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Our raised garden beds are going on 16 years old now. When built, we used wood we had available; not necessarily the best for the job. As a result, many of them are rotted beyond repair and in the last few years we've started to replace them.
This spring I marked eight of them that are in sad shape, and yesterday Papa Pea started work on one of them.
To start, he had to dig the soil out of the bed all the way around the frame. He tossed the dirt onto the top of the bed next to the one to be replaced.
The left-hand board had (for some reason) bowed way out on this bed. (That's Maisy, our granddog, diligently supervising the job.)
Yep, this side board would soon have had holes in it.
The boards meeting at this corner DO have holes in them!
Here's the new raised bed frame ready to be set in place as soon as the old one is pulled out. It's constructed from leftover Douglas fir we used for the floor joists when we put on our house addition in 2000.
Papa Pea had only an hour or so to give to the project yesterday afternoon but it will get finished up most likely tomorrow.
That's the task I wanted to write about today. Now, what's the hatch, you ask? Well, my current blog header photo will give a hint-hint-hint. It's of six of seven goslings hatched in 2010.
Mother Goose has been faithfully sitting on a clutch of eggs for the past month or so and this morning, there was one little yellow fuzzy head peeking out from under her! Don't know yet if that little guy is the only gosling and don't have a picture to show, but a final count and pictures should be showing up here soon.
Hope you all have a lovely Sunday!
Maybe the grayness and rain contributed to making this feel like a long week. Or life's little hurdles might have entered in there, too. Don't know, but even though each individual day did not drag, looking back on this week makes it one I'm not eager to repeat.
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Good News: We have (what we sincerely hope is) enough fake brick ordered to finish the wall behind the living room wood stove.
Bad News: We don't expect it to arrive for two more weeks. And let's all hope it arrives undamaged. The bricks are somewhat fragile and don't take to being handled roughly in shipping. The factory acknowledges this and is doing special packaging to minimize damage.
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I think I must be the gardener most behind any of the rest of you. Not because I've been lazy in getting my rear out there to do what needs to be done, but because our season starts so much later than most anyone else's.
I did plant out two raised beds with salad greens, scallions, radishes, kohlrabi, Swiss chard, spinach, etc. a week ago but decided not to put cold frames on top of them because our weather has been mild. If we had had more than 15 minutes of sunshine this past week, I think the seeds would have done better. But they didn't get much heat without the cold frames, and today only the blessed, hardy, little radishes are poking through. Next week's forecast has more clouds and rain in it so I might be wise to drag out the cold frames this weekend and get them in place.
All my inside started seedlings are looking good, but aren't big enough to transplant to bigger, individual pots yet.
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I managed to stretch my birthday celebrations (birthday was last Monday) out for nearly a whole week. Was taken out for a lovely birthday lunch by a good friend yesterday and tonight we'll finally get together with our daughter for our celebration. She's making homemade hoagies (I LOVE sandwiches!) and my birthday "cake" which is Banana Cream Pie.
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What with our continued remodeling and spring things outside to do, I haven't been spending much time on housekeeping lately. A couple of you bloggers have been posting about decluttering, cleaning, straightening and sorting and you've inspired me to tackle my closet. So far today's weather doesn't hold much promise for sunshine so I may talk myself into attacking that area. If I survive that, there are plenty other hidey-holes I can move on to in the hopes or organizing and having better use of the space.
I knew this was going to be a busy week, but I didn't think it would last this long.
I know, usually I'm complaining that time goes by too fast. And although time this week is certainly not lagging, it does seem as if it should be more than just Wednesday.
Our weather has been alternating rain and sun but has kept things outside too wet to work on those tasks. So efforts have been on remodeling and other inside projects along with getting the last of the seedlings started.
A friend commented today that she saw a blossom on a wild strawberry plant. Granted, the wild ones typically bear fruit a bit earlier than domestic strawberries, but it's still mighty early to be seeing blossoms up here.
In the summer we have one of our hummingbird feeders hanging right outside the window over the kitchen sink. I'm not totally sure he wasn't hallucinating, but Papa Pea thinks he saw one of the little guys zoom past today as he was filling a bucket of water at the sink. If this is true, it means their arrival is a full two weeks early in our neck of the woods this year.
We lost our last Light Sussex laying hen day before yesterday to a hawk. We ordered the Light Sussex as chicks last year and it was the first time we've had this particular breed. I really liked the looks of them, they're a dual purpose breed, are excellent foragers, are docile and friendly and tend to go broody. This gal was sitting on a nest of twelve eggs when she ventured outside for a little exercise and fresh air . . . sadly just at the wrong time.
Out of the twelve Light Sussex birds we got, only four were hens. One we lost early last summer and then three more, including this last one, have been picked off by hawks. They say light-colored birds are more likely to be easy prey and in our case, this has proven to be true. Dang.
We've had lots of little decisions to make having to do with the remodeling this week and a couple of small glitches have popped up. One glitch which wasn't such a little one is that we don't have enough of the fake brick material to finish the area behind the wood stove. S-c-r-e-e-c-h! That's the sound of progress coming to a halt.
