Month: December 2022

Analysing our 2022 garden: squash, gourds and melons

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

Okay, it’s that time! I’ll be working on a serious of posts, going over how our 2022 garden went, what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t even happen at all. This is help give us an idea of what we want to do in the future, what we don’t want to do in the future, and what changes need to be made.

*sigh*

I had such high hopes for our squash and gourds for 2022. We planted SO many varieties of squash! We especially worked towards growing winter squash, with a focus on varieties that stored well for the winter. This is part of our working towards being as self sufficient as possible, and to have a good supply of food during the winter months when we can expect to be unable to get out, either due to being snowed in, or vehicles freezing, or whatever, for at least two months. Something we’ve already had to deal with, somewhat.

We also planted a variety of pumpkins, including 3 hulless varieties for their seeds, and summer squash, plus had both new and old varieties of gourds.

Almost everything was a loss, and what wasn’t a loss was still nowhere near fully successful.

We’ll start with our “fun” plants: the gourds.

I am wanting to grow gourds to cure them, then use them for crafting or to make useful objects out of them. Three that we had grown before were:

  • Tennessee Dancing Gourd, which did very well in 2021, even in drought conditions.
  • Ozark Nest Egg, which was set back in growth for quite time time, but when they did start to grow, looked to be incredibly prolific and would have done amazing, if they had not been killed off by frost.
  • Luffa, which had not done well before, but I really want to grow them for their sponges.

These were grown from seeds left over from the previous year. They germinated well, though there were issues with the cats getting into the mini-greenhouse they were in and destroying many seedlings. I used the last of our seeds to try again, and we did manage to have a few survive.

New gourds included the canteen gourd, and apple gourd.

The Results:

I am really, really happy with how the Ozark Nest Egg and Tennessee Dancing Gourds did!

The Ozark Nest Egg gourds are absolutely beautiful! I just love the size and shape of them. The Dancing Gourds managed to produce a decent amount that were larger than those we collected at the end of the previous, drought stricken year.

As I write this, they are both in a bin, curing. The Dancing gourds have mostly turned a tan colour. The Ozark Nest Egg gourds were already almost white, so there’s not a lot of change in their colour.

I look forward to seeing what we can do with them, after they are fully cured!

Then there was the luffa…

They took such a very long time to even start blooming, and when they did, it was all male flowers for quite a long time. When the female flowers started showing up, there were no male flowers to pollinate them! So when we finally got both blooming at the same time, I made sure to hand pollinate them.

By then, however, it was just too late in the season. There was no chance for them to fully mature. When the frost finally hit, that was the end of them.

Conclusion:

I would definitely want to try all three again. Hopefully, I’ll have seeds from the Ozark Nest Egg we harvested, because I didn’t see them when I was ordering other things from the site I got them from originally. I may have just missed them.

As for the luffa, I think those will wait until we have a greenhouse or polytunnel before I try again. I really like them, and when the plants finally do start growing, they grow so incredibly fast!

Next, we have the canteen gourd and the apple gourd.

The canteen gourds ended up needing potting up a couple of times, and even then, by the time I could transplant them, they were getting way too big for their pots. I’d have transplanted them earlier, but had to wait until after our last average frost date (June 2). They were already showing flower buds when they were transplanted – which promptly died.

They never really did well after transplanting, staying long and gangly, and never filling out. They did bloom, but again, it was male flowers only. We did, eventually, get female flowers that I hand pollinated, but it was too late in the season.

The canteen gourds were planted at the tunnel trellis, which had been used the year before, but the apple gourds were grown in a completely new garden area. This squash patch had most of our winter squash and pumpkins. Each transplanted went into its own dug out hole that was filled with fresh garden soil before transplanting. Unfortunately, this area got heavily saturated during the flooding, and it was way too long before everything finally got well mulched.

Out of everything there, though, the apple gourds did the best.

It still took them a long time to get to the point of flowering and producing fruit – I would hand pollinated them, any time I saw new female flowers show up. The three surviving transplants began to produce quite a few gourds, but it was simply too late. Then, even with protection, they were pretty much killed off by our first frosts.

I know these grow in our climate zone. It was just a terrible growing year that set everything back so much.

Conclusion:

I’ve already picked up more canteen and apple gourd seeds. In fact, I’ve also picked up some drum gourds to try, too! Plus some Caveman’s Club. I am just determined to make it work! I want to make stuff with these, and there are other varieties of gourds I will eventually be trying to grow, for different purposes.

Then there was the summer squash.

*sigh*

We accidentally bought three, instead of one, variety pack of summer squash seeds, so we’ll have green zucchini, yellow zucchini, Magda and sunburst patty pan seeds for years to come. Summer squash was one of the first things we grew, in our very first gardening year, and even though we lost half of them to frost because they were transplanted too early, we still had so much summer squash, we were able to harvest them daily for a while.

They didn’t do as well during the drought of 2021, but we were still able to harvest enough summer squash to be able to do refrigerator pickles. Mostly, though, we enjoy eating them fresh and raw!

For 2022, we were accidentally sent a packet of G-Star patty pans, a green variety, as well. When the mistake was pointed out, we were sent the seeds we were supposed to get, and told to keep the ones we were sent by mistake. We were quite happy to try a new variety of patty pans!

The Result:

*sigh*

The Magda, yellow zucchini and sunburst patty pans were planted in a low raised bed together. Because we like them so much, we had twice as many sunburst as anything else. The green zucchini were planted into the new squash bed, right next to the low raised bed.

We planted as many of the G-star as we did the sunburst patty pans, but those got planted in another new bed, on the opposite side of the main garden area, along with corn, winter squash and hulless pumpkins.

All of these had been started indoors with an excellent germination rate.

None of the summer squash did well, though we did get more Magda squash than in previous years, when fewer plants survived. We quite like the Magda squash. Still, there were very few of them overall, and the plants did not thrive.

We got almost nothing from the green zucchini, and not much more from the yellow. Most disappointing of all was how few sunburst squash we got. Even with hand pollinating.

The G-star had a rough start, but once they got well mulched, they really perked up and grew very quickly. We were even able to harvest some, though the biggest, healthiest plant suddenly died, its stem completely cut through by an insect.

Conclusion:

Since we’ve had such success with summer squash in previous years, we know that 2022 was an exception for how bad our summer squash did. The question is, was it because of the flooding? Or where there other factors? I think lack of pollinators were part of the problem, but the plants also just didn’t bloom much at all.

We’ll be growing all these varieties again, and hopefully, 2023 will be a better growing year!

Now we go into what was one of the more disappointing things; our winter squash. I’m including the pumpkins with these, even though they actually did better.

Along with the three types of hulless pumpkins, which were transplanted well away from each other, we had a couple of free giant pumpkin seeds we grew in a hill we used for Crespo squash the year before, and some Baby Pam pumpkins from seeds left from the year before. Those had a zero germination rate the year before, but for 2022, we had a 100% germination rate!

In the new, big squash patch, we also had Teddy Squash, a tiny, short season variety we’d had seeds left over from the year before, Georgia Candy Roaster, and Winter Sweet. In the corn and squash patch, we had Boston Marrow, while Red Kuri was planted in a new bed by the chain link fence.

I feel like I’m forgetting another winter squash. Maybe I’ll remember later. Oh, right! We also tried Crespo Squash again. Those tried to do so well the year before, but kept getting eaten by deer and groundhogs!

The Results:

Again, it was almost a total loss. Especially for the winter squash.

