The weather apps say we’re anywhere from 24-26C/75-79F out there this evening but, strangely, it felt much cooler! Very enjoyable, in fact. Well. Except for the blood red sun from all the wildfire smoke.
I decided to head into the outer yard and check on the walnuts this evening; something I usually do in the mornings, but my daughter did the watering out there today. I was very thrilled to see this.
It was very hard to get the camera to focus on such a small spot! Surprisingly, it did better when I accidentally took some video. Of course, it didn’t help that I had cats pushing their way into things!
What we have here is our very first walnut tree leaf bud! It was taking so long, I was starting to think it might not have survived being transplanted. I’m so happy! No signs of anything from the walnut seeds, yet, but hopefully they will start emerging soon.
This evening I decided to take the cover off the winter sown bed in the east yard. It has the same mix of seeds as the high raised bed, plus lettuce from our own saved seed. The two beds could not be more different!
For starters, the one thing that is thriving in this bed is the Jebousek lettuce, which is the only variety of lettuce we planted this year. The rest is onions and root vegetables. There’s so much lettuce, though, it’s choking things out!
So I thinned some by picking a bunch out by the roots. I grabbed a couple of radishes, too.
We’ll need to thin the lettuce out more, as I could see scrawny beet greens being crowded out by them. There are some larger leaved plants in there I wasn’t sure of, so I carefully took a closer look at their bases. It looks like we have a few Zlata radishes growing! These seeds were gifted to me, and I’ve never seen them before. They are very round and have a yellowish colour to them. I’ve left them for now. The radishes I did pick are the longer French Breakfast variety. The first lettuce and radish harvest for this year! I ended up picking another French Breakfast radish from the high raised bed, the picked some spinach from the old kitchen garden. We’ve been using the spinach mostly in sandwiches, but we’ve got the makings of an actual salad from our garden right now!
And it’s not even June, yet.
Yeah, I’d say winter sowing like this is something we’ll be doing again!
It’s hard to be having a heat wave like we are now, and have to think about last frost dates before planting things! Our average last frost date was June 2, but this year it’s listed as a range from May 28-31.
On the one hand, I’ve been eyeballing the long range forecasts. They tend to change often, sometimes multiple times in a day, but we are no longer having predictions of overnight temperatures below freezing. So far, nothing lower than 5C/41F in the overnight lows expected in early June.
On the other hand, I’ve been eyeballing the dandelions. If you’ve been following Maritime Gardening, you may have heard his way of using the stages of dandelions to judge when to plant things. When the greens emerge, the soil is warm enough to plant cold hardy seeds like peas and spinach. When the flowers are blooming, the soil is warm enough to plant things that need a bit more warmth, but can still handle a night of frost, like brassicas. When the dandelions go to seed, the soil is warm enough to plant everything else.
Our dandelions have been blooming for a while, and lots are starting to go to seed.
So I should be able to direct sow or transplant pretty much everything right now, but I still want to be able to cover things if we do get a frost.
Since I didn’t want to render myself immobile again, today I decided to work on the tiny raised bed garden and transplant the herbs I bought a few weeks back.
This bed got prepped in the fall, so there wasn’t much it needed – other than finally reinforcing the cover that cats keep lying on!
I took the cover over to the garage, along with some leftover pieces of hula hoop, which is what is already being used in the cover, to add to it. I got one installed, but when I tried to set up the other, it kept snapping on me. Thankfully, I had a piece of pipe of some kind my brother had passed on to me, along with lumber, shelving and numerous other small items he knew I would find uses for. It was perfect for the job, and I still have some left over. There was also a short bamboo garden stake that I wove through the chicken wire across the top. That will both support the wire (and the weight of cats) and make it easier to carry the cover.
Then it was time to ready the soil. It had a grass clipping mulch that was set aside, then I used my little hand cultivator to loosen the soil so I could better remove the rhizomes. Unfortunately, I was also finding tree roots; this time, from the nearby ornamental crab apple. I think there’s actually a large root running under the bed, but if there is, it’s deep enough it shouldn’t be a problem. It’s the little capillary roots that can become an issue!
After a few years of amending this bed, the soil was really nice and fluffy, already. I did amend it more with the rehydrated coconut coir, plus some manure. The soil was insanely dry, so I made sure to give it a very thorough watering once the amendments were mixed in.
I then set the pots in and moved them around until I figured out where the herbs would go. I’ve got English Thyme and Golden Yellow Thyme that are kitty corner from each other. The other corners have oregano and Greek oregano. In the middle, closer to the walking onions, is lemon balm, with the basil across from it. Once transplanted, they got another watering.
After they were transplanted, I carefully scattered the mulch around them, making sure it was under their leaves and stems.
Then it got another watering.
Last of all, the cover was set in place. No kitties will be rolling around on or digging these up!
The next area I plan to work on is the wattle weave bed. The tiny strawberries in there are blooming up a store right now, so I’m not going to transplant them until the fall. They don’t take up a lot of space. I think there is enough room to plant both the eggplants and peppers in this bed. We’ve grown both in there before, and they did surprisingly well, so that should work out.
We’re going into the city for our first stock up shopping trip tomorrow, though, so that won’t happen for a couple of days. The transplants are all looking really strong and healthy this year – even the ones that got dumped upside down when the wind knocked the greenhouse half over! If things work out, we should be able to get all the transplanting and direct sowing done over the next week or two. I’ll be quite happy when that is all finally done!
I have to keep telling myself. It’s still only May. With the weather we’ve been having, it feels like I’m behind on things, but I’m actually ahead!
