Hoops are up... well, many of them

But less than half, but its not a bad thing.

This tool is great, but it is hard on my small girlish hands...

Um, so...  i didn't measure all that well when i marked my template pipe that i was using to mark out each cut.  So my sockets are all one foot, one inch long.  I was going for 12"....  so i have one short useless piece  of waste pipe from each length.  But it looks like some of my sockets actually need that extra inch, so i'm not going to dwell on it.

I put the string back up cause i was having trouble keeping the sockets in a straight enough line.
And i got my big hammer and my 4' measuring stick.

It takes extra whacks if i find a rock... and i did a few times.

Good 'nuff

Do that another..16 times.

Then pop in the hoops... that is the fun part!

I make sure the print on the pipe is facing the back.  Just to make things look a teensy bit more professional. lol

I really like the way this looks...  Wonder if Jonah would agree?

Beat pipe in another 16 times and viola!  Another whale's ribcage.

Now the burning question....

Will my childbearing hips fit between the rows?

Ok,  yes i do fit, but i was really worried for a while.  I also have to be able to lean into the rows between the hoops without putting my bottom through the other row.  I tip over a lot, so falling into the other rows is a real possibility!



A good day's work.
I like the look of it,  i wonder if the neighbors think i am crazy.  You really can't miss these, even though  its in the back.

Lilacs definitely bloomed early this year...here's a giant bouquet i picked yesterday

And these guys are being hardened-off to get stuck in the garden in just a few more days

I might try to cut some more pipe....

...and i just noticed that the weather forecast is threatening night time lows of 31 degrees on Sunday night. Arrgh.  It might  change...?

Rain and things to do

Its raining lightly this morning. When the little one takes her nap, i'm going to go out and spread the slug, snail & earwig bait.

Oh, my leg hurts so bad today. I think the weather and over doing it yesterday are the culprits. Its almost like being punished.
But since it is raining out, i won't be feeling like i should be out there trying to do things. But i'm sure i can find things that need doing in here that can be done while seated.
Like getting the Paeonia  anomala seeds started.  And i have to decide what i am going to do with those Goji  seedlings.  I think i got 100% germination out of those berries and the seedling are in clumps.

I also need to resow a few of my flats where germination has been sparse.

I also have other seeds that need starting...annuals.

I am having no luck with the sweet pepper seeds i planted. The old 'fooled you' Jalapeno seeds did sprout and the seedlings are doing well.  The Chiltepin peppers are no-shows. But those are old seeds. I am a bit annoyed with the Zsa-zsa sweet pepper seeds. Not a one sprouted. At all. It has been warm enough in the greenhouses, so i don't know what the deal is. But i'm going to try again. I guess it won't be too bad if i have to go to the local nursery this year to get sweet pepper seedlings.

We may get some rather cold nights over the weekend. The forecast is saying 34 degree overnights for Sunday and Monday.
This tells me that it is not a bad thing to not have some seedlings in the garden right yet.  I think the GrowVeg database is off by maybe a week ot two.  The thing is that since they don't have the last frost date data for my actual town, they use the closest town to me, which is just on the edge of the Zone 5a/b border.   My town and actual yard are firmly within Zone 5b according to this map .
I guess bottom line is that their estimate is about as accurate as any one else's guess for weather at this time of year..so i won't fret about not having things done according to the schedule they offer. Although i'd really like to have these things scheduled down to the letter, i know it doesn't work that way.

I got my order confirmation from Amishland seeds, she takes about 5 days for turnaround during her busy season, i don't know if this time of year is still busy for her. I would think things start to slow down for seeds about now since we, out at the far point of the northeast, are coming within 4 weeks of setting out our tenderest plants and most of those were started from seed at least a week ago. Unless you are late!  So i figure the soonest i will get my seeds is next week, since she is in Pennsylvania, the seeds won't be traveling too far once they hit the post office.

I think i am going to try and make plant markers with some old Sculpey clay that i have.  I bought it on clearance at Staples a number of years ago for less than half price. I bought 4 boxes of 1.75 pounds each. I only got to use one box, it is white so i was thinking i could sculpt then paint it,  but i never got to use the rest...
But i think i could make a few blank plaques out of it, using my pasta machine to get a consistent thickness and impress some patterns onto the edges, then bake them.  I could use them flat on the soil as tiles or i could epoxy the plaques to some cut-up clothes hanger wire and use them as stakes.  I don't know if i should write the plant names on them after baking, or if i should scraffito them in... or use colored clays to embellish them...  I think for the tomato plants  i could make gift tag style markers and just tie them to the base of the vines.  I'm going to know what is where pretty well by reminding myself with my GrowVeg plan,  but the rest of the family might not. I might get as many as 10 plaques out of each box if i make them 4"x5". I don't know, i'll see what i have time to do. Plenty of ideas and materials, but so little time.

My dad stopped by with another load of loam/compost. This load is for the yard itself, so hubby has some hope of growing a lawn.  The ground  is mostly sand right now and there is nothing to help anything grow, so a couple loads of nice dark dirt will put a few inches of topsoil down and grass might get to grow.

Oh,  and one of my horseradish roots have sprouted....

