Garden progress

Right now, with spring fully upon us, we have any number of projects yanking us in different directions. However we're focusing on one very big and very important project at the moment: The garden.

We installed about half the garden beds two summers ago, but nothing since then. And even those beds weren't fully planted. Why? Because we didn't have the garden fenced against deer. The things I did plant (such as strawberries) had to be heavily cloched with deer netting, and even then the deer learned they could press their faces against the netting until plants poked through, then eat down what they could. (This –  THIS! – is why we're planning on installing ten foot fences around the garden. Eight feet simply isn't enough. Not taking chances!)

This year is when we plan to complete the first phase of the garden. I saw "first phase" because we're giving ourselves the option of literally doubling the size of the garden at some future point, should the need arise. But for now, we plan to have 35 garden beds in four rows (three rows of nine beds, one row with eight beds, leaving a space to install some solar panels we purchase second-hand a few years ago, and which we hope will work to charge our Bluetti battery. More on that when the project happens.)

So, once the ground was firm enough to drive on, we got busy. The first thing we did was remove the cattle panels we had used to enclose the garden area against the cows for the last year. (The cows are currently in the sacrifice pasture.) These four-foot-high panels were ineffective against deer, but fine for keeping the cows out. Since we carved the long, narrow garden area out of a section of the pasture next to the house, protecting it against the cows was imperative.

While I worked on disassembling the fencing, Don opened the pasture gate and brought in the tractor with the rototiller attachment on the back. This way he could churn together the three elements we use to fill garden beds – dirt, compost, sand – and pile it up.

Then Don started weed-whacking the other half of the garden to knock down the vegetation.

While he worked on that, I pulled together a new roll of heavy-duty weed cloth. This is one of the many purchases we made over the last few years in anticipation of such projects, and now that we're on a strict budget, we're beyond grateful for the resources we bought ahead.

We rolled out the weed cloth the length of the garden.

This cloth comes doubled over, so we unfolded it once it was cut to length.

See the hose bibs sticking up? We installed those two years ago for the future drip irrigation system (they're placed to fit at the end of each garden bed). We had to fit the cloth over those.

To help with this, we pinned the edge of the cloth with metal stakes to hold things in place. 

Then we each took a pair of scissors and went down the row, feeling the hose bibs and making X-shaped cuts in the cloth to let the bibs poke through.

Here's the progress so far. We need to trench and lay irrigation hose on the right-hand side for the last row of garden beds, but that won't happen yet.

With that task completed, it was time to bring in gravel. This not only anchors the weed cloth, but it provides a drainage base for the garden beds. By the way, piles of gravel are yet another resource we purchased last year.

We kinda rolled the side of the weed cloth in while Don moved gravel so the cloth wouldn't get damaged by the tractor tires.

He spaced the gravel loads wide enough to make about a one-rock-thick layer once everything was spread out. Spreading gravel with a rake and shovel is exhausting. It also let us know where Don needed to add more gravel to fill in black spots.

After this, we carried in the nine garden beds Don had constructed last summer, and which have been stacked and waiting this whole time. We positioned these beds in front of each hose bib.

Because we've been having some issues with the beds bowing outward, Don installed a heavy-duty wire brace inside each bed.

He drilled a thin hole through each center rib and threaded the wire through, stapling it down. We've had no problems with beds actually breaking, but we figure this will relieve some of the outward pressure.

Then it was time to start filling the beds. Here's the first of the mounds of dirt/sand/compost Don churned up.

He scooped up a bucket at a time with the tractor, and brought it over to each empty bed. For obvious reasons, it's essential to fill the inner beds with soil before we put the last row of beds in place. (In other words, to fill the beds as we go.)

Once the beds were filled, we took a break from infrastructure so I could get some stuff planted. Some of the older garden beds had been cannibalized of their soil to top off other beds (soil tends to settle), so I needed to get those beds refilled. To do that, I cannibalized soil from the newer beds, since Don can top them off with the tractor later on.

Of our original 17 beds, four already had strawberries planted in them, and five had been planted with garlic last fall. Here is the garlic...

...and at the other end, four strawberry beds, cloched with deer netting until such time as we have the permanent perimeter fence installed.

This left eight beds, which I wanted to plant with potatoes.

Yesterday I pushed through and got everything done. I topped off the beds with dirt and raked them smooth. Then I pulled out some crates of potatoes harvested last fall which had been stored in our pantry. They were comically overgrown.

I planted three rows of seven potatoes – 21 potatoes – in each bed.

I laid them out first...

...before digging them in deeply.

The actual planting didn't take long; but by the end of the day, after all the toil of weeding the beds, topping them with dirt, then planting all the potatoes ... well, I was wiped.

