I had nine transplants, so that worked out with using the trellis posts as spacing guides.
Since I was going to plant bush beans along the edge of the bed, I did things a bit differently from the other half. With the melons, I set out the collars, added a handful of manure into each one and worked that in, in situ, then made narrow trenches around each collar. For this half, I started out by making a shallow, flat trench along the length of the bed I’d be planting into, pushing soil up against the log wall, and towards the trellis line. I added manure into the trench and worked that into the soil before giving it a thorough watering. Then I added the collars, closer to the centre/trellis line, than the melons are. Then I watered it again, filling each collar with water, as well as the trench.
To transplant the tomatoes, I scooped out a hole in each collar, deep enough for the entire root balls, then added it back in after the tomatoes we in place. Even with filling each collar and letting it absorb water before hand, I was still pulling up dry soil! Once the tomatoes were in, I filled the collars with water again.
Each tomato got a pair of bamboo stakes set on either side, placed right against their collars. Later one, once I have the time and the ties, I will be adding cross pieces to make them sturdier, and also secure them to the wire trellis. Growing these before, I’ve been able to just wind their stems around a single bamboo stake but, after a while, it starts to get tippy, so I’ll better secure them this time.
Once done with the tomatoes, I made another long, narrow trench to plant the beans into. That got watered using the jet setting to drill the water deeper into the trench, which also helped level it out and even break up some of the clumps I missed. I didn’t have a full packet of the Royal Burgundy purple beans, but I had just enough to evenly space the seeds from end to end. I don’t expect a 100% germination rate, so we might end up with a few gaps, but these are new seeds, so it shouldn’t be too bad.
Once I spaced the beans out evenly, I pushed them into the soil in their little trench and covered them, then went over the trench with a more gentle flat spray of water to fill it and level out the soil again.
That done, I used the last of the grass clippings left in the wagon to mulch around the tomato collars, and the edge of the bed along the bean’s little trench. I ran out of grass clippings with just one corner left to cover, but I still had some leaves and grass clippings mulch set aside from the winter sown beds I could use.
Then it all got watered again, making sure to soak through the mulch.
With how dry that bed was, it’s really not possible to over water it.
Since this bed had been covered in plastic while we had our recent rainfall, I fully expected it to be so very dry. After working on the next bed, however, it turns out that it really didn’t make much of a difference. It still would have been that dry!
The next bed I worked on was the end of the garlic bed, where I’d winter sown some of the same seed mix of root vegetables that is in the high raised bed. Nothing survived in this bed, though.
I didn’t have time to break out the weed trimmer to clear around the bed, so I used a rake to knock the weeds and dandelion seed heads down and way from the bed. This little section still has netting over it, though the cats have still been lying on top of it! So before I started, I had to pull the netting away, starting at the garlic end, leaving it still tacked down at the other end. The bed then got a weeding, and finally some manure was worked into the soil.
Next, I used some of the small plant support stakes I was no longer needing at another bed, to add more supports for the very loose twine, including adding one in the very middle of the bed, where the twin crossed.
Once the soil was ready and watered, I made three round, shallow “bowls”, which got watered again. Each “bowl” got three squash seeds planted in them. On one side, I planted the White Scallop squash. On the other, Black Zucchini.
Then the “bowls” got watered again.
This garden bed was fully exposed to the rain we got, and yet it was every bit as dry as the bed I’d just worked on, that had been covered in plastic while it was raining! You’d never know we had any rain at all.
This bed had been mulched for the winter with a mixture of leaves and grass clippings, that had been pulled to one side of the bed in the spring. I was able to use that to mulch around the “bowls” the seeds were planted in, with a light scattering of mulch in the bowls, too. Once that was in place, the netting was put back in place. Then it got watered again.
Hopefully, the new supports will help keep the cats off!
By the time the squash is large enough that the netting will need to be removed, they won’t need the extra protection anymore. We shall see how many of the seeds actually germinate. If I end up with extras, I will thin by transplanting. Hopefully, this year, we will actually have a decent amount of summer squash!
So that is now done. In the main garden area, the only bed left is the trellis bed. I won’t work on that again until everything is planted, though.
From the looks of the weather forecast, I should be able to get lots done tomorrow.
Gosh, I’m so enjoying all the progress in the garden! I might be in a lot of pain when I’m done, but it feels so good otherwise, it’s totally worth it.
Once the frame for the low raised bed was finally assembled, it was time to set up a trellis, then do some transplanting.
This time, I got to use actual new, never before used by anyone else, metal posts to hold the wire! I had picked up four of these posts at Dollarama, and they seem like a really good product.
Rather than set the posts right at the freshly attached end logs, I set the end posts about a foot in from the ends, which turned out to be roughly 15′ apart in the 18′ bed, so the other two were set about 5′ apart. And by “feet”, I mean literally my booted feet. 😁
At the end closer to those trees we need to get rid of, I had to actually dig around with the garden fork to pull up the rocks I kept hitting, trying to push the post in!
Then I went to the old squash tunnel and snagged the last 2″ square wire mesh. There’s still one section with chicken wire on it. I find the 6 sided shapes bend and stretch out of shape too much for my liking, so I’m not sure what I’ll use that for.
The square wire mesh was about 18′ ong, so there was excess to work with.
One of the things about these posts is that they have hooks on them to hold stuff like this, which you can see in the second image of the slideshow above. There’s four hooks like that, with the opening facing up, along the top 2/3 or so, then two in the bottom third, facing the other way.
