As reported in a previous post, I had nearly given up on my Shiitake Mushroom Log I bought on Amazon.com, after 2 months of non performance upon arrival. However after trying the techniques I described in that post, 2 actual mushrooms began to get extruded from a drill hole at the bottom and a break in the bark next to that. Orange arrow indicates the items in question below:



( Click here to read more.... )
 

The baby American Liberty Elm is still doing great! It's covered with small, less than 1" long leaves that make me very nostalgic since I grew up surrounded by huge elms in southside inner-city Minneapolis. I hadn't realized I missed elms.



When we got the tree we also received a nice brass plaque with the tree's breed and its propagation year, so I installed this rock to mount the plaque on. Basically I just dug a large hole and buried all but the top 1/3 of the rock. I wanted it to be stable and permanent, but also easily moved in later years if the tree starts to crowd it.



To drill holes for mounting the plaque we used a Hilti TE 16 rotary hammer drill I got at the Goodwill in Woodland Park, Colorado for $20. A lot of Goodwills are overly anal about what they'll accept and you'd never find anything that cool there, but this particular store was really great! I got a ton of good stuff there. Lead anchors were inserted after a pair of holes large enough to accept them had been drilled. Then the plaque was attached with #10 brass screws. Brass so it wouldn't rust, and lead because, according to my Spouse, that is the type to use with brass screws.



Tada! Makes me feel like I live in a fancy conservatory or something. No, really! (hehe)

Today we worked hard and managed to get the blueberry bushes planted in their new home! Mostly it involved a good deal of shoveling. First we had to shovel out the red clay dirt we'd cleared, hacked into chunks, turned over and weeded a few days ago.



Hmm, take away the green lawn surrounding it and this part would look remarkably like where we lived in Colorado! All told about 10" of dirt was removed from the bottom of the bed, leaving a pit with a wall surrounding it. (We had built the wall the previous day.)



Also we harvested the first ever batch of leaf compost from our big compost operation in the back of the yard. It has been going for a couple years now and finally starting to produce.



This operation basically consisted of pitchforking and shoveling off the top of the compost until we reached the nice black stuff with no recogniseable leaf or grass texture left, which was down at the bottom.



Although we didn't get a huge amount, it is a start and we should have continuous harvests from now on! Here's what the heap looked like after it was entirely turned over and the good bits removed.



This distance shot shows the piles of dirt (left) and compost (right) on the tarp next to the wheelbarrow. The compost is nice and black by comparison to the clay soil! If you click on that photo to see a bigger version you should be able to see the Bushes waiting between the wheelbarrow and the peat moss.



The next step was to mix a dirt recipe, doing it in batches in the wheelbarrow and stirring with a shovel. Our recipe ended up being:

5 shovels of original clay dirt
2 1/2 shovels of compost *
1/2 bag peat moss**
1/2 bag sand
1 small handful elemental sulfur
1 large handful cottonseed meal.

* Because that is all the compost we had ready! Wish there had been more.
**  Wish we could have afforded to use twice as much peat moss, but that stuff is expensive!




We spread an initial layer about 10" thick that filled in the bowl we'd shoveled out at the bottom of the bed. This was to give good drainage underneath the roots. This used about half of our supplies.



We then placed the 2 largest bushes (Barbara and George, hehe) before we went any further. This was because they had the deepest root balls. We also watered at this point, to make sure the bottom layer got moist. Then we started adding another layer half as thick as the first one. The other, smaller bushes went in on top of that, and then a final layer of the rest of the dirt. Some of the smaller bushes were interesting to put in because they'd been growing on a steep hill at the farm we bought them from, so their roots were on a diagonal. We got around this by digging a diagonal hole for them with our hands, and adjusting them until the plants looked straight.



Here's the finished bed, with leaf mulch on top. I'll add aluminum sulfate when it arrives in the mail, as well as wood chips. Then I'll check the pH every 40-60 days thereafter, adding more aluminum sulfate until the correct acidity is obtained. It might take quite a while! Fortunately from the yellow color of the leaves I gather the Bushes were not in very acid soil before, so hopefully everything they see here will be an improvement.

These pictures don't do justice to how heavy this work was. Whew! Need I say dirty too? (Goes off to collapse in exhaustion.)

The outdoor container garden is doing great! It is now so populated I cannot fit it all in one shot in my camera.



Since the radishes are coming along nicely in the radish-and-carrot containers, I went ahead and planted 2 more of the same. According to the pkgs I should start more every few weeks in order to have harvest all summer. Also new in this picture are the basil, thyme, and chocolate mint (!!!) plants from the plant sale, celery and sage from counter rootings, and a last straggling bucket of sprouted red CSA potatoes.



