ hardware cloth I still have a piece of, laid it over the bin, then sifted peat over everything. Aside from topping up the tubes, I wanted it to get in between the tubes and fill the gaps to hold them in place. Especially in the spots where the wheels of the bin are, with a “fender” on the inside that I couldn’t put tubes on because it was too uneven.

After that, a whole lot of water was poured over all the tubes using a watering can. It would have been much easier to use a hose on “mist”, but by then it was night and too cold to use the hose.

The sun room was nice and warm still, though!

Adding the water had two unexpected effects.

The first was, the tubes started to float! I should have expected that. The problem was, you can’t actually see that it was floating. I’d added another watering can of water before I reached out to even the tops of some tubes, and the whole thing sank!

The peat may have been all light and floating, and it takes a long time to absorb moisture, but the tubes are a different story! They not only quickly absorbed water, but some of them started to come apart at the seams. Thankfully, they’re packed tightly enough to hold each other in place.

It did make be wonder if this would work at all.

I think it will. Here is how it looked this morning.

The cardboard actually seems to be helping the peat absorb more moisture. I went over the surface with a spray bottle. You can see in the photo that some of them still have dry areas. This is all being absorbed from bottom, though, so they should have been mostly moistened through. Normally, I would have premoistened the peat, but there was just too much needed for this job.

I’ll check it again tonight and see if I can start planting the corn, or if it will wait until tomorrow. There is still enough water in there that the tubes in the middle are still floating a bit, as the bottom of the bin is sagging from the weight of the water in that area.

After I got home from helping my mother, I made a quick run into town and made a special trip to a dollar store. I picked up some hula hoops. We haven’t been able to find row cover supports, so my daughter thought of cutting hula hoops and using those. If it works out, we can get more later.

I also cleaned the store out of pinwheels (they only had 6 left), plus I got some spinners and wind vines. When I did my rounds this morning, I found birds digging in the dirt in the bed we planted carrots in. :-( All those beds now have shiny metallic pinwheels in them. I’ve set up wind vines at the strawberry spinach, and as close to the garlic beds as I could. I put spinners in the ornamental apple trees over where the spinach was planted. We still have a few more of those, but we’ll save them for later. I will probably get more pinwheels after the store restocks. It would be good if we could replace the plastic grocery bags on the pea trellises with things like that. I noticed there was a solar motion sensor floodlight that would be good for startling deer, but it was out of budget. :-/

The girls and I were quick about putting the bird scarers out. I had hoped to cover the beds with plastic, but it was just too windy. So I watered the beds again. The water will help regulate the temperature in the soil as temperatures dip overnight. At least, that’s what I’ve read! I didn’t get any photos because, to be frank, I just wanted to get back inside again! When I checked the weather once I was inside, it said we were at 2C/32F – but the windchill was -6C/21F! It certainly felt like it was below freezing. Meanwhile, the thermometer in the sun room was reading about 28C/82F.

One of the things I made sure to do before I went to my mother’s was to get the mail. The last of our onion sets were in, but so was another pleasant surprise!

The kit to convert our pressure canner to use a weighted gauge (aka: jiggler) is in!!!

I can hardly wait until we can test it out!

That might be a while, though. We’ve got lots of outside stuff that needs to get done, and we won’t be in a position to continually monitor the canner while it’s being tested.

I’m really looking forward to it! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: old kitchen garden, part one

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

A change in plans.

Today, I wanted to get started on the old kitchen garden, where we intend to plant the poppies.

This is how it looked at the start.

The hose is from the sump pump in the old basement.

It has not turned on in ages. It’s simply been too dry.

You can see a path has started to form, a couple of feet from the wall. This is mostly from the cats crossing the garden, though we sometimes walk through there, too. The plan was to add new soil against the wall, to plant the poppies, and put in a stepping stone sort of path where one naturally formed. We found some concrete blocks out near the barn that we decided to use for the paths.

But first, it needed to be cleared.

Our first summer here, we did a major clean up of this old garden, removing a fence, cleaning it out as best we could, laying down cardboard, then covering it with straw, grass clippings, kitchen waste, and any soil from various places that we could get it. You can read about the clean up we did here, here, here and here. Yeah. It took a while! (all links will open in new tabs)

My mother had flowers growing here, and quite a few of them made their way through the layers. So did the crab grass and a vine we’ve been fighting continually since moving here. So the first thing I had to do was rake away the mulch, down to what was left of the cardboard layer. You can see lots of roots that were uncovered!!

Most of the biggest ones were from that invasive vine. It used to cover the entire wall until my brother and his wife pulled it down while painting the house, the summer before we arrived. They were causing damage, so we don’t want them growing back.

Speaking of damage, that crack is in the foundation under the old kitchen, which was tacked on to the log cabin portion of the house at some point. There’s a crawl space under there.