Very convenient, except it was remarkably difficult to get all of them hooked up at the same time!
It was still much easier to get the wire mesh up evenly than on the salvaged T posts I used for the pea trellis.
Once the trellis was done, it was time to finally do some transplanting!
Once again, the trellis posts dividing the bed into 3 sections came in handy, as I had three types of melon to transplant. There were four each of the honeydew and Sarah’s Choice (cantaloupe type) melons. Then there were the Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon. There are two larger plants, plus one really tiny one I probably shouldn’t have bothered with, but I can’t just toss the poor thing!
I decided to transplant all of them melons on the East side of the trellis, so they will get the morning sun, and the three watermelons would be on the south end of the bed.
As with the winter squash, I set up collars made from 4L water bottles that my husband uses for his CPAP humidifier. Those are turning out to be very handy!
Once I spaced out each collar and set them into the soil, just enough to keep them from blowing away, I added a handful of manure into each. That got well mixed into the very, very dry soil, the collars reset in place, and then I made low trenches in the soil around them, to drain water down towards the roots.
Then everything got a thorough soaking. Which got sucked up like a sponge, so I did it again.
Even with filling the collars with water, as well as the trenches around them, when I dug down to plant the melons, I was still reaching super dry soil!
Everything got another thorough watering, once the transplants were in.
Then I grabbed the wagon and headed to the outer yard to rake up grass clippings to use as mulch. Thankfully, that area is far enough away that it’s not filled with Chinese elm seeds! The inner yard is practically drifted with them.
Once the melons were surrounded by mulch, it got yet another thorough watering. I wanted to make sure the mulch was wet all the way through, not just on top.
As these get bigger, I plan to train them up the trellis as best I can. Last year, we had a 4″ plastic trellis net, and it really sagged under the weight of the vines, so I’m hoping this set up will work better. I will probably still have to add cross pieces at the tops. The wire extends about 4″ above the top hook on the posts, so I should be able to weave supports through the mesh fairly easily. The posts also have holes in them so, if necessary, I can use twine or something to stake them out at the ends, so the weight of melons doesn’t pull them towards the middle.
That took care of one half of the bed.
I have decided that I will plant our Spoon tomatoes in the other half.
Several of them are staring to bloom now! These are indeterminants that can grow quite tall, so they will have their own individual supports, plus the trellis, to hold them up. I’ve got nine Spoon tomato transplants, so there will be room to plant something else with them, if I wanted to. Some bush beans, perhaps.
I’m hoping to be able to get them in tomorrow morning, since the bed is pretty much ready, and there’s even extra mulch waiting in the wagon for them. My daughter has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, and we’re planning on leaving early. Chances are, we’ll need to go to the pharmacy after her appointment, and I will likely take advantage of the driving around to do some of the shopping we weren’t able to do during our stock up shops, so it might be a long day of driving around! Which means the morning will be pretty much the only time I’ll have available to get any more transplants in.
After the Spoon tomatoes are in, that leaves the peppers and eggplant to be planted in the old kitchen garden, and the rest of the tomatoes should fit in one of the low raised beds in the East yard. The other low raised bed will have our short season corn planted in it, with more bush beans planted in between.
By the time those are in, the elm seeds should be done dropping, and I can finally do something about that bed along the chain link fence. The mesh tunnel may be all bent up, but it’s still doing its job of keeping the bed from being suffocated by seeds. I’ll be replanting the bed with my remaining packet of Hopi Black Dye sunflower seeds, and pole beans.
I might skip planting into the chimney block planters at the other section of chain link fence entirely, this year. I’ll have to see how badly the elm roots have invaded. There’s still the trellis bed that still needs work, but can be planted in before that’s done. Plus, the bed in the old kitchen garden that will be getting wattle weave walls added. It could probably be planted in before that’s done, too.
It feels like I’m way behind on getting the direct sowing done, but it’s only June 2 today – our previous average last frost date. Which means most things couldn’t actually be safely direct sown until after today, anyhow! We had so many insanely hot days, lately, everything feels off.
I decided to plant the all the remaining winter squash into one bed. With these ones, I’m not looking to save seed, so it doesn’t matter if they cross pollinate. The bed I decided to put them in has been solarizing for quite a long time now.
The first thing to do, though, was get in with the weed trimmer and clear around the bed.
There were clouds and clouds of dandelion seeds!
The plastic did a great job of protecting the soil from that, though.
Once the weed trimming was done, I removed the boards and bricks holding the plastic down. One of the boards had been used to roll the plastic up for storage, and I used that again.
It’s amazing what can survive under the heat of that plastic – and the lack of any moisture!
So my first job was to break up the compacted soil and so what weeding needed to be done.
I was finding elm tree roots at the end furthers from the elms.
It was while I was working on this that we got company. My brother came over today. He had some stuff he needed to get done, so I just went over to say hello before getting back to my own work.
The first thing he did was comment on how I needed to not die on him! Apparently, I was extremely red and flushed from the heat! I did make sure to sit in the shade and hydrate, often, but after his comment, I made a point of going inside and sitting in the air conditioned living room for a while before getting back at it.
As I was working, I thought about how to bed protect the bed. Seeing how, even with logs added to the sides, the peas and carrots bed was eroding on one side, I wanted to prevent that right from the start.
