planning ahead

Our 2021 garden: beans are in, and first spinach protectors

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Once again, our temperatures have lurched from one direction to the other! From days cold enough for the furnace to turn on, and overnight lows below freezing, we’re back to the heat. It’s past 7:30pm as I write this, and our temperature is still at 24C/75F. A week from now, we’re expected to hit 31C/88F.

Well, by then we should be transplanting our squash seedlings, so that will be good for them, at least!

This morning’s job was to direct sow our bush beans. I am so glad we picked up that extra hose. The mini-beds we made for them needed to be soaked, re-soaked, then soaked again, before I even planted the seeds. I can’t believe how quickly things have dried out already, though I suppose with the winds we’ve been having, I shouldn’t be surprised. You can even see that the pea trellises have been moved around by the winds! I even found one end of a cross piece had come loose after one particularly windy days. The bags may work to startle critters, but they also act like sails.

The yellow and green bean packages had 200 seeds each. With a 20’/6m double row, we still had seeds left over. The purple beans were packed by weight, and a 50g package was just enough for its double row.

Once planted, they all got watered, and watered again! Normally, I would have pre-soaked the beads, but these were inoculated seeds, and I figure soaking them first would have washed off the inoculant!

After the beans were done, we set up the sprinkler to start soaking down the rows for the corn and sunflowers. We left it running over one side for a few hours, then moved it to cover the other end. Much to my surprise, the sprinkler can cover all but 3 rows. There isn’t a lot of pressure, this far out!

Our afternoon project was to see what we could do about protecting our spinach beds. After scrounging in a little shed near the barn, we dragged out the last of some narrow old, salvaged boards. Many of them had several 3″ deck screws in them that had to be removed, first. There were 13 boards, and we ended up using 12 of them, because they were not all the same length.

The roll of chicken wire (or 1″ hex wire) we got was 25′ (7.6m) long and 4′ (1.2m) wide. We have three spinach beds we need to cover. While the beds themselves are about 3-4′ (about a meter) wide and roughly 15′ (just over 4.5m) long, the rows of spinach were, of course, less than that. So we were able to use the roll to cover 2 spinach beds. Well, mostly.

We stole a couple of hoops from the small beet bed by the garlic beds to hold the wire up in the middle. The sides are held in place with sticks, that have a bit of mesh hooked onto their tops, so they are helping hold that up, too. Once we get more hoops, we’ll be able to stop using the sticks to hold up the mesh, which will allow us to move the covers to harvest the spinach.

The edges of the chicken wire were sandwiched between boards that were screwed together. Because of the different lengths, we had to cobble them together. A couple ended up with small gaps between the ends of boards, but they were still secure. The covers don’t really leave much room to do a second sowing, though, which we could do any time now, if we wanted. I think I will skip it, and save the seeds to sow later in the summer for a fall crop.

Like everything else we’re doing this year, this is a temporary thing, so we don’t need to get too fancy. When we build our permanent, high raised beds, we will make protective covers that fit properly, and be properly framed and supported. Right now, neither one completely covers the rows of spinach, so the ends might still get nibbled at, but it should be fine. If we want, we can tie on brightly colored or metallic ribbons to flap in the wind and discourage critters.

I’ll have to make a trip to the local dollar store again and see if they’ve restocked on things like pinwheels. I’ll pick up more hula hoops, too. I figure a couple more rolls of the chicken wire would not be a bad idea. I think we still have enough of that wood in the basement that we can make one more cover for the third spinach bed. For the small beet bed, I’m hoping the mosquito netting we ordered will come in soon, but if not, we can use chicken wire.

While in the city, I also picked up 200’/60.9m of yellow rope to string around where the corn and sunflowers will be planted. If what I read about deer not having good depth perception, so having two shorter fences a few feet apart works as well as a high fence, is accurate, we should be able to string just one “fence” of the yellow rope around half the garden, since it’s already so close to the barbed wire perimeter fence. Since most of the other half will be edged with squash, which deer don’t like, we might not need to do much more than that. We shall see!

Now that the blocks for the corn and sunflowers have been soaked down, tomorrow’s job is to plant the corn, with radishes in between to help break up the hard soil, and direct sow the rest of the sunflowers. The transplants are not done hardening off yet, and all our transplanting will wait until after June 2, regardless of what the weather forecasts are right now! The forecasts change so often, I don’t really trust them beyond a couple of days, and, even then, they are frequently wrong for our area.

Once the seeds are sown, we can finally get back to working on the squash tunnel!