My brother told me about fixing the broken attic window above the old kitchen. It never occurred to me that the glass would still be on the ground! We’d laid cardboard over it, and never new it!

Finding glass from a broken window, I can understand. But this?

Why a spoon?

At this point, I was breaking up the soil with the fork and pulling out lots of roots.

Lots of roots.

So many roots.

Which created a problem I did not expect.

I was pulling roots out from under the old kitchen foundation, and the concrete floor of the sun room. In the process, soil started falling out from underneath.

No wonder the windows in the sun room are cracking as it shifts!!!

This required a change in plans. There was no way I was going to turn this into a garden bed, where watering it might continue to undermine the concrete. I needed to get those roots out, then shore up the sides.

It’s a good thing we have a nice big rock pile over by the power pole. We also had piles of smaller rocks we’d gathered from the garden, though not very many.

Large rocks were placed against the wall, soil put back to fill gaps and support the rocks, smaller rocks are added on top, and the concrete blocks were placed to begin the path.

We brought those blocks over in the wagon, which is rated to 300 pounds. I don’t know how much they weight, but with three blocks, the wagon didn’t want to roll. My daughter pushed while I pulled. After that, I only put in two blocks at a time.

The wagon was used to bring rocks over, too.

After a while, it started to get hard to find smaller rocks. There is decades of detritus that has decomposed on them, with a very strong layer of crab grass rhizomes!

As we worked our way down, still clearing away roots, we got hung up by an old rose bush. It took a while, but I finally got it out!

That is one weird looking root clump!!

My daughter was just coming back from a break (we were very careful not to overdo it; the last thing we need is to injure ourselves!!) as I put it in the wheelbarrow with all the other roots. She was checking it out when she suddenly dropped it in alarm.

This thing had been exposed and wriggled at her!!

I don’t know what this grub is, but considering it was burrowing in the rose roots, I’d say it’s not a beneficial creature to have in the garden. :-/

This is where we stopped for a longer break. Sustenance was needed!

There are enough larger rocks to line the wall. My daughter used some to make a little wall around the power cables that run under the old kitchen. We also found a cable running along the wall to the corner, which is going to be carefully covered with rocks.

There are two more of those blocks in the wagon. They will be spaced out from one end to the other, and the gaps filled with soil and rocks.

As for the poppies, they will now be planted on the other side of the path!

Meanwhile, as I’ve been working on this post, the girls have gone back outside and are planting the Strawberry Spinach. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Snowy morning

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

This morning, we had snow coming down with flakes so big, I could see them without my glasses! :-D

They even triggered the motion sensor on the security camera during daylight. That happens all the time at night, with the infrared flash (and I wake up to hundreds of emails with images of snow or rain streaking across… :-D ), but almost never, during the day.

The outside cats are completely unphased by this little bit of snow. :-)

The future tomato bed got some much needed moisture! The more the better, to help break down that cardboard and straw.

The garlic sprouts don’t mind the snow at all. :-) The snow actually made it easier to see how many more have sprouted since I last checked them out.

It was interesting, going through the maple grove and checking out the areas we planted bulbs and corms in. There was a void in the snow, under every single spruce tree. This is a good visual to ID which areas are getting the least moisture, so if/when we do water where we planted, we know which areas need it more. Of course, once the other trees and bushes leaf out, there won’t be any difference, but that’ll be a while, yet.

There are still only two tulips showing, and that one onion that’s managed to survive from when this was my mother’s garden, in the areas my daughters planted their bulbs. They don’t seem to mind the snow at all!

In the sun room, while it was still just below freezing outside, the thermometer was reading 10C/50F. That is more than adequate for the onion seedlings. The light and heater bulb kept the tomato and luffa seedlings nice and warm through the night.

By the time I finished my rounds, much of the snow was already melted away, and from what I can see on the security camera live feed, there isn’t a bit of it left.

I don’t know that we’ll have a nice enough day to continue working outside today, but we’re supposed to get warmer over the next couple of days, then cool day with rain. As much as it slows down how much progress we can make on the garden beds, I am thankful for every drop of moisture we’re getting right now! After one hot day, the temperatures will drop down and basically flat line at around 8C and 10C (46-50F) for highs, and hovering at or just above freezing for the overnight lows, for the next two weeks. We might even get a bit more rain in there, too!

The weather for today is still saying we’ll have a high of 7C/45F, but that it’ll feel like 4C/39F. I’m hoping to be able to get some more progress outside, but we shall see. The melted snow might actually make it easier to dig more post holes for the other pea trellises we’ll be making. If we can’t get to that, there’s plenty of other things we need to work on! :-)

What fun! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: killing grass, and first one!

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

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

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

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