Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category

As in Oops, I think we planted too many. Hey, some years we have a few plants and hardly get any, so we erred on the side of too many plants this year.

I’ll be taking sacks of them to work Monday.

I’ll turn all the Romas into tomato jam. I don’t can tomatoes, I think it’s too much trouble when you can freeze them just fine, skins and all.

hugs,
Vyx

Took these photos the weekend of the 4th, uploading in a more timely manner than I did with the last batch of yard photos! LOL!

First of all… I accidently left the soaker hose going overnight on the berries a couple weeks ago. It was really dry and they needed water, but probably not quite that much. Thing is, though, that the right amount of water at just the right time will make the berries HUGE when they ripen. Huge as in monster sized!

Not a very great photo, and they weren’t all that large, but most are at least as large as my thumb. A few are monsters. :) We are way overloaded with berries again, I think next year I’m going to put a sign out for “U Pick Thornless Blackberries. Cheap.” They are starting to wind down a bit, and the bugs are getting them…. so we are being more selective of what we try to pick. We get japanese beetles, but now there are also Big Green July Beetles. 4x the size of japanese beetles, and love fruit. Will fly out and whack into me so hard that they almost knock me down. :)

Seriously, though… I am tired of picking berries and washing them and etc. The neighbor who promised me he’d come pick berries has never shown up. Pfft! No jam for him! Of course I haven’t been real great about helping pick his garden, either… but I can only use so much squash and cukes. I have yet to make pickles, just hope the cukes in the fridge will be okay until this weekend.

Anyhow. All of my lilies bloomed this year, including for the very first time my tiger lilies planted from the bulblets that they grow on the stem. I’m so happy… those weren’t that old and I wasn’t expecting blooms for a few more years. They are so pretty, always have been one of my favorite kinds of lily.

I had planted stargazer lilies last year, but they didn’t do well and didn’t bloom at all. This year, even though the grass got away from me in the flower bed… and even though it’s all full of dillweed… every single stargazer bloomed, from the ones I thought I’d killed last year to the new ones I planted this year. I really love the pink stargazer lilies and they smell good, too. (and I’m sure I’m going to be really sorry about the dillweed next year when it =really= takes over!)

Plus! One of my stargazers is an albino! Or almost an albino. It’s supposed to be that brilliant pink like the others. I thought the buds looked a little pale, and they were for a reason.

None of my sunflowers are what they are supposed to be… it’s like someone swapped the seeds in the packets. I planted Apricot Splash and Cherry Rose… and what I have are plain yellow (but multi-blossomed and pollenless) and a yellow with red at the centers, also multi-blossomed. I know darn well what Cherry Rose looks like, and it doesn’t look at all like these two. It’s a double sunflower, and dark pink. Hmmpf! My volunteers look to be Russian Giants… tall, huge stems like tree trunks and just your basic yellow sunflower with a single blossom. I’m thinking some of these fancy sunflowers I grew last year must be hybrids that went back to parent on the seeds. Oh well! No good photos of the sunflowers, I tend to get out there too late in the day with the camera. One of the giants is a bug magnet… every sort of bug is on it drinking it’s sap out of the stem. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen… wasps, bees, beetles, ants, butterflies, all hanging out together on the stem of the sunflower. I have taken a few photos of that, but the EW factor of bugs keeps it off my blog, lol!

Speaking of bugs, last night I got to watch a cicada come out of it’s shell. I’ve never seen that in person before. Cicadas have to be one of the ugliest bugs ever… and the beetle type shell they emerge from isn’t very pretty either! I documented that with camera… took out a good halogen light so camera could focus and not use up the batteries on flash. It was quite interesting. Newly hatching cicadas are beautiful colors of green and white! Bright dayglow green! I had to move him before his wings got stretched out, so that he wouldn’t be run over by Ron leaving for work. Tried to take one more photo and the cats finally saw what I was looking at. Sorry bug, you just became a cat snack. Just like the sphinx moths that come to feed at my Four o’clocks every night… cats get em.

