While doing my rounds today, I noticed some really huge squash and pumpkin flowers were open. There was even one among the zucchini that I made sure to hand pollinate, since no male flowers were open.
In checking the winter squash, though, I had my first find of potential Baked Potato squash. Two little female flowers were finally forming.
Once those blossoms open, I will be sure to hand pollinate them, just to be on the safe side.
Not that it’s likely we’ll get anything from them. We’re well into the second half of August right now. These are shorter season varieties, but even if these female flowers get properly pollinated and start to grow, it’s unlikely we have enough season left for full maturity.
Once I was done my rounds, I grabbed the wheelbarrow and started bringing wood chips over to cover some garden paths. I forgot to get a “before” picture of the first one I started on, so I instead have a “half way done” picture.
That first picture is after three wheelbarrow loads. Some of the wood chips were also spread around the north ends of the two beds.
The second picture shows that path finished, including the ends of the two beds, with a total of five wheelbarrow loads. I especially wanted to make sure there was a thick, stamped down layer right up against the walls of the raised beds.
The only down side is that, while loading the wheelbarrow from the wood chip pile, I broke up an ant hill. Which means that, along with the wood chips, I also brought over a whole bunch of red ants and their eggs.
I’ll need to pick up some ant traps soon.
Once this was done, I headed inside for breakfast. By the time I came out again, it was just starting to almost, kinda, sorta rain. More of a misting than a rain. I was already soaked with sweat from the humidity, so I figured I may as well keep at it.
For the second path, I remembered to get a proper “before” picture.
For this one, I tried to load the wheelbarrow as much as I could, without losing woodchips along the way. It still took five loads, but I had enough to add to the ends, as well as more to put along the sides of the flower bed. That bed will get walls eventually, and the wood chips are where the walls would go, but that’s okay. As it is now, if I’m not careful while watering, the soil mound the flowers are planted in starts to erode, and the wood chips will reduce that.
The high raised bed already had its own ant colony in one corner, so I just added more ants… 🫤
Those bricks at the end of the flower bed were added because the cats were digging there to use the soil as a littler box.
The Cosmos are getting nice and tall, and looking really healthy! Hopefully, they aren’t shading out the memorial asters too much.
I did finally remove the hoops that were still over that section. I’d left them after removing the netting simply because they weren’t in the way of anything, and it was as good a place to store them as any.
Eventually, this end will have a more developed 4′ wide path, but that will happen after we get rid of those killer trees and build more beds to reclaim the space they’ve taken over. For now, I just need a narrower mulched path to keep the weeds down.
Once this was done, it had gone from misting to raining, so it was time to stop. This area won’t get more wood chips for a while, as I’m adding that after the raised beds on either side of a path are permanently framed with logs.
I did use up a decent chunk of the wood chip pile!
Not only was there a big ant nest in it, but poplar roots were working their way through it, too. It’s been there a few years, now. Where I’m standing to take the picture is how far it extended when the tree company we hired to get rid of the big branch pile for us dumped it there. This area is meant to be kept open, wide enough to drive through, if needed, so it’ll be good to use up that pile. We’ll need to go over with with the landscape rake when we’ve cleared as much as we can, just so we can mow over it without the lawnmower blades doing much crunching and munching, and potentially getting damaged.
The next areas I’ll be adding wood chips to are around the raised beds in the east yard, and around the newest food forest additions.
Which I might actually get some progress on, as it seems to have stopped raining. We’re getting into the hottest part of the day, though, so I might work on another project, instead.
I’m so enjoying finally getting some stuff done out there!
My first priority was to mow around the chat shelters. Get that over with and give them time to calm down before it was time for the evening feeding.
Eyelet is SO deaf. He was sitting with his back to me on the sidewalk as I was mowing alongside it. Other cats ran off, but it wasn’t until he turned his head and actually saw me, having just stopped because he wasn’t moving, that he finally ran away from the mower.
For all the rain we had, only parts of that section of yard needed to be mowed, so I was done quickly and could move on to where I really wanted to get into.
My ultimate goal is to get all that overgrown area mowed, but not quite yet. First I had to move those logs that are meant to be vertical supports for future trellis beds. Then I cleared away where the plastic has been solarizing where the next trellis bed will be. Most of that was plastic I found while cleaning up after we moved in, and I think it was meant to be used under shingles. It’s seen a few years use already, so it was disintegrating. As a result, the area isn’t very solarized, but it’s a start. That cardboard on the side will be laid over it, eventually.
The solarized area got cleared out, but I left the cardboard for now. I started off mowing in between the existing beds, as I plan to add wood chips in a couple of paths soon. I’ll be going over that with a weed trimmer next.
From the paths, I started mowing the open area I’d cleared before, but only got a little more than half of it done. It wasn’t just because I was still feeling weak from being sick, though. That area gets the full brunt of the sun for many hours. We were expected to reach a high of 24C/75F today, but we hit 25C/77F while I was out there. I don’t know what the humidex was but as I write this, a couple of hours later, it has dropped to 23C/73F and the humidex is at 28C/82F. Which means the humidex probably broke 30C/86F while I was out there.
Not the sort of temperatures to be moving logs, cleaning things up and using a push mower while in full sun at the best of times, never mind while still recovering from illness.
In the end, I had to stop, get inside, cool off and hydrate. Later on, I did go out to feed the outside cats while my daughter put away the lawn mower and gas can, and then made a quick… I was going to say supper, but I guess it was really lunch.
