On Wednesday I had left the Small garden looking like this. On Thursday I was up at 5:15AM and out in the garden by 6AM. I planned to move mulch but had to figure out what to do about the crabgrass.
In doing the cleanout, I found the small patch of flowers that had been left over the winter had not survived. That gave me a small amount more room. So I took the southwest corner and turned it into Larry’s crabgrass corner. I moved almost all the grass into it and mulched it some. Hopefully it would survive and provide him grass into the winter. That finished the clean out and now I could move mulch.
Unfortunately, when I reached that point at 9AM, the sun came out and it was just too hot and humid for me to continue in this sunny garden. So I picked up, made my notes and photos, and moved to a shaded garden, the East Shed garden.
The first thing I had to do was prune the 7 Sisters rose back and up so it wouldn’t be tangled in my hat or hair. It had hundreds, maybe thousands, of buds and a good deal of what I cut off had buds on it. But now I could work under it unmolested.
I got the weeds out, put down a light dose of FlowerTone, and then got some plants to plant:
Bachelor’s buttons 1
Begonias 3
English wallflowers 2
Forget-Me-Nots 1
Heliotrope 2
Stocks 1
I finished around 11:30AM and was too exhausted to go back to the Small garden to plant. It was too hot anyways. My helper friend arrived at 11:30AM and we decided to do the freezer inventory instead.
I sent him on errands while I got a shower and rested. Then we went to the barn and brought back the 2 huge coolers and cleaned them up.
We got them into the cellar and got set up. We’d be doing the vegetable freezer first as it needed a major cleanout.
Because I didn’t have the gardens up to full force over the last 4 years, I had carried over a lot of things that were now just too old. There was stuff that went back 7 years!
So I sorted through it all, kept the recent stuff from 2024 and he hauled cooler after cooler of stuff upstairs once we’d finished.
We did the meat freezer next and there wasn’t much discarded from that. I didn’t have the energy to defrost the freezers at this time. They weren’t bad and it could be a Thursday job on a hot afternoon.
The left photo is the stuff I kept and beef bone stock. The middle is the baskets with jars or bought stuff and the right is the fruit section.
We had about 1¼ hours when we finished in the cellar so we started emptying the old freezer containers into 5 gallon buckets and he hauled them out to compost. We finished with about 10 minutes to sit down and rest before he left at 5PM. It was a very long day for me.
I made supper, watched a small amount of the Downton Abbey movie and was in bed by 8PM.
On Friday I plan to get out early and at least get the broccoli planted and mulched. We will have to haul hay from the barn and my helper friend will be doing to foliar feeding around the yard and gardens. I have an event at the Senior center in the afternoon.