So the winter sown flower bed was a total failure. If any seeds did survive the winter, I saw no sign of them. While the bed did get covered with plastic, eventually, once that mulch was removed in the spring, it became a favourite spot for the cats to roll around on!
And did in, of course. 🫤
I decided it should be safe to direct sow more flowers into this bed.
The Dwarf Jewel mixed nasturtium is one of the flowers that had been planted here in the fall. I recently picked up the Cosmos, as I know for sure they grow here; my mother grew them here, and even after we moved back, I remember seeing a few of them show up in places were they’d self seeded. The Aster are seeds that were included in a memorial card for an old friend that passed away suddenly, last year.
The plastic cover on the bed had torn at one end, where the end of a bamboo stake was. That tear was all the wind needed to rip the whole thing in half. So that was the first thing to get removed. Then the hoops and the bamboo stake pieces holding them in place were pulled out and set aside.
The bed itself was full of weed seedlings, plus the dandelions, crab grass and creeping Charlie around the edges. There was even some burdock coming up, next to the high raised bed. It took a lot of loosening with the garden fork before I could start pulling the weeds and trying to get as many of the roots out as possible. Unfortunately, I was also finding elm tree roots in there, too.
Once weeded, I went over it with the rake to pull the soil more towards the middle, making it narrower than before. Partly because fewer seeds were going to be planted here, and partly to make it easier to cover and protect. After everything was levelled, it got a thorough watering, before the smaller seeds were scattered about. The nasturtium seeds are large enough that I planted those, individually.
While cleaning up the bed, I did find at least one nasturtium seed that had been planted in the fall; they were the only seeds large enough that they could be seen. Which means that it is possible that some of the seeds planted in the fall might have survived and could still germinate. Unlikely, but possible! 😁
Then it was time to set the hoops back in place, over the broken pieces of bamboo stakes holding them in place. With the hoops still attached to the bamboo stakes across the top, it didn’t talk long to get them back in place.
While gathering my supplies for this, I had grabbed a folded up piece of mosquito netting I thought might be good to set over the hoops, but it turned out to be too short for this bed. So I went and got the rolled up netting that had been over the garlic, before they got too tall. That turned out be just the right length! I weighted down one edge at the based of the high raised bed, then unrolled the netting. This netting catches on everything, so that was not as easy as it should have been! Once the netting was pulled snug, there was just enough slack to roll back around the stick it had been stored on. I then used the bricks, rocks and pieces of wood that had been used to hold the plastic over the hoops to secure the side, rolling the weights up in the excess netting. I was able to get the netting nice and snug over the hoops.
Hopefully, this will be enough to protect the area until the seeds germinate and get big enough that they won’t need the hoops and netting anymore. The nasturtium are edible, but they can also act as a trip crop, to keep insects away from other edible greens.
Once I gather the materials, I’ll build frame to fit over this area and attach these hoops to support whatever wire mesh I have to put over it, making sure to close up the ends, too. That will be much handier than setting hoops over sticks in the ground! I’ll be making several such covers, little by little, all with the same frame dimensions, so they can be interchangeable. The prototypes I’ve made so far have been incredibly handy!
One more job done. Time for another hydration break, then one more bed to work on!
One of the things I was able to get done while it was still cooler this morning, as I was finishing up with watering the garden beds, we to finally mulch the potato bed.
This bed had the summer squash winter sown in it and I made a point of saving the leaf mulch along one side, to be added as the seedlings came up. Except they never came up. Now that the potatoes are planted here and have had a chance to, hopefully, start rooting themselves, and I think I even saw some potato leaves starting to poke through, I decided it was time to return the mulch. I will not be hilling the potatoes, just mulching them.
The bed got a deep watering, first. Then I lifted the netting along the one side and basically just tossed handfuls of leaves over the soil, trying not to include any dandelion flowers with it! Quite a lot of dandelions were growing right through the mulch on the one side, so I pulled a lot of that, too. Once the mulch was in place, it got another thorough watering.
The next thing I worked on was planting carrots on either side of the sugar snap peas.
That job required some damage repair, first. When I watered the bed this morning, I found something had been digging into the edge, all along one side, undermining things.
So the very first thing to do was put the soil back into the bed. I was going to just use a hoe, at first, but realized there was a lot of creeping Charlie trying to creep its way into the bed again, so after removing the protective boards, I went through it all by hand, removing as many of the roots as I could, before replacing the dug away soil.
There isn’t a lot of space between the peas and the edge of the bed, though. Just enough for one row of carrots. I created a slight trench to plant them in, as we are expecting drought conditions this year, and a trench will have any rainfall flow towards the carrots, rather than washing away down the sides of the bed. I used the jet setting on the hose to basically drill water into the trench. This both ensures the water gets quite deep, but the water helps level out the trench itself for planting.
This side got the Atomic Red carrots I got from MI Gardener this year as back up seeds. While we do have carrots coming up among the winter sown beds, there don’t seem to be a lot of them, and I do want to have quite a lot of carrots to store for the winter.
After the seeds were sown, I used the mister on the the spray nozzle to “bury” the seeds a little. Then I put boards back over the trench. Two of the boards that were there before were pretty broken up on the ends, so I traded them for more solid ones that were weighing down the plastic on the bed that’s still solarizing. Three boards wasn’t quite long enough, but I already had a short scrap piece for the last bit at the end.
The boards had been placed along the outside of the peas, and mulch down the middle of the bed, to keep the cats from using the bed as a litter box. They would still walk across the bed, though, and would end up moving the boards. Every now and then, I’d find a board rotates with one end over the peas and the other hanging off the edge of the beds. To prevent that, I got out some of the short bamboo plant stakes I picked up at the dollar store that came in packs of 25. I stuck a bunch of them into the soil along the boards, to prevent the boards from moving if a cat walked over it.
