I got the strawberries through one of their $20 specials. This was supposed to be a package of eight, but there turned out to be nine in the package. Bonus! Thanks, Veseys!
I’d gone to their website yesterday, to get the planting instructions. The first step was to set the roots to soak, while I continued working on the bed I prepared yesterday – which I found covered with kitty footprints, this morning!
I decided to add more soil, so I brought over the last of the amended soil left from when we redid the bed against the chain link fence. The extra soil from making the bed narrower has come in very handy!
After leveling off the new soil, I made holes to plant in and filled them with water. The instructions said to spread the bare roots over a small hill of soil, so I added soil back to make one in each hole, while the water was being absorbed. Next, the bare roots were spread over each hill, and soil pulled back around them, making sure the growing tops were above soil and supported.
After that, I brought over some straw that has been in the potato grow bags last year, and carefully mulched around each plant. I wanted to make sure the hills of soil were well covered so it wouldn’t erode when watered, as well as packing extra around the outside, to make it less likely for water to wash the soil out under the frame. Once that was all in place, it got a deep watering. Yes, we’re expecting rain this afternoon, but with our weird little climate bubble in our area, it could pass us by completely and we might not get more than a few drops.
From the information on the Veseys website, they recommend pruning away the flowers in the first year, to have stronger and more productive plants the next year – except for everbearing varieties. These are everbearing, so there will be no need to prune them.
Which means we should have strawberries to harvest this year – if they survive being transplanted!
Today is turning out to be such a gorgeous day! The outside cats are very happy and spending more time outside, rather than in the sun room.
Unfortunately, the skunks are out, too. I went into the sun room from outside and found one in there, eating the cat kibble. At least the skunk doesn’t bother the cats any, and the cats generally stay in the sun room while the skunks are there. The racoons, on the other hand, usually come in groups and tear the place apart, digging for stray bits of kibble, and they’re easily twice the size of any of the cats. Expect maybe Shop Towel.
As I write this, it’s coming up on 4pm, and we’re at 13C/55F, with a “feels like” of 15C/59F. I couldn’t resist! I had to get out there and get some work done!
So I decided to work on the low raised bed that runs along the chain link fence between the people gate and the vehicle gate. It needs to be narrowed for better reach, but we didn’t get a chance to work on it before the ground froze.
I’ve been making sure to take photos and videos that will be put together in a video later on, but there was one thing I found I just had to share now.
After removing the mulch to get started, I found onions!
Last year, after transplanting onion seedlings in various places, I still had lots of teeny, tiny onions left over. I also found onion bulbs in various places, from the year before, that had survived the winter. Most of the seedlings got transplanted just inside the bricks framing the bed – and most did not survive. The bulbs I found from the previous year’s onions – Oneida onions, if I remember correctly – all got transplanted at one end of this bed, plus there was a single surviving shallot that survived the previous year’s flooding that I just left to grow. It tried to go to seed, but didn’t quite make it. I didn’t harvest any onions out of here in the fall, because there was nothing to harvest.
Well, those previous year onions actually survived the winter, and I uncovered a bunch of them! Even the shallot at the opposite end was starting to show green!
Where they were growing was part of the bed I had to move to make it narrower, so these had to go.
The largest bulbs in here are the yellow onions that I think are Oneida. The shallots had two bulbs growing against each other, plus there were a few little onions that I think may have been survivors last year’s transplants. There is a pair of bulbs that look like yellow onions that I think might be a different variety of shallots, but I’m not sure.
These got transplanted in the raised bed we will have peas planted all down the middle. I haven’t quite decided what I will plant on either side of the peas but, at one end, it now has these onions. If they survive, they should go to seed, which would be awesome. Onion seeds are viable for only a year, but once the plants go to seed in their second (or, in this case, third) year, I believe they go to seed every year. We could potentially have our own annual onion seeds to collect.
We shall see!
After the onions were transplanted, I went to work on the end of the bed next to the people gate. That’s where I’d found there were broken pieces of sidewalk blocks and bricks, buried under the soil. You can read about that here.
