Garden of wonder

I don't think I've talked about gardening before. We keep a couple gardens, in front of the house I've got an asparagus patch with some potato plants growing in textile pots (more on them next time) and in the backyard I've got a little patch of vegetables:

Theres 2x 3'x5' beds with a dry laid brick walkway up the middle. Lets look at the right side first.
In front theres a tomato plant, I don't remember the variety since I don't eat tomatoes but its grows grape size tomatoes that Angie likes

The tomatoes are formed but haven't started to turn red yet, we're getting some warmer weather lately so I expect these will ripen pretty soon. Behind the tomatoes we've got some basil, lady bell peppers and lettuce I didn't get pictures of. At the rear of the right side we've got cucumbers, by accident we ended up with 8 cucumber plants so pretty soon we're going to be swimming in cucumbers. Cucumbers take a lot of space if you let them grow along the ground so this year I'm training them up poles. What started as an experiment with one plant has now become most of them:

I was a little dubious of the idea at first but I'm sold now, I've been using baling twine to attach them to some sticks I pulled out of the woods and we're finally starting to see cucumbers. The other nice thing is that the cucumbers are easy to find and pick with this method. I've also been careful to cut all the suckers the vines produce which is supposed to force them into more useful growth rather than trying to strangle each other.

Back on the left side of the garden we've got kale:

Oh boy do we have kale! Last year our garden sucked due to some weak fertilizer that I under applied and about the only thing we got was kale. We had 4 plants last year which produced about one meal of kale a week. This year we've got 6 plants which produce about a meal every other day which is a problem as we're both already tired of kale...

Behind the kale and in constant danger of being taken over is the swiss chard

Its also doing real well, producing a meal every 3rd day or so. If I had a preference I'd rather get more chard and less kale but what are you gonna do? Just to the left in the picture you can see the butter crisp lettuce. I like this lettuce because it doesn't head so when we want some I just go cut some of the outer leaves off. This should give us lettuce all summer.

Behind the lettuce and chard is the bean trellis,

The frame is 3 pieces of fencing in a triangle shape. The picture is a few days old and the plants have gone crazy in the meantime, you can barely see any of the horizontal strings anymore. I expect we'll start getting beans soon. These should be Kentucky Wonder yellow wax beans and if the bean production meets the vine production standard we should have a ton of them.

Once the beans get rolling we'll freeze a bunch of them for the winter. In 2012 we froze a bunch of fiddleheads with Ziplock brand vacuum freezer bags that worked out really well so we'll try those again. Sadly it looks like our local stores don't stock the bags anymore but fortunately Amazon has them. I was momentarily tempted to buy a Foodsaver but we really don't freeze enough to warrant it and I hate having extra junk around the house that we don't use a lot.

Something NOT to buy

One of the reasons I started blogging was to give myself a space to review things and mostly for that I've reviewed cars, here's something different:

I picked up this bag of Schultz Potting Soil Plus at Tractor Supply last spring. I wanted to use it to start plants in the house. The bag says "A rich mix of sphagnum peat moss, perlite, composted organic material and a wetting agent" which as near as I can tell means a little peat moss mixed with what could best be termed "mulch" but seems to be wood chips, and some little pellets of some magic chemical. What it seems to do mostly is nothing. About 1 in 30 seeds actually germinated, those that did were spindly and barely grew.

In about July I put some of the mix into a hole in my front yard, in September it looked like this:

Remember I said it looked like much? Thats what it looks like on the ground... Notice how weeds won't even grow on it. I've got 2 other spots in my yard I put this stuff on and those are dead zones too.

I found an Amazon review for the same stuff in a different bag: http://www.amazon.com/Schultz-Purpose-Potting-Soil-20140/product-reviews/B000HAAO04 which mostly echos my experience.

I'm going to write a note to Schultz on their website but don't expect much.