Well, it’s time to eat, feed the pets and get this uploaded. My daughter left Tuesday morning, and arrived on the coast of southern North Carolina this evening…. she text messaged me to tell me she got there okay. I was worried… it’s a long drive to do in 2 days. Wish she could have stayed here longer, we never got to make pickles or do tie dye, both of which I need to get doing! This weekend for the pickles, maybe will fit in some dye work, too, hot as it is. :)

hugs,
Vyx

The lilac bush went crazy this year. Butterflies are loving it, I am too.

Macro actually worked on the camera. There is a button, but when set on Auto the camera should actually switch when you are close up. Doesn’t always work, however. I am not in the habit of walking around the yard with glasses handy, so I never can tell if it’s going to work, lol!

The clematis I bought on sale last year. Seems to be doing okay after being eaten by the neighbors’ goat and/or pony last fall. Sort of a natural pruning, which it did NOT need. I am going to need a better trellis for it to climb, the one it has came with it and isn’t nearly large enough.

Kittens are out playing and starting to eat food.

They don’t always hold still long enough to take a photo.

The calico is the biggest kitten… and also the wildest one. She’s a week older than the other two.

Libby’s boys. Libby is in the upper left corner, and that is Tyler and Fluffy posing. They are almost all grown up now. Libby seems to have the most exotic looking children of all the cats.

I had a lot more photos but the light was horrible and some didn’t focus properly so I skipped the uploading.

Well, I have lots to do today, indoor stuff. Gotta get the new blinds hung so I can quit using a tablecloth for a curtain…. the usual cleaning and laundry stuff… some drawing and carving of a new stamp… and then bake a cake to take to work for my birthday. Sort of a preemptive cake, so that no one else brings one. I don’t particularly like cake.

hugs,
Vyx

One of the peonies that I bought a while back, and planted (bareroot, from Lowes) is growing! Notice the lack of mulch or anything… just a bare hole in the lawn. We have a really old peony in the lawn that doesn’t seem to care about the grass, and Ron usually mows it down when it’s finished blooming. Crazy! I will probably go out and mulch it tomorrow. We are expecting anywhere from no snow to maybe 10 inches of the stuff over the weekend. Sheesh!

It was an absolutely fantastic day outside today. Nicer than yesterday, where I spent a bunch of time getting ready for going into work at noon and then got there to find out that I wasn’t needed after all. They did call me and leave me a voicemail on my cell phone. Thing is… I never look at my cell phone unless I need it… and usually that is to check the time or something, not to talk on it! LOL! I was a bit annoyed, it’s quite a drive and a waste of gas… not to mention I couldn’t even pick up my paycheck as the boss had just left and hadn’t signed them yet. So I went shopping, then came home and puttered around. Planted my latest addition to my new vineyard.

This morning I went to Lowe’s with the truck. Twenty bags of mulch for my grapes. I over-estimated, I’ve got 5 bags more than I needed at this point. I put down landscape fabric, then about 4 or 5 inches of mulch. When we get a calm and dry day I’ll go out and use RoundUp around the edges of that. Have to stop the bermuda grass and weeds so that the grape roots won’t have to struggle. Oh, and besides my Muscadine grapes, I also picked up a seedless table grape locally last week. Vanessa, which is a red seedless. I was VERY impressed with the roots when I planted it… they were HUGE! The Muscadines I bought online had very wimpy tiny roots. Lots of em, but tiny. The Vanessa grape had long fat roots winding around in the pot. I unwound them planting, of course.

All nice and mulched…. but you can’t see the vines in all that mulch. I did try a few photos, but decided they weren’t worth uploading. Basically, aside from the trips to post office and Lowe’s… my day was spent mulching the grapes.

I dumped out the dirt in the “window” boxes a while back, and used the potting soil I’d bought end of season last year to fill them back up about a month ago. Planted radish seeds in one, then forgot to water it! It was too cold right then, so after about a week I remembered about watering and watered them, and now I have baby radish plants, growing VERY slowly. Radishes are pretty much the fastest and earliest veggie you can get out of a garden… and I love em. Here is a photo of them… I had a duh moment today and moved them to where they get full sun all day today.