Unfortunately, the ground it still too frozen. I got one broken piece loose that can be left in place, as it will not be under the bed. I was able to remove another broken piece, but found the edge of yet another chunk. I tried pouring water over it do make it more visible, and possibly thaw the soil a bit, too, but eventually had to stop. Depending on where it extends under the soil, I might be able to leave it for now.
When I realized I was just chipping through soil that was frozen rock solid, I set that job aside and started working on pulling up weeds along the edge of the bed, and moving the soil away from the path and closer to the chain link fence. In some places, it worked out okay, but for the most part, the ground is just too frozen.
With the mulch removed and the black soil now exposed to sunlight, it should start thawing out faster. Hopefully, we’ll have that bed reworked and ready for planting, soon. It’s one of the areas thawing out fast enough that we will be able to direct sow things that can be planted before last frost.
Gosh, it felt good to be working out in such a beautiful day!
This morning, before I intended to continue working on the trellis bed, I wanted to transplant those volunteer tomatoes into the old kitchen garden.
Yes, it’s September, and our average first frost date is the day after tomorrow, but if the frost holds off long enough, they just might have a chance!
It was also a good time to amend the bed the Irish Cobbler potatoes were in. After removing the remaining mulch and loosening the soil (and finding a few tiny potatoes that got missed!), I worked in a bag of cow manure. I also noticed a couple of spaces in the walls where the grass clippings used as chinking was gone, so I found some scrap pieces of wood to put over the gaps on the inside.
Once the bed was prepared, I went and dug up the volunteer tomatoes. I don’t even water that bed anymore, so the soil was very dry. None of it stuck to the roots at all! I laid them out gently on one of the baking sheets we use to transfer seedlings in and out while hardening them off. Those are so handy! We need more of them, but Costco no longer carries them. They are SO much more expensive, elsewhere!
Anyhow.
I had seen one volunteer tomato had died; all it’s leaves just shriveled up for some reason. I left that one, but I still ended up digging out 9 tomato plants! All but one of them are where we’d had Spoon tomatoes planted, 2 years ago. I kept track of the one that came up where cherry and grape tomatoes were planted last year, and the year before.
I’d already given the bed a fairly decent watering, but once I knew how many transplants I had, I dug a hole for each of them, then gave each hole a deep watering. As for the transplants themselves, I trimmed off the lowest leaves and buried the bare stems all the way to the first set of leaves.
I happened to have exactly the right number of plastic rings that had been used to protect the peppers, etc. in the wattle weave bed, so those got put around each tomato plant. These will not only protect them from overnight chills, but from rambunctious kittens, too!
At this point, my alarm went off, reminding me that the post office was open again after lunch. I have a subscription on lysine for the outside cats, and it was in. When I got there, however, I had a pleasant surprise.
My saffron crocus bulbs were in! When I checked the tracking, it was telling me the package would arrive on Monday, so this was a pleasant surprise.
It also changed my plans for after I finished with the tomatoes.
Since we had to pull up all the Roma tomatoes, I had a lot of bamboo stakes available. I pushed in a pair of them inside each plastic ring. These will keep the wind from blowing them away – and the cats from knocking them about – and if the weather holds long enough for them to survive, they will be supports for the tomato plants, too.
I also had the soaker hose that had been used on the Roma tomato bed. It’s pretty long, though, so I was able to run it back and forth and around every plastic ring, using tent pegs to hold it in place on the curves.
Last of all, the mulch got returned.
It’s ridiculously late to be transplanting tomatoes in our area, but I wanted to give them a chance!
That done, I could move on to the saffron crocuses, which needed to be planted right away.
These are actually a zone 4 plant, and we’re zone 3, so they went into the same protected area we have our zone 4 apple tree, and where the girls planted tulips. This area has a mishmash of wire surrounding it, to protect them from the deer.
There are 20 bulbs in the package, and the need to be planted 4 to 8 inches deep, and 3 inches apart. I was originally intending to plant them in a 4 x 5 bulb block, in an area I was pretty sure there were no tulips growing, but after poking around with a garden fork, that went out the window pretty fast. The area is so full of large roots!