But I managed to accomplish another task that was overdue: Planting seedlings.

I'd been meaning to do this for a couple weeks, and finally got around to it. I'm kinda late, but hey, it's been a busy spring. (Visiting my parents was more important.)

I planted 50 onion seeds, 34 paste tomatoes, 16 broccoli, 2 beefsteak tomatoes, and 16 sweet peppers.

The rest of the seeds can be direct-seeded once the beds are completed and the weather permits.

So that's our garden progress so far. Don is engaged in building the remaining beds for the final row. Once we have the area rocked in and the beds filled, we'll install the permanent perimeter fence and breath a sigh of relief that the deer won't be able to decimate anything we plant. Onward!

Product Review Monday

For this week's book review, how about a little fun? Most readers know I love books, and therefore I'm also a sucker for books about book collecting. Over the years I've purchased a number of coffee table-sized books with beautiful photos depicting book collections. Some of these books are great, some are not so great.

This one is my favorites: "At Home with Books," by Estelle Ellis and Caroline Seebohm.

If you drool over the home libraries of serious book collectors, this is the volume for you.

Don's recommendation this week is a power stapler. He had a project that required him to crawl under the house to install additional electrical wiring. The wires, of course, had to be secured to the underside of the house, but it was impossible to swing a hammer under those conditions. As a result, he was dreading the task.

As he put it, "If you've ever had to crawl on your back under the house or in another cramped space, stapling up electrical wiring while trying to swing a hammer with just inches of clearance, you'll understand the value of this tool." Add to this mix that, as a 67-year-old man, his interest in such physical gymnastics is just about zero.

So he purchased this tool, and wow ... just wow. It worked beautifully.

These are the crown staples the tool uses.

This stapler is a game-changer when it comes to working in tight conditions. Of course, a cramped space is only one of its many applications, but that was the original reason behind its purchase. The tool came highly rated, and Don can confirm it lives up to its promises. 10/10 would recommend.

(Obligatory disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Affiliate, if you purchase through those links, we earn a small commission.)

Happy stapling!

Frugal (sort of) computing

Don turned on his computer the other morning ... and it didn't start. Muttering, he poked and prodded and fidgeted and finally concluded that his six-year-old computer had finally bitten the dust.

Fortunately he had foreseen this very event, and had an identical model (he uses a desktop) wrapped and in storage. It took a few hours to get it set up and running, files transferred, etc., but now his new computer is working perfectly. I should specify that we both purchased backup computers (I use a laptop) a couple years ago. They were inexpensive because we purchased refurbished Windows 7 machines. (Cue the wails as techno-savvy readers point out Windows 7 is no longer supported. Yeah, we know.)

Interestingly, Older Daughter's five-year-old computer also started to go on the fritz. It didn't completely die all at once, but it was dying, so she knew she needed to get another unit before it bit the dust. Unlike us, Older Daughter is more technologically savvy. She uses Windows 10 and has gaming components. Rather than purchasing a new unit that would cost a whole lot of money, she decided to build her own, which would cost about half of what a comparable pre-built unit would cost.

What followed was a lot of research, including asking questions of computer geeks in online forums as well as watching loads of how-to YouTube videos. She ordered the various components she needed, and a couple days ago she took over the kitchen table and got to work building her new computer.

I can't even begin to express how impressed I was by this undertaking. I cannot fathom doing anything similar.

Throughout the building process, she wore a grounding bracelet clipped to the metal frame. Apparently even the tiniest spark of static electricity can short out a component, so she wasn't taking any chances.

She spent hours on this task. Apparently it's highly recommended to build the working components outside the frame (which makes sense) to make sure everything works. It if does, it's disassembled and reassembled inside the frame.

When she tested the system outside the frame, she was delighted to find it worked.

Then came the task of building the unit inside the frame.

She finished this step fairly late in the evening, so she took her newly built computer into her room and plugged it in. And ... it worked! Over the next day, she put it through its paces and it functioned perfectly. Then she was able to transfer her files, her games, her photos, and other data. (Both Don and Older Daughter routinely back up their files, by the way. My nagging in that regard has been effective.)

Here's her fully-assembled new computer:

And here's her dolled-up computer area, with her original monitor:

Frugal (sort of) computing.

Fencing the sacrifice pasture

A couple weeks ago, Don and I completed an arduous task we'd meant to do last year: Fencing a sacrifice pasture.

A sacrifice pasture, essentially, is a section of land on which livestock can be housed during times they can't or shouldn't be on the regular pastures. This includes winter months and/or months in early spring to prevent regular pastures from being overgrazed while still in the young-growth stage. In our case, since we have much less acreage than our old homestead, we have to be careful not to let the cows eat too much early grass before the pastures have a chance to grow lush and thick.

