First seeds started indoors, and the Plant Hospital...

With clear skies yesterday and temps in the 70's today, it was a prime opportunity to get out and do some early spring garden prep, cleanup, and tie up some nagging loose ends from last year's gardening season.

What you see above is the area I lovingly refer to as my "plant hospital."  It's the place where the plants that I had written off as dead go when they suddenly show show signs of life come springtime.  It's also where I pot out tree seeds and volunteers from my rambling bramble collection.  So far I've "rescued" a blueberry, two elderberries, two afghani figs, and a small cadre of Cascade hops that I was pretty sure were all toast.

I had to dig up and re-pot some bramble suckers that had escaped their original pots and plantings in various places.  I've long lost the tags (some of these plants were from little root bits that remained in the soil after a flat of 4" pots had been moved), but they're all various cultivated strains of Raspberry, blackberry, and Tayberry.  They'll be fine in the pots, but I need to find a place where I can get some of them properly established without worrying about their wandering and spreading habits.

I also potted up a fair number of the paw-paw seeds that have been chilling in the fridge since last year's Ohio Paw Paw festival in the hopes to get some of them growing.  Paw paw seeds are supposed to be notoriously tricky, so this may be a long-shot... we'll see what happens.

Leah and I also got our first batches of indoor-started seeds going.  We seeded some cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and leeks.

I actually got a little sunburn on my translucent white arms today!  After thinking about being outside so much these past few dreary months, it feels amazing to actually be out there.

Learning about ollas...

Photo via threeForks

Just found this post on threeForks from a few years back about a concept I've never seen before called ollas.  Basically it's using buried unglazed terra cotta vessels as a slow-release watering device in your garden.  Seems quite simple and efficient.

I've got a ton of terra-cotta pots out in the white barn, so it'd likely be a zero-cost experiment.

Keyhole Gardening bed mimics Hugelculture...

Someone over on permies.com posted a link to this interesting article about using (what amount to) hugelculture principles to make a drought-resistant keyhole planting bed.

Good read!

First day in the garden!

My dad and I were talking over dinner Friday night about projects, and how many I tend to take on, and how many is too many.  My mom perhaps gives me too much credit (as moms so often do) by using the analogy of Michaelangelo (the painter, not the ninja turtle) whom apparently had a tendency to take on too many projects and had to be prodded to finish older ones he had already begun.  This is me to a "T", but I think that's probably where the similarities end.

However, this weekend proved itself to be an excellent example of why it can be beneficial to have multiple irons in the fire.  Timing, weather, temperature, and circumstances often keep you from being able to work on one project or another, and having multiple projects going on at once means you'll always have something to do.

The basement is coming along nicely.  We spent the first half of the weekend chipping, scrubbing, and mopping the layers of sediment off the concrete.  It looks like they had a small flood at some point when their sump pump failed.  The previous owners (a very nice elderly couple) never used the basement for much, and so they never bothered cleaning up afterwards.  But we wanted to paint the floor, and so we needed it squeaky clean.

We rented a floor buffer/polisher and some scouring pads.  It took the better part of an entire day to get the floor clean enough to paint.

Over the course of Saturday evening and Sunday morning, we painted the floor and got a second coat of paint up on the drywall sections of the wall.  Then we headed upstairs to let things downstairs dry.

With some bonus time on our hands, amidst chilly winds and the occasional toss of snow flurries, I actually got out and about in the garden today.  I weeded the garden beds for the first time this season.  We patched some muddy ruts in the driveway with gravel left over from the greenhouse floor fill.

I prepped the "stinging nettle beds" along the sides and back of several buildings, getting them ready to harvest the nettles when they start coming up.  I also did a number with a machete on the on the wild grape plant that consistently overtakes my giant raspberry bush behind the barn in the hopes that I can actually get some fruit off it before the birds eat it this year.

Also got to digging down in a few of my raised beds, giving the ol' Hugelculture practice a try.  I dug out the garden bed about a foot below original ground level, then buried a fair bit of punky wood bits leftover from the wood shed and some charcoal from the fire pit.  Mixed in some compost and coffee grounds with the soil when I covered it back up with soil.

My understanding is that Hugelculture pits can be dicey in high-clay situations like we have here in Central Ohio, so I want to give this a try before I incorporate such practices in all the beds.

My back hurts.

My lovely, brainy and talented girlfriend has just started blogging over at http://foxgloveandfolksongs.blogspot.com/

Drop by and check out what she/we are up to.

We've been graveled!

Hooray!

Friend Chris of next-door-neighbor Bryon stopped by yesterday with his big yellow backhoe and saved me at least an entire weekend's worth of backbreaking manual labor by moving the entire giant pile of gravel from the tail end of the driveway to the interior of the greenhouse.

Watching the guy maneuver a large vintage piece of heavy machinery with inch-by-inch precision was pretty awe-inspiring.  Now all we have to do is rake the gravel out to an even bed and we'll be good to go to start moving in the planting benches!

Would have loved to snap pics (staring down the scoop of the thing as the gravel poured out was pretty neato), but I was too busy helping Chris know where to dump the gravel and madly shoveling out space for the next scoop to be dumped.

I owe Chris a big one, and I'm beyond fortunate to have neighbors and local folks who are willing to go out of their way to help pitch in on a neighbor's project.  I hope I can repay the favor in kind.

Pics of the greenhouse with all trusses installed....

A combination of lousy weather and camera difficulties mean it's been a while since we got the last of the roof trusses up on the greenhouse, and I still haven't managed to get a good picture during daylight hours.

Today presented the opportunity, and I managed to snap a few.  Next we'll be putting up the walls, then the roof and polycarbonate panels, then the siding, doors, and finishing touches.  Can't wait to get this bugger built!