As I write this, at almost 6:30pm, we are at 25C/77F with the humidex putting us at 28C/82F
I’d watered the garden beds last night, and they were still fine this morning, but by the evening they were definitely in need of more water. I knew we were expecting rain tomorrow, but too many things were getting baked!
It was only on checking the weather app as I wrote the above that I found the rain expected tomorrow, is now expected tonight. Only a 32% chance of rain, though, and for a shorter time. *sigh* A good overnight rainfall would be a wonderful thing right now, but it doesn’t look like it’ll happen!
While checking on the in-progress trellis bed, I was expecting to see more of the barely visible sprouts that were starting to come up yesterday. I was NOT expecting to see the entire row and basically exploded!
So… finishing that trellis is going to be a priority! These are the red noodle beans, and they’re going to need something to climb.
What is odd is that these beans are coming up, but none of the others beans I’ve planted have. I planted a row of them in the same bed as the Spoon tomatoes, and there’s nothing. Right now, only the Chinese elm is sprouting. Those were the Royal Burgundy bush beans, and they really should be up by now. The tomatoes and melons in the same bed area also struggling, so I wonder of there’s a correlation, there?
Oh, and I think, maybe, possibly, there are some sunflowers starting to come up. I’ll need to wait until the seedlings get bigger before I can be sure that’s what I’m seeing, and not some weed.
While watering in the old kitchen garden, I saw flashes of colour hidden by the leaves, and discovered the strawberries we grew from seed a couple of years ago now have berries ripening! These are the small wild? Alpine? strawberries we got in a kit meant for children, and there was nothing on the package to say what kind of strawberries they were. They are absolutely thriving. Too bad the berries aren’t particularly good.
I had a bit of a surprise with our corn, too. In the last image in the slide show above, you can see a row of corn sprouts.
These are the ones I planted with the Arikara squash. There are sprouts coming up all over in that bed!
Those were left over seeds from running out of room while planting in the nearby low raised bed. In that bed, there’s only one corn sprout visible. !! What is it about this little squash bed that has almost all the seeds I planted sprouting already, while the bigger bed has only one, so far?
No sign of any of the yellow bush beans, yet. With those being older seeds, I would not be surprised if none of those came up.
I don’t expect to get much, if anything, done in the garden tomorrow. In the morning, I’ll be heading to my mother’s to get her to a lab for her monthly blood work, then do her grocery shopping. We’re running low on wet cat food, plus we are now down to just one hose nozzle that doesn’t leak, so a trip to Walmart is in order for the afternoon. After that, my week is clear of appointments, so I should be able to get some work in the garden done. I want to get those vertical supports for the trellis bed secured, and whatever horizontal supports we decide on. For this year, we might just use temporary plastic trellis netting we already have, then put something more permanent on, next year.
Our plans are very loosey-goosey, and prone to change! As long as the final goal is achieved – in this case, permanent trellis tunnels joining pairs of low raised bed – I’m rather indifferent as to how it gets done! 😁
Well, I’ve got an early start and a long day ahead of me. Time to start winding down and get to bed early.
Ha!
I told myself that last night, expecting to be in bed shortly after 8pm. By the time I finally got to bed, it was past midnight.
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!
I managed to get it done, just as the rain started to hit!
I think I can now officially say, our garden is in! Sure there are some things, such as fall spinach, that can be planted, but for all our expected spring planting, it is done.
Yay!
I waffled between planting along the chain link fence in the south hard, or in the trellis bed in the main garden area. In the end, I decided to go for where I knew there would be the most sunlight.
The first image above is how the bed looked, after the mulch was pulled off. Last year, we grew melons along one side, onions for seed on the other. The onions were replanted in the fall, with just one half of the bed being prepped, then covered with leaves for mulch. The other half had melons mulched with cardboard, bark and grass clippings and, in the fall, I just pulled the melon plants and left the rest in place to protect the soil.
That made cleaning the bed up much easier!
This bed does have an issue, though. You can see that – sort of – in the next two images.
To make these beds, we’re using logs as straight and even as we can find. Which is surprising difficult. Especially when looking to use 18′ logs. With this bed, on the trellis side, one of the logs was quite bent. We put that one on the bottom, with the bend going into the bed, while the top log is straight. That’s what the remaining three vertical trellis support posts are going to be secured to.
What that means, though, is that there is an entire log, just inside the top frame of the bed, in the middle. The bend is extreme enough that there’s an actual gap formed between the two logs. Over time, it won’t matter as much, as we are aiming to eventually make the beds all 4 logs high. Until then, though, the gap is getting stuffed with skinny pieces of wood, bits of bark and even grass clippings and dried leaves.
