Replacing Garden Beds

Part of my gardening is done on flat land in traditional rows . . . what I refer to as my field garden. Other planting is done in raised beds.

We've got 26 raised beds and over the span of years, normal deterioration of the wood frames has taken its toll. In the past couple of years, we've had to replace a few of the raised beds here and there. This spring, in doing a maintenance check, I found several that had pretty much given up the ghost over winter.

There are eight beds that I decided had served their purpose and needed to be replaced. One was done in early spring and is in use this summer growing season. That leaves seven more we want to get replaced yet in readiness for next year's use.

In his spare time (ahem), my dear husband has been working on constructing the replacement 4' x 8' frames. Above are four of them ready to go out into the garden area. We've used 12" wide boards for these frames.

How bad are some of the existing bed frames? Here's one that we've tried to give a little extra support to in order to keep it limping along. Enough now though. This one comes out and will be replaced.

You can see daylight through each corner of this other bed's end board which is just about totally nonexistent. Yup, time for this frame to go.

There's a blog post I did showing us installing a new raised bed frame if you're interested in more detail. Click here to go to that post.

Both of us are avoiding going to do outside jobs this morning. It's heavy and humid out there and prime conditions for biting insects. We have the possibility of thunderstorms today and tonight. We need the rain again and I wish it would just start raining and clear out the mugginess. Maybe even bring in some cooler air. Not holding out for much, am I?

Life Is . . .

. . . surprising

. . . good

. . . hard

. . . confusing

. . . inspiring

. . . sad

. . . what you make of it

. . . complex

. . . tiring

. . . rewarding

. . . (too) busy

. . . full of hope

. . . scary

. . . challenging

. . . wonderful

. . . going by too fast



Additions, anyone?

A Small Celebration

Although about 6 days past her actual birthday, the Pea Family got together last night to celebrate Chicken Mama's special day.

We had a simple dinner of a big tossed salad and garlic-cheese bread so we had more room for cake!

Birthday hopes and wishes all around were for a much, much, much better coming year for our little girl.

After dinner and cake and opening presents (including one I had for Christmas but hid so well I didn't find it until a couple of weeks ago), we adjourned to the living room for Family Reading Night. I think we've missed this night for the past month (or maybe two?) but I hope we can get back on schedule now and keep up with our once a month reading together because we all really enjoy it. Our choices of reading material never fail to be varied and bring up discussion and conversation that we wouldn't have in the ordinary course of day to day communication.

* * * * * * * *

I need to get outside right away this morning to do what needs to be done before it gets too hot. We've got another two days of high heat forecast after the past couple of days of a (blessed) cooling off.

It seems to me that summer starts to slip away very rapidly after we pass the 4th of July and there are still many projects to be done around her before cold weather sets in so I need to make a list, check it twice and get on with it!

It's A Good Thing I'm Retired

Otherwise, I'd never have time to do what I do.

Today was a good start to the week. Got the laundry done and hung out on the lines early this morning. Brought it in as it dried, folded it and put most of it away. Tonight I ironed what needed ironing.

This morning I also picked about 12-14 pounds of strawberries. After lunch I sat and cleaned them all. That part is NOT my favorite as it's so tedious! (And you can carry on a conversation with a bowl of strawberries for only so long before you start getting a little funny.)

After dinner I made two batches of jam.

Then I baked a birthday cake for our daughter because we're finally getting together tomorrow night to celebrate her special day . . . only six days late. No picture of the cake 'cause I only got it baked. I'll frost it tomorrow.

Below is a picture of our granddog, Tucker, that I snapped today. His favorite place to take a nap in the house is by the back door because it's coolest there.

The room right inside the back door is a step down from the rest of the house and apparently the little guy was so tired he needed to rest his chin on the step before falling fast asleep.

That's a little bit the way I feel right now.

Yup. 'Twas a good day. Now I'm ready for a good night's sleep. Hope I make it into bed instead of zonking out on the floor like Tucker.

A Quiet Sunday

Our day was quiet but profitable. Progress in our never-ending remodeling was made.

Mostly for the past couple of weeks, we've not been working inside the house but rather working on getting the interior of the garage finished. That, in itself, seems a project that just may go on forever, but I know that's not really the case. (Pul-eeze tell me it's not the case.)

We've gotten the three-sided storage area on the back end of the garage completely closed in now with a wall and good, stout door.