That still left the problem of whatever was digging all along the side of the bed. For that, I went into the stacks of short logs that had been used to frame these beds, before they were shifted over into their permanent positions. I dug out the straightest ones I could find and jammed them into the soil along the sides of the bed. Hopefully, they will be enough to deter the digging.
I repeated the process on the other side. On this side, I used our home made seed tape with Uzbek Golden Carrots. These are older seeds, though, so I doubled them up. Thankfully, the wet soil was enough to keep the wind from blowing them away! A final misting, and they got covered with boards, too. Only one of these had to be traded out. I found more short logs to set on that side of the bed, too.
Over the next while, we’ll keep checking under the boards to make sure things are damp, and to remove them as soon as we see seedlings starting to come up.
Eventually, more protection will be added to this bed, to make sure the deer don’t eat the peas. I still haven’t decided just how to do that, though.
One job down! How many more could I get done today?
It was a perfect day to work outside! We reached our expected high of 15C/59F, there was a bit of a breeze, and a lovely mix of sun and clouds. Not too hot, not too cold… It was juuuuust right!
Most of it involved clean up.
I headed out to open the gate for my brother, only to find he was at the gate and opening it for himself. 😄 We said our hellos, then he set out to get their push mower out of storage (there was a lot of other stuff in front of it) and get it going. My first task was to get the wagon out and start going through the yard, picking up all the fallen branches and sticks I could find. We hauled away any large branches that fell right away, but there’s always tonnes of smaller ones that we leave until a day like today.
I worked my way around most of the yard before stopping near the septic tank to switch jobs. The tank was still covered with an insulated tarp, folded in half, and the pipes and hose for the emergency bypass was still set up over it. A few things needed to be moved so I could get the tarp off. That got dragged to the south yard and stretched out to full size, so I could hose it down, then flip it over and hose it down again. Then I went ahead and got the sun room broom and used that to scrub the entire surface before hosing it down again, then leaving it out in the sun. Then it was back to the septic tank area.
It’s remarkable how much survived being under that insulated tarp. In fact, some things had even started growing into the fibres!
The rigid pipe is being left where it is for now. I don’t have any way to store it properly right now (I’m wanting to find a way to store all the parts and pieces right near the tank), and the pipe that sticked out through the wall still needs a cap. I don’t want any dirt – or small critters! – getting into there.
I brought the back hose over and used that to spray down the inside of the flexible hose. It’s quite long, to it took a while to get enough water flowing through it. A number of bricks, rocks, boards and pieces of Styrofoam insulation were used to create a slope for the fluid to drain away, though some low spots were still inevitable. I gathers all those up to store against the house for now, the rinsed the inside of the flexible hose some more before finally dragging it all in, making sure water continued to drain away. Then that got curled up into a pile near where the boards were sticks. Then, since my next job was going to be weed trimming around the house, I pulled in the garden hose, too.
By this time, I could hear my brother’s lawnmower, so I went over to see how things were going. He showed me the particulars of how to start and run the mower (it has a choke that shuts itself off!) and his own modifications to it. He was mowing a lane to the barn, and around his stored equipment beside it. He had other stuff he needed to do, so I took over with the push mower and ended up finishing off most of the area in front of the barn. It was all being cut at the highest level, so I’ll be going over it again, likely with the riding mower, soon, to get it cut lower, little by little. The area is so dense with dried thatch mixed in with the tall grass, it would easily be too much if the mower were at the height I would want to cut it to.
I’m going to have a lot of grass to use as mulch, soon!
Once that section was done, it was time to get back to the inner yard.
No, those are not leaves. At least, mostly not leaves. Click through to the next picture, and you can see that these are seeds. The Chinese Elm are absolutely thick with seeds right now, and they’re blowing everywhere. Pretty soon, they’ll dry up and drop like a storm.
I’m not looking forward to that. We’ve got so many of these trees in the south yards alone!
I then spent the next hour or more with the weed trimmer. Aside from doing the edges and areas too small or awkward to use a mower in, I went hunting for the rocks and roots in the lawn that stick up high enough that, if I’m cutting to the height I want to, would get hit by the mower blade. I’ve run over these by accident in the past. Bad enough when using our own equipment, but I do NOT want to damage my brother’s equipment!
In the end, I was able to get the south east yards done before I had to head inside, pausing only to find my brother and touch base with him. He was up on the roof of their trailer! 😄
While I was outside, my daughters were busy inside, and I came in just as one of them was making dinner. I actually needed help getting my boots off, before I could change out of my grass covered clothes, take some pain killers, and rest for a bit.
I also had Butterscotch all over me. She has started to become aggressively affectionate when I sit or lie on my bed.
After having a lovely supper my daughter made, I realized I was hearing a mower running outside. By then it was time to feed the outside cats, so I started doing that. My brother, I discovered, had taken out the riding mower and was mowing around their trailers and RV, and in front of the storage shed. Something to be very careful off, as that area has some really rough spots! Leveling things off around there is something they have plans to do, once they can get some of their equipment going.
Unfortunately, he was done and gone before I was finished feeding the cats!
I wasn’t going to be doing more weed trimming today, but I did get a chance to weed the retaining wall blocks.
Unfortunately, it has worn out holes in it, so water gets inside the tarp. I’m not sure how to address that, Ideally, I’d hang or drape it somewhere, but it’s quite large and surprisingly heavy. Especially with any water inside it! For now, it’s just going to say on the grass for the night. Hopefully, we don’t get any high winds to blow it away!
Tomorrow, the tarp will need to be moved away, and then it’s back to weed trimming. Particularly around the cat shelters and the portable greenhouse.