Once the mulch was removed, I went over the bed with the garden fork first, to loosen the soil and make it easier to pull the weeds. As I went along, I started to find other things besides weeds, though – and I was not at all surprised. The onions that had gone to see had dropped some of their seed before they could be harvested.
Once I got to where the onions had seeded themselves, I worked a lot more carefully, and gathered every one that I could find.
Along the way, I also found a couple of plants I recognized as the flower I allowed to grow at one end of the bed, last year. I removed those as well.
It wasn’t part of the plan, but since I had them, every since baby onion I found got transplanted. The flowers got transplanted at the opposite end of where we grew them last year.
While preparing to transplant the onions, I also carefully pulled some of the onions that were growing against each other, broke them apart, then replanted them separately.
One half of the bed had fewer onions survive than the other, so that was the first area I started transplanting onions the tiny onions. I still had enough left over that I made a second row for the rest. They filled a little over half the bed’s length before I ran out, so there’s still room to plant something else, if I wanted to.
After that, I planted the two flowers (possibly a wild salsify) I’d found, then marked off two more rows in the soil in the other side of the bed. Those were for the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers and the Red Noodle beans.
There were not enough sunflower seeds to fill the row. I spaced them about 6 inches apart, which is close for sunflowers. I don’t expect a 100% germination rate, though. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if none germinated. These are older seeds.
The red noodle beans, on the other hand, are fresh seed. These got planted nearer the edge of the bed, where they will be able to climb the trellis that will be built on that side of the bed. After filling the row from end to end, I had only 6 bean seeds left. So I stuck them into some of the gaps among the sugar snap peas, since they have a trellis already prepared. The planted rows then got marked off at the ends with plant stakes, so that if I decide to plant something else there, I know where the open spaces are.
Oh! I completely forgot! I was going to plant the pumpkins in this bed!
I can still do that. For those, I plan to set up plastic collars to mark where the seeds are.
In fact, I see the rain has passed and the sun is out. I’ll go do that right now!
I woke at my usual time, which is basically when it starts getting light out (about 5-5:30am, these days), but was in massive pain. I did manage to get outside to feed the yard cats, but wasn’t able to do the rest of my morning rounds. Instead, I took some painkillers and headed back to bed.
I didn’t wake up again until about noon!
I did feel a lot better by then, though, which is good, because – as always – the job I needed to do took more than expected!
The bed I need to work on is where I had eggplant and hot peppers growing, last year. These had been mulched first with cardboard, then grass clippings on top of the cardboard. In the fall, I just did a chop and drop, leaving it pretty much as it was for the winter.
What you see in the first photo is what was able to grow through the openings in the cardboard where the peppers and eggplant were growing through, and areas around the edges where rhizomes in particular were able to work their way up the side walls of the bed.
The box frame was secured to hold plastic I’d set around the eggplant and peppers to form a sort of open top greenhouse. The twine wrapped around was there to reduce billowing in the wind. If the wind were not an issue, it would have worked out quite well, but it was a pretty constant battle. Even the cover with the wire that is stored on top of the box frame would get blown off, and it was there to weigh down the tops of the plastic, and didn’t have anything else over it! Which is why it got lashed down with paracord, later on.
Removing the mulch and remaining bits of cardboard did clear a lot of the elm seeds off, but there were so many seeds, the mulch can’t be used again, nor would I want to put it on the compost pile. Instead, I put it around the base of the box on the outside, to hopefully smother any weeds that would come up through the gaps.
Then it was time to fluffify the soil and pull the weeds, including the roots.
Which was absolutely brutal. It was like concrete.
I normally would have gone over it with a garden fork, first, but with the box frame in place, that wasn’t an option. So I was just using my little hand cultivator.
That has got to be my favourite garden tool right now. It really does the job! It was still pretty difficult. In the end, I spent more than an hour, just breaking up that soil. There weren’t a lot of weeds to pull, thanks to that mulch, but getting the roots out was almost impossible. Even after breaking up the soil first, if there were any clumps at all, the roots and rhizomes would just break apart.
I keep water with me while I work but, once the soil was prepped, I had to head inside for a sit down and hydration break. Thank God for cooler temperatures! Unfortunately, I’m out of any amendments that would help reduce this sort of compaction.
For this bed, I wanted to plant the Orchard Baby corn, which has only 65 days to maturity, with some beans. I had some yellow Custard bean seeds left. Which is a bit funny because, a few years back, we grew a different variety of corn in this bed, with beans from this same packet, in between!
