Spring...it's official

Looks like spring is here although we could get a night or two below freezing still.

The weather is fantastic this year.  I am trying to be outside to enjoy it.

I drove into Carson City for the BIG shopping trip.  We have been very conservative with our grocery dollars.  After awhile, it gets a little dreary.  I splurged and got the 4# bacon pack.  We have had some Del Monte green beans in a can to use up and I must say I don't like the flavor.  We don't eat a lot of canned goods but since we need to be stocked up in case of an emergency, we do have some.  That means trying to use them up every once in awhile. This time of year there aren't many fresh veggies at the store so now is the time.

Anyway, I am going to do some bacon and almond with green beans to see if I can spark those canned green beans up to a more edible level.

I love bacon on my venison burgers.  This venison has a stronger flavor than some and the bacon is a good counterpoint.

I also bought frozen shrimp.  Yep, decadent at $12 for 2 pounds but hey, you only live once:) And we will get two dinners out of that.  I got the small ones even though I like the big ones.  The big ones were $19.   Out here in Nevada, I prefer frozen seafood.  You know it isn't fresh when you buy it at the store.  We live hours  from the ocean.


Today I have lots to get done.  I bought pansies and snaps to put in the new barrel set up out front.  Oh, and some Dahlia roots for the summer.  Should look great!

Get 'er done!  Looks great.  I must get a photo.  I also got the automatic drip water onto the barrels.

I need more rocks so that I can keep filling in this area.  I need to finish the end of the front area.  It's about 7' by 6' so I will lay newspaper down to smother the light and the landscape cloth on top of that.  That should take care of the weeds.  Then, rocks to hold it down and protect the landscape cloth from the wind and the sun.

I really must start seeds indoors today!  Petunias, peppers and tomatoes.  The greenhouse is still a bit cold overnight but doing much better.

The list goes on!!!

Got the baby onion plants in and the water running on them.

Temps

26 degrees for the low
51 for the high

Inside the greenhouse this morning was 48 degrees - not bad

The lettuce and rads are coming up in my greenhouse planters.  Too cool.

Lettuce and Rads

Yep, today we got some lettuce and radishes started in the greenhouse.  This is the first year we have done this.  I put some planter boxes on the ground, filled them with potting soil and watered in the seeds.  Let's see how our little experiment goes.  Overnight in the greenhouse has bee about 44 to 46 degrees.

It has been above freezing overnight for a couple of nights in a row. Yea!  70 degrees for the high today.

Finished transplanting the mums and the iris today.

Tomorrow Hubby and I need to clean the house since his folks are coming for early dinner.

Greenhouse

I noticed a huge hole in the foundation so I plugged it up and was hoping the temp in the greenhouse would be better this morning.  The foundation is dirt.  So, the temperature inside was better but still cold.

21 degrees outside

36 degrees inside.

More rocks:)  Should start improving as I get the rocks in there to soak up heat during the daytime and I will go on the outside to day and shove some more dirt in.  I may need to fix the plastic.  I was hoping not to spend the money:)

Looks like another sunny day.

Spring is Coming Fast

This happens every year.  Spring is suddenly pouncing.  Sure, we still have cold nights and a few cold, windy days ahead but today is lovely.  34 degrees overnight.  Should be well into the fifties. Only a bit of a breeze.  Nice.

The greenhouse was only 40 degrees this morning.  Still too cold to do much but...I think I can plant lettuce in a couple of more days.  We had a couple of really cloudy days in a row and the door wide open while I was working on the interior.  Now that it is sunny, we should get some heating in there.

I am bringing some more dark racks into the space to help soak up the heat in the day time.  I have a barrel of water to fill.  That should help with the overnight temps.  We shall see.

I worked really hard to get the new ventilation door done.  Hubby did the real work on that but I insulated it and worked on getting the planter boxes set up and the shelving in and the rocks in.  A few more loads of rocks over the next couple of days.  I have to spread that out since it is very hard on my arms and shoulders.


We went to Fallon and we bought our round pen!!!!!   I am so very excited.  Wiseguy and I are going to enjoy our new adventure.  We can't use the cart in there because the sand is too soft but we can do lunging and trying the harness and different things.  Maybe even teach him a couple of tricks.

The panels are supposed to be delivered on Wednesday.  By sheer luck, Hubby will be off that day so he can help unload.  That saves my puny little arms a lot of strain.  Yay!

I am transplanting chrysanthemums and getting rid of some of those golden rods.  The golden rods are trying to take over the world.  Not too happy about that.

