LysmachiaMoon's blog: Winterizing

A lot accomplished this weekend (starting on Thursday afternoon, hey, it's a perk of being self-employed: weekend starts on late Thursday). The outside water faucet is turned off and drained. All the hoses are drained, coiled, and stored. The henhouse is winterized (gaps under the eaves stuffed with paper). The rabbit hutch is winterized...it has two floors...the bottom floor is for cats, the top for chicks. I got the whole thing cleaned out, put fresh blankies into the cat apartment, then blocked off the screened upper floor with cardboard and filled it with leaves for insulation. The top floor is never used in the winter, but filling it with insulating leaves or straw makes the lower floor nice and toasty warm for any passing cat.

Removed all the blackened annuals from my pots. I'm not ready to lift and store the cannas, calla lilies, colocasias, and dahlias yet. We had temps into the 20s for a couple of nights but now it's back up into the more normal low 40s so the soil is still warm. I like to wait as long as possible before lifting and storing tender bulbs...it gets pretty crowded down there in the basement!

Dug up my sweet potatoe patch. As I expected, it was not the bumper crop I have had, but it filled a 5 gallon bucket so that's plenty. I did not realize how cool/shady that spot was until mid-summer and sweets like it hot and sunny.

I have a few new big pots that I need to have drainage holes drilled into. These are plastic, but for some reason, they don't have those "punch out" holes in the bottom. That's ok though because I want to set these permanently in place and they'll need very big drainage holes. I've asked R to find his hole saw attachment for me. Considering the state of his workbench, this may take a while....

I'm setting up for another small project. I need short pillars or posts or something to set my concrete Japanese lanterns on. I've got a 4 foot long, 8 inch diameter cardboard tube that is used to pour concrete posts; I have no idea why I have this, but it's been sitting in the garden shed for possibly decades. Today I wee-jee'd it out, cut it in half (two 2-foot sections) and set them upright in the veg. Tomorrow I'll buy a couple bags of concrete mix and pour. I'm trying something: These will be very heavy so i was wondering how to lighten them a bit. I came up with the idea of filling a half-gallon plastic milk jug with sand, plugging the mouth with a wad of cloth, setting it upside down in the base of the cardboard tube, with the mouth level on the ground. Once the tube is filled with concrete and it sets up, I'll pull out the wad of cloth and drain out the sand. The milk jug will stay in place, but it should leave a hollow that will make the column lighter and also allow me to set it down over something to anchor it.

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