The weather this time of year is perfect for me, at at least when it isn't raining. Today I was able to get outside before work, during my lunch break, and after lunch, which makes for a very productive day.
I got up early and weeded the garlic. It wasn't terribly weedy, but I'm trying to make sure it doesn't get overtaken the way our garlic has in the past. It took about an hour to thoroughly weed the bed, which isn't bad. Most of the weeds pulled out easily, due to the looseness of the soil. While weeding I noticed three stalks of Koren Red growing right together. I suspect this must have been from a split, since I had counted cloves before planting, and that matched up to what I planted. I pulled two of the three, and will use them for green garlic.
Weeding of the area where I planted seeds, in hopes of having some scallions this spring, wasn't quite as easy. The blades of those plants aren't very tall or well pronounced, making it difficult to tell what is garlic and what are weeds in some cases. I have also realized that planting seeds isn't really giving me the results that I had hoped, because the slow growth means that the scallions aren't ready much earlier than the actual garlic. It probably makes more sense to plant additional cloves, and harvest some of those in the spring has green garlic.
During lunch I went out for 30 minutes or so, and did a few small tasks, but nothing major. It was just nice to get outside for a bit, after sitting at the computer for several hours. I headed back out immediately after work. My first task of the evening was to tackle the ramp kit again. I thought it might go better if I cut the 2x8s on an angle, so I tried that. I'm not sure that helped a lot, but while I had them held down with clamps I decided to try driving the ends onto the boards again. The combination of having the boards held in place by clamps and the heavier hammer I was using seemed to have helped, because I was able to get them installed. I'm not entirely happy with the result, especially of one of them, and might take them off and reinstall at some point, but they work for now.
Next I loaded the push mower into the bed of the RTV, using the ramps, and took it to the garden. I used it to make another pass over the rye, to ensure it was mowed down nice and short. The pass I made with the big mower was probably sufficient, but it doesn't cut quite as short as I had wanted to mow the rye. While I had the mower over there I also made a few passes around the edge of the garden, because its hard to get really close to the edge with the big mower. I also mowed around the potato tower similarly. I had been planning to use the string trimmer to mow around the raspberries, but decided to just do that with the push mower as well.
After I finished mowing I got out the chainsaw and began cutting limbs from a tree near the garden that is in the way. I plan to eventually cut it down, but removing some limbs helped. I might would have gone ahead and cut it down, after removing the limbs, but I ran out of gas. I had taken the gas can over with me, but was unable to get the gas cap off of the chainsaw. I had issues with it when I last used it, and will probably have to use a wrench or something similar to get the leverage I need to remove it. I need to figure out why it is so hard to screw on and off. I went ahead and moved the limbs I cut to one of the brush piles, and also picked up a few more limbs to add to the piles while I was at it.
It was a very productive day, and I still made it back inside in plenty of time to relax a bit before bedtime. Hopefully I can have several more days that work out like this.
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