More stuff. The last of the sprouted green onions (from CSA yellow onions)  are planted as well and we've eaten the last of the frozen CSA veggies from last year, so we are all ready for this year's shipments to start arriving! Alas, they won't for a few weeks yet. A couple of the more thick and robust green (yellow) onions have started to flower. I don't know if they'll all do this or just some. I need to look up more about propagating onions :)  I am not sure if this means I get to eat them next year, or 2 years from now. We'll see!




As previously reported, the retaining wall for the raised bed for our new blueberry bushes was delayed by several days. What happened was, back on Monday I phoned up Carlson Building Materials and asked if they had 10' landscaping timbers. "Oh," they replied, "those are 8 footers". OK! So my Spouse and I hopped in the big truck and drove down there, paid for 16 of the 8' timbers plus 2 pieces of 1/2" rebar and a cutoff wheel, and they took our money. It was only after we drove the truck around into the treated lumber gate of the yard that it was discovered they had no landscaping timbers in stock.



Back at the main desk up front, they were wringing their hands as I walked in to get my money back. "The computer says there are 240 in stock!" they explained. As it happens, the guy in line ahead of me was also doing something to do with out of stock items, for which he was receiving substitutes. They really wanted me to wait for the timbers to come in, instead of getting a refund, so I told them I'd leave my order intact if they'd deliver them for free on Wednesday when they promised their back order of 240 timbers would arrive. "Thursday at the latest," was their story. The days passed... apparently the timbers were being trucked in from Duluth but kept not being on the truck. Meanwhile the Bushes sit all forlorn with dead leaves packed around their bare roots, being watered twice a day.



But on Friday they arrived and we got to work. Here's a picture of the timbers, cut to size, all laid out in readiness to be put on in tiers. They are surrounding the 6" deep bed we cleared and dug several days ago. They're 3"x4" timbers so at four layers tall this wall will raise the bed up 12" up off the surrounding ground. 



All I knew going into this project was that the landscaping timbers were are cheapest available bet for building retaining walls, at least at this time and on a strictly temporary basis. Oh yes, based on the experiences and advice of my friend Debbie Bibb of Running D Ranch, I knew that using rebar to tie the pieces together was important for strength and stability even on a much lower wall than this. I did some research and found a pretty good set of general instructions on the web titled "How to Build a Cheap Decorative Retaining Wall Out Of Landscaping Timber", by Agnes Farside. After a lot of head scratching I created the above drawing, which allowed me to calculate how much landscaping timber and rebar to buy.



One thing we did do differently was that my Spouse felt (again, from personal experience) it'd be easier to stack all four tiers at once, then drill through with a very long drill bit than to put the layers on one at a time as Ms. Farside suggested.  Also since we had a four-corner bin rather than a wall on a hillside as they did, we decided not to put on the corner brackets. The thing was incredibly tight and sturdy when it was finished as-was.



The holes are 1/2" in size which is the size of the rebar minus its protruding ribs. This made the holes tight enough that the rebar had to be pounded in with a sledge hammer. For most of the beginning I was employed to sit on the frame to keep the timbers still during the drilling and hammering. Ladies, I highly recommend this enjoyable experience and would definitely do it again.



One end result of this was that we ran all the rods all the way through, instead of having them staggered as shown in the drawing. This meant that there were far more rebar ends showing on top than I'd planned on. I was a little concerned that the rebar would poke out and scratch people -- this being mainly due to recollections of my childhood days playing on city playgrounds in Minneapolis. However, it turns out that the wood is much more springy than the metal of the bar, so the bars could magically be recessed simply by pounding with a big sledge a few extra times. I learn something new every day!



Here's what it looked like more-or-less completed. The next step (it will have to be a project for another day though) is to remove the loose 8-10" of dirt from inside, and mix that with peat moss, sand, dry leaves, and sulfur and install the Bushes in their new home! As a note, that's the new Liberty Elm tree lit up in the background. On the right is what I call the "south garden" of the house.



Here's another shot of the completed wall. It sure looks nice -- it is too bad walls like this don't last long. Well, hopefully it will last long enough for me to save up for a real wall :)



That south garden is finally coming into its own. I think I mentioned before that the majority of the veronicas and purple coneflowers I planted last year have survived the winter and are coming in nice and healthy. I did have to replace a few coneflowers (not shown, but they look like bare spots that break the alternating pattern) and have not quite had luck with that yet. First I planted some storebought purple coneflower seeds indoors but they did not germinate. Now I have planted the remaining storebought seeds directly in the ground where the missing plants were. If that does not work, I have one more thing I can try: planting seeds harvested from last year's coneflowers blossoms. If those don't grow either, hopefully by then Walmart will have coneflowers plants in stock again. I have been checking but they don't have any yet.



