We've had a couple of days and nights when the cold north wind was blasting us and finding it's way through every little crack and into the house. Snowflakes were flying horizontally and some briefly stuck in places were the ground had been shaded and was cooler than most of it. The utility poles had a vertical stripe from top to bottom which lasted a whole day until the wind dehydrated it into nothing. We kept the fire going in the wood stove and stayed warm. Although outside was beckoning a few quick and necessary trips outside were enough to convince me that outside was not where I wanted to be! It seemed a lot more like January than November. Today is partly sunny with a light breeze and a forecast of 36 with something in the 20's overnight. Much better!
This morning at daylight we saw a dozen mule deer in our pasture. One was thinking about jumping the fence into the yard. I went out in bathrobe and slippers to discourage him, and soon the whole bunch had jumped over the fence into another pasture. One of those iris was uprooted again in the last couple of days. It's replanted now and after I did that I wondered if sprinkling coffee grounds over that bed would deter the deer. Of course I had just buried the kitchen compost in the garden before I thought of that possible solution. It's not as if the deer are starving, they just like variety. Our area has plenty of large ranches and farms, thousands of acres of unoccupied land and many huge haystacks plus goodies in other people's yards. Often we see them eating in hay fields after all of the hay has been harvested, right in there among the cattle that are munching on the regrowth that will never grow enough to make into hay. Mule deer are much larger than most other types and can jump most fences. Even half grown ones clear our 4 ft pasture fences with ease. The vegie garden and a small orchard of 4 trees are safe with 7 to 8 ft fences.
After our first frost when I was doing vegie garden clean up, I saved half a dozen tomato suckers to plant and grow in the greenhouse. Half of them are alive and well. I might have some winter tomatoes this year! The survival rate might have been better if I had cut them back to about 4 inches, but 3 is better than the one survivor I had last year. Now I need to prepare some pots for lettuce and beets for salad greens. And start some alfalfa seeds in a jar in the kitchen to add to salads from grocery store greens. If you buy greens in those plastic "clam shell" boxes remember that they can be used as mini greenhouses. Or for storing small tools, etc.
When I was in the vegie garden this morning I checked the soil thermometer and found that the garlic row temperature is about the same as the dry, unmulched areas. It's just above freezing 6 inches below the surface. The garlic is planted about 6 inches deep. I'm always curious about things like that. When we get a good snow cover the ground will be warmer. Even when the temperature is down around 0 if there is a few inches of snow I can clear it off and dig a hole to bury the kitchen compost. I left the soil thermometer in the ground at the end of a row so I can check the temperature periodically through the winter.
I have an oversized cardboard box that needs to be flattened and used to smother weeds in a spot where I want to put more rhubarb. My old plants have multiplied and multiplied. I have dug out a few of them over the years and given some away, planted others to grow new plants and now need to do it again in the spring. Covering a spot or two with the cardboard is step #1. Along with selling garlic I sell rhubarb, over 150 pounds this past year. All from a couple of starts I got free about 25 years ago!
Remember hearing about Johnny Appleseed, the man who carried a bag of apples seeds and gave them to homesteaders everywhere he went? Apple trees do grow from seeds and the surprise will be what I have when I plant the two that came from some grocery store apples. They were already sprouting. The variety was labeled Autumn Glory. It's fun and worth a try.
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I wonder if anybody really likes going back to standard time after being on daylight savings time since last spring. It just gets dark too early.
Over the past few days I've made good progress cleaning up a large perennial bed. It's mostly done and the worst of the weeds are gone. Yesterday I was removing small Canadian thistles that regrew after the last weeding session several months ago before the vegie garden needed me more urgently. The leaves have been frozen and are dry, crumbly and still sporting stickers. Many were on the ground getting into my knees and through those lightweight gardening gloves that somebody left here last year or the year before. They are worthless for dealing with thistles and rose bushes! The two packages of "Pinking of You" daffodil bulbs finally got planted today accompanied by strong north wind and a friendly cat who was only trying to help. That was about a 20 minute job but long enough to make my fleece band covered ears ache and my hands get all tingly even with gloves. My legs are still cold an hour later. The above mentioned gloves are also worthless for keeping hands warm. What are they good for? Well they do keep my hands reasonably clean. Today I also had to replant half a dozen of those iris under the bird feeders and know that this time the culprits were probably deer because they did leave me some fertilizer right next to the flower bed.
We've made a couple of trips down to Ontario, Oregon in the past 2 days. That is right on the border with Idaho. Yesterday we went to have our car serviced, and had lunch at Olive Garden another 30 miles down the interstate which isn't so far when we had already traveled 90. Then on the way home we stopped at Sears in Ontario to see if we could order a freezer. A few months ago, we had checked with them and learned that the large chest freezer we wanted was so back ordered the store wasn't taking orders for them. Small ones were available but we were told we might be able to order the larger size in about 3 months. Well, it was the same story yesterday but the freight delivery truck was still unloading in the parking lot and they had received 2 small chest freezers, one of which was already sold. We bought the other one and went back today with the truck to get it. We are way out of their free delivery zone and would have cost an arm and a leg to get it delivered. It was cheaper to go after it ourselves. With wintry weather coming here in the next day or two we needed to get those things done. Snow is falling in the mountains around us and on the pass just north of us, elevation about 4,100 ft.