While the big squash patch didn’t have standing water during the flooding, the ground did get quite saturated. We lost some of our transplants completely. The squash and corn patch, on the other hand, so SO much more flooding!

Still, if we’d been able to well mulch the big squash patch better, I think it would have helped. Also, the south side of the patch got more shade than the north side, due to the tall trees between the garden and the house, which certainly didn’t help!

The Georgia Candy Roaster and Winter Sweet just didn’t grow. It’s like they never recovered from transplanting. The Teddy did a bit better, and even started to form tiny squash, but it was way too late for them to mature. The Baby Pam did surprisingly well, and we did get a few little pumkins (they only grow 5-6 inches in diameter). We got a couple of Kakai hulless pumpkins, too. The Crespo squash never even bloomed.

Probably the only really successful thing was the giant pumpkins. We made no attempt to get actual giants, but they still grew really big. We had two plants, and got two pumpkins out of it.

In the corn and squash bed, which got so much more flooding, I’m amazed we got any Boston Marrow at all. They took a long time to recover from flooding, but they did eventually start blooming and producing fruit. We did pick a few, but they were under ripe, and even the ripest one was much smaller than they should have been.

We did get some Lady Godiva and Styrian hulless pumpkins, though nowhere near as many as we should have, nor where they as big as they should have been.

The only real success was the Red Kuri (Little Gem) squash, that grew in the south yard up the chain link fence. They were still smaller than they should have been, but we did get an okay harvest.

Conclusion:

Well, our reasons for growing so much squash haven’t changed, so we’ll definitely be trying to grow them all again. There’s nothing we could have done about the damage the flooding caused. When we try again, we will have to take extra care to make sure they are well mulched, as that made quite the difference, once we were finally able to do it. We’re going to be trying pretty much all the varieties again. My source for Baby Pam pumpkins and Teddy squash no longer carries, them, though. I don’t remember right now if we have any seeds left, but if we do, we will try them again, too.

Among the things we are slowly working on is building high raised beds in the main garden area. When we get to building them where the large squash patch was, the extra height will also help get away from the shade problem on the north side .

Now we reach one more disappointment.

A total and complete loss of our melons.

We had made two new large garden plots, using the Ruth Stout deep mulch method. The north half of both had potatoes planted in them, and the south half got melons.

The previous year, we’d grown two types of melons. In spite of the drought, they did very well, and we got a surprisingly good harvest. We loved having fresh melons, so for 2022, we planted even more. Some were seeds harvested from grocery store melons. We also tried Zucca melon (a giant variety) and a short season watermelon, for six varieties altogether.

The Results:

When some of the transplants died, we filled the gaps with Yakteen gourds (the ones with the red arrows pointing to them).

The watermelons died almost right away. Of the ones that didn’t die outright, they just didn’t grow. It wasn’t until the very end of the season that a couple of Zucca melons started to grow, and even bloom, but it was just way too late by then.

Conclusion:

After the success of the previous year, this was such a huge disappointment. We all really love melons, but they are quite expensive to buy, so growing them would be well worth the effort.

For 2023, we’ve bought more Halona and Pixie melon seeds, which we had successfully grown the year before (we had saved Halona seeds, but not Pixie), plus we are trying a new cantaloupe type variety. We will also be trying the Zucca melon again, plus we still have saved seeds from other varieties.

The flooding we got last year was exceptional, so I don’t think we’ll have that happen again, but we will still need to work on improving the soil and planting them in, at the very least, low raised beds. The Pixie and Halon were planted at the trellis tunnel the first time, and are excellent climbers. We don’t plan to use that tunnel trellis again, but will be building new, permanent trellis tunnels closer to the house, with low raised beds at their bases. That should make a big difference in growing conditions – so long as the weather is cooperative!

The Re-Farmer

Analysing our 2022 garden: cucumbers, bell peppers and eggplants

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Okay, it’s that time! I’ll be working on a serious of posts, going over how our 2022 garden went, what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t even happen at all. This is help give us an idea of what we want to do in the future, what we don’t want to do in the future, and what changes need to be made.

Here, we are looking at growing stuff that was new to us. When I was a kid, my mother did grow cucumbers here, but she never grew peppers or eggplants. Our own experience with growing peppers goes back to before our move, when the co-op we lived in built accessible garden beds, and we signed up for one of them. We tried growing a hot variety of pepper, and we were getting one that was developing really well – then it got stolen. I don’t know if I feel sorry for whomever took it and tried to eat it, thinking it was a bell pepper, not a hot pepper! We ended up potting it up and bringing it inside for the winter, and got many peppers from it, that we dehydrated.

I am not able to eat fresh tomatoes. They make me gag, and I’ve since learned this is a thing similar to how some people find cilantro tastes like soap. There’s something in fresh tomatoes that I react to, but not when they are processed.

Peppers is a bit different. It doesn’t matter if they’re fresh or processed. They make me gag if I can taste them. I’ve eaten things with peppers in them as an ingredient, without reacting to it, so it’s not an allergy, but if there is enough that they can be tasted, I can’t eat it. Oddly, I can eat jalapeno stuffed peppers just fine! As for fresh peppers, I love how they smell, and the crispness as I cut them up, but when I try to eat them, I just want to puke! However, my husband and one of my daughters both love peppers, so we gave it a try.

Eggplant is something that most of us like, but we rarely buy, so we decided to try growing them to see if we liked them enough to make it worthwhile to grow them every year. Peppers and eggplant are both heat loving plants, but as long as their growing season is short enough and they are started indoors, they can be grown in our zone 3. Our summers can get extreme heat as much as our winters get extreme cold!

I’ll start with the cucumbers, though.

We chose a variety that was supposed to be good for both fresh eating and for pickling. They were started indoors, and were transplanted at one of the A frame trellises.

The Result:

In a word, frustrating.

As with so many other things, the cucumbers did not reach their full potential. However, they did grow and bloom and produce. We would even have had enough to do a few jars of pickles, but we mostly ate them fresh.

For the amount of cucumbers we planted, we had enough for our own use.

The frustrating thing?

My sister had a very productive year for cucumbers, and she dumped bags of them with us.

We made up a dozen jars of pickles, but she gave us so many, they started to mold before we could use them all, and ended up composting a lot of them. With so many cucumbers given to us, it made it harder to use up our own cucumbers, too.

As for the pickles we made, we used a garlic pickle recipe. They’re good, but we’ll have to try different recipes, and different varieties of pickling cucumbers, to find what we like best.

The Conclusion:

Yes, we will be growing cucumbers again. Hopefully, we’ll have a better growing year, with bigger, stronger and more productive plants. We’ll be trying different varieties and, as we grow more herbs and continue to grow garlic, we’ll hopefully be making tastier pickles, in the future.

I’m also going to have to tell my sister that, if she has another bumper crop of cucumbers, to please not pass on any to us! We like cucumbers and pickles, but we don’t like them that much!

With the peppers, we got one variety of purple bell peppers (Purple Beauty) that were supposed to be so dark, they were nearly black when ripe. They were started indoors and germinated quite well. They were transplanted into one of the low raised beds, surrounded by spinach on one side, turnips on the other (both of which failed) and onions (which did well). We also had them under netting for most of the growing year, to protect them from critters.

The Result:

These were definitely a fail.

