I’m glad we got as much of the mowing as we did, yesterday. It has been raining on and off since last night, and today they are predicting thunderstorms, with possible hail and tornadoes (?!?!) this evening and overnight.
We may get high winds, but tornadoes are not an issue where we live. Water spouts on the lake, maybe, but these weather systems tend to move to the south of us. I checked the weather radar and it looks like we’ll probably get hit by the edges of the system. So I am expecting rain and high winds, but the main body of the system looked like it’ll hit the city. Which means my brother and sister’s places will likely get hit harder than us.
While doing my rounds this morning, I spotted a Rosencrantz.
We think she has a litter of kittens, somewhere, but so far have seen no sign of them. She comes here for food, then disappears.
I had both Creamsicle and Potato Beetle joining me this morning, but they were not happy with each other. Moments after I took this picture, Creamsicle attacked Potato Beetle! I actually had to break up the fight. :-(
I checked the gardens, and the sunflowers. There are now about 26 sunflowers sprouting, that I can see.
The one on the left is an Early Russian, the one on the right is Giganteus.
Then there is this one.
Deadeus.
Looks like something just bit the top off!
Back in the house, I had to help my daughter with the kittens.
They can climb to the top of the stairs, now, and they want out!
So we spent some time, distracting them.
Dave came down to babysit, while Beep Beep went upstairs. :-D
They really like the lilac branches, and my box of wood chips. This, it’s okay for them to get into. I have a separate, sealed, container for sawdust.
So it looks like today will be an inside day. Time to catch up on little projects I need to finish. Maybe even spend some time with the kitties, and practice carving on that spoon blank that came with the carving kit. :-)
And mabye playing a bit of Civ VI. I used to play Civ II, years ago, but didn’t like the newer ones. Loved Alpha Centauri. Then I moved on to Age of Empires, and others in the series. I stopped playing completely for a while, because the games user interfaces changed so much, I couldn’t figure out how to to the most basic things. The tutorials were no help at all. Civ VI became available for free recently, and I am finding it has become user friendly again, and actually fun to play. Perfect for a rainy day.
Well. Until it starts storming, and we shut all the electronics down! :-D
Oy, what a day. We’re already at 27C/80F (feels like 29C/84F), and we haven’t even reached the hottest part of the day, yet! Hard to believe we had frost, just a few nights ago.
Speaking of which, it looks like the frost damage to the squash was worse than it originally looked like. I think we’re going to lose most of the one bed.
The new transplants, on the other hand, are looking great!
Before I headed into town this morning, I took the time to use water from the rain barrel to water the new garden plot with the carrots and beets. Things are growing rather well in there, too.
Once in town and after I dropped off the van, it was still cool enough to make walking around town quite pleasant. When I had the chance, I tried calling our doctor’s clinic, as we need to get prescriptions renewed, but the call went to “this customer is not available” messages. That surprised me, as it usually means a number is no longer active, so I called the hospital the clinic is in, and talked to the nursing station. I told her what happened, and after confirming I was calling the right number, she tried transferring me. It didn’t work! It turns out the clinic is just really busy with doctors making calls. They are still only doing telephone appointments now, and I don’t think they have very many phone lines available. We will have to keep trying, because my husband got only a week’s worth of meds. For his pain killers, they can’t be faxed to the pharmacy, so the fastest way for them to be delivered is if I drive to the clinic, then deliver them to the pharmacy myself.
I stopped trying after getting a phone call from the garage, saying now was a good time to come and discuss the van and my mother’s car.
That never sounds good. :-D
I had three things I hoped to get done on my van. Only one was done.
The lift gate now lifts. No more pole!
The AC is shot. The compressor isn’t even working. To fix it would cost well over a thousand dollars, and he basically said it wasn’t worth it.
The door hinge is going to wait. It wasn’t the easy thing. It’s a welding job. The holes are starting to become ovals. It is, however, just starting to happen. While there is a little bit of play in the door, it is still fine and not a concern. He recommended we wait the door dropping becomes and issue, then bring it back.
So only one out of three jobs got done.
Then there is my mother’s car.
He was able to find a second hand differential, but the total cost would be just over $950, plus taxes. We talked about it for a bit, and I asked about the possibility of making payments. Since I’d budgeted for 3 jobs and only had to pay for one, I offered to make a deposit of $300 now (which kept me under budget), then make another deposit next month. After that, he’ll start working on the car, and I can pay it off in full the month after.
The down side is, this is money that would have gone towards things like what we’ll need to purchase to build the cordwood outhouse. The payments are low enough to still have some left over that can go towards that, but not as much as I’d like. Ah, well. There are still things we can do that don’t involve any money at all. Like clearing away the sod, cutting wood to size, and making bottle bricks.