Yeah, I probably should have eaten before I went outside, too. I just wasn’t feeling hungry!
After putting the mower away, my daughter came over to help with the cat feeding, and I showed her what I found in the isolation shelter.
Most of the time, when I come by and there are kittens in there, they run off in a panic. This one hunkered down and tried to make itself small, instead. Which a prefer, since that meant it could get to the food I’d just put in faster, and was already next to a full water bowl, with a lovely, soft cat bed in between. Later on, I saw it in the lower level, peaking out from between the two box nests that are down there.
As we made our way back to the house, my daughter spotted Adam, covered in kittens. I snuck around and managed to get some pictures.
A couple of kittens had run off by then, so the first couple of pictures have “only” three kittens nursing. I wasn’t able to catch them all, but there were kittens going in and out of that chimney flu in front of the cat house entrance – they use that to get under the “porch” side of the cat house. There were so many of them under there! No way to count, though. For all we could tell, with how much they were moving around, we were seeing the same ones over and over again.
Oh, and that handsome boy in the middle of the second last photo of the slide show is “Cat #1”. I was able to spot the tattoo in his ear, which makes him the kitten that we had neutered at the same time Kohl was spayed, all grown up now! He stays nearby and I’ve managed to sneak a pet every now and then, but he is not socialized.
He is such a beauty, though!
Anyhow.
I’m not done for the day, as far as outside stuff goes. I’ll try to rest up some more, and will try mowing again tomorrow, BEFORE it gets hot out! Tomorrow’s high is supposed to be 26C/79F. Mind you, even our overnight low is supposed to be 20C/68F, so it’s not like we’re really cooling down much. We’re also supposed to get about an hour of rain in the wee hours of the night. I’m not complaining, but it will make mowing that overgrown area more challenging, as well as cutting away all the poplars that are trying to take over.
I actually took a nap for a couple of hours – while writing my previous blog post, I fell asleep at my keyboard several times! Woke up just in time for the hottest part of the day. 🫤
I got a daughter to assist me with doing the evening outside cat feeding, supervising the kittens as they ate in the old kitchen (once again, Havarti was nowhere to be seen), passing me the other cat soup bowls through the window, and helping me trade out the frozen water bottles from this morning for new ones, and putting the thawed out ones back in the freezer for tomorrow. Tomorrow is supposed to be at least a few degrees cooler, but we shall see.
Grommet was taking advantage of a relatively cool spot in the sun room, after filling his belly. The sun room was about 35-40C/95-104F, according to the wall thermometer!
I managed to get some decent progress done outside. One rather nasty job that I finally got around to doing was raking up the dirt floor in the garage, around my mother’s car. The cats had been using it as litter all winter, so it was really… unfortunate. It’s all cleaned up now! Finally.
We also finally got the second clothes line up using the kit I’d bought awhile back. My daughters have been washing their bedding today, so that’ll come in handy. We still have space for one more line, but there is no rush on that.
I just realized; I forgot the step ladder that I had to use to attach the pulley at the far end.
Despite the rain we got, I found that the beds in the old kitchen garden were remarkably dry, so I got those watered. We didn’t get enough rain to refill the rain barrel, but there was enough to water the old kitchen garden, at least. I’ll water the rest of the garden beds and trees in the morning.
One of the ornamental crab apple trees has gotten overgrown again and branches have been getting in the way of access to things, so I finally broke out the extended pole pruning saw and cut some of it away. We’ve worked out how much of that tree we need to take down, which will be a rather substantial section of it. We’ll do that in the fall or spring, though. For now, we’ll just take down some of the branches, first. The cut pieces went onto the branch pile near the fire pit, so we’ll have some nice apple wood to use during cookouts. Whenever we manage to actually have one. With the fire bans, it certainly isn’t going to be for a while!
Then I worked on the elm tree outside the kitchen window. The one we need to get rid of completely. We’ve cut that thing back a few times, but it has since regrown to the point that when I pull up to the house with the truck, it’s hard to open and close the doors without catching branches. Even when mowing the lawn, I was starting to have to duck under them, which is saying something, considering I’m on the short side!
What I’d really love to do is take down the big branch that’s overhanging the roof, but we have no safe way to do that. My brother was saying he could do it. Alternatively, we’d have to hire someone to safely take it down, and that is a lot more expensive now, then when we had a company come in to clear the power lines for us.
Still, I was able to get quite a few branches cleared away for now, and we’ll no longer be hitting them when we drive in with the truck. I could have kept on going, but even with taking it easy and staying in the shade as much as possible, the heat was getting to me.
Meanwhile, my brother and SIL have been busy with their own stuff, including moving some of the parked vehicles and equipment to mow under them, so the tall grass won’t start rusting things out. Then my SIL kept on going with the big mower, doing the rest of the outer yard. I think she even went into some of the rougher areas that hadn’t been done yet. The big mower can handle the terrain better. I’d already mowed around the planted trees, with paths in between, so that made it easier for her, too.
I think I’ll pop on over to see how they’re doing, while it’s still light out. I do enjoy being able to just casually see them like this! They are just the best. 💕😊
It’s mid afternoon as I start to write this, and time to take a break from the heat.
Depending on which weather app I look at, our expected high today is supposed to be 22C/72F or 24C/75F. As I write this, one app tells me we are at 23C/73F, while another tells me we are at 21F/70F, with the humidex putting us at 25C/77F.
