preparing garden beds

Getting things done, and which is it?

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I’m happy to day I did actually get some progress done outside.

Last night, however, I was up late doing some research on well pumps and pressure tanks.

I’ve been angsting about our well pump since we moved out here. I’ve never been able to ascertain what “normal” sounds like. Thanks go my brother, we do have a new pump ready and waiting to be installed, but no plumber has dared do it. I explain about it in this post from 2020. Basically, there was a possibility the foot valve was leaking, because the pump would start running, even when no one was using water, and they were concerned that if they switched out the pump, the foot valve could break apart. If that happened, we would have no water at all and could potentially need a new well dug.

Eventually, though, we figured out that we have phantom flush. I just happened to be on the toilet in the wee hours of the morning when I heard the water start going in the tank, to refill it. We replaced all the parts in pieces in the tank, but it was still happening. Finally, I just took the refill out of the overflow, so it filled directly into the tank instead, and the phantom flush stopped. Why it worked, I have no idea, but it did.

So with that problem “solved” (we actually want to replace the toilet, for a number of reasons), we figured it should be safe to replace the tank. We just don’t have a budget for it.

Well, in the last while, the pump sounding more and more grindy,. It runs for a normal length of time and the pressure is good. Most likely, it’s the bearings.

Which is bad enough on its own, but lately it’s been going off way too often. Every time the toilet is flushed, even if it’s been on person right after the other, using it. When someone is in the shower or the washing machine is going, it starts running so often, it may as well not have stopped in between (as I hear the pump starting up again, while my daughter is in the shower). We’re also losing pressure faster, which is always most noticeable in the kitchen, which is the farthest sink from the pump and tanks.

After looking things up, it looks like the pressure tank is starting to lose pressure. There can be a number of reasons for this, but the end result is the same. The tank can’t keep up the pressure, so the pump keeps having to turn on to refill it. Depending on the size, a new pressure tank can cost anywhere from about $200 to over $500. For the amount of water we use, we would need a somewhat larger tank (I think this one is a 7 gallon tank), I’d love to get a 20 gallon tank. That way, if we ever get those water fountains by the barn serviced, we could turn the tap on in the basement, and there would be continuous water available for any animals we might get, or even for the renter’s cows. These fountains are insulated and keep the water warm enough to never freeze, too.

But that’s not an option now, and to meet our needs, we’d want at least the same size as what we have no, no smaller.

This morning, I messaged my brother about it. The tanks I looked at all say “compatible with most deep well pumps”, but he’s the one that knows the system better than anyone living.

He doesn’t think it’s the pressure tank.

He thinks it’s the foot valve. He says it was last replaced 20 years ago.

Well, I don’t know how it can get replaced. The bottom of the well access is a concrete floor, with pipes running to the house through the side near the bottom. I don’t know how the well pipe itself can be accessed. The plumber seemed to think that the concrete on the bottom would have to be broken up. Which doesn’t make sense, if the foot valve was replaced 20 years ago. We should be able to pull it up somehow.

I’ll have to consult my brother about that.

Whether it’s the pressure tank or the foot valve that needs replacing, either way it would be a good time to install the new pump!

All these pumps and tanks are the greatest source of stress for me. Water related or septic related!

So that’s something I really would rather not have to worry about. There’s absolutely nothing we can do about it right now, either.

What I did instead was my morning rounds, after feeding the outside cats. While coming back from checking the gate, I realized I was seeing an amazing full moon, and just had to try for some pictures. I even found someplace to steady my phone against, so I could zoom in.

Now that I see the picture on my desktop, it looks so detailed, I’m wondering if the camera automatically “fixed” the photo. That was a bit of a “scandal” some years ago, and that “feature” was supposed to have been dropped.

As I was going through the garden, I checked out the sunflowers. This past frost has killed them off, so any remaining seed heads will never reach maturity. I did, however, find this one…

It is possible that this one has viable seeds in it! I’ve tucked it into the portable greenhouse for now, to dry out some more. It would be nice to try again from our own seeds. Every generation of seeds collected will be better adapted to our local climate.

While the frost killed up most of the things that were exposed (I still haven’t tried peaking under the cover for the winter squash), one thing is doing just fine.

The self seeded peas just keep getting bigger!

Once the morning rounds were done, I waited until things warmed up a bit in the afternoon before continuing with the stuff from the sun room that I had soaking over night. Most of it could be spread out, hung up or set up to dry. Except for the garden mesh. Today turned out to be ridiculously windy, so unraveling those will have to wait. For now, they’re set aside with their bin upside down over them, so they hopefully will not blow away.

That old sheet I found that was repurposed to cover garden beds sure had it’s moments when I tried to hang it on the line. Lots of clothes pins needed! Sure dried fast, though. 😄

I’m so glad I though to put that old roof panel onto the shelf shelter! This little feral kitten could enjoy a warm sun spot while completely protected from the wind.

Eventually, I got things done as much as I could until things dried. After my daughter and I get back from her appointment in the city, I’m hoping to finally put everything in bins with lids, and get them out of the yard again! I need that space to paint the isolation shelter.

The next thing to work on was that garden bed I’d started on a couple days ago.

*sigh*

With all the years of amending the soil, prepping these beds for the winter should only have taken about 15 minutes each. Half an hour, if the rocks and weeds were really bad.

Instead, I’m fighting those !$%&$! tree roots!

Where I’d stopped, last time, had a bit root sticking up and I had to use the loppers to cut that. Then I just kept working my way down that side of the bed. In the first picture, you can see some of the roots I was exposing as I worked my way down. By this point, the soil was so dense with roots, I actually had a hard time pushing the garden fork through it!

The second picture was taken when I finally got that side done. I’d emptied the rocks bucket before I started, so these just rocks I’d picked today. When I stopped last time, I had worked past the half way point, so this was from about a third of one side of the bed. That pile I raked up at the end, near the bucket, is almost all tree roots. Very few normal weeds.

That last photo was taken from the unworked side of the bed. There were a could of bigger roots that I pulled up, but I won’t be able to get the rest out until I’ve worked the other side of the bed.

None of this was there when I planted the peas and carrots in it in the spring. All those roots are just one summer’s growth.

My mother keeps giving me a hard time for being such a bad gardener. Meanwhile, it’s the self seeded trees she deliberately left, after transplanting the raspberries they’d been growing through, that is causing me more problems that all the rocks! The roots are growing into where the soil is easiest to grow in – the soil I’ve been amending to grow vegetables in. So they’re filling the beds and taking up all the water and nutrients, and I’m not even finding it until the end of the season, after the damage is done. This, on top of dealing with drought conditions and smoke this year.

Trees are not always good thing.

One of these days, I’ve got to snag a daughter and our cutting equipment, and take down the entire row of elms and maples. Then we’ll have to find a way to make sure they don’t grow back! Otherwise, even as we build these up into high raised beds, the roots will still find their way up and into the growing zone.

It’s taking a lot longer than it should, but at least I did get some progress in today. Whether I manage to get any done tomorrow, after we get back from the city, will depend on how much daylight we have left.

Little by little, it’s getting done.

The Re-Farmer

How things went today

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I’ll start with the more pleasant things!

First up, while doing my morning rounds, I spotted something very white in the wood chip pile, from quite a distance. Check these out!

The first picture was of a group of three very round mushrooms – I thought they were puffballs at first, until I saw the stems. The next three pictures are with my hand for perspective – then I found a fourth one, off to the side!

I have no idea if they are edible, and have no intention of finding out.

As I was heading inside, I found this adorable cuddle puddle.

Two of them! The smallest kittens really like to pile together.

Once the morning round were done, I was able to get a few things done before heading to my mother’s. My brother came out today, but he had to focus on replacing the radiator on one of his tractors that got damaged last fall, then try to get it going. Days are short, so I just popped over to say hello before I headed out.

When I got to my mother’s, she was all “prepared” for me. I barely got through the door! She had ice cream buckets of tomatoes she wanted me to take home. One of her neighbours in her building has had a great tomato year in their little garden plot and has been leaving boxes of them in the common room for people to help themselves. My mother keeps taking more than she needs for herself, because apparently no one else is taking any, and she doesn’t want them to go to waste.

So… she gives them to me.

While I was getting the two ice cream buckets of tomatoes out from under her table for her, I saw her collection of jugs for her drinking and cooking water, so I refilled those right away.

There were other errands she wanted me to do, but I told her I’d do them after I’ve put away her groceries.