I left a 24" lane between the retaining wall and the place where the south garden wraps around the corner of the house. This was partly to set a precedent because I want to have lanes like this between all my raised beds in the future; partly to give better access to the blueberries on all sides for picking; partly to preserve that south bed instead of overshadowing it too badly; and partly to make it easier to maintain. 24" was calculated to allow the lawnmower to get in there fully.



Once the new wall was done my Spouse cut off the pointy end of the old previously existing 4" x 5" landscaping timber that had been lying alongside the deck, so that I could replace it in the corner to finish off that space. Of course, now that we have this new wall the decrepitude of our existing landscaping becomes painfully apparent. I foresee a re-do of that south garden timber border in my rather near future!

An update on the blueberry bushes, George, Barbara, Jeb, Dubya, Laura, and Jenna*: I went to the lumber yard to buy landscaping timbers and they first sold them to me, then admitted they didn't have any. So I am waiting on them to deliver... supposedly today or tomorrow. In the meantime, Peat Moss turns out to be insanely expensive, and sand only comes in small containers around here. Woe is me! The Bushes are huddling under plastic bags for now, getting water once or twice a day. I hope they make it!

Yesterday I did a pile of transplanting and stuff indoors. The winner of the Best Sprout Award was definitely the zucchini which was already about 8" tall! I also found three butternut squashes, each about 4" tall and quite robust, as well as Spacemaster Cucumbers. The cucumbers sprouted really well, but they turn out to be problematic to transplant. Out of 6 pots, 7 sprouted (heh) but I snapped 2 in half transplanting them. Oops! The five survivors immediately drooped within 5 minutes of transplanting. Luckily they lasted the night so I think they've made it, but I dread transplanting them to their final location in a week or two. I am going to make a note to wait until after frost and plant Spacemaster directly next year.



Here's the five after they started to droop... OK today though.



I found 1-2 each of tiny basil, oregano, thyme and sage sprouts from my most recent attempts. Let's hope I keep them alive this time! A couple of them are shown above, along with some very robust Pepper sprouts. The little pepper plants are mostly from seeds from grocery store peppers, including small Mexican sweet peppers, and a red bell pepper. Also I have some Hungarian Yellow Wax peppers that did grow from seed, but I'm having a heck of a time getting Jalapeño to sprout. Maybe I will just buy one of those as a plant, lol.



Here are some grape tomatoes I grew from seeds from grocery store grape tomatoes too. I don't personally like this kind of tomato but they are my Spouse's favorite so I figured I'd put in the effort. There sure are a lot of them... in addition to the six I transplanted last night there are 4 more little pots with several underdeveloped sprouts apiece. 



Here are some "heirloom" Brandywine Red tomatoes from seed. I wonder at what point they stop being "Heirloom". These came from the regular old seed rack at the grocery store. Sounds pretty mass production to me!



Here are morning glories. I was supposed to plant them 4 weeks before last frost but they are already huge and there are still a week or two left to go. I am thinking that I might move these outdoors now and just replace them if they die, because they aren't going to be very happy growing this fast indoors.



Braeburn apple sprout! This was just sort of a "for fun" sprout.



The avocados need to be moved outdoors soon too. They also need to be transplanted into larger containers. We had a very warm day (80 degrees!) the other day and two seeds that had been sitting on the counter in water for months suddenly split and started growing. Woo!

Today I found a plant sale put on by volunteers who work on gardens in a local city park. Everything was make-a-donation with proceeds going to keep the park beautified. I got 2 basils, 2 thymes, and a chocolate mint (!) plant, as well as a horse chestnut tree I didn't really want but she insisted nobody else would comprehend what it was or take it. I also got a large number of small plastic planting pots, and a fair collection of large pots suitable for planting stuff outside too. All in all a good haul for the donation.

* It has come to my attention that some people are afraid I might be seen as making a tribute to the Bush family by naming my bushes after the Bushes. Never fear! It's not a tribute, they just had to be ID'd somehow and it was more fun than A through F or 1 through 6.

My Spouse and I both have the habit of perusing the local Craigslist listings for good deals. The other day my Spouse spotted a small farm selling off 200 mature blueberry bushes at $5-10 apiece, all cold hardy low bush cultivars. By the time we managed to get there a day later, we were the very last stragglers, picking off the final 6 bushes available. We got two Northlands and four North Blues, each about 10 years old. The farm was an interesting place, where the 2 guys were a sheep herder and an artist respectively. They had a number of sheep type dogs about the place. The ex-blueberry field was going to become a formal garden.



Here are the blueberry bushes -- George, Barbara, Jeb, Dubya, Laura, and Jenna -- resting in our back yard after a journey in our pickup truck. The first two, the Northland cultivars are much larger than the others and take two people to lift. The others are only 2-3 feet tall.