We did get tiny little peppers that ripened to the dark colour they were supposed to become, but the plants never thrived. I think they would have benefited from being mulched properly earlier, but we just didn’t have the material to do it until it was probably too late. How much of a difference the mulch would have made, I can’t actually say, but I would guess it would have at least improved things a bit.

We simply had a really bad growing year, even aside from the flooding. The low raised beds were enough to protect what was in them, for the most part, even when there was standing water in the paths, but it’s likely the flooding was still too much for the roots. The peppers were in the bed under the mosquito netting, on the left of the above photo. It wouldn’t have taken much for the roots to be hitting saturated soil and starting to rot.

What’s amazing about that standing water is, our top soil is only about 6-8 inches deep in this area. Under that is rocks and gravel. Which would normally mean, really good drainage. We had so much water this spring, however, there was nowhere for the water to drain!

Conclusion:

While the peppers may have been a fail, we’re going to try again. Hopefully, we’ll have better conditions in 2023.

My daughter had mentioned she thought we’d be trying more than one variety of pepper in 2022, so for 2023, we’re going to try several different varieties, including one hot variety. We’ll be looking at what we can do to improve soil conditions – perhaps using a higher raised bed, and making plastic domes to cover them, for extra heat. And, of course, mulching them very well, much earlier!

In the process, if we have a good growing year, we’ll figure out what varieties are enjoyed the most, and eventually work our way down to just one or two varieties to grow every year.

Assuming we’re able to grow them at all! We shall see.

Last of all, are the eggplants.

We chose the Little Finger variety, because I liked their shape and, from all I’d been able to find, they were described as quite delicious. I got them from a seed source that is even further north than we are, so we could be quite sure that they would grow here.

Well, not quite.

In the above photo with the flooded paths, the eggplants were transplanted into the middle bed, where the front half is planted with garlic. The eggplants were planted in the middle, with spinach surrounding them (which failed) and onions around the outer edge (which did okay). We had hoops to hold up mosquito netting to protect them but, like many other things, we were not able to mulch them properly until late in the season.

As we were doing the last of the transplants, we found a couple of eggplants that were missed, so those got planted into a dollar store “raised bed garden” that was made of black felt. This was set up quite a ways away from the low raised bed, which turned out to be slightly elevated, and not affected by the flooding.

The Result:

These were mostly a fail.

The eggplants in the low raised bed did not thrive at all. It wasn’t until very late in the season that one of them finally started to bloom, and develop a tiny little eggplant. Covering them did not seem to help them at all. The lack of a good mulching for so long probably didn’t help, either.

The ones in the black felt bed did better. I suspect the black fabric warmed up the soil more, and that they preferred that. They still took a long time before starting to bloom and develop fruit, however. One plant did noticeably better than the other.

That handful was our entire harvest.

We left them to grow as long as possible. We didn’t get frost until quite a lot later than average and, when we did, we covered them to protect them and squeeze out as much growing time as we could.

The few eggplants we did get, however, where quite tasty!

Conclusion:

We are definitely going to grow the Little Finger variety again, plus we will be trying some “regular” eggplant – the size and shape we would typically find in any grocery store.

With what we learned in 2022, I think that we will perhaps try growing them in pots or grow bags, or higher beds. If we can do black fabric grow bags, that would be even better. With two varieties to try, we’ll see which ones we like better, and see if we use them enough to keep growing them, year after year.

In the future, we hope to have some sort of greenhouse or polytunnel to help extend our growing season, and provide better growing conditions for heat loving plants, such as peppers and eggplants. Once we have a really good growing season for them, we’ll finally be able to determine if we actually like them enough to be worth growing annually, or if these are things we would continue to buy only once in a while at the grocery store.

The Re-Farmer

Finally done, kitty progress, and a beat up Shop Towel!

/ Re-Farmer / 9 Comments

First, the good stuff about Marlee.

She may still snarl and growl at the other cats, but she’s doing really well. Last night, I put her on my bed and she actually stayed for a while, rolling around and streeeeettcching herself out. I sent a picture to the cat lady, who was shocked. She’d never shown them her belly!

The outside cats have been pretty excited about their wet cat food treats this morning, with a couple of them cleaning out the bowl for me. I’ve been mixing in some lysine before doling it out.

I spotted the tuxedo in his favourite spot under the cat house, so he got a big dollop. I later spotted the bitty tabby under the cat house in a different spot, but couldn’t get a picture. Pinky kept blocking my view!

I left quite early to take my mother’s car to the garage, and my daughters took turns supervising the cats in my room, and indulging Marlee. She has started to jump up onto the bed with them, and rolling around while being petted. She still snarls and growls at most of the other cats, but she was okay with lying on my bed next to Cheddar, which is awesome.

Cheddar is really good with other cats!

Big Rig has been a pain! She wants out of the room, but when we did let her out, she immediately went after one of the other cats. She has only a tiny incision, but if she’s going to be picking fights with other cats, we’re going to have to keep her isolated longer, to give it more time to heal. The last thing we want is for her to open it up because she’s being a big B to the other cats! The problem is, even when being kept in my room, she’s been going after Butterscotch, too! I’m not impressed with her. 🤨

As I write this, she’s made her way onto my arms and is currently using one of my elbows as a pillow, while her body is sliding down and pushing my keyboard further and further away.

She makes it quite difficult to type!

While I was in town, I was early enough to fill my mother’s gas tank and get a car wash. I figured the mechanic deals with enough filthy vehicles. Especially with our current temperatures hovering around freezing, making for some very messy roads. When I dropped off the keys, I was still almost an hour early, so I went for lunch. He wasn’t very busy, and since I was just there for an oil change and coolant check, he got it in and finished before my official appointment, so it was ready and waiting when I got back. It has been so long since the oil was changed (thankfully, it doesn’t get used all that much), the tag from wherever it was done last was unreadable. Whoever did it last hadn’t done a good job, and it may have been leaking slightly all this time. The oil level was a bit low when I checked it, but not much, so it wasn’t too bad, at least. The filter was changed and the coolant topped up as well, and now my mother’s car is very happy! I could feel the difference as I drove home.

Gotta make sure it never gets that long between oil changes again!!!

By the time I got home, it was time to feed the outside cats again. This time, I saw Shop Towel coming a lot closer than usual – he was smelling that wet cat food and I could see he was wanting some! I don’t know of there was any left, by the time he showed up. My focus is on making sure the bitties get their fill.

Shop Towel (aka: Sad Face) was not looking good today!

He has clearly been in fights recently. You can even see blood in his fur on his side. We haven’t been hearing any cat fights, so this likely happened at one of the other farms in his territory.

I want to snuggle that sad faced boy so badly!

I ended up sending a picture to the cat lady. I told her, this isn’t one of our cats, but he’s been coming around for a few years. Because he’s so aggressive with our male cats, we haven’t been encouraging him to stick around, aside from filling his belly. We’re not exactly chasing him off, either. We’d love to actually befriend him, but not with the way he behaves with the other cats. I suggested that, if we could ever trap him, he’d be a good candidate for a TNR.

Much to my surprise, the cat lady said that she knows of a farm with no other cats where he could be released! That would be ideal for him – and there would be a better chance of him being at least somewhat socialized, if he’s not fighting for territory with other males.

Of course, the idea of a farm that doesn’t have cats is just… so foreign to me! 😄 Usually, they just show up.

Now that the car is taken care of and the cats brought home, we actually have some quiet time over the next while. No trips to the city, no errands, no more waiting for the roofers… I can actually stay home for the next few days! About the only thing I expect to need to do is help my mother with her shopping, now that her car is done.