She didn’t have a list, so I sat down to start that with her. It took a while, because she kept wanting to go on about other things. There’s one home care worker she has issues with in particular. For a basic med assist, they are supposed to be there for 5 minutes, making sure she takes her medication before they leave. The morning assist is for 10 minutes, as they are supposed to help with emptying the commode or helping apply her Voltaren to her back. This one rushes to put the meds in the little bowl she has for them, to make sure they’re all there (sometimes, they can get caught in the packaging), locked the box up and leaves without making sure my mother takes her meds. Apparently, she’s been so rough with the lock box, she ended up knocking my mom’s phone off its charger and just left it where it fell.

My mother was also angry about her new schedule. She has five evenings, which is two med assists done by the same person, plus four mornings, done by someone else (out of a 2 week schedule) listed as “unfilled”. I tried to explain to her that they have to have the schedules out by a certain time, so if they don’t have someone for a specific date or time, they have to list it as “unfilled”. That doesn’t mean they won’t find someone. Just that they hadn’t, before the deadline. My mother thinks it means people are going to show up because they’ve… called in sick, in advance? She doesn’t understand how scheduling works.

It did give me a chance to try and talk to my mother about things she can do to try and get herself into a nursing home faster. I tried to explain that, because she’s only getting med assists, they basically view her as being able to care for herself. But if she takes advantage of the other assists they have available – meal assists, bathing assists, dressing assisted, etc. – that would go a long way to helping her get in faster.

She just got angry at me. She doesn’t trust the home care workers (there’s one that she says is really good at her job, and that’s the one that helped care for my father, before he went into the nursing home) and doesn’t want them touching her or preparing her meals. I tried to explain why she needed to get it anyhow and, besides, if she were in a nursing home, she’d be having that all done for her, anyhow. To which she said, in a nursing home, she would have “professionals”. I told her, the home care workers are “professionals”. They may or may not be good at their jobs, but they get training, first.

At one point she told me she had been talking to a woman that used to live in our little hamlet, that I went to school with. Her mother lived in the same building as my mother, having moved in a few years ago. It turns out her mother is in a nursing home now! She was visiting a friend and stopped to chat with my mother. As my mother told her how much she wants to be in a nursing home, she was told to try falling down! Which is pretty much what I was thinking, but hadn’t mentioned. My mother is constantly afraid of falling down, so she is super careful not to. If, however, she did have a fall, she’d have to use her Lifeline to get help, because she certainly couldn’t get up again on her own. They could call her an ambulance (and would call me to inform me of any issues). Chances are if that happened, my mother would end up going straight to a nursing home or supportive living, somewhere.

She did mention about the last time she used her Lifeline to talk to someone about her she was feeling. At the end of it, she was asked if there was anything else they could do for her. She said, help me get into a nursing home! The person on the Lifeline said they would talk to someone higher up about it.

I don’t know what they can do, but if there’s something, it would help! Lord knows, my mother isn’t willing to do anything herself that would get her in faster. We keep telling her things that would help (like getting other home care assistance that they have available), but she just refuses. I can understand why, but she doesn’t understand that she is sabotaging herself. She much prefers to complain and expect other people to do things for her, not do them herself. This is not a new thing. She’s been like this for as long as I can remember.

After much circular conversation, I did manage to get a shopping list written down for her. Some of it was “see how it looks” or “depends on the price” type stuff. She needed more of her Voltaren, too, so a trip to the pharmacy was also in order.

I was able to find everything she wanted, and even got her a pumpkin pie as a treat I was pretty sure she would be happy with. Either she’d be happy, or she’d be angry. Thankfully, she was in a good mood, and was very happy to see the pie!

Once everything was put away, she insisted I sit with a cup of tea for a while before I finished doing things like sweeping her floor, taking care of her garbage, etc. Then she foisted a bag of aluminum foil she saved from her Meals on Wheels packaging onto me, together with the tomatoes! She’s been carefully washing and setting aside the foil each part of her meal is wrapped in. From the amount in the bag, it’s been probably a year’s worth of foil! She thought I might be able to use them in the garden (??) or something. I told her, I could add them to our aluminum recycling. We save up our aluminum until it’s worth the trip to the salvage yard. She was quite happy with that idea.

All in all, the visit with my mom was pretty good. Just one racist rant I had to distract away from, and during the times she did get angry because she didn’t like what she was being told, it wasn’t quite the personal attacks on me such things often become. It was actually a pretty good visit, as far as that goes with my mother!

That done, I had a request from my husband, so I went to the town we usually go to for our local shopping. The difference in prices between grocery stores was worth the extra driving.

Thankfully, fruit cake was not part of his shopping list.

I could not believe how expensive these fruitcakes have become! Not that long ago, seeing them at prices above $7 was considered expensive!

After I got the few things on my husband’s list and made a stop at the gas station, it was time for home.

My brother was still working on his tractor, so I headed over for a quick hello and to update him a bit about how it went with Mom. Then I went in to change into my grubbies to do some work in the garden, instead of in the sun room, while there was still light enough.

I made sure to water the winter squash and cover them for the night, first. We’re supposed to get rain, but it’s also supposed to get cold enough that I’m not sure the winter squash would survive it. They might be kept covered for several days, if the 7 day forecast is at all accurate. The next three nights in particular will probably put an end to the eggplant, peppers and summer squash, so if there’s anything to bring in an ripen indoors, tomorrow will be the day to do it.

I need to get more garden beds ready for winter sowing, though, and today I started working on the bed the carrots and peas were grown in.

*sigh*

I got a little more than a quarter of it done. As I was working my way down one side, I kept getting tangled up in tree roots. It was a while before I found root they were all coming from and got that pulled out. Then I found more from another root!

It was starting to get dark, so I didn’t want to start fighting with roots I couldn’t quite find yet, so I decided to call it a night. For all the work done in these beds, particularly when they got shifted to their permanent locations, getting them ready for the winter should be easy. All of these roots I’m hitting were not there in the spring. I’m blown away by how far they are extending from the trees, and how big they are.

According to the weather apps, we’re supposed to get rain all night and all through tomorrow, with heavy rain warning. So it might be a couple of days before I can continue. The overnight lows that had been forecast to drop below freezing have changed to just at freezing. Hopefully, the cover will be enough for the winter squash. After that one cold night, we’re actually supposed to get decent, if cool, weather again. That would be a good time to get the garlic in.

Well, we’ll see what actually happens! I’ll take the mild weather for as long as possible!

The Re-Farmer

Work in the garden is good for the heart – especially when our mothers aren’t.

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I had two main goals for today. The first was to take care of my mother’s morning med assist and do her grocery shopping. The second was to get more progress cleaning up in the garden beds.

My mother turned out to be having one of “those” days.

It actually started off okay. She was in bed and not wanting to get up. I can’t say I blame her! She told me she feels like she just wants to lie in bed all the time, these days.

I got her morning meds out. I took out her other type if inhaler, too – the one that home care workers aren’t allowed to give her. I’d already talked to her about the doctor removing it from her med assist list for home care, and she doesn’t need to take it anymore, but when I’d called last night to let her know I’d be coming over, she told me she decided she would keep taking it after all.

When I brought it out, I told her again, she doesn’t need to use it. The doctor removed it from her prescription list. The experiment was to see if she had asthma, and she clearly doesn’t. It won’t hurt her to take it, but it’s not helping her and she doesn’t need to.

Usually, my mother is all about trying to drop her medications because she doesn’t think they’re helping. If they were helping, why does she feel this, or that, or this other thing? when her meds are for completely different things. Now she has a medication that was a trail, it isn’t helping her, she doesn’t need it… and suddenly she wants to keep taking it?

I told her I’d planned to take it to the pharmacy for proper disposal, but in the end I just left it out of the lock box for her to take or not take. It only has 28 doses left in it, so 14 days of daily use, if she keeps it up.

She had not made her shopping list, so after she took her medications, I went through her fridge and cupboards and we talked about what she needed before sitting down and making her list with her. Then she gave me cash in an envelope; I always make sure that the change and receipt is put back into it for her to go over at her leisure, later on.

All of that went smoothly, and I was soon back and putting everything away for her.

My brain is already trying to wipe things out, but I think it was the spaghetti squash that started it.

This is what WP AI image generator thinks my mother looks like.

My mother no longer has a garden plot, officially, but she did grow a spaghetti squash along the fence outside her window, which produced for her a single spaghetti squash. She’d already eaten half of it, but struggles with the hard skin, so she offered the other half to me. I politely declined, saying I was the only one in the family that likes spaghetti squash.

That lead to a lecture on how we’re all so fussy, and that it just needs to be cooked right (she still thinks I don’t know how to cook), etc.

Then she offered me some of the seeds she’d saved from her spaghetti squash. Again, I politely declined (I just told her I’m the only one that likes it; why would I grow something no one else wants to eat?) and told her I have lots of seeds.

