I have a few too many irons in the fire right now, and unfortunately this one is the one that is being neglected.
I’m bird-sitting my parents’ lovebird while they are on vacation with my Niblings. The bird has laid 4 eggs in the 2 weeks she’s been here.
My latest original knitting design is knitted, but getting the pattern and charts together from my notes seems to take as long as knitting it did.
Fermenting is fun! A few new sauerkrauts have come off my fermentation table, including a Carrot Cake Kraut that included pecans, raisins and cinnamon. That jar became Carrot Cake Kraut Muffins. Delish!
The local farmers market started yesterday, a couple of weeks earlier than last year.
Gardening is proceeding. I planted the flower starts I got at the market yesterday, along with some of the flowers I started from seed and the cucumbers I started. More planting this afternoon.
When last we chatted about the garden, I had finished moving around the dirt and rocks that was delivered. That’s all structure and aesthetic enhancements. What else is going on?
I have 4 boot trays and starter “greenhouses” full of seed starts. Luckily, I found some great tracking sheets at Botanical Interests, for easily logging the things in those trays.
Some things are going gangbusters, like the okra, cucumbers, and summer squash. In fact I had to take the lid off that tray because the seedlings were pushing at it already. Tomorrow’s to-do list includes moving those into peat pots so they have a little more room.
But the tomatoes aren’t looking too hot. I started making sure I have full-spectrum lights aimed at the tomato tray during the day, because there isn’t necessarily much sun getting to it. And I want lots of tomatoes for canning this summer! Really. It’s why I started seeds for the following tomato varieties:
Cherry Sweetie: red cherry tomato for eating in salads, plain, or pickling whole
Golden Rave: yellow Romanita type for eating raw or making chutney
Chocolate Cherry: purple/black cherry tomato for eating plain or in salads
Tumbling Tom Yellow: yellow cherry tomato
Costoluto Genovese: red tomato for sauce or canning whole
Amish Paste: red heirloom type for sauce, paste or salsa
More later in the season on tomato chutney, tomato jam and homemade ketchup.
Next year I’ll have some rhubarb to pick, because I planted 10 last week. There’s one that came up from last year, out of I think 3 that I planted. I should probably move it, becase it’s in the middle of what’s now the asparagus bed.
Radishes, kohlrabi, turnips, spinach, beets and snap peas have all poked their little heads above ground in the garden beds.
Flower starts so far include marigolds, sunflowers and Gaillardia. The marigolds are supposed to help keep nemotodes away from garden veg. Gaillardia are perennials and will attract hummingbirds, butterflies and other pollinators. And sunflowers are just cool. I’m also hoping that they’ll give the squirrels something to eat instead of the garden veg.
Sorry, no pic. Sometime in the next week, we’ll have some sun and I’ll get out with the camera. But there’s not much going on outdoors yet. The average last frost date here is May 2, so it’s considered “safe” to plant out the starts after the 15th or so.
No, I didn’t actually count them. But on Tuesday (April 19), I took delivery of 4 yards of garden soil and a ton of assorted cobblestone.
In other words, dirt and rocks.
Last summer, which was the first that I had a garden, I had things pretty squished in one of those pre-packaged 4×4 raised bed kits, a few deck containers, and a couple of beds in the front yard that are really probably better used as flower beds. But I had a total blast being able to bring buckets of fresh produce into my kitchen, mere yards from where they were grown. I got a little carried away ordering seeds from a couple of seed companies.
So I decided that this year, I’d go big or go home. Even though this is home.
That’s butterfly weed, still dormant.
You know what I mean.
Last weekend, we borrowed my parents’ truck to pick up lumber, and we built a really big raised bed. The basic footprint is 10×20 feet, though there is a 2-foot “hallway” running up the middle of it. We built it from 2×6 lumber, so it’s deeper than the other bed. No way in heck was I going to try to get bags of soil from a garden center to fill it.
Enter Main’s Landscape Supply. Order placed Monday, delivered Tuesday, and then it was just a day and a half of pretty constant work with my shovel and the wheelbarrow.