I look forward to tucking my head into my shell and being a hermit for a while!

The Re-Farmer

Analysing our 2022 garden: peas and beans

/ Re-Farmer / 6 Comments

Okay, it’s that time! I’ll be working on a serious of posts, going over how our 2022 garden went, what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t even happen at all. This is help give us an idea of what we want to do in the future, what we don’t want to do in the future, and what changes need to be made.

It was a mixed bag when it came to growing legumes in 2022!

As with so many other areas in the gardens, we did have flooding around the pea and bean trellises, but that area is a bit more elevated, so it wasn’t much of an issue, compared to other garden areas.

The previous year, we’d grown three types of bush beans, and they did very well, in spite of drought conditions and heat waves. We were very happy with them.

For 2022, though, we decided to try growing pole beans, and shelling beans.

The previous year, we had little success with peas. For 2022, we decided to try an edible pod pea, as well as shelling beans. Plus, we had a whole four saved seeds from the King Tut Purple Peas we tried growing the year before.

Let’s start with the peas.

We used the same trellis we’d grown peas at, the year before, amending the soil a bit more. The trellises were all meant to be temporary, but we did get one more year out of them.

Don’t those peas look nice and healthy?

That was about the best they got.

The Results:

The sugar snap peas germinated, then almost disappeared. I think we got a whole two pea pods out of them. There weren’t a lot of those, however, and were planted in half of one side of the trellis. The shelling peas too up the rest of the trellis, which means some were planted across from the snap peas. Those pea plants also did not do well, which tells me that the soil on that end of the trellis was most likely the problem.

A couple of weeks later, we planted more of the shelling peas at an A frame trellis, shared with gourds and cucumbers. Those plants actually seemed to do better.

In general, though, the peas did not thrive. Even the healthiest, strongest plants only got to about half the size they should have. I did have shelling peas to harvest, but never more than a handful. Usually, it was just a few that I could eat right away.

Then there were the purple peas.

The Results:

As with the other peas the year before, the King Tut Purple Peas did not do well, but they kept trying to grow and bloom for a surprisingly long time. I decided to try starting the four seeds we’d managed to keep indoors. All four germinated and were looking quite healthy. They were transplanted in a south bed with the chain link fence to climb. Shortly after transplanting, I cut the top and bottom off some gallon water jugs and put them around the peas for extra protection from the wind until they could grow big enough to start vining into the fence.

They… grew. Like the other peas, they did not reach their potential at all. They grew tall and thin, without a lot of foliage. There were a few purple blooms and pea pods developed, but they were green instead of purple, except for one. I never tried harvesting them at all, but just left them to go to seed. There wasn’t a lot to collect at the end of the season, and I’m not even sure I want to try growing them again. They weren’t the tastiest of peas, but that could be because they just didn’t grow well.

The Conclusion:

While the peas did not do well, we will still be growing them again. For 2023, I’ve already ordered the variety of shelling peas we’d tried in 2020. The pea and bean trellises have been dismantled, and they will be grown in a completely different area, as we build up our permanent garden beds. Hopefully, that will make the difference. I really love fresh peas, and would love to have enough to freeze. I would love to have edible pod peas, too, but I’m not sure if we will try them again in 2023. I think it will depend on how far we get with the permanent gardening locations.

Then there were the beans.

While we bought pole beans, we also had green and yellow bush beans left over from the year before.

We planted a green and a purple variety at an A frame trellis. The shelling beans and the red noodle beans were planted at what had been a squash tunnel, the year before. The yellow beans were planted with the kulli corn to act as a nitrogen fixer, as well as to help shade out weeds.

The green beans from the year before were planted with our sweet corn as well, but that bed got flooded out. While most of the corn survived, not a single green bean germinated. We bought another variety of green bush bean and planted those, and they did grow.

The Results:

The purple Carminat and the green Seychelles pole beans did great, considering what a horrible growing year it was.! Both varieties were quite productive. I wasn’t picking beans every day, as I was with the bush beans the previous year, but I was at least picking some every couple of days. The purple beans seemed to do the best – even when a deer went by and nibbled on them all along the row!

The yellow bush beans planted with the kulli corn did quite well, too. The only downside was that we had a net around the bed to protect the corn from deer and racoons, which made harvesting the beans very inconvenient.

The green bush beans we planted with the sweet corn didn’t grow as large as they should have; it was a new bed and it had lots of issues, so I’m not surprised by that. Everything did a lot better when we were finally able to finish mulching it all. The bean plants were so small, however, that it was hard to harvest them with the mulch. They were there more for the corn than for us, so I decided to just leave them and hopefully have seeds, but I think they were planted just too late for the season, and none of the pods dried out.

Then there were the shelling beans and Red Noodle beans at the tunnel trellis.

The shelling beans (Blue Grey Speckled Tepary) were very small plants, just barely getting tall enough to start climbing the trellis, yet they produces so many pods! Still, there wasn’t much of a harvest of these very small beans. That photo is the entire harvest! I saved 100 seeds (we’d planted 50) to grow in 2023, and we ate the rest. It was the first time we’d tasted these beans, and they were barely enough for one meal! Still, we found them tasty, and I look forward to trying them again. I hope a better growing year will improve things.

As for the Red Noodle beans…

These are supposed to be a vining type bean, but it wasn’t until near the end of the season that they actually got large enough to start climbing the trellis. It took even longer before I finally saw blooms. We were starting to harvest and pull up the garden for the end of the year, when I found a single, solitary, baby red noodle bean pod, which you can see in the above photo.

I had been looking forward to trying these beans, and would like to try growing them again, just to find out if we like them! Not in 2023, though.

Conclusion:

Beans are such a staple crop, and we enjoy having a variety of types, we are definitely growing beans again in 2023. Along with the seeds we saved for shelling beans, my mother gave me a jar of white beans that are descendants of beans she used to grow here. She gave seeds to my sister to grow in her own garden, which she did for quite a few years. She’s not growing shelling beans anymore, though, so she gave her saved seeds to my mother, who passed them on to me. What a circle!

On top of that, we have ordered seeds for green, yellow, purple and red varieties of beans, including one that is supposed to be good as both a fresh bean and a shelling beans.

While we’ve had our failures this year, beans are one of the few crops that have produced really well for us, even in adverse growing conditions, making them a reliable food to grow.

The Re-Farmer

So far, so good!

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Well, we had our first night with Marlee!

I made sure to have as few cats as possible in my room overnight, so I could leave the baby jail open, and Marlee could come out any time she felt comfortable. That meant Nozencrantz and Butterscotch, who simply won’t leave, Big Rig, who wants to leave, but we’re keeping her isolated for a while longer as she recovers from surgery, and Marlee.

This morning, she was not in the cage. I eventually found her, peeking at me from under my vanity – then she came out for pets! Which is really funny because she’ll be enjoying pets, but if she so much as hears another cat moving, she would hiss and growl – while still demanding pets! After a while, she seemed to be trying to get at her food bowl inside the baby jail, from outside, so I put her in and she enthusiastically ate and drank. For a cat that has known hunger for the past couple of years, I fully expect her to be taking many opportunities to eat!

What I can’t tell is if she has used a litter box. The one in the cage looked unused, but there are two others that should could have used. Or, she might have used some corner of my room that I haven’t found, yet! The cat lady uses stove pellets for litter, too, so I know she is at least used to that.