While all this conversation was going on, I started sweeping her floor and doing other little things, as I usually try to do for her. She kept going on about the garden, asking me about how our garden is. I had told her before that it was a messed up year, but I told her again, things were really behind this year. We had the spring with hot days in May, but too cold nights. Then we had drought conditions, heat waves, and wildfire smoke. So the garden really sufferred.

Oh, I’m the only one complaining about the smoke! No one else is! (I wasn’t complaining, just listing it among other things) I have two daughters to help me! I should have a big garden, etc. etc. etc. I should have so much food from the garden, etc. etc. I told her, we did have some, just not much, and even tried to show her pictures of the winter squash and said I have been managing to keep them from freezing. Freezing? she asked. I guess she forgot that we’ve already had frost, and that our nights are getting pretty cold.

Then she just flat out said: I’m a bad gardener

My response was, And you’re very rude.

She agreed.

???

It was around that time, when I’d just finished sweeping her floor and was about to start emptying all her garbage cans, that the door opened and my brother walked in! He’d been on the way to the farm and decided to swing past my mother’s place to see if I was still there. He saw a Caravan parked, and knew the courtesy vehicle I had was a Caravan, so he decided to pop in.

He barely walked in and gave her a hug hello when she started going at him, immediately asking about pictures of his grand kids. My brother has shown her digital pictures, but she wants something she can tack onto her wall. The problem is, the last time he gave her prints of the grand kids, the first thing she did was ask if one of his grandsons was Downs Syndrome or something. Which neither of them are, but she didn’t like how one of them looked and basically said he looked retarded.

Needless to say, he’s not eager to give her more photos of his grandsons.

I don’t even know if he has a printer anymore. My sister’s the one that’s into that stuff, so she’s got a high end printer. I think my mother even paid for it. Anyhow, I tried to distract her away from that, then continued into empty her garbage cans into one bag then, emptied her commode.

Which is how I missed the first part of what they’d started talking about. I didn’t get the straight of it until much later, here at the farm, as we filled in my SIL.

It turns out our vandal had showed up at my mother’s place on Tuesday. The day the mental health assessor was interviewing my mother. It seems he walked right into her apartment and immediately started ranting at her, right in front of a stranger, about how she gave the farm to me (????), then started saying nasty things about my one of my daughters, (getting them mixed up, apparently) that were complete fabrications. He hasn’t seen either of them in years. Someone, however, seems to be telling him things (like my younger daughter having a PCOS beard), and then he’s going from there and just making things up. He didn’t even use my daughter’s correct name! Whichever one he meant to be talking about, anyhow.

My mother, however, believed him. ?!?! She started saying that it was true. As if she knows any better?

I’d asked my mother before about how that meeting with the mental health assessor went, and she just brushed her off in disgust, saying she wasn’t any use, and had told my mother something along the lines of, “there are people worse off than you”. Which is true, but pissed my mother off. My mother did NOT mention that our vandal showed up.

Or that the interview was cut short and that the assessor left with our vandal.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Red flag time!

Now that we know this happened, both my brother and I plan to phone the mental health assessor. If I’d known earlier, I would have already phoned her by now!

Meanwhile, in the middle of all this, my mother found the time to ask us to take her angel here to the farm. Years ago, my brother bought her a resin garden decor angel that my mother just loves. She’s been doing a lot of “when I go up-up, who is going to take this? Who is going to take that?” After confirming that no one else among my siblings wanted it, I assured her it would go to the farm. It’s made to be outdoors, so I said I would set it up somewhere nice.

My brother and I then joked that we should set it up facing the gate, so our vandal would see it and maybe be reminded that the things he’s doing isn’t particularly Godly. Or whatever.

Today, my mother brought it up and asked if we could take it.

That was our cue.

My poor brother was there for less than 10 minutes, and got jumped all over right from the moment he came in. He didn’t even have time to finish giving her a hello hug before she started, and he was more than happy to leave right away.

In bringing the angel out, he noticed there was a crack under one wing. That led to a whole other thing with my mother, because she didn’t know it was there. My brother suggested it had fallen over, but she said it had never fallen. We quickly distracted away from guessing, though. Later on, my brother said it probably happened when her apartment was being fumigated, and someone knocked it over. She’s already convinced the exterminator stole things from her, so my brother wasn’t about to bring that up around her!

We headed out together, with me taking her garbage out and my brother carrying the angel to load into the van. I used the fob to open the rear gate for him before going out the other door to the building’s garbage bin.

As I came around, my brother was trying to figure out how to get the angel into the back. One of the third row of seats would need to be folded down. As he was looking around, I decided to open up the side door to try and see from the other side. I had the key fob in my hand as I did.

I accidentally hit the panic button on the fob – or so I thought. The horn started honking an alarm.

I tried hitting the panic button again, but it only changed the pattern of honking. I couldn’t see how to shut the honking off, and the buttons I pushed didn’t work! My brother has seen this type of square key fob before, so I showed it to him, but he didn’t know either. He just started smashing buttons, and it stopped.

Well, the entire neighbourhood now knew we were there!

In the end, I figured out that I hadn’t accidentally hit the panic button. I had tried to open the door, while it was still locked. I didn’t even know the van had an alarm, but with the rear gate open, I thought the other doors were unlocked as well for some reason. So I had set off the car alarm. I think it stopped when my brother hit the unlock button while button smashing!

At least it worked.

We then headed off here to the farm.

I brought the angel to the door, messaging a daughter to bring it in. Because of the cracked wing, it will need to be repaired and sealed before we set it up outside. Otherwise, water will get inside it.

I joined my brother and SIL in their “new” camper – it’s the first time I’ve been inside it – and we had a chance to catch up my SIL on how things went. My brother and I both needed to decompress, that’s for sure! There was more than what I mention here, of course. The main concern was our vandal showing up like that – and leaving with the mental health assessor!

After we had a visit, I left them to their work. They needed to winterize the camper and the trailer, and would only be around for a few hours. I headed in to grab lunch, change and get to work in the garden.

Which was very therapeutic. Part way through, my younger daughter even came out to check on me and make sure I was okay, after that visit, which was much appreciated.

My focus for today was on the beds with carrots in them, both winter sown and spring sown. I started on the East yard garden bed, removing the bamboo stake trellis that was holding up the radish bushes, first.

After the trellis was removed, I pulled all the remaining radishes – this bed had quite a few go to seed – and lettuces. Some of the lettuce were going to seed, so I broke off the tops and set them aside to collect the seeds later. Everything else went onto the compost pile.

While this bed had the same root vegetable mix as the high raised bed, it also had lettuce seeds added. Those grew so well, they became a weed and choked other things out. I was curious to see how the carrots did, under those conditions.

The answer is “surprisingly well”.

They’re mostly small, and some of the smallest ones at the end just got added to the compost pile, but it was actually better than I expected. There were even a few of the orange “Napoli” carrots in there. Those seeds were pretty old, so I wasn’t sure what to expect with them.

Once the carrots were harvested, I went over the entire bed, loosening the soil and pulling weeds, none of which could be added to the compost pile, or they’d start growing again!

There was one carrot that had gone to seed, so I gave it a support stake and left it to finish maturing.

The soil was pretty compacted and hard to clear. I know there’s still lots of weeds in there, but I plan to amend the soil before any winter sowing gets done, so there will be time to get more of them.

From there, I moved on to the high raised bed.

Again, I pulled the few radish bushes that were left in there, then started on harvesting the carrots. These ones were not crowed out, like the other winter sown bed was, and I could really see a difference!

I was pleasantly surprised by how many orange Napoli carrots there were.

Once the carrots were out and I started weeding, I found these…

A couple of those beets are supposed to be white, but they look more yellow than white. Then there are the teeny onions. I’d picked what beets we had, earlier, but these had no greens left (thanks to the deer), so I’d missed them. As for the onions, I’d included onion seeds in the mixed, but only a couple managed to form proper bulbs. With these ones, I could potentially use them as sets for next year.

Once again, I left a carrot gone to seed. It had branches sprawling all over, but now they’re held together in the support stake. I’ve already cut some of the seed heads off a while back, as they were fully dry, and now there’s more that I could probably harvest now.

The next bed to work on was the spring sown bed. Being in an almost ground level bed, it was easier. I could just go along each side with the garden fork to loosen the soil, first.

Which was much needed. Compaction is a definite problem.

The first carrots I picked where the Uzbek Golden carrots using our home made seed tape.

I’m rather surprised by how well these did.

There was also a surprise orange carrot among them! I also noticed that some of the yellow carrots had a more orange caste to them as well.