The Re-Farmer

Garden pause

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The much needed rain we are having right now has been accompanied by some pretty chill temperatures! The furnace even turned on, this morning. As I write this, my desktop weather app tells me we are at 4C/39F, but it feels like -1C/30F. But then, it also says we’re raining right now, and we’re not. As I thought might happen, the weather system is passing us by to the south, and some areas are getting storm conditions, but we’re just getting the edges of it.

A couple of days ago, our neighboring farm was rushing to get their crops planted. One of my daughters and I had gone out past midnight to investigate the smell of smoke. There are several wildfires burning in our province, most under control, but none nearby, yet we were still getting smoke! While out, I noticed lights through the trees that looked like vehicles in the rented field beyond the barn, so we went to check it out. It turned out to be farm equipment in the next property over, where they had worked their way close to the property line. Checking the trail cams the next day, I saw the farm equipment going past our driveway after 2am! They got their seed sowed, just in time for the rain.

Looking over all the garden beds this morning, everything is looking fine so far. Even if we dipped low enough to get frost, the things we have planted won’t need to be covered. Which is good, because we don’t have anything suitable to cover the beds we have. Meanwhile, the seedlings in the sun room remain in the sun room. That will set back the hardening off process a bit, unfortunately. Ah, well. It is what it is!

The work outdoors has had to take a pause. The girls did as much as they could, but it was just too cold and wet to continue building more beds for the corn and sunflowers, nor add to the pea trellis. That, at least, we still have plenty of time for.

The blocks for corn will all have 5 twenty foot rows, while the sunflower blocks will have 3 twenty foot rows in them – though we might not have enough sunflowers to fill the blocks. At least not of the purple ones. If the half we started indoors still haven’t germinated in such ideal conditions, I don’t hold much hope that the direct sown half will germinate, either. :-(

With today’s weather, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to get more progress in building beds, but hopefully we’ll be able to get more done over the next couple of days. I don’t mind the delay. We need this rain so much. For all the watering we’ve been doing, it can’t compare to the deep soak that several days of rain can do! Even with the chillier temperatures, I think what we’ve got sprouting right now is going to thrive for it.

The Re-Farmer

This is me, taking a break from the garden…

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After getting the Dorinny corn planted yesterday, we could take a break from manual labour in the garden for a day or two. Which makes this the first Sunday I’ve been able to take as a day of rest for a while.

Well. Sort of.

For some reason, I did not sleep last night. At all. At 4am, I found myself chatting with my SIL. She had been driven out of bed by pain, so she got up to watch the sun rise. Which is why I ended up outside by 5:30 am, doing my rounds and watering the garden beds, haskaps, the newly planted mulberry and the nearby cedar. We did get some rain during the night, which was wonderful, but it still wasn’t enough to skip the morning watering. Most of the rainfall missed us, it seems. We’re supposed to continue to get rain over the next while, and possibly even thundershowers, but we’ll see if any of it actually falls in our area.

I did, at least, get a nap in after I finished my rounds. Unfortunately, as I’d somehow thought yesterday was Friday instead of Saturday, I hadn’t phoned my mother as I’d intended. I woke to a message my brother had sent a couple hours earlier, telling me he’d called our mother and she was talking about going to the grocery store with her walker. By the time I called and got through to her, she had made her trip. It was just a little one, though, so I will be going over later in the week to help her make a larger trip.

We needed to make our own trip to do some shopping; it should have been done yesterday, but I just wasn’t up to the drive. I still wasn’t up to it, today, but my daughter was able to do the driving, so we headed out this afternoon to the smaller city, where they have a tiny little Walmart. Cat food was one of the things we needed to get more of. It seems people have been making a run on the big bags of kibble, because there was almost none in stock! At least, not of the affordable stuff. I grabbed 2 of the last three bags on the shelves. While there, I also took a look in the gardening section and discovered that all the hoses longer than 10′ were completely out of stock too.

One thing they didn’t have was the hardwood pellets we are switching to, in place of cat litter. All but two of our litter boxes have been switched to the pellets. The cats have gotten used to the pellets already, which is great. Using the pellets has meant no more dust, and no more smell! They also need to be cleaned out less frequently, since they don’t get scooped, but emptied completely after several days. We just have to figure out how to dispose of the pellets during a burn ban.

