I’d planted three groups of three seeds of Black Zucchini and White Scallop squash. The zucchini almost all came up – one spot had only two come up – but the white scallop squash saw only two germinate, in one spot.
That left me with two empty spots – and those were being filled with tiny elm seedlings taking over!
So the first thing I had to do, after taking the protecting netting off, was move the mulch aside and get in with the hand cultivator to weed as much as possible.
That took a while.
I really, really hate those elm seeds.
With the white scallop squash, I simply moved the smaller plant into the empty spot beside it. I did the same with the zucchini that had only two plants growing. Then I very carefully removed the extras from the other two spots that had all three zucchini seeds germinate.
I turned out to be wrong. I must have dropped a seed or something, because one of them had four!
I found spaces for them in other beds. Two went into gaps between the three types of winter squash, which are still recovering from getting hit with that one cold night. One went into the end of the bed with the Spoon tomatoes in it. Those all got protective plastic collars. The last one went into an open space in the high raised bed, left from harvesting some radishes and turnips.
Thanks to my SIL using their big zero turn mower on the outer yard, I had a whole lot of grass clippings available. I needed more mulch around the original summer squash bed, plus the one in the high raised bed got a grass clipping mulch, with a final watering to soak the mulch.
Hopefully, the transplants will survive alright. Squash don’t like their roots disturbed, but there was no way I could take them out without using a lot of water and washing the roots off completely. Those ridiculous elm seedlings were wrapping their tap roots around everything!
The first image is of the Spoon tomatoes in the main garden area. I’ve been seeing tiny tomatoes developing for a while now. I had expected them to get much taller before forming tomatoes – when we’ve grown these before, they always got really tall and lanky. This year, they seem to be staying short and bushy. I’m not bothering with pruning side branches away, after seeing some videos about that from Gardening in Canada, so I was expecting them to be bushier. These are still indeterminate tomatoes, though, which are more of a vining type. Which is why I made sure they had a nice, sturdy trellis to climb. We’re just into July, though, so maybe they’ll still get taller. We’ll see.
In the second image, we have our first sugar snap peas developing. There are quite a few more flowers blooming now, too. Most definitely the biggest, strongest and healthiest peas we’ve ever grown, this year. I don’t know if it’s the location, this year’s weather, or what, but I’ll take it!
The final photo is my morning surprise. There are Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes forming! Yes, these are super short season tomatoes but, like the Spoon tomatoes, the plants haven’t really grown much since being transplanted. The plants are so short, the developing tomatoes are inside the protective collars!
The Chocolate Cherry and Black Beauty tomatoes are getting taller, at least, and getting to the point that I’ll need to start clipping them to their supports, soon. Those, we’ve grown before, and I am expecting them to get quite a bit taller – but then, I was expecting the Spoon tomatoes to get quite a bit taller, too! There were flowers blooming on all the tomato varieties when I transplanted them, but I remember that the Black Beauties took a very long time to ripen. The plants had loads of tomatoes, and I remember they tended to crack and split a lot, long before we had any ripe enough to pick.
It should be interesting to see if there is any difference in how quickly they ripen, this time around.
While our garden is officially in, things will still be planted! We’ll be doing some succession sowing later in the month, but today, it was damage control.
The first bed I worked on was the corn and beans bed. There are now a whole three beans that have germinated, in between the corn, out of all the seeds planted in two rows! The ones planted on the same day, in between the tomatoes in the next bed over, are stating to get bigger, but not in the bed with the corn. I want beans in with the corn as much for their nitrogen fixing properties as for the beans themselves, so I decided to replant.
I still had seeds for the yellow Custard bush beans that were planted here, so that’s what got planted again.
I didn’t have to remove the protective netting, thankfully, and could just make use of the box frame to hold it for me while I first weeded the bed as best I could. There are just so many of those elms seeds sprouting! Many were still too small to try and pull, though.
If you click through to the next photo in the slideshow above, you’ll see my little froggy friend!
