What Did You Do In The Garden?

[SPedigrees]

We started re-building the chicken run with a roof for our second flock, another 7 hens. I am kind of falling in love with building something in the garden, haha.

I'm looking forward to seeing pictures of your chickens occupying their new housing. Work on the runs is progressing well from the look of it. You have many talents!

 

[SPedigrees]

Had the trimmer and the cord, walk over. He said, "I thought you meant electric like this." And, he shows me a leaf blower with a battery. I said, "no, something like that is something really new to an olde guy like me."

Steve

Some of us can be stubbornly old school in some respects, but high tech in other arenas. I've been using battery-powered ryobi string trimmers and a leaf blower, for the past decade or longer, and I have Bitcoin, plus linux operating systems on my computers, yet I pay my bills with checks through the mail, and only just this month acquired a mobile phone that has a camera and texting, but didn't activate its internet services.

For my acres of land, dragging an electrical cord out across the field behind the house would be impractical, and I've never gotten along well with gasoline powered tools, so battery powered makes sense.

 

[Branching Out]

So far I have picked carrots, buried potato pieces to trap wireworms, and I also found some fabulous fungi. They were so small that I almost missed them, perhaps 1/4" across and a very pretty yellow colour. There are still three hours of daylight left, and more adventures ahead for the afternoon.

Update: went to harvest more carrots yesterday afternoon, and found a section of green tops looking droopy; it turned out there were no carrots attached to them. Me thinks we have a significant vole infestation.

 

[digitS']

@Dirtmechanic , it looks to be a very idyllic location.

Well, my final, repeat tilling of the 1/4 part of the garden is likely not to be done in 2023. The pickup is running  rough. I can change the spark plugs but that's about the extent of my auto electric skills these days. It may need to go to a mechanic. Before the 1980's models, I could change points, condenser and set timing.

@SPedigrees , I do a better job with trimming our small yard with the electric trimmer than the gas. The only rechargeable tool in the box is a drill motor and I'm often using the wired job, instead.

At this time, I'm not sure how many devices are in this house for internet access. Buying online and bill paying is just a few clicks away. And yet, I remember when banks sent out the first credit cards without customer requests and and were in trouble with the government and courts because of mailbox theft. Dang, that certainly predates the internet! But then, I also remember my parents' icebox and the iceman delivering every week.

Rechargeable? Well, these new hearing aids are. I can use Bluetooth and listen to the Blues while doing my 30 minutes of exercise every day (there's the -tooth ).

Steve

 

[Branching Out]

Yesterday one of my garden buddies and I spent several hours moving plants around at our friends' community garden. Lelway lettuce and Pink Peppermint chard had been direct sown on August 9th and were starting to look a bit ragged out in the open so we moved the lettuce to a raised bed with row cover,and the chard was relocated to the hoop house. A bunch of small volunteer chard, dill, lettuce and pansy seedlings were transplanted in the hooper as well. It was a bit fiddly separating the small starts and getting them planted, but it was warm and dry in the hoop house so great conditions for working outdoors. This communal garden has never been used to grow winter vegetables before, so it will be a new experience for all of us. Too much humidity and lack of air flow will be factors to consider; around here cold and damp air often leads to fuzzy grey mold.

 

[Zeedman]

The ground was dry enough a few days ago for me to work in the garden, and temps in the cool but tolerable mid-40's F. I was able to take down all the trellises & poles in the 15' X 100' garden at home. Upper 30's tomorrow, so I should be able to get the other home garden done, and mow them both. Then mow my shaggy lawn to collect a mixture of grass & leaves, and spread that on the gardens. The ground is too wet to turn anything under; but last year I ran over the spread leaves again to chop them more finely before Winter & that proved to work well in Spring, so I'll do that again.

Not sure how much I'll get done in the rural garden, but hopefully at least get all of the trellises & poles taken down. Still not sure how much of that garden I'll use next year either, since I was unable to get the upper hand on the weeds this year. It allows me to double the number of some seed crops I can grow, so I don't want to give it up completely... but unless I can find volunteers willing to help in an ongoing basis, the cultivated area still needs to be reduced. Sadly, it looks like the days of big areas devoted to corn & winter squash are no longer feasible. After all of the weeds which were able to seed this year (including A LOT of crabgrass & purslane) I may need to use agricultural fabric to better control the weeds, and then find a way to control the rodents which will nest under it.

 

[heirloomgal]

This is the first year I think where everything got too wet before we were able to till in fall. I'd have much preferred to get that done, but like you @Zeedman we have a lot of poles and trellis's to take down and that is what got done first. Then the rain came. The beds are covered in mulched bean plants and shells, along with all the other veggie plants. Would have been nice to mix that in before all this snow fell.

Could you use a straw mulch only in the corn patch? I too have moved completely away from mulch for the same reasons as you, rodents, but the corn is one place where the voles have tunneled but not caused damage. They can't seem to kill corn plants the way they do bean plants.

 

[Zeedman]

Could you use a straw mulch only in the corn patch? I too have moved completely away from mulch for the same reasons as you, rodents, but the corn is one place where the voles have tunneled but not caused damage. They can't seem to kill corn plants the way they do bean plants.

I already use hay mulch around most vegetables, especially all members of the bean family (except soybeans), tomatoes, members of the gourd family (except squash, since it shelters squash bugs), and peppers planted in the open. The plants love it, and green-cut hay breaks down during the season to provide some nutrients (the hay I use is timothy/clover). The good thing about hay or straw is that predators can hunt mice through it... but cardboard, landscaping cloth, or anything similar provides shelter from predators, and turns into mouse habitat. In the rural garden, the property owner's semi-feral cat does a good job of hunting mice through the hay.

I've used small slotted landscape fabric squares around caged peppers to keep weeds down near the plants. Those work well, are reusable, and I wouldn't mind making more of them during the Winter; but using them large scale - and collecting & storing them after - would be a PITA. Even for the peppers, those squares interfere with the wire cages I place around the plants to support the weight of the peppers.

Now, because of the weed pressure in the rural garden, the hardest thing to deal with is ground-hugging plants. For winter squash, I can grow bush varieties. But gherkins and tepary beans can't be trained to climb. I only grow one tepary bean, and I could live without it (it failed this year). But I love growing the gherkins for pickles, and they sprawl about 6' in all directions - and the dense growth is difficult to weed through. I used weed barrier around them once, and voles nested under it; but that - and traps placed proactively - may be my only option.

 

[SPedigrees]

My outdoor gardens are all put to bed for winter, and I've turned to indoor gardening, such as it is. Because of the nearly sun-less summer, my houseplants grew leggy and weren't much to look at. Still I like the looks of this coleus variety so I let it continue growing to collect seeds from it.

Now that I've collected seeds for the next generation, I bid these two house plants farewell and replaced them with rooted slips from my outdoor geraniums. Geraniums seem to do well in my house in winter which makes no sense since they are tropical and would probably like warmer temperatures and more sunlight. (The waxed amaryllis is my guilty pleasure, no care holiday flower.)

This Christmas tree looked a lot smaller when I bought it, than it actually is now that I've got it home! I refuse to decorate it until after Thanksgiving, but it needed water, so I got it situated in its bucket of rocks and water.

 

[flowerbug]

... (The waxed amaryllis is my guilty pleasure, no care holiday flower.)
View attachment 62306

i learn something new every day. i didn't know that waxed amaryllis bulbs were a thing.