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.

Grapes

I would guess that the number one reason why people start a vegetable garden would be to have access to food that tastes like they remember growing up .  Second to that would be to guarantee that the food has more nutrition and less chemicals than the ones available at the grocery store.  The number one home grown vegetable in America is the tomato .  To quote Andy Rooney "The federal government has sponsored research that has produced a tomato that is perfect in every respect, except that you can't eat it".  Therefore Americans long ago realized that they would have to grow their own slicing tomatoes if they wanted a decent BLT.  I too began gardening so that I could have the same tomatoes that I grew up eating.  That soon expanded to peas and beans and apples and has rounded out with strawberries, corn on the cob and cantaloupes.  Next up are grapes and blackberries.

Vitis Himrod White Seedless Grape

We live in New York state and New York is the third largest producer of grapes in the US.  My grandmother used to go into grape country every autumn and along with Concord and Niagara grapes she would bring back some amber colored seedless grapes that were so sweet.  I am not sure what variety they were or even that they were always the same, but they were a type of grape you will never see in the grocery store and rarely see at farmstands. 

Tickled Pink

 For years I have contemplated where I could grow some grapes.  I need a trellis, and I need to have them protected from all of our destructive and sticky fingered critters.  I finally decided that I should just go ahead and put them in one of my raised beds.  I don't need a whole vineyard, I just need enough space for a couple of vines.  When I started gardening in these raised beds, I shared them with the next door neighbors and for years was perfectly happy growing in six of the twelve beds available.  A couple of years ago I turned one bed over to more permanent biennial herbs and flowers for the pollinators and I haven't missed having the space for annual crops.  

To support grape vines I will need to put up three 4x4s and run cables between them.  Above is the sort of setup that I have been watching Garden Answer grow grapes on for a few years now.  Its nothing fancy, and I can grow two vines in a raised bed.  If, once the vines are established, it turns out the I need or want something more substantial, I can always sink posts at each corner and build an overhead trellis.  But this will be a good start.

I ordered two different kinds of grapes.  The first is the Vitis Himrod White Seedless Grape which is a New York grown variety and should do well in our climate and the second is Tickled Pink, an Arkansas grown red seedless table grape.  Last fall I also got a jump on growing some blackberries, and planted two Triple Crown Thornless Blackberry plants.  I made that decision right after the racoons found the bountiful canes full of berries that I had carefully supported and covered.  The little bugger climbed right up the canes under the cover and ate every last berry.  That couldn't have been comfortable with all of those wicked thorns which just proves the lengths that they will go to steal food.  If I want any berries for myself I will have to have a electric fence to keep the coons (and deer and bears) out and a floating row cover to keep the birds out.

  I have chosen the two west end beds which are the most difficult to water because the water hose just barely reaches to the far end of each bed.  Having a couple of permanent plants in each bed will be the best use of the space because I won't have to be watering dozens of seedling transplants three times a day.  So now all I have to do is wait for winter to be over.  I love looking forward to live plants coming in the mail.  It will mean that spring is finally coming.  It is a balmy 4F here today with a wind chill of -8F.

The Reappearance of the $1 Chair

 It has been two years since I finished caning the seats on our dining room chairs.  All this time, the remaining chair, that doesn't match our set exactly, has been sitting in the workshop gathering dust.  I have just about enough cane left over to finish it.  You watch, I will come up a few pieces short.  I finally found some ambition to get it done.  This chair has had the seat replaced before I think.  The sides are woven wrong and I doubt that a factory caner would have made those mistakes.  The chair is at least a hundred years old and that is enough time for it to have been fixed at least once already.  Whomever fixed the seat then oversprayed the entire chair with some sort of varnish.  That made the seat very brittle.

And when I tried to pull the cane off it was all stuck down to the rim.  What a mess.  It was nearly impossible to get an awl in under the binding.  It took me over an hour to break all of the old cane out and pick it out of the holes and then another hour to sand the fibers out of the varnish and get back to clean wood.

I taped off the section I didn't want to sand into and took it out to the garage.

I used a die grinder and some fine sand paper to not only remove the fibers, but round off the inner edge of the seat.  There were some sharp edges and these can cut into the cane as the seat sags.

This chair is definitely black walnut and not cherry.  A little Old English Scratch Cover and the chair look as good as new.

Caning is just like riding a bike.  Once you get the hang of it you know how to do it for life.  Today I spent two hours laying in the first three layers.  The fourth layer is my least favorite so I always start fresh on that.  The diagonals are the fun part.

My original plan, since this chair doesn't match the others perfectly, was to try weaving a Daisy Chain pattern.  It is not as strong a seat but... it would take less cane.