We can go no farther on the living room until we finish the brick wall. It has to be done before the tile goes on the floor under the stove. Before the stove gets set back in place and reinstalled. Before the flooring can be laid on the rest of the floor. Before we have a soft piece of furniture on which to plant our weary butts at the end of the day. There's no place that handles this particular product anywhere close to us. We had to order what we got from the factory 350 miles away. Gotta figure out what to do now.
As we frequently say to each other (several times a day it seems), "If this is the biggest problem we have, we have no problems."
Right now, both of us are really tired and need a vacation. Ha! That's not going to happen, so we'll settle for a good night's sleep tonight. Tomorrow is a new day and we'll wake ready to whip our weight in wildcats!
Got wood shavings spread over entire blueberry patch.
Got the Sweet Peas planted.
Made the decision to plant all the potatoes in the pumpkin patch this year.
Started more seedlings inside.
Planted out two raised beds.
Did some tilling around the field garden and pumpkin patch to knock back sod that was trying to creep in.
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Raised Bed #3 has been planted out to our first crop of lettuce with a few rows of Swiss chard and spinach interspersed. Come on, salad greens, we're hungry for a good home grown tossed salad!
Raised Bed #6 has been planted out with alternating rows of scallions, radishes and kohlrabi.
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I haven't even covered the raised beds with cold frames since it's stopped freezing at night (at least for the time being), no sprouts are up yet to be damaged (obviously), and I wanted the forecasted rain on the seeds in the newly planted beds.
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All we've gotten in the way of moisture was a little over night (the deck was wet first thing this morning) and then about 10 minutes of light rain before noon.
The day felt very cold, gray and damp and the sun did not choose to shine on northern Minnesota at all today. But our temp now at nearly 9:30 is still 40 degrees and I have windows and doors open because some dummy (that would be me) over-fired the wood stove after dinner and it's HOT in here. I find it's difficult to heat with wood in the "shoulder seasons" as the house either feels a titch on the chilly side or you stoke the fire for 20 below . . . as I apparently did tonight.
Come gardening season, my hubby's second floor office window is truly a room with a view. I never tire of going up there to chronicle the stages of garden growth from this time of year all the way through the harvest. (I do realize this may be boring as heck to you all, but it's a visual record for me during each glorious gardening season. A gardening season which I missed so much last year while spending the summer with hands covered with minor carpentry injuries, polyurethane, paint and various adhesives rather than ground in garden dirt.)
Yesterday Papa Pea cultivated the field garden and pumpkin patch.
This successfully annihilated the robust little weeds of various varieties that were starting their assault in an attempt to take over the gardens.
We also plowed up an extension to the blueberry patch where we planted our three new little haskap bushes. This area needs to sit for a couple of days now so the roots of the sod turned over start to die. Then we'll till it up a couple more times before adding compost and a mulch covering for this year's growing season. We haven't made a decision what we'll plant there in the future (more haskaps?), but it gets rid of a little more lawn area that we won't have to mow this year.
I finished prepping the strawberry patch yesterday and feel good about that. Now the half-dormant plants need a good soaking rain and some warm sunshine and they will take off.
I still need to get the blueberry patch mulched with wood shavings. With luck, that will happen today. Starting tomorrow, our whole week looks to be filled with rain so today may be my last chance to play outside all day.
The Sweet Peas haven't gone in yet. I'm about two weeks later than usual for getting them planted, so I'd like to get that done today also. (I'm planting those you sent me, Erin, so get ready for more pictures of Sweet Peas than you may want to see.)
Now the field garden is ready for shelling peas and potatoes which I'll plant as soon as I can. I haven't figured out this year's layout for the field garden yet so I'd better sit down with pencil, paper and my thinking cap soon. I rotate everything planted there each year and am contemplating putting the potatoes, for the first time, in the area designated as the pumpkin patch. I just have to do the math to make sure the 100' of potatoes we need will fit in that area. Then the squash and pumpkins will be planted in a corner of the field garden for this season.
See that white stuff on the grass above? Yep, that's frost this morning. We had a low temp of the mid 20s overnight. A couple more weeks and hopefully we'll be done with Jack Frost's antics. For a few months anyway.
Got some more seedlings started under lights two nights ago. The peppers and tomatoes I started around the middle of the month are over an inch high. What a miracle to watch . . . those fragile, little sprouts coming from seeds so small I lose them under my fingernail when trying to plant them.
I sure don't take very good care of my house during these months of spending so much time outside. I promised myself I'd do a cursory cleaning this morning before heading out to play in the dirt so I'd better get on that pronto.
Papa Pea came back in twice for more clothing when he was working outside. I caught this shot of him gazing at the fog rolling in (again) right before he gave it up for the day. "Chilled to the bone," he declared as he came in for his afternoon cuppa java. (And just WHY is it we choose to live up here, you rightfully ask?)
We tried our best to get some pictures of the goslings but neither Mother nor Father Goose was happy with us being intrusive.
We can see three of them for sure so far.
Mother Goose pushed this egg out of the nest yesterday. Does she know it's a dud? Or with the already hatched goslings did she think she needed more room in the nest so this one had to go?