So, once the soil was weeded and fluffified, I decided to make use of the boards that had weighed down the plastic, and make temporary walls.
I first raked the soil in from the edges. In going through my supplies in the garden shed, I brought out a bundle of metal stakes that were salvaged from the Walmart market tent we had a tree fall on, several years ago. I’d used these to mark out where to shift the garden beds last year, and this particular bundle all had pinwheels – or the remains of pinwheels – taped to them. A pair of them still had twine wrapped around them, so I put those two at opposite ends of one side. I then used the last of some small bamboo stakes I had to fill in the gaps a bit, to support the boards, as they are all different lengths and some are pretty rotted out and broken on their ends. Once the boards were in place, I raked some of the soil against them to hold them in place and create a shallow trench in the middle.
The soil was insanely dry. Once the boards were in place, I gave the trench a thorough watering. The water just disappeared! Eventually, I got it to the point that the water would actually sit for a little while before getting sucked away.
I used the plastic collars to work out the spacing, setting them into the soil just deep enough to not blow away, but not so deep that they would restrict root growth. Then, each collar got a handful of manure mixed into it. The soil around each collar got shallow trenches made around them, too. Then everything got another thorough watering.
The metal stakes handily divided the bed into three sections, and there were three varieties of squash to transplant. There were six Mashed Potato squash, and I decided those would go on the end closest to the elm trees. I figured, if the elm roots started crowding into the bed, it would be better to have the variety with the most plants at that end, in case we lost one or two. There were five Baked potato squash, which went in the other end, and four Sunshine squash were planted in the middle section.
After being planted into the collars, everything got another watering. Then I grabbed the wagon and went into the outer yard, where sections have been mowed, and raked up dried grass clippings to use as mulch.
While working on this, I could hear various noises and saw my brother driving around in the zero-turn lawn mower, using it as transportation. One of the things he did today was add a ball hitch, so he could use it to tow a small trailer.
Then he came to get me. He even set up a stump of a log I had in the shade of the trees, on the trailer as a seat for me! A seat is why that log was set up in the shade in the first place, so that was rather funny.
I did need his help to steady myself to get onto the trailer, though. 😄
One of the many things he got done today was replace the long screw eye we’ve been using as a pin on the slide bar for the gate. He got two different possible replacements for it and wanted me to choose one of them. After we got that figured out, he gave me a ride back to the garden.
That was really fun!
Meanwhile, the wind has been picking up through the day – and the elm trees are dropping their dried out seeds.
There were times when it was like a snow storm of seeds. Our lawn is thick with them and, in mere minutes, the soil in the garden bed I’d spent so much time clearing out was getting filled with seeds!
Mulching around the squash was as needed to keep those frickin’ seeds off as much as anything else! I even tucked a light mulch of grass clippings inside the collars, carefully setting it around the stems.
Once the bed was mulched, I brought over the rolling seat and settled down for one last watering. The grass clippings are bone dry, and it needed to be soaked all the way through. This way, the damp grass clippings will keep the soil both damp and cool, and is more likely to allow water through. When it’s completely dry, the grass can act as a thatch, and prevent moisture from reaching the soil, instead. So I took my time and made sure the mulch was completely soaked.
By that point, it was time for supper, and I was done for the day! It was 34C/93F and holding. I didn’t catch what the humidex was, but it sure felt hotter.
At the moment, the high forecast for tomorrow is “only” 20C/68F, which is going to feel blessedly cool after the past couple of days! We might even get a bit of rain at around 7am.
Hopefully, I’ll get there rest of the transplants in tomorrow. I have both tomatoes and melons blooming right now! So those have priority.
I’m going to be pretty much living on painkillers for the next few days, but it needs to be done!
Once the garden is in, I want to just sleep for a week.
Which won’t happen, but I can still fantasize about it! 😄
I’ll be paying for it tonight and tomorrow, but I’m very happy with how much I was able to get done in the garden today. Those winter squash could have been planted a couple of weeks ago, at the size they’re at! I noticed some even had flower buds already on them.
Of the four types of winter squash we have this year, there is one type that I specifically want to save seeds for. That is the Arikara squash, which was listed as extremely rare.
That meant they needed to be planted well away from the other squash, to avoid cross pollination.
I decided to put them in the new little bed I successfully grew Crespo squash in, last year.
As you can see in the first image, we have been rather behind on clearing things lately! My daughter was able to do the main lawn mowing, but this area needs the weed trimmer.
So that was my first step. I cleared around all the beds and, since there are two more that need to be cleared for planting soon. One of them will have tomatoes in it. The other will have direct seeded corn and beans.
The small bed was fairly compacted, so it took a while to loosen the soil enough with the garden fork, just to be able to pull the weeds. That one little space, and I was pulling the usual crab grass, creeping Charlie, dandelions, white clover and thistle. There was also lambs quarter and a weed with leaves I keep mistaking for while strawberry, until they get bigger.
There was one surprise in there. I pulled up something with very distinctive spike leaves of a flower that look like a small version of the irises we have growing near the house. I set it aside by the transplants, with the roots in water, until I decide where to transplant it. I’m very curious as to what it is!
One the soil was clear of weeds and the clumps broken up, I added some manure and mixed that in thorough.
There are only three Arikara squash transplants, and I had considered planting something with them, like I did with the Crespo squash last year. In the end, I decided against it.
