Relentless Inquiry

Two more 3'x3' beds forked, prepped, raked, and filled today, Mike being the star player and tool-wielder. A brief timeout for a Home Depot trip to replace the fiberglass-handled spading fork with a wooden-handled one after the former BROKE while Mike was trying to turn baked clay at the edge of the beds. I moved them about a foot closer to the house, as the sun is there in the morning, so there was about a foot of baked-though-the-chip-mulch hard clay to break up, ugh.

Serious chocolate craving munchies after mulching with cacao hulls as part of the soil mix for the beds (1/3 our crunchy clay soil, 1/3 compost, 1/3 cacao hull or coir+peat mixture). Stuff just *radiates* chocolatey goodness– maybe my strawberries will grow chocolate-covered now. Not! But would be cool.

Rescued and transplanted 12 – 15 more strawberries, many runner-scions of the original 4 or 5 'overflow' strawbs from the set I got to plant in hanging bags. In some cases had to soak the roots and thump with trowel to get the clay lumps off. Amazing that they invade the untreated areas of the backyard! Harvested about a half dozen ripe strawberries, and picked off the several that the snails got to first.

We got a couple more containers of chip mulch and of compost at the SMaRT center today, and will go back for more of each tomorrow (Sunday). Got pavers for the greenhouse 'foundation' too. Tomorrow's task is to level the greenhouse. We've got to t get the darn thing up before springtime! At the rate we're going we may have it up by Solstice– whether the Winter or Summer, I'm not sure. But after many weekends of “not now, honey” suddenly Mike is fired up to get it done, so I'm hopeful that progress will be made soon.

I'm tempted to start some plants tomorrow– that means that we'll NEED to have it up by about 2 weeks from now. Hmm. Cukes, zinnias, cold-tolerant tomatoes (got a Siberian heirloom and a couple others), Hungarian peppers, and maybe a squash of some sort. Probably also beans of some trivially self-pollinating type.

Need to seed beets n carrots outside. Broccoli seedlings are transplanted, still mostly only two true-leaves, but those have doubled in size. Cauliflower and cabbage seedlings kinda randomly sprouting, some big and some small. Got my doubts about those. Should be ready for xplant soon. Will try some lettuce outside too; rescued 3rd-gen Black Simpson bolted seedhead, but left it on the steps outside– need to see if still any seed on it! If not, I still have 2nd-gen bagged from last year, and a few first-gen seeds still in packet.

Scavenged some nasturtium seed from ground outside where the N's died off when it got cold, and have some volunteer N's that we've rescued while moving the beds. Might try planting some of the Japanese iris seeds I scavenged from some parking lot where the gardeners hadn't come to snip the pods off yet. Got quite a bit of it!