Seedling Transplanting

 Winter returned this week, but I don't mind much because...

It is sunny and warm in the workshop

Today was a transplanting day.  After I start my seeds in bulk in smaller 6 packs, one variety per cell so I can fit everything up under the low light fixture and on a heat mat, I have to transplant them into larger trays of cells packs.

I use my tidy tray as a workspace on the counter and have a separate tray for dampening the potting mix.  I have used Pro-Mix soil for my transplants for several years.  I like the dry, compressed bales of Vegetable and Herb mix.  Last year I purchased two regular bags, not compressed, because of cost if I remember correctly, and I was not at all happy with it.  Despite the fact that it was the same formula Organic Vegetable and Herb Mix, it was dampened in the course of production and the darn stuff never dried out.  Ever.  I had all kinds of damping off problems, and the plants were telling me that whatever organic fertilizer was supposed to be mixed in was severely lacking.  I suspect it may have already leached out with the moisture.  I ended up having to repot several things and dumped what was left of the new soil in my compost. 

I have my sprayer full of water, and my fruit tree sprays ready to go when I get the right weather

These ornamental pepper plants were seeded on March 1st.  Some of my other seedlings have already been transplanted, but peppers are slow.  The best time to transplant is when the plants have their first true leaves.

The Cotyledons are the first leaves as they germinate out of the seed.  This stage is just right.

You don't want to wait too long because the root systems will be harder to stuff down a hole.  The easiest stage to transplant is one hair root, but the tipping point is very quick. 

These peppers are sharing a tray with micro and dwarf varieties of tomatoes that were transplanted a week ago but are also slow to develop.  

I noticed a fungus gnat flying around so I put out some traps and caught three right away and two more shortly afterwards.

I am about halfway through seeding this year.  I just started some Marigolds today and in another week or two I will start my indeterminate tomato plants.  So far I am quite happy with my new grow lights.  I am still 6 to 8 weeks away from planting out.

Early Spring Chores

It's time to start the spring garden chores.  

I removed the dead leaves from the strawberries as the new growth is coming in.  I gave them a shot of fertilizer.  Then I sprinkled some more pansy seeds in there to fill in the bare spots and compete with the weeds.

There is already a Citrus Mix of orange, yellow and white pansies.  This white plant is blooming already.  The honey bees are out looking for the crocuses.  This time of year I have to juggle my wire cloches around taking them off of lower risk plants and protecting the yummy Crocuses from both deer and rabbits.  I also go around sprinkling Milorganite fertilizer on anything with new growth.  Critters don't like the smell and it helps to get a few more days out of unprotected crocus flowers and protects the new shoots of Hosta as they emerge.

The Snowdrops and Winter Aconite (yellow) are blooming.  Next will be Hyacinths then Daffodils.

Time to empty the compost tube.  We drag it out to the center and lift it off the pile.  This will still need to be turned for a couple of months to finish composting before it is ready to use.  This has accumulated from last June until fall when I started the tall tube.  The tall tube will be added to until the pea plants come out. 

I removed one layer of surrounding netting from the Pear tree to make it easier for me to get in there and spray with dormant oil and copper fungicide.  Everything is pruned, now I just need a dry day without a March wind so I don't end up wearing it.  I will post about the pruning when that is done.

The other thing I have done is to check on the woody stemmed shrubs. About half of them had lower branches break off from the weight of the snow pinning them down.  I trim the ragged edges cleanly and check for any splits that need to be cut back.  Next we will start edging and mulching.  The lawn is firm enough, but the mulch pile is still frozen.

 

Done Messin' Around - Grow Lights

 Seed starting season is here at last.  I finally took the plunge and ordered a grow light rack. I’ve only had table top lights before and spent a lot of energy scheduling planting times, juggling lights and moving things around. I needed something that freed up my workspace and had more potent lights. I also wanted something that had a little style to it so it could come into a living space without looking too massive or industrial.   I was going to order one from Gardeners Supply but the one I wanted has been out of stock all winter. So I went with the closest thing on the internet and ordered from Vego.