As we are expecting a dry year, the bed got a lot of watering. It was incredibly dry, so that took a while. Once the soil was damp more than just on to top, I set the transplants with collars around them, then created trenches around the collars, to collect as much water towards the roots as possible. The collars do a good job of holding the water and allowing it to slowly seep down.
I had a bin nearby, with grass clippings for mulch, from last year. It turned out to be exactly enough to thoroughly mulch the entire bed around the collars. Earlier, I had cut the sets of 3′ plastic coated metal plant stakes in half, and set one in each corner. I had pipe for hoops I intended to set in an X over the bed, but they are 5′ long, and that’s not long enough to reach from corner to corner. So I set the hoops at the ends.
I had a piece of mosquito netting to put over the hoops, but I didn’t want it to come in contact with the squash plants – and they’re already pretty big! So I joined the hoops with three 4′ plant stakes. The one in the middle hangs under the hoops, but I put the ones on the sides on top of the hoops, to keep the mesh off the leaves.
The netting was more than long enough, but not quite wide enough. The ends got rolled up in more plant stakes and pinned down with ground staples. I could just reach the top of the mulch on the sides, and those are secured with a couple more ground staples and rocks.
This covering is temporary. Once the transplants are well established and bigger, I’ll remove the cover. When they start blooming, I’ll be hand pollinating them as well as letting the insects do the job, just to be on the safe side!
By the time I finished here, it was 26C/79F, with the humidex putting it at 32C/90F. It was also coming up on noon, and my daughter was sweetheart and had lunch ready for me. She has been feeling quite sick today, and has spent much of the day in bed, yet she still made me both lunch and supper!
I am so grateful for that AC my brother set up for us in the living room. It was downright heavenly to take a break and cool down!
I still had a lot of work to do, though, so I was soon back out. By this time, I knew I wasn’t going to get all the transplants in, but I needed to at least get the rest of the winter squash done.
Yeah. That one turned out to be a big job, too. I did, however, have a bonus for the day!
I don’t know if starting our seeds in the relative cold of our basement has anything to do with it, or maybe having the portable greenhouse, but this year’s transplants are some of the strongest, healthiest looking plants I’ve grown yet!
The first image is all our tomatoes. There’s one bin of Spoon tomatoes, one of Sub Arctic Plenty, and one with a mix of Black Beauty and Chocolate Cherry. One of those was lost when the wind tried to tear apart the portable greenhouse, so there was space enough for me to tuck in the two sage transplants I picked up yesterday.
In the next image, we have two bins on the left, one with eggplant and one with peppers. In the middle are our melons, and on the right are the winter squash. It was the winter squash that was my priority for today, as they are outgrowing the cells in their tray.
I did the safe first, though, since there was just the two of them, going into an already prepared bed.
I tucked them into the middle, between the other herbs.
I look forward to seeing how this bed looks, once the herbs reach their full sizes. They should fill the whole thing. I’m curious to see if we’ll need to remove the cover later on. For now, the main thing is to protect the transplants from cats.
Speaking of which…
The older kittens have discovered the portable greenhouse – and the pots with luffa in them! The pots have a thick layer of sawdust from the stove pellets added around them as mulch.
Apparently, sawdust makes a great bed.
Grommet was in the pot with the larger luffa and wouldn’t leave. Which was a surprise, since he normally runs away when I come too close. This time, however, he let me pick him up and carry him around for a while enjoying pets!
The luffa now have gallon size water bottle collars around them, to keep the kitties from squishing the luffa!
The next thing I wanted to get done was the Arikara squash.
My goal for the day was to get all the transplants in.
Ha!
No, I didn’t achieve that goal.
I did, however, get a LOT done, until the 34C/93F heat finally did me in. Enough that I’ll be breaking it up into several posts.
The start of the day was the same as it has been for the past while; after my morning rounds, everything got a watering in preparation for the coming heat. I was quite appreciating the new watering can, which holds twice as much as the breaking apart bucket I’ve been using! So that part of the watering went a lot faster.
Before I started watering the new asparagus bed, though, I did some modification. The landscape fabric or whatever it is had just been folded back to uncover the space I planted in, and the rocks I pulled out was just tossed on top. I lifted the folded side to shift all the rocks towards the opposite side, then laid the edge out close to the little wire fence protecting the strawberries. After weighing that down, I pulled the other end to cover a new section of what had been our squash patch in previous years.
There was still some grass clippings on the fabric, and that got used to lightly mulch the asparagus area, and heavily mulch along the wire fence. Once that was done, it all got a thorough watering.
The light mulch should be enough to protect the soil, while still making it easy for the baby asparagus to poke through. The heavy mulch should, hopefully, keep any weeds from coming back by the strawberries.
I’d left a couple of buckets filled with water to keep them from blowing them away. I noticed the cats have been drinking from them, often, so now I keep them full for the kitties. 😊
Next to the new asparagus bed is our garlic bed, then the potatoes.
The garlic is looking so good! We should start getting scapes soon. We are all looking forward to cooking with those!
The potatoes are coming up a lot faster now. When watering that bed, I noticed there are SO many frogs! They get startled when I water the potatoes, and jump into the netting. They seem to be able to get in and out just fine, though – at least when they’re not being scared by something!
Once all the watering was done, it was finally time to start transplanting things.
The weather apps say we’re anywhere from 24-26C/75-79F out there this evening but, strangely, it felt much cooler! Very enjoyable, in fact. Well. Except for the blood red sun from all the wildfire smoke.