It’s hard to tell in the first couple of photos of the garden bed, but if you can make out some pink dots in the photo, those are the inoculated beans. I just spaced them out in the rows the first beans were planted, then went around and simply pushed them into the ground just enough to bury them. Hopefully, these ones will take! I didn’t pre-water the rows, as the soil was still wet from last night’s rain, nor did I water after, since I could hear the incoming thunderstorm.
Once those were planted and the protective netting back in place, it was off to the main garden area.
I had planted Royal Burgundy bush beans near the Spoon tomatoes. An entire packet’s worth. Only three germinated, and one of them got chomped. It seems to be growing back, though.
The one that got chomped is visible sort of between the first two tomato collars.
I could not find more bush bean seeds of any kind while out and about yesterday, so I went with something else, which you can see in the next image above. Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard. Their seeds are of a decent size, so after loosening the soil in around the few bean plants that made it, I was able to space them out fairly well while planting them. Swissh Chard is related to the beet family, and the Fordhook Giant apparently also produces an edible root. We’ve grown it before, a few years ago, but they never got to that stage. We’ll see how it goes this year. We did include Swiss Chard in one of the seed mixes that were sown in the fall. Some have come up, but they were basically too crowded out with other things to get very big. Only now, as we’ve thinned things out over time, are they starting to catch up in size.
By the time I finished sowing the Swiss Chard, it was raining, so I made my way indoors. I had picked up some yellow zucchini seeds, too, so when I head out again later, I’m hoping to get a few of those planted, too.
Maybe.
We are currently under a severe thunderstorm watch, but then my weather app says we’re raining right now, and it’s bright and sunny out there. We’re also at 27C/81F right now, but the humidex has us at 31C/88F. I’ve heard forecasts saying to expect the humidex to make it feel like 38C/100F in places. We’re supposed to keep getting hotter until about 6pm, and then it will very slowly start to cool down after 7pm. Tomorrow is expected to be slightly cooler, so it’s no big deal if things get postponed until then!
I am very thankful for what rain we do manage to get!
I just got back from giving the garden beds a watering for the evening. Tomorrow is not supposed to be as hot as today, but we haven’t gotten any of the rain that hit other parts of the province, some of which got serious thunderstorm warnings!
When I got to the trellis bed, I was rather blown away by how much bigger the noodle bean sprouts were, even compared to this morning.
In the first image, you can see four of the five collars around pumpkin seeds – and they are all sprouting! Nothing in the fifth one, yet, but these were the very last seeds I planted, and they’re already up! I remember last year, being amazed by how fast these free pumpkin seeds grew, too.
I have also confirmed, and you can see in the next photo: we have sunflowers! Not a lot, but the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers are starting to sprout. I wasn’t sure if these seeds were still viable or not, so anything we get of those is bonus!
While watering the new asparagus and strawberry bed, I got another pleasant surprise. I am pretty sure I planted the bare roots and crowns too late; I had not expected it to take so long, or I would have stored them properly. And yet, I found a single Jersey Giant asparagus, sprouting along the stake I place to mark where the crowns were planted. It’s so adorable!
I spent a fair bit of time working on the snap pea bed, carefully using the hose to pull weeds without also pulling the peas and tiny carrots out. As I worked my way from one end to the other, I was startled to find a bean sprout. Several of them. I had completely forgotten that I’d planted the last few bean seeds in the gaps between pea plants in one row! Gosh, the red noodle beans germinated fast!
Meanwhile, the Royal Burgundy bush beans I’d plant much earlier, beside the spoon tomatoes, have finally shown signs of life. All of two beans have sprouted. Hopefully, this means more will show up.
I didn’t bother trying to get a photo, but I also saw more corn seedlings showing up in the corn and yellow bush bean bed. Still very few, while the leftover seeds that got planted with the Arikara squash have more sprouting, and the earlier ones are getting quite big!
The Black zucchini has been doing really well. I planted three seeds in three spots, and 8 out of 9 seeds are now sprouted! With so many sprouting, I will probably have several to thin by transplanting, later. Even where the White Scallop square are planted, one seedling has appeared. Last year, those ones took three tries and a much longer time before any germinated, so that makes me very happy.