We spent a bunch of time today preparing the base of a new garden bed for the Bushes. This is the 6' x 9' area we selected. After marking it off with string we used a mattock to chop away the sod, then again to break up the clay soil. A hoe to break up the clods the mattock left, and then a spade to turn it all over once. I did a pH test and it came out between 6.5 and 7 -- way too high for blueberries which prefer 4.8 to 5.2. We're going to build up a 16" high retaining wall of landscaping timbers, then mix the old dirt with peat moss and aluminum sulfate to lower the pH. It'll need elemental sulphur added each year thereafter to keep it down. Ideally you're supposed to start preparing a bed for blueberries a year in advance, but this was all so sudden we didn't get that option. The Bushes do have some of their original dirt with them though which should help a little. Cross fingers!



The deck container plants are doing nicely. Everything that was sown outdoors so far has sprouted. I am having to water these once a day and I am thinking that maybe twice a day will be necessary for the potatoes in the wood crate. I've already eaten several thinned-out sprouts from spinach and radishes... yum! I also stole some of the more spindlier yellow onions for Chinese Foo tonight. There are still a ton of small sprouts and things in the house that cannot be placed outside yet. Tomatoes, peppers etc. We had a 20 degree night last night!



I fooled around with my PlanGarden plot tonight and added the Bushes (each one labeled with his or her name) where their new plot will be. I also changed my overall plot to show our entire yard, and segregated the container plants in a to-scale outline of the deck. I then altered the containers and their plants to match what is actually out there, so this should match the photo now. I still have a whole lot of "to be planted" stuff that was shown on the original PlanGarden plot so I could figure out which size containers to use for what. Those are kind of stashed off to the side of the picture out of sight for now, but ultimately I'll be placing outlines of the house, garage, shed etc. where they can be shown wherever they are throughout the year.

Be sure to click on that to see it close up, it's much better ;-)

The container garden is coming along nicely. The number of containers planted as-planned is getting closer to what is shown on my PlanGarden plot, though there are a bunch yet to go. It is still officially 3 weeks before last frost here! I had to bring in a couple things overnight the last two nights.



I still have a lot of sprouts in the basement, mostly peppers and tomatoes that are sprouted but can't be brought out yet, and melon and squash type things that are too recently planted to have sprouted yet:



A lot of these are in this new potting soil my Spouse got me from Wal Mart, that is supposed to be 100% organic. I'll say! The other day I found these little volunteers in my lettuce sprouts (see inside the orange circles):



They looked like small round seeds growing up on long stalks. Trouble is I hadn't planted anything with seeds like that. Here's a closeup:



Pretty soon there were one or two in every pot! Well, a few days later, boom:



They are tiny mushrooms! LOL. Guess I'll try not to eat those, no idea what they are except they apparently like organic matter. Alas, the Shiitake mushroom log I bought on Amazon did not work out and I have to send it back. Hopefully they will send me a new one that sprouts actual mushrooms! I'll let you all know what ends up happening there.



So here's a little tour of what's outside on the deck right now. First here's the bok choi heart I rooted, looking insanely happy. There's almost enough leaf there to make chinese foo for two again! The center now has a tiny cluster of buds. I think that means it is going to bolt right away. I'm not really surprised since it was basically a mature plant (sans leaves) to begin with. I read that the stalks and buds are edible (inf fact the best part of the bok choi) but I might also like to keep the seeds to plant next year. The alternative would be to harvest these leaves now immediately before it bolts any further. Decisions, decisions!



The red potatoes are starting to sprout and leaf up. These are from CSA potatoes from last fall, that started to sprout over the winter and I kept them sitting on the light table until now. They are planted in layers of shredded paper to give lots of space for potatoes to grow. When the greens get taller I am suppose to keep backfilling the buckets until the dirt and paper reaches the top, for max amount of potato harvest. Cross fingers! Also note to self, find better way to store potatoes next winter.



These green onions are probably the next most ready to go crop after the Bok Choi. They're from white storebought sets. I foresee a harvest of at least a handful of them soon!



These leaning onions are transplanted from large yellow CSA onions that sprouted over winter too. They lean over because I let them grow bigger and bigger in the sheath of their old mother onion, and they leaned way over so they could get more light on the light table. I have since figured out that they can be removed from the original onion as soon as they're clearly seperate entities, and well before they get that big. So in the future I won't have any more leaning ones like this, but hehe this first batch is oddballs. They seem to be getting bigger anyway despite their odd shape.



I hope these will be large round onions also... they are red and white ones from grocery store sets. Just starting to sprout now! They are planted 3" apart from one another in the pots.



Here's the first round of radishes and carrots. I read that I should keep planting new rounds every X number of weeks in order to have continuous harvests. These containers have radishes (showing) and the little guys between them are carrots. The carrots will be big enough to want the extra space by the time the radishes are ready to pull. I hope. The carrots are half-longs so the pots should be plenty deep enough for their growth.