I ended up being able to start a longer trench, so I went with 2 rows of 10 bulbs, instead.
The instructions specifically said to NOT amend the soil with manure of fertilizer, to water them when planted, but to not water them again unless it was drought conditions.
In clearing out the soil, so many weed roots were removed that there was hardly any soil left. I would have to get soil from the remains of the truck load of garden soil in the outer yard we bought a couple of years ago.
After removing the top 4 inches of weed roots and dirt, I loosened the bottom with a cultivator tool, then gave the trench a very deep watering. Then I loosened the soil some more, tried to level it off a bit, and watered it some more!
After that, I went and sifted some garden soil into the wheel barrow to fill the trench, before getting the bulbs.
I did not expect them to be so…
…hairy.
The bulbs got laid out in two rows, 3 inches apart, then buried. I ended up needing to get a second small load of soil to cover them well. They got about 6 inches of soil, maybe a bit more, on top. It will, however settle over time. Compaction is another concern. I wanted to give them a final watering, but not with out a mulch, first!
Thankfully, we still have lots of grass clippings handy for mulch!
Once a thick layer was in place, I gave it another deep watering. I wanted that new soil, which was quite dry, to be moistened. The mulch is great for keeping the soil below moist, but if the clippings are very dry, they actually prevent moisture from getting through. The top will get wet, but the bottom – and the soil below – says dry. Kinda like how thatch works. So I made sure the mulch itself was very wet, all the way through, so that the water could moisten the soil, too.
Given the temperatures we can hit over the winter, these will need more protection before the ground freezes, as well the apple tree. It’s already sheltered and protected from the north and, now that the dead and dying trees are cut away, it gets full sunlight and warmth. Still, extra protection will be good! When the leaves fall, we can use that to mulch the entire area. In the spring, though, the mulch of the crocuses will need to be pushed aside, leaving only a light layer to protect the soil. The alternative would have been to plant them in pots and bring them in every winter, and frankly, I have no interest in doing that. It’s hard enough to protect our house plants from the cats! They’d just love some big pots of soil to dig in. 😄
Once the mulch was in place, I spread out the soil that had been removed as evenly as I could, and that was it.
We now have tomatoes transplanted that, if they survive, will be for this year, and bulbs planted for next year! These crocuses boom in the fall, so it will be quite some time before we know we will have any saffron to harvest.
Bulbs typically triple their flower output year over year. A package of 20 bulbs should produce enough saffron in the first season for the average family to enjoy sparingly.
Triple their output every year? That would be amazing!
First image is the Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes that have started to develop.
In the matching pots are the herbs. The single oregano transplant is in the middle of a pot, surrounded by the second variety of thyme we have. The second pot has all the spearmint. For the pot themselves, I put a few inches of grass clippings on the bottom to keep the soil from falling through the drainage holes. Most of the soil is actually recycled out of other plant pots, with only a bit of a top up of garden soil, then the transplants were carefully mulched with more clippings. Doing the transplants freed up a couple of metal trays, so they’re now being used as drain trays.
We had already transplanted a couple of rows of onions in between the spinach earlier. The remaining spinach that bolted was pulled up, and my daughters took care of harvesting the remaining leaves. They discovered the Susan really, really likes spinach! We had to check to make sure spinach is okay for cats, and once that was confirmed, my daughter would hand her a leaf every now and then, as she stripped them off the stalks. It was amazing to watch her gobble them down! Even Fenrir came over and tried stealing some leaves, and got a few given to her, too.
We definitely need to stick to this variety of spinach. As bolted as they were when the plants were pulled, the leaves are still not at all bitter!
Now, the bed that had the spinach is completely filled with Red of Florence onions. There were still onion transplants left, so I cleaned up a bit more of the spaces the lettuce and bok choy were planted, in the bed along the chain link fence. Much to my surprise, there are quite a few lettuces that survived the smothering drifts of elm seeds. As for the bok choy, we’ll be lucky if the three or four I found survive at all. The empty spaces in the rows got planted with the remaining onion transplants, including a few yellow onions, and the other variety of red onions we’ve got. There were enough Red of Florence onions left that, after transplanting from end to end between the remaining lettuce and bok choy, I made holes in the mulch along the outer edge of the bed and kept on transplanting, filling about half the length of the bed. By the time I was putting those in, only really tiny ones were left. If they survive and develop fully, great. If not, we’ll still have lots.
