I had me a not so happy surprise on Saturday morning...  After working in the garden, I went out to the garden shed to put some stuff away.  As soon as I walked in I saw a wasp flying around inside.  Now I'm not usually afraid of them and figure if you leave them alone, they will do the same.  This one must have flown into the shed and couldn't get out, right?  Well it didn't fly out while I was in there and it started acting aggressive.  Now what happened next should have been taped and submitted to America's Funniest Home Video!  That little wasp first stung me right in the forehead and got me dancing and swatting my way out of there so quick I knocked my glasses off and couldn't see where I was going.  I got stung another time under the arm as well.  My wife was laughing so hard I thought she was going to have the baby right there in the backyard.  I don't think I've moved my 240lbs so fast in my life, well not since University Football anyways.

After the adrenalin wore off, I went back to the scene of the crime to see what happened and where the buggers were coming from.  It seems like they just started building a nest in the upper corner eves of the "potting shed".  Since I use this area daily, have 2 dogs that play in that area as well my my son, I opted for the quick method of spray to remove them.  I know it's not the natural way to dispose of them, but I needed a quick solution.  After a quick foam coating both inside and under the eve, it looks like they are gone and we can use that area again.

One thing I did learn is that wasps should be thought of as beneficial insects.  They prey on other non beneficial insects and usually leave us alone, unless provoked or their nest is disturbed like I did.  This is unfortunate, cause they sometimes nest where we do business and then become a nuisance and hazard.  I found Earth Easy had a pretty good article covering this topic so if anyone else is having this issue, check out their article Natural Wasp Control.  Now that I know better, I'll be keeping an eye out to discourage wasps rather then having to distroy them in the future.  A couple of other good articles I read: How to get rid of Yellow Jackets and How to get rid of Wasps.

It's been a while since I've been able to post due to intense work schedule. Been keeping busy around the house and garden though. It's been a trying spring and beginning of summer with workload, preparing for a new baby, studying and gardening... obviously a few of the more ambitious plans had to go ;o)

Due to time and money, the squre foot garden conversion had to be pushed off till next year. That's OK though as we expanded the garden yet again to add a 20 x 5 plot for corn and potatoes. We also planted an herb garden on the deck boxes and testing planting tomatoes on the side of the house where the cold frames will go this fall. Here are a few pictures to start, get caught up and document the start of the garden. Plan is to take pictures on Friday to document and visually follow the progress of the garden as well as note what worked and what didn't... on to the pictures.

My son give the thumbs up after his first shot at starter seeds back in April.  He started and cared for tomato and cabbage.  The cabbage didn't make the first round, I think due to over watering?, but the tomatoes came out good and are planted on the side of our house in the test bed, next to the raspberries... yumm!

The deck herb garden is a new addition this year.  We used to have flowers in there but decided this year to grow some herbs: basil, cilantro, parsley, mint and a couple others as well as jalopenos and peppers.  The boxes are about 8" deep and were filled with black earth and compost.  Next year the plan is to rebuild these as self watering containers using old storage bins, hidden inside the wood frames.  It will look just as it does now, but will be much less maintenance to keep watered.  We need to water these boxes at least once a day or twice if it's an extremely hot day.  We'll test a few different methods but one setup I like so far is: Building a self watering container.

The new bed we put together this year for corn and potatoes.  Should have taken the picture after weeding yikes!!  Potatoes on the left and corn on the right.  Half the corn was started indoors and the rest seeded direct.  This bed used to be a long flower and shrub bed along my neighbours fence line.  We moved the cedar shrubs at the top of the pics to create a natural barrier for our dogs and transplanted the flowers around the house.

We planted bush beans, pole beans and giant oregon snow peas where we had potatoes last year.  Here they're just babies.  My son and I had fun running out to get alders for the frame that will support the netting for them to climb up on.  Hope it works out.

Last picture for this post is an overview shot of the backyard garden just prior to planting.  I'll get some updated shots in the next few posts.  This picture looks like we live in the country...lol.  It's hard to believe we are about 5min walk to 3 grocery stores, 3 big box stores and basically a shopping mecca.  We are lucky as our property is pie shaped backing onto a green-space.  Just below our backyard is a drop of about 8 to 10ft and a small brook.  What the nice trees in this picture hide is the huge heavy equipment rental shop just across that little brook and a car dealership.  Which reminds me... I need to go complain about how loud their damn outside paging system is!

Enough for now... now that work and personal schedule is getting under control I hope to bring this blog back to it's normal posting frequency.  Cheers and happy gardening!!

On the calendar spring is only a few days away, but in my neck of the woods we'll still have snow till mid to end of April.  Mother Nature always has that last good-by winter storm in April!  Still, just the thought of Spring coming makes me smile and warms me up.  Local stores have their patio furniture, camping gear and Spring/Summer clothes out.  Local nurseries started putting out the seed displays and Spring displays... I love this time of year.

