I've been busy

I know it's nothing compared to some gardeners, but I have been busy the past few weeks. Between working, trying to walk the new (to us) dog every day, and garden work, I haven't gotten in the habit of blogging again, but I'll get there.

I made good use of my new seed starting stand and started more seeds this year than I ever have. I also had very good help.

Delilah (the cat) had to inspect my soil.

Very thoroughly. Clearly, Glory (the dog) didn't care.

Things I started indoors: broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, zinnias, marigolds, snapdragons, tassel flower, amaranth, St John's wort, cantalope and basil.

As of today, only the basil and cantalope are still inside.

onions, broccoli, radishes, and 1 volunteer lettuce

eggplants, tomatoes and volunteer sunflowers

onions, peppers, broccoli and beets

peas, peppers, cucumbers and nasturtiums

tomatoes, zucchini, onions and nasturtiums

I had a wonderful garden surprise this spring. Last year my rhubarb plant disappeared. It was so gone, that I wasn't even worried about machinery driving over it when the wall was being built. This spring, however, it came back!

It's so big that, if I had been expecting it, I probably could've cut some and made rhubarb pudding. Oh well, that will have to wait until next year.

I've been working on some other garden projects, and taking pictures along the way, so I hope to be posting those pictures soon. Right now, however, I've got to go walk the dog.

Plans

As I have every year since 2013, I created an online plan for the vegetable garden this year.

In light of some of my failures last year, I simplified a bit this year. First, no lettuce or cabbage because we end up not eating either of them. I'm also ignoring the garden planner's schedule for carrots. Every year I plant them as early as I can, because that's what the planner and seed packet say, and then I have carrots in summer, when I really want them in the fall. This year, I'll be planting them later, about the middle of June. We'll see how that goes.

I'm planting more broccoli in place of the cabbage because broccoli is something we can always eat. I generally freeze it and like to use it for broccoli cheese soup in the winter.

I'm trying two new things this year: Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes. A lady I work with has grown Brussels sprouts for a couple years. She says you have to plant them later so you can harvest them after we get a frost. I'm taking her advice and will be starting them inside in June to plant out in August.

I wanted to try asparagus again this year, but can't quite bring myself to dedicate the space to it. I know it will do better in the raised beds, but it takes up a lot of space. I have recently thought of an area in the other gardens where it might survive. I need to think on that one a bit, although I know time is ticking for getting it planted.

My lack of organization last year caused me some stress and failures, so I created task lists for myself this year. This is my planting schedule:

The story this year for everyone, as far as I can tell, is that spring is LATE. Even though the dates for planting out the broccoli, onions and peas have passed, it'll still be at least a few days before I get that done. We've been in the 60's-70's for the past three days, during the workweek, but this weekend we have winter storm warnings. While the plants could probably survive the cold temperatures, I haven't had time before now to do any planting, and I'm not going out there when it's raining/sleeting/blowing.

The above schedule also shows that I have missed some seed starting dates. That has nothing to do with weather and everything to do with the fact that I took a road trip last week. I don't like making D babysit too many seedlings, so I held off planting several things. D kept the broccoli, peppers, snapdragons and St. John's wort alive while I was gone, and I have plenty of time this weekend, in light of the crappy weather, to get the other seeds started.

I also have a master task list going. It's the one I think is most important. Last year, I was so overwhelmed by the sheer number of things I want and/or need to do throughout the entire yard and garden that I hardly knew where to start. I created this task list so I could at least experience the joy of crossing things have and knowing I was making progress.

As the season progresses, more things will definitely be added, but it has already helped me get a few things done I might otherwise have forgotten. Quite a few of those tasks are weather dependent, so it could be awhile before I get to cross anything else off.

With my plans in place, I'm so ready to get outside, but I will have to satisfy myself for the time being, as so many other gardeners are, with indoor planting.

New seed starting set-up

Last winter I came into possession of this:

It's an A/V cart from a local grade school. For over a year, I've been planning to make it into a seed-starting station, and couple weeks ago I finally did.

The cart is equipped with its own power strip and extension cord and is roughly two feet long on each side.

My plan is to be able to use the second and third shelves for trays of plants. To do that, D and I drilled holes through the top two shelves and attached 1 by 4 lumber to the undersides. Then I screwed little hooks into the lumber.

I bought four two-foot-long LED light fixtures, thinking I'd have two fixtures for each shelf. The light fixtures came with their own hanging cords, but they weren't long enough to get the lights close to the seedlings, so I added some chain extensions.

With the extensions, I can move the fixtures up and down as needed.

The cart can hold two seed trays on each shelf. I have a pretty small garden, so I may not need to use the bottom shelf for seedlings, but it's a great place for storage, too.

I now have one tray on the middle shelf with broccoli and pepper seedlings, and I planted some flower seeds yesterday in a second tray. It might be a good thing if I don't need the bottom shelf, because the light fixtures are pretty narrow, so I'm currently using two of them for each tray, instead of the one I originally planned.

At any rate, planting is underway, and I really like my new set-up. Maybe I'll remember to take pictures of it in use one of these days.

Gardening season is back and so am I

After getting overwhelmed last year, and still having so many ideas and projects for the garden this year, I decided to make a task list. There's almost nothing I like better than to cross things off a list. It's still a little cold to get much done outside, but I have managed to complete a few tasks.

I wanted to add some compost to the raised beds this year, so last weekend I went to the garden center and bought 24 bags.