I made sure to update the cat lady about how the night went, and they are SO happy with how Marlee has been doing. Her husband was saying, cats know when they are home! I hope that’s how Marlee feels, because after all she’s been through, she deserves a soft and comfortable life indoors, with lots of love! The only issue we might have is with the other cats. Unlike Nosencrantz, however, I’m sure Marlee will handle potential conflict better, and not collapse into a ball of panic and anxiety, like Nosencrantz sometimes does.

So that’s good news!

I did get a daughter to stay in my room and supervise while I did the morning rounds, just in case. Cheddar forced his way into the room as I was leaving, but this is Cheddar. He accepts all cats. Marlee hisses at him, and he’s completely oblivious. If any cats gets through to her, I’m betting it’ll be Cheddar. Even Nosencrantz and Butterscotch like Cheddar!

The outside cats were completely out of water in both heated water bowls this morning! The heated bowl that isn’t working and has been sitting in the sun room, full of ice, has been melting, though, so they do still have access to water. Once I got their food and warm water out, I got one of the big cans of donated wet cat food and emptied into a bowl, then broke it into much. I didn’t think of it until later, but I should have mixed in some lysine while I was at it.

After that, it was a race. There were kittens in the sun room, so I gave them a few spoonfuls, dropped spoonfuls in front of the cats in the shelf shelter, then quickly started dropping spoonfuls across the roof of the cat house, where most of the big cats were still eating.

By then, I had the attention of the kittens that hide under the cat house, so I quickly dropped some food for them before adding to the trays in the kibble house and under the water shelter. By then, all the cats were pretty excited about this whole wet cat food nothing – it’s the first time most of them have ever had any – so I was able to dump the bowl onto the tray inside the cat house entry, for the bitties.

Then, as I was starting to leave, I saw a little face poking out from under the cat house, near the counterweight. I hadn’t left any wet food there! So I started scraping the bowl and managed to leave a bit for that one, too.

I had considered using more than one can; they’re big cans, but that’s a lot of cats. In the end, I decided I’ll just do it again when I feed them in the late afternoon. The main thing is to get it to the bitties. What I’m spreading out for the older cats is a distraction. A treat, not a feeding.

That done, I finished off my morning rounds, and as I came back into the sun room, I found this adorable trio.

That’s Pointy Baby on the left, Pinky in the middle and Gooby on the right.

It’s funny how they like to sit on the board the heat bulb’s fixture is attached to! I’ve got it on the top shelf, so cats can sit under it on the bottom shelf for warmth, without any chance of them touching the bulb. It might be a bit too high for the warmth, but I do see kittens under there every now and then.

Today, I finally have a day where I don’t have to go anywhere. Now that the morning rounds are done, I am seriously considering pain killering up and going back to bed! I can finally have a day of rest – until I have to go out again, tomorrow, and get my mother’s car to the garage for a much needed oil change. Thankfully, it’s supposed to be just below freezing tomorrow, so I will be able to walk around town while I wait and do a few errands.

I think a day spent at home and loving on a traumatized cat, is a good plan!

The Re-Farmer

Analysing our 2022 garden: carrots, turnips and beets

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Okay, it’s that time! I’ll be working on a serious of posts, going over how our 2022 garden went, what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t even happen at all. This is help give us an idea of what we want to do in the future, what we don’t want to do in the future, and what changes need to be made.

This year was quite a mixed bag, when it came to our root vegetables!

Let’s start with the ones we had more success with. Carrots.

We planted 4 varieties of carrots in 2022. Two varieties were seeds left over from the year before, and one was included in a seed order as our free gift. The older seed got planted between tomatoes and onions/shallots in the low raised bed by the chain link fence. The new seeds were planted in a low raised bed in the main garden area, along with a couple of varieties of turnips.

The Results:

The old seed – Kyoto Red and Napoli – seemed to start out well enough, but like so many other things planted in this bed, they were affected by the flooding. Especially at the end near the vehicle gate, which is the lowest area.

Still, we did manage to get a small harvest of both. A couple of Kyoto Red (the darker carrots on the right) bolted, so I left them to go to seed, but they never finished blooming before it got too cold.

Then there were the Uzbek Golden carrots (the free seeds) and the Black Nebula carrots.

It’s hard to tell in the above photo, but we got a lot of Black Nebula carrots – and a surprising amount of Uzbek Golden carrots! The free seeds didn’t have a lot in the packages, so I was pleasantly surprised by the quantity that we harvested.

As you can also see in the above photo, the turnips didn’t do so well!

We planted three varieties of turnips. Gold Ball, Purple Prince and Tokyo Silky Sweet. One variety we got as free seeds, Gold Ball, were planted near the Uzbek Golden carrots, and then the Purple Prince you see in the photo were planted at the end of the same bed.

More of those, plus the Tokyo Silky Sweet, were planted in other beds, shared with onions, spinach, and peppers.

Those were a total loss!

The Gold Ball turnips germinated quickly – and were just as quickly completely destroyed! Something completely decimated their leaves. The Purple Prince also were badly eaten, but enough survived to get that tiny little crop you see in the picture.

In the other beds, I know I saw some start to germinate but they, too, promptly disappeared! A total and complete fail.

Finally, there were the beets. We had four varieties to plant. They went into a small bed in the old kitchen garden, protected by netting.

They, too, were a complete loss!

The Results:

They had a decent germination rate, but that’s about it. They barely grew at all. Eventually, we took the netting off and pretty much abandoned the bed, other than watering them and occasionally weeding out the mint that kept trying to take the bed over again.

When it was time to clean up the bed for next year, however, we did find a tiny, sad little crop!

That’s all we got.

This is the third year we’ve grown beets and have never had a really good crop, but this was by far the worst year. We can’t even blame it on things like deer and groundhogs eating them! Nor can we blame the flooding we had, because this garden is next to the house, and slightly elevated. There was no flooding in that garden, even with the sump pump’s hose ejecting into one of the paths. Everything drains away from the house. Even one of the bottom corners, which was near where water collected and formed a moat around the storage house, is elevated enough to not be affected by the flooding.

Conclusion:

With the carrots, things went pretty good, all things considered. For 2023, we will be trying a different variety of orange carrot, mostly because of how much the Napoli carrot seeds increased in cost. We enjoyed the flavour of all the carrots we grew, and I’ve ordered more Uzbek Golden carrots as well. I really like their nice, crisp texture.

As for the Black Nebula carrots, they are good, and I’m glad we tried them, but we won’t be growing them again; at least not any time soon. These are a very long carrot, and our soil compacts very quickly, which made thinning by harvesting pretty much impossible to do. When cooked on their own, their colour is very dramatic, but when cooked with something else, like in a soup or stew, their intense colour can make things look very… unappetizing! We still have lots, stored in a bin in a chilled location, and have discovered they very quickly become white, with capillary roots! It makes them look moldy. 😄 This isn’t a bad thing. Those little roots are collecting just enough moisture to keep the carrots firm and crisp, but they have SO MANY of these little roots, it actually makes it hard to clean the carrots in preparation for cooking.

So for 2023, we will still be growing carrots, but just two varieties.

As for the turnips… I don’t know that we’ll bother growing them again in 2023. When we do try them again, we will have to make sure that they are under floating row covers, as soon as the seeds have been sown. Turnip greens are supposed to be good for salads, too, but we never had a chance to find out if we liked them or not. I would have loved to try the Gold Ball variety. The main reason we wanted to grow turnips in the first place is because their bulbs are a good storage crop, making them something we want to include in our goals of self sufficiency. So we will definitely be trying them again. Just maybe not in 2023.

