Pruning and Cleaning

Today was cold but pretty out.  I got the Apple trees pruned and some general clean up.

This tree had a lot of water shoots.

Seriously!

One tree worth

Besides the water shoots I took very little else out.  Just a couple of cross branches.

Then I got the strawberry bed cleaned and fertilized.

There were half a dozen runner babies which I cut loose and potted up as spares.

These plants are the Honeoye that I bought on sale last May and transplanted in late summer.  It looks like all of them survived the winter just fine.

After that we played pick'em up stix in the lawn thanks to the high winds we had.  And we got some drifts of oak leaves collected up out of the corners.

A Tale of Four Chairs

 

Remember how I said that I routinely run into these Eastlake style chairs?   Our table seats six people when all of the leaves are in it.  The seventh chair, being ruined, had resided in the attic since before we arrived.  We do have a side table and an empty spot in front of a window.  We have room for eight chairs,  I once saw a complete set of eight.  My husband and I are what collectors call "completists".  We want the whole set.  It was actually my husband who said he thought I should find an eighth chair to round out our set.

It is surprising the number of chairs you run into when you are actually looking for chairs. The nearest Antique Mall has about three dozen that I never noticed before. The Monday night auction house in the next county hauled a few dozen old project chairs out of a barn last week.  Somewhere in Northwestern PA there was a person who got it in their head to repair chairs.  And the project outlived them.  From the vague online photos I saw that one or two may be exact matches for our seven dining chairs.  To the average person, these all sort of look alike.  

Can you spot the one I'm looking for?

How about here?

As a newly minted ChairNerd I should round out my set of eight. Right?  Especially when a golden opportunity such as this presents itself.  A couple of years ago my husband was looking for a pair of oak arm chairs like you see in courtrooms, bank offices etc.  We checked this auction house's auction pics, and there were the perfect chairs.  And as I told him then I repeated now:  "when you send out a request to the Universe for chairs.  And the Universe gives you chairs.  You don't mull over whether you really need chairs or not.  You just go get the danged chairs."

 So off we went.  They were running two auctioneers in two rooms so my husband and I split up.  I figured I could get one or both chairs for under $10.  Chair #1 was in a lot of a dozen which appeared to have solid seats (after a hundred years they are all at their breaking point). We had to pay $7.50 for choice. Mission accomplished.  Chair #2 was in a pile of a dozen chairs in various states of ruin.  My husband paid $2 for choice on the ruined chairs.  

Chairs #1 and #2 are exact matches for our seven

And by the time he met back up with me and told me what he had been up to, he had also paid $1 a piece on single chairs #3 and #4 because he "felt sorry for them" and didn't want them to go on the burn pile with the other unwanted chairs.  

Chair #3 is very similar but has a perfectly round seat
#4 we call "Plane Jane" because she doesn't match anything

Chair #3 may be made of Black Walnut and has a round seat that is and inch and a half wider than our chairs.  Maybe good for larger people to save our "good" chairs?  I think I will try a different weaving pattern on it.  Plane Jane is going in our garage sale free to a good home.

And so it begins...

Preparing the Raised Beds

 This morning we got bonus weather.  After breakfast it was sixty degrees and sunny.  Not a cloud in the sky.  I got the compost pile sifted, even though it was really too wet to be a pleasant job.  The sifted material went on top of the shredded corn stalks.

This bed below, which will be planted with flowers, has almost no organic material left in the soil.  I put the rough siftings which contained a lot of shredded leaves from the lawn mower on that.

It will need to be raked a little at planting time, but the leaf component will make good mulch.

The compost tube got dumped.

The buckwheat stems were removed from the beds and put in the empty tube.

The bed is prepared for peas to be planted over the next couple of weeks.

And then the weather started to turn so we came in for lunch.

Right now we have a wicked front coming through gusting 70 mph.  The outdoor lights are on, and the house is groaning a bit.  This should wash everything clean and blow any loose leaves out of the compost.  I'm pretty happy with what I got accomplished during my bonus morning. 

Assessing the Raised Bed Soil

Now is the rainy season.  I have things I want to do outdoors, but I have to wait for drier days to do them.  Its pretty puddly out there.  The compost and soil is saturated.   All I can do today is make a To Do list.

I have turned my compost pile a few times.  Its done working and is ready to be sifted and used but I am trying to get it thawed out and fluffed a bit so it will dry enough to be sifted.  Once this compost is used on the beds, I will dump the tube full of our winter kitchen waste so I can get that working again and use it later in the summer.

 

One of my compost tubes is full of shredded leaves.  I will use the ones from the top to mulch containers, then probably mix a portion of it into the newer compost pile.

The raised beds need a little tidying up before planting.  This would be the time to test soil if I wanted to, but this year I am going to add a balanced organic fertilizer and top dress with compost.  I don't have any beds I am concerned about.  The bed above is clean and ready to plant and I will first be planting some butterhead lettuce under cover, then after the lettuce bolts I will plant the whole bed with a cover crop of buckwheat.  The birds have been sorting through the leaf mulch looking for insects.

These two beds (above and below) have old buckwheat stems from last fall.  I just chop and dropped it and since it was late in the season, the stems did not break down.  But they provided protection for the soil all winter.  Now I will lift the stems with a pitch fork and toss them into the new compost pile.

