Building the planter bed was the agenda for today, but there turned out to be a lot of little tasks to get out of the way first.

It wasn’t long before I accepted that I wouldn’t be constructing the raised container today.

First
thing I did was to take down the sheets of wood from the roof of the
shed which I used to angle rain water off and keep my shed from rotting.

Then
I replaced it with a sheet of plastic (from a wardrobe move in the rain
months ago) raised in the middle like a tent, metal taped to the sides
of the shed.

Then I was distracted by the rain system.  The
tubing on both sides need a bit of adjusting.  The barrel was almost
full and it rained today, so I used my new watering can to transfer 4
gallons of water stored from the last rain to my potted plants.  Then I
remembered that when I purchased this RV trailer it came with an
external waste water tank which I have never used.  It holds 32
gallons.  I filled it from the storage barrel to make room for today’s
rain.

With the barrel half empty, I had a chance build a
better and higher platform for it.  Wood which I had kept from dump
runs years ago because it might come in handy someday, finally came in
handy.  My new 18v cordless jigsaw made short work of custom fitting
the wood to the barrel.

Watering the plants, I noticed that some
which had grown a lot last year weren’t doing so well, so it was time
to give them some more room.  Three were replanted, using soil from my
compost bucket behind the house to fill in the extra volume in the
bigger pots (the pots came from a dump run; they’ve been sitting behind
the house waiting for this day).

Having one simple compost bucket,
there is no place to separate recently added material from finished
compost, so extracting soil to use meant going through it one handful
at a time and separating out the food scraps and worms, (and then going
back through the soil twice more to get all the scraps and worms I
missed the first time).

As I suspected, the roots were totally compacted.

Last
fall I happened to be up in Joaquin Miller Park on the day of the last
sale of the year for the native plant nursery.  I bought a CA
strawberry plant.

The strawberry was one of the ones which got
replanted today.  I have two strawberries already!  They are very tiny,
and may not make it to edible size for months, if ever.  But still,
they are very clearly strawberries already.  There is also another
blossom which should join them as fruits before long. 

Also, my lupine has blossomed.

These are exciting times 🙂