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Yesterday the last of the garlic was planted and tucked in for winter. The rows were watered because the soil was very dry, then we mulched with straw, watered again to settle the mulch into a mat that won't blow away in the wind, then tamped it all down firmly with the back of a garden rake. My soil thermometer tells me the temperature is 41 degrees down there where the bulbs are. Wake up, little guys, it's time to grow roots! Nothing will show above ground until late March. A great horned owl watched from a nearby tree and surely knows all about it now.
After having a couple of unseasonably cold and windy days it sure is nice to have sunny, warm, calm ones. Today I laid large sheets of black plastic over a patch of Quack Grass that has rhizome roots with sharp points that will grow through a potato or an iris root and is a royal pain to try to eradicate. We already had the plastic, plus some boards and a lot of rocks to anchor it. Let the sun do it's work! Next spring I will peek and see how effective this is, and maybe will just leave the plastic in place. Yes, it's ugly. I've thought about laying a soaker hose under the plastic and making a few holes to plant squash. I'd planned to do more flower bed clean up today but needed to take advantage of the rare, calm and warm autumn day to deal with the plastic.
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Most of the garlic is in the ground. Tomorrow I will try to finish the planting, then mulch it with straw and water everything to settle the straw into a loose mat that will stay put when the wind blows. The wind blows a lot here. Yesterday and the day before were cold and windy. A mass of cold air came down through Canada, through Washington and through our area, taking about 48 hours to pass through. Temperatures got as low as 12 and mostly stayed around 25. Snow fell on the hills and mountains around us. We got enough rain to make the sidewalk by the back door wet but not enough to measure in the rain gauge. Today was fairly calm, sunny, and reached 45. Tomorrow will reach 55 by mid afternoon. Not exactly a heat wave but war, enough for me to get back to planting garlic.
Today I made bread. My batch makes 4 loaves. I buy whole wheat grain from a farm and have an electric grinder so the bread dough gets freshly ground flour. I sweeten it with blackstrap molasses. The only white flour I use is just what is on the counter when I knead the dough. Ratio is probably close to 8 cup whole wheat to about 1 cup of white. My hubby does not like bread from the store anymore. My fault, I have spoiled him. Spoiled myself, too. I started making bread about 50 years ago, sometime around 1970 when our kids were grade schoolers. At that time it was hard to find any good bread in a store. The choices were white or wheat which only had a small amount of whole grain in it and a lot of coloring to make it look brown.
Last week after planting the iris I mentioned in the last blog post something uprooted quite a few of them. I replanted. And the next morning there they were lying on top of the soil again. I left them while it was so cold and replanted them today. My first thought was that cats had romped through or been fighting there, but then I saw raccoon tracks on a patch of bare, windswept ground. The flower bed is under a bird feeder. The resourceful critter was looking for seeds. Hopefully it has moved on to another farm. The garlic was not disturbed. My garden is down the hill from the house about 200 ft, and I plant the cloves about 6 inches deep, maybe that is too deep for a critter to smell them. I didn't find tracks in the garden.
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The canning is finished! Twenty eight quarts of plums should be enough. I gave the leftovers in the box to a neighbor who is said she would dry them. It does feel good to have the shelves full and the canning kettle and jars put away. And not have any boxes of fruit waiting for my attention.
I got another load of compost, shoveled and wheelbarrowed it to the rows and my son ran the rototiller over it all. Now I can start planting. Today I finished transplanting more iris into a flower bed I cleaned over the past 2 days. The soil there is terrible, it's what came out of the excavation that became our basement. I've added better soil and compost to it over the years but the good stuff is only a few inches deep so digging the old, all the same color iris out was a hard job. Planting was the easy part except that I had to dig up iris from another place, then do the trimming and get down on my knees to plant them. Getting down is the easy part, gravity helps. Getting up is the challenge but I can still do it. Gardeners spend a lot of time on our knees! Peaches, my calico kitty helps me by taking advantage of me being down at her level, washing my face with her scratchy tongue and giving me lots of attention, and lying just where I want the next plant to go. How does she know?
The weather forecast says we will have mostly nice weather for the next few weeks. They look at the past weather patterns and decide we will probably have about the same thing again. I hope they are right because I have a lot to do outside before we get winter.
Garlic sales continue. I mailed another box today and also sold some to the co-op. I hope to be able to sell everything I don't plant but might be giving gift bags of garlic for Christmas gifts. So far I have not done that but there is always the chance.
We've had some awesome sunsets lately. This evening the sky to our west had a lot of orange and looking east I saw purple. Our dry pasture was gold. We have jagged mountains on two sides of us. The sun sets behind one row of stuck together peaks, mostly around 7,000 ft elevation. Trees stop part way up and everything above is just rock.