Time passes and stuff happens

Months slip away like water.
So let me bring you up to date. I'm off on another work trip to California, it seems like I live here part time. Last week we were made our yearly spring trip to camp. This year's big project was to move the outhouse. The old outhouse hole was full. I don't remember what year I dug that hole, I'm guessing 2005. 9 years isn't bad for a hole I dug by hand while the outhouse was tipped forward. We probably should have made some sort of a box when we dug that hole to keep the dirt around the hole from collapsing in, you live and learn. This year we rented an excavator to do the digging. We built a box 4 feet tall by 4 feet wide by 32 inches deep out of OSB scraps and 2x4s, then dug a hole to fit the box. Finally I built a frame of 4x4s to slide the outhouse onto. The sliding went pretty poorly when the outhouse hung up on a concrete block as I slid it. I should have stopped at that point and jacked up that corner with the wagon jack to get the block out but instead I ended up wrestling it around with the excavator. Later on I had to spend a bunch of time jacking the outhouse up to get the 4x4s back into the right place. The other mistake I made was not spiking the 4x4s together, mostly because it didn't occur to me to buy spikes...

The next day we used the excavator to dig a test hole in a place Dad thought there might be some gravel. Off to the side of one field is a hill that appears to be degraded shale or slate which breaks up pretty good with the excavator. We dug some up and used the wagon to haul it to fill some wet spots in the road. Angie ran the excavator while I made runs with the Cub Cadet. I had the much harder job, the excavator can fill the little wagon no problem to the point where the Cub Cadet can just barely handle the weight. Then the dirt would be stuck in the wagon. Since it was a little wet when I'd dump it'd stick in the bed and I'd have to shovel it out.

To make this work we need either a real dump truck or a bigger dump wagon we haul either with the truck or the Farmall Super M.

Speaking of the Super M it got all new wiring this trip. We'd known the wiring harness was in tough shape for awhile and when the tractor wouldn't start at all we knew it was time. We finally did get it running by wiggling some wires but it wouldn't run well and couldn't pull any kind of engine speed. Fortunately we'd already ordered a wiring harness. The harness included the main wires from the generator to the switch and voltage regulator and from the switch to the coil but didn't include the lights or some other incidentals, we made those other wires ourselves so now every wire on the tractor is new except for one battery cable. That got the machine running and I used it to plow and disc the garden. I tried to shoot some video of my rollover plow but I haven't reviewed it yet to see if its any good.
While the tractor now runs its probably time to do a 12 volt conversion on it. 6 volt batteries are expensive and seem to be prone to failure. A small 12 volt battery would cost half what we pay for a 6 volt, it'd probably last twice as long and in a pinch we would be able to jump start the tractor off the truck. Having 12v electrics on the tractor would also allow for an inexpensive electric ignition conversion. Thats not a big requirement I've never really had any trouble with the points but it would make for a better running engine with increased reliability down the road.
I almost forgot, while we were doing all this work I put in new spark plugs too.
After all that effort the tractor started nice as you please although it did crank slow from the bad battery. When we left I put the battery on the desulfator, we'll see if a few months of that maybe helps salvage the battery. I doubt it and I see that a 12 volt conversion kit runs about $150. I may end up just doing that in the fall.

I'd bought some asparagus to plant at home but the package of roots I'd bought was way more than we could use around our house so I bought the rest to plant at camp. Asparagus is cool for camp since it comes up in the spring and requires relatively little maintenance the rest of the year. I planted a 14 foot trench worth which should provide us with about all the asparagus we can eat. The trenching was hard work and in retrospect I should have used the excavator.

Buster liked the trench though, he came up to inspect and immediately flopped down in it. I'd guess the bottom of the trench was cool and it was a hot day, especially for a black dog.

Finally we planted our yearly camp garden which feeds the wildlife. We've seen a big increase in the deer population around our farm over the last couple years and I'd like to think this garden has something to do with that so I keep doing it. This year we planted mostly turnips but some kale, squash, cucumber and whatever other old seeds we had at our house. Angie also bought some sunflower seeds which she put around the edge of the plot.

We planted by broadcasting seeds which we then disced in with the Cub Cadet. I'd tried plowing with the Cub Cadet but the so was unusually strong, last year we didn't get good coverage with the oats we'd planted so the grass took right over again. The plow I've got is also a little over large for the Cub Cadet and we're probably under weighted so it just had a hard time. The Super M just walks away with the 2 bottom plow I've got and it only takes a few passes to clear this area. Our neighbor Grant came by with an old spring tooth harrow which made short work of cleaning up the furrows. In past years its taken me hours to plow and disc the plot, working with the bigger tractor certainly made things easier.