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Make hay while the sun shines

Getting good (i.e., not raining) weather in the early spring here at Chez Siberia is a rare enough occurrence that when we get it, and on a weekend to boot, it’s all hands out in the garden and get that work done.

Lots of work got done:
General cleanup in the vegetable garden. No, I did not get the plastic out on one of the beds; with any luck, I’ll get a chance for that this coming weekend.

Blueberry bushes got hauled out of their snug winter heeled-in spot and planted, along with compost, bone and a bit of blood meal, and wood chips.

Tomato and pepper seedlings got transplanted into four-packs. The King of the North seedlings are frankly, amazing, with multiple rootlets on each stem. This are hardy folk.

Lots of bush trimming and other snips and bits cut down and taken out of the front of the house landscaping. We had a hard winter and the rhododendron looked like it had been blasted with a flamethrower from winter-kill.

But the major item was the work done (mostly by the DH; I admit that) in the photograph above: The drainage ditch. As readers who follow this blog might remember, we dug a huge number of holes up in the pasture on the hill for fruit trees last fall. Some of those holes filled up with water (and I am not kidding about filling – like, nearly to the top). At this point in the spring, there were only three holes with water – all in a line. And we have had no luck in getting someone with a backhoe out here to put in a big drainage ditch along the back of the barn (which would have taken care of the entire problem not only for our property but would have blessed our neighbor’s property as well), so the DH decided to take matters into his own capable hands. As you can see, he dug a trench – about 8″ wide and slightly deeper than the bottom of the bole at the bottom of the photo (and it, like the other two holes above it, was full of water), all the way down to where there is a small creek which runs along the edge of our property. So, in other words, the ditch, at the top where it met the bottom hole, was slightly lower than the property ‘water line’ at that point. The ground is a lot higher where those holes are than where the creek runs – we have a pretty good slope there. We laid landscaping fabric into the ditch and put in a lot of rocks of various sizes, folded over the edges of the fabric and put in more rocks (Chez Siberia produces more rocks than perhaps any other crop)on top. The water quickly drained out of that hole.

We were happy.

This morning, we were happier.

This is the hole at the top of that series. Yesterday, it was full of water. This morning?

Gone. And the water in the second hole is gone also. We’re supposed to get several days of rain this week (and some snow. Don’t ask me how I feel about that), so this should be a good test of how well this is going to work.

Drainage. Gotta love it.

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