So far so good! I have to keep reminding myself that I finished planting everything such a short time ago. It just feels so late in the season. Probably because we had that heat wave in May.
On a completely unrelated note…
We seem to be missing three kittens.
Caramel’s tabby, Li’l Rig, and her tortie, Wormy, are nowhere to be seen. Yesterday, I spotted Caramel “luring” Li’l Rig into the maple grove on the north side of the inner yard. I strongly suspect she has taken them across the road. I was really hoping that, after I brought Li’l Rig back to the sun room yesterday evening, she wouldn’t try again. Caramel has been hanging around the house, which seems very strange for her to do, if she took her babies onto the property across the road.
Their brother, Havarti, is the biggest of the litter, is still very much around. He is so active and independent, I doubt he’d follow his mother anywhere right now. The other two are much smaller and were both recovering from oogey eyes. I can’t find them to check if their eyes still need washing.
The third missing kitten is Zipper. He was the sickest and the last on the road to recovery. He did seem much improved but, to be honest, in looking for him, I was looking for a body. No sign of him, anywhere. I do hope he’s okay. I can’t imagine he would have followed Caramel across the road.
I’m probably going to go outside one more time and do a walkabout. Maybe I’ll find him then.
As I write this, at almost 6:30pm, we are at 25C/77F with the humidex putting us at 28C/82F
I’d watered the garden beds last night, and they were still fine this morning, but by the evening they were definitely in need of more water. I knew we were expecting rain tomorrow, but too many things were getting baked!
It was only on checking the weather app as I wrote the above that I found the rain expected tomorrow, is now expected tonight. Only a 32% chance of rain, though, and for a shorter time. *sigh* A good overnight rainfall would be a wonderful thing right now, but it doesn’t look like it’ll happen!
While checking on the in-progress trellis bed, I was expecting to see more of the barely visible sprouts that were starting to come up yesterday. I was NOT expecting to see the entire row and basically exploded!
So… finishing that trellis is going to be a priority! These are the red noodle beans, and they’re going to need something to climb.
What is odd is that these beans are coming up, but none of the others beans I’ve planted have. I planted a row of them in the same bed as the Spoon tomatoes, and there’s nothing. Right now, only the Chinese elm is sprouting. Those were the Royal Burgundy bush beans, and they really should be up by now. The tomatoes and melons in the same bed area also struggling, so I wonder of there’s a correlation, there?
Oh, and I think, maybe, possibly, there are some sunflowers starting to come up. I’ll need to wait until the seedlings get bigger before I can be sure that’s what I’m seeing, and not some weed.
While watering in the old kitchen garden, I saw flashes of colour hidden by the leaves, and discovered the strawberries we grew from seed a couple of years ago now have berries ripening! These are the small wild? Alpine? strawberries we got in a kit meant for children, and there was nothing on the package to say what kind of strawberries they were. They are absolutely thriving. Too bad the berries aren’t particularly good.
I had a bit of a surprise with our corn, too. In the last image in the slide show above, you can see a row of corn sprouts.
These are the ones I planted with the Arikara squash. There are sprouts coming up all over in that bed!
Those were left over seeds from running out of room while planting in the nearby low raised bed. In that bed, there’s only one corn sprout visible. !! What is it about this little squash bed that has almost all the seeds I planted sprouting already, while the bigger bed has only one, so far?
No sign of any of the yellow bush beans, yet. With those being older seeds, I would not be surprised if none of those came up.
I don’t expect to get much, if anything, done in the garden tomorrow. In the morning, I’ll be heading to my mother’s to get her to a lab for her monthly blood work, then do her grocery shopping. We’re running low on wet cat food, plus we are now down to just one hose nozzle that doesn’t leak, so a trip to Walmart is in order for the afternoon. After that, my week is clear of appointments, so I should be able to get some work in the garden done. I want to get those vertical supports for the trellis bed secured, and whatever horizontal supports we decide on. For this year, we might just use temporary plastic trellis netting we already have, then put something more permanent on, next year.
Our plans are very loosey-goosey, and prone to change! As long as the final goal is achieved – in this case, permanent trellis tunnels joining pairs of low raised bed – I’m rather indifferent as to how it gets done! 😁
Well, I’ve got an early start and a long day ahead of me. Time to start winding down and get to bed early.