Getting more of the pellets meant going to Canadian Tire. I haven’t been to this location since before the restrictions, and had heard they didn’t accept medical exemptions, or even Mingle Masks. I’m happy to say that I had no issues at all. At least not with my medical exemption. Finding the pellets was something else entirely! I found the type I’d picked up before in the seasonal section, but in one of the groups I’m on, people talked about switching to the pellets and mentioned getting them at Canadian Tire – but the ones they were talking about were much cheaper. Even the bag I did get was cheaper than litter, but it wasn’t what people were talking about. My daughter tracked down an employee who said they were by the cash desks on the way out, so we went and looked. That’s where the automotive section was, so we were confused. We looked around some more, then finally found a different employee. She looked it up on her phone and found exactly what I’d seen people talking about. It turned out we had to go through the cash desk first, pay for them, then someone would bring them to us.

Once we knew that, we made a side trip to the garden centre, first. My daughter has a birthday next month, and I wanted to pick up an early birthday present for her. She’s been really wanting to have raspberries, and the ones my mother had transplanted in the old garden are not doing well. I’m still not sure why she chose to plant them under the apple and chokecherry trees, and in the middle of flowers. They’re not getting anywhere near enough light. We weren’t going to get more until next year, but she has been wanting them so much, I decided to surprise her. :-)

Once in the garden centre, we found their raspberries and I got my daughter to choose which variety she wanted. There was only two to pick from, and she chose a heritage variety that produces a small yield in June, then a larger yield in September. We got two plants for now. While there, I was very happy to find lady haskaps, and picked one up.

We will harden these off a bit before we transplant them. We’re not sure, yet, where the raspberries will go. Over the next while, we plant to pick up varieties that have different coloured berries, so these will be the first of many! The lady haskap will be planted between the two we have now, though off to one side of the bed, to maintain the spacing they need. The male haskap has opening blossoms, while the struglling female is finally starting to open its leaf buds. We definitely won’t be having any berries this year! With this new female plant, though, we will hopefully start having some next year.

After finding the plants we wanted, we went to pay for them, and asked about the hardwood pellets. We didn’t have someone bring them to us, because it turned out the stack was in the exit vestibule. No wonder we couldn’t find them! The 40 pound bags were only $7 each, so we got two. We’d taken my mother’s car for the trip, since it hasn’t been driven enough. Next time, we’ll be using the van, so we’ll have the space to get more and be well stocked.

While doing my rounds this evening, checking the garden beds, giving the newly planted corn an extra watering (my other daughter had watered while we were gone, but it’s pretty much impossible to over water in this area), and checking out how well my daughter’s tulips are growing, I found the plum trees are in full bloom, now!

The rain we got was enough for them to fully open. It’s remarkable, how much of a difference even a little bit of rain can make, when things are as dry as they have been!

Last night, the girls had popped outside after dark and called me over to see the sun room window. I had the aquarium lights set up vertically on the inner side of the shelf our seedlings are on, and it was causing confusion!

There were moths all over the window, trying to get at the lights, including this beauty!

They won’t have as much light to attract them tonight, though. In checking and watering the seedlings (and finding a whole bunch of new sprouts, including another Crespo squash!), I noticed the Montana Morado corn and Mongolian Giant sunflowers, in their long bin, were getting leggy, reaching for the light coming through the Western windows. I set the brighter of the aquarium lights up above the bin, which should help with that problem. At the rate these are growing, I might have a problem keeping the light high enough above them, that they won’t get too close to the fixture; this one actually puts off some heat, too. With what I’ve got to support the light fixture right now, it’s about as high as it can go, unless I can find something else to hold it in place. We will have to figure that out!

Even on my “day off”, I just can’t stop thinking about the gardening! I can hardly wait to continue setting up the rest of the beds we need and, now that the peas are starting to sprout, finish their trellises and build the squash arches.

I suppose I should let the girls have some of the fun, too… ;-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: haskap and corn plot status

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The girls were able to come out and give me a hand this afternoon, so things got done a lot faster. Especially for me, when they booted me out of the garden and into the house. Apparently, I was looking pretty sun burned! Not feeling it, though. ;-)

In my focus on watering, I’ve been eyeballing the haskap bushes. The male is doing quite well.

It’s even beginning to show flower buds!

We planted these two summers ago, so this year should have been a year with good production.

That’s not going to happen.

I wish I knew what was going on with this poor female haskap! The only leaf buds are on the very tips of branches, and not even all of them. I’d expected to get more of them by now, but I haven’t seen any yet. We might have to order more online for next year, instead. We shall see.

