We have SO many flowers blooming all over right now! The combination of lilac and crab apple flowers is heavenly!
In the tulip patch, a single black tulip has managed to bloom! I believe there was 5 of each type of tulip in the collection my daughter got. It’s hard to say how many of these would have bloomed, if they hadn’t been eaten by something. Now that the tulip patch is surrounded by chicken wire, which we’ll likely leave there until we need to work in the area to clear out the dead apple tree stump, etc., we have a better chance of finding out, next spring!
While putting the plants out this morning, we had another flower blooming.
This is a Crespo squash, and it shouldn’t be blooming yet! A lot of the remaining squash waiting for transplanting have flower buds on them, but they’re more like the other tiny ones you can see in the photo. There was just this one large one!
We’ll have to pinch off the buds when we plant them, so their energy will go towards growing and establishing themselves, rather than into flowers. These would be the early, all male flowers. The female flowers should start showing up later.
With my husband and I heading to the doctor today, then needing to make an unexpected trip into town, there was no point in getting back to the garden today. Especially with the hordes of mosquitoes out there. Tomorrow will be a day to cover ourselves with bug spray and get back at it. It’s supposed to be another hot day, then the day after, we might be getting thunderstorms, showers, and more thunderstorms over the next three days. So if I’m going to go at what will be the squash patch with the weed trimmer, tomorrow is the day to get it done!
My morning rounds includes checking the various growing things, and I finally got a decent photo of my daughter’s tulips emerging!
The leaf mulch has made it hard to see them in photos, but at this angle, you can see quite a few! There are more, out of frame. We’re so happy they survived their first winter! :-)
This morning, I headed out to be part of a surprise for my mother. My older brother was able to acquire a nice scooter, and he wanted to bring it over for her to see and try driving. While getting her to test drive it, he was going to get her to a nearby park, where we siblings were planning to surprise her with a picnic lunch together.
The problem was, we weren’t sure where the picnic tables were, so we weren’t quite sure exactly where to meet. We also weren’t sure the park was officially open for the season, yet. People could walk in any time, of course, but the entry gates get closed to traffic in the off season. So I left early to check it out.
I think we timed it just right. Not only were the gates open, but there was a crew of people doing all sorts of maintenance and clean up started. I was so focused on looking at where the picnic benches were, I didn’t realize I drove right past my brother! He’d had the same idea I had, and come early to scope the area.
There were quite a few clusters of picnic tables, including a whole bunch under a shelter. There was one that was closest to the entry that we considered moving closer to some buildings, because of the wind. As we walked around, though, we realized there would be no point. The wind was swirling in all directions. There was no shelter from it, anywhere! It was a warm enough day, but we knew the wind would be an issue, so my brother was going to make sure my mother dressed warmly.
My mother loves her fried chicken, so my contribution for the day was picking some up. We were so early, though, I had time to play some Pokemon Go, first! :-D I didn’t want to get it too early, even though I had an insulated bag to keep it hot. I still ended up back at the park early. Which worked out okay, because I soon saw my brother and mother making their way down the road. It was fun to sneak around the building and wait for the opportune moment to step out and surprise her! :-D
My mother, being my mother, was determined to be miserable. She makes a big deal about not liking surprises (except for those times when she tells us how much she likes surprises…), so she was already giving my brother a hard time. She refused to get a warmer coat or a hat, and wouldn’t even put on shoes; she was wearing house slippers! Then she saw me, and that was another surprise she didn’t like. :-D But then we got to the picnic table and I started setting food out. It turned out she hadn’t had lunch yet, and … well … there as fried chicken and wedges to be had! :-D My sister had the day off, so she was able to join us, so that was one more surprise for my mother. By then she was eating, so she skipped being miserable. ;-) Among the things my sister brought was a big thermos of hot tea, and today was certainly a day for it! I’m glad I had my picnic backpack; not only did we have real plates and cutlery, but I had room for actual cups. If we’d gone the disposable route, everything would have blown away!
We managed to have an excellent picnic outside, even with the wind. Plus, we brought enough food that my mother would have enough for another meal or two. :-)
As for the scooter, because my mother has been waffling back and forth between wanting one, because her knees are hurting so much, and not wanting one, because apparently, someone has told her it would be too much for her to take care of (apparently, plugging in the charger would be more than she can handle?) and too much responsibility. So my brother made sure to tell her that it was his, he was not leaving it for her, but he wanted her to try it out and think about it. If she does decide she wants one, it would mean getting rid of her couch (which she doesn’t use, anyhow), and probably at least one shelf. Her apartment is very tiny, and she would need to be able to turn around with it in her living room. I know quite a lot of people who use motorized wheelchairs or scooters, and they tend to have very little furniture, so they had room to maneuver – and they had much larger apartments than my mother’s! She wouldn’t miss the couch, but she does love her little tchotchke!! And not-so-little ones. I forget. She’s even got a garden statue of an angel in her living room, and that thing’s pretty darn big!