Below is the tabletop grow light I have had for ages.  It is still sold by Park Seeds and takes 20 watt florescent tubes.

24" Florescent Table Top Light

I started my growing career in the dining room with this light and I added a second light soon after.

When that got a little overwhelming with soil in the house, I moved everything to the basement where I could spread out and make a little more of a mess.  The past couple of years I have moved out to our heated workshop.  It has a long counter top and I added a Oslo frame with a high efficiency 24 watt LED light and then some 10 watt LED under counter lights from Amazon.  The Oslo is well made and collapses easily for storage.  I was going to add the four tiered system, but it is still out of stock.

It is so handy to have the plants growing in the workshop.  I have room to store everything there and I can easily set flats outside in the sunlight, or carry them to the cold frame without the hassle of negotiating the basement steps.  But as you can see, I need my work surface to not be full of grow lights and trays of plants.

When it became clear that Gardeners was not going to have the Oslo system restocked in time, I consulted the Google Machine and came up with a similar system from Vego.

I have been aware of Vego for a few years but had never ordered from them.  They are, apparently, very popular with Millennials and their big product is the metal raised bed.  I watched a few reviews on YouTube and this system appeared to check all of my boxes AND was less expensive and on sale. 

Four Tiers

LED Lights

Compact

Customizable

Attractive

It arrived this past weekend.  The packaging was amazing.  Not a speck of plastic or styrofoam in the whole box.  Everything was corrugated or kraft paper, which of course, makes it compostable or at least recyclable.  The steel is a good, heavy gauge, and the powder coating is excellent.  It snaps together with pins and is very sturdy.  Even the trays are well made, and those can be hard to manufacture without warping.  So I am very pleased with it.  

It comes with four 20 watt LED lights that are magnetic and self timing.  The lights have three modes which you choose based on the type of plant you are growing and its light requirements.  If you are starting seeds, you put the light on seed starting mode and move the tray up closer to the light.  At the end of the first day you can put each light on sleep mode and it will turn off for eight hours and then come back on in the morning and repeat the cycle of 16 hours on and 8 hours off.  That way you do not have to purchase a separate timer.

I set my seeds trays on a heat mat and even though the thermostat in the room is set at 55F, during the day with the combination of heat mat and lights, the air temperature near the trays is 69F and the seeds are sprouting after three days.  Right on time.  Now I just need to move my tubs of dahlia tubers somewhere else cool and turn the room heat up to 60 for everything to grow on without a heat mat.

See the little green sprout?  That's a Dahlia.

So far I have micro tomatoes, ornamental peppers, sage, two colors of border zinnias and dahlia seeds starting.  Next will be lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage.

Today was 55F in the shade with sunshine and no breeze.  We spent time outdoors getting gravel out of the lawns, leaves out of the corners, and sticks picked up.  I cleaned about a third of my strawberry bed and Friday I plan to prune the apple trees.  Garden season has begun!

Out Looking for Trouble

 We finally had a pleasant day with no snow pack so I could go out and look around for winter damage in the garden and landscape.  We have had such weighty snow that everything is smooshed down.  So smooshed in fact that some of my bulbs are pushing new growth up through leaves.

Daffodils coming through Verbascum leaves

The best news is that there is no vole damage.   Last year I had a vole or mouse nesting under the deck which ate all of the roots off of my Prima Ginger Echinacea plants.  I took steps to block them out, and it looks like we did not have a nest under the deck this year.  No damage. 

The Primroses have buds and a few blooms on them.  

Once they get a little air and sunlight they will bloom.  They will be in their prime in early April.

In addition to Primroses, I have a couple of Hellebores that I have managed to keep alive.  I wish that our garden centers would bring these in as perennials so I could plant some more established plants instead of bareroot.  They always look like heck this time of year, but this one is looking pretty darn nice by my garden standards.

Below is the dream they sell you... but it takes years to get them established like that.  I get a bloom or two, but they have not yet been nice enough to bother photographing.  ...someday....

Some of my Heuchera plants look pretty darn nice.

