the little wild kingdom

[flowerbug]

i did get the peppers planted and now can get on with the beans in all of the rest of the gardens. will take me a week or two depending on the weather and whatever else comes up.

 

[flowerbug]

yesterday was the annual running of the worms finale and over the past several months i've been thinking of retiring from worm keeping and so i have not restarted the worm buckets yet and i may not until the fall or perhaps never.

i did learn a lot about them from keeping them and taking care of them, they were not that much effort but with my most recent mistakes and Mom's change of her routine i wasn't getting enough of the right kind of food scraps to keep them going very well and the bulk of the worm buckets did not support worms very well at the end. they all did need to be refreshed and i did need to get some different worms and i am not getting out much to look around and i don't want to order them to be shipped to me either. just not what i have time to do these days. so it was time to let the worms go that i did have and to regain that space in my room (it looks very strange now to not have those buckets there).

instead i will be doing the bury in the garden kind of food scrap composting and then the worms will have a more natural setting out there and when it gets colder in the fall and i can't do that i'll return to drying things out as usual and then i can store it in a bucket until i can bury it in the spring. any spoiled and messy stuff can go on the weed pile out back as usual, the birds pick through it looking for bugs and other treats...

14 years and it will be a change in routine and scenery and i'll have to get used to it.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Wow - that certainly is a big change for you. Sounds like you've got a good alternative plan though.

 

[flowerbug]

today finished up planting one garden with three rows of mixed beans (a variety of selections from last season's crop) and of course i also put some Purple Dove beans in with them to make sure there were plenty of chances to get some more crosses. when i harvest from this part of the garden i'll have to remind myself to keep all those beans apart from the rest so i can replant all of them.

sure i'm counting chickens before they hatch here but that's what is fun for me too is trying different things and seeing what happens but also just imagining what i may get in return eventually. so far so good.

i did clean out all the trays of food scraps i had dried that were sitting around my room on the floor waiting for me to get them in the worm buckets or buried in a garden. that happened today and so this room looks very strange to me right now. i've not seen this much floor space cleared since the spring of 2010. at one time i had 17 or more 4-5 gallon buckets in here, the past year i just had 7. now there are none. but i do have other buckets stacked in the corner that have shredded paper in them or they are empties that i'm saving because you can never have enough clean buckets. that i have just one stack is an improvement too...

two bags of bean pods from last fall's harvest i need to bury in a garden and half or all of that may happen tomorrow.

killdeer mama came back and has three eggs in her nest, not sure if there will be four tomorrow or she'll stop at three. sad if she lost all her babies. it's not a sure thing for them here even inside the fenced gardens, once they go off and running this isn't a shoreline that's consistent, there's a lot of ditches and places for little birdies to get caught or lost. she's not going to be very happy when i need to get that pathway weeded that she's nesting in...

 

[flowerbug]

got the ex strawberry patch taken care of for now and i can go out later and do an hour or two of more prep work so it will be ready to plant in the morning.

a break for lunch happened and a siesta is calling me on speed dial...

 

[flowerbug]

and then a change of plans since there was a change in the weather forecast for evening rains. so i got my butt out there this afternoon/evening for a few hours to get the garden more prepped and even planted most of it. and yes the rains came along and i'm happy about that.

the downside was in my rush to get out there i didn't take some paper and pencil to write down my rows, but that is ok as i know what i generally put in that garden and the plants will hopefully sprout and grow and show the rows and produce enough shade in that garden to keep the weed population down. small other downside is that i'm not too fond of the layout i did but it's mostly done other than a few rows i'll have to put in Monday at the end near where the killdeer is nesting again.

good to be this far along and almost done and hopefully tomorrow will be yet more progress in other gardens i need to get weeded and planted.

 

[flowerbug]

the past few days, looking out to the south, i was getting worried that the taller plants i was seeing in there were thistles. i got a short walk out there to see yesterday and yes, it is... i had planned to call the neighbors who own the field to ask them what was up a few weeks ago. a lot happened to keep me busy from doing that. last night i finally did call just to ask what was up, to see if they did get the field into the conservation plan and to ask about the thistles...

the good news is that the field was planted and it is in the conservation plan. and he also said he was going to mow the problem areas (maybe even today, but soon before they bloom is fine). that will avoid the worst of the problem i have had since last fall (zillions of seeds dispersed into gardens with tons of rocks which are hard to weed/move to get the thistles out once they get started).

i told him i'd kiss his feet.

 

[flowerbug]

a lot of rain in the forecast for the next several days, but not today, so if i go all out and can get a garden weeded and planted today it might be all i can do until this weekend... not what i want to happen, but weather is weather.

 

[Mini Horses]

I told him i'd kiss his feet.

. That's a little extreme

 

[flowerbug]

. That's a little extreme

if you knew how much extra work those zillions of floating seeds have made for me you'd not think that at all...

we have a lot of rocks, tons of rocks, every seedling that gets going between the rocks that i couldn't get all the root pulled out when it was young meant that i had to move those rocks to get it all out of there. each of those means either a few seconds or a few minutes, but add those up and it has been a lot of extra time.

yesterday when weeding a few gardens to get those thistles out of there that did not get weeded last fall. it took 10-15 minutes for some of them to get all the roots out (and i may still have missed some). normally i don't have thistles showing up in gardens often at all, at least not these kinds...

so, yeah, ...

he did mow yesterday and i talked to him and said thanks, he first mowed the back part that had the worst patch growing and then he took a break and i was worried he wasn't going to do the front part, but his wife likes to mow the grass so he let her mow for a while before coming back out to finish the front part. *whew!* i talked to him a 2nd time and offered him some $ for gas but he wouldn't take it, he said the conservation easement was paying him to do this... if things go ok, tree planting next spring.

i was rather amazed that someone did what they said they were going to do. and also very happy to not have to worry about all those thistle seeds showing up again in a few weeks.

the thistles i weeded had some flowers just starting to show some fuzz so it was time for them to come out.

p.s. i did give him a hug in thanks.