All our outdoor thermometers are in full sun, so they’d be reading high, but given how I felt while outside, I’d say at least the humidex making it feel like 25C/77F is accurate!
My morning rounds finished off with watering all the garden beds, trees and bushes. For the vegetable beds, I set up the fertilizer sprayer, because of this.
These are the Arikara squash, but all the winter squash and melons in the main garden area are also getting yellow and droopy like this. So are all the tomatoes. They’re still blooming and stuff, but looking very sickly. These seems like more than transplant shock.
The peppers, eggplant and herbs show no sign of this.
I looked up possible reasons for why this could be happening, and there are many possibilities. Most could not apply for various reasons. One very possible cause is lack of nitrogen; for all our amending, our soil is still nutrient deficient, being low on nitrogen in particular, though it is starting to improve.
The fertilizer I got was and 18-18-21; a tomato, fruit and vegetable ratio. With the hose attachment applicator, I went through most of the container by the time all the beds were done. It’s recommended to apply every 7-14 days. I’ll need to get another container before then, because there isn’t enough to do a complete watering with what’s left in the cannister right now!
When I got to watering the walnuts and Korean pine, I had a couple of surprises.
The first photo is the year old sapling, and it’s doing very well. The second photo, though, is what I found after removing the mulch that somehow ended up on top of the plastic collar, completely covering where the seed was planted.
Something was digging in there!
My first thought was that a squirrel or something stole the walnut seed. Still, I started digging, just to confirm it was gone.
I found it.
Whatever was digging had stopped a couple of inches above the walnut seed! So I just replaced the dug out soil and gave it a thorough watering.
I was encouraged to find that the soil was still moist at the level of the seed. Just barely, but at least it wasn’t dried out!
Then I found what looks like our first sprouted sapling. At least I hope that’s what it is. Until the leave unfurl, it’s hard to tell. While I tried to remove any roots I found while digging the hole for it, it’s still possible something else is sending up shoots.
Speaking of sending up shoots, I saw our first zucchini sprouts today!
Just in 2 out of 3 spots planted, so far. No sign of the white scallop squash, but I remember those took a lot longer to germinate compared to other summer squash we planted last year. We are seeing a remarkable number of frogs this year – more than we’ve ever seen since moving out here – which gives me hope that the squash sprouts will survive. I haven’t seen a single slug this year, yet, and I’d say we have all those frogs to thank for that!
My daughter, meanwhile, headed out this morning to start mowing the lawn with the riding mower, after I came inside for lunch.
Some time later, I heard a knocking at my window.
My daughter needed help. She had tried to mow closer to the crab apple trees. She got caught on a branch that flung off her hat…
… and her glasses!
Crabapple branches are horrible for that sort of thing. It’s like they reach out and grab at you, like something out of a cartoon scare scene!
She had been looking for them but, without her glasses, she couldn’t see very well. So I went out to help her look, but had no better success. Her biggest fear was that she’d run over them with the mower, so of course that was the first place she looked, but when it came to the grass, who knows how far a springy branch could and flung them!
After a while I suggested she go inside to get her prescription sunglasses while I kept searching. Then she would at least be able to see while looking!
While she was gone, I remembered her worry about having run over them, so I decided to look at the mower, too. She had stopped it well away from where the tree branch had caught her.
When I found them, I just had to take a picture, or no one would believe me.
There they were, sitting like someone had very carefully folded them closed and put them in the safest spot possible. They couldn’t even be accidentally stepped on in that spot. While needing a lens cleaning, they were completely undamaged.
An absolute miracle! I brought them to the house just as she reached the door to go back out with her prescription sunglasses. She was so incredibly relieved!
Then she was happily back to mowing.
When I headed back to work in the garden, I didn’t get much done. It was getting way too hot by then, and I was in the full sun. I went through the soil in the kiddie pool we tried using to grow zucca melon before, only to have them eaten by slugs. The soil was full of crab grass but, being contained as they were, it was easy to clear them away. I then used about half of it to top up the row of asparagus, against the log border. I wasn’t able to dig down to the proper depth when they were planted, as it gets too rocky, so I was glad to have the soil available to top them up.
If there is anything alive to help out. I strongly suspect that it took too long for use to plant the asparagus and strawberries. I don’t expect to see the asparagus quickly, but the strawberries should have appeared by now. I’ll keep watering the new bed, just in case, but it might be a total loss.
One thing I’ll have to do later today, and hopefully snag a daughter to assist, is set netting around the trellis bed. This is where the red noodle beans and Hopi Black Dye sunflowers were planted, along with the free pumpkin seeds and the baby onion sprouts I found while cleaning up the bed Aside from overwintered onions and the collars where the pumpkins are planted, this bed is pretty open.
The cats have been digging in it.
So far, they don’t seem to have actually dug up any seeds, but they did dig up at least one or two tiny onions. I’ve set the rest of my tall metal plant stakes, plus some bamboo stakes, around the bed to hold the netting. I’ll wrap the entire bed in netting, like I did with the corn and beans bed. That should be enough to keep them out.
In the process I found my first red noodle bean sprout! There was just a bit of stem visible, elbowing its way through the soil surface, so I didn’t bother taking a picture, but I’m very happy to see it! There should be others, soon!
I’ve set things up so that, after the netting is in place, it won’t block access to where the remaining three vertical support posts for the permanent trellis need to be installed. Keeping the cats out of the bed is the priority right now!