Next, I worked in the wattle weave bed, and noticed one of the Sweet Chocolate bell peppers is getting quite big! The plant is still blooming, as are the other plants, so I expect we may get a decent harvest over the summer.
The tiny strawberry plants grown from seed got transplanted out. One of the three bunches of winter thyme did not survive being transplanted, so that left a gap I could fit several strawberries in. I did take out the self-sown walking onion as I kept transplanting strawberries wherever there was space between the herbs and bell pepper. It was neat having that onion show up on its own, but I don’t want walking onions settling into this bed. The strawberries are planted pretty close together, but it’ll give them a chance to get bigger, before they get transplanted to somewhere else next year.
There was still one surviving squash that I’m about 95% sure is more luffa, so I transplanted that next to the other two, and transferred the protective plastic ring to the new one. Hopefully, it won’t get shaded out by the potatoes too much.
I didn’t get a picture, but there was one last tiny Spoon tomato that emerged from the only Jiffy pellet that hadn’t had anything germinate when I potted them up. One of the Spoon tomatoes that got transplanted into the retaining wall blocks got broken, and is just a stem with a single branch, now, so I planted the baby tomato plant in the same block with it. Hopefully, at least one will survive.
And that’s it. These are the last of the surviving transplants – though when I went to get the trays, I spotted a hulless pumpkin seedling show up in one of the trays! All the other trays left behind are with things that did not germinate at all, for some reason. The Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon. Both varieties of cucumbers. The Birds Egg and Apple gourds, and a few other things. I’m not sure what to make of a zero percent germination rate. Since so many things have this habit of suddenly germinating, later on, I am not quite ready to count them as a loss, but even if they did germinate, for most of them, it’s too late in the season for them to be able to reach full maturity by the end of the growing season.
While I was walking around, setting up to transplant the onions, I kept hearing a cracking sound from the spruce grove. The cracking really started to increase, so I stopped to watch as the one tree my brother cut down for me that got stuck on other trees, started to fall. It got hung up again, but there was enough wind that it fell further still. It’s still stuck on other trees, but is now at about a 40° angle, instead of an 80° or so angle! It should make it easier to finally get it down the rest of the way, I hope. That one tree is almost enough to build a complete bed in the size I’m after!
After so many delays and distractions, it felt so good to finally get progress done outside! The one thing I want to do before working on those trellis beds is re-sow some of the summer squash. Then, it’ll be time for some manual labour!
Well, we have now planted as much as we can until we build the new trellis beds.
The first job was direct sowing summer squash. I forgot that we have 5 varieties. Which worked out well. There were four empty mounds from yesterday, so prepping another row of six mounds meant two for each type. Much less than we would normally plant per type, but this year we seem to be more about variety than individual quantity.
The last row will not be used this year, since it gets the most shade. Each mound got two are three seeds – all the seed packets are from previous years, and several of them had only five seeds left in them. With older seeds, we have to consider that some of them won’t germinate at all. The varieties we have are sunburst and G Star patty pans, yellow and green zucchini, and Magda.
Next, the grow bags were gathered and filled.
The low, black ones were “raised bed gardens” we got from the dollar store last year. The green ones I picked up from the dollar store this year, and they are really good! I folded them down to about half height. The fabric seems really strong, and they have sewn in handles that also seem really strong.
Four of two different varieties were planted in the wider black bags/beds. Two each of a third variety went into the green bags. They all got Red of Florence onions planted around them. These are Early Sunsation, Early Summer and Dragonfly.
The last five feed bags were filled, and each got one Cheyenne pepper in them, with more Red of Florence onions. The last bag got all onions.
We still have lots of each type of pepper (and you can see the one late germinating Spoon tomato!), which can be given way. I plan to continue to interplant the onions any chance I get. We started a lot of them, because we use a lot of onions, and ran out fairly quickly, last year.