Given that the beans are a few years old, I don’t expect a high germination rate, but bean seeds last a lot longer than other things.
Using the end of one of the larger plastic coated plant stakes, I marked off 5 fairly deep lines in the soil – three for corn, two for beans – then filled the resulting little trenches with water. Then I ran the stake over the lines again, and this time used the hose on the jet setting, to drive the water deeper in the planting areas.
In the slide show above, right after the photo of the seeds, the seeds are laid out in the rows. Even the bright pink inoculated bean seeds are hard to see, but they’re there!
The beans were planted pretty far apart; there were enough that I knew there would be plenty left behind. They’re more of a “bonus” crop.
The corn was supposed to be about 50 seeds per packet, and I did hope to get them all in, but there just wasn’t the space, even setting them pretty close together. They will be thinned later, if the germination rate is high.
To actually plant the seeds, I cheated, and used the end of the plant stake I used to make the rows to push the seeds into the soil, which you can see in the next picture. For each one, I’d give the stake a spin to make sure no seeds stuck to the end, before moving to the next one! Then I gently dragged the stake over the rows to cover the seeds before finishing off with a gentle watering, which further ensured the seeds were well covered.
I still had those leftover corn seeds, though. I didn’t want to hang on to such a small amount, but what to do with them?
Well, there was this little bed nearby, with the Arikara squash in it.
So I opened up the mulch, where there seemed to be the most room, including right in the very middle, and planted the leftover seeds there. These beds are close enough that wind pollination between them should work out fine. For now, though, the mosquito netting cover got put back on until the squash is large enough I won’t have to worry about something getting at them.
Then I went to the tomato bed and, using the plant stake to make holes in the soil, planted more beans down the middle of the bed, plus the gap between the Black Beauty and Chocolate Cherry tomatoes. Bonus beans, plus they will act as a living mulch later on.
That done, I brought out the stove pellets for the corn and beans bed. I scattered them all over the bed, then misted them with water. After the pellets had a chance to expand and start breaking up into sawdust, I sprinkled some more pellets on and misted it again.
As there is nothing in this bed with protective collars or anything like that, it was going to need something to keep the cats out. A few years back, my daughter bought us a large roll of netting. I’ve been reusing pieces of it in other areas but, for the amount I needed, I brought the remaining roll out. You can see it in the second last photo of the corn and beans slideshow. The netting on that roll is actually folded in half. I left it as it was, though. Using ground staples to fasten the netting to the wire above the box cover, I unrolled it all the way around, with a decent amount of overlap, before cutting it. Roughly 25 feet, in total. There is still lots on the roll.
About this time, I got a notification on my phone for a voicemail message. Turns out my Wi-Fi calling had shut itself off. Why I was still able to listen to the voicemail message, but not get the call itself, I have no idea.
It was home care, letting me know that there would be no one available for my mother’s bed time med assist.
It was almost 6pm when I got the message, which means she would have just had her suppertime med assist.
I had time to finish setting up the netting. The top was secured with ground staples to the wire cover at several points. This netting catches on everything, so I was able to make use of that and got it “stuck” at each corner. Then, just to be on the safe side, I used more ground staples to secure the netting between the box frame and the walls of the bed. The box frame is tied down tight enough that it was hard to make the space to slide the ground staples through. Those aren’t going anywhere! The netting would rip, first.
Once that was finished and everything cleaned up and put away, I got a daughter to take over and do the watering of the rest of the garden, while I washed up and changed, before going to my mother’s.
It’s been almost a week since I did my mother’s grocery shopping, and I have an appointment in town tomorrow, so I left early enough to hit the grocery store, first. I knew she’d be running out of milk, at the very least – she is always running out of milk, but refuses to buy more than one 2L carton at a time – so I got that, plus a few other things I thought she might be running out of by now. Since I was there anyhow, I spotted some excellent sales and picked up some stuff for ourselves, too.
When I got to my mother’s she was so very happy when she saw I’d brought her more milk! She had told me, she even considered asking me if I could pick some up on the way, but had decided against it.
I was early for her evening pills but, once everything was put away, I opened up the lock box and got them ready for her. Which gave her time to tell me why the cover was missing on the tiny tagine shaped bowl I gave her to put her pills into, so they could be double checked and counted before she took them.
It turns out that, a couple of times now, someone would open the bowl to put in her dose for the time, only to find one of her half pills from the previous med assist, still sitting in the bowl. It had been counted out, but she missed it when she took them – and clearly, the home care aid didn’t double check to make sure my mother had actually taken all the pills!