Because I had a second box that didn’t get full from that bag of potting soil, I finished filling that up with potting soil out of one of my tomato buckets… and planted more yesterday. The baby chicken wire and hardware cloth on top of the boxes is to keep the darn cats from digging and using them as toilets. I watered both of em yesterday, too.

I tried to get photos of buds of lilac, but my camera wouldn’t focus that closely… it has macro mode and I couldn’t get it to work. Can’t see the screen in bright sunlight, can’t read it anyhow without glasses sometimes. Oh well. The lilac needs some major pruning… sections of it are dead. We will wait until it’s done blooming, but the Althea might get lopped down this weekend. Needs it even more than the lilac. The floribunda rose in the yard needs dead wood cut out, too.

More signs of spring… Our neighbor Brent came up with his tractor and disced our garden area… and then came back a few days later with his tiller attachment and tilled it. It’s WONDERFUL! But Ron thought I should have asked/told him to do more of the garden area… even though what is done is fine for what we usually grow. So, being Ron, he decided that he would get his own tractor out and do it himself.

I don’t know how long he’s had this tractor, but it hasn’t been used in the 4 years I’ve known him. He got a new rototiller since I’ve met him… but never bothered with his old tractor. He said all it needed was a battery. But it ended up needing filters cleaned and gas put into it… the gas had evaporated! Gaskets had to be made… New terminals for a battery… and finally today he had to go get hydraulic oil for the transmission and lift.

The tractor is running, but the lift is not working, and that makes it pretty useless as a tractor. You need the lift to keep the discs out of the ground while you are driving, turning, etc. Or whatever you are pulling behind. You can’t just be dragging it all the time. Have to lift it up.

Anyhow, I took a photo of it today, parked in front of the garage. Then, before I started this post I looked up just how old the darn thing is. Shocker! It’s older than I am! It looks it, too, lol… but figure those are probably the original tires on it… dang!

That’s an 800 series Ford tractor and they were built from 1954 to 1957 in Dearborn, MI. This one looks like it still has original paint, too… what’s left of it. I hope Ron can figure out what’s wrong with the lift, he spent most of last weekend messing around with it and it looks like he’ll be spending this weekend messing with it, too. I’d rather have him help me with other stuff! LOL!

Finally, because this is also a sign of spring around here… kittens! There are only 3, and I only did close ups of two of them. They have different mothers, but the mother in the first picture decided to take em over when we moved the other 2 out of the cold. She’s not a very good mother, let 2 of her own die… I guess her mothering instinct is just slow working and she’s taking good care of all of them now. Big size difference… they are only a week apart! Kittens grow fast, the tiny ones are already getting their eyes open, not a week old yet.

This is Patches III….

And finally, a sort of tortoiseshell kitten…

Too cute! They didn’t even yowl at me when I picked them up to take their pictures! Itty bitty babies usually howl and holler… and are super hard for me to photograph, they wiggle too much. I just lucked out, I guess!

hugs,
Vyx

I forgot to mention…. I’d rather use newspaper or cardboard under my mulch, rather than landscape fabric… but it’s almost ALWAYS horribly windy here and I just can’t see how to lay that stuff down. The fabric stuff is on a roll, and held down by the roll…. and then I dump mulch on it. Can’t see doing that with a good layer of newspaper… the paper would blow away before I could do anything. So… landscape fabric it is.

It felt like spring this weekend and while I was at Lowes buying a new doormat I saw all the packaged bulbs and plants.

I couldn’t resist. I got a package of 5 stargazer lilies and two packaged peonies. I KNOW the darn things will be growing in the bags since they were in the store where it’s warm…. but it’s better to buy em now while the stuff is still alive.

Yesterday I was out digging holes. I planned to put the lilies out in my flower bed and the peonies up by the fence in front of the garage where we have another peony. So I started out digging one hole for the first peony. Not really that much digging… more digging the grass out and getting the rocks out. The dirt up in front of the garage… aside from the part we drive on… is WONDERFUL soil. Thick black dirt, not all clay… and not that many rocks, either. I love it when there aren’t a lot of rocks. The few I found I pitched through the fence to the cow pasture side. Ditto with the sod. But I dug up a huge piece of hinge… solid steel and pretty large. Plus a couple huge nails. Must be from the old farm that used to be here… the old farmhouse is in pieces slowly rotting away down at the bottom of the property.

