Month: April 2017

I finally finished Muriel’s raised beds this past weekend.  We talked about two different designs for these, one made of inter-lockable stacked cedar frames she could put together and vary the heights as she pleased, and this design.

The landscape tie based one is a variation of a planter she saw at one of the local garden centres.  Each box is 4′ x 4′ and 30″ high.  The height was based on my old garden beds in Saskatoon.  “No Stoop Gardening”.

I didn’t use rebar as pins as is quite commonly done as the boxes are actually linked together and the measuring/drilling process would have been tedious at best and potentially frustrating with the slope of the yard.  I chose to build them using 6″ spikes and a 3 lb hammer instead. Wow, did that ever give the elbow a workout.

Wow.  We drove around the island this week and man oh man are the blooms starting to appear.  The fruit trees are beginning to flower and the daffodils are everywhere.  Most of my place it still forest so not a lot of blossoms to see but I did find this little fellow.

I believe this to be a carpenter bee, a very good pollinator but not so much a honey bee.  Since we will be planting some fruit trees I’m glad to see them around.

In other new, I was helping with renovating a chicken pen this week.  The chickens definitely did not like the machinery and ran off quick.  The ducks however were not phased a bit.  In fact, these two ladies spent the entire afternoon trying to get into where we were working.  They stood on the other side of the wire and mumbled at me constantly.  It seemed like they were saying “So, got any worms over there?”