That will wait until things start to cool down a bit, though. I just don’t have any tolerance for heat anymore!
On a completely different note, I have some cuteness to share with you.
We still don’t have a name for this mama. For a mostly feral cat, she is thankfully quite comfortable hanging around the house. Very unlike the other more feral mamas! She takes very good care of her kittens – and any others that happen to be around!
There is a gorgeous long haired tabby that I decided to start calling Rabi, because I thought it might be Kohl’s brother, but I think I’m wrong. While we can’t see to know for sure, I think he might be a she.
I saw her trying to carry off Hastings, yesterday.
She’s acting like a mother cat trying to carry her own kittens away, but these aren’t her kittens, and they don’t want to be carried off by her!
It has me wondering if perhaps she lost her own litter, and some maternal instinct has her wanting to carry off other kittens to mother. I’ve noticed she (I’m going to just assume “she” at this point) has been following me around the yard, but never quite allowing me to get close or reach out to her. I can’t say she ever looked pregnant – another reason we thought she might have been male. I don’t quite know what to make of it!
We’ll have to keep an eye on her. Hopefully, we can get her friendly enough to get her into a cat carrier end get her spayed!
One that started way too early, but still an awesome day!
I had my alarm set for 6am. Unfortunately, the furry alarm clocks had other plans. It was light out, anyhow, so I got up and did my morning rounds.
It turned 6am as I was getting back into the house!
My daughters didn’t fair much better, and one of them was up working all night.
My younger daughter and I made sure to grab breakfast before we left, but did make a stop at a gas station convenience store along the way to make sure she had a couple of large water bottles to keep with her during her workshop. I’m glad we left nice and early, because we drove right past the place and had to turn around. 😁
When we got there, others had arrived even earlier than we did. My daughter had a standard waiver to sign as we made our introductions with one of the instructors/owners, then my daughter headed over to their “classroom” to pick an individual forge for the workshop, while I headed out.
The road the forge was on turned out to go almost directly to where the small Walmart we tend to go to is. Very convenient! My new shoes, while fitting where they need to, are still size 11 men’s, so they are too long, and my heels were popping out. So I went searching and found some insoles and heel thingies – I can’t remember what they are called – to reduce the problem. Once I got those into my shoes, I set a timer for myself, settled into the truck and went for a nap in the Walmart parking lot! It was much needed.
They had a 1 hour lunch break scheduled to start at noon, so after a lovely little snooze, I went to a downtown grocery store to hunt down a lunch for us. I asked during the drive in, and my daughter requested something cold for lunch, since she was going to be working with fire all morning. I knew this grocery store would have some good options. I ended up getting some fresh made sushi, a lovely little charcuterie board, cut vegetables and hummus for us to share.
When I got back, it was too early for lunch break yet, but my daughter showed me some of the hooks she had made, using various techniques. She finished one last hook before break was called.
This place has a really good set up – one with extra care taken, since they’re under a fire ban, too. All the forges had new hoods put on them, and everything was set up under a roof. The walls were open, but several sections were covered with a particular sort of cloth/netting. I’d thought it was to prevent sparks from blowing out, but it turns out it was to keep flammable cottonwood puffs from blowing into the fire zone!
The entire grounds were fascinating, with all sorts of equipment – some modern, some antique – around. Even the house was amazing, built out of huge logs. It may have had a modern metal roof but, from the aging of the logs, I wouldn’t be surprised if the house itself is probably close to 100 years old.
The grounds were also very open and spread out, and they had a picnic table available in the shade of some trees for those who wanted to have lunch on site. The instructor/owner that has met us when we came in soon joined us, along with her husband, and some of the other students had brought their own camp chairs and settled in the shade nearby, too. We all had some grand conversation; the other attendees were very interesting people!
Then my daughter’s cell phone rang, which is always a surprise. She uses her phone as a phone even less than I do with mine! 😄
It was from her doctor’s office.
She quickly got up and went aside to take the call until she needed to come back and clear some dates for me.
Her surgery to remove her ganglion is going to happen in July – about 3 weeks from now – and she’s got a consultation appointment to go over the details, tomorrow, late afternoon.
The hospital is in the same small city we frequent in between stock up trips, and it basically across the street from the vet clinic that’s been doing our spays and neuters, so it’s all familiar territory for us.
Of course, other people heard us as we put the appointments into my calendar. Afterwards, we learned that one of the guys that joined us at the picnic table had had a massive ganglion removed some 25 years ago – large enough that he still has a scar! So he and my daughter commiserated about how painful those things can be, for a while. 😁
When the scheduled lunch was done and everyone went back to the workshop, I went back to the city and spent some time actually looking for stuff this time. We need at least one more garden hose, but the only ones that were affordable were the ones that keep breaking on us. In the end, I ended up picking up some replacement couplings, instead. Hopefully, higher quality ones. They also have a built in shut off valve, so you can switch attachments and not have to turned the water off at the tap or, like I usually do, kink the hose to stop the flow – which is part of why they end up breaking so quickly. Oddly, the one that’s leaking on me right now developed a pin hole in the metal of the female coupling. How that happened, I have no idea, but it’s enough to send a tiny, barely visible stream of water shooting out at least a foot!