The kittens are not going to be happy with all that noise!
Once that’s done, though, I’ll be able to use the riding mower. With the amount of mowing I did today with the push mower, plus all the trimming, I’m in quite a lot of pain, even with taking painkillers. There’s no way I’d be able to do push mowing two days in a row.
While the overnight temperatures are still too low to set out the transplants, there are some things that can be direct sown. I’ve decided to take advantage of the boards protecting the sugar snap pea bed, and plant more carrots. I do see carrots coming up in the winter sown beds, but I’d like to have more! There are a few other things that can be sown now, too, once I get the beds prepared for them. We’ll see how it goes. The rest of this week will have some good daytime temperatures for that sort of work. Next weekend, things will start getting hot again.
The forecast for freezing overnight temperatures, with rain and snow, that I was seeing for the end of May, beginning of June, this morning is gone. Now the forecast is calling for overnight lows of almost 10C/50F! What a difference!
Of course, by tomorrow morning, it’ll probably be completely different again.
As for me, I’m heading to bed as soon as I’m done posting this. Well… after I take more painkillers, that is. Today is a day to max out the prescription dose, that’s for sure!
It looks like we’ve got at least two blue eyes babies among the three mostly white kittens. I think we’ll call this one Zipper. In the next image, there’s a white and grey/black in a cuddle puddle inside the cat house. That one is Grommet, and I don’t think he’s got blue eyes. Eyelet is in the last image in the series, and he’s got blue eyes. It’s too early to tell with the grublings, of course. Their eyes are just starting to open, still.
After checking on the kittens, I did my evening rounds. The chitted potatoes in the portable greenhouse are clearly dead; if they weren’t already dead, the heat in there cooked them. So I brought out the new bags and laid them out in trays to get some light. Both bags of potatoes were growing, one quite a bit more than the other.
At first, I was just going to leave the trays of potatoes in the old kitchen, where they wouldn’t be affected so much by temperature extremes. It was such a lovely evening, though, I decided to prepare a bed for them.
I decided to use the bed that had been winter sown with summer squash seeds. There’s been no sign of any squash germinating. This bed already had protective netting over it, so I decided to just go for it.
The first thing to do was lift the netting off to one side and remove the support posts, for access. Then I went over it with a garden fork to loosen things before weeding it. Inside the bed was mostly crab grass and maple seedlings. Along the edges was dandelions and crab grass.
This bed has seen a few years of amending, even taking into account the whole thing got shifted over last year. Which means these potatoes are going into the softest, fluffiest soil since we’ve been gardening here. Which should also mean, bigger potatoes.
We shall see.
While weeding, I did find some squash seeds. Not a lot. There was no evidence of germination on any of them. Some felt “empty”. As if only the outer shell remained. It’s entirely possible that we’ll still have some summer squash show up later on, but I think it highly unlikely. If any do sprout, I’ll probably transplant them. Meanwhile, along with some flower seeds, I did pick up a packet of zucchini to go with my white patty pans as back up summer squash seeds.
Once the weeding was done, I used a thatching rake to create a wide, flat trench down the middle, so accommodate a double row of potatoes. I then emptied the rest of a bag of sheep manure into the trench and worked that in with a garden fork.
From there, my daughter helped me bring the trays of potatoes out. She gave the trench a thorough watering while I went through the potatoes and cut a few of the larger ones into two.
We then planted the potatoes in a double row, but found ourselves with 5 or 6 “extra” potatoes. Not enough to start another bed with. So we set them in the largest looking open spaces down the middle. Which makes things rather other crowded for potatoes but, to be honest, I don’t expect them all to make it.
Once the potatoes were set out in the trench, we mounded the soil over them and evened it out.
Then came the “fun” job of putting the supports and netting back. They’d been set pretty deep, as I was originally trying to put the mosquito netting over them, so there had been a lot of slack with the black netting I ended up using, instead. We put them back without pushing them so far down, which took up some of the slack in the netting. The twine ended up sagging more in some places and too tight in others, so it took a while to get it close to where it was supposed to be, before tacking down the edges of the netting.
That didn’t stop Magda from finding a way inside and then having trouble finding her way out again!!!
Once the netting was set and secured, the whole thing got another thorough watering.
We’re supposed to get about an hour of rain tonight. I won’t be holding my breath on that, since I kept getting notifications this morning about how long the thunderstorm was going to last, when we didn’t even have a drop of rain. It’s supposed to start raining again tomorrow evening, then keep raining all through Friday. Tomorrow’s high is supposed to be a bit on the high side, though nothing like the past couple of days, then the temperatures as supposed to drop significantly on Friday. At least we’re not expected to get temperatures below freezing on Friday and Saturday nights, but it’s still supposed to get quite close to freezing.
For now, I want the potato bed to get as much rain as possible, but when the overnight temperatures are expected to drop closer to freezing, I have plastic that’s large enough to cover the netting on the entire bed, with enough excess to weigh it down along all sides. We should have only two nights where it’s supposed to be cold enough at night, that it might kill things off.
In the photos, you can see how well the garlic is doing. We are quite looking forward to having scapes to harvest!
So, there we are! One more thing planted in our garden.
I’m looking forward to taking some pain killers and going to bed early, though! 😄
But first, the cuteness! While feeding the cats this evening, I got to see the grublings while their mama was outside. They are getting way more active!
While getting the container out of the cat house for Caramel and her babies, I saw a surprise through the window.
Three kittens, snuggling together in the cat bed.
The sun room kitten has found her siblings!
She didn’t say, and was soon back in the sun room for feeding time, but I’m glad that she found and was immediately accepted by them.