Oh, I didn’t bother taking a photo, but I also planted a few beans. The row of green Lewis beans had a lot fewer come up than the yellow Custard beans. The gaps in the yellow beans are minor, but less than half the green beans either didn’t germinate, or didn’t grow well once they did (some have just stems left, as if the leaves just died off), so I planted more.
We have so many varieties of beans I hoped to plant this year, but at this point, my priority is to get a trellis bed built so that we can put in our melon transplants.
Thankfully, all of these are short season varieties, so we should still have plenty of growing season left for them. The pole beans, however might have to be skipped this year. We shall see.
A high priority over the next while will be to mulch around today’s transplants, and the summer squash mounds. That means cutting more grass and collecting the clippings!
It’s only the 10th of June today. We should still have time. Plus, it’s an El Niño year, which means we should have a warmer, wetter summer and fall, and a mild winter, too. Anything that extends our growing season, I will be thankful for!
Well, I got them in, before things got too windy out there!
The winter squash were planted in the small Jiffy Pellet trays, six of each type. Of those where not all of them germinated, I still planted the empty pellets with ones that had germinated. They may not have had visible seedlings, but some of them did have roots showing through the pellet’s casing.
In the northernmost row, there are two Boston Marrow, two Winter Sweet and two Lady Godiva.
There were four Honeyboat Delicata seedlings to tranplant, but only two Little Gem/Red Kuri.
The North Georgia (I just noticed the typo I made when labeling the photo!) had the most seedlings, with five to transplant. There were three Pink Banana. That left four empty mounds. I’ve decided to fill one more row tomorrow, to direct sow summer squash in. We have four varieties, and I want to have at least two plants of each.
While I intend to mulch the rest of the patch with wood chips, I’ll be gathering grass clippings to mulch around the mounds of soil.
But not today.
Tomorrow is supposed to be cooler, with a predicted high of 21C/70F, which will be much more pleasant to work in. Especially since I plan to have enough soil brought over to fill grow bags.
Weather willing, we should be able to get quite a bit done tomorrow.
Okay, so I managed to get a bit done in the garden this evening. Also, I had a wonderful surprise. Rolando Moon appeared! I haven’t seen her in at least a month, maybe two. At her age, we just never know if she’ll disappear and not return anymore.
I was also happy to see The Distinguished Guest wander into the north side of the property. Happy, that is, until I heard a cat fight and discovered he had attacked Pinky, and I had to chase him off. *sigh*
I had some squash that were getting too big for their pots that needed to go in, so I focused on the hill we grew pumpkins in last year.
This is how it looked after taking a weed trimmer to it, after the mowing around it was done. Those bricks had been placed under the developing pumpkins to keep them off the ground. The round thing is an ant trap. There was two of them, but one disappeared when it got caught by the push mower, last year.
They didn’t work. The ant hill is still there.
Thankfully, the bug spray I used seems to do a good job of deterring ants, too. I dug up the bed with a garden fork and pulled out as many weeds and roots as I could. The ground was crawling with ants, but while I had them on my boots, that’s about as far as they went.
Before, this hill had only ever had two plants transplanted into it. After weeding it and working the last of a bag of sheep’s manure into the surface, I raked it out into a flattish square.
I fit 6 transplants in. The row of three on the far right are Zucca melon, from a second seed start. In the middle row, the two in the foreground are African Drum gourd, also from a second seed start. The other four were in an unlabeled pot. I restarted both the Zucca melon and Drum gourd at the same time, but one unlabeled pot got mixed up. I think they are also drum gourds, but I’m not sure. At this stage, the leaf and stem shapes look almost identical.
We’ll figure it out soon enough, if they survive.
I then filled in the last of the space available in the wattle weave bed.
I had removed the protective plastic from the Sweet Chocolate peppers, and they now all have support stakes. I left the protection around the one Classic Eggplant, though it did get its own support stake, as did the luffa in the corner.
I transplanted one of each variety of pepper seedlings we had waiting. Between the luffa and the eggplant is Dragonfly. The three around the curve are the Cheyenne, Early Summer and Early Sunsation. I wanted to get at least one of each type transplanted, just in case we aren’t able to get things ready early enough to get the rest into the ground.
