self seeded

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

Our 2025 Garden: Surprise finds!

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While going through what’s left of the garden as I do my evening rounds, I’m constantly surprised by what’s still surviving. The still blooming summer squash and eggplant. The pumpkin vines growing new leaves and blooming. The bush beans still blooming and producing.

This evening, however, I had some more unexpected surprise finds.

The first was tomatoes!

Yes. Actual tomatoes are ripening. The tiny self seeded tomatoes in the trellis bed got hit hard by the frosts we got at the beginning of the month, but mostly survived. To find a spray of ripening tomatoes, however, was the last thing I expected to find! It also confirms that they are Spoon tomatoes.

The next two pictures are of pea plants I found near the end of the bed with the newly completed log frame around it. The last picture was of a group of three pea plants I had unknowingly stepped on! We didn’t grow peas in that bed. They were in the bed next to it, roughly 7 feet away.

My guess is a deer eating the pea plants might have dragged a section of vine away, dropping a pod in the process. Which still seems unlikely, but it’s the most logical explanation I can think of.

I’ve since stuck some short pieces of bamboo stakes into the ground beside them, so I won’t accidentally step on any again. I don’t expect them to get very big before the season ends, but I don’t want to walk all over them, either.

What a strange, strange gardening year this year!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: beans, sunflowers and unexpected transplants

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I managed to get it done, just as the rain started to hit!

I think I can now officially say, our garden is in! Sure there are some things, such as fall spinach, that can be planted, but for all our expected spring planting, it is done.

Yay!

I waffled between planting along the chain link fence in the south hard, or in the trellis bed in the main garden area. In the end, I decided to go for where I knew there would be the most sunlight.

The first image above is how the bed looked, after the mulch was pulled off. Last year, we grew melons along one side, onions for seed on the other. The onions were replanted in the fall, with just one half of the bed being prepped, then covered with leaves for mulch. The other half had melons mulched with cardboard, bark and grass clippings and, in the fall, I just pulled the melon plants and left the rest in place to protect the soil.

That made cleaning the bed up much easier!

This bed does have an issue, though. You can see that – sort of – in the next two images.

To make these beds, we’re using logs as straight and even as we can find. Which is surprising difficult. Especially when looking to use 18′ logs. With this bed, on the trellis side, one of the logs was quite bent. We put that one on the bottom, with the bend going into the bed, while the top log is straight. That’s what the remaining three vertical trellis support posts are going to be secured to.

What that means, though, is that there is an entire log, just inside the top frame of the bed, in the middle. The bend is extreme enough that there’s an actual gap formed between the two logs. Over time, it won’t matter as much, as we are aiming to eventually make the beds all 4 logs high. Until then, though, the gap is getting stuffed with skinny pieces of wood, bits of bark and even grass clippings and dried leaves.

Once the mulch was removed, I went over the bed with the garden fork first, to loosen the soil and make it easier to pull the weeds. As I went along, I started to find other things besides weeds, though – and I was not at all surprised. The onions that had gone to see had dropped some of their seed before they could be harvested.

Once I got to where the onions had seeded themselves, I worked a lot more carefully, and gathered every one that I could find.

Along the way, I also found a couple of plants I recognized as the flower I allowed to grow at one end of the bed, last year. I removed those as well.

It wasn’t part of the plan, but since I had them, every since baby onion I found got transplanted. The flowers got transplanted at the opposite end of where we grew them last year.

While preparing to transplant the onions, I also carefully pulled some of the onions that were growing against each other, broke them apart, then replanted them separately.

One half of the bed had fewer onions survive than the other, so that was the first area I started transplanting onions the tiny onions. I still had enough left over that I made a second row for the rest. They filled a little over half the bed’s length before I ran out, so there’s still room to plant something else, if I wanted to.

After that, I planted the two flowers (possibly a wild salsify) I’d found, then marked off two more rows in the soil in the other side of the bed. Those were for the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers and the Red Noodle beans.

There were not enough sunflower seeds to fill the row. I spaced them about 6 inches apart, which is close for sunflowers. I don’t expect a 100% germination rate, though. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if none germinated. These are older seeds.

The red noodle beans, on the other hand, are fresh seed. These got planted nearer the edge of the bed, where they will be able to climb the trellis that will be built on that side of the bed. After filling the row from end to end, I had only 6 bean seeds left. So I stuck them into some of the gaps among the sugar snap peas, since they have a trellis already prepared. The planted rows then got marked off at the ends with plant stakes, so that if I decide to plant something else there, I know where the open spaces are.

Oh! I completely forgot! I was going to plant the pumpkins in this bed!

I can still do that. For those, I plan to set up plastic collars to mark where the seeds are.

In fact, I see the rain has passed and the sun is out. I’ll go do that right now!

The Re-Farmer

First sunflower!

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No, none of our giant sunflowers are blooming, yet. In fact, we didn’t even plant these ones.

Bird seed and deer feed we’ve been leaving at one end of a flower garden have been sprouting. Much of it is in the grass and gets mowed, but right under the platform feeder, we’re letting them grow.

I was surprised to see a sunflower blooming this morning. They are all really quite small plants! From the seeds I’ve seen in the mixes, I expected them to grow much larger.

Another sunflower will be blooming soon! The oats beside it are from the deer feed.

Then there’s whatever this is. Millet, maybe? I don’t know.

There are some other plants that I find myself looking at and wondering; is that from the bird seed? Or is it a weed? :-D

For now, I’m leaving them. We’ll find out soon enough!

The Re-Farmer