We did make some progress today but had a pretty massive thunderstorm roll in that is causing us a delay.

We started working our way from the barn to the greenhouse with the watering system connections. We had to remove the temporary faucet we put on the water connection we have in the garden. This ended up being more difficult than we thought because the pipes didn’t want to come apart but we succeeded in the end. We now have forked piping laid out with two faucets beside each other. One is connected to the Gardena C1060 watering control unit and the other has a Gardena attachment so we can have multiple hoses attached at the same time.


Because the sun was beating down on us, we decided to repot the plants in the barn where it’s much cooler to work. It wasn’t necessarily spacious but it was much better than working outside or in the greenhouse.


We managed to transplant one Big Rainbow beefsteak, one Red Zebra and eight Colibri tomato plants into 32 cm pots. We also moved the Thai Chili and Turkish Sweet pepper plants into 26 cm pots. But unfortunately that was as far as 180 liters of soil got us. So we will need to make another soil run.

This is actually the perfect excuse for us to go back to Sunflower gartencenter, the store we fell in love with today. The soil we bought today at Hagebau was ok, but really not very good quality. Some of the bags had mold in them and were starting to sprout weeds. So we’re going to give the Sunflower brand soil a try and see how it goes. It is pre-fertilzed which should give all these plants a nice boost now that they finally have some room to grow. The tomatoes had used up all the soil in their pots already and I’m sure the cucumbers and zucchinis will be the same way tomorrow.

As we were finishing the last transplant and moving the plants into the greenhouse we realized that there was a huge thunderstorm coming up from behind the barn. We figured we might be able to still make it to the garden center to get more soil and could continue repotting plants in the barn. But within 15 minutes the sky had turned black and it started to pour. We took cover near the horse stalls and noticed that we have a water drainage issue to address when we get up on the roof to cover the grape vines on the barn. We think the grapes may be growing in the gutter and the water is rushing off the roof like a waterfall. Not a great thing. But at least we noticed it now and not after we’d just been up on the roof.

The wind started to pick up and we were getting pea-sized hail so we dashed into the house. Needless to say Ayla was just loving all this. She just strolled around in the rain, enjoying the cool wetness. It’s been close to 90 degrees here lately and that’s about 40 degrees above what a Newf finds “ideal.” And why restrict a water dog when she wants to play in the rain? That would be like telling your kids not to do it or not doing it yourself when there’s no good reason not to. Our house is waterproof…mostly.

When we got inside we realized that the rain was blowing in through the windows in the living room and our bedroom. Joy. We had the top part of the windows tipped open and the water was collecting on the glass pain which tips to the inside and just running down into the house. There wasn’t too much water coming inside in the living room but the bedroom actually needed to be mopped. A bit of water managed to leak through the ceiling into the living room but thankfully it was just onto the floor. There’s not really any insulation between the floor upstairs and the ceiling downstairs so it just dripped around one of the beams where it meets the plywood.

Things have calmed down again now but there may be more storms coming. We have to go make sure the roof is still on the greenhouse and I will try to take pictures of our progress then as well. We basically have to call it quits with the replanting but the garden center is open tomorrow morning so we’re going to get the soil then.

Instead we will carry on with installing the Gardena microdrip watering system. We need to lay the main piping and dig it down a bit and then set up the hoses in the greenhouse so all the pots have two drippers. Thank goodness we won’t have to make major changes to this every year. It’s a whole lot of setting up and initial costs. We also have to construct our greenhouse benches sometime in the near future so the pots aren’t on the ground anymore. But the payoff is going to be absolutely worth it and we’re already loving the benefits.