planning ahead

Fall clean up: squash beds done

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Yay! The squash beds in the old garden area are now all done.

Also, where the pumpkin mounds were, we now have three new beds.

Here is how it looked when I started.

The bamboo stakes are marking where I planted the seed potatoes I found while digging up the potato beds. It should be interesting to see what happens there in the spring!

Being such a narrow row, it shouldn’t have taken long to prep this area. It was, however, incredibly full of rocks. Not even big ones, really. Just so many! If we decide to continue planting here, this area would be the one most in need of a raised bed. If we do build a raised bed in this area, it’s going to be long, narrow (no more than 2 ft wide), and will have a built in trellis for a back “wall”.

Here is how the pumpkin mounds looked before I started.

The black that you see is the ashes cleaned out of the fire pit.

The crab grass growing through it is noticeably brighter!

Once done, here is how the back row looked.

It’s hard to see through the mulch, but I turned the soil and mulch, so the more decomposed mulch was more on top, and the less decomposed mulch was partially buried. I don’t know what we’ll plant here next year, but whatever it is, it’ll need to be pretty hardy, until we can build the soil up more!

Here is how the pumpkin mounds look now.

I was pretty sure about turning one of the mounds into a larger bed, but with so much crab grass, I didn’t think I would do the others. However, after a year covered in mulch, and a lot fewer rocks then in other areas, the soil was much softer than expected, and I ended up turning them all into larger beds. The one on the left had the least amount of grass and weeds to clean up, but it also had the most rocks that needed to be cleaned out! When I started on the middle mound, the soil was so much better than it had been, I went ahead and dug another bed, pulling up as many weed roots as I could. That went fairly easily with the crab grass. They took the easy route, and their rhizomes spread like a net under the mulch, rather than into the ground. Those come up quite easily.

Then I hit a patch of Creeping Charlie, making its way through the mulch. I lost about an inch or two of topsoil, pulling up those root mats. !!

The third bed was even easier to dig up, so that went very quickly.

So this area now has 6 beds in total, ready for next year. :-)

The next area to prep will be the carrot and beet beds. I’ve been leaving them in the ground as long as possible. Which might be working for the carrots, but the beets are mostly a lost cause. Too many visits from deer! That area will be cleaned out and prepped for the winter garlic that should be coming in within the next couple of weeks.

I will leave that for tomorrow, however. Today, we need to strain the crab apple cider vinegar. We meant to do it yesterday, but so many things went sideways, it got postponed.

I am happy to say that the septic truck did show up yesterday, shortly before 6pm. The poor guy looked so tired! All I could say after greeting him was “long day?” I think he had been bracing himself to be given a hard time for being so late, because all the tension seemed to just droop out of his body as he simply said, “yeah.” He ended up spending half an hour on the tank. I honestly don’t know how my parents emptied the tank only once a year with 7 of us. We didn’t empty it this past spring, since we’d had him come out in the winter, when things started backing up into the basement. So it was more than 6 months since it was cleaned out, and it showed!

When we booked him to come in, I asked how much it would cost so I could take out cash; it’s not like these guys can take debit. ;-) I didn’t have exact change, but when it came time to pay, I didn’t ask for any, even when I confirmed the amount and he gave me a lower number! Maybe he was giving me a deal for being so late but I figure, if anyone deserves a tip, it’s the septic guy! If I’d had more to give him, I would have!

I really, really appreciate people like him. What would we do without people willing to do such dirty jobs?

Meanwhile, I have not heard back from the plumber. We’re getting near the point of having to call someone else. Our plumber knows this place and has been doing work here for many, many years, plus he’s really gone above and beyond for us, so I would rather not go with someone else. But we need to get that well pump changed. We should have done it months ago, but all our “spare” funds went to paying for the new differential on my mother’s car. If it does turn out to be something wrong in the well itself, we want to find that out now, not when there’s snow on the ground! We shall see how that pans out.

The Re-Farmer

Fall clean up: starting the squash beds, plus… this could be bad!

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On my list of things to do today was to prep the squash beds for winter.

Of course, things happened, so I started much later than intended – past 2pm – and didn’t get as much done as I’d planned on.

Here is how it looked when I started.

The first thing I had done we pick up the bricks we’d used to weigh down the plastic we used to cover the beds in the spring, and again under some of the plants to protect the stems or support heavier squash.