Very tired.,..

Got all the walking paths  cleared.
Got most of the beds smoothed...

I even got some sockets cut and pounded in so i could test the hoops.
I cut the sockets only 12" long so i could get 10 out of each length. It seems to be a functional length.

They are a little uneven, but that's cause my spacing wasn't exact and when the sockets go in, they like to lean in different directions. This could be fixed by making myself some sort of rigid measuring grid and making longer sockets,  but i think once the Remay is on, it won't be as obvious.
I cut the spacing strings through the beds, i think i might put them back to install all the hoops.

I want to lay out some plastic, but i think i am officially wiped out.

 ...several minutes later...

Oh!  and i just thought of something that will save me the expense of buying sandbags if i need them to hold down the row cover.  I could use plastic grocery bags. Just fill them with dirt or anything, tie them up and trim the loose ends so it doesn't look like garbage and drop them where needed.  I have a lot of them kicking around.  It came to me when i was messing around with the trash bags i might open up and use for warming the soil.

Ok,  i need to rest. Even my fingers hurt. lol

I wonder if i am going to have enough PVC for the number of hoops i need.  I wonder if hubby is going to have a cow if i decide i need more.  He just might if i can't make do with what i've got.
I am pretty sure i won't have enough for the anchor sockets...  I can cut those and find out pretty fast since hubby bought a PVC cutter a while back.  I had forgotten this and planned to use the shoelace saw trick. It works (i have done it many times before) but it makes a mess.  The PVC cutter works just like a pruning shears.  It is much faster too.

I may need sand bags to hold down the Reemay edges, but i won't be sure until i get it all set up.

I  think i decided what to do about hoop clips.  I'm going to get some of the thinner walled PVC and split them up one side, then to protect the Reemay from rough edges, i can cut scraps of polar type fleece into pads to go between the clip and the Reemay covered hoop.   If i leave plenty of extra material around the edges it should cushion any rubbing that the wind will cause.   I have plenty of fleece fabric.

As soon as the little  one gets settled down for her late morning nap i will be out there, trying to finish up the walking rows.  After that, the hard labor will be mostly over. I am very sore from yesterday, but the idea is that i can get this hard stuff done, then rest a few whole days.  I can get some frost resistant things planted this weekend. Like radishes and salsify, kale and onions.  The rest of the rows, like where the corn is going, can be covered in black plastic to speed up the soil heating.

 Some things will need row cover as soon as they are planted.  I keep seeing cabbage butterflies in the yard and while i don't mind picking a few caterpillars out of my broccoli as i am cleaning it for the table, i don't want an infestation.

I also have to decide how i want to measure out the garden in the opposite direction. I where i am trialing so many plants this year and using up old seeds before they go bad, i need to measure carefully to fit them all in but still let them have the right amount of room. But i don't want to go through the tedium of laying the string out in the opposite direction and i know that i will trip over it all anyway.
Maybe i will just make a giant ruler out of a scrap of plywood and use the 100' tape measure. Since i will have the hoops spaced 4' apart that will also be a measurement guide.



I think i will end up with extra space in the melon/squash patch since i charted it out for one plant per hill, but i plan to plant 2 to 3 per hill and won't need half the space i charted. I might be able to put the popping sorghum in there, but that needs as much room as corn....


Also found this while puttering around, looking at more season extenders:
DIY Wall-o-Water

I happen to have a sudden surplus of 2 liter bottles. And suddenly, while wondering where to store them until next year, I saw The Light !
Take six or seven 2 liter bottles. Group them around one in the center so you have a circle of bottles.
Duct tape the group together at half-way up.
Now pull out the center bottle so you have a kind of 'donut'.
Put in the garden over a new tomato transplant. Fill with water from your hose.
Instant Wall-O-Water.
Cost, 10 cents deposit each in Michigan, plus duct tape.
Plants will get some light from through the 2 liter bottles and eventually grow above them.
The heat of the sun will warm the water in the bottles.
Six bottles times two liters is 12 liters.
That's three gallons, roughly.
One BTU is the heat stored in one gallon of water by one degree Farenheit.
If you can store twenty degrees of warmth during the day, that gets you 60 BTU's of heat stored for the cool nights.
Throwing a cap over this setup would conserve that warmth to deter fr*st.
And it's not unreasonable that you could store more heat in the water than that.
Paint the bottles on the North side of the plant black to store more heat. Add a pinch of salt to the water to push the heat storage a bit.
You might get up to 120 BTUs stored in the bottles, ideally.
Enough to last through a 38 degree night. Maybe.

Oh and i just ordered some more seeds from a small grower: Amishland Seeds
She had this odd eggplant that i have seen called "Pumpkin on a Stick"  they are very bitter though edible, but i want them as an ornamental.  I am also getting a super tiny and very early type of watermelon from her called Golden Midget.  I hope she has a quick mail out system. :o)

Housework time....

Its starting to look like a garden!

I couldn't wait to start the walking rows and i wanted to test a hoop...  so i took some Motrin and when things began to get dull, i went and tried it.
Took me about 40 minutes to clear it, small shovel loads....

