Almost Done!

Eric has been Mr. Garden Studmuffin all this week. (Plus he's either made me tea or met me with coffee every day this week, and gave me a really helpful leg and back rub one night because I started a "boot camp" type fitness program that felt very intimidating. Poor guy is getting up at O'dark-thirty in the mornings, participant or not.)

The thing I'm blogging about, though, even though it's only one thing, was part of getting the yard really ready for the tour. I'm trying to clean up, spruce up, and fill empty spots. So I bought some plants that I might have waited and grown from seed, or those that died in their pots quickly or birds ate or something.

Yesterday I put the climbing winter squashes in half of the spinach bed. This half wasn't intensively planted, and besides, some of the other spinach is bolting -- it's not going to last long. The butternuts I planted never came up, so I grabbed a couple of them at the nursery, plus a Kuri Red squash and a Small Sugar pumpkin.

But half the spinach bed isn't too big, right? What to do? Denise and Kevin had given me a bunch of huge bamboo from their yard, and Eric was a boy scout, so. . .
 

It's probably strong enough for a person to climb on, but the twine wouldn't hold. Certainly it's sturdy enough to hold pounds and pounds of squash, plus it's going to store easily or break down easily. Darn thing has to be 12-13' tall, though.

I'm going to use it as a place to put my "growing vertically adds space" sign for the tour on Sunday.

Lots afoot

So much happening. Things being planted out (hot peppers and pole beans so far), things being harvested (peas, celery, a garbage bag full of spinach), and one big thing being built.
Kevin has been making me an unbelievable birthday present:

and Taz is going to find that her easy-access days are all over. I'm working hard getting ready for the Bay Friendly Gardens Tour on April 29th.
Denise and Cat helped process the celery.

I've posted a listing for "soup celery," which is what the San Francisco Chronicle called it this weekend, although I'd call it "trimmings," on Freecycle. Don't worry -- I'm keeping plenty to flavor broth.

Oona can now put herself IN the dog crate.

And Eric and I got to dress up and go to a wedding this week.

Clean up rather nicely, don't we? Unfortunately, Taz proceeded to eat my new shoes the next morning. I had gotten home late and tired, and left them carelessly on the couch. Instead of getting up and taking her running, I'd read the paper. 

Maybe if they'd been behind a fence. I'm very very sad about that.

I meant to do one of these

I still like the copper chicken sculpture. Maybe I should try to make more garden art.

Oddly enough, Tor, Ellie, and I aren't as good at archery as we hoped. The box with a turkey drawn on it remained mostly unscathed, but the irrigation pipe is a goner.

Cilantro can be picky for me -- won't germinate, bolts immediately, etc. But let a plant go to seed, and it's Salsa Pathway! Maybe I'll use the last of the tomatoes and make a batch, after harvesting with nail scissors.

Gone to the dogs

It just dawned on me tonight that I have not only been not posting on my blog, but I have been not reading anyone's blog. I've been feeling a little. . . underwater. Homeschooling has been really busy, even with one less child actively homeschooling. I still read papers and discuss ideas, but the college kid is much more in charge of her learning. And a great visit with my mom and my aunts culminated in taking four seventy-ish ladies camping, one for the first time. That was pretty great. . . and work is busy, and I'm helping out with a couple of groups I'm excited about in the homeschool group, and I actually made it to spinning night tonight, but still.

It's been a year since I felt as though the garden had any purpose other than helping me feel as though there was just One More Thing I Wasn't Doing Well At.

Hmpfh. For something I've loved since I was ten, that's a bad thing. And last night, I had a nightmare about working in the garden with friends who were going to help me whip it into shape, etc. etc., but it all went pear-shaped pretty quickly.

I think it's anxiety because in April, I'm going to be part of a fairly bigdeal kind of garden tour, so knowing that months turn into weeks into days into ohmygoodness it's here! it is time to get everything going again. Starting seedlings, repairing broken irrigation systems, dealing with pests.

Speaking of . . .


Picture of innocence, isn't she? We all know better. In fact, Eric and I are almost as tired as we were with newborns. Broken nights -- and they haven't all been puppy-caused, to be honest -- have really messed me up. I'm even taking naps nowadays, and that's not like me.

Mikey hardly gets any quiet time unless she's in her crate or taking one of the still-baby naps that she's prone to.


Otherwise, they're pretty fond of one another, I think. She seems to be sharing some things with him on occasion,


But mostly it's teeth and paws and barking. She's still short enough to stand directly under him and bite his legs, even when he's trying to get a drink. We had hoped to not get a puppy bold enough to bully him, but bold enough to stand our busy household, but this is what we got.


Good thing she's cute.


But since there really is some activity going on in the garden, her new habit of leaping into beds and digging (sorry, two-inch-tall peas!) had to stop. Bowing to the inevitable truth that I'm not going to train her to stay out of them fast enough to get the fall garden up to speed, the kids did this today:



Parts are short, only the 24" chicken wire, but parts are leftover chicken run fencing. It's big enough right now to keep her out, and we're doing things as we can.


