Garden Works (but sometimes it doesn't)

The tomato plants I started from seed did very well. They did so well that they have really out-grown their little flats. Which leaves me in a quandary. It's way too early to transplant them into the garden but I'd rather not transplant them into bigger containers only to transplant them again in a couple (well, more like three or four) weeks. I figure the less transplanting, the better for the plant. So I've been experimenting with various forms of row covers. I can buy row covers easily enough at the garden store but that's not half as much fun and it costs money. Where as if I try myself, it's a lot more interesting, I might learn a bit and it keeps the neighbours amused.

Not surprisingly, my first attempt was dismal but I did find yet another used for the frame of that silly portable green house of mine. That thing is becoming invaluable. I put it on its side to be the frame work and simply covered it with plastic and weighed it down with rocks. I planted 6 tomato plants. It looked ok but the wind played havoc with it and I lost all the plants except for the two closest to the frame. Well, I have lots of extra plants so it let's try something different....










The first not-so-great attempt. Those patches green you see in the garden are not weeds, but clover. I try to leave some clumps in because I think it is good for the overall health of the garden and the rabbits love their fresh clover!

I decided to put the frame down on its front and cover it and the two surviving plants with plastic. The wind can't easily grab hold of it this way. I can hear the wind try, the plastic flaps and the frame rattles but it holds steady and the wind is defeated. That solves the problem of keeping the two surviving plants alive (I hope) but I still have a flat of tomatoes that need transplanting.

I have a lot of discarded tomato cages. They never worked for me. They were fine for a few weeks then the tomato plants basically took over and the cages collapsed in defeat. That's why I switched to teepees. As it turns out, the tomato cages came in pretty handy as temporary mini green houses.

Saturday morning, P, teenage son, and I cut down the largest hoop leaving the two top hoops. We left 2 - 3 inches of wire from where we cut to poke into the ground. If I ever make more, I'll leave 5 - 6 inches just to make it a little more secure. Then we bent the top wires, which originally the ones that get stuck in the ground down, so they wouldn't pierce the plastic or poke an unsuspecting person in the eye. Now we have our frame to put an extra large freezer bag over and Ta-Dah! instant protective cover for the tomato plants. I might weigh down the bottom with little rocks to protect the frames from high winds. One thing I've learned is the winds around here never give up. I hope it works, I think I could get years of use out of the frames, I just might have to change the plastic ever now and then though the years.

Ordering Aromatherapy Stuff

I treated myself to an hour of bliss a couple of weeks back. When I first started with aromatherapy, one of my greatest joys was going to a aromatherapy shop and picking out the oils I needed. That always involved lot of chatting, sniffing and information gathering. A totally pleasant and almost spiritual adventure. I loved spending an hour or two in a fragrant, calm oasis that exists wherever essential oils abound.

I can't do that anymore because the one and only place here that sells aromatherapy products, while perfectly delightful, is more of a gift shop is limited in their selection of oils. But I have found the next best thing, mail order. After trying a few places, I find the perfect website to suit my needs. Essential Aura Aromatherapy has a great selection and are offer many fair trade, organic products. Perfect. So once, may-be twice a year, I'll go through all my oils and see what I'm running low on and what I need. Then I'll grab my trusty aromatherapy books and look at profiles of oils I might want to try. With list in hand, I'll go to the website and poke around there for a while. It's just joy, looking and reading and learning. I've been doing aromatherapy for ten years and am still learning all the time. Then I'll make my order.

Within a week, it comes. A plain brown package all gussied up with tape, labels and a glaring red sticker proclaiming fragile contents, handle with care. I open it up and enjoy old familiar scents and delight in new aromas. The oasis has arrived.

Note: I am in no way associated with Essential Aura Aromatherapy, I just love their products.

Early Edibles

I had my teenage daughter, T, and her best bud rake out the herb garden, or at least the remains of it, last weekend. The herb garden is turning into a perennial patch of comfrey and various mints, if it's invasive, it stays to do its own battle with the weeds. Among the various mints was a patch of chives, a good 6 - 8 inches long. Whoot. I love chives, they're a great substitute for onions. I ran out of my own onions a couple of weeks back and had to buy them. Which was pretty depressing because store-bought onions are really inferior in both taste and looks to mine (she says matter-of-factly, with no snobbishness or pride). But now the the chives have sprung up, I can use them pretty much wherever I'd use onions. The picture many not look like much, but the chives were great in the pasta salad I made that night.

Chives aren't the only thing springing up around here. Clover, dandelions and plantain are also making an appearance, much to the rabbits delight. They love their fresh greens. As the season continues, they will eat more and more fresh and less pellets. I think its better for them and they certainly enjoy it more. I think they can smell the greens when I bring the laden bowl down to them. I'll fill up the pellet dish first, the rabbits may give it a disinterested sniff or two but the rabbits will look at me expectantly, ears erect, eyes bright, and sitting with their front paws in the air... they know what's coming! Then I'll dump the greens and the rabbits dive into that sea of fragrant, fresh goodness. It may not look like much in the picture but the rabbits think it's divine.

The compost is also giving up its bounty as well. As I turn it, the worms wiggle and squirm. Now that's a treat only the chickens could love, and they do. They sure make short work of them. I'm positive the worms don't even know what hit 'em. (No picture because not only doesn't it look like much, it positively looks gross.)