I decided to head into the outer yard and check on the walnuts this evening; something I usually do in the mornings, but my daughter did the watering out there today. I was very thrilled to see this.
It was very hard to get the camera to focus on such a small spot! Surprisingly, it did better when I accidentally took some video. Of course, it didn’t help that I had cats pushing their way into things!
What we have here is our very first walnut tree leaf bud! It was taking so long, I was starting to think it might not have survived being transplanted. I’m so happy! No signs of anything from the walnut seeds, yet, but hopefully they will start emerging soon.
This evening I decided to take the cover off the winter sown bed in the east yard. It has the same mix of seeds as the high raised bed, plus lettuce from our own saved seed. The two beds could not be more different!
For starters, the one thing that is thriving in this bed is the Jebousek lettuce, which is the only variety of lettuce we planted this year. The rest is onions and root vegetables. There’s so much lettuce, though, it’s choking things out!
So I thinned some by picking a bunch out by the roots. I grabbed a couple of radishes, too.
We’ll need to thin the lettuce out more, as I could see scrawny beet greens being crowded out by them. There are some larger leaved plants in there I wasn’t sure of, so I carefully took a closer look at their bases. It looks like we have a few Zlata radishes growing! These seeds were gifted to me, and I’ve never seen them before. They are very round and have a yellowish colour to them. I’ve left them for now. The radishes I did pick are the longer French Breakfast variety. The first lettuce and radish harvest for this year! I ended up picking another French Breakfast radish from the high raised bed, the picked some spinach from the old kitchen garden. We’ve been using the spinach mostly in sandwiches, but we’ve got the makings of an actual salad from our garden right now!
And it’s not even June, yet.
Yeah, I’d say winter sowing like this is something we’ll be doing again!
It was way too hot for this kind of work today, but once I started, it had to be finished!
I had picked up some asparagus crowns and bare root strawberries at Canadian Tire, some time ago. According to Instagram, I posted this 5 weeks ago (as of this writing).
The Purple Passion is the same variety of asparagus we’ve got in the failed bed (though some new spears showed up recently, so they are still trying to survive!). The plan had been to add a new bed of green asparagus the next year but, for a variety of reasons, that just didn’t happen. Which is probably for the best, as it gave us more time to learn the different areas and decide where to plant. The current bed seemed like a great place for something that’s expected to produce for 20 years. We had no idea at the time, how much that location was affected by spring flooding! We should have been able to start harvesting from there two years ago, at least. Instead, I’m shocked if any spears show up at all.
For green asparagus, I chose Jersey Giant. With the strawberries, I wanted to try the White Carolina again. We tried growing those a few years back, but not a single one survived. The spot we’d tried growing them in was overrun by grass and weeds almost immediately. Now, it is the resting place for one of the yard cats that passed last year. For the red strawberries, I chose another everbearing variety, Ozark Beauty. With most strawberries, it’s recommended to prune any flowers in their first season. That isn’t necessary with everbearing varieties.
Here is a slideshow of the new bed. Instagram is letting me do slideshows of more then 10 images now. I don’t know why, but I appreciate it!
The first couple of photos shows the location I decided on. This area was a squash patch for a couple of years. We dug holes and amended the soil to create hills for individual transplants, since it was impractical to do the entire area. The rest of the space was mulched with carboard, straw and grass clippings. A section of it has been covered with the black … landscape fabric? I salvaged from around the old wood pile, for the past two years. It came in handy to spread out grass clippings to dry in the sun a bit, before using it as mulch, so that was an extra layer to ensure no sunlight got to the soil. With so much crab grass, dandelions and other weeds, it took a lot to kill that off! Even so, it’s amazing how much I still saw trying to grow under there!
The new bed was to be built along the northernmost edge. It will get the most sunlight, there. Unfortunately, it’s also closest to the row of maple and elm trees my mother allowed to grow. She used to have a row of raspberries there. After a few years, she transplanted them to a new location, and these trees were found growing in between them. My mother decided to leave them for “shelter from the wind”.
Which wasn’t needed there.
I once estimated and calculated how much of the original garden space here was lost because these trees were allowed to grow there. It came out to roughly 1200 sq ft. What I didn’t know at the time, however, is just how invasive the elm tree roots are, and it’s been a battle to reclaim garden space from them, ever since.
Before I started preparing the soil, though, I set the roots and crowns into buckets of water from the rain barrel to hydrate. I wanted them to have at least an hour to soak, but they couldn’t stay in there for too long, either. Once they were in the water, that was it. There was no option to stop part way through, and continue tomorrow or something.
The soil under the fabric was pretty compacted, of course, so the first thing to do was simply go over it with a garden fork to coarsely break it up, starting about four feet away from the garlic bed. That bed will eventually have log walls around it, and I took that into account while pacing off what will be a four foot wide walking path.
This was also the start of taking out rocks and roots, but mostly I just wanted to get things broken up, from end to end. Unfortunately, there was a fairly large ant hill in the very last squash hill. It had been completely under the fabric, so I had no idea it was there until I started on this today.
Once the first pass was done, it was time to get the soil fluffed up and cleared out. Which involved straddling the worked on area and twisting the garden fork into the soil until it was broken up enough to get into it by hand. In places, there were entire mats of small tree roots to pull out. Then there were the thicker roots that needed to be cut with the loppers. And, of course, there were the rocks.