Also, Kale and Sir Robin are 1) insanely fast and 2) determined to go into the old kitchen. As soon as the door is open, they come bounding for the doorway. It’s actually really quite dangerous for them, because they’re doing this while I’m carrying the kibble bowl with one arm, opening the outer old kitchen door (the one with the screen window, with no screen) with the other, and trying to get through fast enough to close the inner door (the solid one) and keep the cats out. They keep getting under my feet while I’m juggling all this. I’ve already accidentally closed a door on a tail because Sir Robin basically teleported from across the sun room.
Kale and Sir Robin want people, and they want inside!
So that’s what feeding time is like these days. 😁
One of the things I wanted to do today was get our push mower to the small engine shop in town. Last summer, it got harder and harder to start until finally, after stopping to refill the gas tank, I just couldn’t start it anymore. It’s possible this is related to the fact I was unable to change the air filter all summer, because there were none to be had. I finally found one this past winter and made sure to bring it with me. While I was at the counter, this was one of the things I mentioned. The woman filling out the paperwork was very glad that I brought the filter. It seems I was not the only one to have problems finding these, last year!
Along with basic servicing (oil change, blade sharpening, etc.) they will check the self propelling mechanism, which is broken, but not in any visible way, and look for anything that could be causing the starting problem. This time of year, she told me they probably won’t have a chance to look at it until next week, which is pretty much what I’m expecting. The nice surprise was when I gave my name and contact information, and she recognized me. We haven’t met in person until now, but “know” each other on local Facebook groups. When our truck suddenly lost oil pressure and started giving the “shut engine off now” warning, her husband was the person who stopped and helped us out. I made sure to tell her to thank him again for us, briefly mentioning some of the problems we found from this happening.
That done, it was a run to the grocery store to refill our 5 gallon water jugs and pick up a few things before heading home.
By the time I was able to head outside and work in the garden it was, unfortunately, reaching the hottest part of the day. Which, thankfully, was only 17C/63F. Still hot in the sun, though. Tomorrow is supposed to be 22C/72F with high winds again, then 27C/81F on Mother’s Day, then 32C/90F on Monday! Or 32C/90F on Sunday and 34C/93F on Monday, depending on which app I look at! So now was the time to get this done.
The first thing to do was finished getting all the weeds out of the second half of the bed. By now, the soil had baked hard and had to be broke up with a garden fork again, so I could get as much of the tap roots and rhizomes out as possible. I am so thankful for that rolling seat! It’s not comfortable to sit on while reaching down that far, but still much easier on the body than bending at the waste. My doctor may want me doing squats, but my knees are too unstable to bend that far for that long!
In the first photo of the slideshow above, the bed is cleared and leveled, and the centre marked out. I wanted to set trellis support posts down the middle, along the twine you can barely see in the image. The posts I used were old T posts we found while cleaning up around the property. They’re not in good shape and several of them are way too tall for this, but they’ll do. With the first one (set at the end at the bottom of the photo), I hit something in the soil below, and it just would not go any deeper. I tried using my chisel tip digging bar. That wasn’t getting very far, either, and I ended up having to use a spade to loosen whatever it was I was hitting, before I could set the post. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do with any of the others. You can see all 5 posts in the second image of the above slide show.
At that point, I had to stop, get out of the sun and take a break. Before heading back out, I prepared my seeds.
My original though had been to do a row of peas down the centre, then plant potatoes on either side. I changed my mind and decided to do two rows of snap peas; the Sugar snap peas and the Super Sugar snap peas. I prepped markers and set the seeds to soak while I continued.
I decided to use wire mesh for the trellis instead of the plastic trellis netting that I used last year. I found that too saggy. I went to the old squash tunnel that should have been taken down a couple of years ago, and grabbed the 1″ square wire mesh from one section of it. That leaves one more section of 1″ mesh, plus another with hex chicken wire. It’s turned out to be a rather handy way to store the wire on there. 😄
I wasn’t sure if it would be long enough, so I laid it out on the grass to check, and was very happy that it wasn’t too short! Then I realized I’d set all the “teeth” of the T posts facing the other way, and had to drag it around to the other side of the bed. 😄
In the old garden shed I had a bungle of garden twist ties and brought those out to fasten the wire to the posts. The next while was spent first getting it up, then adjusting one way or the other, to get the wire snug between the posts, without pulling them one way or the other. There was enough excess wire to actually wrap around the posts at each end, and fasten it to itself. The other posts got twist ties at the top and bottom to secure it in place.
One thing about using this wire for the trellis. When the wind blows through it, it can get pretty loud!
Hopefully, we won’t need to secure the posts with tie downs. It will depend on how much trouble the wind becomes, once there’s peas actually growing up the trellis and acting like a sail.
I took a picture of the trellis after the wire was up, but you can’t really see the wire at all!
That done, I used a garden stake to draw a trench for seeds on each side of the posts, then used the jet setting to deep water the trench only. This would also break up and clumps, plus the water would naturally level the soil a bit.
Then it was time to set out the pre-soaked seeds evenly down the trenches. There were more of the Super Sugar snap peas, but this bed is long enough that they got pretty normal spacing, while the other wise got more space between each seed. Hopefully, we’ll have a high germination rate, and there won’t be any gaps!
After pushing the seeds into the ground, the trenches got another watering, this time with a flat spray; gentler than the jet setting, but still enough pressure to settle the soil over the seeds.
While I was working on this, of course there were cats going across the freshly loosened soil – and trying to use it as a litter box! So after the seeds were planted, I took the boards that were used to weigh down the solarizing plastic and set them along the sides of the bed. Hopefully, that will be sufficient, and they won’t go under the wire in the middle and start digging there. Later, mulch will be added.