Finally, there are the beets.

I don’t know what went wrong with those. They should have done well, where they were. My daughters like beets, however, so we did order one variety to grow in 2023. I think we’ll have to be more selective on where we plant them.

Root vegetables are definitely going to continue to be a challenge for us, given what the soil it like here. It will take time – and more raised beds! – for us to amend the soil until root vegetables can reach their full potential. Which is something we’ve already been working on, and have long term plans for.

The Re-Farmer

A bit more updating

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I think the outside cats are very happy the roof is done!

I think I actually counted 28 this morning, including two of the bitties that were under the cat house!

We have been having almost rain, almost snow, lately. Many trees look like they’re covered with hoar frost, but it’s actually a layer of ice.

Something I had to deal with when switching out the memory card on the gate cam!

The entire front was covered with a layer of ice! The camera lens has a plastic protector in the front cover. I spent some time trying to melt it away with the heat of my fingers, then trying to scrape it off. Then I use my palms to try and melt the ice off the solar panel. There’s not much I can do for the divots in front of the infrared flash lights. At least not without some kind of tool that can get in, but from the looks of the file, enough light is getting through that the night vision still works. At least as much as possible, when the lens itself has a layer of ice over it!

I went around the house this morning, taking pictures from the ground (not getting very good angles in most places!) of the new shingles, and moving a few things back that got missed.

This is what’s left of the chimney! A lot of the bricks are broken, but that’s okay. We will likely use these to make paths, and broken pieces can be used mosaic style.

While they were working on the roof, I’d burned a pile of wood over burnable garbage, adding a few old and rotten pallets I’d cleaned out of the yard in the process. This morning, I found this on the banked ash pile.

I’d seen these by the house while they were working and was wondering if they were going to keep them or not. It was too funny to see they’d added them to my burn pile!

They didn’t stay there. There’s some salvageable wood in there! I moved them to the barn. The bottom one was a bit singed by hot spots in the ash pile, but that one also has more broken pieces, of it was better for that one to be singed than the one that is in better shape. 😊

I got a message from my brother saying that he wanted to come over again – not as early as yesterday, though, thankfully! I told him I was leaving to meet with the cat lady, and thought I’d miss him entirely, but he was here when I got back. So I stayed outside after the cats and other stuff was unloaded into the house. There isn’t much I can do to help him, but I still wanted to be available!

I also took advantage of the daylight and walked around looking for “flyaways”. They cleaned up as best they could in the dark, but there was bound to be stuff they missed. Especially the clear plastic strips that covered the adhesive under the shingles. Those are hard to see, even in daylight, and are so light, they were blown around all over. There were also pieces of white plastic, on white snow, that were very easy to miss. I expect we will be finding more bits and pieces when the snow melts in the spring!

My brother sent me a picture of Dishy – after he secured it to the roof! It was held by only one screw. We figure they lost the other two while working around it.

My brother also tarred around the new anchor bolts he’d put in for the antennae wires, and checked the septic stack vents. There are two of them, and they were pretty blocked with debris. Not from the roofing job, but just from years of exposure. These vents are there to ensure no vacuum forms in the pipes as water drains to the septic tank. Now that they’ve been cleared, we should notice water draining better, throughout the house. He had a chance to talk to one of my daughters about it and, now that they know, they will include checking the vents when they’re up on the roof to clean the eavestroughs. They’d cleared those before the snow fell, but my brother found the downspouts were all full again!

Oh, and I had to laugh when I came outside this morning. Do you see the roof of the kibble house, behind the satellite dish? With something in the snow?

It is a forgotten can of A&W Root Beer! One of the guys must have put it in the snow, where it wouldn’t slide away, and would stay chilled, then forgot it there. 😄

There is one thing that we found – or should I say, didn’t find – that my brother is not happy with.

The parts and pieces from our old satellite dish that was still up there. Also, the remaining supports from the one that is now stored in the basement, that we’d left in place rather than leave screw holes in the roof.

I think they got taken to the dump. Those were not supposed to be throw away.

My brother will see if he can find out what happened to it when the company contacts him with the bill.

Oh, and he remembered to tell me something our mother had said when he visited her yesterday. She was complaining that none of the roofers, or someone from the company (I still haven’t figured out who she thinks it should be) came to visit her. Then she started saying that if they did any extra patch jobs on top of replacing the shingles, she won’t pay for it.

As in, if they found and fixed any rotted areas.

So… while talking to me, when I said they’d found no rot (only later did I find out they’d found and fixed one small patch of it), she was upset because she didn’t believe they’d recognise rot when they saw it, and/or that they would have put new shingles on top of rotten wood, rather than fix it, and the roof is gong to collapse like she saw on the news, who knows how long ago.

But in talking to my brother, she’s saying that if they DID fix anything beyond what was included in the estimate, she won’t pay them… for repairing the damage she doesn’t think they’d competent enough to recognise, and/or too corrupt to fix, therefore the roof is going to collapse.

My brother and I both know that she will try to go back on her word to pay for this, so he didn’t say much, or she’d get mad at him and use that as an excuse to not do what she promised she would do.

We will both be very relieved when the bill if finally paid!

Meanwhile, as my brother was up on the roof today, and I was picking things up around the house, he noticed a dark SUV suddenly slowing riiiiiggghhhttt down as it drove past on the main road. Slow enough to almost be stopped on the road.

It kept going until we could no longer see it through the trees, then I saw it going down the road by our driveway, as if it had driven around the other way. Which, since there is a “missing” road at a one mile mark, meant driving around an extra section (which is 1 square mile) to come back from that direction.

We both recognized the vehicle as one our vandal owns.

We saw it again, driving very slowly the other direction.

With the roofers coming, but not knowing when, we’ve had the gate wide open for quite some time. I went over to close it, but I looked down the road first. From our driveway, we can see open road for about 3/4 of a mile, but there was no sign of the SUV. I should have been able to see it. For it to be gone, it had to have turned into a field, and there are only two driveways into fields out there – one of them being part of this property, that is rented out. The other is a barely-their driveway that, as far as I know, doesn’t even get used in the winter.

I closed up the gate, then started walking back when I heard an engine coming.

Sure enough, it was the same SUV. Wherever it had disappeared to, it had turned around and come back, again driving ever so slowly.

So I started walking up the driveway towards the gate. Basically, I wanted our vandal to know that we could see him stalking around the property. When he saw me, he started driving faster, turned towards his place and didn’t come back.

Since he stayed on the road and never stopped, I don’t think he could be considered in breach of the restraining order we have against him, but he sure was on the edge of it!

My guess is, he noticed the new roof and was wanting to get a better look at what was going on, since he still seems to think he has some sort of claim on this place.

Which reminds me.

It turns out he’d called my mother again, though I’m not sure about the timeline of it. He said he wanted to come and visit her. She told him, sure, and started laying out the conditions of behaviour if he did. He’d responded by saying that he was going to be there on his own terms!

My brother asked her, why are you even wanting him to come over at all? What do you think he’ll do? She told him he’d probably do the same thing he always does; make demands, rant and rave, without letting her get a word in edgewise. So my brother asked again, why do you want him to come over? She started making excuses but, my goodness… if she knows he will only continue to be verbally abusive and coercive towards her, how does she think letting him come over will help?