Aaand....  i got to test a hoop:

I only had one piece of PVC pipe that i could use as the socket, i need to cut some more soon. So i used a cinder block for now.  But the PVC socket works perfectly,  i think its about 18" long and all but 6 inches of it are in the ground.  Maybe they could be shorter, but this seems to work fine.  I'll have to decide how short they can be and still anchor it enough.

Ok, not that i am certain that this these parts of the garden are going to work out the way i hoped, i can relax about it.

Flying fig and string-marking the garden.

The delivery estimate for my fig tree from Henry field's has changed. It used to have an estimated ship date of 5-3-10/5-10-10. Now it is scheduled for 5-11-10/5-18-10.

Oh, i can't forget to make room in the garden planner for my popping sorghum...!

11:30 am update.

It took me almost 2 hours cause i am so slow,  but i got the garden all marked out.

First thing i did was re-peg the corners. My dad plowed under one or two and in some places he tilled well within where i had marked. Its ok, but i have to recalculate some square footage because of it.

When i got the pegs in, i strung the pegs together to mark out the perimeter. Once that was done, i used our 100' flexible tape measure to mark the string with a Sharpie in 1' increments. Then i took fluorescent survey tape and made little flags and numbered them and tied them on.  If i didn't do that i would have had to run back and forth along the garden to count the Sharpie marks to be sure my rows were corresponding from one end  to the other.

 It is all strung here.
I was thrilled to see that i still ended up with 5 rows and plenty of walking room between.  The last row toward the trees is even bigger than i had expected. It is 6 feet wide so it will be the perfect spot for all the melons, cucumbers and winter  squash...and those gourds.

.
I made a 1' edging along the starting side so that we will have room to put some boards or bricks to make a sharp border,  if we don't  it will at least be a buffer between the lawn mower and the garden pants.

In the picture below, i used clothes pins to mark the per foot measurements. The pink flags were great, but it was time consuming. While i was rifling around for my other shoes, i noticed i had a whole pack of new clothespins. They will still be usable for laundry after this, so why not?

I'm hoping this won't be an issue...  but i am 1.5' short over here... This should be 28' long.  I might get out the mantis or just hand-straighten it.

.

This end is fine. :0)

Measuring the squash and melon bed.  I love extra room!
.

The apples are officially in bloom....

Are they supposed to smell?  Cause i'm not getting even a whiff...  but i have had so many bad sinus infections, my sense of smell is almost gone.

I don't know what this is all about. Maybe the branch was damaged and its being weird or maybe the Bonide can't  fix whatever this issue  is?  I'll have to look it up

I can see a chewed leaf right up against the white post.  Maybe my Bonide mixture was too weak?

Or maybe it really just reduces insect damage...  i guess that makes sense. Eliminating it entirely might not be as good as it sounds,  chemical overkill.
I don't know.  All products sell themselves as a cure-all.

Well, i am beat.  It is very nice out, but hot in the sun. The ground is uneven in the garden where it was tilled... the soft spots were a killer on my leg.  I hope to get the walkways scooped and the soil up on the beds tomorrow.

I'm debating on whether to use the Ortho snail-be-gone stuff yet.  It has been a fairly dry spring for us here.. Last year it was so wet that all my plants were snail eaten. The earwigs were coming into the house and getting trapped in our clean dishes! It was disgusting.  Since the snails have not been a bother yet, i'm not sure what to do. The earwigs have always been a problem. Every year they destroy my sweet peppers by boring holes into the fruit and then feasting on it all cozy-like from the interior. They also attack my corn,  worse than the caterpillars. But i have not seen any yet.  I don't know if i should be proactive or if it might be too late by the time i realize they are an issue...

I think i will treat...  it might rain this evening or overnight and the instructions say to use it on damp ground for best results. So i might do this later tonight or tomorrow in the morning.  I have to watch the dog around the area i put it.

Oh... and before i forget, i need to get ready to plant carrots and parsnips. This  means i need to get ready to make the seed tape for easier planting, better seed economy and  almost no thinning. So i hope to be able to make up a sort of tutorial to post for fun.

Also i need to remind myself of something i came across recently. When planting seeds directly in the ground that are the type that can only be covered thinly (like carrots and parsnips), the way to keep them moist is to cover the planted area with a board.  Plant the seeds, cover them normally, water them in and then cover with a board. Check daily for signs of germination then remove the board but continue to water frequently.

We have hit the 80's

Boy, it was warm today! Very humid as well,  but the stiff breeze made it quite pleasant....

At 4:30pm it is in the low 80's and there were thunderstorms to the north of us, racing across the state, but they stayed well away from us and the ones that were in line to get us just faded out well before they got here.  Its a little bit disappointing because i love a good thunderstorm.

I didn't take any pictures today, but the apple trees are just on the verge of blooming.  There are apple trees in the area that are in bloom, but not mine quite yet.

 I'm not sure how i am going to get the measuring done for the garden, i know how...but not quite when.  I have to be somewhat precise with my rows and beds since i am using the hoop and row covers.  I have to have 4 foot beds, and 2 foot walking rows.  If the beds are wider the hoops won't fit, if it is narrower, they won't bend right  and if the walking paths are too narrow i won't be able to move between them. I also want everything to be as straight  as i can get them,  i don't want this to be an eyesore.  With the white covers on everything for the first couple months, the garden is going to be highly visible and explaining it to people who might ask will be much easier if the presentation is....well, presentable. 

