It’s like they all exploded into existence, overnight. I’ve read that peas don’t like to be over watered, but they sure seemed to like the downpour we had!
The remaining three strawberry plants in the asparagus bed were eaten. One not as bad as the others, but a lot of leaf loss, for sure. I have to find some way to protect this bed, so the plants can recover.
What I really wanted to check – with some dread, I admit! – was the squash patch. Did the cornmeal work, or did my squash plants get decimated by the hundreds of slugs I saw last night?
Well… the good news is, there was no new damage to any of the plants, though a couple of seedlings will certainly not recover from the state I found them in last night.
There wasn’t a single slug, in any of the traps.
I could still see corn meal dusted on the mulch around each mound.
I didn’t see a single slug, live or dead.
Now, a live slug, I would not have expected to see. Not in the sun and heat we already had by then. But I did think I might see less cornmeal around the plants, and dead slugs.
It could be, they ate their fill, then crawled away before they died, but if that were so, I would not have expected to see so much cornmeal still visible.
So I’m not sure what to make of this. I mean, I’m glad there is no new damage to the plants, but for all I know, they’ll be back tonight.
Which means, when I head out to do my evening rounds, I’ll be looking closely at the squash patch!
First image is the Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes that have started to develop.
In the matching pots are the herbs. The single oregano transplant is in the middle of a pot, surrounded by the second variety of thyme we have. The second pot has all the spearmint. For the pot themselves, I put a few inches of grass clippings on the bottom to keep the soil from falling through the drainage holes. Most of the soil is actually recycled out of other plant pots, with only a bit of a top up of garden soil, then the transplants were carefully mulched with more clippings. Doing the transplants freed up a couple of metal trays, so they’re now being used as drain trays.
We had already transplanted a couple of rows of onions in between the spinach earlier. The remaining spinach that bolted was pulled up, and my daughters took care of harvesting the remaining leaves. They discovered the Susan really, really likes spinach! We had to check to make sure spinach is okay for cats, and once that was confirmed, my daughter would hand her a leaf every now and then, as she stripped them off the stalks. It was amazing to watch her gobble them down! Even Fenrir came over and tried stealing some leaves, and got a few given to her, too.
We definitely need to stick to this variety of spinach. As bolted as they were when the plants were pulled, the leaves are still not at all bitter!
Now, the bed that had the spinach is completely filled with Red of Florence onions. There were still onion transplants left, so I cleaned up a bit more of the spaces the lettuce and bok choy were planted, in the bed along the chain link fence. Much to my surprise, there are quite a few lettuces that survived the smothering drifts of elm seeds. As for the bok choy, we’ll be lucky if the three or four I found survive at all. The empty spaces in the rows got planted with the remaining onion transplants, including a few yellow onions, and the other variety of red onions we’ve got. There were enough Red of Florence onions left that, after transplanting from end to end between the remaining lettuce and bok choy, I made holes in the mulch along the outer edge of the bed and kept on transplanting, filling about half the length of the bed. By the time I was putting those in, only really tiny ones were left. If they survive and develop fully, great. If not, we’ll still have lots.
Next, I worked in the wattle weave bed, and noticed one of the Sweet Chocolate bell peppers is getting quite big! The plant is still blooming, as are the other plants, so I expect we may get a decent harvest over the summer.
The tiny strawberry plants grown from seed got transplanted out. One of the three bunches of winter thyme did not survive being transplanted, so that left a gap I could fit several strawberries in. I did take out the self-sown walking onion as I kept transplanting strawberries wherever there was space between the herbs and bell pepper. It was neat having that onion show up on its own, but I don’t want walking onions settling into this bed. The strawberries are planted pretty close together, but it’ll give them a chance to get bigger, before they get transplanted to somewhere else next year.
There was still one surviving squash that I’m about 95% sure is more luffa, so I transplanted that next to the other two, and transferred the protective plastic ring to the new one. Hopefully, it won’t get shaded out by the potatoes too much.
I didn’t get a picture, but there was one last tiny Spoon tomato that emerged from the only Jiffy pellet that hadn’t had anything germinate when I potted them up. One of the Spoon tomatoes that got transplanted into the retaining wall blocks got broken, and is just a stem with a single branch, now, so I planted the baby tomato plant in the same block with it. Hopefully, at least one will survive.