I also picked up some water soluble fertilizer for the vegetable garden, and some potting soil. Our massive jade trees need repotting. We need to find a new home for them. We have to keep them in the cat free zone/living room, and there just isn’t enough light for them in there. Maybe rehoming plants will be easier than rehoming cats!
That done, I took my time checking out a couple more stores, just to pass the time until I headed back to the forge.
This time, I hung out in a seating area they had in the “classroom”, where my daughter was conveniently set up. They were working on long implements at the time, with a twist in the handle.
My daughter was in absolute heaven.
It was an interesting group to watch. There was about 10 people there, each at their own forge (there were a couple of “spares” that weren’t being used). Most were men that looked to be about my age, give or take a decade. There was one other woman there, who looked to be in her 60s. My daughter was clearly the youngest person there. Everyone seemed to be really enjoying the workshop, too.
Talking about it later, my daughter said she was 99% sure she would love blacksmithing, but there was still that 1% she wasn’t sure of. After today, she is 100% she is in love with blacksmithing! She’s really looking forward to building her own forge and smithy here at the farm. It will take time to acquire the materials, and set up a safe area to work in. Particularly since the area that makes the most sense to build it in is where the fire pit currently is, and there are several dead or partially dead trees with branches overhanging the area that we need to clear out! I plan to make our outdoor kitchen in a different area, so the fire pit area will be available to her. Thanks to this workshop, she also knows which things she prefers to have, such as a hand operated blower instead of an electric one. We do already have some of the tools, since my late father had done some blacksmithing here, though his forge got scavenged at some point. One pair of tongs I found were broken, but another is fine. My daughter says she has seen other tools that are suitable, laying around, including ball peen hammers of the appropriate size and weight. There is a tiny anvil, made from a piece of railroad tie. When I was growing up here, I remember we had a full size blacksmithing anvil in the pump shack, but that is another of the things that grew legs and walked away over the years before we moved in. So it really wouldn’t take much for my daughter to be able to set up her own smithy!
Here are the things my daughter made, by the end of the workshop.
The first image is a series of hooks including one that is meant to be hammered in like a nail. The others have different shaped flat parts, including one leaf shape, with screw holes in them. The screw holes were added towards the very end, using a special hole punch. Then there is the handle; getting the swoop shape it was supposed to be was not easy!
The second image has a fire poke, with a twisted handle. The other thing is a steak flipper. Not something either of us is familiar with!
The owners/instructors welcomed people to stay as long as they needed to put on any finishing touches on their projects before leaving, and most of them did stay longer. My daughter just needed to use the hole punch before she was done, so we had a chance to chat with the other owner/instructor.
My daughter still wants to clean up the stuff she made with a wire brush to give them a more finished look. She plans to give some to my brother and his wife, as a thank you for their birthday gift of this workshop. The steak flipper and fire poker are both going to get use when we do outdoor cooking again – which might be a while. With the current fire bans, some fires are allowed, but with our own fire pit area we aren’t going to chance it for some time.
With staying longer to finish things off and chat for a bit, it was getting pretty late, so we went into the city again, and I made sure my daughter got fed! She ended up choosing to go to a Subway, but she was so tired – especially her hands, from all that hammering! – she could barely hold her sandwich! My husband messaged me to see of I could find something at Walmart for him, and she stayed in the truck while I popped in. She was so tired this morning, was absolutely fine during the workshop, but once it was over, she was basically crashing!
It was absolutely worth it for her, though!
By the time we got home, it was well past time to feed the outside cats, so I took care of that while the girls took care of bringing stuff inside. I ended up bring out a bowl of warm water to wash leaky eyes, assembly line style. Kale and Zipper are still the worst for it, and I’m afraid that Kale might lose an eye. She has missed some eye washing, simply because we couldn’t reach her, or she wasn’t around at the time. Most of the other kittens look like they are recovering quite well.
When I go out to take care of the cats, I’m always on the lookout for more kittens. So far, nothing. I am seeing Sprout more often and, this evening, I could just make out as she ran passed me, that she has at least two active teats, but we can’t get close enough to really see. With others, I just can’t tell. Not even with Slick, who will jump up onto the roof of the cat house to eat. She doesn’t give us a chance to see her belly!
Today turned out to be a really lovely day in the weather sense, too. The high of the day was supposed to be 18C/64F, but we did end up reaching 20C/68F, but with a lovely breeze to keep things from feeing too hot. We’re supposed to get warmer over the next few days, but nothing excessive.
I am very glad I got the garden in when I did, that’s for sure. If I hadn’t, I probably be dealing with dead transplants right now!
Mostly, though, I’m just so happy my daughter enjoyed the workshop, and is now sure that blacksmithing is something she really wants to continue with.
Spoon tomatoes can get pretty tall, but they don’t tend to get particularly large or heavy. Each transplant has its own pair of vertical supports, and I wove the horizontal supports through. The bamboo stakes I used are about 6′ long, and the row of tomatoes is about 13 or 14 feet long. I ended up weaving two bamboo stakes through, then using whatever sticks I had handy to finish off the last bit. The tomato plants should be light enough that this should be enough to hold them. I might have to secure the supports to the metal posts, if they start to get tippy, as the tomatoes get bigger. There’s a possibility that, once the trellises start filling in, they will start acting like sails in the wind. We’ll see, as the season progresses.
With the temperatures at a more reasonable level, I haven’t had to water every morning to protect the garden beds from the heat. Even with that lovely rain we got recently, though, things dry out really quickly, so I watered the beds in the main garden area, after I was done with the tomato supports. The other beds got watered as I was working in the areas, later on.