But now that she’s had a chance to drive this one around a little, she can think about it, and decide what is more important to her; maintaining independence as her knees get worse, or her bulky furniture and bric-a-brac.
I do think she’ll eventually agree to taking it. Especially as we assure her that she just needs to plug it in to charge the battery; any other maintenance is stuff my siblings and I can take care of, for her. It’s not something to load up like her walker (I have ramps and can load it into my van, but it’s very hard for her to get in and out of it), but it’ll let her make runs to the shops in town as needed.
We shall see.
I’m glad we were able to get together today. Our province has decided to lock down even harder again, starting tonight at midnight. I’m not entirely sure why, but we were already listed as “critical” (even as our Schrodinger’s Virus numbers, which were never all that high to begin with, continue to go down as the season progresses). Not sure what word they’ve come up with to be scarier than “critical”. Anyhow, it was already illegal for more than one person visiting at a time – and even then, only because my mother lives alone, so she has an exemption. That was why we met at a park, though my mother’s apartment is so small, we couldn’t have all fit comfortably in there, anyhow. More than a few people have noticed that these intensified lock downs and restrictions happen right before every special date or holiday, regardless of what the actual data is, or that the lock downs themselves have been completely ineffective. I’m quite content to be a hermit, but for people like my mother, who thrives on social interaction, it’s making life more … well, like no life at all. Today’s visit will, I hope, provide a bit of relief from the malaise I’ve been seeing in her lately. She tried to be critical and miserable about the surprise, but I could see that she was really enjoying herself – even with the wind!
When I got home, it was early enough that I considered getting some more gardening in, but not only was it still quite windy, the girls convinced me to back off a bit. It’s a good thing I’ve got them watching out for me, because I have a terrible habit of overdoing things, then ending up out of commission for several days. :-D
So I made mocha chocolate truffles, instead. Not the best I’ve ever made, but good enough to satisfy a craving! I did accidentally make a double recipe, though. The recipe I was found called for 1/2 pound of one type of chocolate, and 1/2 pound of another. I didn’t have fancy chocolate, but I did have lots of chocolate chips that were suitable, so I broke out the scale. It’s in metric, and 1 pound total of chocolate is 2.2 kg, so I started weighing it out. It was an awful lot of chocolate, so I decided to do a half recipe. It wasn’t until I’d poured the hot cream into the chocolate to melt it that I realized I had it backwards. 1 kg is 2.2 pounds, not the other way around! I’d weighed out 1.1 kg.
Oops.
Thankfully, part of the reason I was making it was to use up the cream before it expired, so I just doubled the rest of the ingredients.
While doing my rounds today, I brought out one of our black tarps and headed over to where we will be planting the Montana Morado corn.
None of our corn can be planted until well after our June 2 last frost date. Covering this area now will give us about 5-6 weeks to kill off the grass as much as possible, before the corn can be planted. There’s a lot of crab grass around here, so I don’t expect to kill those off completely, but we should be able to pull up a lot of the rhizomes later on.
The Montana Morado is the only corn we will be starting indoors, as we are not sure how well they will grow in our zone. If things go to plan, we will save seeds from these and, over the years, it should develop hardiness to our local climate. But first, we have to get a successful crop! I’m really looking forward to how these turn out.
Of course, while continuing my rounds, I checked the areas where we planted in the fall. There are more tiny little muscari showing up, as well as the snow crocuses. This was my morning surprise, though.
The very first of my daughter’s tulips has emerged! So exciting! The tulip bulbs they planted here needed to be buried quite deep, and heavily mulched. While they need cold winters, we didn’t know if they survived the extreme cold we got in February. If they had been established, I would not have been concerned, but this is their first winter after planting, and they were more vulnerable. Hopefully, this means we will be seeing the other tulips, and the irises come up soon.
We did see something coming up that we thought might have been an iris, though my daughter didn’t remember planting that far out. It turned out to be an onion! When we moved here, the old kitchen garden had a fence around it, and my mother had some onions just outside the fence line. One or two have been coming up every year, but they never reach full maturity before dying back, so I’m really surprised to see one coming up.
It makes me think about transplanting our bulb onions in the sun room soon. The ones started in the Jiffy pellets are getting really big. :-) We still need to add soil to the beds those will be going into, though, which means I should probably start hardening them off now.
