Lobster Shorts gardening

The Yum Forest Gets A Herb Garden

Have I mentioned I love plants? That I want to grow food, gardens, and plants year long? How I want to plant once and all plants will grow year after year? I live in Canada. Garden Zone 5B. I had no idea perennial herbs were an option in my garden zone. It turns out there are quite a few. Alas, not the best herb in the world – basil. But there are A LOT. A quick Google search brought up a list that surprised me: Lavender, Chives, Oregano, Sage, Thyme, Rosemary, Tarragon, Mint, Chamomile, Cilantro, Dill, Parsley, and more.

I don’t know how accurate this list is as I was told at the greenhouse I bought the dill from, that dill was an annual. Maybe there are different kinds of dill? Some more winter hardy? Plants are expensive and I don’t want to spend a lot of money every year on tons of plants. I get perennials. Plant once and you’re good to go – set it and forget it. I have tried planting indoor herbs, I am not an attentive enough gardener to keep indoor herbs alive. These plants do much better for me outdoors.

View post on imgur.com

It was time to build a herb garden! I went to Home Hardware and managed to get a great price on end cuts of cedar. The wood was tall enough that I would only need to make it one board high, but not very long, so I built two herb gardens side by side.

View post on imgur.com

It was hot as balls out and I had to level out the ground before I could fill it with dirt. I used newspaper and cardboard to help with future weeds. These gardens aren’t held in place with stakes and don’t have a bottom. I haven’t had them long enough to know if a storm, or heavy rain will make all the soil leak out the bottom, or if Winter will shift them out of place. For now they are doing fine.

View post on imgur.com

I have filled them with a combination of herbs and seeds:
-Oregano
-Sage
-Thyme
-Chives
-Tarragon
-Chamomile
-Fennel
-Dill
-Parsley
-Basil

View post on imgur.com

I didn’t have enough plants and seeds to completely fill the herb garden, so I added some other plants that I like to call grocery store gardening. My mango tree was doing really poorly in the flower garden and I replanted it here (right side garden on the front far right). I’m hoping it perks up. I’d be so sad if it died, it’s on its second season. I planted a ton of lemon seeds, a couple blueberries, and kumato tomatoes. There’s a bit more space to add more. I’m torn between rosemary and cilantro. I can get cilantro for $0.99 at the grocery store right now – that likely is the deciding factor!

Are these truly perennials? Time will tell. If you want to see the garden being made in a video, it will be posted below:

Lobster Shorts wine

Wine-ing and Tumbling

It was a productive weekend. Projects were worked on and hobbies were started. Mr Lobster Shorts is building a shed from scratch. Neither of us has built a shed before. This weekend we finished the base. It seems sturdy and I’m hoping it keeps going so smoothly. I’ve already got plans next year for him to build a pergola in the garden, but one thing at a time!

One of my hobbies is making wine. I used to make it at home frequently with take-home kits. It’s a lot of work and it’s messy, so now I go to the winemaker shops. It’s been a long time since I’ve had some made and I was out of bottles. You need 30 bottles when you bottle wine. If you don’t have them, the shop will provide them, but it’s $2 a bottle. That adds another $60 to your winemaking bill. I put an ad out asking for leftover used wine bottles, I figured it would take a while to collect enough, but a generous soul donated 4 1/2 cases of old bottles they no longer needed. One and done!

Over the weekend I cleaned and disinfected all the bottles in a bleach solution. There were a lot and I did it in two stages.

I have the second half still drying on the bottle dryer. The dryer is handy, but it’s two days later and they are still wet inside. I don’t currently have a better solution. Also pictured above is a 4L wine jug I found at the thrift store for $3.00. That one still needs cleaning and disinfecting. I bought that little jug for a reason. Rhubarb wine!

On top of having wine made at the shop, I’ve gotten back into making it at home. I bought a lovely book at Chapters years ago, by Beshlie Grimes. It’s no longer available at Chapters, but I did find it on Amazon. I’ve made her apricot, and plum wine and both were delightful. This time I wanted to try rhubarb wine. My rhubarb plant is thriving and had tons of rhubarb stalks. I usually harvest the rhubarb for pie, but this year it was time to try something different. I’ve never had rhubarb wine before. This book is for small-batch wines (about 5 bottles) and it’s the perfect size for me not to feel too overwhelmed. Maybe one day I’ll get back into the thirty-day kits, but for now, this is much more manageable.

I washed and chopped all this rhubarb with a pair of scissors. I would not do that again. I’d use a knife. I’m pretty sure my cutting board was in the dishwasher, which is the reason I went with scissors. Next time I’ll wait for the washer to finish! My hand was aching!

The next step was to pile a ton of sugar on top of all this rhubarb and wait 3 days. And that’s the step I’m at… 24 hours in. The rhubarb is starting to get liquidy at the bottom. Two more days and it will be time to add water, yeast and yeast nutrient, for fermentation. It’s such a fun hobby. I’m enjoying myself.

