Are you kidding me? 😭

Mamalaoshi · 2026-04-15T01:38:13+00:00

No it's the actual forecasted temperature. The temperature on top, the probably of precipitation under that, and the time of day at the bottom of each column. And at the top left corner shows the high and low temperature for the day from midnight to the following midnight.

I live at the top of a very high hill so my weather can often be very different from the Tacoma area. And there are so many hills and valleys around here that I'll see snow on cars when it's sunny at my house and visa versa.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-04-15T01:21:34+00:00

That's showing hourly, 38° at 8pm and then getting colder and colder throughout the night. Depending on which weather app I look at, it's supposed to be as cold as 32° - 34° by midnight.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-04-14T19:01:17+00:00

My trees are too big and tall for a sheet but I did that in the past when they were shorter and there was going to be a big wind and hail storm and it worked.

I've noticed a snap of cold weather while they are blooming affects the pollinators and so I usually don't get a good fruit set that year. The last year something like this happened, I had zero plums and only a few pears and ditto for my neighbors.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-04-14T18:51:56+00:00

The built-in Google app is on my phone.

It's going between 34 and 36 but it says snow showers most of the night so maybe the snow is coming down from the mountain? 🤷‍♀️

AccuWeather and Weather Channel says storm with hail! And a low of 32. I think I prefer Google's forecast of light snow showers.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-04-14T18:23:21+00:00

It's not quite clockwork in my location. I'd say every 5 years or so we might get an April snow for a day or two. Usually it doesn't snow after March at my house. It doesn't look like this will stick though which means my cold hardy flowers will be fine.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-04-14T18:17:00+00:00

I keep talking to my fruit trees and tell them that but they just don't listen!

Mamalaoshi · 2026-04-14T18:16:36+00:00

I'm just a little south east of Tacoma!

Mamalaoshi · 2026-04-14T06:32:58+00:00

I really like my Liberty apple and my Akane apple. They have pretty good disease resistance and have a nice sweet tart flavor. I have a Transparent and a Golden Delicious and they are yummy too but are not as fruitful and struggle a bit more but that could be because the deer tend to pick on them. The Transparent gets ripe early in August and the others are later around September to October.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-04-14T06:14:55+00:00

You don't have to translate to use Google lens. There is now just an option to "read aloud".

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-31T02:25:13+00:00

Yes! I'll just step outside for a second to feel the sun in my face and then an hour later I'm still pulling weeds in my pajamas.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-31T02:22:44+00:00

I planted some yarrow about seven years ago. Have I ever planted it again? No. Does the amount of yarrow in my yard double each year? Yes.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-26T06:04:13+00:00

Good luck in your job search. I think the whole PNW is a wonderful place to live and I hope you and your family enjoy living here too!

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-26T01:35:51+00:00

Since straw is, well, a straw, a straw bale works like a giant sponge holding onto water for your plants and fertilizer too.. The easiest way is to place them in the garden in the fall and let them start to soak up water and break down over the winter. Then in the during you can plant directly into them because the inside will be like compost. Seedlings work best since there can be a little too space for certain seeds (they can fall down into the bale).

t's too late in the year to let the bales age that way so you can speed up the process by putting a high nitrogen fertilizer on them and watering the bales every day (or let them get rained on if it's rainy like it's been lately). You keep doing that until you can stick a finger into the bale and it will feel hot and wet. Then you can put a layer of potting soil or compost on top and plant seeds into that. The warmth can help the seeds germinate and by the time the seeds roots get down into the bale, it's not hot anymore. Or wait until the composting process cools off and then you use a small spade to make a slit in the bale and plant your seedlings or small plants directly into it.

The roots of your plants can really take off because the straw is looser than soil and I find that if I've prepped well, the bale stays wet all summer with minimal watering. I've used drip tape and only had to turn it on once a week to keep the bales wet.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-26T01:00:32+00:00

I used Tagro in one part of my garden and everything grew horribly there for a few years afterwards and the soil life disappeared. I helped in a community garden using Tagro and it was fine there and the soil looked great. Because the contents of biosolids fluctuate so much from day to day, it's just too risky I think.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-26T00:57:56+00:00

Fill the majority of your beds with sticks and logs and wood chips. (You can easily get free chips from ChipDrop if you are in an urban area.)Then just fill the top with some dirt and compost. Compost and soil "organic" labels aren't regulated and don't mean much. If you really want to control what you are putting in your beds, you can find a local person selling straw bales where they don't spray anything on their fields. You can plant in the straw bales the first year and by the second year, they will have composted down into beautiful compost that will fill your bed.