With all the watering they’re getting, my mother’s yellow flowers in this bed are already starting to come up strongly in places. We’re not watering the entire bed as thoroughly; just the haskaps and the lilac bush. I expect the lilac to do better this year, now that the maple tree that was shading it has been cut down.

Meanwhile…

My daughters and I marked out a block for the corn we will be planting soon. This block is to the West of the peas, so it can actually be reached with the hose. One of my daughters worked on soaking the area while the other helped me with chopping up straw with the lawn mower to lay down in the block.

The rows are two feet apart, and the corn needs to be planted 1 ft apart. We just have one packet of these seeds, so this should be more than large enough. The variety being grown here is called Dorinny. While I found them at Baker Creek, apparently they had largely disappeared for decades, until they were rediscovered and reintroduced by Wood Prairie Farm. They are a Canadian heritage breed, can handle cold soil, and matures in only 75 days. I’m quite looking forward to them! These are a type that I hope to save seeds from.

One of the bonuses of these being planted earlier and maturing so quickly is that the chances of cross pollination with the Montana Morado we’ll be planting at the other end of the garden will be greatly reduced, even with our winds. They will mature at completely different times.

We know this area is low in nutrients, especially nitrogen, which corn needs a lot of, so we’ll have to take extra steps to ensure they have enough. The fresh, nutrient filled garden soil mix will be the first boost. We picked up a water soluble vegetable fertilizer that has higher nitrogen levels, but in cleaning out the old kitchen, we found a water soluble fertilizer that’s even higher in nitrogen. We also found a pump sprayer, still in its box, so we’ll be able to use it to feed the corn, even in the furthest plots, where the hose doesn’t reach. We do plan to pick up more hose but, for now, the rain barrel and watering can are working out just fine.

The chopped straw was also added to the rows of peas as mulch. Being able to run the lawn mower over the straw a couple of times really makes a big difference. I find myself thinking that I wished we’d thought of it earlier, but then I remember that when we were using the straw previously, we were having problems with the push mower that was here. I did use the new push mower to do it last fall, but that’s when it stopped working completely. I’d chopped up just enough to mulch the garlic for the winter.

One thing’s for sure: we’ve made a huge dent in that straw bale! We’ll need to get another one by the end of the season, for sure. :-)

The girls went on to thoroughly water everything for the evening. Tomorrow, we start hauling soil again… after soaking the ground some more, and stomping down the chopped straw. I do wish we had enough cardboard to lay over the grass, but there isn’t enough in our recycling to cover even a single row. I supposed that’s a down side of our bulk-buying, low packaging shopping habits!

Once this block is planted, we can move on to preparing the beds for everything to be planted or transplanted out here, after June 2. After the girls kicked me out of the garden so they could finish, I checked how things were growing in the sun room, and am very happy to see more summer squash and melons have germinated. It doesn’t look like any of the winter squash or pumpkins have started yet. Still nothing on the rest of the gourds, either. :-( I’ll be keeping a close eye on the climbers over the next couple of weeks. How many germinate will tell me how big of a squash arch we will be building.

The day after tomorrow, we should be getting our first batches of items in the mail from Veseys, including the mulberry tree. I am thinking of planting it in a grow bag this summer, though. There are too many dead trees in the area it will be going in permanently that need to come down. I’m hoping they are solid enough that we can use them for building materials.

Next week, the potatoes will be arriving, and we’ll set up the grow bags we made from feed bags for those. We settled on having them along the chain link fence near the storage house, where they’ll be out of the way, yet easy to access and tend to. Plus, full sunlight. Hopefully, using the grow bags will alleviate the slug problem I found we had, last year.

It feels so good to be getting so many things into the ground! Now we just have to wait and see how many will actually grow! ;-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: quick finish on the unplanned bed

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A while back, the girls and I decided to create a bed in an unplanned area. Today, things got pleasant enough outside that I quickly finished part of it.

This is the side that will have the Strawberry Spinach planted. These can be successively sown every two weeks, starting before the last frost date, so I wanted to get it finished.

It’s warm enough to have the garden hoses out, though we still have to be careful to make sure they don’t have water in them overnight. This meant I was able to give the cardboard layer a solid soak, first. Before we lay the cardboard down, the dead grass and leaves had been raked away, and that got put back on top of the cardboard, followed by another soak, a layer of straw, another soak, then a layer of garden soil, followed by a final soak. Over the next while, weather willing, I want to continue to soak the new garden beds as often as I can before planting, to get them damp through the layers (at least those we can reach with hoses!). That will help the layers break down faster, plus they will act as a sort of sponge, so the beds will need less watering later.