But i think i will re-peg all corners and tie nylon string to them,  and use the big 100' tape reel to measure and mark 1' increments with a sharpie. I can use pieces of flagging tape to make the marks visible from the opposite end of the garden. The permanent marks will help in case the tape pieces slide.  Then i can pound in sticks and string a line for each bed across the garden.  I  can use the string to guide as i use the shovel  to move the soil from the paths to the raised beds.  They will probably be about 6" higher than the walking paths.  Since i am only doing 2 foot wide, i should be able to manage, its only going to  be 30' at a time.  If i can get the strings done tomorrow and then 2 rows a day, it would only take 2 days. Then i could get the hoops set up on Thursday and then get some of the hardy seedlings planted out and some of the cool crop seeds sown, put the row covers on by Friday.

I think it is interesting that the Grow Veg program says our last frost date up here is May 1.  Traditionally, we don't plant here until the last full moon in May...  Maybe that is playing it too safe?
I think i need to re-read some things...!  If i don't have to wait almost a whole 'nother month to plant things, i won't!

And i'm really trying to remember how often we got frosts after May 1st It is not proving to be easy. I remember many warm nights (though not as warm as last night). It might be that it referrs to tenders, but we always just did it all at once anyway. Maybe an online weather site has some sort of Almanac that took note of frosts and daily conditions.  maybe i will have to commit more to this Blog and take note of daily highs, lows and presence of frost.  I should get a soil thermometer too, that would be a useful piece of information as well. I despise having such a horrible memory!
But that is what this blog is supposed to help with.


The concept of multiple plantings is sort of new to me, i know it can be done and i think i remember my grandfather doing it when i was little, but it isn't something my parents took the time to do. So i have had to learn to expect to plant more than one thing in one spot in the garden.  But working more than full time since before i got a house, i never had the time to think about it as much as i would have liked to, gardening has only been a weekend dream until now. So this i guess, is the year to unlearn some things now that my garden should be big enough to be a working garden and not just a  hold out for 'someday' ... that day has finally arrived.  The GrowVeg program has a custom guide that shows  when to plant successive crops- if applicable. Its neat how it makes a chart  of all the things placed in the garden plan. It also sends email reminders for planting times,  and i think it  also lets you plan the garden monthly as well as having a crop rotation guide.

My main  issue with crop placement has been to make sure the tall stuff goes to the north side.  When we planted the Jerusalem Artichokes, we were in a hurry, didn't have much time to plan and they had to be out of the way.  The North side of the garden is closest to the house and if it was the only thing there, they would have gotten trampled.
Now as it is, i am going to have a shady spot next to them on the far side.  I know the 3 Sisters style of planting...  i have never tried it since my corn likes to fall over because of the wind alone. I can't imagine what squash vines would do to them... like watching the slow-motion vegetative version of a pack of wolves dragging down a megaloceros .  So...  maybe the JA's could handle the squashes?  I have read about people saving the JA stems to use as stakes for next year's crop propping. Not as strong as bamboo stakes, but good enough to be useful. Maybe sturdy enough during growth to become supports?
So i put the vining things over there to try it out
The  tomatoes and corn are going to be all the way to the Northern side, i am going to put the tomatoes at the front of that row and have the corn to the back i think...  the shed can perhaps shield the corn from the wind and hopefully the fence will add some more protection.

Ok, off to check the preceding years' weather...

Garden is almost ready!

My dad came over this morning and got started on the garden.  I have had it staked out for a while, but we had to cut the plastic  tape, but we left in the pegs...

First he spread out the compost/topsoil that he brought me yesterday.  Which looked like this on Saturday :

Hubby had taken more of the manure stuff and tossed it on the pile on the left...  but the compost is so nice and dark colored!

Ok, so...spreading it out...

There was a  bit more of it over there, so he took it too.

Ant this is the first actual tilling of the soil to mix it in

It looks so good!  (But, darn i can't wait for that fence to get finished)

All finished!

The yard slopes quite a bit, so my dad suggested that hubby take a few old boards we had lying around and make a retainer out of them for the back part of the garden.  We had plenty of scrap and they did it pretty quickly.

I also had dad do the part in front of where i planted the JA's ,  i am going to put the rhubarb in there and possibly the horseradish,  so i figured i might as well have that bit done. Otherwish hubby would have had to break it in for me with the mantis...  would have taken  him much longer.

It looks funny where it goes around the JA plot,  but i'll try and neaten it up some other time. We were in a rush last fall, so our digging wasn't quite as straight as the garden.

Very good day.

The weather was absolutely beautiful. I didn't check the temperature but i think it hovered around Perfect. It wasn't dry, it wasn't sweltering...it was sunny, little warm breeze... just right.  The Maine State Birds ( black flies )were out, but they weren't biting...too much..


Ok. Random spring pictures:

These are my tulips for the second round of spring bloom. They seem to come anywhere from 1-3 weeks after the Torontos.