So.
Many.
Rocks.
Not even particularly large rocks. Yet, every time I tried to push the garden fork into the soil, I was hitting rocks. If I was lucky, the tines would scrape and slide through them. If not, I’d get jammed into a dead stop. Which could get rather painful at times!
The roots got tossed into the grass towards the trees. The rocks got tossed onto the landscaping fabric. We might find a use for them. They did keep the wind from blowing the folded over section back over where I was working, at least.
I worked on that, section by section, little by little. After about an hour, I still hadn’t reached the half way point! I’d set up the rolling seat in the shade and brought water bottles, but ended up messaging a daughter to see if more could be brought out, because I went through those pretty fast! It wasn’t even the hottest part of the day, yet. My daughter was a sweetie and brought me four water bottles, just in case. 💖
The roots and rocks were the worst at the far end, where the ant hill was. I was very thankful for gloves and tall boots, at that point! The ants were very angry.
We’ll never get any garden bed completely clear of rocks and roots, but I could at least make it better. Once I had done as much as was reasonable, I used the landscape rake to pull the loosened soil to one side and create a trench for the asparagus. That, of course, exposed more roots and rocks to clear out.
Once the trench was dug, I emptied the remains of a bag of manure along the trench, then used the garden fork to work it into the soil at the bottom a bit. Then, I filled with it with water, using water pressure to level the soil on the bottom of the trench, more or less. After a thorough soaking, I raked back a hill to plant the crowns on, and gave that a watering, too.
Each bag had 5 crowns in it, so I paced out and marked where to plant them, about a foot apart (they should be more like 2 feet apart, but the bed wasn’t large enough for that), from the ends. That way, there was a slightly larger gap in the centre, between the two varieties.
The Jersey Giant crowns were huge compared to the Purple Passion ones. You can see the Jersey Giant in the image showing the entire bed. The photo with just the one asparagus crown in it is of one of the larger Purple Passion crowns. A couple of them were so small that, once they were pressed into the dark soil, they practically disappeared!
The crowns got another watering, and then the rest of the soil was pulled back to bury them, creating a hill where the trench was. I used the landscaping rake – that thing is so useful! – tamping the soil down and leveling the top. The bags the crowns were in had wood shavings with them, so I scattered that on top. It isn’t enough to be a mulch, but it will protect the soil at least a little bit. These will be mulched thoroughly, over the next while.
The asparagus planted and watered, I made another shallow trench in front of them, from end to end. The covered asparagus crowns got another watering, then I used the jet setting on the hose nozzle to drill into the mini-trench for the strawberries. I emptied a couple of buckets of rainwater that the roots had soaked in, into the trench as well.
The white strawberries were planted in the half closer to the garlic bed. The packages had 10 bare roots each, so I placed a marker at just each end of where the varieties were planted. The white strawberries actually had a bit of growth starting on them! As with the asparagus, I started at the ends and worked my way to the middle. The red strawberries turned out to have a couple of extra bare roots in them, so the spacing got adjusted a bit. Of course, once they were planted, they got watered again. The bags the strawberries were in had what looked like peat in them, and I dumped that into the buckets the strawberry roots were rehydrating in, to soak for a bit. After the strawberries were planted and watered, I carefully emptied the buckets with the hydrated peat over the rows, too.
I used the packaging to label both the strawberries and the asparagus at the centre of the bed.
Then everything got watered again.
Last of all was protective measures.
I had a log that was meant for the trellis beds that was too damaged by weather, so I set that along the far side of the asparagus. Then I grabbed the wonky log in the old kitchen garden that is going to be replaced with wattle weave, and used that for the rest of the bed. This log is a lot longer, so there’s excess, but that’s okay. We just have to watch not to trip on it.
Then there were the strawberries. I raided the old garden shed for some old dollar store wire border fencing that was here when we moved in. I set those out almost right on top of the strawberries. Hopefully, that will keep any cats from digging in the loose soil and using it as a litter box.
All of this took over 4 hours to do. Probably almost twice as long as it would have taken on a cooler day, where I wasn’t making sure to stop and hydrate so often!
Over the next while, mulch will be added on and around where the plants are. Especially the asparagus hill, as those were not buried as deep as they should have been. I couldn’t dig any deeper, with all the rocks I was hitting.
I’m going to have to replace the handle on my garden fork again.
The main things it, it’s finally done! Now, we wait and see what survives!
It’s not even 6pm as I write this, and I am ready to go to bed right now. Partly because I had a terrible night last night, starting with Butterscotch deciding to pee on my shoulder and my bed. ???!!!??? I had just changed my bedding, too.
Fenrir, I found, was loafed beside the one litter box Butterscotch will use. Fenrir chases Butterscotch away when she tries to use the litter. When Butterscotch peed on my shoulder, I chased off Fenrir and put Butterscotch directly into the litter box, and she immediately started to use it.
While three tabbies suddenly converged in stalking mode, with her as the target.
I chased them off, only for Fenrir to come back and make a bee-line for Butterscotch.
In the end, I had to sit there with a spray bottle, standing guard over Butterscotch, so she could use the litter.
Then I snagged a daughter to help me change my bedding again, after I cleaned myself up and changed.
I finally got back to bed and even fell asleep when a cat crashed onto my head.
