Category: Home Fires

The sun is out and so am I, in the yard that is.  I spent the weekend and Monday putting in the driveway gate.  This is a BIG checkbox.  Kelly has plants that have been waiting many week to be planted that required the front drive to be fenced off so the deer would not eat them up.  I took Monday off in order to finish hanging the gate and put up the fencing.

The gate posts were a bear.  Our soil is 6″ of forest duff then sandstone and gravel.  Soft sandstone but stone none the less.  I had to dig the last foot with an air chisel.  Bleh.  Didn’t get them as deep as I would have preferred, only has deep as my arm is long.  I hope I don’t regret not spending some cash and getting somebody with a machine to bore them out.  On the bright side my free cement mixer performed great. I do need to get a grease gun for it.  The drum squealed a bit on the last mix.

 

The garden seems to be working out so far.  We have been a little concerned that it would not get enough sun but so far so good.  Everything is up and looking good with the exception of some of the tomatoes.  We could not find our usual varieties here and are trying some new ones, new to us anyway.

Our small orchard is in the same fenced area as the garden.  Not much in there yet, a couple of pears trees, a couple of hazelnuts, some rhubarb and a few Saskatoons still waiting to be planted.  I really need to get the mower in here its getting to be a jungle.

The buckets are my cheapo tree watering system.  Construction pails and a 2 gallon per hour drip nozzle.  I’ve made 20 of these so far, and could use a few more. I use them here plus all over the upper yard where we have planted mock oranges, roses, magnolias, camellia, haskaps, lavender, cherry and apple trees.  Some of these could have been in the orchard too I suppose but it has been an evolving plan, and some were planted prior to the orchard spot being decided on.

I am loving my little shelter. I knew I would.  Check out the free cement mixer!!

Not much has happened here over the last three weeks as far as “getting things done” is concerned.  I was laid up since the beginning of June with pneumonia and spent 8 days in the hospital.  Kelly has been keeping me on a short leash since, as she should because I tend to be in denial.  I’ll be feet up chillaxing for another week, with some puttering around as rehab.  Maybe I’ll try to finally dig the post holes for the gates.  Follow up appointment with doctor tomorrow, we’ll see what he says.

I took a couple days off last week from my other duties to focus on the garden.  May is quickly passing and we need to get the plants in the dirt.

We decided to build the same style of beds as we had in our last location, raised beds built with patio blocks.  They have the advantage of never rotting and we like the working height.  Not being low to the ground is a real back saver.

Out here it seems you can’t buy the size of patio blocks I wanted, they just don’t sell them and no one would even agree to have them ordered in special.  Every thing here is a smaller size, so we had to improvise a base platform for the smaller blocks to sit on.  This turned out to be cindercrete.  These days cindercrete blocks are no longer made from ash, just concrete, so they are safe to use for this purpose.  The only other change I made were the top rails.  I used radiused deck boards instead if 2×4’s for a wider and hand-friendly rail.

Also needed to run another 300′ of deer fence to enclose the garden and the small orchard we have started.  So far only pears and hazelnuts. The apple is in the future and the cherry is planted up closer to the house.

Still some work to do to finish up.  I need to pin down the bottom of the deer fence (deer with try to crawl under if they real want to get in), and set the posts and install a proper gate. Later this summer we plan to install a cistern and collect rainwater for the garden.  Until then I have to run out 300′ of hose from the house.

Eventually I will build some type of potting bench for Kelly.  I left room up close to the gate for one.  I am also toying with the idea of moving my tin shed from up by the house to down by the garden.

 

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?”

When it came to where to build the garden our plan was to wait a year before we choose a spot.  We have a fair amount of space but most of it is heavily treed.  There is actually very little space with any good sunlight.  Since we like to grow things like tomatoes we need to be picky.  The “hot” season here is quite a bit shorter than the prairies. A longer growing season sure, but cooler.  Tomatoes need sun, and do better with a little heat.

The time has come to decide and after much hemming and hawing we thought we had it figured out.  I spent a day levelling a spot and hauling the cement blocks we will be using to build the raised beds.  We really like using patio blocks on edge for raised beds.  No rot issues, and a nice working height.  This is the second property we have built them on.

The next morning doubt crept in.  Maybe this is the wrong spot.  Maybe this will not see enough sun, too close to the trees on the south exposure.  A little time on the NRC web site and we convinced ourselves it would be wrong.  Likely less than 3 hours of direct sun.  Needs to move.

Originally we had picked out a nice sunny spot down the hill at the back of the property.  There is a good sized clearing there and we have no other plans for the space.  The problem was water.  It’s too far away to water from the house or with collected rainwater from the old shelter on the site

The shelter site also had a nice clearing but would require another few hundred dollars of deer fencing and we had other plans for the space.

We spent this morning staring out at the yard and finally decided to put it on the north side of the house.  The beds will sit on the far edge of the lawn just by the tree line.  Good southern exposure we think. Soon I’ll start to move the blocks and begin again.  I guess I have to fix the grass I dug up too.