That done, I made a quick trip to the hardware store. I was looking for another garden hose. Thanks to a sale, instead of one, light duty 100′ hose, I got a pair of medium duty 80′ hoses.
We now have enough hoses (that don’t leak!) to be able to reach all the sunflowers!
When I got home, the girls were mostly done with stuff in the yard, including getting out the weed trimmer and cleaning up around the edges of the inner yard.
That lawn already needs to be mowed again, and I haven’t even finished with what I’d started!
We have a lot of lawn.
That done, I was able to use the grass clippings I’d collected while mowing in the outer yard. Only 2 days, and the core of the grass pile was already composting and getting so hot, I was almost burning my hands! We used up almost the entire pile to continue mulching around the sunflowers.
There’s only about 8 left to mulch, but I don’t have enough grass clippings to finish. My daughter followed along and dampened the mulch.
I’m happy to say, we are seeing sunflower sprouts!
It looks like the ones that have sprouted are all from one variety; the ones that grow to “only” 6-8″ in height.
I’m so glad I got these hoses. With how far we can now reach, we can be safer when we burn out the apple tree stumps that are infected with a fungal disease. Now is the time to cut out the diseased branches, before spores become a concern. The winds are so high, though, it might be a while before that gets done.
Meanwhile, the work outside has stopped for now, as it’s just too hot out there. I just checked the weather app, and we’ve got up another degree.
My husband had been trying to get through to the clinic for 5 hours, and has given up. Tomorrow, one of my daughters and I will be making a bonus trip to the city. I will try swinging by the clinic and talking to someone in person. My prescriptions can wait. My husband’s cannot.
Oh, and one last thing.
Here is your smile for the day!
None of them stayed still long enough for me to get a decent picture, but Big Rig almost co-operated. :-D
Today has been a lovely, cool day! Perfect to get those sunflowers done.
I had assistants.
When I started filling the holes with the soil mixture, the Potato Beetle decided to sit his butt over one of the next holes! My first thought was that he was taking a dump and I went to push him away. He just flopped onto the ground and looked at me as if to say, “Yes. Rub my belly. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
Then he moved over to the next hole and sat over it, watching me. When I moved to fill that one, he went to the next one and lay down.
With his butt over the hole.
What a weird cat. :-D
Creamsicle was also fascinated by the holes.
I have no idea what he was seeing down there that was so interesting! :-D
The soil mixture in the little pool got quite a lot of rainwater, along with the water I’d already put into it, so it was quite saturated. I was still finding pockets of dry peat, though! Still, this was perfect, as it meant I didn’t have to drag buckets of water over the very rough ground to water the soil mix, first. I could just go straight to planting.
I decided to alternate the two varieties. The row still marked with flags starts and ends with the variety that can grow 10-12 feet high, while the other row starts and ends with the variety that can grow 6-8 feet high. The varieties ended up lining up with each other where the two rows overlap.
And that will be it for today, with it being Sunday. I just did what had to be done, before we got more rain (if we get more rain; we’ll see if the forecasts are right for a change).
Next, for this area, we will be adding a straw mulch, little by little, as well as taking the opportunity to dig up the burdock that’s starting to come up, as well as the self-sown trees that are showing up.
Tomorrow, weather willing, the priority will be to get more of the squash transplants in. Quite a few more are ready, now. And I might even be seeing some of those gourds finally emerging, too!
Putting in a garden this year is really changing what is being worked on outside. The original plan was to spend the first 2 years cleaning up the inner yard, the next year or two working on the outer yard, and moving beyond the outer yard as we could, after that. With my husband ended up in the hospital for 3 weeks last year, and many trips to the city to see specialists, things got more focused. Which worked out, since we ended up focusing on cleaning up where the old wood pile used to be, and finding that wonderful soil we have planted the carrots in. For this year, we will continue to work on cleaning up the spruce grove, but will also have to get things done in the outer yard, and now keep up on the garden beds. Oh, and build that new outhouse as a cordwood practice building, too.
First, the garden needs to be planted.
Then, we can mark out where we want to put the cordwood building and start clearing the space and removing sod. Cleaning up the spruce grove, etc., will continue in between stages of building. I’m hoping I can borrow my brother and his trailer, and visit a salvage yard for materials to use as a floor/base. I’m thinking along the lines of pavers, but who knows what else we might find! :-)
The winds finally died down today, and we were able to prep for the giant sunflowers we will be planting.
To recap, these are being planted for several reasons. One is to have seeds for the birds over the winter (and for ourselves, if we want). Another is to create a wind break and privacy screen at the far end of the old garden area. A potential bonus is that sunflowers are supposed to be good for improving soil, and the area can use all the improvement it can get!