The other side were the Atomic Red carrots.

With these ones, we’ve been thinning by harvesting, as needed. That gave them space to get bigger… but they didn’t get much longer! These are supposed to be a deep red and quite long. Instead, we have light orange and stubby.

Odd.

I didn’t continue cleaning up the bed, though. That’s for another day. This took several hours – my brother and SIL headed out before I even finished the first bed, it took so long – and it was time to stop.

Not before gathering the harvest and giving it a quick hose down, first.

A lot of them are pretty small, which will make them harder to work with, but that’s a pretty decent amount of carrots. Plus a few bonus beets!

I was glad to have the work to do. Physical labour goes a long way to working out any stress and, after being with my mother this morning, I had plenty of stress to work off!

Now, I need to head back outside. It’s getting dark, and we’re in for a cold enough night that the winter squash need to be covered again.

But I’m such a bad gardener, don’t ya know!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: last of the potatoes, prepping beds and a bumper crop

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I’m happy to say I was able to get some progress in the garden yesterday evening, and again today.

I did not continue cleaning the sun room today. My daughter will finish that, but she will restart tomorrow. It turned out that, after trying to keep up with me yesterday, she hurt her back! I keep forgetting, I’m the most able bodied person in the household right now. The kittens, meanwhile, have been piling into the cat cage. It got a bit chilly last night – cold enough that I covered the winter squash, but not cold enough to cover the summer squash, peppers or eggplant – and they was a whole crowd of littles in the cat cage’s cat bed. Most of the other cat beds they could access are outside right now. Only one of the smaller kittens has figured out there are cat beds on the platform, and is able to climb up the shelf to get to them. With the floor now dry, I did put one of the cat beds and the self heating mat on the floor for them to use.

This is what I was able to get done yesterday, before it got too dark.

This is the bed that had three types of tomatoes, bush beans and self seeded carrots in it. I pulled the remaining stems and roots of the tomatoes an the bush beans and set them aside. They will get buried in the bed later on. In the second picture, you can see the finished bed. Most of what I pulled out of there can’t go into the compost, as their roots will spread. In the last picture, you can see the bonus Uzbek Golden carrots that were large enough to keep. The greens will also be buried in the bed. I’ll be doing some amending later one. I’ll be using this bed for winter sowing, but have not yet decided what I will put in it.

This afternoon was pretty hot, so I chose to harvest the last of the potatoes, then work on that bed. At this time of the year, and at that time of the day, most of the bed was shaded by trees, so it was a lot more comfortable to work on.

This is how many potatoes I found in the remaining two or three feet of the bed.

I was really surprised by how many tree roots I was finding while I dug them up. That’s quite the distance! I thought that maybe they were from the other direction, but the nearest tree on the south side is the chokecherry tree. They spread through their roots, but the suckers all come up close to the main trunk. As I worked on the bed, though, it was clear what direction the roots were coming from.

I ended up making a short video when I was done.

I cleaned up only one long side of the bed before I had to stop for hydration and sustenance. I’ll probably work on the rest tomorrow. At the end, you can see all the rocks I “harvested”. !!! Keep in mind that this bed had been amended several times, the soil sifted several times, most recently when all the beds were sifted over into their permanent positions. Not only that but this bed was winter sown with summer squash, which did not take, so it was trenched and cleaned up before we planted the potatoes.

All those rocks were what we “grew” since the potatoes were planted in the spring. Just the bigger ones that were easier to pick up, and I know there were plenty that got missed because they kept getting buried in the soil while I loosened it and pulled as many weeds and roots as I could.

Before I headed in for a break, I just had to check out the blooming asters.

Sir Robin was already checking them out.

Still no Cosmos, but there do seem to be a few more flower buds trying to develop.

Tonight is supposed to be a bit warmer, so I don’t plan to cover the winter squash again, unless that changes. The next couple of nights are looking chilly enough that I might cover the other beds, too. Unless I decide to harvest the Turkish Orange eggplants, first. The peppers can stay for a while longer, as long as the weather holds.

I have decided the bed I’m working on now will be where I plant the garlic in a few weeks. This time, I’m thinking of making sure to mark exactly where they are planted, and then interplanting with something else before the ground freezes. Maybe spinach and/or some other greens. In theory, the garlic should protect any greens growing with them from the deer, same as onions can. The greens would be finished before the garlic is ready to harvest, and could be succession sowed with something else that’s quick growing. Bush beans, perhaps. We shall see.

It’s not a lot of progress. As usual, it was a bigger job than expected. Particularly as I got closer to the north end of the bed, where both the tree roots and rocks were so much denser. Still, a little progress is better than none at all!

The Re-Farmer

Foggy morning, parasitic weeds, cuteness, garden update and doctor visits.

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The garden clean up has officially started!

Not until rather late in the day for that sort of thing, but it’s started!

This morning was surprisingly foggy, and actually seemed to get denser as I did my rounds.

While going around the row of crab apple trees, I noticed some pretty little flowers in the grass. Just a little patch.

Thankfully, just a little patch!

I pulled all that I could find. We have these all along the shoulders of our gravel roads. In one of the nasty voice mail messages our vandal left on my brother’s cell phone, he said that there was red bartsia in the second quarter section our renter is taking care of. That quarter is just used for pasture now, though it also has trees, a pond and marshland. Our vandal still thinks the property should be his, so he was having a screaming fit on the message about how I should get my [insert vile and disgusting insult] daughters out there with lawn mowers to get rid of it.

If you follow the link about the weed, you’ll note it specifically says, “Mowing is not reccomended.”

With the arrangement made with the rent, they’ll be the ones dealing with it. This stuff is parasitic with grasses, and can do real damage to pastures. Cows can’t eat it.

We can’t do much about the roadways, but we can keep it out of the areas we are responsible for, at least! It’s bad enough that we’re dealing with creeping bellflower and creeping Charlie.

While uncovering the garden beds this morning, I was happy to finally see some colour among the peppers.

That was this morning. This evening, I went looking and did find another with some colour showing at the very tip. Also red. No sign of yellow or orange in any of this mix of peppers.

I didn’t start any projects outside this morning, as my daughter and I had consecutive appointments with our doctor early this afternoon. We got some Dairy Queen coupons in the mail, so we left early enough to have lunch in town before continuing on to larger town our doctor is in (I just double checked; it’s not large enough to be considered a city, yet). They weren’t very busy, and my daughter got called in for her appointment right on time. Mine was half an hour later, and I got called in on time, too.

All I was there for was to go over my X-rays. With my hand/wrist, it was confirmed that I did NOT break anything in my fall. It just still hurts at times. More my shoulder than where I landed on my palm, even after all this time. Not that anything could have been done about it, if there had been a break. It’s been quite a while since my fall!

It was my hip that I really wanted to see about. According to the lab report, there is actually very little change since the last time I got X-rays done, some five years ago! The arthritis and bone spurs aren’t any worse.

I told her about the issues I’ve been having. I told her, with the anti-inflammatories making everything else so much better, when it comes to things like my hip, the pain is more acute, now that there isn’t so many other aches and pains muffling it. She was nodding her head as was saying this. It’s very typical! I described the issues I was having with my hip, using last night as an example. As soon as I lie down, it starts to hurt. Eventually, I had to get up and take some pain killers, which didn’t really do much. I got up again and used some of the Voltaren lotion, and that finally did the trick. Only then could I sleep. It’s been getting more painful, though at least I can now put weight on that leg when taking the stairs again. When I mentioned that, she suggested it was due to increased activity. I told her that was very likely, since I’m outside working and winterizing while the weather is good. She just laughed and said, “making hay while the sun shines!” Yup. She gets it!

She said that it sounded like tendonitis, so she has referred me to a sports injury physician. This would be in a clinic in the city, but one that is straightforward for us to get to. It would be decided by the specialist, but she felt that getting a steroid injection to the hip might be helpful.

She was writing up the referral as I was leaving. I was done my appointment a whole 6 minutes after it was scheduled! My daughter had already booked her own follow up appointment a couple of months from now and was waiting for me in the truck. No extra trips to the pharmacy or anything, but we did make a quick stop at a grocery store and a gas station before heading home. I was looking to get a flat of 30 eggs, but chokes at the $15 price tag. It was actually cheaper to buy two 18’s, instead. Weird.

After we got home, I was soon outside, starting with the evening feeding of the yard cats. I’ve actually reduced the amount of food I put out, because there are so few adult cats around these days!

Must share the adorableness, of course.

Frank is such a good mama, and her kittens are adorable. When I checked on them this morning, one kitten had one eye stuck shut, which was easy to address. Another had both eyes stuck shut and I ended up bringing that one into the bathroom for an eye washing. This afternoon, that kitten’s eyes were both stuck shut again, so we’ll have to keep close watch on it.