Then I went over to my flower bed. I had Ron till up a strip a couple years ago… and he pried out a LOT of LARGE rocks. I added a few bags of good garden mix to it and planted brugsmansia and datura the first year. Last year I went with bags of clearanced glads. Tossed about 1/4 of what I bought, moldy or just dried up. I did have good glads last year, though. I ought to have better this year. I =thought= I was digging just outside of the strip and dug up some huge glad bulbs. Probably about 3x the size I planted. Great! I stuck em back in… hope I got em right side up, lol!

So I move over and dig some holes. It was a bit damp, but not muddy. I got a few lilies in and then went back to my peony hole to plant one of those. Surprise! Instead of just one peony in the package, I had two! Well, no problem, I’ll just put the extra one over in my flower bed. It can go where I had some sunflowers last year that didn’t get mulched. I stick my spading fork into the ground and pry… and up comes this whole yard of metal. Dig again and I get what looks like more of it. I’m not sure what it is… it looks like part of a rusted farm implement, something that would be dragged behind a tractor. What it’s doing under a fence and in between posts I don’t know. A bit of it had been sticking out, but I never tried to dig that deep last year in that spot. Good steel, just like the hinge piece… hardly rusted at all.

The trash that is at the bottom of the property is crazy… you can see pieces of roof with shingles. Old fridges laying on their sides with the doors hanging open… sheet metal… old pressure tanks from having to get well water out of the ground. Just lots of junk… and all covered over in summer with wild things growing and piles of brush getting tossed in. It’s actually great for wildlife.. the bits of roof make nice covers for animals that don’t actually dig burrows. Piles of brush left alone eventually break down and become dirt. We don’t really notice all that stuff in summer, it’s grown over. But winter… ugh. Could be worse, though… and I’m sure it would be if it didn’t have piles of old sticks and stuff thrown over it.

This is life in the country… and where no one outside of city limits had trash pick up until fairly recently. If you had the land… Just shove it over there, eventually it’ll rot away hopefully. Of course it doesn’t… My Mom’s property had trash pits all over it. When she had her pond dug, we were picking up plastic milk jugs for years. Plastic is forever. My Mom was good, though… she composts everything that can be, and then even before trash pick up would sort stuff out and save it up and haul it out to where the county would let rural customers take trash. Now she has trash pick up… she still composts. She does, however, still burn paper stuff. I’ve found that most people that live out in the country still do that. At least it’s just junk mail and cardboard from packaging… not trying to burn plastic milk jugs. That’s illegal here now, any burning of trash…. but I’ve also found that most people that live outside of town never heard about it. Probably the people that lived in town and had trash pick up voted on that, lol! There are the idiots still… people that don’t want to pay for trash pick up because they never have. They have DUMPS in their yards somewhere. Sometimes multiple dumps. Ugh!

It’s not nice digging up a bit of the yard for a flower bed and coming up with bits of old tin can and broken glass. Or pieces of old farm implements. From what we know, the previous owners of this property never had a vegetable garden…. too many rocks is what they said. That’s pretty unusual around here… everyone has a veggie garden, you did it because it was cheaper than buying food. If you had rocks… you picked them out, along with your children helping… because that is what people did. I’m still trying to find the old farm area where the garden was, though, lol! Ron did his picking up of rocks… he says that he thought he was going to end up with another pond. If you saw the pile of rocks you would understand. It’s HUGE. Perhaps the garden area was that section over where the peony is… NICE dirt. There is always a spot somewhere on an old farmstead where the dirt is good.

Anyhow. Today it rained most of the day and watered in all my new stuff. Now it’s going to flurry and then freeze again. Hope the peonies survive. Hope my new grapes survive. If not… well…we’ll see.

hugs,
Vyx