Gardening in a Kilt (Buzz Kidder Canvas)

[Bugbear]

I finished those weeds on the side of the cottage, and now there's a bunch of green stuff to mix into the compost pile that had been moved over on top of that trench I dug. I was going to review that belt and tool pouch.

The situation was that I bought a black 2" wide belt at lowes a couple of days back. The belt was to go with my kilts for casual dress, but it came with a nylon and Velcro covered foam padding that attached to the belt. While looking at that, right next to it was a black, canvas tool pouch on sale for fifteen dollars. I had been needing one of those, and all the other tool pouches were very expensive leather styles. I got both the belt and the pouch. I noticed that the Velcro padding thing for the belt had two straps with belt loops that slid over the belt, and these straps had the other side of the Velcro from the padding... The straps are completely removable from the padding and the belts. I saw that I could then take the long Velcro covered padding piece and attach the Velcro strap to each end, and make a complete belt from just the padding! It just so happens that the canvas tool pouch has Velcro on the back side of the sleeve that the work belt is meant to slide through. I can stick the tool pouch on the Velcro of the padding belt. I don't know that the Velcro will be able to hold up a power drill or some kind of heavy load, but it seems to do pretty well. The padding is wider than the belt, I'm guessing three inches wide. Wide belts make a big difference because a skinnier belt tends to cut in to my waist. The canvas apron pouch that I usually use. has strips of canvas made into strings like most aprons and that can cause discomfort problems too. This padding belt is very comfortable, and the tool pouch, with the Velcro, can be easily moved to the front, side or back of the belt to get it out of the way.

As far as I can tell this was a really good buy all around. If I weren't intending the leather part of the belt to be used with my kilts, it would probably be good with that padding. I kind of like having the Velcro closure just to be able to get the whole thing off quickly though.

I think I'm done with the work for today, I got a bunch done out there. In a bit I'll go out there and water the citrus to get the fertilizer started on it's way. I have the trees set up so I can flood the area they are growing in to water them. I'll also write up a post to tell the story of how I ended up with six cats.

[Bugbear]

post deleted.

[Bugbear]

I Will wait until tomorrow to flood the citrus trees. There's no hurry. I think I should add A description of each of the cats to that last post... just for the record.

[Bugbear]

Things are moving a little slow today. I woke up with an allergy headache which makes sense from all the weed pulling and dust raising that I did yesterday. Today will be about watering those citrus after picking a large bach of oranges. I don't want to have to pick for a couple of days after I water because of the mud around the trees, and that is why I put it off until today.

[Bugbear]

I went out and picked most of the navel oranges a while ago. The navel oranges start falling off on their own when it warms up. I tend not to eat them if they are on the ground first, but I suppose they might be ok. Those end up in the compost. I will set things up for the wattering this afternoon. It takes about an hour to flood them; it's several hundred gallons of watter. I do that two times in a row, usually adding gray water in, and that waters them for a month at this time of the year. In the summer, it is every two weeks, and they get doses of gray water on and off. I swich between the septic and the gardens on the gray water during the two winter-ish months if I don't have a large number of plants like tomatos growing. As I've said before, I've removed most of my raised beds, and am starting all over. There's not much out there right now. It all works very well, but gray water systems require someone to decide where the water would be best used, and also to make sure everything is up and running: unclogged. It can be a bit of work.


* That's done. I flooded them. I also chopped down a good sized forest of weeds that had been growing between the block wall and the row of citrus. That'll help in the new compost heep. I think I'm done for the day out there. Tomorrow, I'll flood them one more time and there good to go for this month.

* There, I added in descriptions on the end of the Cats post.

[Bugbear]

Last year, I think August or September, I mooved a bunch of pottery from my front yard to the back yard. It's mostly bonsai pots, and a few sculptures. They're stacked up behind the citrus trees and weeds have started growing up over them. It looks like some kind of ruins down in South America. I think I should find a better place for all that stuff. The other stuff behind the trees needs to be sorted a bit too. I've collected hundreds and hundreds of plant containers like the one gallon plastic nursery containers. It's fairly organized, but a few things have fallen over and so on. I almost need a storrage shed just for that stuff. Anyway, I will need to get that done before it starts getting hot. I also need to crawl up under a couple of my citrus trees, and prune off some suckers that are growing off the root stocks. I air layer some of those to make new trees to be root stocks for grafting also... It's just about that time of year. The garlic is still doing well. That's the garden.