This little room will be primarily for storage of our generator.

Today we decided to tackle getting the wood stove back into the house and hooked up in the living room. (I know it's hard to imagine that it will be cold and we'll want to use it someday despite the fact that we currently feel we'll never again long for the warmth of a cozy wood fire.)

The stove is an air-tight, solid cast iron one and after today I'm convinced it weighs about 2,000 pounds. Actually, the weight is closer to 300 pounds but after having to man(andwoman)handle it today, who cares? It felt like 2,000 pounds.

It may look like it would have been an easy project but it was quite the feat getting the stove not just through the whole house and into this corner of the living room, but then maneuvering it into just the right spot so the stovepipe, when hooked up, was level side to side and front to back. I can't begin to count how many times we moved it a quarter inch this way, a half inch that way.

Whether it's perfectly placed now or not, that's where it's going to stay! Cross that item off our list. Whew.

I took a slow tour of the garden this morning and found no army worms. But I did find another variegated cutworm on the same peas that we found the other ones yesterday. I made myself (wearing gloves) remove the worm, throw him on the ground and smoosh him completely. Utterly. Totally. Nuthin' resembling a worm left.

I had a very nice note from a blog friend in Wisconsin saying she had a terrible variegated cutworm infestation about a month ago. She's had success eradicating the buggers from her flowers and veggies using spinosad, a biological pesticide.

I could have picked strawberries again today but put that off until tomorrow so we could work on the stove project. Good thing I'll have something to do tomorrow!

Saturday Shudder

It doesn't make much sense to be a gardener if you scream, jump a foot off the ground and run when you see a worm. But that's how the hateful things affect me. Give me any kind of a bug to deal with and I'm okay. But worms? Heck, I don't even like the friendly, environmentally healthy earthworms that are so beneficial to our garden soil.

So you can imagine the angst I just experienced when strolling through the garden and found our whole bed of comfrey heavily infested with army worms. ((Shudder!))

We had been warned that our area should be on the look-out for these nasty creatures this year. Several years ago a large part of our state had a terrible (and I mean terrible . . . as in sides of houses and whole roads covered with them . . . ish!) invasion of army worms and many mature trees died as a result of the infestation. At that time, we apparently were very lucky and were not affected by them.

Well, we have them this year. (You may have to biggify the picture to see the damage.) Papa Pea knows my aversion (that's putting it mildly) to worms so he came out to help me cut down the comfrey patch, pile everything in our big garden cart and truck it out to a distant part of the poultry yard where he assured me our chickens will feast with relish on the worms.

After disposing of the foliage, I carefully walked through the rest of the garden to see if I could spot them anywhere else. Lots of grasshoppers happily munching on various plants here and there but no other detectable army worms.

However (insert more cringing), I did find what I'm afraid is the variegated cutworm. (Arrrgh, how will I survive all this?) Supposedly this is a new kind of cutworm that hasn't previously been able to survive this far north. Thanks to our wimpy winters for the past couple of years, they have been able to migrate from farther south and take up residence here now. We've seen lots of the moths that lay the eggs that hatch into the worms, but this was the first sighting of the actual cutworm. (No picture of these guys. I was so freaked out by then that I was hopping up and down and squealing like a little girl.)

We've always had (regular, old, garden variety -- pun intended) cutworms and I lose a couple of newly set out plants to them each year. This old, familiar type wraps itself around the base of the tender stem of a plant at soil level and basically cuts it off in order to suck the juice from the stem.

This new-to-our-area variegated cutworm will also eat the leaves and will burrow right into the formed vegetables besides sometimes cutting off the plant at the knees. Or toes. Or whatever.

Upon discovering these blankety-blank variegated cutworms (four of them) on my snow pea vines (dining vigorously on the leaves), I ran to get my big, bad, better half to kill them. (No, I cannot stand to touch the hateful things.) He plucked them from the pea vines, dropped them on the ground and I pulverized them with the heel of my shoe. For about 5 minutes per worm.

Now I know each time I'm in the garden my eyeballs will be popping out of my head searching for worms trying to steal our fruit and vegetables from us. If the army worms get into other crops like they did the comfrey, it's gonna be curtains for any harvest around here. Cross your fingers for us.

P.S. You have no idea how creepy and crawly I feel right now. I've washed my hands at least six times in the hour I've been back inside. ((Shudder!))