So it was decided that she would tuck the lid away so that, if a pill got accidentally left behind again, it could actually be seen and she could take it right away.
Good thinking, but really, part of the home care aid’s job is to make sure my mother takes her pills properly. That’s why they’re there, and the pills are in a lock box, after all!
I did get a bit of a visit in before I headed home, much appreciating the longer daylight hours! I’ve made these trips in the winter, when it was dark by the time my mother was supposed to get her suppertime visit, but this time of year, I was driving home in full light. Much easier to watch for deer!
Tomorrow, I’ve got an appointment in town, but my afternoon is free. I’m waffling between working on the bed at the chain link fence, or the bed that will have a permanent trellis built into it.
I’ll see what I feel up to, after I get home!
For now, it’s time to take some pain killers and get to bed. Maybe even before midnight!
This bed had already been prepped, then covered with plastic, except for one end, where there had been onions gone to seed. They did not survive another winter, though.
The plastic didn’t solarize the weeds to death, but at least it kept most of the elm seeds off! The challenge was to get the plastic off again, without dumping them all onto the soil.
For a bed that had already been weeded before the plastic was laid down, there were a LOT of weeds to clear out. As I worked around the bed, I suddenly realized that I was pulling out baby carrots! Last year, we had a couple of Uzbek Golden Carrots bolt and go to seed, so I left them to it, so I could collect the seeds in the fall. When I went to gather them, though, the seed heads were shriveled and messed up looking, and there were no seeds to collect.
Looks like one of them did have seeds, after all!
There was no way they could be transplanted or anything like that, so away they went.
Once the bed was clear of weeds and roots, I finished off our last bag of manure into it, and worked that into the soil.
Then it was time to figure out where the tomatoes would go.
I used the collars (I found an extra “stash” of the water bottles I make the collars from in the basement, so I had plenty for the tomatoes) to figure out the spacing. There were four Black Beauty, four Chocolate Cherry and nine Sub Arctic Plenty.
We’ve grown the Black Beauty and Chocolate Cherry before, so I know what to expect with those. They both get quite tall, while the Black Beauty became really heavy. They had trellis supports, and I ended up having to add supports to the supports, to keep the whole thing from tipping over in the wind!
With that in mind, I made sure that these were on the north side of the bed, so they wouldn’t shade out other plants. So I set out eight collars on that side, with a space in the middle.
If I remember correctly, the Sub Arctic Plenty are a bush type tomato, so I don’t expect them to get tall. I’m thinking they will be more like the Forme de Couer tomatoes we grew last year. Each tomato plant had a pair of bamboo stakes to support it, and I’d used twine around the plants to secure them. The plants got so heavy with tomatoes, the supports started falling over, and some of the bamboo stakes even broke from the weight.
With that in mind, I planted the Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes along the south side of the bed, where they would get the most sunlight.
As with everything else, this bed was dry, dry, dry, so it got repeated waterings at every stage. I’d taken the cover off the other bed and every time I watered the tomato bed, I gave the other bed a gentle watering, too.
Once the tomatoes were in, it was time to give them support. For the verticals, I used 6′ plastic coated metal stakes. I’m glad I got more of these! Every collar got one of these tucked against one side. I used up all the stakes from last year, and used a couple of the new ones, to make one for every tomato plant.
Once those were in place, I used bamboo stakes to weave through the verticals. I did three horizontal rows on each side, and more can be added later, if need be. I then added some sticks to connect the two sides. There’s just a couple at the ends of one level, and a couple more further in, at another level. We may not need any more than that. We’ll see how things progress over time.
I did not have any clean grass clippings left for mulch, so I made use of the stove pellets we use for cat litter. I scattered them around, and even inside, the collars before giving the whole thing one final watering, to get the pellets to break up into sawdust.
I think it worked out rather well, and should be able to hold the weight of the tomatoes we can expect from these varieties,
Once this was done and cleaned up, and I took a break for lunch, it was time to work in the old kitchen garden. I decided it was time to remove the cover and netting from the greens bed, so the first thing to do was roll up the two sheets of netting, then take the cover off.
The kittens are going to miss their little mosquito netting hammocks!
The greens bed was really dry, so I spent time time watering it from the rain barrel – the rain we had was almost enough to refill it – and weeding. The spinach is bolting and we’ve decided to let them go to seed. I also found a second tiny bok choi that is staring to bloom.
That done, the herb bed got a watering, too, and then I did the pruning and clearing I mentioned in my earlier post, before I could even start on the wattle weave bed.
I decided that the Sweetie Snack Mix mini bell peppers would go in the short part of the L shaped bed, and the eggplant in the long section, among the strawberries.