I will plant something under where the boards are, later. I haven’t decided what, yet. The potatoes I’d planned on will get their own bed, I think. If they get planted at all. I may have to buy new seed potatoes. When I prepped the potatoes for chitting, they seemed to be find, but have just… stopped. No sprouts, no leaf buds, no growth. Some of the potatoes have even started to shrivel up and dry out, instead. They were sprouting in their bag when I bought them, and then just… didn’t.
I suspect our basement set up has something to do with it. I hoped they would start growing once in the warmth of the portable greenhouse, but nope. No change at all. I could – and probably will – still plant them, but I think getting more potatoes is in order. It’s not like we can have too many potatoes! It’s just a matter of space.
For now, I’m thinking and early bed time and an early start tomorrow, before the heat hits, which is supposed to be in the early evening. I’d like to get some more walnut seeds in, but I also need to start digging a trench for the asparagus crowns and bare root strawberries I picked up awhile ago. Then there’s the trellis bed that needs to have the rest of its vertical supports attached, the log frame of another bed assembled, then the bed cleared of weeds… and then… and then… and then… Lots of work to do before we can do more direct sowing and transplanting!
For all the heat we’re supposed to get within the next few days, in the long range forecasts, the temperatures are supposed to drop quite a bit, again, with overnight temperatures barely above freezing.
What we really need is rain. It’s wildfire season, and there are quite a few going right now. The closest ones to the north of us are mostly now listed as under control, but the further north you go, the bigger they are, and they are all listed as out of control. Rain and no wind. That’s what we need!
From the 10 day forecasts, we might get some next week, but just for a couple of days.
We shall see.
For now, I’m happy to have gotten that bed done, and some direct sowing accomplished! Peas really could have gone into the ground quite a while ago, but this should be okay – as long as the heat doesn’t kill them! It sure feels good to be digging in the dirt again.
Even if my body is now saying very nasty things to me right now. 😄
The first image is under the cover of the low raised bed in the East yard. This one has a root vegetable mix of seeds, plus 1 type of lettuce and onion seeds. There are a lot of sprouts in there! I’m guessing mostly radish and beets. I’m not seeing signs of carrots or onions sprouting, but it’s really hard to tell at this point.
This bed was getting the most difficult to tend to with the high winds, so when I took the cover off to water it, I spent a lot of time securing the plastic after the cover was put back on. The plastic on all the beds is meant to be there only until the plants establish themselves and don’t need as much warmth or protection. It will likely be replaced with netting later in the season. So securing the plastic involves a lot of rolling and carefully tucking under the frame. With this one, that also meant completely redoing how it was weighted down on top. Hopefully, it will hold. We’re expecting high winds again, in a few days.
There wasn’t much to see in the high raised bed or the ground level bed with mixed flowers in it. There are sprouts, but not very many. The main thing is, they are no longer being dried out by the wind, nor dug into by the cats!
The next picture is of the old kitchen bed. There is quite a bit of spinach coming up in there, and I can even see tiny onion sprouts. The cluster of larger leaves visible came up very early and I thought it had to be a missed onion from last year, but now I can see that these are most definitely garlic. We had garlic planted in here, two years ago! I did try to pull things that were most obviously weeds – crab grass and dandelions – but only if I could do so without disturbing any seedlings, so there wasn’t a lot I could pull.
The other winter sown beds got watered as well. I think the summer squash bed, and the end of the garlic bed, are lost causes. The only things coming up in the summer squash bed is clearly not summer squash, and the few feet of the garlic bed shows nothing at all. I don’t think they made it!
There are more sprouts coming up in the mesh covered bed at the chain link fence, though still just the one pea shoot. This is the bed that has Dalvay shelling peas, a few King Tut purple, Royal Burgundy bush beans, Hopi Black Dye and Mongolian Giant sunflowers, a few black Montano Morado corn seeds, plus onion seeds. So there should be more pea seeds showing, as peas prefer to germinate in cooler soil. That suggests to me, most of the peas did not survive the winter. As for the sprouts I am seeing, about all I can say right now is that none of them are corn.
Unfortunately, while covering the bed with netting will protect it from the Chinese Elm seeds that are forming right now, the net only partially protects from the cats. There are a few smaller cats that are absolutely determined to get under the netting. Then, when I go to get them out, instead of leaving through the open space next to them that they got in on (the netting slides on the wire hoops), they run down the length of the bed, bashing themselves against the netting every now and then, in a panic. Or, like this morning, they simply climb on top of the netting and play on it! This set up wasn’t designed to actually hold that kind of weight, so quite a few of the wire hoops are now bent out of shape. It is really frustrating.
This bed is still made with temporary materials. Along the path side and ends is loose bricks. The chain link fence there are old boards to keep the soil from spilling through. When we finally have the materials to make it more permanent, we will need to keep protection in mind. It’s not enough to just cover it with netting to keep the elm seeds from smothering the bed, stop the cats from using it as a litter box, or keep the deer from eating whatever is grown there. We need the cover set up to be able to hold the weight of cats – we just can’t keep them from going right on top of any of the covers!
The cover that we have over the old kitchen garden bed is the one that was made using fence wire. When it was done, I swore I never wanted to work with that again! It’s so thick, I had to double up the frame on the sides to secure it in between, then double up the ends, just to keep it from falling apart. However, while it was on the high raised bed, I found it worked out really well, in that I could reach through the wire to tend to the bed, without having to remove it. The openings are not all the same size, though. It’s meant to be installed with the narrower openings at ground level to keep small critters out, while the larger openings at the top are all that’s needed to keep mid sized critters out. Which means there are spaces where I cannot fit my hands through, but I can still reach around from other openings.