When working in the old kitchen garden, there were a few things that needed to be done before I could start on the transplants. One of them was dealing with the pink rose bush. This rose bush is insanely thorny, and it wants to sprawl. Part of it died over the winter, too.
So this afternoon, I broke out the leather gloves and pruned away the dead parts. There was more of that then I expected! Then I dug out the pair of wire supports I’d picked up at the dollar store last year. I used them on their own, as three sided supports, last year, but for the rose bush, I joined them together.
I didn’t think to get a picture until much later, though, after the transplanting was mostly done.
The green wire is hard to see with all the other greens around it, but you can just make it out in the photo. It’s tall enough that it should keep the branches from leaning into the garden bed or the paths. It had a tendency to flop all over the place, so we’d tied it off with twine and, for the tallest stem, I actually had it tied to a branch of the ornamental crab apple tree.
I think that tree might be why the rose bush doesn’t seem to be doing as well this year. We pruned it back quite a bit, years ago and, once it started getting sunlight, the rose bush finally recovered and started to thrive. The crabapple tree has filled in again, though, and the rose bush is being shaded out again. We’re going to have to prune it back again.
The ornamental apple tree at the other corner did get some pruning. Aside from a few low hanging branches that kept catching on my hat, there were some large, dead branches that needed to be cleared away, too. On that side of the garden, there is a white rose bush that is aggressively spreading. I cleared spreading little rose bushes away from the wattle weave bed and out of the rhubarb, old asparagus and some flowers in that area. It was even coming up through the stack of small logs I’ve got stored in that corner. There is more that needs to be cleared away, but for today, I just cleared enough that I could get into where I needed to work, without getting attacked by rose bushes or crabapple branches!
These were the “little” things that gone done today.
I did manage to get all the transplants in, though! That will get its own post. See you there in a bit! 😊
Once the frame for the low raised bed was finally assembled, it was time to set up a trellis, then do some transplanting.
This time, I got to use actual new, never before used by anyone else, metal posts to hold the wire! I had picked up four of these posts at Dollarama, and they seem like a really good product.
Rather than set the posts right at the freshly attached end logs, I set the end posts about a foot in from the ends, which turned out to be roughly 15′ apart in the 18′ bed, so the other two were set about 5′ apart. And by “feet”, I mean literally my booted feet. 😁
At the end closer to those trees we need to get rid of, I had to actually dig around with the garden fork to pull up the rocks I kept hitting, trying to push the post in!
Then I went to the old squash tunnel and snagged the last 2″ square wire mesh. There’s still one section with chicken wire on it. I find the 6 sided shapes bend and stretch out of shape too much for my liking, so I’m not sure what I’ll use that for.
The square wire mesh was about 18′ ong, so there was excess to work with.
One of the things about these posts is that they have hooks on them to hold stuff like this, which you can see in the second image of the slideshow above. There’s four hooks like that, with the opening facing up, along the top 2/3 or so, then two in the bottom third, facing the other way.
Very convenient, except it was remarkably difficult to get all of them hooked up at the same time!
It was still much easier to get the wire mesh up evenly than on the salvaged T posts I used for the pea trellis.
Once the trellis was done, it was time to finally do some transplanting!
Once again, the trellis posts dividing the bed into 3 sections came in handy, as I had three types of melon to transplant. There were four each of the honeydew and Sarah’s Choice (cantaloupe type) melons. Then there were the Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon. There are two larger plants, plus one really tiny one I probably shouldn’t have bothered with, but I can’t just toss the poor thing!
I decided to transplant all of them melons on the East side of the trellis, so they will get the morning sun, and the three watermelons would be on the south end of the bed.
As with the winter squash, I set up collars made from 4L water bottles that my husband uses for his CPAP humidifier. Those are turning out to be very handy!
Once I spaced out each collar and set them into the soil, just enough to keep them from blowing away, I added a handful of manure into each. That got well mixed into the very, very dry soil, the collars reset in place, and then I made low trenches in the soil around them, to drain water down towards the roots.
Then everything got a thorough soaking. Which got sucked up like a sponge, so I did it again.
Even with filling the collars with water, as well as the trenches around them, when I dug down to plant the melons, I was still reaching super dry soil!
Everything got another thorough watering, once the transplants were in.
Then I grabbed the wagon and headed to the outer yard to rake up grass clippings to use as mulch. Thankfully, that area is far enough away that it’s not filled with Chinese elm seeds! The inner yard is practically drifted with them.
Once the melons were surrounded by mulch, it got yet another thorough watering. I wanted to make sure the mulch was wet all the way through, not just on top.
As these get bigger, I plan to train them up the trellis as best I can. Last year, we had a 4″ plastic trellis net, and it really sagged under the weight of the vines, so I’m hoping this set up will work better. I will probably still have to add cross pieces at the tops. The wire extends about 4″ above the top hook on the posts, so I should be able to weave supports through the mesh fairly easily. The posts also have holes in them so, if necessary, I can use twine or something to stake them out at the ends, so the weight of melons doesn’t pull them towards the middle.
That took care of one half of the bed.
I have decided that I will plant our Spoon tomatoes in the other half.
Several of them are staring to bloom now! These are indeterminants that can grow quite tall, so they will have their own individual supports, plus the trellis, to hold them up. I’ve got nine Spoon tomato transplants, so there will be room to plant something else with them, if I wanted to. Some bush beans, perhaps.