Speaking of good mamas…

Adam is so patient!

After I took the video that’s after the still shot, that tuxedo pushed its way under the smaller kittens, hunting for nip! Only then did Adam move, pushing him away with a back leg so he’s stop messing with a kitten that was still attached.

As I was scrubbing out and refilling water bowls, I spotted some kittens in the portable greenhouse. Now that they’ve discovered it, they really enjoy staying in there – even when the thermometer in there was reading 50C/122F!!!

I’m not sure if the little tabby in the first picture is part of Slick’s litter or not. They usually stick close to junk pile, shrine feeding station and isolation shelter, but there’s one little tabby that comes to the house and even into the sun room. I think it’s actually from another litter, but I really can’t tell.

That black and white with the blue eyes in the next photo is a stunner.

After tending to the yard cats, I started watering the garden. There was just enough water in the rain barrel to do the old kitchen garden beds. The Turkish Orange eggplants were drooping! Everything else was looking better, but those Turkish Orange eggplant seem to be really sensitive to all sorts of things. They can’t handle cooler temperatures well, and they seem to not handle heat very well, either! Or at least the dryness that comes with the heat. They’re watered just as much as the peppers, which haven’t shown any drooping at all. We reached a high of 23C/73F, but our low is supposed to be 9C/48F, so I’ll be covering them for one more night. According to the 10 day forecast, the overnight temperatures are expected to be warm enough to not cover them anymore, and I could even be leaving the winter squash uncovered for the night, too.

Once the watering was done, it was time to start.

It’s clean up time!

For now, I’m working on infrastructure.

The woven bamboo stake trellis I made for the Spoon tomatoes is now dismantled. The tomato cage wall I set up to keep the deer from eating the Super Sugar Snap peas I was leaving to go to seed is down. The soaker hose that was around the Spoon tomatoes and melons was removed, but I’m leaving the one around the winter squash for now. Hoops and stakes and fasteners collected. Most of the stakes with deer distracting pinwheels on them were already set aside. Some of the water bottle noise makers were collected. Not pictured is the post I’ve started using to hold the plastic collars that were around the Spoon tomatoes. I haven’t taken the ones off the melons, yet.

Remarkably, I’m seeing new flowers on the pumpkin vines I thought were killed off. There’s even some melons, still green and trying to bloom. I think the plastic collars actually helped them survive the frosts! My big surprise this morning, though, as finding more bush beans to pick. Only a small handful, but I expect to continue to get little handfuls of beans for at least another couple of weeks, if the weather holds, and I keep watering!

I’ve got a lot more stakes and ties to collect, but I will need to snag possibly both daughters to help me remove the protective netting that is currently pulled up and over the tops of the beds. It needs to be stretched out and straightened before we can fold it up into more manageable sizes, then roll it up for storage, and this particular netting is surprisingly difficult to handle. It snags on EVERYTHING!

As I clean up all the structural stuff, it’s all being brought to the bench by the garden shed for sorting and organizing.

This was the stuff I could do with the time I had this evening. With no outings scheduled, for the next few days I hope to work on more time consuming projects.

I’ve been thinking about that inner wall on the garden bed in the old kitchen garden I’ve been working on. I was going to take out the wattles I’ve got so far, add another stake in between each of the current ones, and find more material to weave a wall. The problem is, even with extra stakes to weave around, I just don’t think I have suitable material for weaving.

So I think I’m going to skip the weaving entirely.

Instead, I’ll do a version of what I think is called a dead hedge, though a very short, narrow version. I’ll be adding vertical stakes to make two rows, a few inches apart, and just lay the horizontals in between them to form the wall. No trying to bend anything. As long as it’s dense enough to hold the soil in, I’ll be happy!

That narrow little bed is taking a ridiculously long time to work on. Lots of experimenting in the process.

That’s just one job I want to work on. Unfortunately, there are so many larger jobs to get done before it starts getting too cold, it gets hard to prioritize which ones need to be started first! Looking at the long range forecast, I’ve got maybe 9 or 10 days before the temperatures start to drop. There’s even a mix of rain and snow in the long range forecast, a little over two weeks from today.

Well, however it works out. As long as I have garden beds ready in October, for planting garlic first, and then doing our winter sowing before the ground freezes.

Lots of work to do!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026? garden: prepping the next wattle weave bed

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With today’s heat, I chose a job that had me mostly in the shade.

It was still way too hot, which was bad enough on its own. Being eaten alive by mosquitoes while I worked was brutal! Gotta find our cans of bug spray!

The goal for today in this bed was simply to weed it and move the soil away from where the wattle weave wall will be.

The first couple of pictures in the slideshow above are the “before” views. Then I removed the sticks that were used to hold the logs used as walls in place. Most of them were broken, but a few looked salvageable.

I had intended to leave that bottom log in place, but I think I’ll leave it out. It’s not the complete length of the bed, for starters, and there were shorter logs and pieces of logs added to the ends. Plus, one end of the longest log is looking pretty rotten. I think it can still be used somewhere else. Just not here.

This bed has had a few years of amendments in it so, while it was somewhat compacted, it didn’t take much to use a garden fork and loosen it again. Which is good, because this is the first time I’ve put my left arm through this level of work since I injured it. I can use my right arm, if necessary, but it doesn’t hold out as well, and the motor control is not as good. It was more of an issue when using the garden fork. I never really thought about it before, but it turns out I use that mostly left handed. Once I was doing the actual weeding and using the little hand cultivator, though, it was less of an issue. Turns out I use that mostly with my right hand.

There weren’t actually a lot of weed in there. It hasn’t been watered, other than by rain, all year, so it was incredibly dry. What weeds did make it were easy to pull up.

It was the roots that were the main problem.

Some of the roots were from the ornamental crab apple trees. All along one section, I was pulling up smaller roots that were clearly attached to a much larger root running down the length of the bed, deeper down. From the direction others were coming from as I pulled them up, I think they were probably from the lilac bush. A few may have been from the rose bushes.

Wherever they came from, most of the debris in that wheelbarrow is tree or bush roots, not weeds!

After the weeding and loosening of soil was done, I used a hoe to pull the soil towards the retaining wall, then level out the ends and the edges, where the wattle weave will be done.

I’ve decided to make the bed shorter. At each and, I will find something I can lay down to use to step on to go into the garden from the other side of the retaining wall.

I’ve also decided I will use the retaining wall itself and add a short wattle weave wall along the middle of the bed, right on top of the blocks. I figure, if I’m going to be redoing this bed anyhow, I may as well make it a fair bit higher, so it’s easier on the back. It’s already only about 2 feet wide, which should be good for reach, but the lower the bed, the further the reach. As it has been, I could reach across, but it would get pretty painful, pretty fast. It will depend on how much material I can collect, but it would be really good if I could get this bed’s walls at least two feet high. Getting posts to weave around at that height will not be a problem, but the weaving takes a LOT of material.

I’ve been monitoring various willows and poplars and maples for potential material. For the vertical posts, I will be using maple again; the inadvertent coppice by the pump shack needs to be cleared away from the power line anyhow, and it looks like there are some nice, strong suckers suitable for the job.

With the first wattle weave bed, I kept running out of materials, so in there, I ended up using mostly poplar, but also some maple and willow. This time, I think I will have a decent amount of willow I can harvest, but I should have a fair amount of useable poplar, too. The problem is that a lot of the switches that I’d be harvesting aren’t straight all the way, but either branch off or completely split off, part way up. Since I plan to have closed ends on this, I’ll need quite a few pieces that are only about 2 feet long, so they would still be useable.

I plan to gather the materials as I need to use them. The vertical posts will be done, first, which I’m hoping to get done tomorrow, weather willing. For the weaving, I want cut and use the switches right away, so they are still green and flexible. The weaving will loosen up as they dry out and shrink, but at least they will be less likely to snap on me as I weave them around the vertical posts. Alternatively, I could harvest the switches and let them dry out completely, then soak them before use, but I don’t have anything long enough to soak them in. I’d need a water trough of some kind. Which we probably have, lying in the junk in the outer yard or beyond. Something we might plan for in the future, as I expect to make more wattle weave structures over time.

So the soil part of the job is done for now. Once the walls are built higher, more will need to be added, which will be a good time to amend with sulfur granules for next year. I might even have a chance to pick up a bale of peat to add to it as well. It’s going to take years of amending to get our soil less alkaline, never mind slightly acidic.