The wire is also strong enough that no support hoops were needed. Not only can it hold itself up, but when the plastic was placed over it and the cats started jumping on it, it held their weight, too!
The cover that’s on the winter sown bed in the East yard is almost there. The hoops are strong enough to hold weight; especially now that I’ve secured them permanently, and they no longer slide through the pieces of metal strapping I used to hold them in place. I originally thought it would be useful to be able to remove the hoops at some point, but that potential convenience caused more problems than solved any. They do, however, still bend inwards, slightly. Particularly the ones at the ends.
The hoops are supporting a plastic mesh that is stiffer than netting, but more flexible and easier to work with than hardware cloth. As you can see in that first photo, it’s wide enough that it creates more shade, so this is a cover that would be idea to use for things like lettuces, which like more shade. The plastic mesh does sag when the cats jump on it. My plan is to add horizontal supports in between the hoops. These would keep the hoops at the ends from being pulled inwards, plus keep the plastic mesh from sagging downwards. I am hoping it will only need horizontal supports across the very top, but it might need more halfway up each side, too.
Once the plastic sheet is no longer needed, I will have to put something across the open ends, to keep the cats out. I have some black plastic mesh that should work out well, once I figure out how to secure it!
I don’t want to be spending too much time or effort on these covers, though. These were my first experimental raised bed covers. Now that I know how these have been working out, I plan to build new ones using better and stronger materials, taking into account what we have found works, or doesn’t work, with these ones. These ones still have a few years in them, though, and we will keep building more raised beds, so we will need more covers as time goes by.
Meanwhile, as I was watering the bed at the chain link fence, I took a good look at the haskap bushes.
*sigh*
I have one “Mr. Haskap” and two “Mrs. Haskap” bushes – cross pollinating varieties. With haskap, you need two varieties for cross pollination. The “Mrs. Haskap” is the Borealis variety. I can’t remember what the “Mr. Haskap” is, but that one still has its label, so I can check later.
The first image is the “male” haskap. It’s leafing out beautifully and, in the second picture, you can see it even has flower buds forming!
The next two photos are the “female” haskaps.
The larger one was bought at the same time as the Mr. Haskap and, at one point, I was sure that one had died. It has barely any leaves opening on it. The smaller one is still really small, even though it’s only one year behind the other two. At least it has more leaves, but still, they are way behind their pollinator variety! This is why, after all these years, we’ve never had more than a small handful of berries. They simply aren’t blooming at the same time long enough for proper pollination.
The varieties I have coming later in the month are Aurora (the pollinator) and Boreal Blizzard. These will be planted out in the food forest area, near where the apple and gooseberry just got planted. The Opal plum should be shipped at the same time as the haskap, and it will be planted in that area, too.
Hopefully, this will work out better than what we’ve got now, and we’ll finally have berries to eat! Two bushes should be enough to meet our needs; they are supposed to be quite productive. We’ve got three, and have barely had enough to taste.
At least we know we like them!
So that is how things were in the garden this morning. With today being a calm day, I hope to get back out there soon, and get some work done!
As things got hotter in the afternoon, I headed out again, hooking up an extra hose to the front tap to water that bed again, as the winds are drying everything out. Inside the portable greenhouse, it was above 50C/122F. Since this is just a plastic covered frame, there is no way to vent the heat, other than to keep the door tied fully open. So I misted everything in there, several times, to try and cool things down. Even the chitting potatoes got misted, a little bit.
The wind was threatening to blow away the plastic covers in the East garden bed and on the high raised bed. The heavier plastic on the old kitchen garden bed cover was handling things much better, even though that cover is slightly elevated by bricks and whatnot, allowing some air flow underneath. I did open up one end and gave it a watering, too. Normally, I would have lifted the cover off completely to water that bed, but that was just not going to happen with this wind!
The covered raised bed in the East yard was getting hit the worst. I ended up tying some more sticks together to drape across the top, but they were still too light. This bed did get a watering, too, and I kept tucking the excess plastic under the frame itself, but the wind kept blowing it loose. I even tied it down around the entire base of where the mesh connects with the frame, but that just got blown loose, too. Eventually, I raided a pile of rocks I’d taken out of the sun choke bed and stacked against the garage, grabbing the larger ones, and using them to weigh down the edges more, rolling them up in the excess plastic where I was able.
The high raised bed was also being blown around like a balloon. Even the extra hoops on the outside of the plastic were getting pulled loose from the stakes they were set on. I used the 3′ extra piece of pipe at one end to give a bit more something to keep the plastic from ballooning in the wind. Between that and the stone and board I already had to secure it, it finally held.
This bed got a pair or sticks joined with twine draped over it, too. These sticks were heavier, but still not heavy enough. I had already used rocks rolled up in the excess plastic as weights, but they were not heavy enough, so I raided another rock pile for larger ones to weight the edges. One of the hoops on the outside kept getting blown loose and I finally had to find a longer piece of bamboo stake – going from about an 8″ piece to one almost 2 feet long – before I could finally secure one end enough that it couldn’t get blown loose again. Once that end was secure, the other end was no longer being pulled loose.
In between fighting with the wind, going back and forth between the two beds, I also set up several hoses from the back tap to the main garden area and got a daughter to open the valve in the basement. I managed to water inside the high raised bed cover first. I’ve got one of those long reach spray guns and the sprayer end can be adjusted up and down. I had it spraying upwards, into the plastic, to rain down, so I wouldn’t accidentally damage the sprouts under there with water pressure. The weight of the water also helped with securing the plastic cover a bit.