Spinach sprouts. These were the first things I sowed outdoors. The ones in back are co planted with peas. The ones in front don't have their buddies yet.



I really have no idea what to expect from this tiny rosemary sprig. I had no luck growing rosemary from seed but this leftover storebought piece unexpectedly rooted in water. I think it succeeded because it was in the same water with other herbs, one of which must have convinced it to go. I don't hold out a lot of hope that I'll be able to keep it alive, but heck... it's worth a try!!



These two sage plants also rooted in the same container of water. Since I've never had luck with rooting sage before either, I'm convinced there must have been some plant in there that was greatly benefitting these guys. Either that or the rosemary and sage were benefitting each other. Hope they live! That round green guy in the back on the right is a boston red lettuce heart. No roots on that yet... but it hasn't shriveled either.



While at WalMart we splurged and got some potted stuff too. Cilantro (I still haven't managed to sprout any from seed), strawberry (which I had planned to get storebought all along there) and the middle one is a wacky tomato my Spouse took a yen to. It's called Mr. Stripey and the fruit apparently looks like this:



It appears though that the fruit can have any of a huge variety of different kinds of stripes. It'll be interesting to see what we get, assuming I don't kill it first. Since we now have Brandywine Red, grape tomatoes and berry tomatoes in cultivation as well I predict a very tomato-ey summer :)  Homemade salsa, here we come!



In other outdoor yard and garden news, I have been transplanting a few of these bulbs each day (see orange arrow in picture). They had been growing over in a very dark corner of the yard that is OK in spring but totally shaded in summer. As a result I have no idea what kind of flowers they are -- they never get a chance to bloom.



Here's the old location with the other half of the bulbs still there. It's a surprising amount of work to move them and keep them safe but the already-transplanted ones are doing great! Maybe 2 more days to get the rest, and then I was thinking maybe plant something else that is more shade-loving in this dark corner.



The newly planted American Liberty Elm is starting to show leaves! Yay!



On the back lotline the Toronto Tulips are now in full bloom, with the pastel regular tulips coming up nearby (not budded yet).



This picture doesn't do them justice but there are also dozens of these tiny blue Glory of the Snow which actually came as part of the same collection with the Toronto ones. I can't wait to get more this fall and support this little collection to make it bigger next year!

Today was another big day of work on garden stuff. I planted the sprouted grape-tomato seeds and some blue morning glory seeds I'd been soaking, in little 1" seedling planters. I went through the Ziploc bags of planted seeds and transplanted into 4" pots a number of sprouts that had appeared since the last round, including Mexican sweet peppers, a red bell pepper, Brussels sprouts, and a berry tomato. The light table is changing quite a bit in layout as the season progresses and different stuff gets started:



Probably the biggest job I did gardening wise was to separate out and transplant a lot of the yellow CSA onions that had sprouted over winter, and that I had been rooting in 4" pots. Here's how I did it:



They had all grown multiple "green onions" out of themselves, still wrapped in a pulpy old onion body from the former sprouted onion, as well as long roots.



First I used what I am used to calling a matte knife but which I guess is officially a "utility knife" to slit the extra layers up near the top where it's easy to see, and avoid, the green onions inside. I keep the knife edge pointed outward and use the blunt side for feeling between the onions for their safety.



Then I grab the extra layers and peel them off in one piece, or as close as possible. Depending on the onion these can be pretty squishy and disgusting.



I put the pulpy remains in the compost heap. I assume they would have functioned as compost for the small onions had they remained there in the same soil with them.



The green onions inside are stuck together at the disk shaped base, that the roots come out of the bottom of. There seem to be 3-5 green onions per big onion on average.



I use the utility knife to gently cut halfway through the root disk from the top between 2 onions, then carefully twist the knife to encourage the onions to snap apart along natural lines so they each get their own roots. If they don't want to snap apart, go around and cut between some of the other pairs as well before trying to separate. I did a lot of these today and only had a couple that had no useful roots of their own after separation. These had undeveloped root nubs though so I just placed them in a glass with some shallow water for a couple days.



These are fully separated. As you can see they're already trying to form the bellies of big round onions but there wasn't enough space to develop them quickly when they were stuck together.



These are nice sweet yellow onions so I planted them individually in larger pots so they will hopefully grow large and round like the parent onion by fall. I did a total of about 25 yellow onionlings today. Right now these are all out in the garage being acclimated to the outdoors weather. I'll bring them out onto the deck next week.

Of the stuff already out on the deck, there are lumps and bumps where potatoes and white onion sets are ready to bust through the surface of the dirt, and the tip of one tiny green onion already showing. Fun!