This is a pink hyacinth that i do not remember planting. It has never appeared before that i know of and this is the first time i have seen it bloom.  I have no idea how it got there.  I must have put it there of course, but i thought i only put daffodills and crocus there.  Either i simply forgot, or my package of daffs had a hyacinth stowaway. The daffs were planted at least 4 years ago...

Oh, this is the Hoya Shepherdi flower penduncle.... or what i am hoping is.  Blurry, but worth taking note of so i know what to look for in the future:

The JA patch....  i think this was while i was trying to weed it...  The plants are not even big enough to make them out in this pic....

Apple blossom buds, turning pink...  Glad i happened to notice this  Friday evening because i sprayed Saturday and took this picture later that day... they are just about to open now.

The beach plums that made it through the winter.  The others got stepped on by mistake....  but i had to put them in drilled kitty litter buckets to protect them from being stepped on again.  The pink strings were supposed to prevent it, but no such luck.
Not a good picture of them, but i can at least record when they break dormancy in the spring for next year. Though this is an early year for everything.

Veggies revisited.  Again.


Kohlrabi, Burdock and Kale...  doing well.  Some of the other seeds in there are starting to come up, but are still small.

Pak Choi and Collards...  a month after seeding today.

Welsh onions and Shallots  (and a weed)

Lettuces... i need to trim out the twins....and eat them.

Assorteds

The other flat of assorteds... the tomatoes are looking good

Tomatoes and Tomatillo

Asparagus from seed.... so funny looking!

Another assorted flat

The citrus that i potted



























The grape. With the green onions behind that i planted for green onion tops.

Big honking rosemary....
I keep forgetting to buy plastic cups to transplant them all into. 

Goji doing really well...

The double flowered Rose of Sharon bush breaking dormancy. I don't really like the flowers much, some flowers don't double well and this is an example of that. Like hollyhocks, doubling the petals just detracts from the simple shape.  These flowers look like they have been shredded by wind.  I prefer the purple/blue shade of RoS,  this one is a medium pink color.  I might try to give this one away sometime later on. Replace it with something more to my tastes.

And the big Peegee Hydrangea is waking up.  It looks stark dead for most of the spring, its one of the last things to wake up.

Almost 11pm

I'm going to try and measure out the rows tomorrow, then dig the paths and mound up the beds. Thats the plan whether it takes me all week or not, i guess i will find out. Its dependent on weather, nap times and pain levels.

Molly...

We have a dog.  She came to us yesterday afternoon. The neighbors are finishing packing up. They will be moving permanently  into their apartment tonight.
We took her shopping this morning. Got her a new collar and a tag with our contact information on it. The Home Away database just needs to be updated. Her owners gave us all her vet info and paperwork, so that is good to have. We stocked up on food and treats and got her a couple toys.. Frontline Plus as well.
I am really happy to have a dog,  she is a really good dog.  Only problem is that under the circumstances, i feel like i'm taking someone's best friend away.

But its really nice to have a dog!


This morning i got up early and sprayed  the apple trees again, this is their second treatment. The buds are swelling and getting bright pink and i have to spray this round before the buds open up or i will be endangering any bees that try to pollinate them. I love bees so i don't want to cause any problems for them. 

Wish i could own my own bees.  Maybe someday.

My dad came over with two huge loads of the compost/topsoil.  It is gorgeous.  He thinks he might be able to stop by and put the tiller into it tomorrow. Yay!

Biodegradable plastics and other things...

I came across this today in another blog i have been following:
http://undercovergardener.blogspot.com/2010/04/sunchips-compostable-bag-day-1.html

I went to reply but after 2 paragraphs i realized i was carrying her entry too far off topic....  but it sparked a memory of a few things that i'd like to hang onto just a bit longer, lol.
She is doing her own test on the Sunchips biodegradable bag in her compost pile. According to Sunchips, the bag should be gone in about 14 months.

This is what i was going to reply with:

interesting. i saw their commercials but never looked into the claim. there was a plastic-like product made of corn starch that i remember being started when i was a kid. i had a writing pen that was made of it. It was green and yell and had a character of a smiling ear of corn on it.  you had to be careful to not chew this pen because it would begin to break down. i think it was the same stuff that Booda Velvet dog chew bones are made of...

Anyhow, i wonder if the bags could be used as one-year containers for planting in. I know some people have done whole (though small)gardens using store bought soil. They simply laid the bag along the ground, leaving the soil in the bag and planting seeds in a couple holes punctured in the bag. At the end of the season the bags are split open and the soil is left in place to be tilled under- since the soil bag effectively mulched over the garden plot they were placed upon. I once bought some doggy cleanup baggies at a pet store where i worked that claimed to be biodegradable.  After testing them with household kitchen waste, i decided that they weren't very biodegradable. I did some research online and discovered they were only made up of 10% biodegradable.  I'm not an Earth worshipper or even a believer in the global warming hoax, but i was wanting to be a little more responsible in Stewardship.  That company really made me mad because frankly it was more than a little misleading.   But through researching that, i did find a company that does make doggy cleanup baggies that are plastic-like and compostable and at a decent price.  But since i decided to keep a Vermicomposting bin in my kitchen, i didn't need any small, biodegradable, plasticlike baggies for my kitchen waste  any longer since i don't have to take that winter trip to the compost heap anymore.  But i do need to find those bags again because we are adopting the neighbor's Basset hound (a sad casualty of an unexpected divorce and subsequent relocation of the  family into  'no pets allowed' apartments) tonight or tomorrow, so i will need something to pick up the poo and i plan to install one of those pet poo digester compost pits.