That should be enough for one or even two days:)

The farrier was here yesterday.  He has a new lady working for him.  He is a very good farrier so I trust him on his judgement for hiring in a new person.  I met the gal, raven, and she is very nice.  She likes doing miniature horse feet so that is good.

Greenhouse Refreshed

This is what happened over the winter.  The plastic has been up for  three years?  Maybe four.  The sunlight has rotted the plastic.  This is the east side of the greenhouse.

This is the west side of the greenhouse.  You can see that the plastic has rotted where the sunlight shines directly on the plastic.

You can see my flimsy support piece in the middle of the wall.

These two photos show you how we insulated the walls.  It's been working great.

We used a roll of insulation on the ceiling since we could staple it up.  I found the insulation in front of the home improvement store on super mark down since it was out of its wrapper.  Still, insulation was pretty expensive and straw was $8 a bale and I probably used 2 bales.

Here is a photo of the west side with the shade cloth going up.  The shade cloth has been repurposed several times.  First it covered a friends horse pen.  Then it did several miscellaneous jobs around here for a few years.  It is getting to be in sad shape but I decided it could be used in the greenhouse for its final incarnation.

Here is another item being repurposed.  It was the legs on a cheesy table I made for the back patio.  That table was in use for about 7 years but I finally decided it was too rickety to put potted plants on so I busted the table apart.  Anything too small is being burned in the wood stove but the bigger pieces are being reused..

There is our table leg as a sturdier support for the shelving in the green house.

Here is the east wall with the repurposed shade cloth almost covering the entire wall.  A few more staples and it will be done:)

This is a to be continued spring saga.

A quick note on the weather.  The overnight low was mid-forties.  It is cloudy and raining!!!!!  When you live in the desert rain is a very good thing.  The rice grasses would so appreciate getting some real moisture.  I hope it just keeps raining.  This is not a hard rain but a gentle warm rain.  

I'm baking banana bread.  I had to cheat and put a little melon from the freezer in it since I was a bit short on bananas.  I like to take the over ripe bananas and throw them in the freezer.  When I have a bunch of them, i thaw them out and make banana bread.

Spring is in the Air!

Well, it feels a lot warmer out there.  Overnight lows of 28 and 31 degrees last few nights.  Highs in the upper fifties and low sixties.  Nice.

Plenty to do around here as usual.  March could be windy so I guess I better get as much soon as possible on the nice days:)

I'm going to chip away at the greenhouse.  I have some old shade screen cloth that is in good shape so I think I will get out the staple gun and use it to fix up the sides where the plastic covering the straw has deteriorated.  If I get lucky I'll find the staple gun and the staples quickly.  Hope so anyway.

I am planning a "door"  in the north side of the greenhouse and I have an old screen that I want to fit into the opening so I have to see if that will work.  Hubby is actually going to measure and cut the hole for the ventilation door on his next days off.

I have to figure out what I am going to do to fix the straw slumping problem on the north side as well.  I have lot of old string board.  I might use that on the bottom half, stuff straw in between the studs to insulate the wall and then I can use plastic on the top only.  That would probably work.

I'll try to take some photos today.

Greenhouse

The greenhouse is sort of a mess.  The straw has been slumping down inside the greenhouse, behind the plastic on the entire back side.  This is the insulation.

On the sides where the light hits, the plastic is totally deteriorating.  Got the little bits of junk that has accumulated out.  Got a bunch of the straw out.  Now working on the plan to fix this mess.

I also want to put a larger portal in the back on back side which  the coool and shady north side so that we can have more cool air circulation when it is hot out.

Hubby got the straw that has been collecting all winter from the goat pen clean outs rototilled into the veggie garden.  We need it to decompose before we start planting.

Cold Weather

Well, it is 27 degrees outside but it sure feels cold.  There is a bit of a breeze and the humidity is at 90% so that must be why it feels so chilly outside.

Of course, the wood stove is keeping us toasty warm inside the house:)

I am perusing the seed catalogs since it is that time of the year.  The dead of winter but spring will be here before we know it and I want to put that greenhouse we built to good use this year.

Where Have I Been?

Well, I guess I have been busy and a little lethargic.  Not a great combo.

I am going through the seed catalogs so that I can start ordering for spring planting.  I have a greenhouse and I need to make good use of it!

I have pretty much quit smoking using the e-cigs.  I am still clinging to a couple of smokes a day but yesterday I forgot to smoke any real cigs until late in the day!  I love the e-cig and they are a much safer alternative to smoking.

What's the Damage?