You can really see which bed had the most successful plants!

Also, notice the raspberry canes to the left on the foreground? Or, should I say, the bare raspberry canes?

The deer have been nibbling the leaves off those, as well as the sunflowers!

I had brought out both the potato fork and the spade to see which would be better to work on the beds.

It turned out to be the fork. After a year under the mulch, the ground was a lot softer than before, but even with the fork, I had difficulties getting past the rocks. We have only one good spade. I don’t want to break the blade on a rock!

Here is how they looked when I finished for the day.

The bed on the left was still a real chore to dig up. With each section I lifted with the fork, I had to break up the soil by hand. That gave me the opportunity to pull out weed roots and the more in-the-way rocks. The bed on the right was much easier to work, and I had a lot fewer rocks that needed to be pulled out. The squash plants were also buried so they can compost directly into the soil.

I was really happy with how much easier the soil was to work with. To compare, I had pushed the spade into the ground next to the mulched area. After working for a while, I took off my jacket and hung it on the spade. A few minutes later, and a gust of wind turned my jacket into a sail and down it went. So I pushed it into the ground again, this time, standing on the foot supports and bouncing my ample weight on it a few times, then hung my jacket back on the handle. The next stiff breeze, and it fell over again! And I didn’t even hit and rocks when I was pushing in the spade! What a difference, working under the mulched squash beds. Not only was the ground much easier to work, I was finding SO many worms! What a great sign. :-)

The next area I will dig up will be the long row at the back, and then the pumpkin hills in the middle. The one hill nearest the back row, I might enlarge to create another longer bed, but the other two are so surrounded with crab grass, I’m just going to dig up a roughly 4′ x 4′ area and pull out as many rhizomes from there as I can.

The main reason I had to stop, though, we because I started to feel rather unwell. It took a while for me to realize something.

I hadn’t eaten yet, other than a couple of freshly baked cookies, before I headed outside.

Usually, I do my morning rounds outside, then have breakfast while going over the trail cam files. Today, I was out earlier to make sure the gates were open for the septic truck. (Which still hasn’t shown up.) Then I heard someone in the kitchen and with our kitchen being so small, I decided to wait until they were done.

Then my husband came over and informed me we were almost out of butter. He is having a good pain day today for a change, and was up to making cookies, not realizing we didn’t have enough butter to make them. Normally, we would have done our monthly shop by now, and there would have been a whole bunch in the freezer, but we had to take care of other things. We’ll be going in a couple of days.

So I made a quick run into town to pick up a few things along with the butter. I’m glad I did, because once I had a data signal, I started getting texts from our plumber. I’d sent him pictures of our well pump when I was in town yesterday, as he requested, and he was responding to them

*sigh*

The first thing he noted was that the new pump is 1/2 hp, while the old pump is 3/4 hp. My brother bought this pump and he knows the system very well, so I knew it would work. It’s just not as powerful. After seeing the pictures of the old pump, from various angles, he thought the problem might be in the well itself. This is something my brother and I had talked about, as he thinks the foot valve might be leaking. The problem is, this is a very old system. He has actually worked in there before – about 20 years ago! – and that was probably the last time anyone has gone into the well.

So aside from it getting harder to find parts for it, it’s going to be fragile. If he starts opening things up to see what’s what, we might end up with no water at all. I could go to a company that specializes in wells, but they don’t like these old systems, either, and he said we would most likely be told we need a new well drilled. We could instead replace the submersible pump in the well, along with the pump in the basement, and that would take care of all sorts of potential problems down there. I asked him for an idea of what those pumps cost, but before he could get back to me, I had to leave town and head home, where I would no longer be able to get text messages. I sent him a message to phone me later and headed home.

Once at home, I emailed my brother to pass on the info, since he knows the system way better than I do. We both agreed that we should just get the pump in the basement switched to the new one, then see how it goes. If we still have problems, then it would be time to have someone go into the well and see what’s what. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Over the years, the well cover has been damaged. It’s a concrete circle with bent rebar handles embedded in the concrete. At some point, one of those handles got broken right off, and the other is bent down against the concrete. I’m not sure how we would get it open.