And that’s it. These are the last of the surviving transplants – though when I went to get the trays, I spotted a hulless pumpkin seedling show up in one of the trays! All the other trays left behind are with things that did not germinate at all, for some reason. The Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon. Both varieties of cucumbers. The Birds Egg and Apple gourds, and a few other things. I’m not sure what to make of a zero percent germination rate. Since so many things have this habit of suddenly germinating, later on, I am not quite ready to count them as a loss, but even if they did germinate, for most of them, it’s too late in the season for them to be able to reach full maturity by the end of the growing season.
While I was walking around, setting up to transplant the onions, I kept hearing a cracking sound from the spruce grove. The cracking really started to increase, so I stopped to watch as the one tree my brother cut down for me that got stuck on other trees, started to fall. It got hung up again, but there was enough wind that it fell further still. It’s still stuck on other trees, but is now at about a 40° angle, instead of an 80° or so angle! It should make it easier to finally get it down the rest of the way, I hope. That one tree is almost enough to build a complete bed in the size I’m after!
After so many delays and distractions, it felt so good to finally get progress done outside! The one thing I want to do before working on those trellis beds is re-sow some of the summer squash. Then, it’ll be time for some manual labour!
This morning, I made sure to get a picture of our newest tomatoes.
These are the first Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes forming! We’ve got more Romas forming, too but, so far, no Black Beauties. They are blooming, though.
After I finished my morning rounds, I put the remaining transplants into as few containers as I could fit them, then loaded them into the car. Last night, I made sure to write out labels on Post It notes. When I went to the post office yesterday, and asked the store owner if I could bring my extra transplants, she had indicated a counter to leave them on, but there was no way they’d fit on there. There is a picnic table outside the door, though, so after clearing it with her, that’s where I set them up. She was really surprised to see just how many transplants I had! I told her a bit about the different varieties. I managed to squeeze 22 Romas into two bins, and all the Spoon tomatoes into one tray. Fifteen in total, I think. I didn’t really count as I combined the two trays into one. There were only 7 or 8 Black Beauties left, so they fit into one bin easily enough. The tomatoes are all so tall and really, really need to get into the ground!
I knew which group of peppers were the hot ones, so I had those set aside in a smaller tray. I had the bell peppers in groups by variety, but after taking the labels out when I transplanted half of them, I lost track of which was which! I still stuck labels on the tray with information about each variety.
This general store can get very busy, since it not only has the post office, but also sell liquor and gas. I hope that people will take all the transplants today but, if not, they are sure to be taken tomorrow. Our little hamlet is having it’s annual picnic and parade tomorrow, and the parade goes right past the store. The store itself is closed on Sundays, so having them on the picnic table works out well.
With these gone, I have just a few things left to transplant. The spearmint will go into a pot. Only one oregano survived, and I’m not sure how healthy it is, but I’ll try transplanting it somewhere as well. There are also the second variety of thyme to transplant, and I might just put those in a pot, too. That leaves the last of the onions to transplant. Today, I plan to pull the last of the bolting spinach and will transplant the onions there. If there are any left over, I’ll use them to fill spaces near the peas, where the lettuce and bok choy were choked out by the Chinese elm seeds. Thankfully, the trees are now done dropping seeds for the year. I also plant to re-sow some summer squash. They have a short enough season that there is still time for them to grow.
Once all the surviving transplants are in the ground, I can finally turn my attention to building those trellis beds! If I can get that done fast enough, we might even be able to direct sow a few other things with really short growing seasons, but at least that is no longer an urgent thing.
Decimus has taken to wandering around and exploring the house, which gave me the opportunity last night, to get a good look at her babies. Three of them still have their eyes closed. The bitties are getting big enough that, after squirming their way out of the cat cave, they can squirm their way back in again, all on their own!
I was going to my mother’s this afternoon, so I was outside early to get some work done in the garden. I hoped to be out there before it got too warm, but we were above 20C/68F in almost no time at all. Ah, well. At least I got some progress!
We had very few melons germinate. Of the four types we tried (all short season varieties), there were no watermelon, only two Sarah’s Choice, three Pixie and four Halona. I had intended to transplant them into the new trellis beds, but the seedlings really needed to get into the ground.
So I made do.
I used the kiddie pool that has come in so handy over the past few years! We definitely need to get another one before the end of the growing season.
I punched some holes for drainage, then put a layer of grass clippings over the bottom. A couple of wheel barrow loads of soil was enough to fill it. The soil got a soaking, then a layer of grass clipping mulch, and another soaking.