[Bugbear]

I've been posting over in the hair salon thread today because of some strange things going on with the guest numbers over the last couple of days. Guess the hair salon is the best place to post the gosip.


Any way, I was talking about moving all those ciramics that I had hidden behind my citrus trees because the weeds were growing over them. Last year I was able to get a big, new wheel barrow with two front wheels. That will help in moving all that stuff. Still need to get a few trees in the ground. I'm also cooking a chicken breast for lunch.

Oops, I guess I posted a picture in the wrong thread.

With the short sleeves and no jacket, I think this would be more at home in the "casual" section.

I removed the picture from the Dreessy Kilt pictures thread though. I didn't know what the other pictures were showing, so I goofed. On the other hand, I only have two pictures and neither of them belong in that thread.

[Bugbear]

Yay! They got the new photo gallery up and running, and it's part of the forum. Maybe I can upload my own pictures now. I was poking around over there, and I'll need to learn to use it. Also, they locked down the old picture forum. I had been able to remove my picture from the wrong thread as I explained in my last post, but they locked it down right after that. Don't know what happens to that forum now..

I'll have to find the instructions for the photo gallery and read over them.

[Bugbear]

I finnished the second round of watering on the citrus. I might write up something on how the watering grid and so on works out there and patch it into this post later.

Ok, here's a description of the irrigation system I have set up for my citrus trees. All but one of them are in a row across the back of my property. The property slopes very slightly to one side. When I moved here the citrus were flush with the ground with no connecting trenches or paths for the water. This meant that each tree had to be watered individually with a slow trickle from a hose. It's a little difficult to get gray water to do that, and it is also nice to be able to water everything all at once. Over the course of a year I dug in a network of connected potholes and trenches. I tried to make this look a little like a dry river bed.

On a tree and particularly a citrus tree, it is best to have the tree trunk and root ball a little above grade or at the middle of a mound that slopes away from the trunk. I didn't plant them and they were quite established, so I had to remove some of the top layer of the soil to make the flood basin. That's what all the pot holes and trenches were about. The ground did begin to slightly slope away from the trees out away from their row, so I piled a berm up at that point with the soil I was removing.

This was enough to make the flood basin, and the slight slope from one side of the yard to the other promoted a gentle flow of water from one end of the basin to the other. I had to be very careful about removing the soil from around the trees because citrus tend to have many surface roots. Digging shovel sized holes allowed me to work on an area then leave it for a month to let the tree adapt while I worked on a different tree's area.

One tree is off to the side of the row, I didn't plant them , and so I just dug a irrigation trench over to it and gave it it's own basin. I put a spill over point at the end of the trench that meets the main watering basin, so that when the main basin is filled to a point, it spills over and flows to the off row tree. When that trees basin is filled, the watering is done. Mostly all I have to do to water them is use a garden hose with a heavy weight on the end to keep it from flying everywhere down in the main basin. That would be with a fully opened valve of course. It has worked quite well, and I can also direct gray water into the basin in the same way.

[Bugbear]

Boy, I'm going to have to find where the instructions on that photo gallery are, if there are any. I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to do, and I'm a little afraid to start an album or upload something until I understand what to do and how it works. I'm hoping that I can upload my pictures from my computer to the gallery somewhere, but then have them there for if I need to post them in this thread. If I can't do that, I'm not sure it will help me any.

Ehh, this usually happens when something changes. It'll all work out, and I do think it will be good for the forum to have pictures stored at the forum and not always independantly on other sites...

Thinking back on the day, it seems like I didn't have much energy. I did wake up with a bit of a headache and that was from allergies and weeding with all the dust and stuff. It just made things weird feeling when all the changes and things were going on out there on the forum.