I bought three different varieties, so I had to do a little math to figure out how to divide them up.

I have to admit, I had some help getting them from the truck to the back yard. After that, though, it was all me.

One of the varieties I bought was mushroom compost. It had more worms in it than I've ever seen in a bag of compost.

It's not much to look at, but I know how much work went into this:

After a week of cold, wet weather, I was able to get back out there this weekend, and I broadforked the four smaller beds.

You certainly don't need a gym membership if you're going to haul compost and wield a broadfork.

Last but not least

The most exciting project of 2017 was one that I didn't even do...The Wall. I will be paying for it for a while, but at least I didn't have to build it.

How it looked before, starting at the house, curving toward the west side of the lot and then running north:

Demolition:

Construction:

I forgot to take pictures of the finished wall, so this is where it ends. I got a little bit of grass planted before it got too cold, but not the entire area, so that is still on the to-do list. Also, due to a little misunderstanding between us and the builder, we need to have him come back out and cap the top. Other than that, I couldn't be happier and I don't have to worry anymore about the wall collapsing, and my front yard ending up in my back.

The stairs are by far my favorite part. Now I don't have to climb the wall to get on top. Moving the rest of the rocks will be much easier this spring.

The Rocks

As I mentioned before, one of the projects I tackled this summer was moving The Rocks off of The Wall.

This wall:

The horrible, falling-over wall that has been a source of consternation since we moved here. In July, we decided to move forward with replacing the wall and got the work scheduled for late August. Knowing that the rocks would be in the way of the workers, I decided I wanted them off the wall before work began.

It was not fun work. You can't just throw rocks away, especially not in the quantity that we had.

We tried to give them away, and were eventually able to get rid of some that way, but in the end, more of them stayed in our yard than left it.

One of the ways I used them was along the fence which runs down the east side of the back yard. Our neighbors have river rock on their side of the fence already, and the area is prone to eroding and hard to mow. As with most things this summer, however, I had to tackle another project before I could start this one.

Where the spade sits in the above photo, the prior owners had stacked a bunch of "logs". As you can see, they were generally chunks of a large tree trunk. We've got pieces of this tree all around the yard, but this area was a big pile. I moved them away from the fence, loaded the ones I could lift into the truck, and hauled them away. Then I started laying rocks along the fence.

Obviously, I couldn't lift most of the stumps

One day, a neighbor came by to ask if I'd like some hostas that she had to move out of her garden. Of course, I'll take free plants.

I continued the rocks and hostas on the other side of the fence in the top of the above picture.

This corner is the far back end of the new area covered in my prior two posts.

Some of the stumps found new life as potential backyard seating (or just more things to mow around).

Moving rocks by the bucket and wheelbarrow load in July and August is not something I'd recommend, but it was a good workout, and extremely satisfying.

Did I mention the entire area has landscape cloth underneath?

I did run out of time and energy before the wall work began, but I made great progress. I also never got back to it this fall, so come spring, I'll be out moving rocks again. Then I'll have another large open area that needs to get covered in plants so the weeds don't take over. Wow, I've got my work cut out for me.

Something bigger - Part 2

After installing the path, I started slowly trying to fill the space. This task quickly began feeling a bit overwhelming. I'm not a person who can plan the whole area and buy all of the plants at once, so I did it gradually.

What we found under the concrete pad was mostly clay. That's generally how it is around here. There is a lot of clay underground, and fill dirt invariably ends up being mostly clay. While I probably should've put in the effort to add large amounts of organic matter to the area, I decided instead to do that gradually and concentrate on finding plants that could tolerate the clay.

I threw down a few bags of compost, planted some of the area with annual rye grass just to get something growing, and began working on perennials.

Seeing that the slope had eroded in the time since I installed the path, I also decided to use some of The Rocks along the path to hopefully mitigate that problem.

One of the first things I did was move some hostas from other areas of the yard. Since the area is on the east side of the house, with several trees providing partial shade, I thought they would do well here.

I couldn't have been more wrong. They all shriveled up and disappeared before summer was over. Maybe too much sun, maybe bad soil, maybe not enough water. As far as I'm concerned, they were free so I'm not out anything, and at least their decomposing parts may help improve the soil.

I also set up the rain barrel at the end of the garage. Lots of issues with it this year, but I did have a supply of water for the new plants and the deck plants for a portion of the summer.

Unfortunately, the spigot leaked, and dummy me put the downspout together backwards (bottom into top instead of top into bottom) so a lot of water poured onto the ground instead of running into the barrel. Both of those issues are fixable, so next year should be a better rain barrel year.

During the course of the summer, I planted 20+ perennials in the area and many more annuals. The annuals included zinnias, snapdragons, moss roses, cosmos, and calendula.

They all helped fill the space, but the zinnias were outstanding. They're the orange bunch in the middle above.

The perennials were monarda, gallardia, helenium, coreopsis, and some type of sedum.

I added an Annabelle hydrangea in the back. It's the lone plant on the other side of the bricks in the above photo. The bricks were helping keep the mulch from running down the hill.

Late in the summer, I transplanted some purple salvia from another area of the yard. I think that's them to the left of the hydrangea, but those could also be weeds. I also added a golden rod I found at the garden center, which I never took a picture of.

I did a couple other things with this area, but I didn't take pictures of them at the time, so I'll have to try to get some pictures and post them later.