Then I left it for the water to be absorbed and dealt with another problem. Overhanging tree branches! The row of trees my mother allowed to take up where she used to have a raspberry patch includes a bunch of Chinese elms. Around this spot, their branches were getting quite large and dense, and hanging down low enough that I kept getting my hat caught in them. I cut away quite a lot of the branches and some of the smaller trunks. The goal is to get rid of all of them, but that will wait until I can get out there with a chain saw. For now, I just needed to clear the area around our container garden area.
That done, I have the new bed one more soak, then got the transplants. The two Sarah’s Choice went into the middle, while the others were spaced around them. They’re a bit densely planted, so I wanted to make sure they could climb. I had picked up some more of those large plastic coated, metal stakes this spring, so I had enough to put six around the outside, plus one in the middle. I then used the broken canopy tent pieces that had previously been used to support the protective boards around the newly transplanted tomatoes, and some zip ties to attach horizontal pieces around the perimeter. Last of all, I added a couple of shorter plastic coated metal stakes across the middle, for the Sarah’s Choice melons to climb. If necessary, we can add another level of horizontal pieces higher up.
There is a risk that the plants on the outside will end up shading out the ones on the inside, but I hope this makeshift trellis will allow them to climb and still allow light through. When we grew the Pixie and Halona before, it was a drought year, and the greenery didn’t get very dense.
So those are finally in!
Once done, I left early enough to hit the post office before going to my mother’s. While at the store, I talked to the owner, and got the okay to bring our extra tomato and pepper transplants over tomorrow, as giveaways.
I’ve since come back from doing my evening rounds, giving the melons one more watering, to settle things in. In spite of the rain we had yesterday, I found the Crespo squash, the low raised beds, grow bags and the squash patch all needed watering! Some of the summer squash are coming up, but I think I will need to replant a few.
While transplanting the winter squash, I included some of the Jiffy pellets that did not germinate, just in case. Sure enough, a few of them have actually germinated, and the new seedlings are looking stronger that some of the transplants! The transplants should have gone into the ground earlier. There is one winter squash that has been lost, though, and from the slime off over the remains, I’d say it got eaten by slugs. We have a lot of frogs this year, but they’ve been hanging out in the low raised beds. We should set up some little frog shelters around the squash patch to encourage them to hang out and eat the snails!
I’m really happy with how the potatoes are doing. Even the Purple Peruvians, which were the last variety to emerge, are now showing flower buds. I even spotted a couple of Indigo Blue tomatoes forming!
The only problem I have is the cats! While watering the beds, a couple of them decided to lie in the ones I hadn’t got to, yet – right on top of the seedlings! They like to lie on the mulch, and don’t care if that has them lying across seedlings, too, the buggers! Some onions and turnips got a bit shmushed, but I think they’ll recover.
I will be quite happy to pass on all those leftover tomatoes. I’d hoped to get the rest of the Romas into the ground, but with all the delays that keep popping up, I don’t know that I’ll have anything built to plant them in fast enough. Once they’ve been passed on, I will be able to take more time to get it done right, and not have to rush. I’d still like to get it built in time to plant any really short season crops we’ve got, but at this point, I am willing to let a lot of the direct sowing we intended to do, slide for this year. I’m still debating whether to plant some pole beans with the Montana Morado corn. I keep waffling back and forth on that. We shall see.
The next few days will be modestly hot, so I hope to catch up on the outside work!
I’m really impressed with this variety of spinach we tried this year. The plants are finally starting to bolt, but the leaves have not become bitter at all!
I picked some spinach to use for today, but the whole bed will need to be harvested. We can dry the excess leaves, and plant something else in the bed.
I thought I would be picking the last of the garlic scapes, but a couple more showed up overnight that should be ready to pick tomorrow. I don’t know if two scapes could be considered a harvest, though. 😄
Several of the strawberries I was expecting to pick this morning were gone. I found their remains on the mulch nearby. There were a few others that I could pick. They clearly did not get fully pollinated and are misshapen, but my goodness, they are tasty little morsels!
Once these are done, there won’t be anything that can be harvested for some weeks, or even months, and there are still things that need to go in the ground. The squash – including the mystery squash I transplanted near the rose bush – are finally looking like they’re getting stronger. I keep having to remind myself, we’re still in the middle of June. We’re actually ahead of the game a bit. It’s the heat that’s messing with my perception. Well, that and on some of my local and Zone 3 gardening groups, there are people sharing pictures of their huge gardens and the things they are already harvesting. !!!