To the left of the luffa is the largest of the 3 mystery squash that germinated with some Roma tomatoes. I think they might be luffa, but I’m 100% not sure.
As I write this, it’s coming up on 8:30pm, and we’ve finally started to cool down a bit. What I got done wasn’t a lot, and certainly didn’t involve much physical exertion, but it still left me dripping with sweat. The next few days are supposed to be every so slightly cooler, and then things are supposed to heat up again. And physical exertion is going to be the main work, because we have to start hauling garden soil over to the squash patch, so we can start transplanting. We can’t even start that until I take the weed trimmer to the tall grass around the pile that couldn’t be mowed.
It’s going to be hot, sweaty and disgusting work, but we’re running out of time. It’s not just prepping spots for the transplants. This year, I was going to try direct sowing the summer squash, and those seeds should be in the ground already.
I suspect that by the time we finish building the permanent trellis beds, it’ll be too late to direct sow a lot of things. I might try, anyway. We could find ourselves with a long, mild fall again.
There’s only so much we can do, though. None of us area handling this heat well.
I didn’t get outside to do some work until past 8pm, when it finally started to feel cooler. Thankfully, the days are still getting longer, because it was just past 10pm when I was done, and pretty much full dark by the time I finished putting things away.
There wasn’t time to work on the big stuff, but there was some small spaces I could work on.
The first area I worked on were the 4 empty blocks in between the gourds and Zucca melon. I had some potting soil mix left, so after digging around in the blocks and pulling out any roots I could find, I added a bit of the potting soil to top up each block a bit. There were a total of 5 Little Finger eggplant seedlings, but two were still quite small, so I planted them together. We’ll see how they do and if one will need to be thinned out. I had plenty of new grass clippings to mulch around them, too. I collected a wagon load, and when the eggplants were mulched, I used the rest to finally give the asparagus bed a deep mulch. Until now, only the strawberries in between them were mulched. I was happy to see one new spear of asparagus, already at the fern state, had showed up. That makes 5 out of 6 crowns in this bed that survived last spring’s flooding… if barely!
Our spinach is just starting to get big enough to harvest a few leaves here and there, even though they were planted so long ago. As they will likely bolt quickly in this heat, my daughter went ahead and harvested the largest plants earlier today. In between the spinach, I started transplanting some Red of Florence onions. We grew these last year and really liked them. These are the first of this variety that have been transplanted, and they’re going to be shoved in every place we have room, as we go along planting other things.
Next, I worked my way across the retaining wall blocks, clearing and weeding. Every other block had mint transplanted into them, to contain them. It will be a battle to get the rest of the mint that’s growing in the old kitchen garden, but these were originally from my late grandmother, so I don’t want to get rid of all of them. They don’t seem to have handled last winter very well, and one block’s mint seems to have died (!!! who ever heard of mint dying on its own? 😄). A few other blocks got onions that survived the winter, that I found while prepping the area. Some stayed in the blocks they were found in, while others got transplanted, so that each block had 3 or 4 onions in it. In the end, I found a total of 6 blocks were free. Those got dug into to remove roots, topped up with the last of the potting soil, and then I transplanted some Spoon tomatoes into them. Each tomato got a bamboo stake they can be clipped to as they get bigger, then mulched with grass clippings. It’s not the area I wanted to grow these in, but at least we’ve got some in the ground. At this point, we could give away all the remaining transplants.
Not too bad for just a couple of almost cool hours before things got too dark to see!
I was able to head outside this evening and finish the transplanting I didn’t get to do this morning.
My daughter had mulched the tomatoes with shredded paper for me while I was out. I made a trench in the mulch and transplanted the Red Wethersfield onions. Almost the entire tray of onions made it into the bed. All the other beds are bordered with the yellow Talon onion. That leaves the Red of Florence onions to transplant, and there are a lot of those! We’ll squeeze them in where we can, where they can help protect other plants from insects and deer.
I hope.
So this bed is now done!
Now we have to get other beds prepared. I’m really hoping we get a good rain tonight, to help cool things down and reduce the humidity!