The short side of the bed didn’t need a lot of weeding, and I was careful to work around the garlic that got missed and started growing this year. The old mulch got pushed up against the wattle weave sides, and the hard packed soil was broken up and fluffified. It was surprisingly hard packed. So I added some of the remaining rehydrated coconut coir over the area and worked that into the soil.
I laid the transplants out, in their cups, to figure out the bed way to space them. After that, it was the usual routine of wetting everything down, then again and again, in between every stage of transplanting. When the peppers were finally planted, I made sure to press down around each one, to create a shallow “bowl” to collect water and drain it towards the plant. Then each pepper plant got its own wire tomato cage to grow up into.
That done, it was time to work on the other side. It was a bit more challenging, working around the strawberries and onion survivors that are there. There was no sign of any of the chamomile self seeding, and the thyme that almost survived the winter was long dead, so that gave a bit of extra space. The mulch was moved aside, the compacted soil broken up, and the last of the coconut coir worked into the soil.
The transplants in their cups were laid out to figure out the spacing, along with the mystery flower. I decided to plant that at the very end of the bed, where it could stay permanently. If it survives! The flower did get a plastic collar, more to keep the cats from rolling on it.
Once the eggplant were in, each with their shallow “bowl” around them, they got their wire tomato cages set in place, and they were done!
Almost.
The mulch I’d moved aside was mostly old wood chips. I didn’t want to push that back. I did, however, have some leaf mulch that had been pulled off and set along the inside of the L shape, by the double lilac. It was old and dry, so I was able to crush handfuls of it, and shake it out over the transplants, to give the soil a light protection. More mulch can be added as the plants get bigger.
I forgot to take an “after” picture when I was done, so I went back out later, and got a picture of the entire finished bed, which is the last image in the above slide show.
That done, I went on to water the new trees in the fruit forest area, and the walnuts in the outer year. Still no sign of anything emerging where the seeds are planted, but the year old sapling is starting to get some bigger leaves on it.
I headed outside shortly after 7am to go my morning rounds and start on the garden. By the time I was done and heading back inside, it was past 8am. Taking into account stopping for breakfast and lunch, I got about 10 hours in the garden today!
Which is great, because all the transplants are IN!!!
Tomorrow, my main goal of the day is to get the third low raised bed near the compost rind cleaned up and planted with short season corn and yellow beans. After that, I want to work on the permanent trellis bed where I want to plant red noodle beans. That will make sure the trellis gets finished off, because they’re going to need something to climb!
Last of all, I will be clearing the bed at the chain like fence, salvage what I can find, replant with what I can manage, then cover it up again. Somehow. I like the netting that’s over it, but it really need something better than the wire to support it. I’m not even sure I can salvage the ones that cats have bent up!
I’ll figure it out.
Just another day or two, and the garden will be officially in!
Almost there!
On a completely different note, while I was working outside, my daughter let me know that the shop I took our push mower to had called and left a message. As expected they can’t find the part that’s needed. It’s simply not available, anywhere.
I was expecting this and had been thinking about it. I’d told them not to worry if they couldn’t find it; I’d just come pick it up. However, it would just end up as more junk here. So when I called them back and talked about it, I suggested they could keep the mower and use it for parts. If I ever buy a push mower again, it won’t be that brand, so it would be of no use to me. They, however, might be able to scavenge it if some other poor soul has the same brand of mower and needs a part that’s hard to find. They happily accepted the offer. Win, win!
Thankfully, my brother has provided us with mowers we can use! I was going to take my mother’s old mower in, but my brother thinks he can fix it himself, so we don’t even need to bring that in.
Oh, my goodness. It’s past midnight as I finish this! I need to get my butt into bed!
I had nine transplants, so that worked out with using the trellis posts as spacing guides.
Since I was going to plant bush beans along the edge of the bed, I did things a bit differently from the other half. With the melons, I set out the collars, added a handful of manure into each one and worked that in, in situ, then made narrow trenches around each collar. For this half, I started out by making a shallow, flat trench along the length of the bed I’d be planting into, pushing soil up against the log wall, and towards the trellis line. I added manure into the trench and worked that into the soil before giving it a thorough watering. Then I added the collars, closer to the centre/trellis line, than the melons are. Then I watered it again, filling each collar with water, as well as the trench.
To transplant the tomatoes, I scooped out a hole in each collar, deep enough for the entire root balls, then added it back in after the tomatoes we in place. Even with filling each collar and letting it absorb water before hand, I was still pulling up dry soil! Once the tomatoes were in, I filled the collars with water again.