My first thought was that my glasses were broken, until I woke up enough to remember I wasn’t wearing them. I thought it might have been Butterscotch, but she was loafed in the shelf above my pillow, so I don’t know which cat dive bombed my skull. This morning, I actually spotted a couple of wounds on my forehead from it, though!
Eventually, I was able to get back to bed and try to sleep when…
… the next thing I know, Butterscotch is peeing on my bed, right next to my head, again.
Thankfully, I caught her fast enough that no bedding change was needed again. I chased her off, but she panicked and disappeared. I had to chase all the other cats out of my room for the night. Butterscotch was alarmed by my reaction and hiding. My older daughter helped me out with giving the cats treats to try and give me some peace before they started clawing at my daughter.
At this point, it was late enough that she offered to take care of the morning routine, including feeding both the inside and outside cats, so I could sleep in. With the kittens getting lysine laced cat soup now, I spent some time letting her know what the routine currently includes. I made sure that the morning feeding for Butterscotch was done right away, so my daughters wouldn’t have to open my door to do it, in the morning.
After all those hours in the sun in the garden, they’ll be taking over the evening rounds today, too!
During the night, I kept getting awakened by the sound of litter use. With the other cats gone, it was as if Butterscotch was testing out all three litter boxes! From the crunching noises, she seemed to be trying out the other food bowls, too! I keep food and water bowls, just for her, on my craft table, and the other bowls to distract the cats from her, but they always converge on her bowls, as if they somehow taste better than the same food in other bowls! So she doesn’t get any peace from them there, either.
Then she came over for aggressive snuggles.
At one point, I woke up and she was lying on top of me, her face pushed under my hand. Even in the dark, I could see she was watching me with an almost loving gaze. Well. As loving as a gaze from Butterscotch can be. 😄 She was really appreciating not having other cats around!
I was, of course, awakened several times by cats scratching at my door.
*sigh*
This morning, I spent some time on Amazon, looking for cat calming things to try out. Hopefully, the postal strike won’t be a problem. They went on strike just before Christmas because, of course, and were ordered back to work by the government. The strike didn’t actually end, though, and now they’re talking about walking the picket lines again. They aren’t garnering much public sympathy at all, though. They already have high wages and massive perks that most people can only dream of. Demanding extras like free sex change surgery while 25% of the Canada’s population is needing to go to food banks right now is not helping their cause. The postal system needs to be revamped to match modern requirements, but as a crown corporation, that requires Parliament to act, and they’re just going into session for a few days before breaking for summer. Canada effectively has had no functioning government for the past 3 years, and Parliament has been out of session for months. We won’t be getting a budget this year, but the Governor General is still authorizing billions in spending that is supposed to be approved by Parliament. The GG doesn’t have that authority under these conditions, but our new dictatorship is just as bad as the old dictatorship, if not worse.
Needless to say, they don’t give a rip if Canadians stop getting their mail because Canada Post is throwing a tantrum to get their way.
Living where we do, it’s not like we have other options. So I could order something from Amazon on payday, but the chances of actually getting it aren’t very good.
Wow. What a ramble, brought on because we’ve got a super stressed out cat that needs help!
I, on the other hand, would just love to get a full night’s sleep, so I can get more work done!
I am very happy to have finally gotten those asparagus crowns and bare root strawberries in. I’ll take what progress I can get!
One of the things I was able to get done while it was still cooler this morning, as I was finishing up with watering the garden beds, we to finally mulch the potato bed.
This bed had the summer squash winter sown in it and I made a point of saving the leaf mulch along one side, to be added as the seedlings came up. Except they never came up. Now that the potatoes are planted here and have had a chance to, hopefully, start rooting themselves, and I think I even saw some potato leaves starting to poke through, I decided it was time to return the mulch. I will not be hilling the potatoes, just mulching them.
The bed got a deep watering, first. Then I lifted the netting along the one side and basically just tossed handfuls of leaves over the soil, trying not to include any dandelion flowers with it! Quite a lot of dandelions were growing right through the mulch on the one side, so I pulled a lot of that, too. Once the mulch was in place, it got another thorough watering.
The next thing I worked on was planting carrots on either side of the sugar snap peas.
That job required some damage repair, first. When I watered the bed this morning, I found something had been digging into the edge, all along one side, undermining things.
So the very first thing to do was put the soil back into the bed. I was going to just use a hoe, at first, but realized there was a lot of creeping Charlie trying to creep its way into the bed again, so after removing the protective boards, I went through it all by hand, removing as many of the roots as I could, before replacing the dug away soil.
There isn’t a lot of space between the peas and the edge of the bed, though. Just enough for one row of carrots. I created a slight trench to plant them in, as we are expecting drought conditions this year, and a trench will have any rainfall flow towards the carrots, rather than washing away down the sides of the bed. I used the jet setting on the hose to basically drill water into the trench. This both ensures the water gets quite deep, but the water helps level out the trench itself for planting.
This side got the Atomic Red carrots I got from MI Gardener this year as back up seeds. While we do have carrots coming up among the winter sown beds, there don’t seem to be a lot of them, and I do want to have quite a lot of carrots to store for the winter.
After the seeds were sown, I used the mister on the the spray nozzle to “bury” the seeds a little. Then I put boards back over the trench. Two of the boards that were there before were pretty broken up on the ends, so I traded them for more solid ones that were weighing down the plastic on the bed that’s still solarizing. Three boards wasn’t quite long enough, but I already had a short scrap piece for the last bit at the end.