At least a short respite.

Meanwhile, I finally got out and worked out there today and it made me feel much much better about things. It's not where I want it to be, but on five hours of sleep a night, it's better than what has been happening.

Last of the first days of spring

One of the impressive things this weekend was how much Eric got done with his finger like this:


Just kind of hurts looking at it. But not as much as our excitement on Wednesday, when he accidentally removed the pin holding the tip of his digit in place. Whoo-ee, that was something. Fortunately he had an appointment at the hand surgeon on Thursday, and instead of re-pinning the joint, the good Dr. just had a splint ready for it. Apparently banging the hard plastic splint hurts a lot less than banging a large needle holding your joint still. Go figure.

Eric also finished stapling chicken wire to the tractor, and added a little in-out flap for the top. That should be a lot easier than dropping the box over them!


Another task Eric took on was bringing some order to the storage sheds under the deck. I've asked for this for a while, and I'm pleased with the ingenious kinds of storage. I can think of more hooks and things that would customize it even more -- this is actually going to be a pretty fun project.


Some garlic is definitely doing well so far. The leeks and onions I thought I'd planted next to it are much less robust. Drat it all. They really have to be started indoors, and I'll try to remember to do that next year.


I meant to do this digging over the course of the week, but oddly enough life got in the way, so it wasn't done. Today I got to one of the small fence-side beds, I did the dig a trench, toss it in semi double dig method of mixing in the horse poo and bedding and some blood meal. The bedding is the bulk of this stuff. If I'd done it sooner, I would have kept some more of the goodness in, instead of letting it all evaporate as ammonia, but we do what we can.


I was impressed at how lovely the soil is. Every year, it's showing improvement. And now, after being raked smooth, that part of the bed is ready to go. Into what, I'm not sure. More sunflowers? They sure were happy last year.


Whenever we work outside, at least one member of the family is happy to just hang out. Here, he was chewing an old bone, but generally he'll chew on anything available. A fruit tree, a pepper stem, the edge of a bed, a boot. . . He really enjoys cold, so being outside on the ground is better even than being on the couch inside. Although he'll do that if it's the only option for Being With The People.


So, the update on the bees is as follows. I was quite afraid of what I would find when I went back into the hives. Did I in fact kill my best queen by slopping too much paint on her (talk about feeling terrible, in fact so badly I didn't detail it on my blog), or did the feeding help the hives at all? Did I attract more bothersome ants to my smaller hive? What was going on?

So, today's warm afternoon meant a trip to buy more sugar to mix syrup for them, and I made a new cover, hopefully one that would allow me to cover the hive securely and allow room for a gallon plastic bag of syrup.

The weaker hive was still there -- this time, two frames covered by bees. This was an improvement. I got out a non-warped cardboard nuc box, and shrank the hive down into it. There were three good bee frames, with babies and nurse bees, and the nicely-marked queen, and a couple of frames of capped honey. On top of all of it I placed a nice full bag of syrup. The cover has enough room so I think the bees can get to it and also be covered. I may have to double-check. Being me, sometimes I overslash the bag and it drowns bees, sometimes I manage to keep them out of it entirely, wasting the whole effort. It works pretty well, when operator error isn't factored in.


The "good" hive was also doing very well. They're filling frames with syrup, and maybe nectar too. I saw brood, and then I saw the queen -- overly marked, sure, but walking around as though nothing was amiss. Oh, what a relief!

The top is not really going to work, at least not with a full bag of syrup. I had to tilt it and then block the opening with a large piece of bamboo. That worked for the two sides, but the front and back are open. If they're too open, the hive is vulnerable to robbing by other bees. I think a 2" tall "extension" around the hive would work best, with the top separate from that. If it were warm enough, I'd put an empty super on top, and then put the top on that. But that's 6 vertical inches of empty space to lose heat to, from the bees' perspective. I don't want to stress them any more than I have to. Back to the drawing board!


I wish we were having more weather like this for them. Unfortunately, it's a week of cold and rain predicted ahead. Oddly enough, the apricot tree, which is covered with blooms and directly in front of the hives, was deserted when I was stalking bees late in the afternoon. The Anna apple, 20' away, was just buzzing with them. Go figure.

The price of direct-seeding

Growing from transplants is generally agreed to be not as cost-effective as starting your own.

That's not, alas, true for me this year.


That's right -- the birds. The birds are eating everything intentionally planted in my near-wasteland garden. Between the rain and the birds and the cold, I have just grumpily harvested the preexisting kale and ignored everything else, including my carrot bed which is either not germinating because it's cold or the birds have also pulled every teensy carrot I saw right out. I'm going with option two because I actually saw teensy carrots. And now. . . nothing.

