Adding leaf mulch to the garden

I took the afternoon off from work to spend some time with the family.  Since the big kids were watching some tv, The Bear was taking a nap, and Wifey was sleeping with her eyes open, I retrieved the mower from the shed to pick up the leaves I mulched a few weeks back. 

I wasn't able to get all the leaves I mulched (ground is still a little wet for the bagger to work correctly), but I got a lot.  More leaf mulch has been added to parts of the garden in need of nutrients.

No picture because it didn't warrant it.

Making a hoop house

I've been interested in using hoop houses or cold frames for a few years now.  For those who may not be aware, both are structures that help extend the growing season (earlier in the spring or later in the fall/winter) by being used as something of a mini-green house.

A cold frame has traditionally been a box with a window on top.  They can be very simple or made to be ornate with a hinged top, stands to help keep the window up for occasional ventilation, and more.

A hoop house works similarly, but is a bit more temporary.  In a hoop house, you have half hoops made of metal tubing (often conduit) or PVC either mounted to a frame or stuck into the ground with garden fabric or plastic mounted over top to create the greenhouse effect.

I did some shopping at our local Ace Hardware store to look for conduit or PVC.  Conduit isn't cheap and neither is PVC if you're on a budget.  Also, when I tried bending the PVC, it wasn't overly happy by being bent.  I guess I could heat it up with a heat gun, but, still I was concerned about ruining it.  I also contacted a local rental place to find a conduit bender tool.  They didn't have one, but thought an all-thread bending tool might work.

Stymied, I shelved the whole concept and pondered and read more about it.

This morning, my office-mate at work sent me a message letting me know about a concept he found on his Facebook thread.  HGTV did a mini program about making hoop houses out of half-hula hoops.

BRILLIANT!!!

Hula hoops are inexpensive, are readily available, and already come pre-bent.  Looks like I may be making myself a hoop house or two this weekend to protect our spring crops.

Side garden has been roto-tilled

After I got the rain barrel stand in place, I did the first cut of roto-tilling the side garden.  I'll want to do at least one more pass to the garden before planting anything, but at least the overwinter weeds and winter wheat are all turned under.

Rain barrel stand is in place

Thanks to the govt furlough, I was home early today.  Before I got tied up with anything else, I leveled out the soil by the closest downspout to the garden then put the rain barrel stand in place.

Once we get the barrels plumbed into place, I'll likely end up installing some sort of retaining barriers to help keep the barrels from falling off.

For now, though, it's a good start.

Rain barrel stand is made

We had some unseasonably warm weather today.  As such the family spent the bulk of the day post-church outside.  Wifey worked on cleaning up/out the garage and I constructed the stand for our rainwater collection barrels.

We had a minor disagreement over how high above the ground the stand top needed to be.  Wiefy wanted it to be pretty short whereas I knew that they had to be up a bit off the ground to allow for gravity to get the water fed to the garden.  Since I was running the power tools, I won the debate and the stand is 40" tall.

I'll post pictures tomorrow.  It was getting dark by the time we finished with other work around the yard.

Is it obsession or wisdom?

I was awakened shortly after 3am this morning by a nightmare.  In my hellish dream, I had gone out to the orchard only to discover that some particularly insistent deer had taken the top two feet off of most of our apple trees.  They had bulled their way over and through the deer netting and removed the most tender branches in a particularly brutal manner leaving green shreds behind as evidence of the ripping and tearing they'd done to the trees.  Despite my best efforts, I wasn't able to drift back to sleep until shortly after 5am.

My dream hung with me through the morning, through Pastor Robert's again-excellent sermon, and all the way home.

So it was that I found myself just a little bit ago copiously applying deer spray to the ground around everything out in the orchard.  So what if it's only 23 degrees outside?  Those flea-ridden deer won't eat my goodies! 

(This is where you imagine a crazy-eyed Greg shaking his fist at the invisible deer out in the woods behind the property as if they were kids riding bikes on his grass.)

Just for good measure, I also resurrected the riding mower and mulched the last batch of leaves that came down in the fall.  Because that's a common-sense sort of thing to do in the dead of winter, after all.

This homesteading thing is lunacy.  Craziness.  And I'm doing snow-angels in the stuff.  At least my babies (the orchard) are safe from those brutes!

Good grief.

Indoor citrus: Take 2

Yesterday afternoon, in an attempt to alleviate the winter doldrums, we made a trip to Homestead Gardens to wander around their facility and wallow in some green.  Wifey had been on a mission to try to find some more household plants (succulents, etc) but she didn't find anything that she was all that excited about.  We did, however, come across some citrus for sale.

Last year, Wifey and the kids got me more citrus plants to add to the surviving lemon from a few years ago.  Unfortunately, they died.  For quite a while I thought we'd done something wrong (over-watering, not enough sunlight, nutrient starvation, etc).  Based on my new theory that our water softener is killing our plants, we figured it's time to give indoor plants another try.  This time, we will use less of the household water.

Hopefully, we have more success this time around.