I’m hoping to be able to get them in tomorrow morning, since the bed is pretty much ready, and there’s even extra mulch waiting in the wagon for them. My daughter has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, and we’re planning on leaving early. Chances are, we’ll need to go to the pharmacy after her appointment, and I will likely take advantage of the driving around to do some of the shopping we weren’t able to do during our stock up shops, so it might be a long day of driving around! Which means the morning will be pretty much the only time I’ll have available to get any more transplants in.
After the Spoon tomatoes are in, that leaves the peppers and eggplant to be planted in the old kitchen garden, and the rest of the tomatoes should fit in one of the low raised beds in the East yard. The other low raised bed will have our short season corn planted in it, with more bush beans planted in between.
By the time those are in, the elm seeds should be done dropping, and I can finally do something about that bed along the chain link fence. The mesh tunnel may be all bent up, but it’s still doing its job of keeping the bed from being suffocated by seeds. I’ll be replanting the bed with my remaining packet of Hopi Black Dye sunflower seeds, and pole beans.
I might skip planting into the chimney block planters at the other section of chain link fence entirely, this year. I’ll have to see how badly the elm roots have invaded. There’s still the trellis bed that still needs work, but can be planted in before that’s done. Plus, the bed in the old kitchen garden that will be getting wattle weave walls added. It could probably be planted in before that’s done, too.
It feels like I’m way behind on getting the direct sowing done, but it’s only June 2 today – our previous average last frost date. Which means most things couldn’t actually be safely direct sown until after today, anyhow! We had so many insanely hot days, lately, everything feels off.
Today, my goal was to at least plant the melons in the main garden area. Before I could do that, however, the bed needed to be prepared.
Not the soil, though. That was already done.
The frame that never got fully assembled last year.
First, though, I had to be able to access it, which meant using the corded weed trimmer, so I had to wait until everything was dry enough from this morning’s rain.
After weeding the bed earlier, I covered it with plastic to keep out windblown seeds, cats and hopefully bake any new weeds that tried to come up. Considering the paths were so full of dandelions in full seed, I was glad of it!
I did pause while I was doing that to check on the carrots. I’d seen some starting to come up yesterday, but with how hot it was expected to get, I left them covered to keep them moist and cool. Today, I took the boards off and set them on the sides of the bed to protect the soil from erosion and digging cats.
For the frame, all I needed to do was attached the 4′ ends to the sides. I debated between attaching them to the ends of the logs, which would make the beds slightly longer, or to set them on top of the logs. I decided to set them on top.
The first step, after moving the 4′ logs away, was to move the soil away from the ends to make space. Then the end logs were lined up with the sides logs, so I could use the width of the side logs to make a stop cut for the section that I needed to remove. The first one worked out pretty good.
Once the sections were cut out, I set the log on the sides and used it to make stop cuts on the side logs to match the width of the ends.
From there, it was cutting away enough wood that, once the end log was in place, the top would be about the same height as the side logs. That part took a bit more fussing and more removal of material.
Once it was done and the end log was in place, there was quite a gap under it. I used the bits and pieces of wood that was cut off to fill the space, rather than just fill it with soil. I didn’t want to waste good soil!
Then I repeated the process on the other side.
Which I did a really crappy job on! But, they fit together, and that’s all I really needed! Once again, the scrap bits of wood were pushed under the log at the end to fill in the space, before the soil at both ends was leveled.
The whole thing was more of a pain then it should have been, but it is what it is!
The only thing that needs to be done now is to drill holes through the corners, then drive a rod through to secure the logs together. Right now, the end logs could get knocked of fairly easily.
In time, more logs will be added to make this bed taller, but for now, the priority is to frame all the beds and make the new trellis beds. In time, I hope to make all the beds about 4 logs high (assuming logs the same size as now). That’s what the high raised bed is, and I’m finding that height ideal to work with.
It’s going to get a few years to get to that point, though! There’s only so many dead trees we can harvest for this. That and having nice, straight 18′ lengths for the sides is not as easy as you’d think!
I’ve definitely been running around too much, over the past while.
With the trips to the city, I haven’t been doing as much physical labour, but I’m still in a lot of pain. Mostly the OA joint pain, but it’s definitely more of a mental fatigue than a physical one.
I headed out early today to do the morning watering. I didn’t need my older daughter to help out this time, nor was my younger daughter heading out with me, so they got to do some catching up on stuff in the house, instead.
My younger daughter was going to get the lawn mowing done as much as she could, in the heat. So, just riding mower stuff! We will just need to do the areas that can only be reached with either the push mower or the weed trimmer, later on.
I picked up some of my mother’s favourite fried chicken and potato wedges for our lunch today, so we had a relaxed visit over food, first. She was having one of her better days, behaviour wise, which made it much more pleasant! After that, we went over her shopping list. I spotted some gaps and asked a few questions, and did end up adding a couple of things to her list, too.
Before I headed out, I changed her bedding for her, so she could lie down while I was gone. She is really having a much harder time moving around her apartment of late. For all the heat, she’s also been finding herself getting cold!
I hit a couple of stores to get her shopping list done. It wasn’t a large list, but still came out to over $90. That’s just for one person for a week, and she has Meals on Wheels three times a week!
