Stay at home parent made a comic strip about trying to be a comic strip artist as a stay-at-home mom. If this is all you get
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Worked in the garden more than went to the gym!
I worked in the garden more days than I went to the gym this week (4 days vs. 3! on one day I didn’t do either because we took our kid to the doctor)! This was partly due to not wanting to waste time driving while I have a sick kid at home/staying close in case I was really, really needed. I need to see someone to get a weights workout that’s tailored to preventing some of my aches and pains. I also need to do more stretching- I used to do a long stretch/PT every night. These days I usually only do my arms and feet, I only do my situp-type abs at the gym, and I only do water aerobics 2-3 times a week…
Tonight I weeded the strawberries. This involves an increasing amount of pulling off flower buds because the plants need to grow some more and we need to get past the threat of frost before they start producing fruit. It was a bit too wet to be walking out there today- we got about 3/4 of an inch yesterday.
Tomorrow I hope to do the poor onions. I accidentally mowed some of them the other day because I couldn’t tell where the row started. I do have the plants inside of the drip tape, but I couldn’t always see the drip tape to know to avoid it. I need to pull out a row of sprinklers before they get overgrown by the grass, too.
I’m feeling frustrated that I can’t find my companion planting notes- I thought they were on the first page in my notebook. Perhaps that page got torn out by little hands. Anyhow, note to self: marigold to deter cucumber beetles. Also: figure out how to view things on the blog based on tags.
Speaking of little hands, Z and T picked some greens while I was weeding. 🙂 Z’s dad showed me the pruning that he did the other day- mostly just cutting back dozens of watersprouts from under the three pear trees that are in the garden. The poor trees are so sick, and the watersprouts don’t look much better. Now we need to figure out how to get that wood plus the walnut (?) limb that fell this fall out of the garden. I am thinking we have a truck bring it out to another pile of wood near the driveway and chip it all.
Slugs and grass
Tonight I went out to collect slugs to experiment with dehydrating them with oyster shell lime. I knocked/picked as many as I could off of the greens (everything except dino and what I believe is curly kale is pretty much finished (flowering) and should be pulled out 😦 ). I think I had too many for the size of the container and the amount of lime. I should have added the lime in layers as I added more slugs. I dumped them into a hole that some wildlife had dug, and when I walked past later, there were a number of slugs crawling through the nearby grass. The project was probably also a failure due to the fact that it started sprinkling, and then raining lightly, while I was out there!
I forgot that the other day I hadn’t really weeded the west row of the Chandler strawberries, and started pulling the grass back on the east side. DOH! That other part of the bed is going to be a mess – already I’ve pulled off a lot of blossoms (keep growing, plants!!) and some leaves that were rotting on the wet soil. It is supposed to rain for the foreseeable future 😦
I definitely should not have had the mower on its highest setting the other day, as I pretty much need to mow again!! When one is out in the field, one can see the difference in where I mowed, though.
Lastly, I turned the compost and thought about ducks and/or weeder geese and how it would be cool to have them eating the slugs and pulling the unwanted grasses.
Most of the time I was out there, I was berating myself for having swept the house instead of gardening yesterday when my inlaws were over. I really did need to do some cleaning and organizing, and having done those things made me feel a lot better about the day.
Spring is coming!
On Sunday I quickly weeded immediately around the Chandler strawberries so they could have some air and light. On the image below it looks like the area had been sprayed, but it’s just grass I’d pulled out last time.
Today I mowed a lot of the grass on the north side, and around the strawberry and pea beds on the south side of the garden. The mower was on its highest setting and I can see that I will need to mow again by the 1st weekend in February, when we will host a party.
The ground is really wet, especially where nothing was growing 😦 more stuff to work on next year = plant cover crops on time, mulch bare areas, etc
Need organic beer for the slugs.
Rain prep
I think I spent about 4 hours in the garden today! I weeded the strawberries while Z and T ran some errands late this morning and early this afternoon. In the evening, I weeded those Chandlers some more and then put compost under the plants. (Sadly there are plenty of weeds still in the bed). I noticed that a lot of plants that had frost damage had exposed roots, and some didn’t seem to like having their leaves touch blades of grass.