So I ended up calling the plumber back and leaving a message about starting with switching out the old pump in the basement and seeing how that goes. I also called the septic company to see if they are still coming out today, but we’ve had no call back from them, either. Which is really, really unusual for them.

I don’t like have the gate not only unlocked, but open, for so long. At least I can keep an eye on it through the live feed of the garage security camera.

It’s still afternoon as I write this, but it feels like it should be several hours later, right now!

I have such an urge to just go to bed right now.

The Re-Farmer

All aglow, and yard helper

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The cat house we now have to provide the outside kitties shelter for the winter has power to it. There are two outlets inside, one of which has a light plugged into it. We’ve never been able to plug it in. The nearest source of power is in the old kitchen. We’ve got an extension cord going through the window that we use, but it wasn’t long enough to reach the cat house.

Yesterday, I was able to pick up a new outdoor 25ft extension cord.

It just barely reached!

But reach, it did!

The problem is, I’m not sure how much the cats will use it, all lit up like that. It’s a 100 watt bulb (under a protective, waterproof cover), so it will also help with warmth a little bit, but I am thinking we might want to find some way to create a shaded area more conducive to sleep.

As for warmth, we’ve been looking at different possibilities, but the biggest issue is one of safety. Most types of heaters would not do well enclosed in a small space full of flax straw and a bunch of cats that like to scratch and dig. My daughter, however, thought that maybe a terrarium heater might work. When clearing out the shelves in my mother’s old bedroom, I did find a red heat bulb for chicks, but it’s a 500 watt bulb. We could get a terrarium bulb in black or blue, that’s 100 or 150 watts – or a no-light ceramic heater that screws in like a light bulb. Like this. (not an affiliate link) I think that would be much safer than some of the warming mats we’ve been looking at.

In fact, I just interrupted writing this post to ask my husband to find a ceramic heater type on Amazon Prime to order. This is not something we would be able to find locally.

Solution found! :-) I think the cats will be much happier with that. Since the cat house has three windows in it, they will still have daylight, or even moonlight, rather than being blinded. We still have a couple of sheets of rigid insulation we can add to the walls or under the roof.

Maybe not the walls. They like to use it as scratching posts! :-D

Meanwhile, we still need to replace the skid under it. When we do, we can move the whole thing a little bit closer to the house, to give the new extension cord some slack. I’ll also be picking up one of those waterproof cord protector boxes, since it will definitely end up buried in snow at some point.

I left the cat house plugged in last night, to see if the cats would use it while lit up. When I came out this morning, I didn’t see any cats in it – though I did see cats on it! :-D Unfortunately, looking through the window, I did see that the cats have been pooping in a corner. *sigh* That didn’t take long! :-(

This little baby looks ready to help me with the yard work!

She was actually hunting leaves blown around by the wind. :-D

I was actually able to pet her, Rosencrantz AND her brother this morning, while feeding them!

I’ve been calling this one Little Braveheart, but the girls have named her Tissue, because she looks like tissue paper blowing in the wind as she runs across the yard.

What do you thing? Braveheart or Tissue?

I’ve been calling her brother the oh-so-original “Tabby”, but the girls have been calling him Nostril, because he had one black nostril. I was telling my husband this, and he immediately went to “Nostril-damus.”

I think we have a winner! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting; Bulls Eye Tulips

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I needed to head into town today, and when I got back, the girls were just finishing planting the last of the bulbs we had. Bulls Eye Tulips.

These have more finicky requirements. They are larger bulbs that need lots of sun, good drainage, and if we want them coming back year after year, deep planting; about 12 inches.

The area selected is in the West yard, among some crab apples and plum trees. This area was cleaned and cleared out of debris two summer ago. With all the dead trees and branches cut away, the ground does get good sunlight, while the remaining branches and surrounding trees protects it from hard rains.

While digging the holes, they found plenty of rocks – so they used them to mark out where the bulbs were planted!

The package came with 8 bulbs in total. When the back ordered items come in, there will be more tulips, which will also be planted in this area. I contacted Veseys, and we can expect our back order in the first or second week of October. Weather Canada has said to expect a long and mild fall and, from the looks of the long range forecast, we should still be good when they come in.

The girls got these in just in time. Shortly after, the winds started to pick up, and it’s blowing pretty good right now. We might be getting another rainfall tonight.