So far, the plants don't look too bad and I can't for the life of me figure out why not.  Looks like one more really cold night tonight and then a somewhat cold night the next night.

The biggest casualty seems to be the manifold for the veggie garden/hose complex of irrigation tubing and hoses.  One of the valves froze and then busted.  Fortunately, Hubby can fix that although I have to make into Home Sleezo to buy the part.

One of the forsythia looks a bit unhappy but it was the first to bloom so maybe its just done blooming?  Perhaps I will notice more damage from the big freeze when I get out there tomorrow.  We shall see.

I'll have to go to Carson City on Saturday.

The good news is that I haven't bothered to plant the veggie garden yet.  Peas can take a freeze but a freeze down to 21 would have wiped them out!  I am planning on doing some planting this week coming up.

My tomato babies are doing great.  I haven't been leaving them in the greenhouse overnight but I have put them out there several days so that they get as much sunlight as possible.  I am not really using the greenhouse to its fullest extent this year.  Last year I did annual flowers and it turned out wonderfully but this year I bought perennial flowers that would prefer to be direct seeded.  Oh well, I will simply have to use that greenhouse for fantastic lettuce all the way into winter:)

Bruce had some heavy duty freezing as well in Ohia.  Looks like Raymond had pretty sparkly frost.  He is in Ontario.  That is Canada, don't you know?  He is behind us on spring so I don't think this cold snap quite the agony that it is for Bruce.  Here in the barren desert, we are just starting to see spring so I am hopeful that it won't be a huge set back.

Last year was a minor disaster.  The trees were all leafed out and we got a dip below freezing and that set the trees back about three weeks while they regrouped and tried to shoot out some new leaves.  It took half the summer for some of them to recover.

We had a mild winter and it seemed like the trees kept getting fatter trunks.  I didn't realize that trees kept growing in the winter time.  Deciduous trees, anyway.  The pines, Barker cypress and Rocky Mountain junipers all did really well this winter.  Nice to see us finally getting to a point where we have visible trees.  We have been here 6 1/2 years after all.

Is that another shed in your yard?

Yes, this is the seventh shed Hubby and I have built.  Two were metal shed kits.  One is a green house.  One is a shade cover/hay shed, the goat shed and then there is the long shed.

[Oh, I forgot, I also made two "freestanding sheds" that are technically portable but very heavy.  One for the trash can and one for the freezers.  I guess that means we have built 9 sheds plus the horse shed plus the shed we bought equals 11 sheds on the property.  I have tried to do a very tasteful job of placement.]

We bought the cute little barn style shed when we first moved in here and all our stuff was laying in the dirt while we were getting the garage built.  The garage didn't take long to build but we had to wait three or four months for the contractor to have the time in his schedule to build the garage.

I am basically in charge of getting the last several sheds done.  The greenhouse, Hubby helped me get it started and he helped frame for the windows.  It definitely was a two person job getting the windows in but I did all the rest of the framing and the walls, the trim work and painting.  I put a ventilator turbine in the roof and a small ventilation window in the far side.  I hung a wooden door and re-used our broken screen door on the east side.  I am pretty proud of the greenhouse.  Sturdy and very usable.  The long shed, Hubby did the posts and then I was on my own.  On the shade cover, I actually did most of the posts myself.  Okay, there was a little boo boo on placement of one of the posts but you can't really tell unless I point it out and I don't!

I built the trash can shed and the freezer shed all by myself:)  They aren't perfect but they have held up for a number of years and through several ninety MPH wind storms.  Not to mention the one year where we had two feet of heavy snow.  Didn't break my roofs!

Building a shed requires a lot of stuff.  First thing I loaded up the back of my new '92 Toyota Forerunner and drove confidently into the garden knowing that I could use my 4-wheel drive capacity if needed.  I have ladders and lumber and a drill and a level and other miscellaneous items.  I used to walk everything to my projects but then I realized I was wearing myself out just getting it all organized and set up so I started driving the bigger items in whenever possible.

Getting the first board just right is very important since everything else will be measured and leveled to this board.  

I dropped my drill bit into the sand, darn it!  Even though I saw exactly where it landed, it disappeared into the endless grains of sand and I couldn't find it.  That happens a lot. So, I walked all the way back to the garage to find some more drill bits.  Found a brand new four pack in the tool chest.  Yeah!!!!

On my way to find bits I noticed that the forsythia is blooming.  Spring is really here even though it was 28 degrees overnight Friday night and 30 degrees overnight last night.