Ha!
I told myself that last night, expecting to be in bed shortly after 8pm. By the time I finally got to bed, it was past midnight.
When I checked the temps in the wee hours, we were at 7C/46F, but it felt like 4C/39F. As I write this, we are now at 10C/50F, but it feels like 3C/37F! The expected high of the day is only 16C/61F.
I don’t know if we got one last rainfall during the night. Wind is the real issue this morning. For the first time in a long time, though, I have not been seeing smoke, so I’m hoping all that rain has made a big difference for the wildfires.
While doing my morning rounds, I finally gave in and took the netting off from above the Arikara squash. The elm seeds are mostly dropped, and it was doing nothing to keep the cats off. In fact, as I was starting to pull the ground staples to remove it, one of the yard cats (a tabby with no name) jumped onto the mesh and immediately fell through over a squash and started to roll around in a panic!
Thankfully, the collars around the squash did their jobs, and nothing was crushed.
What we do have, however, is buds and even a blooming flower!
What is strange is that these are all female flowers. No male flowers! I’m used to the male flowers blooming first. I’m not sure if I should be pruning these off so the plants themselves can grow bigger before starting to bloom again. I’ve never grown these before. I’ll have to look that up. I’d hate to have to prune them but, without any male flowers to pollinate them, the baby squash are just going to wither away, anyhow.
At the high raised bed, I decided to pick these, as the plants were getting big enough to crowd other things out.
I’m leaving one Purple Prince (I think) plant that has bolted to go to seed. Tiny flower buds have started to appear. I picked the other larger ones; perhaps I waited too long and should have picked them at a smaller stage. As for the red thing in the middle, I thought it was a beat, but as I was cleaning and trimming it later, I could see that it’s white on the insides to… a big radish?
That’s one thing about using a seed mix for the winter sowing. This one was a mix of whatever root vegetable seeds I had left. There was only one type of turnip, which makes it easy, but there were several times of radishes and beets, and two types of carrots. One type of radish – the French Breakfast – has a distinct shape that makes it easy to identify. Everything else is “root vegetable surprise”. 😄
I just hope today isn’t so cold that the seeds recently planted will die off and rot instead of germinating. Things are supposed to get sunny and warm up over the next while, without extreme heat, which will be nice. Those overnight temperatures, when they start dropping below 10C/50F, could be a problem, though. The transplants should handle things fine, but the direct sowing… well, we’ll see how those go. At the very least, it will slow germination down.
Well, hopefully, we will have a long, moderate fall and a late first frost, to extend our growing season.
Meanwhile, in the time it took me to write this, our temperature has actually dropped, instead of getting warmer! We’re not supposed to reach our high of the day until 7 or 8 this evening. I’m( seriously considered plugging the cat house in again. It’s overcast enough that the light sensor for the heat bulb will turn on for the kittens.
Last year, I picked up the free pumpkinfest seeds early enough to start them indoors. I picked them up just a few days ago, so there’s no time for that, this year!
While we have been getting a few rainfalls, off and on, and don’t expect more rain until tomorrow morning, our province is actually getting special weather alerts for possible funnel clouds. I got messages from my brother, saying they had rain pretty much all day, with occasional massive downpours. It’s been knocking his internet out often enough that he ended up linking to his phone to access the internet, so he could work.
From home.
On a Sunday.
Because my brother just never seems to stop working. Ever.
He’s always been like this, even as a kid. How he hasn’t burnt out, long ago, I have no idea!
While I had completely forgotten about the pumpkin seeds when I was working on the bed earlier, it was probably a good thing, in the end, given that I started to get rained on before I finished what I did remember to plant!
The row with the transplanted onions had enough empty space for four seeds, and the last one was planted in the remaining space of the sunflower row. I used the plastic collars to mark where the seeds would go, then planted one in each collar. They may not all germinate. Last year they have out 3 seeds per packet. I pre-germinated them, and they all sprouted within a day, so I do know they give out very healthy seeds.