Drainage will definitely not be an issue in this location. In digging the holes for planting, they found the topsoil was only about 6 – 8 inches deep. Then they hit sand and gravel. As far as I know, this whole region is like that. I can remember when the will was dug by the house, after the well in the pump shack failed, and we finally got running water. A trench was dug towards the barn, and pipes laid to provide water to the barn and a couple of drinking fountains for the cows, plus the pipes that got diverted to the septic field. I was pretty young, but the top soil did look quite shallow, and I remember the trench being all through gravel and clay.

Another reason we want to build our soil up. Literally!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting: iris

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I needed to make a run into town today, and by the time I came back, my daughter had selected a place to start planting, and gotten started.

She had selected Eye of the Tiger Iris, and I must say – Vesey’s really missed an opportunity for a punny name! :-D Eye-ris of the Tiger? Eye of the Tigris? :-D

But I digress!

These needed to be planted in a location with plenty of sun and good drainage. She decided they would make a good border on the south edge of the old kitchen garden. She had been digging holes with a trowel for each of the 15 bulbs in the bag. She had forgotten that I found a good spade, buried in the garden shed! Things went much faster when I could just dig a trench for her, instead.

She just had to contend with a few rocks, instead!

We should now have a border of irises extending from the laundry platform, to the chives at the edge of the retaining wall corner.

The only thing left to plant now (until the back ordered items come in) are the Bulls Eye Tulips. These are a little more complicated. They need hard winters (we’ve got that), hot summers (we usually have that) and full sun (we can find that) but they also need to be in a dry location and NOT watered or fertilized in the summer. So we can’t plant them around anything we will be watering or fertilizing. One of the areas we were talking about planting in was by the stone cross, but that’s an area that collects water when the snow melts, so that’s out.

Pretty much the entire West yard is quite dry, though. We might plant them in where the crab apple and plum trees are, south of a row of lilacs. One end of that area does get full sunlight.

We have to decide soon, though. Those bulbs need to get into the ground!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting: snow crocus

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Of all the stuff that we ordered for fall planting this year, the garlic and the grape hyacinth were the two things I wanted. The rest were chosen by my daughters. Especially my younger daughter, who is really interested in flower gardening.

No surprise that she was eager to get out there today, and plant the snow crocuses!

This is the area we worked on today.

The first thing we needed to do was rake and clean up the space.

When I cleaned up in this area, two summers ago, I had to take out a lot of dead trees. I deliberately left really tall stumps, after discovering (the hard way!) what a tripping hazard they were if I didn’t. This year, I have a reciprocating saw, which does a great job of cutting level to the ground.

I took advantage of that.

It took more than a year longer than planned, but most of them are now trimmed. There are just a few further out that I didn’t bother with, yet.

While I was working on that, my daughter finished off the raking, then started scattering the bulbs.

Some of them are so tiny! Like little hazelnuts.

The snow crocus mix my daughter chose included Dorothy, Blue Pearl, Tricolour, Snowbunting and Spring Beauty.

Interestingly, when I looked up the mix on the Vesey’s website, it now has 4, not 5, varieties. It no longer includes the Snowbunting.

After the were all planted, my daughter watered all the areas we planted in, including the grape hyacinth, while I placed more logs to border where we planted.

Here is how it looks now.

It’s too windy to burn the debris from the first rake, which is mostly dead leaves, so that will wait for another day.

This section will have a walking path on both sides. Further north, it’s so shaded under those trees, almost nothing grows under there. Even the row of crab apple trees I found buried under the branches is still struggling – though one branch on one tree did get enough sun to produce some apples! :-/ Anything we end up planting there has to be able to handle a lot of shade, and not much moisture. But that is probably still years from now.

So for this area, we are done with planting for the year. Everything else we’ve got, plus the stuff on back order, will be planted elsewhere. We’ve got another week, at least, of warmer weather, so we will work on keeping these areas well watered.

All of the crocuses are supposed to bloom very early in the spring. I look forward to seeing them! I expect they will be rather spotty for the first few years, until they naturally begin to spread. Until they do, we’ll have to make sure they don’t get overtaken by other things. We can also think about what we might want to plant with them and the grape hyacinth that have different blooming seasons, once we get a good grasp on how they are doing.