So the bounty begins and the gifts are well appreciated by everybody on the DaM Farm. And expectations of more fresh produce bloom (cue Carly Simon's "Anticipation" now).

Not Exactly Like I Planned...

Spring is here and everything is bursting with new life except for a little acre or so in scenic PEI nestled in a little sheltered corner of the island. I've been have a heck of a time getting my new generation of livestock going here on the farm. Talk about a run of disappointments.

The rabbits were the beginning of the run. I have a young doe I've been trying to breed for forever. She just won't have anything to do with it. Just my luck to get a purist rabbit. The real disappointing thing is I kept her back from the last litter my dear Earl Grey sired before he passed away. She grew well and had a good body shape and nice personality but so did the other doelings from that litter. The reason why I chose her was because she looked very similar to Earl. Earl was a great rabbit and I wanted to keep his looks around. But she is not co-operating at all. I've tried everything I know of to get her 'in the mood' but nada, zip, zilch, nothing. Of the other four does I bred at the same time, only one had a viable litter. My oldest doe had one large dead kit, the other two did nothing. It was after a fairly long break for them and I know sometimes rabbits take a while to get back into breeding mode but I never had that problem before. So the rabbitry should be 'hoping' with new life but it is not. It's got some but no where close to where it should be.

The chickens are fairing worse than the rabbits! First there was that whole false broody thing where I lost the whole nest of eggs. Then I had an incubator fiasco where it shot up to 110F for some unknown reason but I strongly suspect the water I put in the tray with was may-be too warm. Whatever the reason, I didn't get one chick, not one out of 42 eggs. During the three week incubation period, I hoped against hope that something survived. Two more times the temperature shot up but when I tried another thermometer, the temp. was a perfect 99.5F So I'm thinking it wasn't the incubator but a faulty thermometer. In which case the eggs didn't hatch cause I cooled them down for too long. Losing a whole hatch of my own eggs is bad enough but I bought two dozen eggs, Delaware and Americauna, to complement my own. Losing those just added to the whole disappointment. So I should be having peeps all over the place and I have none, nada, zip, zilch.

That's how it goes sometimes. It's really nothing disastrous, more like a series of setbacks one after the other. The DaM Farm holds so many surprises and unexpected joys that I think I'm just not used to having a bunch of disappointments anymore. I can't decided if that's a good thing or not. Anyhow, onwards and upwards, pip-pip, whoot-whoot and all that rot. Disappointments never killed anybody, probably builds character...or dementia.

So Where's Winnie the Pooh?

I know living a rural life has its surprises but this getting ridiculous. This morning as I was walking through the dining room, I casually looked out the glass doors and stopped dead in my tracks. There's a dog, a boxer, in my yard. Unfortunately, loose dogs in my yard are a common enough occurance here and that is not what has me gazing outside with my mouth open. Following closely behind the dog is a pig. A little pink pig. Well, there goes the neighbourhood. As soon as I go outside, the dog takes off, the pig decides to hang around for a while.

This little pig is checking out the chicken coop. He tried for a while to get into the chicken area and has decided may-be he can get into the coop. My teenage daughter, absolutely charmed by this little piglet, promptly christened him Herbert and declared she wanted him. Fat chance, kid. You have two dogs, one cat, rabbits and chickens, all of which you ignore ninety-five per cent of the time. Forget the pig.

OK, well he's finished investigating the chicken coop so he's decided to mosey over and investigate me. I back up a wee bit. He's a charming little guy but I have a thing about personal space when it comes to pigs, even little piglet ones who should be romping around the 100 acre woods with a stuffed bear.

So now Piglet is heading home. Good-bye little pig, don't come back because you are awfully cute and sweet and may-be the idea of keeping you would be too hard to resist.

First Cold Frame Built

Over the week-end, Don built my first official cold frame. You can't really call the one I knocked together last year a cold frame, more like an experiment to nurture an inkling of an idea. I think this new cold frame looks great but what I'm really impressed with is that, except for the nails, all of it was built from Don's resourcefulness and scrounging abilities. The wood came from an old building we took down when we first moved here. I think at one point the previous owners used it as a duck house. A very sad duck house with no windows, a leaky green roof and very little room. The base was all that was left of it after we took it down and Don used that for the frame. The window part is an old window from when we replaced them in the house. Some time or another, I'd really like to paint it to match the house, probably around the same time Hades freezes over, I would imagine.

In the next little while, I think I'll start hardening my tomato plants in it. After it is finished doing that and all the plants are in the garden (what a delightful thought!), I think I'll use it to grow my potatoes, leaving the window open, of course. I'm hoping that way, those rotten little potato bugs can't find them.

Empty Nest Syndrome

I wrote a little while ago about finding a bunch of eggs and thinking I had a broody hen or two. You can read about that here. Well, Mocha sat on the eggs for two days and I thought everything was hunky-dory. On the third day, she got off the nest and started pacing by the fence to get out. She kept it up all day so that night I let her go back to the main coop. I figured if the eggs were cooled for 24 hours, they were toast anyhow. Out of the eight eggs, I was able to use 3 or 4 in baking, they passed the water test. The others were iffy so I didn't used them. Out of the eight, seven had no sign starting life. One had a little cobwebby blood threads may-be a quarter inch long. A disappointment for sure, but valuable lessons learned and I know much more about broodiness, half -broodiness and stubbornness passing as broodiness.