It’s the delay in building things that’s really eating at me, though. It’s driving me absolutely bonkers So very frustrating!
Yesterday was hot, and today is supposed to be a hotter, so I made sure to give the garden a thorough watering last night. I think it really appreciated it!
The mock orange next to the laundry platform is just exploding with flowers. Even the smaller one against the east side of the house that I keep forgetting to water is starting to bloom (we really need to move both of them!).
I found a few surprises this morning.
We have ripening strawberries. The ones in the photo look like they had some pollination issues, but it looks like all the plants are producing.
The big surprise was finding Roma tomatoes! They’re not the first to start blooming, and where the third variety to be transplanted, so for them to be the first to have developing tomatoes was very unexpected.
Some, but not all, of the resown green beans have germinated. Even some of the summer squash have started to germinate. With the winter squash, while transplanting Jiffy pellets with sprouts in them, I also transplanted the pellets that didn’t germinate. At least one of those has sprouted with big, strong seed leaves emerging. All of the squash seem to be recovering from transplant shock, little by little.
There was one transplant I did not expect to survive. There was a squash of some sort that sprouted in the wattle weave garden bed, between a bell pepper and some shallots. I did not plant it there, and it would have to go, since a squash plant there would completely envelop the shallots and peppers. So I transplanted it to an open space next to the pink rose bush, where we grew leftover lettuce seeds last year. As I tried to gently dig up the squash plant, I discovered that it was far, far deeper than I expected. I’m guessing the seed came with the garden soil, which has compost in the mix. When I pulled it up, it was basically all long, buried stem, but I did see a hint of a root just under what had been the soil level, so I transplanted it anyway. When I saw it the next day, drooping on the ground, I figured it didn’t survive, but included it when watering, anyway. This morning, it was looking perked up and much stronger! So it might actually survive, and we’ll find out what kind of squash it is.
I also got a harvest this morning! We don’t have a lot of garlic this year, and one variety is a soft neck garlic, so even fewer will develop scapes. I’d noticed scapes starting to show up recently, so it was a surprise to see they were ready to harvest, this morning! I picked almost all of them. There are a few remaining that should be ready tomorrow or the day after. Then they will be done.
Next year, we have to make sure to plant a lot more hard neck garlic, and protect the bed over the winter more thoroughly.
In other things, when I came out with the cat food this morning, I saw Caramel out and about, looking very hungry. She even let me pet her, though I think that was more because she wanted food. I dropped a handful of kibble at the opening where she had her kittens. It wasn’t long before she eating it, and was back under the cat house. I could hear the squeaking of kittens. She may have let me pet her while she was on the cat house roof, but when I tried to use my phone again to look under the cat house, she was back to growling!
There was one unpleasant surprise this morning, though. When I got to the kibble house with food, I found blood all over the place! On the floor, in the empty trays, and even against the walls in a couple of places! I’ve seen blood around before. The cats do fight pretty violently at times. Never this much, though. While doing my rounds, I kept an eye out for an injured cat, but saw nothing. Not even blood on the grass to show me where an injured cat might have gone. I’m assuming it was from a cat, though it’s possible it came from a racoon. Definitely not a skunk, since there was no smell.
The weird part is, no one heard any fighting last night. My daughters have a window facing that way that is kept open all night. My older daughter was working all night, as usual, and she didn’t hear a thing. My husband’s window is closer, but between the fans and his CPAP, he would only hear something if he’s up and about already. It would take a lot of noise outside to wake him from all the white noise he’s got going around him, inside.
It is a mystery.
The kittens inside are getting more active. In fact, I found one crawling around on the floor! I don’t want to risk stepping on one during the night while going to the bathroom or something, so with the help of a daughter, we move the cat cave, with the whole family inside, into baby jail. One of my daughter has put strips of carboard around the bottom few inches, so if any of the kittens get out of the cat cave, they won’t be able to get through the cage openings. They’re still small enough to squeeze through!
So far, they seem to be okay with the new arrangement.
Well, we have now planted as much as we can until we build the new trellis beds.
The first job was direct sowing summer squash. I forgot that we have 5 varieties. Which worked out well. There were four empty mounds from yesterday, so prepping another row of six mounds meant two for each type. Much less than we would normally plant per type, but this year we seem to be more about variety than individual quantity.