I had some stove pellets left in the bag I’ve been using in other garden beds, and I finished it off here, including adding a few into the collars as well. Then everything got watered, even though it just rained. The collars got partially filled with water a couple of times, to make sure the pumpkin seeds got thoroughly soaked. The watering was also to get the stove pellets to absorb moisture and start breaking up into sawdust. They will do as a light mulch for now. Later in the season, after things are fairly big, more mulch will be added.
I don’t expect to use the mulch that I pulled off this morning. In the photo, you can see it raked onto the taller grass. That is where this bed’s twin is going to be built. Once things are dry enough to drag out the weed trimmer, I’ll clean out that area, trimming it as close to the soil as possible, then lay cardboard down on it, in preparation for building the next bed. The mulch I’ve set aside will eventually get buried in the new bed.
So I think I can NOW say the garden is officially in! 😄😂 There’s still lots of work to do, of course, but what needed to be planted is now in the ground.
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!
I woke at my usual time, which is basically when it starts getting light out (about 5-5:30am, these days), but was in massive pain. I did manage to get outside to feed the yard cats, but wasn’t able to do the rest of my morning rounds. Instead, I took some painkillers and headed back to bed.
I didn’t wake up again until about noon!
I did feel a lot better by then, though, which is good, because – as always – the job I needed to do took more than expected!
The bed I need to work on is where I had eggplant and hot peppers growing, last year. These had been mulched first with cardboard, then grass clippings on top of the cardboard. In the fall, I just did a chop and drop, leaving it pretty much as it was for the winter.
What you see in the first photo is what was able to grow through the openings in the cardboard where the peppers and eggplant were growing through, and areas around the edges where rhizomes in particular were able to work their way up the side walls of the bed.
The box frame was secured to hold plastic I’d set around the eggplant and peppers to form a sort of open top greenhouse. The twine wrapped around was there to reduce billowing in the wind. If the wind were not an issue, it would have worked out quite well, but it was a pretty constant battle. Even the cover with the wire that is stored on top of the box frame would get blown off, and it was there to weigh down the tops of the plastic, and didn’t have anything else over it! Which is why it got lashed down with paracord, later on.
Removing the mulch and remaining bits of cardboard did clear a lot of the elm seeds off, but there were so many seeds, the mulch can’t be used again, nor would I want to put it on the compost pile. Instead, I put it around the base of the box on the outside, to hopefully smother any weeds that would come up through the gaps.
Then it was time to fluffify the soil and pull the weeds, including the roots.
Which was absolutely brutal. It was like concrete.
I normally would have gone over it with a garden fork, first, but with the box frame in place, that wasn’t an option. So I was just using my little hand cultivator.
That has got to be my favourite garden tool right now. It really does the job! It was still pretty difficult. In the end, I spent more than an hour, just breaking up that soil. There weren’t a lot of weeds to pull, thanks to that mulch, but getting the roots out was almost impossible. Even after breaking up the soil first, if there were any clumps at all, the roots and rhizomes would just break apart.
I keep water with me while I work but, once the soil was prepped, I had to head inside for a sit down and hydration break. Thank God for cooler temperatures! Unfortunately, I’m out of any amendments that would help reduce this sort of compaction.
For this bed, I wanted to plant the Orchard Baby corn, which has only 65 days to maturity, with some beans. I had some yellow Custard bean seeds left. Which is a bit funny because, a few years back, we grew a different variety of corn in this bed, with beans from this same packet, in between!
Given that the beans are a few years old, I don’t expect a high germination rate, but bean seeds last a lot longer than other things.
Using the end of one of the larger plastic coated plant stakes, I marked off 5 fairly deep lines in the soil – three for corn, two for beans – then filled the resulting little trenches with water. Then I ran the stake over the lines again, and this time used the hose on the jet setting, to drive the water deeper in the planting areas.
In the slide show above, right after the photo of the seeds, the seeds are laid out in the rows. Even the bright pink inoculated bean seeds are hard to see, but they’re there!
The beans were planted pretty far apart; there were enough that I knew there would be plenty left behind. They’re more of a “bonus” crop.