I am doing an inside the box rail construction.  I have put up the rails for the wall in the back and then set the rails for the side on top of the back rail.  It is simple this way.  The ends that are sticking out at the back and on the right are going to get cut off.  Hubby says I have to change the roof rails to stick out on each side instead of planning them flush since that will give the roof more support.  He's right but I told him I might wait for him to finish this project.  It is hard to do this by myself.  

How do I do this by myself?  I use cleats to hold the boards up while I get a screw in, slap a level on there and get another screw in on the far side and then finish up with another screw into the ends of each board.  A pain to do on the really high stuff like the roof boards.  Up the ladder down the ladder.  Up the the ladder, down the ladder, ad infinitum.

I thought I did great!  I also got the really big grease wood roots out of the ground in the horse pen and took a large wheelbarrow load of compost from the horse area to the newer compost pile.  The compost isn't composting in the horse area because it is too dry.  That stuff is well over a year old and mostly still looks like  straw.  The newer compost area has a hose available and is actually starting to really cook.

I finished up with getting the greenhouse going.  More on that later!  Then, I told Hubby to please drive by the Take and Bake Pizza joint on his way home from work since I was far too tired to cook.  I hadn't done the dishes from last night yet, either.  Don't tell the neighbors.

A Morning at Home

I fed the goats and the dogs this morning.  The cat showed up late and he didn't get his canned catfood.  Don't worry.  He has a mountain of dry catfood on an old table inside a shed.  I cleaned the goat pen.  Got the wet straw out of the goat shed.  Cleaned the water trough and got those cute goats some clean water.  I decided to take the goats out and let them start eating weeds.  We have just the tiniest bit of green grass coming up and I am counting on those goats to keep the cheat grass and mustard down to a minimum.  Obie, the big goat, decided to take a couple of big chunks out of my nice pine tree on the way back to the pen.  I have got to get a piece of fencing around that tree before it is completely destroyed.

I then got the seed starting materials organized.  Well, maybe organized is a pretty strong word for this mess.  I found a lot of the trays and such that I need to get things moving.  I ordered coconut coir seed starting medium but it hasn't arrived yet.  About March 15th I need to get some seeds in the dirt.  I still have to straighten out the greenhouse and get some water in the reservoir inside the greenhouse.  That keeps the moisture level up and helps even out the daytime and nighttime temps.

Hubby got one of our nice new gates up.  We still have to put wire on the bottom since I don't want the dogs in this area.  I also want to be able to keep little Penny Poo Poo locked into the backyard.  The pots and seed starting stuff are behind the wooden shed.  The shed definitely has a forward lean to it.  The wind has been eating the sand out.  Maybe we will have to jack it up and see if we can straighten it out a bit.  The wood siding is looking really dry so I either need to sand and paint or get some Thomson's Waterseal on that thing.  Painting it white with green trim would look really good and go with our color theme but I really hate to add another project on to my list so we shall see.

Here is the second gate Hubby put up.  Looks fantastic.  We have to get some wire on the bottom of this gate as well.  Penny is definitely going to be able to go right through the bottom rungs. Hubby has the T-post in place for us to get another short piece of wire up on the right side.  Looks like Rusty the Red Dog snuck into the picture.  In the background you can see my giant pile of compost.  I am running a sprinkler on it today.  I can't keep it moist enough to actually want to break down into compost since it has been too cold to run much water.  We'll be spreading it into the garden pretty soon, ready or not, and letting finish composting in the dirt.  That actually ends up working out okay for us.  

You can see the goat pen gate on the right and the shade cover/hay shed/wood shed on the left.  You can't see the greenhouse in this photo.  It is forwards from the shade cover.  The veggie garden will be well protected from dogs and goats when the fencing is finished.  The far left side is going to have a 14 foot gate and a 4 foot man gate.  When both are opened up, we will have an 18 foot wide hole to aim at when we are backing a trailer in there.  Unfortunately, when we designed the greenhouse and veggie garden, we designed a jig jog from the driveway on the side of the house into the back area.  You try to plan ahead but sometimes you just don't quite get it right!

The wind is supposed to come up later today and it is supposed to be warm.  Tomorrow is supposed to go much colder.  This is why we never get any fruit on our fruit trees.  Warm, cold, warm, cold.  Oh well.

Since the wind isn't blowing yet, I decided to take the hedge trimmer out for a spin.  I whacked and sliced and trimmed for quite some time.  Sadly, I am not done yet but I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  I still have to rake and gather it all into piles for burning when we get a day that isn't windy.  I might need two days.  That's a lot of dead grass and brush out there.

Noon- Time to eat lunch, take a break, maybe get a little nap in and start all over again!