Normally, like anything else grown from seed, the sunflowers would be planted closer together, then thinned out after they germinate. For these giant varieties, they would be thinned out to 2 feet apart.
We’re not going to do that.
I counted the seeds in the packets, and they each have exactly 25 seeds in them.
We will be planting one seed every two feet. If they don’t all germinate and we end up with gaps… well… we’ll just end up with gaps.
I also decided to plant them in a gradual curve rather than in straight lines. To do that, I used these.
The bundle of flags I picked up had 25 in it, so that worked out perfectly. I decided on where I wanted to have the ends and pounded a stake into the ground, with another stake to help guide the paracord, (which my husband had ordered a spool of that just happened to come in the mail today) and a tape measure to place a flag every two feet.
I attached the paracord to the two stakes in the ground, with about 3 feet of slack.
For the first flag, I eye-balled where I wanted it to be in relation to the first stake. The extra stake was used to hold the paracord taut.
I then slid the stake along the cord and used the tape measure to determine where to put the next flag. I continued to do this for each flag.
The hard part was making sure the cord wasn’t getting hung up on grass and weeds, which would mess up the arc! :-D
The end result was a long, gentle curve.
One of the things I realized as I was placing the flags was, there was no way I was going to be able to use my new soil auger. I kept hitting rocks, and even bent the wire of one of the flags!
My daughters were sweet enough to take over and dig the holes while I had to do something else. Then after supper, I got back at it. The first thing was to move the stakes in the ground over about 2 feet. For the second row, I started at the opposite end.
This will give us two overlapping rows that will stretch across the entire end of the old garden area.
Digging the wholes was certainly a challenge. Not using the soil auger was definitely the right decision.
This is an example of how many little rocks we had to deal with, at each flag, just on the surface. The holes ended up being somewhat varying in widths and depths, from having to dig out more rocks, as well as pulling out rhizomes. The riding seat we found in the basement and brought out last summer came in very handy, though the terrain was rather rough to roll around on, thanks to whomever botched the plow job however many years before we moved out here. Still better than bending and stretching!
Digging out the holes was made extra interesting by another battle.
Squadrons of mosquitoes were dive bombing me the whole time. Mosquitoes that seemed to treat bug repellent as nothing more than a condiment that was tasty and delicious!
The two rows overlapped for 10 holes, at about 2 feet apart.
Tomorrow, weather willing, we will add a very damp soil mix into each hole, and get those sunflowers planted. :-)
Since the kitty pool didn’t work out, I’m thinking of taking it outside and using it to mix the bags of soil, compost and peat together. It’s big enough to fit all the bags we’ve got, and it will be much easier to mix it all together at once, than doing it in batches in a wheelbarrow. We should have enough left over to use elsewhere, too.
I’m really hoping planting the sunflowers like this works. We’re basically breaking all the “rules” doing it like this. :-D But then, pretty much everything we’re doing for gardening this year is an experiment.
As for the kitties, they are now settled with Mom in the basement. Lots of places were set up for them to cozy up into, and the girls were diligent in making sure everything set up for them was either elevated a bit, or at least not directly touching the concrete.
This would be why.
This was the corner my older brother found full of water and starting to mold, the summer before we moved here. A rain barrel outside this corner had been allowed to overflow right against the basement wall, through most of a very wet summer. He cleaned it up and bleached it (then we bleached it again a couple of months ago), and for our past two summers here, it was so dry, we never had an issue. Now, for the first time, water is starting to seep through the concrete – and we’ve had very little rain! Which means it is as we feared; the weeping tile is probably filled with soil and no longer doing their job, thanks to the overflowing rain barrel.
*sigh*
Another thing that will be a big, expensive, fix.
As for the corner, we already made sure the things we put there were raised off the floor. The only exceptions were the pieces of light figures, and the legs for a folding table. The plastic light cover is not a problem, but the metal piece is now raised off the floor, and the metal table legs were move out completely.
This would explain why, when we did a temperature and humidity check in the root cellar yesterday, the humidity was almost up to 80%! The temperature had gone up to about 13C. With a potential cheese cave in mind, the humidity would be good, but the temperature is now a bit too warm. It should be interesting to see if it gets any higher over the summer.
Meanwhile, we’ve now got a fan on the corner to help try it out. The old part basement already has had the blower for a while, to try and keep things drier there, too. We still need to rebuild the mesh cover for the window on that side, so we can open it up for the summer and not have to worry about critters getting in.
Little by little, it’ll get done. :-)
At least we were finally able to get prepping for the sunflowers checked off the to-do list!
The Re-Farmer 