Now for the second hobby…. rock tumbling! I recently got a new toy on Amazon. A National Geographic Rock Tumbler. I’ve had a rock tumbler before, but it was damaged. I love rocks. I love to search for neat rocks in all sorts of random places. At the same time I was thinking of getting another rock tumbler, I found out my spouse wanted one too, for completely different reasons. He wanted one to clean up nuts and bolts. I had no idea you could even put those in a rock tumbler.

The rock tumbler kit came with some rocks to tumble (and they are much prettier than mine). But I had a few of my own to add. The colours of my rocks aren’t really showing up very well. Two of them have red running through them. Mr Lobster Shorts asked to tumble these bolts. This is our contribution to the first tumbling batch.

And these are the rocks that came with the kit. There is a really pretty blue and white rock in there that I am super excited to see come out. A lot of these rocks look so small that they will be just ground down to sand, but maybe not. I might have overfilled the barrel with all these things, but it’s my first try in the new tumbler and I’m allowed to make mistakes.

The tumbler is LOUD and it’s going to take about a month to get these rocks polished. The tumbler has been tucked in a back room out of sight, but we can still hear it. I can’t wait until my first batch of rocks comes out!

Lobster Shorts gardening

The Tea Garden’s Progress

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0INmT3-r9RM

A couple years ago we started a garden – a big one. I’ve always dreamed of having a garden. The weeds were winning the battle for the lawn. We don’t use sprays, we have fruiting plants that we love to harvest and also – the critters! We have so many critters! Chipmunks, birds, salamanders, insects, toads, snakes, and so much more.

I wish I had pics before we started. My old computer with all the photos crashed and they’re gone. The video starts more mid-progress. Hauling all that sod out was hard hard work. I had regret starting the project, it was such hard work. We did it all manually. Shovelling and hauling sod. Shovelful after shovel full. Once the hard part was done, it was much more enjoyable. We put stone blocks in at the very end of the season (it was much more affordable this way). We spent a lot of time pounding rocks to make them level. They’re a bit more wonky this year after the winter, but nothing I’m stressing over. It won’t be too hard to put them back into place. Gravel was added to form the pathway and the little round area where we’ll be putting a seating area.

There is tons of room for more plants. It’s going to take years to get it full. I’m sticking with perennials. Every year it will be more and more full. Future plans are for lighting: fairy lights, or ground path lights. I haven’t decided. There’s still a lot to do and I love it. I can’t wait to have high tea in the tea garden. I’m sure breakfast and candlelight drinks/dessert in the garden will also be fantastic.

Lobster Shorts lifestyle, The Great Outdoors

Apple Trees and Smores

This weekend the forecast called for storms. Instead there was sunshine and warm weather.

Saturday started with a dog walk, coffee, and a bagel at the local cafe. My spouse and I ended up spending most of Saturday doing yard work. The lawn was mowed for the first time and the garden was weeded. It was so nice to have it done and it looked so much better. We went to the local greenhouse to get some veggie plants. I know you’re supposed to wait until after the May long weekend, but we were too excited. While we were there I saw a tree that grew my favourite flavor of apple.

Honeycrisp! I bought that tree instantly. I love love love those apples. We got into the parking lot and it hit me…. How are we going to get this tree into the car?

Well, we did! I ended up sitting behind my spouse and we put the tree into the front seat and loaded the trunk up with the veggie plants. The tree made it home with all branches intact and we promptly planted it. We collected a lot of fallen branches from the yard and put them in the fire pit, and later that night we had the season’s first smores.

We bought Dandies Marshmallows from Healthy Planet and used Celebration cookies. They come with the chocolate, so it’s seriously easy smores with all the perfect amounts. They were so freaking good. We had smores and watched the bats fly overhead. I still plan on putting a bat box up somewhere, but I have no idea if they’ll use it. I went to bed around 8:30 that evening. I was wiped out.

Sunday I tried to make friends with the chipmunk in our yard bribing him with peanuts. He came as close as an inch away, but he was not there yet. By the end of Summer, I hope to have him eating out of my hand. I toss him some peanuts whenever I see him, so he is starting to pop out when he hears us.

Late afternoon we went on the first kayak trip of the season. I saw turtles! I haven’t seen a single turtle since I moved here and this weekend I saw at least 10 of them; painted and snapping turtles. There were some fish in the water that I had never seen before either. They looked like a suckerfish and had light and dark brown bands running down their body. I think they might have been northern hog suckerfish. They looked very similar anyway. It was fun and I think I will enjoy swimming there on a hot summer day.

We finished the weekend off with sunburns and a beer. The thunderstorms held off and I’m hoping to fall asleep to the sound of rain and thunder.