It’s barely 3:30pm right now, and I could easily call it a day and go to bed right now!
I tried to get out early to beat the heat, but by 7:30, it was already feeling hot and muggy. The humidity is very high, and the uncut grass is covered with dew. Which means that, when the outside cats come over for breakfast, they tend to be completely soaked!
Like this bedraggled beast.
Decimous is so matted and full of burrs! Today, however, for the very first time, I got to give him ear and neck skritches – and he let me! He even started purring. He wasn’t sure about the situation, but he did let me reach out to give skritches – not pets – a few times. His fur is so full of lumps, burrs and mats, I’m sure petting him would be somewhat painful.
I was even able to confirm something.
He is a she.
Yup. Decimous is female.
She doesn’t look pregnant, though. I’m trying to think of how we can catch her and bring her inside, so we can lavish her with love (and wet cat food) and socialize her enough to get those mats cut out of her fur!! The problem, of course, is we already have too many cats in the house. I’d have to bring her into my room and have her in baby jail for a while. That is Marlee’s favourite hangout, though, and Marlee typically isn’t too keen on other cats.
We’ll figure it out.
My priority for this morning was to get as many of the Roma VF tomatoes transplanted in the last available bed as I could.
I focused on getting the largest ones in, first. I didn’t want to do three rows, since it’s harder to reach the middle, but … well, it is what it is. I’m sure I planted them closer together htan they should be. I staggered the rows to use the space more efficiently, and was able to get 41 transplants in It took a couple of hours. I didn’t have time to transplant tomatoes around the perimeter of the bed, nor mulch it right away. My daughter shredded more of our collected fliers and other garden safe paper while I was doing this, and brought out a couple of bags. As I write this, I honestly don’t know if she was able to get back outside to lay the shredded paper around the tomatoes. After that, they’d just need to be dampened, because the tomatoes were deeply watered while being transplanted.
Speaking of which…
These are the mystery squash that showed up with two of the tomatoes. I’d reused seed starting soil from pots where things did not germinate at all, and somehow missed that there were still viable seeds as I pulled out the sticks and rocks I was finding in the mix. We’ll see if they survive. If they do, I’ll find somewhere to plant them, after we get more beds ready. Right now, aside from a couple of scattered spots, we have nowhere left to put any transplants – including the more than 20 Spoon tomatoes, none of which are out, and another 20 or so leftover Romas!
So much work to do!
Today is our average last frost date, but in some places, we’re breaking 30 year heat records. I took some garden tour videos yesterday that I’ll put together and upload later. Lots of heat warnings and warnings for thunderstorms, with possible hail, etc.
The question is, will any of that rain reach us?
Once the transplants were in, I headed out early to my mother’s, stopping to pick up some Chinese food, which was my breakfast. Previously, my mother has started to say not to get rice, because rice makes her cough. She said to get her just lemon chicken. Unfortunately, the timing was off, and I was at her place on the one day of the week they closed. Then she mentioned some of her neighbours would get just onion rings from the restaurant; they have a small North American menu along with Chinese food menu. After that, she started saying she wanted onions rings. So today, I picked up both lemon chicken and onion rings for her, and a combination platter for me.
When I arrived with the food, she was first taken aback that I came early, but I told her I’d been working in the garden, and hadn’t and breakfast. I came early so we could eat together. Then she chastised me for not calling her first, because she’d had a large breakfast (she later mentioned what she had, and it was not a large breakfast. Just not typical breakfast fare). I hadn’t planned to do this, though, so calling ahead was not an option. After I set out the food, setting hers aside on the table while I sat down with my breakfast, she started nibbling on the onion rings anyway, then suddenly demanded to know why I got the lemon chicken, too, instead of just the onion rings. I reminded her that she’d talked about wanting lemon chicken in the past, and she didn’t have to eat it all at once if she didn’t want to . She then started talking about how it’s a “temptation” for her, and if there’s food in the fridge, she eats it…
…
I’m pretty sure that’s what food in the fridge is meant for.
I think she was trying to say that she had little self control when it came to food, but had a hard time coming up with the words for it!