The corn was supposed to be about 50 seeds per packet, and I did hope to get them all in, but there just wasn’t the space, even setting them pretty close together. They will be thinned later, if the germination rate is high.
To actually plant the seeds, I cheated, and used the end of the plant stake I used to make the rows to push the seeds into the soil, which you can see in the next picture. For each one, I’d give the stake a spin to make sure no seeds stuck to the end, before moving to the next one! Then I gently dragged the stake over the rows to cover the seeds before finishing off with a gentle watering, which further ensured the seeds were well covered.
I still had those leftover corn seeds, though. I didn’t want to hang on to such a small amount, but what to do with them?
Well, there was this little bed nearby, with the Arikara squash in it.
So I opened up the mulch, where there seemed to be the most room, including right in the very middle, and planted the leftover seeds there. These beds are close enough that wind pollination between them should work out fine. For now, though, the mosquito netting cover got put back on until the squash is large enough I won’t have to worry about something getting at them.
Then I went to the tomato bed and, using the plant stake to make holes in the soil, planted more beans down the middle of the bed, plus the gap between the Black Beauty and Chocolate Cherry tomatoes. Bonus beans, plus they will act as a living mulch later on.
That done, I brought out the stove pellets for the corn and beans bed. I scattered them all over the bed, then misted them with water. After the pellets had a chance to expand and start breaking up into sawdust, I sprinkled some more pellets on and misted it again.
As there is nothing in this bed with protective collars or anything like that, it was going to need something to keep the cats out. A few years back, my daughter bought us a large roll of netting. I’ve been reusing pieces of it in other areas but, for the amount I needed, I brought the remaining roll out. You can see it in the second last photo of the corn and beans slideshow. The netting on that roll is actually folded in half. I left it as it was, though. Using ground staples to fasten the netting to the wire above the box cover, I unrolled it all the way around, with a decent amount of overlap, before cutting it. Roughly 25 feet, in total. There is still lots on the roll.
About this time, I got a notification on my phone for a voicemail message. Turns out my Wi-Fi calling had shut itself off. Why I was still able to listen to the voicemail message, but not get the call itself, I have no idea.
It was home care, letting me know that there would be no one available for my mother’s bed time med assist.
It was almost 6pm when I got the message, which means she would have just had her suppertime med assist.
I had time to finish setting up the netting. The top was secured with ground staples to the wire cover at several points. This netting catches on everything, so I was able to make use of that and got it “stuck” at each corner. Then, just to be on the safe side, I used more ground staples to secure the netting between the box frame and the walls of the bed. The box frame is tied down tight enough that it was hard to make the space to slide the ground staples through. Those aren’t going anywhere! The netting would rip, first.
Once that was finished and everything cleaned up and put away, I got a daughter to take over and do the watering of the rest of the garden, while I washed up and changed, before going to my mother’s.
It’s been almost a week since I did my mother’s grocery shopping, and I have an appointment in town tomorrow, so I left early enough to hit the grocery store, first. I knew she’d be running out of milk, at the very least – she is always running out of milk, but refuses to buy more than one 2L carton at a time – so I got that, plus a few other things I thought she might be running out of by now. Since I was there anyhow, I spotted some excellent sales and picked up some stuff for ourselves, too.
When I got to my mother’s she was so very happy when she saw I’d brought her more milk! She had told me, she even considered asking me if I could pick some up on the way, but had decided against it.
I was early for her evening pills but, once everything was put away, I opened up the lock box and got them ready for her. Which gave her time to tell me why the cover was missing on the tiny tagine shaped bowl I gave her to put her pills into, so they could be double checked and counted before she took them.
It turns out that, a couple of times now, someone would open the bowl to put in her dose for the time, only to find one of her half pills from the previous med assist, still sitting in the bowl. It had been counted out, but she missed it when she took them – and clearly, the home care aid didn’t double check to make sure my mother had actually taken all the pills!
So it was decided that she would tuck the lid away so that, if a pill got accidentally left behind again, it could actually be seen and she could take it right away.