The garlic bed also got a thorough watering, including the end that has the same mix of seeds as the high raised bed. The bed winter sown with summer squash got a thorough watering, too. There are things sprouting in the squash bed, but definitely not any squash seedlings, yet!
The one bed I didn’t have to do anything with is the one with flower seeds winter sown into it. When my daughter and I covered that one with plastic last night and weighted down the edges with bricks, I ended up using the mulch set to one side and basically burying the edge of the plastic along that side. That was all it took to keep that bed’s cover from being blown around! I could also see condensation inside the plastic, so I knew it wasn’t going to need watering yet.
Tomorrow, we’re expecting heat again, so I’ll be doing more watering early in the day. I’m hoping the wind will die down by then. One of my weather apps says possible rain tomorrow might, but looking at more detail, it’s only a 1 or 2% chance of rain. So I’m going to keep watering.
Weather willing, I am hoping to get to the outer yard and transplant that Walnut sapling. The way things are going, I’m going to shoot to do just one planting out there a day, starting with the sapling that should have already been planted by now. The walnut seeds are less urgent for planting. Each is going to be a big job on its own. I’m rather dreading to see how many roots I will be hitting when I try to dig transplant holes!
I watched this video this morning, and I might be changing up a few things.
After watching the video, I checked and it seems our last average frost date has changed from June 2 to May 21-31. This is based on the town to the north of us, which is now the same as the town to the East of us. The town to the East of us had a last frost date of May 28, so it’s still in that range now.
This means that, once I get the beds ready, we should be able to get things into the ground about a week earlier than I expected to. Some of the direct sowing can be done now, if I had beds ready for them. I’ve got a couple of beds solarizing that will be easier to prep, and I want to get the potatoes in soon. We still need to finish building the trellis supports on one of the low raised beds, but the climbers I want to plant there can be planted before the trellis is ready.
We’re supposed to cool down to more reasonable temperatures in a few days, then get hot again. The overnight lows are still expected to drop to just above freezing a few times. We’ll see how it actually turns out, when the time comes!
For all the fighting with the covers in this wind, I’m glad we got them on.
On a related note, the water table is high enough that I had to set up a the blower fans in the old basement, where water is starting to seep through. The sump pump has even gone off a couple of times, which will be great for the bed in the old kitchen garden it is set up to drain at. My brother came over again today and checked on the ejector; the stand pipe still has ice in it, but with this heat, I’ll be testing it more often, to see if we can finally start getting through the venturi pipe. Even if it’s just a dribble, once fluid starts going through, it will thaw out faster at the bottom.
It’s hard to imagine, with how hot it is today, that the ground is actually still frozen further down!
The first thing I had to do was use the weed trimmer to clear the area they were going into. It hasn’t been mowed all of last year – I got tired of breaking lawnmowers – so there was a lot of tall dead grass. Before I could use the weed trimmer, though, I had to use the loppers to cut out all the little poplars that were coming up.
Then come back to get the ones I missed.
The dead grass was so long, there was only so much our little electric weed trimmer could do, so I got it mostly done, then raked up all the dead grass and clippings, then used the weed trimmer again, then rakes again. I got quite a lot of dried grasses that could be used as mulch, later on.
I decided to plant the apple tree 6′ away from where the plum tree will be planted, with the gooseberry in between. Part of the area was where we’d grown squash previously, so there were layers of straw and mostly decomposed cardboard to rake up. That part should have been easy to work in, but there were so many poplar roots extending through there, it took a LOT longer than it should have! Then there was about three feet of sod that needed to be dug out to where the apply tree would go. More roots. Lots of rocks. It was insane.
After stopping for a lunch and pain killer break, I brought the saplings over, unwrapped and in a bucket of water. I’d made sure to add a wet paper towel to the plastic bag they were wrapped in so the roots wouldn’t dry out, but considering how long it’s been since we found these, I wanted to make sure they were good and hydrated before planting.
This area gets full sun in the summer, and any rain drains off quickly, so I also made sure the planting holes were filled with water first. The holes got shovel fulls of a mix of garden soil (from the pile we bought a few years ago), sheep manure, cattle manure, and some of the rehydrated coconut fibre brick. With how shallow the soil is before reaching rocks, gravel and clay, I tried to build up where they were planted a bit. Once they were in, I mulched with the grass I’d weed trimmed and raked up. To protect them from deer, I set up the dollar store tomato supports I’d picked up a while ago. Then, to keep the mulch from blowing away, while also trying to keep the weeds from growing back, I added a layer of cardboard weighted down with sticks that used to be part of our old pea and bean trellises. I set the old rain barrel up closer to the area. When we set up the hoses, I’ll keep it filled with water so we can water things with ambient temperature water rather than the cold hose.
Oh, before I forget… the apple variety is a Cortland apple, and it’s grated onto a Siberian Crabapple root stock. I made sure the graft was well above the soil line.
Along with the plum, we will be getting two cross pollinator haskap varieties. So we’ll need to dig holes for those, too. I haven’t quite decided where they will go, yet. I was thinking in front of the apple and plum trees, but they can grow 4-6 feet tall, with a 3-5 foot spread, while the gooseberry can grow 3-4 feet tall. I don’t want to shade out the gooseberry, so they will probably get planted in line with what I planted today.
The next job, however, will be to plant the walnut sapling, plus the 8 walnut seeds. These will be planted in the outer yard.
It’s going to be even harder to plant out there than it was to plant year!
In the long term, though, it’ll be worth it!
We’re planting a LOT more trees for the food forest this year than originally planned on. This will put us years ahead of “schedule”, so that’s a good thing. Ideally, we would have done this years ago, but there’s only so much we can do at a time!
The Re-Farmer 