After I’d eaten, and she nibbled, I suggested we head out earlier. She didn’t seem to want to go out and procrastinated. It wasn’t until we were in the car and on the road that she mentioned that, next time, she would give me a list and let me do her errands for here. Her knees are increasingly giving her grief. There’s one errand I can’t do, though, and that is to go the bank for her.
So we got her errands done and her groceries put away. She wanted me to take a couple of trees home with me, along with her vegetable peelings and a plant she’s decided is blocking her window too much (it isn’t).
I did have a bit of a surprise while checking on her air conditioner, next to her plant table. For some reason, it was set to go off at 26C, which is just way too hot. I lowered that, and it turned on and starting cooling things down, but for some reason, I was also feeling heat.
Yes, her heat was also on!
I checked her thermostat.
It was set to about 26C.
So she was heating and cooling her apoartment at the same time.
I turned that right down for her!
I didn’t take any plants from her, because I didn’t want them baking in the car while I did my own errands after I finished with hers. I had to ask her where the trees came from. Basically, she’s got a little maple and an elm in the pot together, and it looked odd. Turns out she’d found them in the few feet of garden space where she has some garlic growing – pretty much the only “gardening” she does right now – so she decided they should go to the farm and stuck them in a pot.
*sigh*
She has also been gathering linden seeds and is trying to get them to grow. She’s got at least a dozen that I could see, scattered at the top of a pot of soil. Something else she has in pots and plans to send to the farm.
This from the person that was laughing at me when I showed her pictures of the garden, because I had some herbs in a pot.
Somehow, my mother has got it in her head that, because the trees around her building drop seeds, she MUST gather then, give them to me to grow, or start growing them herself, so the trees can go to the farm, because they are “free”.
I’m getting a better understanding of why we have so many problem trees right now.
Also, we have GOT to get rid of the Chinese elms. There are millions of seeds drifting everywhere, and every bit of bare soil where I’ve planted seeds or transplanted something is getting filled with them. They have very deep tap roots, even as tiny seedlings, and are so hard to get rid of! There are other elms here that don’t do this, and they’re just fine, but the few Chinese elms are just horrible to deal with!
A job for another time, though.
Anyhow.
Even though my mother basically abandoned the farm a decade ago, she still wants to control what happens here, including giving me trees to plant that are basically weeds out of her own garden space.
She brought up when we can bring her out to the farm to see things – she still has seen only photos of the new roof. I told her that, weather willing, my brother and his wife are hoping to come out this weekend with their lawn mowing equipment to do the lawns. Right now, she wouldn’t be able to get through the grass with her walker! After that, we’ll see.
Once done at my mother’s, one of my errands was to go to the egg lady’s place. While driving out there, I went through several sections of driving rain! It was so good to see! There were a few times I was sure the car was being hit with hail. It wasn’t raining at the egg lady’s homestead, though, and they sure could have used some! She just finished processing 40 chickens, and was dying in the heat!
My next errand was back at my mother’s town, and I drove into rain again. It was awesome! The temperatures dropped about 10 degrees almost instantly, from 31C/88F (“feels like” 34C/93F!), to 20C/68F. It was still coming down so hard when I was ready to come home, I sent a message to let the family know it might be slow driving. And it was.
For a little while.
Then I drove out of the rain, and the closer I got t home, the drier it got.
As of this writing, we still have had no real rain at all. There might have been a few drips here and there, but nothing more.
*sigh*
Looks like our climate bubble is back in action.
We’ll see how things turn out. If it stays dry and keeps cooling down with the wind, I might be able to get more weed trimming done. I need to focus around the garden beds, and where we need to build up the squash patch and where the permanent trellis beds will be built.
Meanwhile, my poor daughter has been busting her butt, cleaning the kitchen and trying to catch up on the dishes, in this heat!
I think I need to shut down my computer, though. It’s starting to act up in the heat. It’s a good thing I know how to touch type, because I’ve been typing entire paragraphs, without anything actually showing up on the screen for almost a minute.
So if there are a lot of typoes or strange sentences in this post, it’s because I’m typing blind right now!