For my Spouse's birthday which is coming up in a few days, I bought an American Liberty Elm tree. These are special elms from native North American stock that are not as susceptible to Dutch Elm disease as the imported ones. They are being specially bred and our elm came with a brass plate with a serial number and the propagation date (in 2002) on it, for attaching to a rock or pedestal nearby. I guess a lot of people who purchase them must be collectors or parks.



It arrived and we planted it today. At 14 feet tall and 3" in diameter it is the largest tree I've personally had any involvement in planting. It really completes the backyard which had formerly had a huge shade tree in it, the stump of which was still here when we moved in. The backyard never looked quite right with nothing there, even though we hadn't seen the other tree with our own eyes.



Already this tree feels like one of our "children". Planting it gave almost a sacred feeling. It took me a while to get photographs that evoked the same feelings as I get when looking at the tree itself. The above is one of the ones I finally got. Both of us will really enjoy watching it grow large in the years ahead.

I'm really starting to get into crunch time for spring gardening... at least in terms of stuff I have to get done each week. I've accomplished a lot in the last several days though. I started seeds of Thyme, Basil, Oregano, Sage, Mustard, Baby Bok Choi, Brandywine Tomatoes, Rosemary, and Chives indoors using the same method I did for that big batch of seeds in March since that seemed to work out great. Also I transplanted some of my rootings that had survived well in dirt into larger pots.



Just look at this bok choi! It came from the leftover stump of a storebought one. The iridescent blueish leaves in the center are the newest to grow.



I planted onion sets from the grocery store. I had done some research and found out that to get green onions the sets should be planted close together and under 2-4 inches of soil (depending on how much white you want on them).  For large onions, they should have 3 or more inches apiece of personal space and be planted only 1 inch deep. So I planted the white sets deep and close for white green onions, and I intend to make larger onions with the red sets.



According to GrowGuide it is time to start hardening off my onions, parsley, and all broccoli/cauliflower/cabbage type plants which I took to include bok choi. Here they are out in the unheated garage for the time being. At rear are individually planted yellow onion transplants that I want to grow to be big onions this summer. These are the ones that came from sprouted CSA yellow onions over the winter. I discovered that after the roots get long and the body of the big onion starts to soften it's easy to cut it off and reveal the 4-5 young onions inside. Then I just use a knife and cut the root disk to give each onion its own section of roots. I have transplanted 10 so far and still have loads more to do. So much to do!



I also planted all the potatoes that had sprouted over the winter and had been sitting on the growing table waiting for months. I think I actually could have planted them indoors a lot sooner but I didn't do the research until now. I found this great website where a guy gives instructions for planting potatoes in garbage cans, containers and even straw piles. See "How to Grow Potatoes in a Container or Potato Trash Can" by Matt A.Maxx. I planted red potatoes in an old cracked bucket, and a old apple basket, and these yellow potatoes in a old fruit crate that had been kicking around our basement unused for about 2 years. The bedding is shredded paper alternating with potting soil. I could have done a lot fewer potatoes per square foot but this year's garden is really about the "art of the possible". I'll give them lots of room next year when I can do a regular in-the-ground garden instead.



The crate has this interesting label on it. It reads "Old Baldy Citrus Assn." and the lemon shows the Sunkist logo. The Sunkist website has a label gallery with an Old Baldy label but it looks nothing like this one. I was not able to find anything specific about what Old Baldy is on the web except that it may refer to the mountain of that name near Los Angeles. I am going to try to get better photos of this (without so much glare) before being outside rain damages it to illegibility.



GrowGuide says I am supposed to be sowing some stuff outdoors already including spinach, the onion sets and the potatoes. So here they all are, the beginning of my container garden! 



I have been working on my PlanGarden page too. In fact it's been a real lifesaver as I've wrestled with the logistics of this container garden. (Click on the picture to see a larger version). I posted about this on gardening and amazingly the actual author of PlanGarden responded and started discussing the features and stuff. Excellent!!

After discovering to my shock that compost bins actually cost around $125 unless you are getting some kind of deal (such as the local city buying 10,000 of them or something), I decided to make my own out of an old garbage can. Here's how I did it:



First I turned the can upside down, so that the wide part of the compost bin will be at the bottom. I then cut off the can bottom (now the top) using some sturdy tin snips. There was a mold line in the plastic there already, so I did not have to measure conveniently enough.



Building the lid was by far the most complicated part of the bin-building process. First I used the cut-off can bottom as a guide and cut a piece of scrap plywood to use as the body of the lid. The idea is that the can bottom will be the "plug" part of the lid, and the plywood will cap it on top so it can't fall all the way in.



Before I could screw the two parts of the lid together I had to put in some filler plywood in the can bottom so that the plywood circle of the lid would rest smoothly on the top and be fully supported. These scraps come to exactly the same level as the outer edge of the plastic.



Screws coming in from the bottom hold these plywood scraps firmly in place. These are just miscellaneous drywall and deck screws I had in the spare parts bins.