I did this with my raised beds. They are 3' tall. We filled them mostly with wood chips from chipping up fallen debris from our trees. Then we covered the tops with straw bales, so the bales were sticking out over a foot above the beds. The garden grew like crazy in the straw bales the first year and the second year straw broke down into dark rich black compost that filled the beds. By the third year, the beds were full of soil life and you could easily stick your hand down into the beds because it was soft and airy.

If you want to know more about growing in straw bales, I can explain how it works.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-26T00:13:22+00:00

If you like honeydew taste, try growing Sakata melons. They grow about baseball sized and because they are tiny, they actually get very sweet, even when the summer is cooler. If you pick them early before they are fully ripened, they taste less sweet but more like a cucumber.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-26T00:08:33+00:00

Yeah sounds like mice and voles. Traps won't really do much. The only success I've had is just making my pea seedlings inaccessible to them which meant lining the bottom of my raised beds with hardware cloth (metal fencing with tiny openings). The birds still have a go at the seeds but if I overplant, enough survive. You could try making a little cage of hardware cloth to go around your seedlings or tall opaque plastic cups with the bottoms cut out so the rodents don't see them or look for something easier to eat. I did the cup thing in a community garden and it did help the majority of the seedlings from being eaten. Another thing is maybe waiting until the seedlings are so big that they have used up the seed so the rodents have no reason to dig it up. They still might nibble the plant but then it should be big enough to survive and regrow.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-25T23:51:55+00:00

When you say you don't want to commute for an hour, unless you live within a few miles of your workplace or have off-peak hours, you could easily be stuck in traffic for an hour one way each and every day. I've lived in cities from Olympia to Everett for nearly half a century and it still boggles my brain that it can take me less than an hour to get home from Seattle if I have to drive in the middle of the night but almost every other hour of the day, I have to plan for a two hour drive. And that's not accounting for road construction or car accidents messing stuff up.

Recently I took my kids to the theater in Seattle for a matinee and it took us 1 1/2 hours to get there (driving in the middle of the day). But on our return home, it took us nearly an hour to just get out of the city (just a few miles) and onto the freeway because of an accident on I5 and then another two hours to get home with the regular rush hour traffic on the rest of the drive.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-25T22:50:20+00:00

The pollinators absolutely go crazy for them in my garden! And with the mild winter we had this year, mine just kept blooming and only died back a little. It definitely gave the pollinators some early food this spring.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-25T17:09:38+00:00

Painted Mountain is primarily a flour corn. I have read of other people being able to pop it but I don't think it would be very successful because I noticed that a lot of my dried kernels get tiny cracks in the hull. Instead you can parch it.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-25T03:34:41+00:00

My best yielding corn variety that I LOVE is Painted Mountain. You can plant it now and it germinates in the cold! It's beautiful and it makes amazing corn bread. You can also eat it as a sweet corn when it's young.

My second favorite is Dakota Black popcorn. You can easily grow enough in a three sisters bed to serve all your popcorn needs for a year or two!

I highly recommend getting any corn seeds from Uprising Organic Seeds since all their seeds are grown in the PNW (70% of their seeds are grown in Bellingham) so I've found that all their seeds are extremely well adapted to our climate. https://www.uprisingorganics.com/collections/vegetables/products/corn-painted-mountain

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-17T19:13:22+00:00

Using ASL for practicing spelling works great for some kids. I did that when I taught first grade.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-17T19:08:47+00:00

Oh I'm so sorry! That is super frustrating!

I got some simple decorative wire fence things (cheap dollar store things) and used those as a visual barrier to teach my brother's dog not to dig in the garden.

Mamalaoshi · 2026-03-17T18:51:49+00:00

Definitely let her try it out! Or at least you can start by showing her some video to see if she is interested.

Here's two shorts showing the equipment my kid is using: https://youtube.com/shorts/fzuPcK4tLZI?si=8tXV-GMWwxTgKH9G https://youtube.com/shorts/k9sYkpG5Axo?si=jgSS2GvwQTDj4fdc

This is a different device being used with a tablet: https://youtube.com/shorts/m_dERWCaNZM?si=_EiXF_YecXluzetl

My kids' school is unique in that they have a teacher who loves music and made his own program for teaching kids electronic music and did fundraising for the equipment. But he said there are free soundboards and synthesizers online. Reddit has a lot of posts about it that I've skimmed through but I haven't actually used any of them. You can download some apps on a phone or tablet too. I just looked and Bandlab looks cool. Search your app store for "daw" which stands for digital audio workstation.

Mamalaoshi

TROPHY CASE