The last row will not be used this year, since it gets the most shade. Each mound got two are three seeds – all the seed packets are from previous years, and several of them had only five seeds left in them. With older seeds, we have to consider that some of them won’t germinate at all. The varieties we have are sunburst and G Star patty pans, yellow and green zucchini, and Magda.
Next, the grow bags were gathered and filled.
The low, black ones were “raised bed gardens” we got from the dollar store last year. The green ones I picked up from the dollar store this year, and they are really good! I folded them down to about half height. The fabric seems really strong, and they have sewn in handles that also seem really strong.
Four of two different varieties were planted in the wider black bags/beds. Two each of a third variety went into the green bags. They all got Red of Florence onions planted around them. These are Early Sunsation, Early Summer and Dragonfly.
The last five feed bags were filled, and each got one Cheyenne pepper in them, with more Red of Florence onions. The last bag got all onions.
We still have lots of each type of pepper (and you can see the one late germinating Spoon tomato!), which can be given way. I plan to continue to interplant the onions any chance I get. We started a lot of them, because we use a lot of onions, and ran out fairly quickly, last year.
Oh, I didn’t bother taking a photo, but I also planted a few beans. The row of green Lewis beans had a lot fewer come up than the yellow Custard beans. The gaps in the yellow beans are minor, but less than half the green beans either didn’t germinate, or didn’t grow well once they did (some have just stems left, as if the leaves just died off), so I planted more.
We have so many varieties of beans I hoped to plant this year, but at this point, my priority is to get a trellis bed built so that we can put in our melon transplants.
Thankfully, all of these are short season varieties, so we should still have plenty of growing season left for them. The pole beans, however might have to be skipped this year. We shall see.
A high priority over the next while will be to mulch around today’s transplants, and the summer squash mounds. That means cutting more grass and collecting the clippings!
It’s only the 10th of June today. We should still have time. Plus, it’s an El Niño year, which means we should have a warmer, wetter summer and fall, and a mild winter, too. Anything that extends our growing season, I will be thankful for!
Well, I got them in, before things got too windy out there!
The winter squash were planted in the small Jiffy Pellet trays, six of each type. Of those where not all of them germinated, I still planted the empty pellets with ones that had germinated. They may not have had visible seedlings, but some of them did have roots showing through the pellet’s casing.
In the northernmost row, there are two Boston Marrow, two Winter Sweet and two Lady Godiva.
There were four Honeyboat Delicata seedlings to tranplant, but only two Little Gem/Red Kuri.
The North Georgia (I just noticed the typo I made when labeling the photo!) had the most seedlings, with five to transplant. There were three Pink Banana. That left four empty mounds. I’ve decided to fill one more row tomorrow, to direct sow summer squash in. We have four varieties, and I want to have at least two plants of each.
While I intend to mulch the rest of the patch with wood chips, I’ll be gathering grass clippings to mulch around the mounds of soil.
But not today.
Tomorrow is supposed to be cooler, with a predicted high of 21C/70F, which will be much more pleasant to work in. Especially since I plan to have enough soil brought over to fill grow bags.
Weather willing, we should be able to get quite a bit done tomorrow.
They have been transferred to baby jail and seem quite content. Decimous (or Decimus, as my daughter spells it) has been very quiet and attentive to her furry little worms.
My daughter has been staying in my room to supervise the family (the babies are so small, they could potentially squeeze through the openings of the cave) and keep an eye on how the other cats behave around them.
She fell asleep on my bed. I think she had a sleepless night last night, too!
Meanwhile, I headed outside and broke out the weed trimmer. I cleared around the pile of garden soil and then, since I had the trimmer out already, as much as I could reach around the burn barrel. I didn’t fell like adding another extension cord, so that area isn’t quite done, but close.
Then it was time to start hauling soil. I didn’t bother to sift it, though I did pause to pull out the biggest roots.
Where the sticks are, marks where we had squash growing last year. In each spot, we dug out the sod, then added fresh soil. Each squash got cardboard layers around them (we didn’t have enough to do the paths with cardboard, too), then mulched with straw, grass clippings, scythed hay – anything we could get our hands on. It took much of the summer to have enough material to mulch all the paths, too.
So now, each pot is getting more fresh garden soil and, now that we have so much of it, the rest of the area will be mulched with wood chips.