Each tomato got a pair of bamboo stakes set on either side, placed right against their collars. Later one, once I have the time and the ties, I will be adding cross pieces to make them sturdier, and also secure them to the wire trellis. Growing these before, I’ve been able to just wind their stems around a single bamboo stake but, after a while, it starts to get tippy, so I’ll better secure them this time.
Once done with the tomatoes, I made another long, narrow trench to plant the beans into. That got watered using the jet setting to drill the water deeper into the trench, which also helped level it out and even break up some of the clumps I missed. I didn’t have a full packet of the Royal Burgundy purple beans, but I had just enough to evenly space the seeds from end to end. I don’t expect a 100% germination rate, so we might end up with a few gaps, but these are new seeds, so it shouldn’t be too bad.
Once I spaced the beans out evenly, I pushed them into the soil in their little trench and covered them, then went over the trench with a more gentle flat spray of water to fill it and level out the soil again.
That done, I used the last of the grass clippings left in the wagon to mulch around the tomato collars, and the edge of the bed along the bean’s little trench. I ran out of grass clippings with just one corner left to cover, but I still had some leaves and grass clippings mulch set aside from the winter sown beds I could use.
Then it all got watered again, making sure to soak through the mulch.
With how dry that bed was, it’s really not possible to over water it.
Since this bed had been covered in plastic while we had our recent rainfall, I fully expected it to be so very dry. After working on the next bed, however, it turns out that it really didn’t make much of a difference. It still would have been that dry!
The next bed I worked on was the end of the garlic bed, where I’d winter sown some of the same seed mix of root vegetables that is in the high raised bed. Nothing survived in this bed, though.
I didn’t have time to break out the weed trimmer to clear around the bed, so I used a rake to knock the weeds and dandelion seed heads down and way from the bed. This little section still has netting over it, though the cats have still been lying on top of it! So before I started, I had to pull the netting away, starting at the garlic end, leaving it still tacked down at the other end. The bed then got a weeding, and finally some manure was worked into the soil.
Next, I used some of the small plant support stakes I was no longer needing at another bed, to add more supports for the very loose twine, including adding one in the very middle of the bed, where the twin crossed.
Once the soil was ready and watered, I made three round, shallow “bowls”, which got watered again. Each “bowl” got three squash seeds planted in them. On one side, I planted the White Scallop squash. On the other, Black Zucchini.
Then the “bowls” got watered again.
This garden bed was fully exposed to the rain we got, and yet it was every bit as dry as the bed I’d just worked on, that had been covered in plastic while it was raining! You’d never know we had any rain at all.
This bed had been mulched for the winter with a mixture of leaves and grass clippings, that had been pulled to one side of the bed in the spring. I was able to use that to mulch around the “bowls” the seeds were planted in, with a light scattering of mulch in the bowls, too. Once that was in place, the netting was put back in place. Then it got watered again.
Hopefully, the new supports will help keep the cats off!
By the time the squash is large enough that the netting will need to be removed, they won’t need the extra protection anymore. We shall see how many of the seeds actually germinate. If I end up with extras, I will thin by transplanting. Hopefully, this year, we will actually have a decent amount of summer squash!
So that is now done. In the main garden area, the only bed left is the trellis bed. I won’t work on that again until everything is planted, though.
From the looks of the weather forecast, I should be able to get lots done tomorrow.
Gosh, I’m so enjoying all the progress in the garden! I might be in a lot of pain when I’m done, but it feels so good otherwise, it’s totally worth it.
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.
I decided to plant the all the remaining winter squash into one bed. With these ones, I’m not looking to save seed, so it doesn’t matter if they cross pollinate. The bed I decided to put them in has been solarizing for quite a long time now.
The first thing to do, though, was get in with the weed trimmer and clear around the bed.
There were clouds and clouds of dandelion seeds!
The plastic did a great job of protecting the soil from that, though.
Once the weed trimming was done, I removed the boards and bricks holding the plastic down. One of the boards had been used to roll the plastic up for storage, and I used that again.
It’s amazing what can survive under the heat of that plastic – and the lack of any moisture!
So my first job was to break up the compacted soil and so what weeding needed to be done.
I was finding elm tree roots at the end furthers from the elms.
It was while I was working on this that we got company. My brother came over today. He had some stuff he needed to get done, so I just went over to say hello before getting back to my own work.
The first thing he did was comment on how I needed to not die on him! Apparently, I was extremely red and flushed from the heat! I did make sure to sit in the shade and hydrate, often, but after his comment, I made a point of going inside and sitting in the air conditioned living room for a while before getting back at it.