 So, yeah...i was going way off topic for a one-sided discussion and didn't want to gum up her nice Blog with my ramblings. That is what my Blog is for. LOL


So....  windy again today... not as terrible as yesterday.  How on earth my greenhouses stayed upright is beyond me.  I have the bigger one tethered to the basketball hoop with coated airline cable and i have the smallet one tethered to that....  it must be the weight of the plant trays and the stability of being strapped together.

One bit of bad news tho...  my big laptop is now toast.   I caught the little one banging on it heartily with a toy and the screen went dead. I went to take a dirty diaper to the trash and that was all it took.  I think the banging dislodged some condensation and it permafried it.  I am just going to put it in a closet for a week or so and see if it ever comes back to life, but i am not expecting anything.
At least i have this mini laptop for now. Its an Acer Aspire, and it is very small but fully functional...  it does let me play with the garden program and some Facebook games- though they are quite small.  But at least i get online.

I almost got my Delicious account setup...  i was planning to do it a few minutes before the power went out and in the mild drama of that, it didn't get done.. then shortly after that, my laptop croaked.  So, my bookmarks are probably gone...again... *sigh*

Oh, another thing that shows how weird things have been for this house in the last couple days.   One of the fan blades snapped off one of our ceiling fans...  while it was on. It simply snapped off and hit the wall...  Hubby saw it fly off, i didn't see it myself but i watched him go pick it up. I had heard the bump noise it made and asked him what that was when he went to get it.  We were lucky that it missed my salt water tanks. It Probably missed the top tank by only about 6 inches.  I'm really glad it missed because we very well could have had 30 gallons of seawater on our floor last night.
So that fan will be removed soon. We think we will replace it with a basic fixture, 12 feet away is another fan and they really aren't needed anyway. In fact i don't like either one at all, but the intact fan is useful.

I have been trying to get my livingroom reordered.  Its small and the furniture is ugly, missmatched, awkward and big and there is too much of it,  but still too little space for more than a couple people to sit comfortably.
Since i have been playing with graph paper so much, i decided to measure out my livingroom and put it on a graph.  I measured all the furniture  and cut out paper pieces to represent them. I put the grid with my livingroom drawn on it into a plastic 3 ring binder sleeve and put scotch tape on the pieces representing the furniture.  So i can stick and unstick the furniture in different configurations and try to come up with a better layout.  I used the scanner to copy a couple of the possible layouts because i will forget from one try to the next.  So i will try and get hubby to look at it with me.  I am so frustrated with this room and the way the space is laid out. Every wall has something against it and it feels cramped and cluttered. Most of our furniture was given to us, and we are grateful for that, but in the 'Beggars can't be choosers'  reality, we weren't able to pick our own pieces with the idea of economizing space. Also, nothing really matches and it is embarrassing on a daily basis, no matter how much i clean the livingroom, it always looks and feels dingy.

Ok, so frustration has been let out and i have had my chance to just babble.

Gardenwise, the Jerusalem Artichokes are really coming along now. They are still very short, but they are appearing  all over.
I have some eggplant seeds sprouting now and more of the seedlings are really looking good.
I hope my dad is willing to do some compost delivering and some tilling this weekend.  There are things i could actually have planted by now if this wasn't my first year getting this plot ready.  If i were more capable i would try the mantis on the garden right now, but i won't make my hubby do it. So i will have to wait for my dad to come with his tractor.
I really hope their back yard, where the compost is, has dried up enough for access.  It needs to be spread out so it can all warm up.

The waiting is truly the hardest part!

Power outage today...

Major winds picked up around 11:15 am. At about 11:30 i was outside making sure things were secure since the baby was finally napping.  I was coming inside and could hear the battery backups all beeping (we have 3 computers and the Vonage and modem whatever system all on their own battery backups)... so there are 4 beeping sources.  That woke up the kidlet.  So, now she is cranky. 
But it was weird because some of the appliances had power, but some did not.  Hubby said that is what a brownout is.  This is new to me since we have only ever totally lost power.  We always lost it completely.
So i didn't know if it was a circuit or what.  Hubby came home from lunch to check if it was on our end or not.  He said all the traffic lights were out.

I keep hearing sirens...  the first were only a few minutes after the power went down. Then about 10 minutes later there were more.  Then just before hubby came home i watched the Fire Chief go by and heard even more sirens. I think there are 3 or 4 towns coming in on this.

My computer has about 2 hours on its own battery when i put all the power on low...  but with the little one awake from a short nap,  its a few sentences at a time.

I always wonder what happens when this stuff goes on.

I wonder if the power out made the lights go out, then caused an accident, then later there was another one.
I bet my daughter's school has no power as well.   Fun for the kids i bet,  something to break up the monotony of regular school.