At least, that’s the theory!

The rest of this area still has just the cardboard, which also got a thorough soaking, to kill off the grass and soften the soil a bit until we get the asparagus crowns that will be going there.

At least I got one area done today! The winds had picked up quite a bit, but this corner seems to be more sheltered. That should be good for the plants!

The Re-Farmer

Snowy morning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What fun! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: marking spaces

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After working things out and making some decisions on where we want to plant things, we are ready to mark out beds in preparation for planting. We have seeds than need to be direct sown before our first frost, and those are the areas we want to focus on.

We’d decided to mark off blocks at 20′ x 20′ (about 6m x 6m) for the corn and 20′ x15′ (about 6m x 4.5m) for the sunflowers, and then make 3′ x 8′ (about 1m x 2.5m) beds for most of the rest.

With that in mind, I figured the easiest way to mark off blocks would be with knotted cord. I used 2 lengths of paracord with a loop at one end. From the loop, I tied knots at 3′, 8′, 15′ and 20′ We have a bundle of small marker flags, and I grabbed those to mark the corners of the plots.

The first thing I did was mark off a 20′ x 20′ block in the furthest corner, from which everything else would be lined up.

I decided to start the rectangular plots roughly 4′ (just over 1m) away from where the corn will be. Once I started marking off the first one, though, I quickly threw away the idea of making them only 8 ft long. For this space, that is just minuscule!

I made them 20′ long, instead.

In the above photo, there are 4 plots marked off, with 3′ paths between them.

I added 1 more and ran out of flags, so I used a stick from the pile of branched I’d pruned a few weeks back.

Then I went back and made more marker sticks. We’ve got the bright orange marking paint, so I used that on one end of the sticks so they would be more visible.

Using the two knotted ropes to find where to place the markers worked really, really well. With the looped ends at markers or flags, lining up the knots to find the next spot to mark also made it easy to keep straight lines and right angles at the corners. It’s not perfect, of course. The rough ground alone made that impossible. They don’t need to be perfect. All of this is just temporary, anyhow, until we plant trees here.

I took the time to make more markers from sticks, spraying one end with the bright orange paint, then made another row of plots.

This is how it looked when I was done.

Yeah. I know. Hard to see!

So I edited it to as close as I could match the lines.

The big block by itself is where the corn will start. It’s hard to know how much space we’ll actually need, but at least we have the general area worked out.

With just the rectangular plots, this is an area that’s 15′ wide and 66′ long (about 4.5m x 20m), including the paths in between.

We will be marking more of the rectangular plots, as well as another corn block at this end.

Our three varieties of bush beans will be planted in the plots nearest the corn, though I’m already rethinking that. The peas, which need to be planted right away, will need to be trellised, so they need to be to the north, so they don’t shade other plants. We have only 2 varieties, but one of them is a bag of 200 seeds, while the other is a typical seed envelope, so having two sections of the green peas and one of the purple should work out. The three varieties of beans can take the next three sections.

The actual dimensions of the area, compared to what we thought we had on the satellite image, means we’ve got three plots at the end that does not have anything specific planned for them. It’s hard to see in the photo, but even the furthest plots are still far enough away from the apple trees that they will still get full sun.

We’re out of cardboard, and we’ll be running out of straw very quickly. It’s going to be a challenge with all that grass, until the plants fully mature. By planting densely, they should shade out and choke out the grass and weeds. When we do add the soil, we will have to be careful in how we use it, or we’ll run out very quickly! One of the things to keep in mind, as always, is that this is meant to be temporary. When it comes to food trees, they take so long to reach productions stage, we really need to get those planted quickly. If we can swing it next year, that would be amazing, but even if we can only afford to do a few a year, rather than a whole nut orchard, all at once, that will be a good start.

Until then, we’ll be breaking up and amending the soil with vegetables. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: unplanned garden bed

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My daughters and I have spent quite a bit of time, working out where to plant what, so we know where to build beds to plant in. Then I realized we completely forgot about the purple asparagus crowns that will be shipped later, to arrive at time of planting in our zone 3 region.

We’d talked about them before, but hadn’t made any decisions. Where my mother had asparagus was ruled out. She’d planted trees and bushes in that garden, so that area no longer gets enough hours of sun in a day. Asparagus will produce for up to 20 years, so we couldn’t include them in most of the areas we will be planting in this year.

After talking about it, we settled on a spot where we had not originally planned to have any garden beds at all this year.

This is the spot we settled on, after I’d raked it out.