Why not bagged dirt? Wouldn’t that be easier and more convenient? Well, I guess. Sure, it can be lugged around and emptied right where one needs it. But let’s take a look at the math. The large bags of soil at garden centers are 2 cubic feet, and around $7. (Prices vary, but that’s a decent estimate for garden soil with compost, etc., but no chemical fertilizers or plant food mixed in.) A yard of soil is one cubic yard, which works out to 27 cubic feet. I needed 4 yards. That’s 108 cubic feet, or 54 2-foot bags. At $7 each, it comes to $378. Plus tax. Plus delivery or multiple trips to the garden center.
Yeah, no.
For less than that, I got my dirt, delivered. AND a literal ton (that’s 2000 pounds) of rocks to edge beds and things. So I had to move it around myself. That was my workout for Tuesday and Wednesday.
There you have it. The garden. Nothing in it yet, but we’re not to our average last frost date here. My sun room has a table full of seedlings started to fill it up: sweet peppers, 3 kinds of hot peppers, eggplant, 8 kinds of tomatoes, cucumbers, okra, and 3 kinds of squash. Plus seeds for other things that will be direct-sown: green and yellow beans, kale, 2 kinds of beets, several kinds of radishes, kohlrabi, carrots, sugar snap peas, turnips, spinach, and lettuce. Some of those direct-sow items that can handle the chill have already been planted in last year’s beds. Ten new rhubarb plants and 10 asparagus crowns went into their beds, too. (I love that I can say I have a rhubarb bed, even if I won’t be able to harvest any real quantities until 2018.)
Car Guy and I got the last of the soil off the pile and into the beds on Wednesday, just in time for some rain overnight and the next day. There’s some poultry fencing up on the 2 long sides of the garden, but I have to move it around and figure out how to keep it from sagging too badly.
That’s the veg covered. What about flowers? Oh, those are coming. The seedling trays include starts of Lobelia, daisies, Penstemon, Gaillardia, sunflowers and marigolds. Plus I’ll be direct-planting zinnias, cosmos, four o’clocks, gladiolas, dahlias, Liatris and hollyhocks. One of the new small flower beds was planted with a shade-friendly mix of lily of the valley and bleeding heart.
Today, Car Guy used the last of the rocks to build downspout extension supports that are a little better looking than the old bricks we used to use. With the bed edgings made of the same stones, they actually blend in. Even if I do think they look a little like burial cairns.
I realized yesterday that I was using the wrong date for average last frost in my area. Which means that I am 2 weeks late getting seeds started and getting stuff out in the yard.
*gasp!*
This is not a huge deal. I am not, after all, some kind of master gardener. Not at all. In fact, I’m a huge faker. Last year was the first year ever that I had a garden, and I basically put plants in the ground and hoped to get food from them.
My plan this year is only a little more sophisticated. In that I thought about what I want to have produce-wise for canning or eating fresh, and I got seeds for those things.
This morning after I hit the gym, I headed to the home improvement store to get some garden soil and some, ahem, amendments (composted manure) to top off a couple of the beds that were used last year. Also in the pic, though it’s under the other bags so it can’t be seen, is a large bag of potting soil for a couple of the planters I have for on the front porch.
Last year, there were 3 beds in the front yard, 4 planters on the porch, a small 4×4 bed in the back and 4 self-watering planters on the deck. I re-bordered one of the front beds, making it just a little bit bigger, got one more deck container, and will be building beds in a 10×20 footprint. Hopefully this weekend. More on that at a later date.
So anyhoo, 2 of the front beds will be flowers to attract butterflies, hummingbirds and other pollinators. The other, newly slightly expanded front bed will house vegetables, and received its first residents today: Lacinto kale, sugar snap peas, radishes, swiss chard and kohlrabi. There’s some space in the bed still for something else, but I haven’t decided what yet. Maybe a small cluster of flowers to attract pollinators, and some other low attractive plant. I’ve got seeds for other radishes and chard, and 2 kinds of beets.