So we’ll have to keep an eye out on my mother, in hopes she doesn’t self sabotage again.

Meanwhile, it looks like we’re going to have to make sure to keep the gate closed and locked again. I was hoping to be able to leave it open for the winter. There isn’t much snow right now but, last year, when the snow got so deep it was hard to open and close the gate, we left it open – which our awesome neighbors took advantage of and cleared our driveway for us, before we even knew they were there! It’s just a lot more convenient to not have to be constantly locking and unlocking the gate, either for ourselves, or for when we are expecting things like prescription deliveries, etc.

I’d hoped, after things had been so quiet for so long, our vandal was finally letting go, but it looks like he’s still watching us.

Just one more reason we want to plant lots of berry bushes and trees, as privacy screens! Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about the driveway.

I am really hoping we won’t have to apply to renew the restraining order when it expires, but I strongly suspect we might have to go through that all over again.

Ah, well. We will deal with what comes.

My brother managed to find all sorts of little things to do while he was here, going up and down the ladder many times, and in many different areas. While I was still gone, he even carried the step ladder up the ladder so that he could use it to get to the second level roof! I was very happy to be there so he could lower it down to me, rather than try and climb down the ladder while carrying the step ladder!

It was starting to get dark by the time he was done, and he still had errands to run. He just never seems to stop!

I love my brother, but as much as I appreciate all he does for us, I wish he would take a break sometimes! He’s burning the candle at both ends.

It’s all done, though! All that the roofers were responsible for, plus the extras my brother did.

This should make quite a difference! I’ll have to remember to ask the girls, over the next few weeks, if they notice a difference in temperature upstairs. It wouldn’t be much; it’s not like insulation was added, but those extra layers of plastic barriers under the newly laid shingles might be enough for a noticeable change for them.

The Re-Farmer

Our new addition, and some sad news

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First of all, allow me to introduce to you our new addition.

Hello, Marlee!

The poor cat lady was in tears as she passed Marlee on to us. We’ve since been chatting about her history, and my heart just breaks for her. She wasn’t physically abused, quite traumatized. Abandoned by her owners, she watched as her stuff – her cat tower, her litter boxes, everything – was thrown away after her owners kicked her outside. The new owners were “not cat people”, and would chase her away from the drier vent she was trying to keep warm under with a broom. A 90 yr old neighbour with cancer fed her every day for 2 years, before she finally called for help, fearing that no one else would take over if she died. The cat lady trapped her, but was turned away by rescues and vets repeatedly, until her own vet was finally willing to look at her. She was deemed “semi-feral” and would never be a “good” cat. They recommended euthanizing her.

The cat lady kept her, but it was 2 months before she would allow any pets, and she never settled in. She was clearly miserable. When passing Marlee on to us, she said she feared the cat would think she was being abandoned again, but at least she would be safer, outdoors with us on the farm.

Well, we’ll see about that.

When I got home, my brother was here, so after unloading the van, the girls took over while I stayed outside to help him.

Yeah. That’s Marlee, accepting scritches. My daughter had poked her fingers through the baby jail walls. Marlee came right over and head bumped her. So my daughter worked her way to reaching in and petting her, and Marlee was just loving it! She loves head scritches (which make her drool like crazy!), and accepts belly and side pets, but doesn’t like her tail or back touched. She was eating well, too. We’ve got Big Rig in my office/bedroom, too, where she will likely stay while recovering from surgery, and Big Rig is being less friendly than Marlee!

When I told the cat lady about it, she was amazed, and then shared the rest of Marlee’s background story. As she described the people moving out, and the neighbours feeding the abandoned cat, I was picturing some typical urban neighbourhood.

Nope.

That house sold for over a million dollars. And her owners got a house in Toronto, which has some of the most expensive housing in the Canada.

Clearly, lack of funds had nothing to do with the cat being abandoned!

One thing is for sure. We’re going to do everything we can to help this lady settle in to a safe and comfortable forever home. Yes, we still have lots of cats, inside and out, that need to be adopted out, but this one is going to stay.

Which reminds me…

Plushy and Princess (who now have new names) were supposed to go to one family, but two neighbouring households. Well, the two of them get along so well, the family decided not to separate them. They will be in one household, and Grandma will just have to walk over to visit her cat! 😄

On a related note…

When I came out to do my morning rounds, the first thing I saw when I stepped outside was a tiny little tuxedo running around! He quickly dashed under the cat house.

He was a hungry little one! (I’m just using the generic “he” – we have no idea if it’s male or female).

Later on, I spotted the tabby.

Usually, I just see his mostly white face. This is the first time I’ve had a decent look at the markings on the rest of him.

Well. Part of the rest of him.

After I came back from getting Big Rig and Marlee, I spotted the tuxedo again, running around, going in and out of the sun room, and exploring.

Here was have one of the littles, next to one of the oldest kittens!

With all the commotion while the roofers were working, I hardly saw the bitties at all, but I still wasn’t seeing the orange one. This concerned me, so I spent some time trying to see into the cat house, until I spotted what looked like orange fur. One of my daughters was able to come out to give me a hand with opening the cat house to check.

Sadly, the little orange bitty was dead. It’s eyes were crusted shut, and its nose covered with dried mucus. From the looks of it, other cats had been snuggled up to him. It’s possible he had been smothered, or it was a combination of respiratory illness and smothering. It definitely wasn’t the cold. This one did seem smaller and weaker compared to its siblings, so I can’t say I’m surprised, but it was very saddening. We even had someone wanting to adopt him.

As for the other two, we’ve had no luck socializing. I was actually able to catch the tuxedo, but he was NOT happy with that, and I ended up bleeding quite a bit for my efforts! Which, unfortunately, has probably set back our efforts to socialize them.

The cat lady passed on some food donations, including large cans of wet cat food. Tomorrow morning, I think I’ll dump a can into a bowl, break it apart, then spread spoon fulls out all over, making sure the bigger cats are busy with eating before making sure the bitties get their share.

Along with the food donations, she also passed on a couple of cat caves and a bunch of treats, too! She has been able to help us out with the cats so much, we’re more than happy doing what we can to help her back, by taking in Marlee (who I can hear growling at other cats behind me right now, from the safety of her cage). We just did the evening wet cat food feeding in my office, and she was quite happy while she was eating, at least! The grey lady needs some more TLC, I think. 😊

The Re-Farmer

Analysing our 2022 garden: lettuce, spinach and chard

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Okay, it’s that time! I’ll be working on a serious of posts, going over how our 2022 garden went, what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t even happen at all. This is help give us an idea of what we want to do in the future, what we don’t want to do in the future, and what changes need to be made.

Growing greens this year was pretty touch and go.

We had three varieties of spinach seeds left over from the year before. Only one variety was a success.

The Results:

These were planted with the Tropeana Lunga onions in the high raised bed, and they did quite well. They were not as lush as the year before, but still quite good.

The other two varieties were planted in nearby low raised beds, together with other onions, and with peppers in one bed, and eggplants in another. The few that managed to germinate disappeared very quickly, with none growing beyond their seed leaves! I don’t know what went wrong with them this year. Last year, they were grown in the low raised beds and thrived.

After the high raised bed spinach was harvested, the space was replanted with chard.

We also had three varieties of lettuce seeds left over form the year before, and those were planted in the L shaped bed in the old kitchen garden, with netting to protect them from critters – whether those critters be groundhogs or playful kittens! The last of the seeds were scattered, all mixed together, over an open space by a nearby rose bush, since there weren’t many seeds left.