As I was working, I thought about how to bed protect the bed. Seeing how, even with logs added to the sides, the peas and carrots bed was eroding on one side, I wanted to prevent that right from the start.
So, once the soil was weeded and fluffified, I decided to make use of the boards that had weighed down the plastic, and make temporary walls.
I first raked the soil in from the edges. In going through my supplies in the garden shed, I brought out a bundle of metal stakes that were salvaged from the Walmart market tent we had a tree fall on, several years ago. I’d used these to mark out where to shift the garden beds last year, and this particular bundle all had pinwheels – or the remains of pinwheels – taped to them. A pair of them still had twine wrapped around them, so I put those two at opposite ends of one side. I then used the last of some small bamboo stakes I had to fill in the gaps a bit, to support the boards, as they are all different lengths and some are pretty rotted out and broken on their ends. Once the boards were in place, I raked some of the soil against them to hold them in place and create a shallow trench in the middle.
The soil was insanely dry. Once the boards were in place, I gave the trench a thorough watering. The water just disappeared! Eventually, I got it to the point that the water would actually sit for a little while before getting sucked away.
I used the plastic collars to work out the spacing, setting them into the soil just deep enough to not blow away, but not so deep that they would restrict root growth. Then, each collar got a handful of manure mixed into it. The soil around each collar got shallow trenches made around them, too. Then everything got another thorough watering.
The metal stakes handily divided the bed into three sections, and there were three varieties of squash to transplant. There were six Mashed Potato squash, and I decided those would go on the end closest to the elm trees. I figured, if the elm roots started crowding into the bed, it would be better to have the variety with the most plants at that end, in case we lost one or two. There were five Baked potato squash, which went in the other end, and four Sunshine squash were planted in the middle section.
After being planted into the collars, everything got another watering. Then I grabbed the wagon and went into the outer yard, where sections have been mowed, and raked up dried grass clippings to use as mulch.
While working on this, I could hear various noises and saw my brother driving around in the zero-turn lawn mower, using it as transportation. One of the things he did today was add a ball hitch, so he could use it to tow a small trailer.
Then he came to get me. He even set up a stump of a log I had in the shade of the trees, on the trailer as a seat for me! A seat is why that log was set up in the shade in the first place, so that was rather funny.
I did need his help to steady myself to get onto the trailer, though. 😄
One of the many things he got done today was replace the long screw eye we’ve been using as a pin on the slide bar for the gate. He got two different possible replacements for it and wanted me to choose one of them. After we got that figured out, he gave me a ride back to the garden.
That was really fun!
Meanwhile, the wind has been picking up through the day – and the elm trees are dropping their dried out seeds.
There were times when it was like a snow storm of seeds. Our lawn is thick with them and, in mere minutes, the soil in the garden bed I’d spent so much time clearing out was getting filled with seeds!
Mulching around the squash was as needed to keep those frickin’ seeds off as much as anything else! I even tucked a light mulch of grass clippings inside the collars, carefully setting it around the stems.
Once the bed was mulched, I brought over the rolling seat and settled down for one last watering. The grass clippings are bone dry, and it needed to be soaked all the way through. This way, the damp grass clippings will keep the soil both damp and cool, and is more likely to allow water through. When it’s completely dry, the grass can act as a thatch, and prevent moisture from reaching the soil, instead. So I took my time and made sure the mulch was completely soaked.
By that point, it was time for supper, and I was done for the day! It was 34C/93F and holding. I didn’t catch what the humidex was, but it sure felt hotter.
At the moment, the high forecast for tomorrow is “only” 20C/68F, which is going to feel blessedly cool after the past couple of days! We might even get a bit of rain at around 7am.
Hopefully, I’ll get there rest of the transplants in tomorrow. I have both tomatoes and melons blooming right now! So those have priority.
I’m going to be pretty much living on painkillers for the next few days, but it needs to be done!
Once the garden is in, I want to just sleep for a week.
Which won’t happen, but I can still fantasize about it! 😄
I’ll be paying for it tonight and tomorrow, but I’m very happy with how much I was able to get done in the garden today. Those winter squash could have been planted a couple of weeks ago, at the size they’re at! I noticed some even had flower buds already on them.
Of the four types of winter squash we have this year, there is one type that I specifically want to save seeds for. That is the Arikara squash, which was listed as extremely rare.
That meant they needed to be planted well away from the other squash, to avoid cross pollination.
I decided to put them in the new little bed I successfully grew Crespo squash in, last year.
