Christmas is coming...but it's not winter til the garden is frozen...

Christmas wood working is a good way to pass the time when its blowing a gale outside and driving rain and sleet. My sawdusty workshop is cosy with a wood stove warming all but the corners, and I can make lots of mess and it just makes it all look that much more productive. This little wagon is 11"x16" and just needs a piece of sisal tow rope with a wooden ball on the end to finish it.  

The blocks and wagon are sanded smooth and oiled with cooking oil. The fun part is playing with all the pieces before they are packed into the wagon for the new owner.

                                                                                          Winter has held off long enough for one last garden tilling 2 days ago. We spread 2 truckloads of leaves on the new garden plot on a rare windless day and got them tilled under before the next round of rain. They should break down more quickly mixed with the garden soil than they would have piled up dry in the compost pile.

With the weather so unsettled I keep alternating indoor and outdoor chores. Here is batch of granola bars just about cool enough to munch. Tomorrow if the wind settles down we'll go find a Christmas tree to bring home before we have snow to wade through.

And since this blog started out being a place to post my watercolors, here is a little one I did recently while longing for warm summer sunshine. It's a doorway of one of the famous waterfront buildings in Lunenburg, NS. Details of this and our other works are on our new art site http://www.saltydogarts.com/



Hoop houses on the first day of SPRING

Crazy warm weather this past week, wonderful to be outdoors doing projects and gardening. We haven't had a drop of rain or snow in this part of New Brunswick for a month or so. I have never been able to till before the middle of april before, climate change is being so kind to me. So I've been building raised bed/hoop houses to get hardy plants out as soon as possible.



They are made of 2x6, 32" wide and 8 feet long with hoops made of 72"long scraps of pvc pipe, 3/4 or 1" diameter. At the Re-store I scored a great pile of large sheer curtains for a dollar apiece and sewed them into fitted covers to go over the pvc piping. That will keep the abominable little flea beetles off the plants they like to devour and also provide a bit of wind protection.

I've been saving cardboard to put between the rows to keep the weeds down.

The covers are held in place by 3" pieces of pvc pipe split end to end and pried open to use as a sort of clamp that snaps over the cloth and hoop.

A peek inside...here are rows of little chard plants set out in the first bed, with radish seeded in between. The flea beetles love radish leaves, so this year when the plants emerge, the bugs are out of luck.

At night I pull a strip of plastic over the rows to protect from freezing, altho the lettuces , spinach and chard in there can stand a bit of frost. If the temperature gets really low (what used to be normal) I can throw some old comforters over the top of the plastic.

Rain is coming tomorrow, so I can at last settle to some indoor work, knowing the whole garden is tilled and the first plants are growing. It just blows me away that its only March , here in zone 4b!