First off, after I posted earlier today, I found a dead bird outside on the patio. It must have hit the sliding glass door and died. So I grabbed a piece of newspaper and wrapped the poor thing up. Then I grabbed a shovel and burried it in the compost bin. I've read that you can compost small animals so it should decompose over the winter.
The cool thing about it was when I dug the hole at 8:00 AM there was a great deal of steam pooring out of it. Yay, the grass clippings did the trick! I also snapped a pic of the compost cover a week after the fall storms had played havoc with my hoop covers. Good thing is that the cover is doing fine.
Well, as expected, today was a very busy day. We spent most of the day preparing to paint my folks new house. Prep work is 75% of the battle we figured, since one of the 4 bedrooms got painted in 1/10th the time it took to prep it. Tomorrow will be more of the same, so no gardening at the Sinfonian residence. I will be working in the yard a bit tomorrow (at my folks place). Seems they have a mound of dirt hilled up the side of their house and it's leaking water into their garage when it rains. So I'll be digging a trench to get the dirt and water away from the house. Next spring we'll probably level the hill, but for now it's a stop-gap measure.
It wasn't all work at my folks place. They called it a day early to go pick up paint for tomorrow, so I got home with 45 minutes to spare before dark. First off, I checked the cantaloupe to see if it needed more water. Much to my displeasure, the blight from the one plant had spread to the other two, killing any hopes for my cantaloupe maturing.
Not that I'd held out much hope considering how late I planted the seeds Judy gave me. Next year I'll plant earlier. That and next time I see blight on a plant I'll yank it immediately or move it well away from any other plants. I should have learned from my tomatoes and beans. /sigh.
After that, I started working on my hoop covers. I'm not sure the next time I'll have to set them up and I wanted to get them in place before the weather turns foul next week. So I started by adding the top bar connecting all the hoops together. I didn't have time so close to dusk to drill holes and find bolts to connect them properly, so I just used twisty ties for now. I can go back later if these don't hold. After that was done, I had my wife help me put the plastic over the hoops. It seems I've got more than I need for bed #1 and far less than I need for bed #3. I wonder if I can cut some of the plastic off bed #1 and somehow attach it to the bed #3 plastic. It's not enough extra on 1 to re-cover 3, but if I could somehow connect the two, it would work fine. Can you tell I'm too cheap to go waste another $14 on 25 more feet of plastic to cut a new one?
For now the back of bed #3 is open against the garage. Not great for keeping heat in, but the cukes are pretty much done as is. I just haven't had the time to sort through the tangled mess of vines to harvest the cukes. I did notice though, that against powdery mildew and the weather there are actually new cukes forming. Boggles the mind. I'm definitely growing them again next year, especially if we like the pickles.
Here's a pic of us just starting to put the plastic over the hoops. We lost light pretty quick after that and none of the pictures came out. As it is the picutre could have had more light. Sorry. Gives you a feel of what I was dealing with, hehe.
Speaking of lighting. I decided to try to change the light bulb in the garden fixture. We've never turned it on because until the garden as created we never went back here other than to get between the back yard and the front. Even then more often than not we would go around the house, hehe. So after I found a light bulb, I wasn't surprised to find that the burned out bulb was rusted or otherwise frozen sold, locked in the fixture. I don't think I can get it out without breaking the bulb. For safety reasons we may just hold off until my dad and I have time to replace the whole fixture. It would be really good to get light back there, even if the fixture is partially blocked by the chimney it is behind. Stupid place to put it if you ask me. In a perfect world it would be under the upstairs window above bed #2 (the bed in the foreground above). We'll see, maybe we'll move it. Doubt it, but maybe.
Well, time to go read more replies from folks I've sent messages to to see what they did in their gardens today. I'm gardening vicariously through them, hehe. It's the next best thing to being out there myself.
Enjoy your garden (for me)!
To bad about the melon but with the cold weather setting in it was probably done for anyway, good thing there is always next year.
ReplyDeleteIf you have any of that pvc pipe left you can reroute your light with that. They sell junction box covers at home centers that the pvc will connect into and you can send it any were you want it to go.