Heuchera Changeling

It is time to prune and spray the fruit trees.  I just need a couple of days of nice weather.  This tree always has a lot of water sprouts in it.  I actually enjoy the pruning process and look forward to it each spring.  The spray part is sort of a hassle, but the pruning is one of the first rights of spring.

Garden time is just around the corner.

Daisy Chain Caned Chair

 I have finished the last chair and used up my leftover cane.  I'm really pleased with this one.  It will now take the place of honor under the bedroom window where I can admire it for awhile.  The deeper red finish of the wood looks nice with our bedroom furniture.  I guess now I am done caning chairs until one of the three dining room chairs that still have their original cane starts to break down,

I followed instructions that I found on the internet. Daisy and Button Pattern Caning Instructions. These instructions were laid out by Wayne Sharp who is a member of two of the caning Facebook pages that I frequent. This is all I could find as far as instructions without purchasing books to see what they had to say and I spent a good deal of time on the web just looking for examples to compare my work to.  I found very few photos and none that had round (or in this case, nearly round) seats.  Apparently round seats are the most difficult to weave.  Well, I learned on harp shaped seats so it wasn't a big jump to the round seat.  The straight sided seats with fewer holes do look a lot easier.  Maybe someday I'll do an "easy" one.

This is what the unbound, but fully woven pattern should look like.

The plan is... to layout the locations of your diagonal cross overs and mark them with twist ties.  I went ahead and wove the first four steps of the cane pattern which is the same for all patterns.  The dreaded fourth step where you have to weave up and down through the seat wasn't even all that bad.

Online Example

At this point I notice that because of the number of holes on my rim (80), Wayne's chair has about 40 intersections while mine is going to have 60!  I did this on the computer first because my chair does not have one middle hole, it has a pair.  So first I chose the one to the left as my center and when I was done decided that the daisies would be too far away from the upper left corner and too close to the lower right corner.

My Chair in computer mock up - not happy with the centering

I shifted all of the markings over one row to the left.  This is better.  It looks "centered".  I also marked the end holes as a target to aim for with my tails.

I had both a photo and verbal instructions to follow...

Always run the cane OVER THE VERTICAL and UNDER THE HORIZONTAL in this step. When you get to a Daisy marker ALTERNATE going OVER ONE & then UNDER THE NEXT intersection. So you have to keep two things in mind:

• the over/under of the verticals & horizontal runs
• alternating over/under the daisy locations.

The alternating over/under of the Daisy run will give you a “squiggly” or curved line. I found that if the cane was NOT “squiggly” I had probably missed something & had to redo. Such is the learning process.

I ran that through my brain and it came back with the reaction "Does Not Compute".  The photo was not clear enough even after I enhanced it, so I used the computer again to trace each diagonal cane with a color so I could see what it went over and what it went under.  In drawing these lines out with my mouse I actually began to get the feel of the pattern.  

The first ten or twenty minutes with the cane were a bit tense.  After a few false starts I got one diagonal in.  The second one of the pair was easier.  Then it went well.  Sometimes, due to variations in the width of space between canes, I got a bit confused but all I had to do was trace that first successful pair to get back on track.  When pulling diagonals, you always start in the center where the weave is still loose to get used to the pattern.  I love "pulling cane" through the diagonals.  It still amazes me how the cane slides in like it was meant to be there.  I quickly found what I expected - because of the squiggle, the cane will not pull.  You have to weave more like step 4 and only "pull" your slack through two rows at a time, cross over, and then pull two more rows.  I finished the first direction of diagonals in two 1 hour sessions.  I sort of savored the process because it is something I really enjoy, and I wanted to make this unique chair as perfect as I could.

The next day I spent about an hour and was moving along quite nicely when I got a bad strand of cane that wanted to snap every time it was flexed or pulled.  I did my best to use the broken pieces to fill in the shorter runs and quit for the day.  I was afraid to waste even a foot of cane. The pattern was becoming evident and I was pleased with the overall look.

Pretty good Squiggles

The diagonals took me a total of four hours instead of the usual six.  I am still slow compared to other caners.  No doubt the number of holes and width of cane chosen has an effect on overall weave time.  This pattern is quick to weave and a lot of fun once you get the hang of it. 