The nice days are starting to outnumber the cold dreary ones now.  Here are a few pictures from last week during March break where my son got a nice white blanket of fresh snow to go sliding ;o)

It was pretty nasty but now the snow is melting and Spring is in the air (hopefully).  In the picture of the back yard the garden is buried under the snow between the patio and my son's play cabin.  It was bare just a few days ago.. ah well ;o)

Over the weekend Seb (my son) and I started a few seeds.  We started a few tomato, cabbage and asparagus peas.  It's still a bit early but I had the itch and hope I can keep them to transplant to a cold frame to get an early start.  We'll start staggering seedlings in the next few weeks.  I can't wait to be able to invest in a good greenhouse!  But the new baby on the way will take care of that money.. haha.  It will be a busy busy summer with a new black lab puppy, Sookie,  as an addition to our 3yr old black lab Maddy and then the new baby (to be named) due Aug. 27th.

Whoa just starting to sink in with all the fun work ahead... good start to 2010!!  Ok back to reading planning the garden... ;o)

Been busy couple weeks at work and coupled with the snow I just can't wait for Spring to come around.  I'll be picking up my seeds probably next week and within the next 2 weeks, start some seedlings indoors.  Visited the local nursery and they still hadn't put out the Veseys Seedsyet, but should be out next week I'm told.  I might just order them online...

I thought I would put some of my work conference call time to good use and draft up what our new raised garden beds would look like in Excel.  It's not pretty and things will not be planted as shown in the image, but setting it up this way will allow me to easily move things around.  Still have some reading to do an beneficial/companion planting and aligning to the sun.  Looking at the image, East is the top of the beds and West is the bottom.  The right side length of the beds will face South.  I have to confirm the number of seeds per square, per vegetable type as well as I only used one reference online but it didn't seem that accurate.  Once it's all put together proper, I should be able to calculate by function the number of total plants per type and benchmark yeild, etc... ya geeky, but it's a start ;o) 

I had to buy a few more training books for work so of course bought a treat.  I figure after toasting my brain on Windows 2008 Active Directoy Configuration (yes it's as exciting as it sounds), I thought I should reward myself with some good reading so included All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow More in Less Space! in my order.   Talk about "one of these things are not like the other..." (if you ever watched Sesame Street you get that ;o)  I had the original edition from the library but had to bring it back before I was done since someone else had it on hold (good for you!!).

So the plan is to study, finalize selection of seeds, start seedlings indoors and complete the plan for the new raised garden beds, almost in that order.  I'll be pricing out the Hemlock that I'll use for the beds once I calculate how much I need.  Also have to start looking for my options on materials to create my own versions of Mels's Mix.  I won't have enough compost to do all the beds so have to find some alternatives.  I can get loam and peat moss perlite at good prices, but good compost in bulk might be hard to come by in the quantities I'll need to kick off all these beds at once.  Still researching at this point. 

So as this is posted it's another snow day here (30cm of the white stuff) and seems like Spring will never come, but it will and I can't wait!!

It would seem that after the Holidays everything just went someplace in the basement... out of sight, out of mind.  I had about a 3ft path to bring the wood and knew this was something I need to tackle, just needed the courage ;o)

I took a couple of before and after pictures so I remember never to let it get to that state again.  Although I still have a bit more to go, I ended up bringing 3 bags of books for donation to the library, donated 3 bags of winter clothing for adults and kids, 2 garbage bags of junk, a list of items to sell on eBay/kijiji and some piece of mind. 

The first picture is from the landing looking to my left where we stack our wood.  On the right is a stack of shelves we built using strapping and old closet doors.  Have a better view of those in the after pictures.  These are great and sturdy shelves deep enough to store our camping gear, coolers, suite cases and even our rotational pantry.  It's amazing how neat everything is when packed properly on the shelves!

Basement After

Once I got started it wasn't so bad. Even my son pitched in and made a bag of toy donations, even though he played with them in the basement more then clean ;o)  It feels so good now to go downstairs and there is a place for the wood, recycled bottles and cans, tools, pantry is packed away, camping gear is packed away, Halloween and Christmas decorations packed away... just neat.

The lessons learned from this was one, we hold on to too much stuff and two, we have too much stuff.  What's hard is deciding what to part with and what to keep.  I'm one of those "I'm sure I could use that someday" guys and need to change that and stick to the necessities. 

We have some plans for the basement and the first step was to

Basement After2

declutter.  This summer we plan on putting in an egress window or a storm door so it's easier to bring in the wood in the fall.  I also have an ambitious plan of building a corner of the basement in to a root cellar so we have a good cold space for preserves and root crops.

In the last picture you can see a better picture of the closet door shelves.  Behind the wall on the right is another closed off section of the basement that was used as a wood working shop by the previous owner.  I didn't take any pictures of that room yet.  I just need to get my own tools to fill it up I guess ;o)

On to the next project for now...