Here's the can bottom temporarily screwed onto the large piece of the lid for test purposes. I don't have photos showing what else I did to the lid but basically it consisted of cutting out the hand holes and screwing down the handle parts so the plastic would lie flat to the plywood there too, and I also primered and painted the wood a dark brown with outdoors latex paint. It matches the house trim.



One more step I had to do was to drill air holes in the can itself. Since there were many vertical lines in the plastic not a lot of measurement was required there to make it look relatively even.



Here's the bin in use. It looks oddly Mission or Prairie Style doesn't it? LOL

Last time I was at my mother's house I saw they were using a covered shallow ceramic bowl to keep each day's kitchen scraps for the compost and that seemed to work out really well. So I found such a bowl on eBay for about $5 and we have already been using it. It works great!



It is about 8" across so it holds a lot but doesn't take up too much space on the big center island in the kitchen. So from now on, each night after I've taken whatever the vermiculture bin needs, I'll throw the rest in the big kitchen scrap compost bin out back. w00t! One more job crossed off the list :D

When I bought this Fine Yacht (a used 12' aluminum Sea King) the fellow said he thought there was one minor leak and from what I could see this cracked bondo patch appeared the likeliest culprit:



There was also this matching patch located on the other side exactly opposite that one:




It looks like the boat got jammed end-to-end somehow, and started to crumple at this point until the two stiffeners at top of that photo bumped up against one another preventing any further movement. Heh, I guess that proves stiffeners are needed. I wonder if later versions of this boat had one continuous one instead of 2 separate ones, since it might have been a weak point in the design.

Well, yesterday my Boat Life caulk arrived, so I no longer had any excuse to delay attacking the possible leaks. Boat Life makes various different products that can be used for boat repairs. The caulk is thick and good for filling gaps and will stay flexible forever once dry -- rather than cracking like this bondo did. I also got a tube of the liquid version which I hope will be good for sealing any rivets that turn out to leak.




My first task was to knock off all the loose bondo which I did with a hammer and chisel. In the picture above you can see how dirt and water were getting in there through the cracks.



Here's what it looked like with all the loose bondo removed. Underneath some of it was good bondo that had not become brittle or cracked. My Spouse says it tends to get mixed unevenly and this is probably properly mixed, while the brittle part probably had too much hardener.



Here it is with all loose bondo and partially sanded clean with a manual brass wirebrush. My options at this point are to either finish cleaning it up with the brass brush, or to use an angle grinder with a cup brush. Trouble is we don't have a stainless steel cup brush, only a regular steel one and those are not recommended for use on aluminum. My spouse suggests I use it anyway for expediency, then follow up with the brass brush to get rid of any bits of steel (molecules I assume) that might still be present. In any case, it is freezing rain today so I have time to ponder before continuing!



Zinger and Daisy watched from the house, probably wondering if I had lost my mind. My Spouse was cleaning my outboard off to the left out of frame, so their heads were swivelling back and forth as if they were watching a tennis match.



Our back lot line near the boat still needs to be cleared. A lot of trash wood grew up there last summer that needs to be taken out before it greens up again this year.



Here's the other half which I have finished! I have been working on this a bit each day. My rule is to cut down 25 sticks per evening. LOL



It now appears that all tulip types are at least partially represented, so we'll see now how well they flower. The tiniest ones are already flowering, making them the first things to bloom on our property this year!



I definitely feel more inspired to keep adding more tulips each fall now that I know some make it. It shouldn't take too many years to have a huge swath growing under the trees!

Today I've been working on garden stuff. I created an account on PlanGarden.com and have been working on this layout of my container garden for this spring. It's cool because people can look in on your gardening pursuits (if you like) and they have their own blog too. There are ways to publish pictures and other stuff to our own blogs too:



Click on the picture to see the plan closeup. If you want to see my actual garden plan on its user interface, click here too.

In order to figure out how many plant pots I had of what different sizes, I cleaned up and sorted all the remaining pots and such in the plant table area, as well as the shed. Here are the big ones I had in the shed:



They are mostly 10-13" in size. This was the "indoors" stash in that they were down in the basement, but I didn't use any this size for anything but avocado trees, so I will probably leave these 6-9" ones in the shed next winter too.



The plant table area is finally clean, which means that entire corner of the basement is essentially done! Well, there's always something to do. The green wooden door needs to be scrubbed with bleach and repainted, and the wall needs the cracks filled with waterproof patching and then painted white. 



I did buy all the seeds I'll need for the rest of the spring planting, but as can be seen above I won't be able to start anything else indoors until something has moved off the plant table! Luckily I am supposed to start hardening off the parsley, onions and leeks this week so they will be going upstairs. Of the latest round of sprouts, almost everything has at least one showing except for the green and red bell peppers, the eggplant, the chives and the jalapeño. The latter two are very old seeds, left over from Colorado so they may no longer be viable. The bell peppers may have been irradiated or an infertile hybrid as I got those from grocery store peppers. I still expect the eggplant to sprout though -- something has to be last to come in.