Part way down is where there used to be one of my mother’s tire planters that I’d taken out. I’d dumped the soil out to remove it, and found it was on top of the remains of an old maple.

I know it was an old maple, because it immediately began sending up suckers.

I had covered it with the soil inside the planter as much as I could. The flowers that were in that planter have been showing up, which was nice to see at least. :-) Much of this area is difficult to maintain, though. So now we will be planting two things here. At the far end, on the other side of the remains of maple, is where we will be planting the Strawberry Spinach. In reviews on the Baker Creek website, where I bought the seeds, it was mentioned that these self seed easily, and it was recommended to plant them in a permanent location because of this. That was kept in mind when we chose this location.

In the foreground is where the asparagus will go. For that, we will need to dig a trench long enough for the 6 crowns we will be getting.

Digging a trench here is going to be a challenge.

So today, I set up the soaker hose directly on the ground to start. Saturating the soil will make it easier to dig the trench.

While that was soaking, I prepped as many cardboard boxes as I could find, removing any tape or stickers on them.

My daughters helped me to lay the cardboard under the soaker hose, and we left it running for a while as we checked other areas. The rain barrel was full, so we used it to fill our watering cans and wet down the cardboard more, and finally just left the soaker hose going for about an hour. The above photo is what it looked like when I turned off the water.

(We are now out of cardboard. :-/ We do still have some moving boxes left, but they’re in really good shape, so we’re saving them for something else.)

We were planning to put straw over the cardboard, too, but it was way too windy today. We have several weeks before the asparagus crowns will arrive, so covering the area now will help kill off the grass, as well as make it easier to dig a trench, later. We’ll just have to keep soaking it. Where the Strawberry Spinach will be planted can have mulch and soil added to it at any time.

I’ve been looking at instructions for planting asparagus, and some places say to dig a trench 15 inches/38cm.

That’s not going to happen!

Those articles, however, also say to fill the bottom third of the trench with compost. We don’t have compost left.

Other articles say to soak the crowns in compost tea for 30 minutes before planting.

Since we don’t have compost to make compost tea with, that’s not happening, either. Our new garden soil, however, has plenty of compost in it.

I’m reading that the crowns should be planted 1 1/2 – 2 ft/46-61cm apart. We will be getting 6 crowns. That space isn’t long enough to plant them in one long row, but it’s wide enough to plant them in 2 rows, so we’ll need to made a double wide trench – about 24-30 in/61-76cm wide. A depth of 8 inches/20cm should be good, but we will be building the area up, so we won’t need to go quite that deep. I don’t know if we even could go any deeper, with the trees being so close. I expect to find a lot of roots under there. By the time we’re done, this area should be about 4-6 inches/10-15cm higher than it is now, so all we really need to do is get rid of the top layer of grass roots.

Hopefully, we will be able to remove more of that tree stump and cover the remains over, in the process.

Once it’s done, we should be able to leave things here and just keep them maintained, for the next couple of decades.

The Re-Farmer

Soil tests, first area (with technical distraction)

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Before I get into this post, I just wanted to add that this is my first post written using the SeaMonkey browser. It’s also the first time I’m actually using the browser, yet I’m already seeing a HUGE difference while working in the WordPress editor. Everything is loading SO much faster. The image uploads, the block editor, everything. I’ve just opened a whole bunch of blogs I follow in new tabs, and not a single one is showing the weird colours, not a single image has failed to load, and when I scroll the bottom of posts, everything is loaded. Including the “like” button which, frustratingly, was often the one thing that would fail to load, even as the rest of the page would load. I have yet to try and leave a comment anywhere, but I’ve uploaded media, including directly into this post, without a single problem. I had been using Mozilla Firefox for this blog (to keep is separate from my personal stuff), and it’s been really awful. SeaMonkey is like Mozilla Netscape, and it works a dream, so far! Many thanks to The Hinoeuma for telling me about it!

And now, back to our regularly scheduled post…

I broke out our soil tester and began with a sample from the newest garden bed. This is soil that was under the old wood pile. You can read about that massive clean up job, here. Under it was the only soft soil we had!

The soil test kit I have is from HoldAll Decorative Plant Accessories, and this is our first use. It has the supplies to do 40 tests; 10 each for pH, nitrogen, phosphorous and potash.

The test of pH is the quickest; soil gets put directly into the test tube with the contents of a capsule (all are colour coded), shaken, then allowed to sit for a minute. The other tests required a soil sample to be mixed with water at a ratio of 1 part soil to 5 parts water, so I started that first. Though only the pH test could be done right away, I readied the capsuled for all the tests, so I wouldn’t have to go into the mylar bag again.