As you can see in the first image, we have been rather behind on clearing things lately! My daughter was able to do the main lawn mowing, but this area needs the weed trimmer.
So that was my first step. I cleared around all the beds and, since there are two more that need to be cleared for planting soon. One of them will have tomatoes in it. The other will have direct seeded corn and beans.
The small bed was fairly compacted, so it took a while to loosen the soil enough with the garden fork, just to be able to pull the weeds. That one little space, and I was pulling the usual crab grass, creeping Charlie, dandelions, white clover and thistle. There was also lambs quarter and a weed with leaves I keep mistaking for while strawberry, until they get bigger.
There was one surprise in there. I pulled up something with very distinctive spike leaves of a flower that look like a small version of the irises we have growing near the house. I set it aside by the transplants, with the roots in water, until I decide where to transplant it. I’m very curious as to what it is!
One the soil was clear of weeds and the clumps broken up, I added some manure and mixed that in thorough.
There are only three Arikara squash transplants, and I had considered planting something with them, like I did with the Crespo squash last year. In the end, I decided against it.
As we are expecting a dry year, the bed got a lot of watering. It was incredibly dry, so that took a while. Once the soil was damp more than just on to top, I set the transplants with collars around them, then created trenches around the collars, to collect as much water towards the roots as possible. The collars do a good job of holding the water and allowing it to slowly seep down.
I had a bin nearby, with grass clippings for mulch, from last year. It turned out to be exactly enough to thoroughly mulch the entire bed around the collars. Earlier, I had cut the sets of 3′ plastic coated metal plant stakes in half, and set one in each corner. I had pipe for hoops I intended to set in an X over the bed, but they are 5′ long, and that’s not long enough to reach from corner to corner. So I set the hoops at the ends.
I had a piece of mosquito netting to put over the hoops, but I didn’t want it to come in contact with the squash plants – and they’re already pretty big! So I joined the hoops with three 4′ plant stakes. The one in the middle hangs under the hoops, but I put the ones on the sides on top of the hoops, to keep the mesh off the leaves.
The netting was more than long enough, but not quite wide enough. The ends got rolled up in more plant stakes and pinned down with ground staples. I could just reach the top of the mulch on the sides, and those are secured with a couple more ground staples and rocks.
This covering is temporary. Once the transplants are well established and bigger, I’ll remove the cover. When they start blooming, I’ll be hand pollinating them as well as letting the insects do the job, just to be on the safe side!
By the time I finished here, it was 26C/79F, with the humidex putting it at 32C/90F. It was also coming up on noon, and my daughter was sweetheart and had lunch ready for me. She has been feeling quite sick today, and has spent much of the day in bed, yet she still made me both lunch and supper!
I am so grateful for that AC my brother set up for us in the living room. It was downright heavenly to take a break and cool down!
I still had a lot of work to do, though, so I was soon back out. By this time, I knew I wasn’t going to get all the transplants in, but I needed to at least get the rest of the winter squash done.
Yeah. That one turned out to be a big job, too. I did, however, have a bonus for the day!
I don’t know if starting our seeds in the relative cold of our basement has anything to do with it, or maybe having the portable greenhouse, but this year’s transplants are some of the strongest, healthiest looking plants I’ve grown yet!
The first image is all our tomatoes. There’s one bin of Spoon tomatoes, one of Sub Arctic Plenty, and one with a mix of Black Beauty and Chocolate Cherry. One of those was lost when the wind tried to tear apart the portable greenhouse, so there was space enough for me to tuck in the two sage transplants I picked up yesterday.
In the next image, we have two bins on the left, one with eggplant and one with peppers. In the middle are our melons, and on the right are the winter squash. It was the winter squash that was my priority for today, as they are outgrowing the cells in their tray.
I did the safe first, though, since there was just the two of them, going into an already prepared bed.
I tucked them into the middle, between the other herbs.
I look forward to seeing how this bed looks, once the herbs reach their full sizes. They should fill the whole thing. I’m curious to see if we’ll need to remove the cover later on. For now, the main thing is to protect the transplants from cats.
Speaking of which…
The older kittens have discovered the portable greenhouse – and the pots with luffa in them! The pots have a thick layer of sawdust from the stove pellets added around them as mulch.
Apparently, sawdust makes a great bed.
Grommet was in the pot with the larger luffa and wouldn’t leave. Which was a surprise, since he normally runs away when I come too close. This time, however, he let me pick him up and carry him around for a while enjoying pets!
The luffa now have gallon size water bottle collars around them, to keep the kitties from squishing the luffa!
The next thing I wanted to get done was the Arikara squash.
The Re-Farmer 