The beds below are covered with shredded cornstalks.  This is also slow to break down but I want to leave it where it is to suppress any weeds that may want to come up thru.  If I rake it it will make a mess, so I will just top dress with well sifted compost and plant my zinnia and cosmos seeds in that layer.

The strawberry plants are putting on growth and need their old leaves removed.

In fact, there are leaves to clean up in all of the corners.

Daffodils and Daylillies

We haven't set up the cold frame yet, but I have a couple of winter sowing projects already going.

The Sterlite tub contains a 1020 tray of lettuce mix and the milk jugs have Sahara Rudbeckia and Snapdragons.

The Snapdragons are up.  I see five teeny tiny plants

Indoors I have some early seedlings under lights

In the seed tray, bottom to top: Celosia, Coleus, Peppers,
tiny Mesclun mix and leftover butterhead.
In the cell pack: transplanted Tom Thumb mini Butterhead lettuce

The peppers are just getting their first true leaves and I will transplant those with the Celosia under a second light and when the lettuce gets set out I will have room to transplant the Coleus and start some tomatoes.

I'm ready for a warm, dry day to get going and in the next week or two I will be direct sowing peas, lettuce and carrots.

The Alberta Spruce and Sun Scald

The past few winters I have been fighting sun scald on one of our mature Alberta Spruce in the front landscape.  The one side that gets winter sun always dries out and burns.  The problem was first noticeable around the bottom so I started by wrapping burlap around the bottom.

But that wasn't enough so this time I used Wilt Stop on it and wrapped it from tip to toe all winter.

This was last spring's stop gap wrap.
I had it tightly bundled all this winter but didn't take a picture.

It still has a brown tinge to the east side of it.

I unwrapped it yesterday because we have a cloudy, rainy stretch coming and that will ease it into full sunshine now that the burlap is off.  I'm pretty happy with these results.  This isn't anything that it won't bounce back from.  At this age you have to stay ahead of these things.

The Alberta below I planted back in 2000 or 2001 at the house next door.  It has the same southern exposure in the winter.

This is what happens when you ignore the problem.

Our current landscaping was put in back in 2009.  They were such cute little trees.

2009

I started flipping through old photos to see how much this area has changed and matured.  Some of the perennials have changed, but the most noticeable changes are in the size of the evergreens.

We lost this pretty Lilac tree a few years ago after those hard winters.

The Lilac tree in it's decline 2020

I haven't properly replaced the tree yet.  I stuck a park bench in there for two years but this spring I have a Instant Karma Elderberry bush that I have stuck in a temporary spot and I think I will try that in there.

It should fill in and balance out the pretty Viburnum around the front.

That's the thing about landscaping with shrubs.  Every now and then they need a reset.  It isn't as easy as taking divisions from perennials.  You have to invest more money and planning into it.  We're not ready for a reset yet, but we do have to be aware that the shrubs are aging, and take as good care of them as we can to get a longer useful life out of them.

Gardening Day One

 Today the March snows have melted and the sun was shining.  It was the perfect day to spray the apple trees with dormant oil to take care of any creepy crawlies.  They will soon be budding out.  I pruned them quite hard last spring and they have put on a lot of new growth.  You can see below that there are many upright water sprouts in this one tree that need to come out.  That could be a sign of over pruning, but the tree did well otherwise.  Maybe it is due to last summer's drought stress.  This tree is in the drier of the two spots. The Gala sapling I planted last spring survived the winter well and looks like it will be the first tree to push new leaves.

The spring flowers are doing their best to brighten things up and there are even a few honey bees out and about.  I spread Milorganite fertilizer on all of the crocuses to discourage the deer.

Crocuses

Winter Aconite

This past Saturday I started some seeds indoors under grow lights.  Normally I would have been sowing peas, lettuce and carrots out in the raised beds this past week.  As part of my lower stress plan this year I am putting that off until April, which was just as well because last week was snowy and blowy and nothing like spring gardening weather.  But it is time to get the peppers started and it would be a good idea to have some lettuce transplants ready to go out.  To fill out the pepper tray I am trying some Celosia and Coleus.  I will also be seeding Celosia and Coleus out in the could frame next month along with the Marigolds and other annuals but I want to see if I can get some further along than I did last year.

First Flame Celosia and Tomb Thumb butterhead lettuce babies were awake this morning

Twenty years ago last Wednesday (beware the Ides of March) I moved into this shabby old farmhouse.  This extra chair was in the attic then, and there it stayed for lo these many years.  Baking away in the extremes of the attic, it had become as dry as an old chicken bone.   Knowing it was up there in its ruined state actually bothered me more than that one ugly chair we had at the table.  I feared if something wasn't done with it, the next people would maybe just throw it on a burn pile.

Someone must have tried to stand on it many years ago because it has a lot less wear and tear on it than the others do.  I don't know how long ago the previous owners had purchased these seven chairs.  It could have been sitting up there a mere ten years before I got here, or it could have been up there thirty years or more.  Either way, it needed a bath and it needed a lot of furniture polish.

Even if it has only been up there twenty five, thirty years or so, that's a few thousand less sittings than the others have endured.  Thus it is really in pristine condition.  Today it is almost ready to rejoin its mates.  Happy Anniversary olde chair.

Tomorrow I may get to tying it off and putting the finishing strip on it.

And then I'll see how it sits!