Since this garden is right up against the house, over time it will become our culinary garden, with herbs and greens and fast maturing vegetables that we can just pop out and harvest as we need. Herbs for tea and/or medicinals will also be included. There are a lot of herbs that can be used as all those things. I’d like to transplant the rhubarb to a better location, though. They are very handy where they are, but they’re at the foot of the crab apple trees, which keep them from getting adequate sun and rain. We’re not quite ready to get rid of the ornamental crab apples entirely, yet, and I don’t know that we’d be getting rid of both of them. It’s the one in the south west corner that is causing the most problems, but they do provide nice shade, look amazing when in bloom, and the grossbeaks love those tiny little apples.

All in good time.

For now, I’m just glad I got as much done as I did, in the heat!

The Re-Farmer

Reclaiming space

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When it came time to start working on our first permanent trellis bed, I had hoped to be able to get in with the weed trimmer, first. It just up and died on me while I was using it a few days ago. I hoped it just needed to cool down or something, so I tested it.

Nothing. Not a click or a whirr or a home. Nothing.

*sigh*

So I went and got the push mower my brother has loaned us.

Where the trellis beds are going to be built is over an area we actually made garden beds, a few years ago. Sections were covered in cardboard, potatoes and melons planted, then heavily mulched with straw.

We had spring flooding that year and very little survived.

After that, we just lost control of the space and it became completely overgrown.

To reclaim the space, we will be building pairs of raised beds joined by trellis tunnels. One beds it built and being used right now, but we need to finish adding three vertical supports before we can have something our Red Noodle Beans can climb.

Before working on that, though, I wanted to clear the overgrown space beside it. One part of it had been measured and marked off for the next bed. I had cut poplars to use for the vertical supports, and those had been stacked nearby – and were completely hidden by the tall grass.

So my first job was to find and pull out all the logs, and set them aside in an area that was already mowed.

Which you can see in the first photo of the slideshow below.

After making sure there were not chunks of wood, rocks, markers, etc. hidden in the grass, I went over it with the push mower, set at its highest level.

Then I went over it again, set a mid height.

Then I went over about 2/3rd of it again, this time with the mower as low as it could go, and only in one direction. At this point, I was hitting the old straw mulch in places, and I wanted the clippings to be easy to rake up, later. They will make a good mulch, after sitting in the sun for a day or two.

In the second photo, you can see the entire cleared area.

It was getting insanely hot, and I knew I wasn’t up to working on the trellis in the heat, so I decided to get the next raised bed space prepped.

I have a couple of small logs that are exactly 4′ long. These beds are going to be 4′ wide, with 4′ wide paths in between, and I’ve found these logs make it easy to mark the spaces. Which is what I’ve done in the next photo. I’ve butted the logs up against the frame, not the vertical supports at the corners. That marked off the width of the path. Then I got out one of my rolls of plastic to set over where the new bed is going to be, to start solarizing.

Well. Sort of.

To have the plastic really cook the weeds and grass and seeds in the soil, the plastic needs to be taught against the soil surface. Since I couldn’t use the weed trimmer to get the space cleared right to the soil surface, the plastic will be sitting on top of the cut stems. It’ll still get cooked in places, but will also act like a greenhouse.

Which is fine. I can work with that.

I also hosed the area down, first. The moisture will get really hot under there and help cook the weeds and seeds, too.

The plastic is wider than 4′, so there is some overlap into the paths, which is also good. The big sheet is actually folded in half and I considered opening it up and covering a larger space, but it’s starting to get old and tattery, so I just re-folded it more neatly, then set it out. It’s not long enough to cover the full 18′ the bed will be, so the last section is covered with a clear dollar store shower curtain.

Then is was time to weigh it down.

I shifted the 4′ logs over so that they are now marking the next 4′ that will the the width of the next raised bed. Then I used some of the logs I’d pulled out of the tall grass to weigh down the edges. There were a couple of small gaps, so I used bricks to weight those down.

I had been using some old conduit pipe I’d found in the barn to mark off where the beds would be. I ended up adding those, plus another short little log, on top of the plastic, to try and get it closer to the soil surface. Then the whole thing got sprayed with water to try and weigh it down even more.

By the time all that was done, so was I. At least for working in direct sunlight.

I did have the lawn mower handy, though.

I hiked the deck up again, then started working on the maple grove. We haven’t been able to mow in there all year, except for the beginnings of a path I’d started before running out of gas, and not being able to get back to.

When I was done, I ended up taking a little video of how much I’d managed to do.

I sound out of breath because I literally just finished mowing. The grass was about 2-3 feet high in there, and still is in places I couldn’t get into with the mower.

When we first moved here, this area was not only overgrown, but filled with trees that had been cut down but never cut up and removed, lots of fallen branches, and it was basically impassible. When I was a kid, I used to keep this area mowed regularly, as was as inside the spruce grow.

It’ll be a few years before we get to that level again!

It does feel good to have finally gotten at least this much mowed.

Then I came in for hydration, rest and supper!

It’s still light out and starting to cool down… oh… never mind. I just checked the temperature, and it’s gone back up again! We are getting thunderstorm warnings which don’t actually affect our area, but the winds are certainly picking up.

I might just have to call it a day. Tomorrow, I’ve got to take the truck into town for the autobody shop to go over, then to get new tires. A old friend from high school is in town and contacted me, so we’ll be meeting up somewhere while the tires are being done. That’s all in the afternoon, though. If I can manage a solid night’s sleep, I should be able to get work done on the trellis bed in the morning.

We’ll see what the morning brings!

I may not have gotten the trellis sports up, but I am glad to have started reclaiming more of those old garden beds, though.

I’d call that a win.

Oh, and I have a bit of cuteness to share. I spotted some eyes watching me from the creeping bellflower leaves…

This seems to be one of the more feral cats we can’t get close to, but I’m not sure. It does like to hang around to watch what’s going on, though. 😊

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: new asparagus and strawberry bed is in

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It was way too hot for this kind of work today, but once I started, it had to be finished!

I had picked up some asparagus crowns and bare root strawberries at Canadian Tire, some time ago. According to Instagram, I posted this 5 weeks ago (as of this writing).

The Purple Passion is the same variety of asparagus we’ve got in the failed bed (though some new spears showed up recently, so they are still trying to survive!). The plan had been to add a new bed of green asparagus the next year but, for a variety of reasons, that just didn’t happen. Which is probably for the best, as it gave us more time to learn the different areas and decide where to plant. The current bed seemed like a great place for something that’s expected to produce for 20 years. We had no idea at the time, how much that location was affected by spring flooding! We should have been able to start harvesting from there two years ago, at least. Instead, I’m shocked if any spears show up at all.

For green asparagus, I chose Jersey Giant. With the strawberries, I wanted to try the White Carolina again. We tried growing those a few years back, but not a single one survived. The spot we’d tried growing them in was overrun by grass and weeds almost immediately. Now, it is the resting place for one of the yard cats that passed last year. For the red strawberries, I chose another everbearing variety, Ozark Beauty. With most strawberries, it’s recommended to prune any flowers in their first season. That isn’t necessary with everbearing varieties.

Here is a slideshow of the new bed. Instagram is letting me do slideshows of more then 10 images now. I don’t know why, but I appreciate it!

The first couple of photos shows the location I decided on. This area was a squash patch for a couple of years. We dug holes and amended the soil to create hills for individual transplants, since it was impractical to do the entire area. The rest of the space was mulched with carboard, straw and grass clippings. A section of it has been covered with the black … landscape fabric? I salvaged from around the old wood pile, for the past two years. It came in handy to spread out grass clippings to dry in the sun a bit, before using it as mulch, so that was an extra layer to ensure no sunlight got to the soil. With so much crab grass, dandelions and other weeds, it took a lot to kill that off! Even so, it’s amazing how much I still saw trying to grow under there!

The new bed was to be built along the northernmost edge. It will get the most sunlight, there. Unfortunately, it’s also closest to the row of maple and elm trees my mother allowed to grow. She used to have a row of raspberries there. After a few years, she transplanted them to a new location, and these trees were found growing in between them. My mother decided to leave them for “shelter from the wind”.

Which wasn’t needed there.

I once estimated and calculated how much of the original garden space here was lost because these trees were allowed to grow there. It came out to roughly 1200 sq ft. What I didn’t know at the time, however, is just how invasive the elm tree roots are, and it’s been a battle to reclaim garden space from them, ever since.

Before I started preparing the soil, though, I set the roots and crowns into buckets of water from the rain barrel to hydrate. I wanted them to have at least an hour to soak, but they couldn’t stay in there for too long, either. Once they were in the water, that was it. There was no option to stop part way through, and continue tomorrow or something.