At the same time, we’ll be looking into a ground cover in the pathways. By the time this area is done, it should have almost no grass and need no mowing.

One thing we do have to keep in mind as we fill these areas, though, is that we still need to have at least some access into them. If nothing else, we’ll need to pick up fallen branches or remove dead trees!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting grape hyacinth, day two, and planning ahead

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The girls were sweethearts; by the time I got outside, they had already planted at least half of the second bag of grape hyacinths. One daughter was still using the broken trowel to dig the holes! It’s really unfortunate that the auger couldn’t be used. :-( That would have made the job must faster and easier!

I did find another trowel among the odds and ends we found while cleaning out the sun room, but it was so cheap, and the soil so hard, it kept bending. I used a weeding tool to loosen the soil, first, then I could gently dig a tiny little hole for each tiny little bulb. :-)

Then, while one daughter watered both sections we planted the bulbs in, my other daughter and I used pieces from the trees that were cut away from the power lines to mark things off.

At the far end it where a walkway will be. Eventually, there will be a sort of V shaped pair of walkways leading from the fire pit area to the broad path that runs down the middle of the grove. At the dead tree, near where the rolling seat is, we marked around a spot where wild strawberries are growing. There are more of them near a tree to the left of that spot, but with the bulbs planted on either side, we didn’t bother going in to mark them. At some point, I’d like to transplant those strawberries to somewhere they won’t be choked out by grasses and wildfowers, but wild strawberries are not the sort of thing that takes to being handled well. It does make me wonder how they ended up here! I used to find them only deep in the bushes, during very damp years, when I was a kid.

This is the next section we will be working in.

We have 20 bulbs each of 5 different types of snow crocus. This area is very narrow, so it should be quite enough to plant the length of this. These were my daughter’s choice, so I will leave it to her, whether we will plant each type separately, or mix them all together.

The crocus bulbs are even smaller than the grape hyacinth! They need to be only 3 inches deep into the soil.

Weather willing, we should be able to get this done tomorrow. After that, we might be done in this section for this year. We still have a double tulip collection on back order, with a total of 58 bulbs, but I’m not sure where they will be planted. I think they will need more sunlight than they can get in this area. The product info says “partial sunlight”, while the further we go in this area, the more “full shade” it gets! They might do quite well in the old kitchen garden, as long as they are planted closer to the house and away from the ornamental apples.

Something we still have time to think about!

Meanwhile, we will work on keeping these well watered while it’s still warm out, to make sure they are established before winter sets in.

I do hope the back ordered items come in soon. I really want to get the garlic in!

The Re-Farmer

Guess what we’re doing this weekend!

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A package I was expecting next week, came in today! Our first shipments of bulbs for fall planting.

Which the cats found very, very interesting…

That’s better!

Mostly. :-D

We’ve got 2 packages of Muscari (grape hyacinth) of 100 bulbs each. There are 5 bags of crocuses. I believe we were planning to mix these all together and plant them randomly. There are also an iris and tulips. We still have some on back order, including a fall garlic mix. The long term weather forecasts show no temperatures dipping low enough for frost over the next too weeks. Hopefully, the rest of the order will come in before things start to cool down that much again.

The Re-Farmer

Wasps, fire and other things

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Yesterday was a day of running into town a couple of things, but I did manage to get one important – if rather late – job done in the evening.

I burned a fungus.

I really should have done it earlier in the year, but just didn’t have the chance until last night. Mostly because of winds. Yesterday evening was finally calmer. The fungus seemed to be growing anew on the remains of a stump, so I really wanted to get that burned away. Because this was under tree branches, I used the sheet of metal to prevent the flames from getting to high, even though I kept the fire small. It ended up being handy. I found that, by moving it around, I could basically direct the fire to around the stump area more easily, making sure to get all the fungal bits.

I had found the fungus almost a year ago, while taking photos of various mushrooms around the yard. The ones growing on the old apple tree stumps were so pretty and unusual, I looked them up – only to find out they are a deadly disease called Silver Leaf, and likely what is killing our crab apple trees. To get rid of it, at its worst, it is actually recommended to take out the tree, roots and all. I have no way to take out the roots – and this stump is in between two other trees, which are so close together, I wouldn’t be able to do so without damaging the other trees, anyhow.

