Gardens - Green House Prep

Guest Author Girl-Child here, with another weekend update. While Mum was visiting our Sailor in Port Townsend, I got a few projects done around the homestead.

      It's just the right time to get veggies going (or so my green-thumbed madre assures me) and once her National Boards is through- she's itching to get back into the garden and play. To help prep for that, I decided to take a day to clean out the green house. Oh yes! The green house mentioned here is up and sturdy and full of life. Just... the wrong kind of life. *cue psycho shower scene music* Eek! Dandelions! Aphids! and Baby Black Widows! Oh my!

     If you remember last February, mum mentioned a bunch of new plants she wasn't quite ready for. Well, Washington proceeded to rain, and rain, and rain, until all of her lovely new plants either drowned, were eaten by chickens, bowled over by raccoons, or molded. The ones that survived, were stashed in the green house and promptly forgotten about. As you can see below, there's a lot of plants to wrangle and pots to sanitize before anything new can start living in here. 

 Gloving up, I grabbed an empty bucket and proceeded to delicately clip-n-catch the dandelion heads with some garden shears. After about ten minutes of this, I recalled my heritage and dashed inside to put on sunscreen.  Very important! Then I doused the bug infested greenery with distilled white vinegar and hot water before tearing them out by their roots (or as close to the roots as I could manage).

The pots were all plastic, aside from some organic/compostable ones (which were pretty thoroughly moldered and tossed into the compost heap), so I got the go ahead to save the soil. If you look in the far back of the above photo, there are some half-wine barrel type garden barrels on the right hand side. They all contain good soil now, ready for re-purposing. The pots were rinsed and arranged by size on a low table, to be sanitized at a later date before rejoining their fellows in the Garden Shed. Plastic labels and tags were washed and put in that white plastic three drawer tower in the Shed for the next batch of lovelies!

Much better! Now that there's room for seedlings, I re-set up Dad's veggie trays.

The carrots and sweet peas are first to show!

 The other project I was able to get to before papers swallowed my weekend, was the raised garden bed. The boy child hauled these bags of peat and compost from in front of the Garden Shed to here. We don't have a wheel barrel big enough, so we would have to mix 3 bag compost with one bag of peat by hand. We weren't certain what was the best way to go about it, so I opted to experiment a little with this handy dandy twirly ground aerater doohickey (yes, that is it's official name, or at least it is until I can ask mum).

It took a bit of work, but the compost and peat mixed perfectly. Mum still wants to add another row of boards around the edge (we're all tall folks here, leaning over will be easier), but that can be added later. For now, we've got a good soil base for any goodies Mum feels like planting! Only two more weeks to go!