I had just finished setting the pH sample in the test tube holder when something large and white caught my eye through the window.

It was the tarp over the load of garden soil in the outer yard, blowing around!

A daughter and I dashed off to get it before it blew away.

The wind has only been picking up! I don’t think I’ll be moving soil onto the new garden bed today. :-(

We fixed the tarp, adding more rocks and even a tire rim onto it, to keep it from blowing away.

Then we came inside, and I found three cats on the table, going after the remaining three test capsules!

They were licking them, and the gel capsules were starting to dissolve. :-( I don’t think any of the powder was ingested, though. They are now sealed in a container.

The pH test had more than enough time to be ready, but the water and soil mixture will need a lot more time! The instructions said it could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours, depending on how much clay is in the soil.

The soil in the new garden bed came up as neutral. We have a soil meter that is simply stuck into the ground that reads sunlight, moisture and pH. It had been used in the area that now has garlic, and read at about 7.5, so this was pretty much what I was expecting. Most of the things we are planting do better in a slightly acid soil – about 6 – 6.5 – but what we planted in this area last year did pretty good anyhow.

As I write this, the soil and water mixture has been sitting for more than an hour, and is still totally opaque! From the looks of it, it may need to stay overnight.

Meanwhile, I’ve already gathered a sample of the next test I want to do: the new garden soil! I suppose I could do a pH test right away, but I’ll wait until the other three tests on this first sample is done, first.

Testing the soil in the old garden is going to be a challenge. The samples are supposed to be as free of rocks and organic matter as possible.

Ha!

We’ll see how close to that we can manage!

Meanwhile…

As I was working on this post, I got a phone call from my mother. After a while, she asked what we’ve been doing, so I told her about the new garden beds. I tried to describe to her where we put the new bed for the tomatoes, and made the mistake of starting with, “you know where your yellow flowers are?” She immediately launched into “you mean you destroyed my flowers!!” I had to stop her and tell her, “wait, no… you know that space between those flowers and the chain link fence?”

I honestly think my mother forgets that the chain link fence even exists at times! It took her a while before she realized I was talking about the grassy area. Which confused her even more, because nothing was ever grown there, and how can I plant without plowing the soil first? Or at least tilling it? So I described to her what we did with the layers of cardboard, straw and soil. Once she knew our garden soil was delivered, that helped, but she still accused me of killing off her flowers again! Then she brought up the shade of trees, and I told her we only had to take down the one tree that was killing her lilac, anyhow, and that we picked that spot because it will get full sunlight now.

She still had a hard time understanding that we’re planting anything on that side of the house, in the yard, and was all, “so you’re letting the garden go to weeds again”, meaning the area she used to garden in. I told her no, we’re going to be planting all sorts of things there. Without plowing? Yes. Without plowing.

That lead to a whole lot more explaining of things, even though we’ve had this conversation several times, now. She has the hardest time with the concept of no-till gardening. It’s just too wrong! :-D

At least this time, she ended by saying, when everything is in and growing, we need to bring her over so she can see it! :-D So that’s progress, at least! She certainly wasn’t impressed by what she saw last year, but we’ll see how it goes this year. I’m sure she’ll find lots to be angry about! :-D

I didn’t even try to explain to her about the soil testing, though. Maybe another time. Us planting in an area she never planted in was already pressing her limits! :-D Which is funny, because she would stick little gardens in, or plant trees, all over the place. Some of them in places that are now very difficult to work around! :-D So it’s not like I’m doing something she hadn’t already done herself.

One thing that was funny was when we talked about starting things indoors, and I mentioned needing to start squash. She asked if we were growing zucchini, and I told her yes, in green, yellow and a different green, plus the bright yellow round squash (the pattypans) that I’d given her last year. Oh, those are just toys! she tells me. :-D I reminded her that we find them quite delicious!

Hmm. Now I’m suddenly wondering. Did she eat the fresh pattypan squash I’d given her? Or did she get rid of them, because they were too new for her?

I don’t think I want to know the answer to that. :-D

As we talked more about starting things indoors, she had the hardest time understanding that yes, we already have tomatoes started from seed. I think she was disappointed that she couldn’t chastise me for not having them started already. :-D

Talking to my mother about this place can be very challenging! I don’t think she forgets that she doesn’t own it anymore, but she still wants to control everything that is done here, including things she doesn’t understand (if only because my dad and brothers took care of them for her, over the years). I try to respect her wishes as much as possible, but our job is to take care of the place, not keep it in stasis. It’s slowly working out, though. It just takes a lot of explaining, sometimes! Or, in some cases, not even bringing them up.