We’re going to have an awful lot that needs to get done, all at once, pretty soon!
Along with the three types of garlic that came in, my daughters’ flower bulbs arrived.
The tulip collection included 10 bulbs each of Orca, Pinksize and Brownie, and 8 bulbs each of Black Hero, Pamplona and Vanilla Coup. There was also 6 bulbs of Gardenia Daffodil.
So while I was having fun working in the soft soil, planting garlic, the girls did the hard work of digging holes for bulbs in hard soil, and between roots!
They did not take pictures of the process, unfortunately.
The tulips were planted not far from where they’d planted the Bulls Eye tulips that came in earlier. This area was selected for its combination of sunlight and drainage, and because they’re not supposed to be watered, and this is not an area where they might accidentally get watered along with something else.
The tulips need to be planted up to 12 inches deep, if we want them coming back year after year, but that depth includes the depth of any mulch. So they planted the 50+ bulbs at 6 inches, adding a 6 inch leaf mulch. Leaves, however, crumble and settle quite a bit, plus the wind was threatening to blow it way, so they also wet down some peat, which we still have lots of, and added that to the top.
The Gardenia Daffodil had different requirements, so it was planted with the Eye of the Tiger irises planted along one side of the old kitchen garden.
When we are next able to, we’re thinking of picking up a couple of bags of soil to scatter on top of the mulch. The soil under the mulch in the old kitchen garden is much improved from before, but the straw itself, and even the grass clippings, aren’t breaking down very quickly, making it not at all conducive to planting in it. It’s all just too stringy! :-D And now there’s the excess flax straw from inside the cat shelter. Adding some soil and peat, as well as moisture, for the microbes and worms to do their stuff should help it break down faster.
We also got a couple other things off the to-do list today.
Now that the soil around the support post has had a few days to settle (and get stomped down some more, every now and then), our new bird feeder is now hung up. Hopefully, this less decorative design will not get flung around in the wind as much as the church and barn shaped ones were, and with the support now buried in the ground like a fence post, we don’t have to worry about it being knocked over any more!
I also had a chance to work on the grapes, while the girls were still digging holes for tulips.
The first thing that needed to be done was prune them. I hope I did it right. From what I’ve read, they should be pruned above the second bud from the ground, as grapes will be produced on first year vines. The problem was, I couldn’t see any buds at all! So I tried to err on the side of caution.
I had to move the trellis supports so I could get behind to harvest the grapes. Today, I finally set them into the ground in their new locations, so we can squeeze behind them again, if necessary. On the right is a long piece of rebar, but the white support on the left is actually two plastic tubes on a shorter piece of rebar. The bar wasn’t long enough to hold the trellis wire, but it is long enough to support the plastic tube. I had to lift off the piece that was woven into the wire mesh, then reset the position of the other two pieces.
When I set this up as a makeshift trellis, I was able to bang the rebar into the ground with a piece of broken brick I’d found while cleaning up around the storage house. I tried that again, but it broke. So I dug around in the sun room, among the things we’d found in there while cleaning it up. There was an old hammer with a ball peen on one side, and a heavy flat head on the other. Much heavier than a regular hammer. For the long piece of rebar, I had to stand on the stairs to reach the top and start hammering it in.
The head fell off the hammer.
It turned out the handle was rotted out at the head!
Thankfully, I still had the new handle I’d found while cleaning up the old basement. I’d intended it for something else, but it didn’t fit right, so I’d left it for later.
Now, I’m glad it didn’t fit the other thing I’d meant it for!
Mind you, it didn’t fit the head of this hammer, either, but I was able to shave the corners of the top, and got it on. I was able to finish the job!
After hammering the rebar supports into the ground and getting the plastic tube in the wire mesh back in place, I was able to use foam covered garden wires a darling friend found for me, to tie the pruned vines to the mesh. Then I used one of the bamboo poles that we’d used in the squash beds as a support for the top. With the grapes growing so well this past summer, I was able to see the weight of the vines were pulling the wire mesh downwards, so this should add some extra support.
Now, all they need is for some mulch to be added to protect them from the winter’s cold. From what I’ve found out about growing grapes in our zone is that they should be just fine with snow as insulation; the vine would be laid down on the ground to be covered. Planted against the storage house like this, that doesn’t really work out, so mulch it is!
We now have all the flower bulbs we ordered planted – 200 grape hyacinth, 100 snow crocuses, irises, gladiolas, and almost 70 tulips – plus the garlic.
That’s it for fall planting this year.
Now, we need to assess how our vegetable gardening went, and decide what we want to plant next year! :-)
The Re-Farmer 