The soil under the fabric was pretty compacted, of course, so the first thing to do was simply go over it with a garden fork to coarsely break it up, starting about four feet away from the garlic bed. That bed will eventually have log walls around it, and I took that into account while pacing off what will be a four foot wide walking path.

This was also the start of taking out rocks and roots, but mostly I just wanted to get things broken up, from end to end. Unfortunately, there was a fairly large ant hill in the very last squash hill. It had been completely under the fabric, so I had no idea it was there until I started on this today.

Once the first pass was done, it was time to get the soil fluffed up and cleared out. Which involved straddling the worked on area and twisting the garden fork into the soil until it was broken up enough to get into it by hand. In places, there were entire mats of small tree roots to pull out. Then there were the thicker roots that needed to be cut with the loppers. And, of course, there were the rocks.

So.

Many.

Rocks.

Not even particularly large rocks. Yet, every time I tried to push the garden fork into the soil, I was hitting rocks. If I was lucky, the tines would scrape and slide through them. If not, I’d get jammed into a dead stop. Which could get rather painful at times!

The roots got tossed into the grass towards the trees. The rocks got tossed onto the landscaping fabric. We might find a use for them. They did keep the wind from blowing the folded over section back over where I was working, at least.

I worked on that, section by section, little by little. After about an hour, I still hadn’t reached the half way point! I’d set up the rolling seat in the shade and brought water bottles, but ended up messaging a daughter to see if more could be brought out, because I went through those pretty fast! It wasn’t even the hottest part of the day, yet. My daughter was a sweetie and brought me four water bottles, just in case. 💖

The roots and rocks were the worst at the far end, where the ant hill was. I was very thankful for gloves and tall boots, at that point! The ants were very angry.

We’ll never get any garden bed completely clear of rocks and roots, but I could at least make it better. Once I had done as much as was reasonable, I used the landscape rake to pull the loosened soil to one side and create a trench for the asparagus. That, of course, exposed more roots and rocks to clear out.

Once the trench was dug, I emptied the remains of a bag of manure along the trench, then used the garden fork to work it into the soil at the bottom a bit. Then, I filled with it with water, using water pressure to level the soil on the bottom of the trench, more or less. After a thorough soaking, I raked back a hill to plant the crowns on, and gave that a watering, too.

Each bag had 5 crowns in it, so I paced out and marked where to plant them, about a foot apart (they should be more like 2 feet apart, but the bed wasn’t large enough for that), from the ends. That way, there was a slightly larger gap in the centre, between the two varieties.

The Jersey Giant crowns were huge compared to the Purple Passion ones. You can see the Jersey Giant in the image showing the entire bed. The photo with just the one asparagus crown in it is of one of the larger Purple Passion crowns. A couple of them were so small that, once they were pressed into the dark soil, they practically disappeared!

The crowns got another watering, and then the rest of the soil was pulled back to bury them, creating a hill where the trench was. I used the landscaping rake – that thing is so useful! – tamping the soil down and leveling the top. The bags the crowns were in had wood shavings with them, so I scattered that on top. It isn’t enough to be a mulch, but it will protect the soil at least a little bit. These will be mulched thoroughly, over the next while.

The asparagus planted and watered, I made another shallow trench in front of them, from end to end. The covered asparagus crowns got another watering, then I used the jet setting on the hose nozzle to drill into the mini-trench for the strawberries. I emptied a couple of buckets of rainwater that the roots had soaked in, into the trench as well.

The white strawberries were planted in the half closer to the garlic bed. The packages had 10 bare roots each, so I placed a marker at just each end of where the varieties were planted. The white strawberries actually had a bit of growth starting on them! As with the asparagus, I started at the ends and worked my way to the middle. The red strawberries turned out to have a couple of extra bare roots in them, so the spacing got adjusted a bit. Of course, once they were planted, they got watered again. The bags the strawberries were in had what looked like peat in them, and I dumped that into the buckets the strawberry roots were rehydrating in, to soak for a bit. After the strawberries were planted and watered, I carefully emptied the buckets with the hydrated peat over the rows, too.

I used the packaging to label both the strawberries and the asparagus at the centre of the bed.

Then everything got watered again.

Last of all was protective measures.

I had a log that was meant for the trellis beds that was too damaged by weather, so I set that along the far side of the asparagus. Then I grabbed the wonky log in the old kitchen garden that is going to be replaced with wattle weave, and used that for the rest of the bed. This log is a lot longer, so there’s excess, but that’s okay. We just have to watch not to trip on it.

Then there were the strawberries. I raided the old garden shed for some old dollar store wire border fencing that was here when we moved in. I set those out almost right on top of the strawberries. Hopefully, that will keep any cats from digging in the loose soil and using it as a litter box.

All of this took over 4 hours to do. Probably almost twice as long as it would have taken on a cooler day, where I wasn’t making sure to stop and hydrate so often!

Over the next while, mulch will be added on and around where the plants are. Especially the asparagus hill, as those were not buried as deep as they should have been. I couldn’t dig any deeper, with all the rocks I was hitting.

I’m going to have to replace the handle on my garden fork again.

The main things it, it’s finally done! Now, we wait and see what survives!

It’s not even 6pm as I write this, and I am ready to go to bed right now. Partly because I had a terrible night last night, starting with Butterscotch deciding to pee on my shoulder and my bed. ???!!!??? I had just changed my bedding, too.

Fenrir, I found, was loafed beside the one litter box Butterscotch will use. Fenrir chases Butterscotch away when she tries to use the litter. When Butterscotch peed on my shoulder, I chased off Fenrir and put Butterscotch directly into the litter box, and she immediately started to use it.

While three tabbies suddenly converged in stalking mode, with her as the target.

I chased them off, only for Fenrir to come back and make a bee-line for Butterscotch.

In the end, I had to sit there with a spray bottle, standing guard over Butterscotch, so she could use the litter.

Then I snagged a daughter to help me change my bedding again, after I cleaned myself up and changed.

I finally got back to bed and even fell asleep when a cat crashed onto my head.

My first thought was that my glasses were broken, until I woke up enough to remember I wasn’t wearing them. I thought it might have been Butterscotch, but she was loafed in the shelf above my pillow, so I don’t know which cat dive bombed my skull. This morning, I actually spotted a couple of wounds on my forehead from it, though!

Eventually, I was able to get back to bed and try to sleep when…

… the next thing I know, Butterscotch is peeing on my bed, right next to my head, again.

Thankfully, I caught her fast enough that no bedding change was needed again. I chased her off, but she panicked and disappeared. I had to chase all the other cats out of my room for the night. Butterscotch was alarmed by my reaction and hiding. My older daughter helped me out with giving the cats treats to try and give me some peace before they started clawing at my daughter.

At this point, it was late enough that she offered to take care of the morning routine, including feeding both the inside and outside cats, so I could sleep in. With the kittens getting lysine laced cat soup now, I spent some time letting her know what the routine currently includes. I made sure that the morning feeding for Butterscotch was done right away, so my daughters wouldn’t have to open my door to do it, in the morning.

After all those hours in the sun in the garden, they’ll be taking over the evening rounds today, too!

During the night, I kept getting awakened by the sound of litter use. With the other cats gone, it was as if Butterscotch was testing out all three litter boxes! From the crunching noises, she seemed to be trying out the other food bowls, too! I keep food and water bowls, just for her, on my craft table, and the other bowls to distract the cats from her, but they always converge on her bowls, as if they somehow taste better than the same food in other bowls! So she doesn’t get any peace from them there, either.

Then she came over for aggressive snuggles.

At one point, I woke up and she was lying on top of me, her face pushed under my hand. Even in the dark, I could see she was watching me with an almost loving gaze. Well. As loving as a gaze from Butterscotch can be. 😄 She was really appreciating not having other cats around!

I was, of course, awakened several times by cats scratching at my door.

*sigh*

This morning, I spent some time on Amazon, looking for cat calming things to try out. Hopefully, the postal strike won’t be a problem. They went on strike just before Christmas because, of course, and were ordered back to work by the government. The strike didn’t actually end, though, and now they’re talking about walking the picket lines again. They aren’t garnering much public sympathy at all, though. They already have high wages and massive perks that most people can only dream of. Demanding extras like free sex change surgery while 25% of the Canada’s population is needing to go to food banks right now is not helping their cause. The postal system needs to be revamped to match modern requirements, but as a crown corporation, that requires Parliament to act, and they’re just going into session for a few days before breaking for summer. Canada effectively has had no functioning government for the past 3 years, and Parliament has been out of session for months. We won’t be getting a budget this year, but the Governor General is still authorizing billions in spending that is supposed to be approved by Parliament. The GG doesn’t have that authority under these conditions, but our new dictatorship is just as bad as the old dictatorship, if not worse.