Then I made sure to shift the compost that I started earlier this week (2nd shifting). I put a whole bale of straw out on the path down the middle of the garden and alongside/in the bed of summer strawberries. I’m starting to experiment a bit with using palm fronds as path mulch. I didn’t cut the fronds up at all, so we’ll see if they break down, get slippery, or work well to cover the ground. I put a bit of straw alongside the east greens.
Speaking of the greens, I noticed that the biggest leaf on my chard plant was wilting yesterday and tried tugging on the plant- yep, it had been chewed clean off of the roots. I harvested those leaves and put the plant back into the ground (I should probably try a different spot, though, huh?). There’s a plant that I threw out of the compost pile a ways back that seems to have rooted. We’ll have to keep an eye on that one! So out of 8 plants that looked so healthy and delicious months ago, I now have 0 plants in the garden.
Pest/IPM report: There was some strange poop near the strawberries. I’m assuming it was from a fox. There’s lots of digging from the raccoons everywhere. It’s so awful. I missed one cucumber beetle today and killed one other. There are plenty of slugs around if you’re out after dark and look hard enough. The plants are growing slowly — it’s been around and below freezing most nights recently.
I was hoping to do some mowing since the grass alongside some of the beds is getting to be annoyingly tall, but it’s just too wet. I think there is a sweet spot around 2 or 3pm some days when it’s sort of dry enough, but that’s naptime.
I’m not happy about the cracked soil that’s down below. Need to keep it covered, preferably with live plants.
Getting low on greens!
Yesterday (Monday the 28th) I started a new compost pile! Yay! I was able to do this because Z took the time to get straw bales. That was only possible because he took the carseat out of his car. He bought them from a place that’s just down the hill from our last place (I had bought a bale or two from them while we were living there).
I picked a bit of tiny collards and some huge leaves that were either green cabbages or collards. Z used some of them in tonight’s turkey and chicken soup.
Today (Tuesday) I bought a bunch of dino kale because we just don’t have that much in the garden right now and I thought Z would be using the rest of what I’d picked in the soup. Hopefully the plants are enjoying the nice sunshine we’re getting this week and we’ll get some faster growth. We finally started covering up the lemon tree that’s right outside our house, though, because the nights are so cold.
Sometimes I open a book and think about crop planning. I don’t get very far since I don’t have much time to think before I have to put the book down. 
Maybe I can plant some favas in late January. Maybe I could get some cabbage seedlings. I am not yet sure where I would put them.
Winter garden notes
Hello, dear imaginary reader,
Our rainy season has finally gotten going in earnest. We’ve now had 64% of our normal rainfall for this point in the rain year, which began on October 1st. At this point last year, we’d gotten 171%. Since this is an El Niño year, a lot of rain is expected to start falling in a few weeks. I have not managed to fertilize with the fish/kelp stuff. There have been preschool events, home repairs, and a sick child in the past month.
We have had a lot of frosty nights, but our garden has been holding up ok. We still have greens, although we are down to one chard plant (we had 8. I am hoping that what ate them was “only” gophers and not some sort of nematode or something). I still go out and pick a few days’ worth of kale and collards, and what little broccoli there is (and what cabbages there were), every few days. The plants at the northeast end of the garden are all pretty stunted, which I am guessing is due to the soil (that, or late planting) – something to keep an eye on.
T and I have scattered rye and vetch a few times. I can’t see the vetch against the dirt once it’s wet, but I can tell when the rye I planted is still there and when it seems to have been eaten by birds! I think the wheat has started to sprout. Our very haphazardly-sown bell beans have roots but no shoots yet. The Chandler strawberries have up to 4 leaves, while the Sweet Anns (was that their name) are, in some cases, starting to have leaves. I did some good weeding of the garlic around Thanksgiving – this has made it possible to see the garlic and the few onions that have come up. 🙂 I wish that I had had extra straw to scatter in the berry and allium beds, because in some places you can see damage from the rain hitting the soil.