Like testing soil. I’ll bring that up only if we have a lot of time for me to explain things in ways that make sense to her. It’s not so much that she isn’t aware of some things; it’s more likely she’s never encountered the terms to describe them before.

It’ll work out. It’ll just take time and patience!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: new bed built

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It was an absolutely gorgeous day today!

My younger daughter and I took advantage of it and built a new garden bed in the area we plan to plant tomatoes.

The tomato seedlings are doing well, as are the luffa.

They have roots starting to show out the bottoms of the pots already!

The onions in the sun room are doing well, but not to much the ones planted more recently.

As for the gourds, none have sprouted yet but, from what I’ve read, they do take a long time to germinate.

Here is where the tomatoes will be going.

We did absolutely nothing to the ground before we started. There really wasn’t any point of even trying.

The first step was to cover the grass.

Actually, the first step was to cut down that maple. I’d already noted that it was creating so much shade when in full leaf, that a unique lilac in the flower bed beside it was being killed off. The stump was left high and will become the support for a seat. The main trunk and some of the larger branches are being kept for future projects.

We’ve been saving the cardboard boxes from cat litter, and their flaps were placed against the fence as a short barrier to hold in the soil.

Well… after spending some time removing all the tape. It took more time to get all the tape off than to lay out the cardboard!

Those and some moving boxes were enough to cover the entire space between the flower bed and the fence. :-)

Then, we broke out the new soaker hose! :-)

We will likely be going below freezing tonight, so the water will still need to be shut off from the basement when we’re done, but for a warm day like today, we could use the hoses for a while.

The soaker hose is 50 ft/15m, so we’re looking at approximately 25 ft/7 1/2m for the new bed.

While letting that soak, my daughter and I began bringing loads of straw over from the bale in the big garden area.

We probably could have left the water running all day to soak it thoroughly, but we didn’t bother. We did move the soaker hose over by the haskap berry bushes, though, and left the water running while we moved on to the next step: spreading the straw.

Actually, I spread the straw while my daughter filled a couple of wheelbarrows of soil and brought them over. Once the cardboard was covered, we tromped back and forth on it, stamping it down, then lay the soaker hose back over it.

We left that to soak and took a walk around the big garden area and talked about changing a few things.

The above image shows the existing beds from last year’s garden, in green. The three smaller beds in the middle were going to be where our three varieties of spinach would be planted. I was thinking we might change those up completely. Instead of three short beds oriented East-West, it would probably be better to have two longer beds oriented North-South, like the two we already have. One of the North-South beds was supposed to have shallots planted in it, but the shallot seedlings failed, so we’ll still have three beds available to plant spinach (and whatever else we interplant with them).

Eventually, we will be building accessible raised beds here, so nothing is permanent at this point, anyhow.

There’s also the two small beds – the shorter green rectangles in the above pictures – where we’d planted potatoes last year. There’s nothing stopping us from making those longer, stretching into the skinny bit that’s marked in orange.

So that’s what we’ll do with those areas.

By the time we went back to the new bed, my older daughter was done work for the day and was able to join us.

The first thing they did was stop using the larger wheelbarrow, because it sucks. :-/ Actually, they both do. We need to get a new wheelbarrow! Just one good one is enough. :-)

So one daughter had shovel duty, filling the smaller wheelbarrow, while the other brought it over and dumped it, then I spread the soil until a new load was brought. The job was done very quickly!

The area of straw left uncovered will be a pathway. At some point, we’ll put in some pavers or something, but for now, the straw and cardboard will keep the weeds and grass down. That and lots of tromping it down with our feet. :-)

Each of the haskaps got a load of soil around them, too.

Then, because the hose was handy, the soil got a brief watering, more to keep it from blowing away than anything else.

Our last frost date is June 2, so this will have more than a month for the straw to settle. We’ve got one more warm day, then we’re supposed to get snow. Long range forecast sees more snow and rain into the first few days of May. Any precipitation we get will help settle it more, and we’ll be able to see if we need to add more soil or not.

If all goes well, I will use tomorrow to dig a new bed next to the garlic beds, before things cool down again. That one will be a lot more physical labour than this one was!

I’m looking forward to it. :-)

One area done, many more to go! :-)

The Re-Farmer