When I finished the Daisy Chains I had enough cane left to do the edge binding but not enough to fill in the diagonals to create the sturdier Daisy and Button pattern.  I found that taking a look at the photo later on highlighted a few changes that I wanted to make to the holes I chose for my tails before I locked them in forever.  The top edge and bottom edge are both symmetrical which pleased me a lot.

  Because of the closeness of the drilled holes, there is quite a bit of cane in this chair which filled in the pattern and made this seat look a lot less airy and unfinished than it might have.

And here is is finally finished.

It turned out really well.  I can still judge my own work.  I am not very practiced at binding the edge and it tends to roll a little when it should be perfectly flat.  You get a lot more practice weaving than you do with this last step.  Whomever drilled the holes for this seat must have sneezed or hiccupped or something as he went around the upper left edge.  The holes wander a bit and they are the worst in that area.  The goal was to use up the cane leftover from the other chairs.  I have two feet of cane and some binding left.  Whew!  That was close!

I brought it in and put it in our bedroom.  We have a few extra of these Walnut chairs that are scattered around the house and I have had my last chair under this window where I can admire it for the past two years.  This chair, being a deeper, richer red than the other chairs, looks nice with my cherry furniture.

After staring at the pictures and discussing my experience with other caners (many people are curious because it is not a pattern you see very often) I did find something that was bugging me...

The center rim with the wide open rectangles kept reminding me of bucked teeth.
And once you see it you cannot unsee it.

It was not really a glaring problem when you looked at the chair in passing, but the more I looked at the photo, the more I saw it when I walked by it.  So I snipped a scrap of cane and worked it in there.

It wasn't easy to get in there so it won't be falling out on its own.

Now I'm happy with it.  

Quick Check In

We have been working on miscellaneous indoor projects over the past couple of weeks.  Mainly I am trying to finish the chair so I can clear that out of the workshop and set up for seed starting.   

One project we completed was adding two narrow shelves to our blank bedroom wall.  This is for some of my horse related collectibles.  We've been talking about doing it for several years now.  The board is the last long plank left from a tree cutting project over 35 years ago.  It came from a red oak tree my husband had to cut when he built the house next door in 1988 where he lived when we met.  The rest of the lumber has been used in many projects over the years, most notably the face frames of the kitchen cabinets in this house in 2004.  It had to be sanded and cut to length and sealed.  This wall was once the outside wall of the house before someone added the bedrooms on in the 19teens or so.  It is one inch thick Hemlock tongue and groove and even after it was pre-drilled it was rock hard and impervious to screws.  

These shelves are amazing.  You could do chin-ups on them and nothing jiggles when you walk by unlike nearly every other display surface in this house.  I was surprised to find, when we had to remove one screw and try again, that ancient Hemlock is still sappy and smells of fresh pine.  My husband's grandparents purchased this house over 100 years ago and these bedrooms were already added on at that point.  Now all of my dustable shelf sitters are in a state of flux as I try to optimize my space and get collections grouped together.

I have created a craft station in the corner of our dining room.  This was a result of the egg ornament project.  I hate having projects spread out all over the dining room table and this little side table tends to be a catchall of things that need dealing with.  So I set everything up over here trying to have both spaces more purposeful.  

Most of my supplies fit in the drawer and the ornament tools and the sewing machine tools fit in the little toolbox which I decorated with Singer Featherweight Sewing Machine decals.  I have been buying trim and jewelry pieces and trying out ornament designs for new Push Pin Ornament creations.  

I will start on an idea then realize I need something else so I shop and those new arrivals spark additional new ideas.  I am about at the point of storing these away until next fall when the Christmas decorating spirit strikes again.  I would like to add a work station self like you use to raise a computer monitor along the back of this table.  That will probably be another wood working project so it fits the available space correctly.

And finally there is the $1 chair project.  I am one step away from being done.  I need a block of at least two hours to put the binding around the edge because once you start that you can't stop and I only have enough cane to do it once with no mistakes.  I will write a blog about the chair, but in the mean time, here is a sneak peak.