Table Talk #2

Hello and welcome to The Daily Scythe table talk #2! It’s been a fun week and a half for me and mine. The weather has been nice in Oregon, only a few rainy days. Spring is coming on in full force and everything is beautiful! I have never appreciated the green of Oregon so much as I do after living in southern California for a year. Sorry So Cal residents, it’s not that I think your portion of the state is ugly, I just love seasons.

I have been working on a lot of outside projects, mostly things pertaining to getting the garden going. Oh and lawn care, a lot of string trimming. My parents have a good amount of grass, and none of it a nicely shaped lawn. They literally live in the woods, so its a chore to keep it looking proper.

Hoop Houses

The first project my dad and I tackled was getting a couple of the raised beds turned into “hoop houses”. The point of this is to keep the baby plants warm. We have a shorter growing season where we are so it requires us to get the plants in while its still a bit cold. Otherwise, the plants won’t mature in time for harvesting. It is a bit of a gamble though because they could still die in a hard freeze, and then you have to start over. I think gardening is supposed to be fun?

Stairs

The next project I took on was a doozy and involved a good amount of digging. The path down to the garden is on a pretty steep slope, and the ground was really uneven. It was a real ankle turner, so I decided to cut some stairs into it. Check it out!

First I leveled out the ground and laid in some 6×8 post that had been recovered from an old bridge recently. Then I had to lay in some extra fill between each stair as well to make it flat everywhere. Finally, drove a stake through either end of the posts, and then into the ground 24 inches to hold them in place. I’m pretty happy with the overall result, considering how awkward the path was to start.

The HotHouse

My next garden project was building a hothouse to start plants from seed in. The concept is the same as the hoop house, just for even younger plants and seeds. We are primarily using it for tomatoes at the moment!

This was a fun project because I had to use whatever I could find lying around the shop to make it happen. Luckily there have been enough building projects recently that a good amount of stuff has been left over. Actually, all of these projects are from repurposed materials!

Retaining Wall

My final project for the week was building some small retaining walls around several fruit trees above the garden. The fruit trees are planted on a slope, so erosion is a bit annoying when you are trying to keep good soil in one location.

I used the same repurposed 6×8 bridge material for this project and staked them down like the stairs. It was a bit of a chore cutting all of the ends to fit together like lincoln logs, but the result is pretty neat!

Scythe Talk

My wife is the sweetest and stayed up to play Scythe with me several nights after the kids were in bed. She could have been sleeping, but she dug in and helped me research Vesna. As a result, you can check out my Vesna strategy post here, just be aware there is Rise of Fenris spoilers.

Are any of you gardeners or builders? How have you been filling extra time during the stay at home orders? Let me know in the comments below!