The Result:

The lettuces did pretty well, in general. Even in the area you see in the photo above, which kept getting overtaken by the nearby invasive flowers, managed to do well. I think the Buttercrunch lettuce did the best of the three varieties.

We eventually removed the netting, when it seemed the groundhogs had moved on, because the netting made it very hard to keep up on the weeding. Ultimately, though, we found we just didn’t eat a lot of lettuce, and they started to bolt. I left some plants to go to seed while harvesting the rest, and then the bed was reseeded with the last of our spinach seeds.

The Result:

The second sowing of spinach was a complete fail! The first section that got planted had started to germinate, but the kittens flattened the protective cover and rolled all over them. They never recovered.

We planted more in two other sections, and made the netting supports stronger – strong enough for the kittens to use it as hammocks, and not touch the ground!

It made no difference. The second sowing barely germinated at all, and never got past their seed leaves. They were a total fail, which really surprised us.

Then there was the chard.

*sigh*

The Result:

What you see in the above photo is all the chard we got. As soon as they started to germinate, their leaves became riddled with holes. Some insect was eating them, but we never saw the insects themselves! In the end, we simply left the chard alone. Most died off, but I figured whatever was left could act as a bait crop for whatever insect was eating them.

Conclusion:

There are expectations, and then there is reality!

With growing greens, we were picturing having plenty of salads, or having lettuce in our sandwiches, and basically just enjoying having access to leafy greens, any time we wanted. We figured they would be among those things we would eat more of, simply because they were there.

Well, that was more or less true of the spinach – what we got of it. But not so much with the lettuce. We found we just don’t eat lettuce all that much. Having them barricaded under netting didn’t help. None of us wanted lettuce enough to go through the bother of taking out pegs holding the netting to the ground (so nothing could crawl under it) to harvest leaves.

As for the plants we left to go to seeds, only one variety seemed to reach full maturity. The others were still blooming when I finally cleared the bed out.

With how well the lettuce did, I expected the second sowing of spinach to do well, so it was a real surprise for them to fail completely. Now that the L shaped bed has been built up to a low raised bed with wattle woven walls, anything we plant there should do better. There is new garden soil, as well as layers of organic matter trench compositing below.

As for the chard, we really didn’t know what to do with it, that we actually enjoyed eating.

For 2023, we will have just one variety of spinach. That, at least, is something we enjoy eating, sometimes even just picking leaves to snack on while doing other things.

We will probably not grow lettuce again next year. If we do grow chard again, it’ll be because we still have seeds left, and have space for it.

It turns out we just don’t like leafy greens all that much. It actually makes more sense for us to buy greens at the store every once in a while, rather than grow them ourselves.

I do still want to get chickens next year, if we can build a brooder and coop for them early enough. One of the things we plan to do is grow as much of their feed as possible, and I can see us growing greens more as chicken feed than for ourselves!

The Re-Farmer

Roof all done, a Muffin update and…

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… my brother is insane.

He sent me the photos he took of the house and roof today. This is one of them.

That’s the step ladder he set up, to fix the broken guy wire on the antennae. I added the arrows; the top one is where he had to thread the replacement wire through, and the bottom one shows the broken wire on the roof. With the wire broken (the roofers were so focused on their job, they never really noticed the wire for what it was), the pipe post was being bent into a curve.

After looking at the pictures, I realized that I noticed the post was bent some time ago, but didn’t see that one of the guy wires was broken. I remember wondering why it was bent, then promptly forgot about it.

I’m not typically afraid of heights. My biggest problem with heights is that, any time I look down from high up, I feel like my glasses are going to fall off. But looking at that ladder, and seeing where he had to climb to thread the replacement wire through gives me the willies!

The roof is now done. The crew stayed until it was completely dark, cleaning up around the house and playing Tetris, trying to fit everything into the back of the truck. The truck has an extended cab and a short box, which made fitting the ladders a challenge! Only one of the guys had come in to eat, so I went out to make sure they came in for food before they left. Knowing they’d want to head home as soon as possible, I dug out some take out containers, if they wanted. I had just finished doing that when one of the guys came in and asked about the possibility of having take out containers! So that worked out perfectly.

In the morning, I will walk around and get what pictures I can from the ground. I look forward to seeing how it looks, though it’s snowing right now, so I might not actually see the shingles very well. 😄

Meanwhile, I was able to keep in touch with the cat lady and worked out when we would meet tomorrow, to bring back Big Rid and Muffin.

Then I got a message asking if we’d intended to keep Muffin.

I told her, no; she’s available for adoption, but since she needs treatment, she would likely end up an indoor cat with us, and not go back outside. Once they come inside, they don’t go back out. The problem is, the other cats aren’t liking the new additions and are causing problems. Muffin, on the other hand, gives no F’s about the other cats and settled right in during her one day indoors.

Well, long story short, Muffin isn’t coming back.

We’ll be getting a different cat, instead!

The cat lady has completely fallen in love with Muffin. She’s incredibly sweet, and the cat lady is wanting to keep treating her, herself. She doesn’t like calicos and doesn’t like female cats (ha!), but Muffin is apparently very much like Cabbages, and has already wormed her way into the cat lady’s heart.

They do, however, have a problem cat.

This other cat had been left behind when the owners moved away, and was an outdoor cat for the last 2 years (the vet thinks she’s about 2 1/2 years old). The cat has not adapted well to being indoors, at all, and has spent the last several months hiding under her husband’s desk, almost never coming out other than to eat and use the litter. She likes other cats okay, but is constantly scared. They don’t want to let her outside, of course, because they live in the city and they are afraid she might get hit by a car, but she is absolutely miserable, inside.

The cat lady knows the set up we have, and as much as she hates to do it, she hoped that we’d be able to take her in with our yard cats.

Of course, I said yes. After all the help she’s given us, it’s the least we can do! I did tell her, though, that there’s no guarantee that she won’t simply take off once she’s outdoors. We can use the sun room as a transition space to get her used to the idea of this being a safe place, with warm shelters, food and water. Aside from a couple of cats, the yard cats have been very accepting every time a new batch of kittens showed up, as well as any strange adults. Even The Distinguished Guest is accepted, though he’s one of the cats that tends to be aggressive towards others. But once outside, we really have no control over what she does. All we can do is make the idea of staying close to the house as positive a thing as possible.

Mind you, we might be able to get her to be okay indoors, here. We shall see.

So when I meet with her tomorrow, we will be bring back Big Rig and a stranger!

I also got more information about Plushy and Princess. They are going to the same family, but not the same household. There’s the family with kids and right next door is Grandma. They’ll probably be able to visit each other! 😄

Meanwhile, after we collect two cats tomorrow, she’ll be picking up a bunch of polydactyl kittens that the RM was wanting to shoot, so she’s going to have a houseful! I’ve found that polydactyls tend to get adopted out rather quickly, though, so I would not be surprised if she finds homes for them soon. They’re going to be getting quite a bit of vet care, first, though.

Which means tomorrow will be another run-around day for me. I plan to leave early enough that I can pick up a few things, like litter pellets, before meeting the cat lady, so that I can go straight home once the cats are loaded up, while also taking advantage of city shopping.

At least, for now, I’ll have one day at home before I have to take my mother’s car to the garage! After that, I hope I won’t need to go out again until we have to do the last bit of shopping for Christmas dinner and New Year’s.

I really look forward to turtling at home again.

The Re-Farmer