It's called a "sacrifice" pasture because, let's face it, it's going to get trashed. In our case, we have about half an acre that's too steep and wooded for any other purpose, so we wanted to fence it for a sacrifice pasture. (You can see the barn at the top of the hill.  The fenced-in corral is to the left of the barn.)

This section of land had never been properly fenced (just three raggedy strands of barbed wire by past owners), so we needed to make sure it was secure for the cows. Nor was it a convenient rectangle, but an odd shape with five uneven sides. The trouble is, the grade is so steep that it's incredibly difficult to get anything heavy up and down the slope, such as the fencing itself. Using the tractor was out of the question. In short, it promised to be a very arduous task.

We started by assembling the tools and materials we needed, including T-posts. Groan, carrying T-posts all the way down that slope wasn't something we were looking forward to.

We gathered the rest of the tools we needed and put them in a wheelbarrow. To get the wheelbarrow down that slope, we ended up going downhill switch-back style. Near the bottom, where we were starting the fencing process, we had to brace the wheelbarrow against tree trunks to keep it from tipping sideways.

The next difficulty was transporting the field fencing itself. A 330-foot roll of field fence is heavy, on the order of 190 lbs. What we did was roll it out and measure off 100 feet, which brought the weight down to a bit under 60 lbs., then re-rolled it. Still heavy, but with two of us carrying it, at least manageable.

And, of course, for the fencing we needed at the bottom of the slope, we simply carried the fencing rolls into the section and let 'em go. Whee! They bounced downward at faster and faster speed until they crashed into a tree, at which point we climbed down behind them, repositioned the rolls, and let them go again. In this manner, at least getting the fencing to the bottom was fairly easy. (For those wondering why we didn't simply drag the entire 330-ft. roll into the field and do this, it's because a 190-lb. roll could easily crash through the fragile fencing already in place at the bottom of the pasture, cross the road, go into our neighbor's field, and keep going. That would be the stuff of cartoons, wouldn't it?)

We started the fencing process by locating the boundary pins between ours and our absentee neighbor's property. Then we ran a string along the boundary.

Then we dropped T-posts at 12-foot intervals along the string.

While carrying the T-posts downhill was a hassle, actually pounding them into the ground was one of the easier tasks. The ground is beautifully soft this time of year, and it took just a few whacks to get the posts properly installed.

Then we stretched out the field fence, loosely draping it over the T-posts to hold it in place until we could tighten it.

Once the fencing was tightened, we wired it to the T-posts in three spots: top, center, and bottom.

It took a couple of days of hard work, but at least we had two sides of the pasture properly fenced. The third side was the boundary fence with one of our grazing pastures, so it was already done.

What remained was the fourth and fifth sides, over a small ridge and on an even steeper slope. We didn't need to install T-posts on this side, merely to reinforce it with field fencing, but it was a daunting task on so steep an incline.

Once again we unrolled stretches of fencing, but this time in 50-foot sections rather than 100-foot, for easier carrying. We wouldn't be able to just let the fencing roll to the bottom.

This time, however, we had one advantage: We could load the tools and equipment onto the tractor and drive it to a flat spot behind the barn at the top of the slope. While we still had to carry what we needed down the slope, at least it was a shorter distance.

Last year, Don had built a utility box for the back of the tractor, and we loaded it up with everything we needed for the project, then drove it to the flat spot.

Fencing this fairly short section took another two days of work, but we finally got it done.

At last we could move the cows from the nice lush pasture where they had been happily grazing, and into the sacrifice pasture. This pasture doesn't have much by way of grass, but of course that's the point. By allowing our two pastures (one larger, one smaller) to grow the grass tall enough to support summer grazing, we needed to remove the grazing pressure from the cows long enough to allow the grass to grow.

We got the animals into the corral...

...and opened the gate into the newly fenced sacrifice pasture.

It didn't take them long to make their way into the new territory. Filet, as the dominant animal in our little herd, was the first one through.

It didn't take long for the rest of the animals to follow suit. What happened next was hilarious: The three younger animals (Mignon, Maggie, Romeo) began racing back and forth across the slope, kicking up their heels in high spirits.

While the others capered, Filet, meanwhile, got right down to work eating.

Now, of course, we're back to feeding the cows twice a day, just as we did during the winter. They're not overly thrilled to be taken off the green grass, but that's the way it goes. We'll keep them in the sacrifice pasture a few more weeks until the grazing pastures are more mature. We'll also provide them with a bloat block when they transition to the greener grass.

Another project, done.