The little 4×4 in the back got a few seeds, too: lettuce, spinach, carrots, turnips. Less than half the bed was seeded, so there’s plenty of room for other produce or later plantings of the same so I can harvest continually throughout the summer.
Beet seeds are soaking on the windowsill for planting tomorrow. This afternoon, I pulled asparagus seeds out of their soak and put them in peat pucks. Does it make me a masochist that I’m starting asparagus from seed and not crowns?
Next steps: build the beast of a bed this weekend and then order a truckload of garden dirt (I figure 3-4 yards) to fill it. Pull out the hostas next to the deck and replace them with rhubarb. Figure out where to plant the hearty fig tree I bought. Start the other seeds that need indoor start: marigolds, brussels sprouts, okra, zucchini and cucumbers.
Woah. It’s been a week since I put anything out here. I guess this week hasn’t been very interesting.
No, that’s not completely accurate. I’ve been too busy to pull out the computer and type something, and it’s just too much of a pain to type anything of any length on the tablet. Dinners this week have been either really boring or intended for recipe posts that have yet to be written. And I finished no knitting, though I did get a bunch done on a shawl for work and some significant progress designing a shawl from scratch.
This week, I finally got my rear in gear to start some seeds for the garden! I’m only a couple of weeks “late” on some of the flowers that should have been started 10-12 weeks before planned planting out. (I’m in zone 6a; average last frost is early- to mid-May; typical planting date is last weekend or so of May.)
Monday I pulled out a starting tray, watered the peat pucks, and grabbed my big ol’ box of seed packets. I started Fountain Lobelia, Shasta Daisy, Gloriosa Daisy, mini sweet peppers, mixed bell peppers, Jalapeños, Impala (cayenne) peppers, Habaneros, Black Beauty eggplants, and a few Black Magic Kale. Yes, I know I could plant kale en situ right now, but I still have to build the beds and fill them, and I’m not sure if I want to put the kale in one of the existing beds in the front of the house. When I checked the moisture on the pucks today, the kale had already germinated!
There have been flurries in the air intermittently all day today. And it’s cold enough that I don’t want to go outside to plant some of the perennials and summer bulbs that could go in now. Maybe Monday/Tuesday, if the air temp is better and it’s not so soggy out.
Knitting-wise, I’m working on the Lilla shawl from Berroco, intended as a class in June on knit-on edgings. For class, we’ll work edging onto a swatch-sized piece because I know there’s no way that people would come to class with a huge piece of knit done already. It’s a simple-enough piece, though I’m still working on the body so I can’t speak about how the border will actually work up yet. We don’t carry the recommended yarn at work, so I’m using a lovely apple green shade of Berroco Ultra Alpaca.
The original design is going fairly well. Last week at work we took delivery of some gorgeous hand-dyed linen blend yarn from Interlacements. It’s not expensive, on a yard by yard basis. But the hanks are quite large. I wanted to create something original that would use a single hank but be compelling enough to make people crave the yarn. The tricky part is designing it to be interesting to look at and to knit without being so fussy or difficult-looking that our customers won’t even be willing to attempt it. That’s a fine line to walk.
The eyelet work I’m using (more solid fabric than holes, so I don’t consider it lace) is basic enough, primarily diagonal lines. But I’m changing directions and adding secondary rows of eyelets, so there’s a sense of motion and curve. The pattern evolves, and will have beads added in the last section to give the outer edge some weight.
Enough of my brain dump. I’m off to edit a couple of pictures and put together a recipe post.
I started canning in 2014, which led to having a garden in 2015. And I’m planning one for 2016. In fact, I think I’ve gone a little crazy with my box of seeds, considering that I don’t really know much about gardening. I just stick stuff in the ground and hope to end up with vegetables later.
Well, not quite that clueless, but it’s not a terrible exaggeration.
That’s the veg covered. What about flowers? Oh, those are coming. The seedling trays include starts of 
The little 4×4 in the back got a few seeds, too: lettuce, spinach, carrots, turnips. Less than half the bed was seeded, so there’s plenty of room for other produce or later plantings of the same so I can harvest continually throughout the summer.
InTheMitten 
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