There are still two rows that I did not add soil to. They get a lot more shadow, so I won’t do those unless we really need the space. Instead, I will work on filling grow bags, next. Those will likely get peppers in them.
After I took this photo, I removed all the sticks marking the spots. Then I went around with the spade and flattened each hill and spread them a bit. Finally, I went around with the hose and used a higher pressure setting to drill water into the middle of each mound of soil.
I’ve left them to absorb the water while taking a break from the heat and the sun. Later today, I’ll go back out and start transplanting what winter squash we have that’s ready. We’ve got some melons to transplant, too, but they’re still pretty small, so they can wait. With what space I have left, if there is any, I want to sow summer squash.
We seem to have reached our high for the day – we’re at 25C/77F and pretty windy – and things are supposed to cool down slightly from now on. Tonight, we’re supposed to have a low of 12C/54F. That is going to feel glorious! My goal is to get as many of the transplants in that we can right now, so we can start dragging out those trees my brother cut down for me and begin working on the permanent trellis beds. If we can manage to get those done over the next while, we might still have time to direct sow things into them, as long as they have a short enough growing season.
This gardening year isn’t quite working out as planned, but it’s getting done, little by little!
Okay, so I managed to get a bit done in the garden this evening. Also, I had a wonderful surprise. Rolando Moon appeared! I haven’t seen her in at least a month, maybe two. At her age, we just never know if she’ll disappear and not return anymore.
I was also happy to see The Distinguished Guest wander into the north side of the property. Happy, that is, until I heard a cat fight and discovered he had attacked Pinky, and I had to chase him off. *sigh*
I had some squash that were getting too big for their pots that needed to go in, so I focused on the hill we grew pumpkins in last year.
This is how it looked after taking a weed trimmer to it, after the mowing around it was done. Those bricks had been placed under the developing pumpkins to keep them off the ground. The round thing is an ant trap. There was two of them, but one disappeared when it got caught by the push mower, last year.
They didn’t work. The ant hill is still there.
Thankfully, the bug spray I used seems to do a good job of deterring ants, too. I dug up the bed with a garden fork and pulled out as many weeds and roots as I could. The ground was crawling with ants, but while I had them on my boots, that’s about as far as they went.
Before, this hill had only ever had two plants transplanted into it. After weeding it and working the last of a bag of sheep’s manure into the surface, I raked it out into a flattish square.
I fit 6 transplants in. The row of three on the far right are Zucca melon, from a second seed start. In the middle row, the two in the foreground are African Drum gourd, also from a second seed start. The other four were in an unlabeled pot. I restarted both the Zucca melon and Drum gourd at the same time, but one unlabeled pot got mixed up. I think they are also drum gourds, but I’m not sure. At this stage, the leaf and stem shapes look almost identical.
We’ll figure it out soon enough, if they survive.
I then filled in the last of the space available in the wattle weave bed.
I had removed the protective plastic from the Sweet Chocolate peppers, and they now all have support stakes. I left the protection around the one Classic Eggplant, though it did get its own support stake, as did the luffa in the corner.
I transplanted one of each variety of pepper seedlings we had waiting. Between the luffa and the eggplant is Dragonfly. The three around the curve are the Cheyenne, Early Summer and Early Sunsation. I wanted to get at least one of each type transplanted, just in case we aren’t able to get things ready early enough to get the rest into the ground.
To the left of the luffa is the largest of the 3 mystery squash that germinated with some Roma tomatoes. I think they might be luffa, but I’m 100% not sure.
As I write this, it’s coming up on 8:30pm, and we’ve finally started to cool down a bit. What I got done wasn’t a lot, and certainly didn’t involve much physical exertion, but it still left me dripping with sweat. The next few days are supposed to be every so slightly cooler, and then things are supposed to heat up again. And physical exertion is going to be the main work, because we have to start hauling garden soil over to the squash patch, so we can start transplanting. We can’t even start that until I take the weed trimmer to the tall grass around the pile that couldn’t be mowed.
It’s going to be hot, sweaty and disgusting work, but we’re running out of time. It’s not just prepping spots for the transplants. This year, I was going to try direct sowing the summer squash, and those seeds should be in the ground already.
I suspect that by the time we finish building the permanent trellis beds, it’ll be too late to direct sow a lot of things. I might try, anyway. We could find ourselves with a long, mild fall again.
There’s only so much we can do, though. None of us area handling this heat well.
The Re-Farmer 