After her groceries were put away, I did some light housekeeping for her, then headed out. I made a brief stop at the hardware store, hoping to find some buckets in smaller sizes than 5 gallons, or watering cans. There weren’t any in the store, but I did remember to get handles to attach to the isolation shelter, to make it easier to move around, and caps for the end of the emergency septic pump bypass, so we can close that off and finally set aside the last of the outside parts of the emergency bypass.
The hardware store did have their garden centre section open, so I checked it out. I did find watering cans there, but only got one, as the price was pretty steep. I also spotted some lovely looking sage transplants and picked up two. There’s just enough room in the tiny raised bed, with the other herbs, for them.
All of this took long enough that, when I got home, it was already time to do the outside cat feeding, so I took care of that right away. A couple of kittens needed eye washing, and I changed out the ice packs in the sun room cat cage, for Poirot and her babies.
It’s barely past 5pm as I write this, and I am so drained, I’ll be heading to bed pretty much as soon as I’m done supper. Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter, and then we’re going to cool down a touch for the next while. I’m hoping to get the rest of the transplants in, and maybe even get the direct sowing done. I noticed this morning that some of the Spoon tomatoes have started to show flower buds!
This is what WP’s AI image generator thinks I look like. 😄
At some point, I need to edit my May garden tour video, too. I decided to keep the video files I took, back on the 21st, and here we are, last day of May, and it still hasn’t been put together!
Little by little, it’ll get done.
I just wish there weren’t so many distractions pulling me away, at times!
Wow. It’s amazing how much can get done in a day, when I can actually stay home for the entire day. Thanks to my daughter doing the mowing yesterday, I could actually focus on the garden! I got enough done that I will actually break it up into several posts.
For now, though, the cuteness!
I had a surprise, yet not surprise, when I went into the sun room to start feeding the yard cats.
After all our attempts to get Poirot and her babies into the cat cage, giving up and upgrading her carrier nest to a larger carrier she seemed happy with, she moved her babies.
Which I was really, really happy to see. They will be much safer there, as they become more active.
In a way, I wasn’t surprised that she moved them, though. When I set up the larger carrier for her, I made a nice bed inside with puppy pads. The past couple of mornings, though, I’ve noticed they were really messed up. I tried straightening them out in the front, over the frozen water bottle I’d tucked into the entry to help cool things down, but realized it was completely bunched up. The kittens were lying on the hard bottom. The puppy pad looked like it had been dug at and pulled from the outside. Which suggested that other cats, or even a skunk or a racoon, had gotten up there and was trying to find a stray piece of kibble or something. At least, that’s my theory.
Whatever her reason, though, Poirot put her babies into the nice, soft cat bed in the cat cage. I was even finding her enjoying her space on the blanket in the other cube, where she could still keep a close eye on her little grublings.
Today was a great day to be outside. Our expected high was 19C/66F, we did actually pass that by a degree or two, depending on which app I look at. We reached our high in the early afternoon, and are only just now, at barely past 7pm, starting to cool down ever so slightly. This morning, however, we had a low of only 3C/37F, and tonight we’re expected to drop to 5C/41F. The highs for the next few days are supposed to keep getting hotter each day, so I was glad to be able to get as much done outside today as I did!
While it was still cool this morning, I refilled the leaking rain barrel and, while that was filling, watered the new transplants, as well as the mulberry, sea buckthorn and highbush cranberry. I don’t water the silver buffaloberry, mostly because there are so many of them, and they look like they are doing just fine as they are.
I did some other watering in the main garden area, before pausing to have breakfast, then getting to work on planting and bed preparation. That area gets full sun, so it didn’t take long to start feeling way too hot!
My brother and his wife came by later in the afternoon, so I used that as an excuse to take a hydration break and say high. My brother had a lot of stuff he wanted to get done, though, and I had to get back to the garden, so I left them to it.
One thing about my brother bringing all his equipment out here is that there are some big jobs that can now get done. My SIL took one of those on and has been using their big riding mower to do the outer yard, including the completely overgrown area where the Korean Pine and walnut trees are (though we still have to plant the rest of the seeds). I headed out to see after I finished in the garden, and am just blown away. This is one of the areas I gave up on trying to keep mowed because it was so rough, and I got tired of breaking lawnmowers.
What a difference having the right equipment makes!
We’ve been using their smaller riding mower, and have permission to use the big one, too. We’ll just have to learn how! It’s a zero turn mower, so it doesn’t have a steering wheel.
My brother and his wife selling their acreage is going to change a lot for us. We are going to be seeing them a lot more often, which is always awesome, but with my brother’s help, we’ll be able to start getting things done here that we simply haven’t been able to, mostly because the tools and equipment that should have been here when we moved in had disappeared. That’s one of the reasons my mother originally asked us to move out here, when she still owned the property. They’ve got plans for things completely outside our scope, too. For the past few years, I’ve been feeling like we have been falling behind so much, simply because things are breaking down and wearing out faster than we can do anything about them, even if we did have all the tools and equipment. Add in various health issues of our own, taking care of things for my mother, vehicle issues, etc., and it felt like a losing battle, and I was feeling like I was letting my brother down. Now, I actually feel hopeful again!
Best of all, though, is just being able to see them more often. They’re just really awesome people, and I thank God for them both!
I also thank God for today being such a productive day. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to get so much done in a day! It won’t be much longer before we can safely start transplanting and direct sowing things that have to wait until after or last frost date, and there is still much to prepare!
The Re-Farmer 