Got my fall cleanup mostly done. Couldn’t find my pruners so got some practice in with the machete cutting down the raspberry canes (trying out cutting primocane varieties completely to the ground each fall), dead sunflowers, tomatoes, and peppers. I’ve had decidedly poor results getting viney things like tomatoes and peppers, and woody things like massive sunflower stems or raspberry canes to compost promptly so I just put them in the street for brush collection (the city will then compost them).
I also was able to muck out under the rabbits, filled many many buckets, probably about 3/4 cuyd of rabbit manure from a few weeks of accumulation while it was too cold and frozen to shovel out.
Anyone have knowledge of rain barrels? I’m allowed a total of 2 with a combined capacity of 110 gallons. Any tips other than “get 55 gallon barrel, put under spout”.
What’s your planned use for the water that is harvested? Use on the garden or pumped back inside the house to fill toilet cisterns? Note that both of those suggestions are requirements of all new builds here.
John next door has provided space for pots of herbs, Gladiolus, Daphnes, Peonies, Brambleberries.
This has freed up room on our front area for 2 fruit trees and 12 blueberries so far. With a 400mm walkway between pots to make life easier for me to harvest berries without further breaking my back.
Tomorrow’s job is to make room for and move the remaining 9 Blueberry pots and 6 fruit trees and 7 bulb/flower pots. And pulldown and set up the watering system.
If your regulations are anything like ours (and they might be, given the climate, but every place is different) you might be able to install a much larger system, but need to have it registered with the city/county/water agency/whatever. Here we can have 2-55 gallon drums with no fuss, and you can get much bigger systems but you have to register them. It doesn’t cost you anything. I know, some people don’t like the government butting in. On the other hand, at least we can have rain barrels (some municipalities forbid it). Maybe something to look at. In the intermountain west 2-55 gallon drums aren’t hugely useful since we get no rain like 6 months out of the year (or nearly none). Building catchments into your landscape is a more efficient way of capturing water (and more of it) than the rain barrels. Just my impression/opinion though!
There’s two rows of fourteen big pots in the middle, with aisles either side and in-between.
Next task is to take the irrigation setup from the boys place and fit it into the existing irrigation for those two rows to enable easy watering. Not sure when that’ll happen as we’re heading into a few days of low temps and rain.
Next on the agenda is sorting out the white sage. They need bigger pots. I could go big with the pots or I could give the plants a trim, plant the trimmings in the off chance they root and pop the parent plants in a minor size upgrade pot.
Seems white sage is very popular for smudge sticks. And they’re not cheap!
Our carrots sprouted and it’s going to be 40*C three days in a row this week. (Above 37C for at least 5 days in a row). I foresee a lot of very early morning hand watering in my future.
The white sage got done. Ended up with four trimmed back plants and eight cuttings for attempted growing. They’re in good dirt, semi shade and regularly watered, so here’s hoping.
Found some more (4) white sage plants during the week at a Mitre 10, so brought them home to treat the same way. I’ll just wait til after this week’s ridiculous heat passes.
This morning I took the gift voucher and cash I’d received from my wife’s half of the family to go shopping at BAAG. Brought home some American Bilberry and Juneberry plants to go with my earlier purchases of Saskatoon and Downy Shadbush. Slowly increasing my american berry collection.
Caught the blackbirds in my garden again today, reaping all they can from the uncovered Blueberries. I was due a pick of them tomorrow, hopefully there’s some left.
So after two days over 40 degrees, one of which was 45, the gardens looking a bit worse for wear.
I’d rigged up a fourth irrigation line on the cool day between the hot days and it helped reduce the time I needed to hand water the pots that had been moved to the centre of our front yard.
I found some more White Sage plants in another nursery, so I’ve got a bit of work ahead of me repotting them.
Runners that had been potted up from Strasberry and Pineberry have now been seperated from the main plants and moved to seperate areas. I reckon I’ve got close to a dozen new plants from each original plant now. The next lot of runners have been pegged down into soil and hopefully that’ll be sorted within a month. Some other strawberry plants are throwing runners too, so cutting them off if I don’t need them or pegging them down if I do.
I’m in kill mode here. I’ve done another section of Morning Glory. I did save a bit of a Cast Iron plant that I found and repotted. I’ve killed two strawberry plants and half a dozen rosemary cuttings through sheer neglect.
I did find a bonus basil seedling next to a watermelon plant, and I’ve spread some basil seeds from last year around the holes in the yard to see if anything sprouts.
Yikes that’s hot! It almost never touches 40 here, typically we top out at 38 or so and spend all but a few days in the summer below 35.
In parts of the US that get that hot regularly I know a lot of gardeners figure on a lot of stuff dying mid-summer so they kind of have a split gardening season where they do spring, somewhat of a break midsummer, then again in fall and winter.
Took advantage of the cooler weather today (24C), after yesterday’s furnace (42C) to plant out a bunch of stuff.
Took seven white sage plants, repotted them into bigger pots, trimmed off longer growth and potted them up as well.
Potted up four 12" tall Poblanos into big pots. The last of the small seedlings went into the next size up pots.
The hot chillies (Carolina Reaper, Butch T, White Ghost) I picked up for a nephew who has a thing for hot food (scored a bunch of super hot chilli sauces for Christmas) were all potted up and sent home via his mum who was in the area today. Almost got her to plant the next lot of Roman Chamomile seeds for her driveway, but she had sushi in the car for her kids lunches, so she got out of that task leaving it to me.
There’s about a dozen pots of bulbs left to harvest, still some green shoots on them, so it’ll be a little bit longer before they’re done.
A gift voucher from Christmas gained the garden another Saskatoon and by coughing up a few extra dollars I picked up a Black Lace Elderberry. Have moved it into a bigger pot today.
Two warm days and forgetting to put the shade umbrella up resulted in the loss of all of my celery, a couple of cucumber plants and half the carrot seedlings. I guess I’m ordering shade cloth this week.
So, while I may not have mastered the art of keeping edible plants alive, I do seem to be doing well with worms. My above ground worm farm on stilts has lots of happy worms and a pile of castings ready for me to remove, even through the heat and the ants that have settled in. My in-ground worm farm is doing really well, and I can probably start feeding it more. It’s very shallow since it’s just a plastic pot I’ve reused, but the worms seem to be doing a great job of wandering in and out again. I’ve made another one next door to it, so the dirt between the two should be getting a lot of worm movement. I’m thinking about setting these up in the self-watering pots I bought to grow veg in as well.