So last weekend I hied me to the hardware store and bought a package of my most loathed outdoor product -- plastic bird netting. I figured I'd engineer a nice pvc box for each garden bed, zip-tie the netting down, and have something I could reuse year after year.

Unfortunately, I'm the Queen of the Jury-Rigged. The repurposed pvc is just curvy enough that the corners keep springing loose:


Although I was confident enough in that one to replant some carrots the other day.

I tried another box style in bamboo, and am not yet happy enough with it to drape netting over it.

But today, I found the least material-intensive design so far:


White tip is NOT a skunk; it's Mikey's tail. He had been lounging in that bed before I chased him off of it and then capped it with netting. If both he and the birds stay away, maybe I'll get some peas, spinach, and tat soi.

If it's warm enough.

Yesterday's harvest? 9 1/2 ounces of red kale and 1 pound 10 oz of Yukon Gold potatoes. The bed they came out of has a scab-type disease in it. No more grocery store potatoes; no more in that bed!

And check out the eggs! Three normal ones; one as though a chicken was channeling a hummingbird. We don't have a light in the coop, and I know we'd be getting a lot more eggs if we did! Maybe bigger ones, too. I should have taken a close-up of that wee egg, but I was tired.


Today, 14 pounds of Bearss limes which will be lime shred marmalade tomorrow. Only one egg today, but normal chicken-sized.


Maybe tomorrow I will weed!

All Strung Out

I shouldn't have believed the pea packets which said the pod peas would max out around 36". They're easily at five feet and reaching. I knew the snow peas were going to climb, so Denise gave me some tall bamboo poles.

Still, they're not just going to climb poles; it's time for some twine. I spent this morning festooning the beds with peas.


There's sort of a charming, "rigged by drunken pirates" feel to it -- and I'm not done. I swear, next year I'm going to knit some kind of twine blanket/screen because what I'm doing isn't working well. And I don't want to use something non-compostable, and the
cut branches I tried for the podding peas worked fine, but weren't tall enough.

Sigh.

All of the Asian greens bolted at once, even the tiny seedlings. Something must have triggered it. I'm just hoping that the rain holds off while the Tat Soi blooms, so the bees can get out there and do their thing. I'd like to gather viable seed from these babies.


Another wonderful thing for the bees to do over the next week would be to visit this tree:


I'd dearly love some apricots this year.

Un.In.Spired.

Call me the intermittent blogger.

Actually, I thought up that title a couple weeks ago but was so uninspired I couldn't bring myself to post. I'm less uninspired now, as opposed to more inspired, which might be an overstatement.

In July, I sing the praises of Early Girls, my very favorite tomato. By October I can hardly be bothered to pick them. The squirrels apparently feel the same way.

I have harvested many pounds, though. The last two batches became slow-roasted tomato sauce, just because it's easy. I discovered if you forget about the sauce in the oven, what you get is more like slow-roasted tomato paste, which is pretty, um, intense.

The squash gets big points for beauty.

I've never eaten a Lakota. Considering the poundage, I hope I like them.

Late-summer blues isn't the only thing sapping my gardening energy right now. We've done a lot of big-ticket work lately, like thinning and topping the 30-plus-foot bamboo to allow more sunlight.

That apartment building is such an eyesore, and it feels strange to thin our optical barrier. The difference in the garden is noticeable, though, and that means more to eat. We have our priorities in order.

The other big change is the wisteria, which grows vigorously over an archway of three cement-footed 4x4s. The original idea was that it would form a kind of doorway leading from one "room" of the yard to another.

The effect, while lovely, was also sun-blocking, so off came the branches, out came the 4x4s, and up came the tree.

It now lives near the remaining bamboo closer to the fence. Since it stretches toward the light, we're hoping it'll reach back toward its original site, again forming that lovely archway, but without stealing light from the garden. I love the carpet of lavender blossoms underneath in the spring. Fingers crossed.

The result of all this work is that the yard currently looks something like this:

We have lots of 20-plus-foot lengths of bamboo to build with---heck, maybe we can refloor the house---and a lot of cleanup to do.

The summer garden is slowly ending. I've pulled up all the squash, saluting the ridiculously productive zucchini and scallopini as I went, except for the butternut that has three tiny, probably ill-fated squash on it. I pulled most of the beans, but couldn't bear to cut the one that's still blossoming and climbing the apricot tree.

And finally, to the planting. Yippee! So far I've planted about 80 onion sets and transplanted 50 or 60 spinach plants, which is what dragged me out of my gardening malaise, I believe.


And after Kevin's egg joke, it was gratifying to return from a weekend away to find this:

And lastly, a surprise treat in the harvesting basket:

That's Dodger, our pest control. I've been on him to get the rats that have been scuttling around outside our bedroom window, belittling his paltry mouse offerings. I think he finally took it to heart, because last night he showed up with two startlingly large bite marks under his arm, and this morning we're off to the vet.