By all rights, things should be going in the greenhouse, and yet....
I caught a mouse in there the other day. I saw the lettuce sprout and then disappear, so I set three traps. I like the Ortho Home-Defender plastic snap traps. They work much better than wooden snap traps. But I actually caught the mouse by bludgeoning it with a rake. They've been ignoring the peanut butter. I must do more to make the cold-frames mouse resistant.
The spinach looks okay, but isn't growing terribly fast.
The arugula is looking damaged. It can't be cold, so it must be getting too hot in there if I don't open the cold frame.
The garlic that seemed less likely to keep, and was therefore thrown in a cold frame and lightly buried, is sprouting nicely. This cold frame has a piece of lumber wrap tarp over it to moderate the temperature and reduce light levels, with the idea of slowing sprouting. Hopefully it will grow slowly enough that I'll be able to transplant it out in a month.
The garlic stored in the root cellar pit is keeping okay, but sprouting some. This is not a surprise, because a chill period (which it had) stimulates sprouting. The stuff in the blue tub is sprouting most.
The well developed scape flowers are sprouting least.
The rest is somewhere in between.
The potatoes in the barrel were a different story. Somewhere along the way it had flooded. It smelled a little funky too.
Behind the potato barrel, I noticed a pile of soil that looked like it had been washed in.
To empty the barrel, I did something I'd been meaning to do for a while. I built a simple pump. This is two check valves, a T, some scraps of 1 1/2" pipe, and a piston made from a scrap of plastic 1" conduit with a flared end. Heating the flared section made it shrink, giving enough clearance so it will slide easily. It doesn't seal well, but for the moment, it works. I used successively smaller pieces of black poly water line as the intake, sealing them with electrical tape. I'd like to work this up and get it smooth enough to attach to a small windmill eventually.
That made it possible to get enough water out of the barrel that I could pull out the potatoes, black plastic contractor bag and all.
Spreading them out, they seem like the tips are damaged by submersion, but the tubers as a whole are okay.
That blue bucket of garlic was on it's side a few days back. I bet it was tipped over in the same flood and may be sprouting more because it has some water in the bottom.
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