The wind is gusting so hard, i am amazed that my mini greenhouses are still upright.  I hope they don't topple!  At this stage  of growth, my seedlings will be very hard to replace.  It would be devastating.

I wonder how long we will be without power. The kiddo is mad cause i can't warm up her milk. Its refrigerator cold and i usually warm it up just a bit...

Fun planning, long-term seed storage

This is fun!

I played with the GrowVeg program and it is really quite fun.
I do need to do my garden plan in a sideways orientation rather than up and down because it obliterates the veggie lables otherwise.  I didn't realize it will let me map out my whole yard, not just the actual garden plot. So i have more things i want to play with...  but in a half hour of playing  to learn the system, i came up with this:

I really think i will subscribe.  It lets you customize your varieties, their size, spacing and names. If they don't have a veggie in their list, they have a 'blanks' for you to customize- and it allows for much detail.  It let me put in my paths in and it even has fruit trees. I'm sure there are more little features, but after just a half hour of just playing, those are what i found.
I did a test print also and it looks really  neat, clean and comprehensive.
I'm going to concentrate more on detail for my actual working plan and i will let me put marks where my hoops will be.  This will help me measure more accurately for the spacing when i actually get out there.
Now that i have a better guide on space needs of each plant, i will have a better idea of how many plants i will need and how many seeds i need to sow and which plants can be multicropped and companioned.  If i subscribe, this could be a great tool to keep me more organized next year.  I will be able to know just how many of what is needed and i won't have a ton of extra seedlings.  I can plant only what i need.

Another thing i was thinking about is proper seed storage. Now i admit i have had awesome luck with germinating old seed, but i'd rather be sure that i can be sure.  So around the time when college gets out, i plan to see if i can find a good deal on a used mini refrigerator. I want a dedicated storage place for my seeds to hang out. 
From what i have read, seeds stored at cooler temps and very low humidity can be kept extremely viable for 10 years or more.  Silica gel is used to keep humidity down and little refrigerators are adjustable and if i plan to use it for seeds only, it won't be opened much throughout the year. That means there will be few temperature fluctuations in their lifetime.
Gardening authors like Steve Solomon even encourage you to buy the bigger packets of seed of many types of  veggies and store them properly to save some money.  His math does work out in favor of this. Particularly if you like the varieties and plan to plant them every year.
This would also be good if i try the Eliot Coleman method of low tunnels in the late fall,  i'd need to buy extra seeds to keep us in cold season crops longer since my season for them would be extended... i might need twice as many seeds each year, so for 8-10 years worth of seed in a bigger packet rather than multiple small packets, the difference could be quite dramatic.
That is if my attempts are successful.

House work.... then more GrowVeg playing.

A couple more links to bookmark...

This is a nice site with cute and clean graphics. They have seed sowing and transplanting times in neat little graphic charts.

I printed them out and put them in my 3-ring binder.  I'm a visual person so i really like these comprehensive little images:
http://www.ourveggiegarden.com/GuideTime.html

The rest of the site is nicely organised and illustrated.  There are tips and suggestions as well as season-spanning photos of their garden's growth.


This site is to a garden planner software. I am seriously considering using this, i think it will eliminate some guesswork and i could easily make multiple orientations to mull over.  I plan on beginning the free 30 day trial tomorrow when i have time to sit down and play with it.  They ask $25 for subscription, and i don't think that is a bad thing.  I watched the little demo and it looks like it has all the little details i need.
You can plot your garden or bed size, place your crops, and the crops have a little shaded halo to show how much space the plant needs. They apparently have a database for Square Foot method as well.  I am hoping to see if they will let you do a hybrid garden- by that i mean classic spacing and square foot spacing in the same chart. 
http://www.growveg.com/demo.aspx

Since reading Steve Solomon's  "Gardening When it Counts" i have gone a bit skeptical on the SFG method.  According to Mr Solomon, just because you can grow 60 lettuces in so many square inches, your lettuce might look pretty and provide a lot of food, the available nutrient level won't be very impressive.  He stresses the idea that your home grown veggies should  provide maximum nutrition, especially if you intend to go 'off grid' when it comes to veggies. Nutritionally deficient home-grown veggies are worse than less fresh store-bought and worse than none at all.  I think i agree with this.  The majority of his book is dedicated to explaining and teaching how to achieve the proper fertile balance of the garden soil, not to make the veggies grown in it as healthy looking as possible, but to make sure the veggies have every opportunity to become as highly nutritious and productive as possible.
So to help maximize the nutrient value of each plant, that recently maligned "old fashioned" wide spacing of plants, is actually the best way after all.  As if the farmers of old didn't know what they were doing all along.

But there are some items that i am not really looking to maximize the nutrient potential, i just want to snack on them.  Things like radishes, or things that don't mind being in poor soil, but do very well when intensively planted in extra fertile soil.
I do want to try intensive plantings of corn. With a small garden, there isn't any other method that will give you more than a couple dozen ears in a season besides intensive.  And if we aren't subsisting on corn, i'm not worried that it won't be as nutrient rich... i don't think corn is all that good for anyone anyhow.