The larger stump I’d burned earlier shows no signs of growth on it. I still need to burn it the rest of the way down to ground level, just because it’s sticking up so high. I could cut it flush to the ground, but this way, I can also burn the stack of diseased branches we’d pruned away, too.

Reading up on this disease again, I find myself thinking of the fruit and nut trees we intend to plant in the area, in the relatively near future. We might have to get brutal to eliminate the disease, and simply cut down any tree that shows signs of the disease. This includes inedible crab apple trees closer to the house, where several have already died. Even the plums (also an inedible variety, but one that my dad used to make wine out of) show signs of it.

*sigh*

That would be a job for next year. For now, we will just burn away what we can, including the pruned branches.

This morning, I headed over to do a meter reading on our power pole. I’ve stayed away, since it’s got a wasp nest under it, so I haven’t actually looked at the nest for a month.

Hhhmmm.

It… looked pretty quiet in there.

Was that spider webs I was seeing in the opening???

Yup.

There was a dead wasp in the opening, too.

I am guessing this nest, being as exposed as it is, did not survive that frost we got not long ago. The tree by the house is still buzzing, so the wasps inside it are still active, but I can probably remove this nest safely, now.

I don’t want to destroy it, though, so I’ll think about how to take it down with as little damage to the nest as possible. I should be able to peel it away from the box and the post easily enough. That power cable it is built around will require greater care.

There was also a snoozing moth next to it! :-)

In other things…

The reason we had to go into town a couple of times yesterday was because the girls had arranged for a vet visit for Leyendecker. The boy is now snipped!

It still blows me away how expensive it is to get that done – and it costs twice as much for females! Thankfully, the girls are taking care of that, as they are able.

I took advantage of being in town to pick up some scrub brushes, including for just outside stuff. This morning, I finally was able to give the outside cat water bowls a thorough scrubbing. I was even able to scrub the bird bath. I’m amazed we got another year out of that thing! It developed such big cracks in it over the winter, and yet it still holds water!

Oddly, this year I have found a couple of drowned frogs in it. We’ve been seeing a lot of little frogs in the garden plots this year, which is great, but why would we have drowned frogs in the bird bath? I keep a brick in it, so the smaller birds can more easily reach the water. Plus, with all those cracks and not expecting it to hold water very well, I haven’t been keeping it as full as I used to. Any frog should have been able to get out of the water, easily.

I’ll have to keep a closer eye on it, now that I’ve cleaned it and refilled it. So strange!

The Re-Farmer

Getting bigger

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Yesterday evening, while doing my rounds and walking around the back of the house, I startled some babies!

Butterscotch seems to have moved her kittens from the junk pile to under the garden shed.

Her kittens are getting so much bigger and more adventurous, wandering further afield in the yard.

I suspect this has something to do with why Butterscotch as moved them. Wherever they are inside the junk pile, it must be getting a bit tight for her and the 4 of them to fit!

Which means that, with the wasp nest gone and the kittens elsewhere (though they do go back to the junk pile to play), I can continue cleaning up in that area.

Now, if only Butterscotch had been willing to move them to the other side of the house, where the food bowls and the old dog house are!

When topping up the kibble, I put one of the containers in the entrance to the doghouse. Recently, I was noticing a definite skunk smell in there, so yesterday, I lifted the roof, fluffed up the straw and left it open to air out for a while. I am trying to think of other ways to encourage the cats to go in there for shelter, but I think it’s going to take winter temperatures to finally convince them!

As for bigger things, look what I found this morning.

It’s the only one that got big like this!

It seems we had a light frost last night (there were no frost warnings), and some of the little squashes actually look a bit frozen. At this point, I don’t think they’re going to get much bigger. I will check them later today, and might just pick what’s left, then start cleaning up the beds in preparation for winter.

This morning, I got a shipping confirmation for part of the fall plantings we ordered. Unfortunately, the garlic was among the things that are back ordered, so they will be shipped later. Still, we will be able to get started on the varieties of flowers we will be naturalizing in the maple grove. I can also leave the beets and carrots in the ground a bit longer, while we wait for the garlic that will be planted there once they are harvested.

It looks like I’ll be able to accomplish more in a few weeks in the fall, than I’d been able to over the past few months, with this summer’s heat! :-)

The Re-Farmer