Good thinking, but really, part of the home care aid’s job is to make sure my mother takes her pills properly. That’s why they’re there, and the pills are in a lock box, after all!
I did get a bit of a visit in before I headed home, much appreciating the longer daylight hours! I’ve made these trips in the winter, when it was dark by the time my mother was supposed to get her suppertime visit, but this time of year, I was driving home in full light. Much easier to watch for deer!
Tomorrow, I’ve got an appointment in town, but my afternoon is free. I’m waffling between working on the bed at the chain link fence, or the bed that will have a permanent trellis built into it.
I’ll see what I feel up to, after I get home!
For now, it’s time to take some pain killers and get to bed. Maybe even before midnight!
This bed had already been prepped, then covered with plastic, except for one end, where there had been onions gone to seed. They did not survive another winter, though.
The plastic didn’t solarize the weeds to death, but at least it kept most of the elm seeds off! The challenge was to get the plastic off again, without dumping them all onto the soil.
For a bed that had already been weeded before the plastic was laid down, there were a LOT of weeds to clear out. As I worked around the bed, I suddenly realized that I was pulling out baby carrots! Last year, we had a couple of Uzbek Golden Carrots bolt and go to seed, so I left them to it, so I could collect the seeds in the fall. When I went to gather them, though, the seed heads were shriveled and messed up looking, and there were no seeds to collect.
Looks like one of them did have seeds, after all!
There was no way they could be transplanted or anything like that, so away they went.
Once the bed was clear of weeds and roots, I finished off our last bag of manure into it, and worked that into the soil.
Then it was time to figure out where the tomatoes would go.
I used the collars (I found an extra “stash” of the water bottles I make the collars from in the basement, so I had plenty for the tomatoes) to figure out the spacing. There were four Black Beauty, four Chocolate Cherry and nine Sub Arctic Plenty.
We’ve grown the Black Beauty and Chocolate Cherry before, so I know what to expect with those. They both get quite tall, while the Black Beauty became really heavy. They had trellis supports, and I ended up having to add supports to the supports, to keep the whole thing from tipping over in the wind!
With that in mind, I made sure that these were on the north side of the bed, so they wouldn’t shade out other plants. So I set out eight collars on that side, with a space in the middle.
If I remember correctly, the Sub Arctic Plenty are a bush type tomato, so I don’t expect them to get tall. I’m thinking they will be more like the Forme de Couer tomatoes we grew last year. Each tomato plant had a pair of bamboo stakes to support it, and I’d used twine around the plants to secure them. The plants got so heavy with tomatoes, the supports started falling over, and some of the bamboo stakes even broke from the weight.
With that in mind, I planted the Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes along the south side of the bed, where they would get the most sunlight.
As with everything else, this bed was dry, dry, dry, so it got repeated waterings at every stage. I’d taken the cover off the other bed and every time I watered the tomato bed, I gave the other bed a gentle watering, too.
Once the tomatoes were in, it was time to give them support. For the verticals, I used 6′ plastic coated metal stakes. I’m glad I got more of these! Every collar got one of these tucked against one side. I used up all the stakes from last year, and used a couple of the new ones, to make one for every tomato plant.
Once those were in place, I used bamboo stakes to weave through the verticals. I did three horizontal rows on each side, and more can be added later, if need be. I then added some sticks to connect the two sides. There’s just a couple at the ends of one level, and a couple more further in, at another level. We may not need any more than that. We’ll see how things progress over time.
I did not have any clean grass clippings left for mulch, so I made use of the stove pellets we use for cat litter. I scattered them around, and even inside, the collars before giving the whole thing one final watering, to get the pellets to break up into sawdust.
I think it worked out rather well, and should be able to hold the weight of the tomatoes we can expect from these varieties,
Once this was done and cleaned up, and I took a break for lunch, it was time to work in the old kitchen garden. I decided it was time to remove the cover and netting from the greens bed, so the first thing to do was roll up the two sheets of netting, then take the cover off.
The kittens are going to miss their little mosquito netting hammocks!
The greens bed was really dry, so I spent time time watering it from the rain barrel – the rain we had was almost enough to refill it – and weeding. The spinach is bolting and we’ve decided to let them go to seed. I also found a second tiny bok choi that is staring to bloom.