But my cole crops, carrots, tomatoes, leafy greens and green beans... they must be as nutritious as possible because i want those to make up the bulk of our summer and fall eating.  The squashes also need to be up there nutrient-wise to have over the winter months when we won't have as much fresh veggies to choose from.
Anyway, fascinating book.  And great websites with good info.

I'm going to have to make an entry of just Bookmarks one day. That way if i ever have another destroyed laptop scare, i at least won't lose my Bookmarks permanently. I know there is a way to savy the bookmark list to my external drive, but i would have to update it often. Here i can just mention the new bookmarks every few days when i come across one.

I need to not worry so much about this blog being dull. Its really just a journal after all... mainly for myself since i have such a bad memory.  Blogs have more bells and whistles than any of the free journal programs i have tried.  This blog site is very easy to use and i won't lose it like i did the last time my computer crashed...  i lost the journal entries i kept during my pregnancy.   That was really upsetting.  Had i blogged it, they  would still be safe and sound.

Oh well, off to find something constructive to do...

Yay, then...not yay... ha ha

Yay-  my laptop survived!
Not sure how it lived, but so far it is back to normal and no sticky keys (i don't sweeten my coffee) even.
Hubby thinks i may have saved it by flipping it over to drain and yanking the battery as  soon as i could. I also put the blow dryer on cool and set it up against it for a few minutes.  WHile that was working, i got out mini box fan and set the laptop up so the air blew into the keyboard so i could put away the blow dryer.  Another thing that helped is thta keyboards have this  failsafe sort of thing, kind of like GFCI....  if there is a sudden voltage change it shuts down automatically.  So when the spill happened, the computer got itself shutting down and i just had to clean it up and wait for it to dry.

So there ends the drama of the day for Tuesday.

One thing i did do to change my laptop's settings to hopefully protect it was to go into the energy settings and tell it to do nothing when the cover of the laptop is closed.  This way when i leave the room for a few seconds, i can close the cover and this will protect the keys and screen from tiny, nosy,  little fingers---and spills.
I keep my laptop on all day and i check something on it a number of times a day. Shutting it down after each lookup  is not going to happen, so this might be the next best thing.

But i am grateful that i don't need to get a new one at this point.  I have been very good at archiving things into my external hard drive, so i would only have lost my huge bookmarks list and a few inconsequential things.

So, all is well that ends well... hubby said just to watch for overheating.

Last night large regions got snow. Our mountains up here got as much as 2 feet. Some spots a few miles East of us got some freezing rain, but i don't think we got any of it.  I think our night time low temperature got down to 38 degrees. I have not been out to see the mini greenhouses yet this morning. I haven't even been over to the window that has the indoor/outdoor remote thermometer in it.  I have the wire of the outdoor thermometer inside one of the greenhouses and then i have the 'indoor' part on the shelf of the gas grill where i can see it through the window (and it won't get rained on).

So there isn't much to report on sprouty things or gardeny things since it just raining out and its not a weekend, so nothing is being done.  Hopefully there won't be too much rain and my dad will be willing to get the compost over here for us.
I hope to have it get tilled in so i can put  clear plastic over the soil to wake up the weeds then run the Mantis over it a week later, then black plastic to warm the soil faster. 
According to the Johnny's blog and according to the book by Eliot Coleman (that i am reading now) i should be able to plant out the hardies within a week or two- and possibly as much as a couple weeks ago-  under the hoops of course.

The little citrus trees seem to be doing fine so far. The venous orange still has those rolled leaves, but there isn't any real info on this plant online. Some posts about them that result from searching, seem to imply that 'venous' is a made-up name by Gurney's/Henry Fields.  There was one suggestion that it might be Madame Vinous orange...which is a known type.  But its hart to tell because people are in general so dismissive to HF and their products, that nobody will say much even if they did know.

I don't know myself right yet,  i just want to get some nice smelling flowers. It doesn't even have to set fruit, but if it does i would love to see some fruit with at least an orange blush.
 I do want a variegated pink Eureka lemon soon.  I saw it first at Springhill's website... but i don't remember their reputation so i'd check in on that before i would consider them .  Territorial also sells it and they have the Kaffir lime that i want to replace the one i accidentally murdered.  They also have the Kumquat plant i want.
They also have one of the better reputations, so i might go there for "all my citrus needs"...  since hubby was kind of freaked out by my idea of turning the front garden into a Milkweed festival, i may have to console myself with a collection of a different sort.

The Goji seedlings are taking off like crazy, and i did manage to find the charger for my camera after an hour of searching the other day.

I also think that  my Hoya shephardi is setting a penduncle.  This is pretty exciting since this can take years to happen... of course it can still take years to bud and then bloom from this point i guess. But the fact that it seems to be starting something after less than 2 years from being a rooted cutting...  its pretty cool.  One out of 6 of my Hoyas might bloom within the next three years.  Yay!

 I forgot two of my Passiflora outside, i'm going to leave them out until it warms up cause i think if i bring them back in they might go into shock if they aren't there already. But i did repot the P. lavender Lady the other day, it looks happier in a bigger pot.

Well, i guess that is all.