Tag: gardens

Rainy Day Activity

Bertha has been providing us with rain all day long. Another front has stalled over our area and we are looking at 3 or 4 more days of rain on our saturated soil and full creeks. Another flash flood warning is in place. We are high above the creeks and sloped, but flat enough hopefully to not have mud slide activity, though there has been a lot of that including destroying a property and making a home uninhabitable in our tiny village.

With my spindle spinning, I am participating in a spin along using only the Jenkins spindles. Since I had filled them all a couple of days ago, I elected to report my results for the month and wait until June 1 to work with them again. I have a new to me spindle due in the mail tomorrow or Friday and received a gorgeous braid of wool a few days ago that I am anxious to begin spinning. To occupy my time, I have been using my wheel to try to make a bigger dent in the pound of gray Shetland that I have been spinning on spindles for two months. And knitting on the shawl that has been on the needles about that long. The first Shetland bobbin is nearly full and I will fill another before plying. The shawl was finished tonight, soaked and is pinned out to dry. I played a bit of yarn chicken with it and finished with only about a yard left, not enough for another row.

I have enough yarn spun to begin my sweater, but knitting a sweater when the weather is hot is not something I want to begin. With the current pandemic cancelling events daily, knitting more items for my shop seems futile, there won’t be craft shows and holiday markets this year. Most people don’t want to buy knitted or woven garments online without being able to handle them, try them on. I have a knitting request from a family member, but it will need to be superwash wool, which I haven’t purchased yet, and it is another sweater. Maybe I will just work on the Shetland, perhaps even one spindle that I can clear before the first of the month. We are going to be indoors for a couple more days, but I did get a bit of weeding done in the walled garden between rain showers today.

When the rain ends, I plan to make a compost bin to put in one corner of the garden. If I can make it sufficiently large, I will gather the composting material from where I moved the chicken run and use it as a base to finish composting along with kitchen scraps to have it ready to supplement beds as they get harvested and replanted. I really hope to fill the freezer and the canning shelves with homegrown produce for the winter season.

The Garden Thrives

Between morning showers and afternoon thunderstorms, some garden work has been done. Daughter provided a windfall of cardboard boxes. The upper edge of the west side and the north side were done one day. Then she appeared with more boxes and today I got about 2/3 of the east side done and dug the Creeping Charlie from the last third. The potatoes have sprouted nicely so I shoveled a new layer of soil over them. Planted and tied up 4 Tomatillos, and weeded the planted beds.

As soon as I came in to shower and start dinner prep, daughter showed up to return our trailer she had used to move her furniture back into her house now that all the repairs are completed, and she brought me more cardboard. There is enough to finish the job and have a good path around the perimeter of the garden covered and mulched to help keep down weeds. While I was out there today, I also strung the electric wire to make the top of the fence hot. The new battery has been in place charging for about a week. The bush beans have sprouted with some damage where the hens scratched when they last got in the garden. Some of the cucumbers have sprouted and so have some sunflowers, but I still don’t see corn. The peas have blooms, so soon there will be pods and fresh peas.

Yesterday we got some flowers from the nursery and I planted half barrels and also Zinneas, which my Dad loved, in the bed along the back of the garage. I need to get a couple bags of mulch to spread around them. We have a curbside pickup scheduled at Tractor Supply for dog food and coop bedding so I will add a couple bags of mulch to the order.

I started digging out the area to be terraced where the mint bed was. Every time I go out with a digging fork or shovel, I dig up so much mint root still in that area. I hope that if I keep at it, I will win that battle.

The Garden

When granddaughter N lived here for a couple of years, she liked helping me in my garden (so did her big brother). When both of them were working, I had to make sure everyone was spread safely apart because garden tools were sometimes dangerously wielded as they hacked at weeds. They moved to a nearby town into a beautiful home with a yard, not a flat city yard, her neighborhood is noted for steep driveways and heavily sloped yards. Late last spring, N said she wanted a garden and her Mom didn’t know where to begin. One Saturday, I joined them in the morning and we set out to get a couple of raised bed boxes, lots of cardboard, garden box bagged soil, seedlings, and seeds. I had taken some low plastic erosion fence and step in poles. We dug away sod to level, laid the cardboard, assembled the boxes, filled them, and mulched around them. Put up the “fence” and planted her boxes. The boxes are close to the neighbor’s fence and they have a little garden on their side of the fence. This was a good and a bad thing, it meant fewer weeds along the fence line, but it is a 4 generation Asian family and grandmom whose garden it was, doesn’t speak English. She took it upon herself to water N’s garden every time she watered her own and N’s garden was saturated, which didn’t help. One day when I was staying with the kids, I tried to let grandmom know that we didn’t need her help watering. I don’t know if I succeeded.

About the time her beans sprouted, something dug up most of one box and something feasted on young pepper and tomato plants, so it wasn’t a great success, but she did end up harvesting a few tomatoes and peppers before the season was out. This didn’t deter her or dampen her desire to garden at all. About a week ago, I got a request to help plan this year’s garden. She is now 8 years old and quite a good reader, so this week I have contributed to her lessons with emails that she has to read aloud to her Mom and then write me back with questions and what she wants to plant. She decided she wanted to expand her garden to a third box and plant some early spring veggies this year. She and her Mom stripped the sod uphill from the first two boxes, built a new box, filled it, and mulched around it yesterday. Then she sent me her wish list.

I had already sent a list to daughter with instructions on a better, more secure fence arrangement and she ordered the supplies to be delivered today. Last night, I designed N’s 3 garden boxes to accommodate her plant wishes and put planting dates by each type of plant. I suggested to daughter that she buy seedlings on as many of the plants as she could, though not the cheapest option, it will guarantee better success and enough quick germinating plants were included that planting those seeds will allow N to have the full experience. I love that she wants her own garden. I hate that I can’t be with her to do it this year, but it has been fun helping her plan. It is contact I miss so much with this social isolation. Daughter has been terrific about sending pictures nearly every day of lessons and projects and it helps.

I wish my garden area was that neat. My celery experiment is growing nicely. I had two celery hearts that were getting soft, so I chopped the celery and froze it for cooking and stuck the ends in a shallow dish of water in a sunny window for about a week or 10 days. When the centers were showing signs of growth, I stuck the two in a clay pot of potting soil and put them in the sun. It will be interesting to see the end result.

The Asian Pear trees are in full bloom and there is no indication of frost in the next 10 days so I am hopeful for fruit. The apples are beginning to leaf out, though I have seen no blooms there.

Today is another sunny day, though cooler than the past two near record breaking days, but yesterday and today, the wind is howling. If I can secure my long hair so it doesn’t whip my face too bad, I will do some weeding in my garden today and maybe try to move some compost into the newly rebuilt boxes.