July 2023

 Harvest season begins with raspberries. It's a fast, almost overwhelming time where I pick every other day for about two weeks. This year I made about 24 quarts and 10 or so pints of raspberry jam. My grandkids have been eating raspberry jam for most of their lives, and I try to make enough so that all of the kids, grandkids, and great grandchildren have jam all year long.

While I could extend the season for another week or so, I'm concentrating now on getting the vines ready for next year.

The old canes that produced berries this year are easy to identify now as they are gray/black, and the new canes for next year's berries are green. I leave the new canes long for now to deter the deer from eating them. They still trim the bottom leaves, but the cane just keeps growing at the top and when all the leaves die off, I'll trellis the canes to the wire. You can see the piles of old canes beside the row.

On to blackberries and blueberries - Both are just beginning to produce! 

The Hugelkultur mound has Kohlrabi, cucumbers, tomatoes, beets and pumpkin growing nicely. I made my first jar of dill pickles today.

Inside the greenhouse things are lush! The tobacco plant in front of Ron has flourished inside. The plants I planted in the main garden are less than a foot tall. Still hoping for a flower! Ron was inside figuring out where to put the electric line.

My hero - digging the trench to bring power and water to the greenhouse. I do have water in the garden, but it's kind of a mess - underground for most of the way, but connected with a hose at the house, which involved turning on the spigot about 200 yards from where we use the water. He resisted a bit bringing water into the greenhouse, but we will lay the waterline today! 

My daughter in law, Tina, and I thinned the apple trees this past weekend, and the deer are enjoying not having to reach for apples. If only they would just eat the apples on the ground....if only they didn't love strawberry and raspberry and blackberry leaves so much....if only they hadn't discovered the green beans....So much of their habitat has gone away in recent years, that we are pretty tolerant of them hanging out in our little oasis.

 

Greenhouse Update

So after a long long cool wet winter/spring, we are finally into some really beautiful sunny days.  I'm new to greenhouse gardening.  We were careful to find the sunniest spot in the garden for the greenhouse, and plants have been starting wonderfully.  I've got all kinds of flowers, and vegetable plants started, and have already moved some into the garden and flower beds.

Today, on our first full sun day when it got to just over 70 degrees, the greenhouse was more like an oven.  I'm going to get a thermometer to keep track of the temperature in there, but know I need to do something to provide a bit of shade. 

I had a roll of black plastic so I tried to improvise a mini-shade, knowing that I would need it soon if not today.  The greenhouse has a built in gutter on the east and west sides that is about an inch wide - I left the black plastic folded so I can open it up for more shade if I need to.  Then I tucked the black plastic into the gutter and wedged a dowel into the gutter on top of the plastic to hold it in place.

So greenhouse gardeners - what do you do about full sun days when your greenhouse can heat up quickly and fry all your plants?

The foundation is done!

When we woke up to perfectly blue skies and sunshine, we decided to work on the greenhouse.  We finished the cement block walls the other day in a driving rainstorm, so we were happy to see that the rain didn't disturb the last tier of blocks that went in while it was pouring. We put lag bolts in at intervals around the perimeter so that we could put a sill plate on top.

Ron drilled holes in the 2x6 treated boards that we used for sill plate, and I tightened all the bolts while he got each new plate piece ready.

Next step:  squaring the metal for the beginning of the greenhouse onto the sill plate.  Fortunately, the foundation was level all the way around, so we didn't need to make any adjustments to that.

Ron left to tend his mowing, and I used the tractor and shovel and rake to fill around the foundation so that the greenhouse will start at ground level.  I still need to bring gravel all around the perimeter, but the foundation is done.  Now the fun begins as we put together the Chinese puzzle that will become the greenhouse.

The Great Greenhouse Project Continues

After watching the original greenhouse site for a couple of months at various times of the day, we realized it just wasn't sunny enough where we had it.  So the project got a lot bigger:  first dig a hole for the new spot (I'm determined to have it partially underground), then fill in the old hole, reroute the water line, then line the bottom with gravel, measure it from every angle, and level it.

More trips to Home Depot for more cement block for the foundation.  We are going to do three tiers of cement block, or a total of 90 blocks. (That's a lot of lifting and toting!)

We decided to order an 8 x 12 greenhouse from Costco, so it was really important to get our foundation the proper size.  We waited for the greenhouse to arrive to be certain of the dimensions.

So here's the greenhouse....yikes!

Including nuts, bolts, brackets, and panels, there have to be a thousand parts and pieces.

Fortunately I have a very handy husband, so the project is once again underway.

Continuing our Greenhouse Project

We keep saying "Rome wasn't built in a day" and then we keep trying to finish every project as quickly as possible!  Not sure my body will hold up until this one is done!

Fortunately, we brought some professional construction stakes home from our Georgia building project, so we started the day finding them and then laying out the footprint for the greenhouse.

Yesterday we went to Home Depot and picked up the first 20 cement blocks for the project, and Ron hauled them to the site this morning.  While he was doing that, I pounded in the four stakes 8' apart to outline the interior walls of the building.

Of course, getting every side to be exactly 8' is the easy part - However, you can end up with a trapezoid if you don't make sure the diagonals are the same.

There's probably some "trick of the trade" for doing this, but we just kept measuring until it was all even.

Then came the hard part - routing the existing water line from where it came out of the ground, across where we had laid out the new greenhouse, and up through a hole in a cement block.  That took quite a bit of digging as the plastic pipe was pretty rigid, but we managed to get it in and the water line covered.

Ron helped me with that as there was no way I could do it by myself.  Then he went off to his mowing project and left me to tinker with the cement blocks.

You can see the water pipe coming up through the first tier of cement block.  I did a preliminary level, but will do final adjustments as we mortar it all together.

Next step:  Off to Home Depot again to pick up mortar mix and another 20 cement blocks.  I'm thinking about filling the holes in the cement blocks with insulation before we do our mortaring.