That done, the herb bed got a watering, too, and then I did the pruning and clearing I mentioned in my earlier post, before I could even start on the wattle weave bed.
I decided that the Sweetie Snack Mix mini bell peppers would go in the short part of the L shaped bed, and the eggplant in the long section, among the strawberries.
The short side of the bed didn’t need a lot of weeding, and I was careful to work around the garlic that got missed and started growing this year. The old mulch got pushed up against the wattle weave sides, and the hard packed soil was broken up and fluffified. It was surprisingly hard packed. So I added some of the remaining rehydrated coconut coir over the area and worked that into the soil.
I laid the transplants out, in their cups, to figure out the bed way to space them. After that, it was the usual routine of wetting everything down, then again and again, in between every stage of transplanting. When the peppers were finally planted, I made sure to press down around each one, to create a shallow “bowl” to collect water and drain it towards the plant. Then each pepper plant got its own wire tomato cage to grow up into.
That done, it was time to work on the other side. It was a bit more challenging, working around the strawberries and onion survivors that are there. There was no sign of any of the chamomile self seeding, and the thyme that almost survived the winter was long dead, so that gave a bit of extra space. The mulch was moved aside, the compacted soil broken up, and the last of the coconut coir worked into the soil.
The transplants in their cups were laid out to figure out the spacing, along with the mystery flower. I decided to plant that at the very end of the bed, where it could stay permanently. If it survives! The flower did get a plastic collar, more to keep the cats from rolling on it.
Once the eggplant were in, each with their shallow “bowl” around them, they got their wire tomato cages set in place, and they were done!
Almost.
The mulch I’d moved aside was mostly old wood chips. I didn’t want to push that back. I did, however, have some leaf mulch that had been pulled off and set along the inside of the L shape, by the double lilac. It was old and dry, so I was able to crush handfuls of it, and shake it out over the transplants, to give the soil a light protection. More mulch can be added as the plants get bigger.
I forgot to take an “after” picture when I was done, so I went back out later, and got a picture of the entire finished bed, which is the last image in the above slide show.
That done, I went on to water the new trees in the fruit forest area, and the walnuts in the outer year. Still no sign of anything emerging where the seeds are planted, but the year old sapling is starting to get some bigger leaves on it.
I headed outside shortly after 7am to go my morning rounds and start on the garden. By the time I was done and heading back inside, it was past 8am. Taking into account stopping for breakfast and lunch, I got about 10 hours in the garden today!
Which is great, because all the transplants are IN!!!
Tomorrow, my main goal of the day is to get the third low raised bed near the compost rind cleaned up and planted with short season corn and yellow beans. After that, I want to work on the permanent trellis bed where I want to plant red noodle beans. That will make sure the trellis gets finished off, because they’re going to need something to climb!
Last of all, I will be clearing the bed at the chain like fence, salvage what I can find, replant with what I can manage, then cover it up again. Somehow. I like the netting that’s over it, but it really need something better than the wire to support it. I’m not even sure I can salvage the ones that cats have bent up!
I’ll figure it out.
Just another day or two, and the garden will be officially in!
Almost there!
On a completely different note, while I was working outside, my daughter let me know that the shop I took our push mower to had called and left a message. As expected they can’t find the part that’s needed. It’s simply not available, anywhere.
I was expecting this and had been thinking about it. I’d told them not to worry if they couldn’t find it; I’d just come pick it up. However, it would just end up as more junk here. So when I called them back and talked about it, I suggested they could keep the mower and use it for parts. If I ever buy a push mower again, it won’t be that brand, so it would be of no use to me. They, however, might be able to scavenge it if some other poor soul has the same brand of mower and needs a part that’s hard to find. They happily accepted the offer. Win, win!
Thankfully, my brother has provided us with mowers we can use! I was going to take my mother’s old mower in, but my brother thinks he can fix it himself, so we don’t even need to bring that in.
Oh, my goodness. It’s past midnight as I finish this! I need to get my butt into bed!
The Re-Farmer 