Needless to say, they don’t give a rip if Canadians stop getting their mail because Canada Post is throwing a tantrum to get their way.

Living where we do, it’s not like we have other options. So I could order something from Amazon on payday, but the chances of actually getting it aren’t very good.

Wow. What a ramble, brought on because we’ve got a super stressed out cat that needs help!

I, on the other hand, would just love to get a full night’s sleep, so I can get more work done!

I am very happy to have finally gotten those asparagus crowns and bare root strawberries in. I’ll take what progress I can get!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: reclaiming a bed

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By the time I finished prepping and planting in the flower bed, things were getting pretty hot out, but I had one more bed I wanted to work on.

The low raised bed with the frame that still need to be assembled.

This is where we had winter squash with trellised peas and beans, last year. It has been completely taken over by dandelions!

It took quite a while, just to loosen the soil enough to get started. Compaction was also an issue.

And rocks. A surprising number of rocks, considering it’s been picked over and cleared of rocks every years for several years now! Then the soil needed to be broken up more, section by section, so the weeds could be pulled without leaving behind any roots. Not that I can get every root, but at least it’s better!

The dandelions, with their deep tap root, was one thing. The crab grass with their endless rhizomes weren’t as bad as I thought they would be.

Finding elm tree roots all the way at the far end of the bed, though… that’s just insane! The bed is 18′ long, and it’s another 7 feet or so from the North end of the bed to the tree line. These were clearly Chinese elm roots, too.

Those trees have got to go!

Once the weeds were pulled and raked away, the soil surface got raked a couple of times, too. The first time, using the thatching rake, which pulled out more rocks and weed roots. Once that was cleared and leveled, I went over it with a fan rake, and that found more rocks and weeds, too!

After the bed was cleared and leveled, I got the roll of plastic that had been used to solarize the bed the peas and carrots are now in and covered the freshly cleared soil. This will help warm the soil up more – and keep it from getting too cold overnight – in preparation for planting or transplanting. I haven’t decided what to put in here, yet. Nothing will go in here until the beginning of June, though, so any weeds that were missed will have a chance to start growing again, and will be easer to get pull when it’s time to remove the plastic.

With this bed done, I was also done for the day!

At least, I was when it came to preparing things in the garden.

After chatting with my SIL, who was mowing the outer yard at the time for a while, I went to check on the walnuts that were planted. Things were getting pretty dry, so I filled the wagon with watering cans and buckets of water and gave them a thorough watering. I watered the Korean Pine, too. We really need to remember to water the outer yard transplants more often. Especially with our upcoming heat and lack of rain. We’re not expecting rain until the first week or two of June.

At least they’re no longer predicting snow and freezing overnight temperatures!

I’m very happy with how much progress I got today. There’s still lots to do, and we’ll have to work around the hottest hours. I just have to remind myself not to over do it, or I’ll end up losing several days due to pain while recovering.

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer

Getting things done!

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Today was a really lovely fall day! We reached a high of 12C/54F this afternoon, making it perfect to get things done in the garden.

But first, the cuteness.

I managed to get a picture of Eye Baby this morning. Not a very good picture, but the best I could get! He just will not stay still long enough for a photo.

His one eye is still looking weird, but it is SO much better than it was! I honestly expected him to loose the eye.

I have no idea how much, if any, sight he has in that eye. There is no difference in how he manages, compared to the other kittens.

He needs a face wash, but now that we’re not grabbing him every evening to give him antibiotics anymore, he has no patience for that sort of thing!

My first goal of the day was to finish clearing the raised bed I’d taken the netting and supports off of, yesterday. I got the T posts out, then worked on weeding it.

It needed a LOT of weeding.

When I got to the seed onions, I pulled them out and set them aside until the bed was cleared.

Once the bed was cleared, the seed onions got transplanted again. There was four of them, including two bulbs together that I split.

After the frost did in the lone ground cherry that showed up in this bed, I found there had been a whole bunch of berries hiding under the foliage. They had been completely hidden until then! I’d gathered those up and set them aside, earlier. Today, I decided to go ahead and plant them in the area next to the onions. I just took the berries, still in their casing, and shoved them in like they were garlic bulbs. If there are any viable seeds and they survive the winter, they should do all right. This end of the bed gets more sun than the other one, so they’ll have a better chance at having a full growing season.

Or, none of them will make it, and I’ll plant something else there.

In the next photo of the slide show above, you can see the entire bed was mulched, with grass clippings. I have the end with the seed onions and ground cherries a thicker mulch, while the rest of the bed was just lightly covered, to protect the soil, more than anything else.

The next bed to work on was the eggplant and hot pepper bed. That bed was mulched with cardboard around the transplants, then grass clippings, so not a lot of weeds got through. With this bed, I just did a chop and drop with the dead remains of the eggplants and pepper plants.

Hmmm… the photos are not lined up the way I set them when I uploaded them to Instagram!

Anyhow…

In the second photo, you can see the yellow Mason’s line I used across the middle of the cover. It had been bowing out. The box frame is the same size, so I used that as my guide as I pulled in the side of the cover frame. I didn’t bother doing anything to the wire mesh, as I plan to replace it with something stronger at some point. This wire mesh is just too bendy.

With this done, my next job was to go through all the stakes and supports I’d gathered together. It took quite some time to organize them. We have metal stakes in two sizes that got bundled up, making use of the garden twist ties that had also been set aside for next year. The bamboo stakes were sorted by height and, for some of them, thickness before being bundled up. The smaller, broken pieces were tucked into a bucket in the garden shed, as they are still useful as supports.

Then there were the hoops and wire fences and other odds and sots that got organized and bundled. The remaining ties and clips were organized as well. We have one of those rolling seats – we found it when we were cleaning the new part basement of the house – that got lubricant added to various places before that got put into the shed for the winter, too.

That old garden shed may be dilapidated and falling apart, but it’s still managing to be useful! It would be good if we could finally gets started on building a replacement next spring.

With everything finally sorted and put away, it was time to work on the cat house. The first thing was to set up an extension cord through the window of the old kitchen. I’d put hooks up last year so we could run the cord above our heads, rather than across the floor, with another outside, keeping the cord snug into the corner of the door frame, so both the inner and outer doors could still open and close without damaging it.

There is a fair bit of excess cord that we usually kept tucked to one side on the ground. This time, I got a utility hook I’d picked up for something else, only to find something better, later on, and used that. So now the excess length is neatly wrapped up on the side of the kibble house, instead of laying on the ground.

As for the cat house itself, my younger daughter did the bulk of the cleaning. After getting the roof open, my job was mostly to make sure it didn’t drop (highly unlikely, but possible) while my daughter clambered inside. There was a large crocheted blanket on the floor, on top of some high density foam mats I found in the barn. It’s too heavy to wash in the washing machine, so we set that aside. The last time we were able to wash it, we used the kiddie pool, but that now has drainage holes in the bottom so it can be used as a garden bed.

I plan to get more. They are very handy.

For now, it’s set aside.

The two cat beds in there were pretty torn up. I don’t know if they’re worth washing, or should be just thrown away. They ended up in the shelf shelter for now.

We decided not to return the litter box. The cats just kicked the litter pellets all over and made a mess, but didn’t seem to have actually used it much.

After sweeping up the inside, we added the two new cat beds that were donated, one at each of the larger windows. The insides of the windows all got washed, too.

The heat bulb was plugged in and tested, as was the smoke detector. We also added a small cat blanket we had in the sun room.

The cats were very, very interested in what we were doing, this whole time. When it came time to close up the roof, we had to be very careful, in case a cat decided to jump up at the last moment!

Once that was down and the crates returned to their place under the counterweight, my daughter and I worked on the rain barrel. It was full of water, so we used the watering cans to empty it until it was empty enough to tip over and drain completely. It’s now set on its side in the old kitchen garden for the winter.

By the time that was done, we were starting to lose the light and time to call it a day. The outside cats got their evening feeding (even though it was really just late afternoon) and we were done with outside stuff for the day.

The next while is supposed to be cooler, though were are still expected to get a few days as warm as 7C/45F or 8C/46F. We might actually get some rain tomorrow afternoon/evening, but otherwise, it should be clear. While the main things that needed to get done are now done, there is always more to do. Right now, my goal for tomorrow is to move the insulated tarp aside and sow the wildflower seeds over the area beneath.

Anything else we manage to get done around the yard and garden at this point is just bonus.

I’m really glad to have been able to take advantage of what will probably be our last actual warm day of the year!

Little by little, it’s getting done.

The Re-Farmer