In other gardening news, the perennial flower garden on the south side is continuing to come in nice and strong. I can now see that all of the Veronicas survived and are doing well. Won't know if any of the purple is in among the blue until they flower though.



Most of the coneflowers survived as well. The two that did not were actually dead before fall arrived so I am not surprised about those. An additional coneflower is needed on each end of the garden to complete the pattern, so that is a total of 4 I need to get this year.



Both kinds of coneflowers are represented among the survivors -- we have some coming up red sprouts and some green.

That's all for now, but trust me there's lots more coming about the garden :)

It's still pretty bleak outdoors, but there are some signs of life nonetheless! The first plants to show are these Dwarf Jacob's Ladder ("Blue Whirl") that I planted in a row near the north end of the deck our first summer here. They have had their little heads showing for almost 2 weeks now!



Alas, one died spontaneously in the middle of last summer. It was in the middle of the row and I have no idea why. I guess I'll have to replace the missing one this year.



Here's a closeup of the leaves. It's a very handsome and dignified plant and it has been spreading each year. I want to do a little more with this garden this year; perhaps make a rock garden with a few extra rocks we have, and then add a few tiny plants of interesting varieties just to spice it up a little.



I had been warned to disbelieve any claims of  tulips being "perennial" and I hadn't planted any new ones last year, so I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of tulips sprouting on our back lotline under the pine trees where I had them before. These ones are Toronto tulips.



They appear to actually be spreading. This one has divided into 3 plants, two of which have buds!



Here's another variety that appears to be coming back with a vengeance. The one shown has divided into a pair. I don't know which one this is for sure, but since the most likely to become perennial variety I planted was the Virichic tulip I'm betting on that!

Now that I know at least some do come back, I'll feel a lot more confident about planting a few more each additional year until I have a huge tulip garden out back :D



Here's the south side of the house where I have been trying for three years to establish a perennial garden. I failed twice and was seriously starting to wonder if someone had poisoned the heck out of that strip of dirt. But last summer I planted alternating blue Veronica and purple Coneflowers and lo and behold, this year they are coming back up!



Here's the coneflowers. Some of them only have one sprout but this one is going nuts! In order to get them all roughly the same color I had to buy 2 different varieties ("Prairie Splendor" and "Bright Star") and various different ages, so I am not overly surprised they're coming up a bit differently.



Here's some of the Veronica coming up. I got two different kinds of those as well. They are mostly blue Speedwell "Royal Candles" but I also had a couple of spindly little purple Spike Speedwell "Foxy Lady" that I ended up dividing and sticking in to beef up the blue ones here and there. It remains to be seen if those come back at all!

An update on the snowblowing: my skill and artistry with the snowblower is, if anything, only getting worse. Our front walk looks like Dennis the Menace took a lawnmower to a wedding cake. Our very prissy (well, about their lawn anyway) next door neighbors actually came and re-snowblowed their own sidewalk after I got done with mine if that gives you any idea. However I'm pleased to report that the snowblower starts at 0°F as easily as it did at 20. That is to say, persistence was the key. (Oh yes, and throttle at full too :-p)  

It's getting down to seriously, -17 tonight with -40 windchill, possibly as low as -50. We have a severe windchill warning in the area. That is just too cold! Brr!

Success! I managed to wrestle the rusty, crusty, old, and very cheap snowblower to the ground and subdue it. Then it proceeded to kick snow's ass. Yay!



It turned out to be way easier to start than I was led to fear it might be. There were only two... small.. details I had to figure out. Firstly, I had to put a drinking glass over the handle with the drive clutch since my arms weren't long enough to hold it down and pull on the starter cord at the same time. And secondly, despite the fact that the snowblower's manual failed to mention its use or even its existence, it was very important to have the Throttle at Full for easy starting ;-)  

Up until today I always figured a Throttle and a Choke are the same thing, but this has both. So I investigated and the more I read about this, the more I am convinced it is a big mechanics' conspiracy to maintain their own job security. They both control how much air gets into the mix... right???

It was only 20 degrees out so it may be more difficult to start again tomorrow when it is closer to 0 out, but at least I've seen it run once now so I have some hope!

This was my first time using a snowblower and now I am very impressed at the snowblowing skills of folks I have lived near over the years. It clearly takes some practice to do a good job. However, since we had 8-12 inches of very heavy (though not sticky.. it had a lot of ice balls) snow it would have been insanely difficult to shovel. After I got done hacking away the worst of it with the snowblower I went back to neaten it up with a shovel and it was heavy duty work even for just 10 minutes! LOL