May | 2010 | Ending and Beginning

Archive for May, 2010

Not Done Yet

31 May 2010

Planted more in the garden, but not done yet, dammit.

Planted mangles (don’t even know exactly what those are other than a vague idea of some hyper-beet — are they even edible by humans?), black garbanzos, more swiss chard, three pepper plants (Margaret’s Hungarian), last two tomato plants in spot between pear trees. Reseeded a few kidney beans.

So in that big bed just south of the pine tree, starting from the east, there’s a row of collards, then swiss chard, then kale, then mangles, then another row of swiss chard.

Also Butternut (5 hills Waltham, 1 hill [farthest to the NE] saved seed) and 2 hills of pumpkin for seed (Kakai) in south end of main garden. It’s really getting shady down there, hope they do okay. Too many damn trees in our yard that aren’t doing anyone any good.

Mulched 2nd row of collards with grass clippings, as they’re in a sandy spot.

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Another Day…

30 May 2010

…of waiting for civilization to come to an end, another day of the bitter disappointment of watching it go on as before.

Planted another 10′ of sweet corn and 20′ of popcorn. That gives us a total of the following in the West bed:

Sweet Corn
15′ + 15′ + 10′

Popcorn
5′ + 15′

I’ll probably put another row of meal corn in the main garden, as we have lots of room.

I confirmed that the dense, lush weeds growing on the other side of the fence at the southeast corner of our property is comfrey. After reading about it, it doesn’t sound like something we want to eat, but it does sound like something we’d want to cut for use as mulch or in compost. And it’s apparently good as a poultice for broken bones, sprains, and bruises. I’ll wait until the bees are through with the flowers before cutting it.

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More Rain Barrels

29 May 2010

I got the fourth rain barrel set up today, and moved one I had set up last week (it was above a retaining wall and leaning a bit). Here are photos, including the distribution manifold:

I really like goofing around with stupid stuff like this.

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Onions

28 May 2010

Used the last of the stored onions from storage yesterday. Pretty remarkable. I loved having all those onions in storage, mostly because I love onions.

The seeds sown directly in garden look almost as good as the ones I started from seed inside two months ago, so that’s probably the answer to that question.

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Rain Barrels

23 May 2010

I made four rain barrels this weekend. I bought 4 second-hand 55-gallon white plastic drums, washed them out (they had car wash soap in them originally), cut off the tops, and installed a sill cock in each. Flipping over the cut-off tops made a good top for them. When they’re flipped over, they have a concave surface. I drilled four 1 3/8″ holes in the tops to let the water in and just directed the downspouts onto the inverted top. Put one or two big rocks on top to hold down the lid (and the barrel until they get some water in them).

I have three of them in place. I had to either figure out how to handle overflow, or move them away from the house so overflow wouldn’t matter. One of the objects is still to get water away from the house.

I still like the idea of having an open one — makes it easier to clean out my coffee ground collection buckets — so I made an overflow from one of them into the 32-gallon trash can I’ve been using to catch rainwater.

Here are pictures of two of them: