It’s COOL Outside!

We had rain and a cool front come through overnight. It’s 44 degrees F. outside right now with a bit of a wind, so it feels pretty chilly.

The wonderful fiber optic people came through recently hanging wire for the future. They had to cut branches out of a couple of trees in our side yard that were encroaching on the lines. When they finished, it looked like the trees had exploded or had been hit by lightning, with broken branches hanging down. They said they would neaten things up. I don’t think they decide where they go or what they do each day, so they haven’t been back.

My husband disappeared, and I went to find him. He was coming back from the shop with the chain saw – just the thing I had been trying to avoid. We are a bit long-in-the-tooth now for activities such as chain sawing and hauling big branches around. Since he was determined to handle it, I dropped what I was doing and helped him.

We worked about an hour, but made some headway. At least it looks now as if someone might have had a plan. I’m still hoping that the guys will come back and cut both of the trees down, but I won’t hold my breath.

The other thing we did recently was to prepare our raised bed, square foot planters for the winter.

(We built six 4’x4’x8″ wooden planters and put them on metal supports, kind of like tables, at about my chest level.)

I harvested the remaining onions very carefully, since the fire ants had taken up residence in the planters. It amazes me that they wanted a home so high up off the ground. Unfortunately, they were aggressive about defending what they considered their home. I had to keep hosing the planters down with bug killer, then harvesting as much as I could or weeding until they started to swarm again, over and over until the job was done.

We then re-filled the planters with Mel’s Mix – a combination of peat moss, vermiculite, and as many different kinds of compost as you can find or make. The level of this had really gone down, so it was quite a job to mix up the mix needed to top them off.

We have made this alternative soil process as seamless as possible, with big trash cans holding the ingredients of the mix, and then a used cement mixer to combine things.

We strung some wires across the remaining two planters not used this year to create the ‘squares’ we use for spacing the plants. We decided to wait until spring to replace the wooden strips that we put along the middle of each trio of planters that hold the sprinkler for the middle of each box and connect the irrigation hoses.

We put a pail in the middle of each of the boxes and then covered each box with a tarp. We are hoping this will cut way down on the weeds in the planters for when we uncover things and get ready for spring planting.