The boards had been placed along the outside of the peas, and mulch down the middle of the bed, to keep the cats from using the bed as a litter box. They would still walk across the bed, though, and would end up moving the boards. Every now and then, I’d find a board rotates with one end over the peas and the other hanging off the edge of the beds. To prevent that, I got out some of the short bamboo plant stakes I picked up at the dollar store that came in packs of 25. I stuck a bunch of them into the soil along the boards, to prevent the boards from moving if a cat walked over it.
That still left the problem of whatever was digging all along the side of the bed. For that, I went into the stacks of short logs that had been used to frame these beds, before they were shifted over into their permanent positions. I dug out the straightest ones I could find and jammed them into the soil along the sides of the bed. Hopefully, they will be enough to deter the digging.
I repeated the process on the other side. On this side, I used our home made seed tape with Uzbek Golden Carrots. These are older seeds, though, so I doubled them up. Thankfully, the wet soil was enough to keep the wind from blowing them away! A final misting, and they got covered with boards, too. Only one of these had to be traded out. I found more short logs to set on that side of the bed, too.
Over the next while, we’ll keep checking under the boards to make sure things are damp, and to remove them as soon as we see seedlings starting to come up.
Eventually, more protection will be added to this bed, to make sure the deer don’t eat the peas. I still haven’t decided just how to do that, though.
One job down! How many more could I get done today?
It looks like we’ve got at least two blue eyes babies among the three mostly white kittens. I think we’ll call this one Zipper. In the next image, there’s a white and grey/black in a cuddle puddle inside the cat house. That one is Grommet, and I don’t think he’s got blue eyes. Eyelet is in the last image in the series, and he’s got blue eyes. It’s too early to tell with the grublings, of course. Their eyes are just starting to open, still.
After checking on the kittens, I did my evening rounds. The chitted potatoes in the portable greenhouse are clearly dead; if they weren’t already dead, the heat in there cooked them. So I brought out the new bags and laid them out in trays to get some light. Both bags of potatoes were growing, one quite a bit more than the other.
At first, I was just going to leave the trays of potatoes in the old kitchen, where they wouldn’t be affected so much by temperature extremes. It was such a lovely evening, though, I decided to prepare a bed for them.
I decided to use the bed that had been winter sown with summer squash seeds. There’s been no sign of any squash germinating. This bed already had protective netting over it, so I decided to just go for it.
The first thing to do was lift the netting off to one side and remove the support posts, for access. Then I went over it with a garden fork to loosen things before weeding it. Inside the bed was mostly crab grass and maple seedlings. Along the edges was dandelions and crab grass.
This bed has seen a few years of amending, even taking into account the whole thing got shifted over last year. Which means these potatoes are going into the softest, fluffiest soil since we’ve been gardening here. Which should also mean, bigger potatoes.
We shall see.
While weeding, I did find some squash seeds. Not a lot. There was no evidence of germination on any of them. Some felt “empty”. As if only the outer shell remained. It’s entirely possible that we’ll still have some summer squash show up later on, but I think it highly unlikely. If any do sprout, I’ll probably transplant them. Meanwhile, along with some flower seeds, I did pick up a packet of zucchini to go with my white patty pans as back up summer squash seeds.
Once the weeding was done, I used a thatching rake to create a wide, flat trench down the middle, so accommodate a double row of potatoes. I then emptied the rest of a bag of sheep manure into the trench and worked that in with a garden fork.
From there, my daughter helped me bring the trays of potatoes out. She gave the trench a thorough watering while I went through the potatoes and cut a few of the larger ones into two.
We then planted the potatoes in a double row, but found ourselves with 5 or 6 “extra” potatoes. Not enough to start another bed with. So we set them in the largest looking open spaces down the middle. Which makes things rather other crowded for potatoes but, to be honest, I don’t expect them all to make it.
Once the potatoes were set out in the trench, we mounded the soil over them and evened it out.
Then came the “fun” job of putting the supports and netting back. They’d been set pretty deep, as I was originally trying to put the mosquito netting over them, so there had been a lot of slack with the black netting I ended up using, instead. We put them back without pushing them so far down, which took up some of the slack in the netting. The twine ended up sagging more in some places and too tight in others, so it took a while to get it close to where it was supposed to be, before tacking down the edges of the netting.
That didn’t stop Magda from finding a way inside and then having trouble finding her way out again!!!
Once the netting was set and secured, the whole thing got another thorough watering.
We’re supposed to get about an hour of rain tonight. I won’t be holding my breath on that, since I kept getting notifications this morning about how long the thunderstorm was going to last, when we didn’t even have a drop of rain. It’s supposed to start raining again tomorrow evening, then keep raining all through Friday. Tomorrow’s high is supposed to be a bit on the high side, though nothing like the past couple of days, then the temperatures as supposed to drop significantly on Friday. At least we’re not expected to get temperatures below freezing on Friday and Saturday nights, but it’s still supposed to get quite close to freezing.
For now, I want the potato bed to get as much rain as possible, but when the overnight temperatures are expected to drop closer to freezing, I have plastic that’s large enough to cover the netting on the entire bed, with enough excess to weigh it down along all sides. We should have only two nights where it’s supposed to be cold enough at night, that it might kill things off.
In the photos, you can see how well the garlic is doing. We are quite looking forward to having scapes to harvest!
So, there we are! One more thing planted in our garden.
The Re-Farmer 