I planted some peas at the end of the pea row a few weeks back, and the seedlings are visible now. The purple podded fava beans at the end of the strawberries have also come up 🙂
I need to start a new compost pile, and I don’t want to put it where the ground is very mushy. I do, however, want it to still be inside the garden. I’m very confused about what to do. I think I will need to buy straw for the pile (the last pile didn’t have enough browns and is still kind of stinky), but it’s very hard to find organic straw, and even harder to transport it with a carseat in the car. SIGH!
I’m hoping to do some crop planning for the spring someday soon. The seed catalogs all look awesome!
Thanksgiving was a success
We ate more food from this place than you’d have thought, given how few things are growing!
We had greens, of course; olives; pear sauce (made into pie? i forget); pear crostada (sp?); pear booze; sage… oh, and there were like 4 different days on which kids (and Z’s mother) picked strawberries! They had to have picked 3 or 4 baskets’ worth (?!). Then we even colder nights over the weekend and everything froze. The strawberries appear to finally be finished. There were no peas last week, and the plants are very unhappy from the cold. We had a heritage turkey (that we provided and Z brined with some of our rosemary) and it was awesome!!!
I think we’ve been watering too much, but there were some windy days over the weekend and we wanted to be sure that the soil didn’t dry out.
We planted some cover crops!!
Well, I still haven’t planted a whole bed of fava beans (there are some growing with our greens). I pulled out some cover crop and grain seeds today. T was excited about the wheat seed, so we planted that in the nicely tilled bed that I was going to put favas in (and hurt my knee trying to hoe yesterday). The things we do to avoid huge tantrums (successfully).
I also planted Territorial’s “Wintermax” which should have been planted in September. It has tillage radish (I really want to grow that!), hairy vetch (iirc we grew purple vetch last year), and rye. I put this in 4 beds, plus maybe the end of the wheat bed. I added bell beans (some were beans that we grew, and some were from the 50 pound bag of bell bean seed that we bought. I put those seeds in the 4 (or 6, depending how you look at it) west-most beds. They need a lot of work, so hopefully some of these seeds will grow. It’s supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow night.
(not sure why Z raked the end of the south beds- maybe to pull out all the excess grass and dirt.)
I would have gotten a lot more done (maybe), but an old friend who is visiting from out of town came by for a visit with her 3 kids and hubby. It was awesome to watch the kids explore the garden together. They picked strawberries (wow, there were some to pick! i hadn’t picked in something like a week) – there were actually some undamaged big Albions. They hung out on the pile of compost. The little girl covered up some of the seeds that were on the surface (we didn’t get around to raking them in). It was so sweet. Then we came inside and they played with what seemed like every one of his toys. It was so much fun!
Z’s family comes to town tomorrow. We’ll have some kids who are currently sick staying with us, so I should really head towards bed…
I read today that nasturtiums can help repel cucumber beetles. I’ve tended to avoid them because in my experience they harbor slugs. Something to research- maybe they can grow on a fence at the edge of the garden.
Better late than never!
I got the 25ish Sweet Ann (iirc) strawberries planted today! The bed sure looks weird because I put so much compost out before the rain the other week, but that’s ok.
Today was the 1st time that Z got out to the garden since last Sunday, he thinks. He got to do some push-mowing and he also raked some of the messier beds. And he punched a hole for a new line to water the strawberries- we’d had 2 but one of them had been too far over.
Hopefully we will finally get our cover crops sown tomorrow. Oh, and some fava beans! I was trying to hoe the bed they’ll be in today and I think I hurt my knee from standing on the very uneven ground (it’s like a snapping or popping that feels like it’s where the hamstring meets the back of the knee). I don’t really feel it unless I’m doing one of the things that bother it, I guess.
I had to do a lot of re-burying garlic today 😦 The companion planting book that I’m reading recommends planting garlic with so many things, and I’m just like: raccoons. Garlic may just be a crop that we can’t grow here.
Family (his) is coming this week – I hope to get some of the big weeds that are almost blocking the garden entrance cut back before they get here!
farmingmum 