Gardening

Boxes, tubers, broken tools and… cows!

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We’re having another lovely, mild day with sunny skies. A perfect day to get more done outside!

My main goal for the day was to finally build the third low raised bed box and set it up.

The ground is starting to freeze, though, so I couldn’t make quite as deep a “foundation” as with the other beds. It should be all right, though.

This is as much as going to be done with it, for now. Things are supposed to get warmer of the weekend, so I might get a chance to bury stuff from the compost pile down the middle, then top it up for the winter.

While I was building the bed, my younger daughter started working on beds in the old kitchen garden.

Beds that were more shaded than other areas.

Beds that were more frozen than not!

Alas, it was too much for our garden fork; one of the few useable tools we found that hadn’t been “disappeared” while the place was empty. It had a tendency to bend in that spot, and when my daughter tried to straighten it, it broke! The poor thing felt so bad.

The old kitchen garden got left for warmer days, and my daughter moved on to clean up the remaining bed at the chain link fence. The chicken wire protecting the cucamelons and gourds had to be removed, the plants pulled, and the soil moved to prepare for the block planters.

The cucamelons did not to well in our drought. The plants grew, there were many, many flowers, with teeny little fruit, but very few of them ever matured. Very likely, they just didn’t get polinated.

As my daughter dug the area up, however, she discovered they did much better below the soil!

Cucamelons produce tubers. I’d read that, in colder climates like ours, they can be dug up, put in a pot of soil and overwintered indoors, then transplanted in the spring. I tried that last year, but the tubers just disappeared in the soil. They, however, were nowhere near as big and thick as these ones!

My daughter set aside the biggest ones, and we will try overwintering them. Maybe at this size, they will have a better chance of surviving to be transplanted.

When my daughter was done cleaning out the bed, she headed inside and I continued working on it.

We had four of these chimney blocks waiting. My daughter had already moved the soil, and I just needed to level it for the blocks.

I found more cucamelon tubers in the process!

I ended up moving the blocks a little bit further away from the fence, so that when we bring up the remaining blocks and lay them down, the fence post won’t be in the way. I put leaf litter in the bottoms of the blocks before filling with the soil, since there is so much of it handy.

It was around this time that I could hear the sound of a utility vehicle nearby, so I headed over. The wife of the couple renting the property had come over to check the electric fence. I have spoken and messaged with her quite a few times, but this is the first time I met her in person! She brought their little daughter along, too, and she was a great help with holding the wire for Mom. It did take quite a while to find one of the ends; it must have gotten caught on a cow’s leg when it got spooked. Not only was it well away from the fence, but a couple of the support poles were pulled right out of the ground!

There was just enough slack that she could twist the wires back together, then we went around to another section where she said she had found a cow had gotten through, in a very unusual spot. She agreed with me, that something must have spooked the cows into going through areas they normally don’t.

While we were walking around, the cows were intensely curious about us humans – and looking for another grain treat!

Just look at those adorable faces!!

Unfortunately, they were a bit TOO interested in Tiny Human, who was starting to get scared. With just cause. Cows may look docile, but they can be aggressive and dangerous to an adult, never mind a wee one. Tiny Human was much more comfortable being carried by Mom!

I took the opportunity to tell her about where we are looking to put a fence through the old hay yard, so we can plant trees for a wind break against the south winds. She let me know that they will likely take out the old fences completely, and put in new, because of the cows getting through so often. We also talked about redoing the fencing around the septic field, so we can still access it from our side, rather than filling in those gaps the cows got through this time. She said she would pass on the things I brought up, and hopefully her husband will soon be able to find the time to come over and we can do a more thorough walk about and discuss it in more detail. They are such good renters. With all our long term plans, I don’t want to be doing anything to make it more difficult for them. That’s part of why I wanted to make sure they knew about where I want to add the fence and plant a windbreak, since it takes away some of the land the cows graze in.

So, all in all, it turned out to be a very productive day, on several levels. :-)

The only down side, is we how have to replace a garden fork. :-D

The Re-Farmer

Back Tracking a Bit, and Looking Ahead

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A while ago, my daughters cleaned up the beds in the main garden area while I worked elsewhere. I’d asked for photos, but thought they’d forgotten to take any. One of them, however, did remember to get before and after pictures, and recently passed them on to me.

So here is some of the cleanup done by my daughters, almost a week ago.

This first bed had two types of onions in it; the yellow onions we stared from seed that actually survived the cats, and red onion sets. Before those were planted, a row of… Hmm. I’ll have to check back. I believe it was the purple kale that we got as free seeds from Baker Creek that got planted down the middle. If anything germinated, something got to them before we ever saw them.

As the onions got harvested later, the bed was left empty when they were done. It had been weeded as much as I could, between the onions, while the onions were growing. This turned out to be one of the easiest beds to clean up and took them very little time.

This is one of the three beds that started out with spinach. After the spinach was harvested, they sat empty until the heat waves finally passed. On the left of this bed, I planted radishes and … gosh, I can’t remember, but it was another cool weather crop. Neither survived the grasshoppers. Eventually, we planted some lettuce seeds that had spilled out of their envelopes and got mixed up. They turned out to be mostly one type; Merlot, I believe they were called, with a couple of buttercrunch that we got as free seeds from Baker Creek. We were able to add a mesh layer over the chicken wire cover on this bed, so they survived. Unfortunately, after a while, the lettuce leaves got very bitter and nasty tasting. I don’t know why. It’s not like they were bolting, and we weren’t getting anymore heat waves, but it got so bad, we just couldn’t eat them anymore. It’s a shame, because they handled the frosts we got extremely well. They didn’t go to waste, though, and are now adding nutrients to the high raised bed. :-)

This was another bed that started out with spinach. Believe it or not, this bed got weeded quite thoroughly before I planted different radishes and one of the chard varieties. You can see the one chard that survived, surrounded by wire, in the background. Closer to the front you can see some bricks and stones that are surrounding the last couple of radishes that survived. This bed turned out to be very difficult to clean up and was thoroughly filled with rhizomes. It took so long to clean up, this was where they had to stop for the day.

Before they left, though, my daughter had gotten a before picture of this last bed. It was the third bed with spinach in it, then it got planted with the Bright Lights chard and French Breakfast radishes. The chard did well until it got hit repeatedly with frost. It handled a couple of frosts very well before finally freezing beyond recovery. There were only a couple of the radishes that never quite recovered from the grasshoppers. Like the lettuce, they got pulled and composted into the high raised bed. My older daughters were able to come back to finish cleaning this bed a couple of days ago, and it was much faster and easier than the last one they did!

Over time, each of these beds will be replaced as high raised beds. They are about 14-15 feet long, but will be reduced to 9 ft, so it will be easier to build frames for protective covers that can be easily moved by one person. We will keep using the dead trees we clean up from the spruce grove to build the beds for as long as we have enough of them. That should be enough to do the remaining five beds. That will leave us room to do a second row of high raised beds, if we choose, but by then, I think we will no longer have enough wood from dead spruce trees to use. We shall see. It’s a big job that is going to take a while to do. In the spring, we will plant into these beds as they are, but now that we have a chain saw, I expect to be able to cut down the dead trees and cut the lengths we need in advance, so that in the fall, we will just need to assemble them.

To get the height of our first high raised bed, we used eight 9ft logs and eight 4 ft logs. With five more beds to build, that means 45 nine ft logs and 20 four ft logs. It took us most of four trees (including one that was smaller than the three we cut from the spruce grove) to make this one bed. The remaining trees that need to be cut are all quite large, but if we assume four trees per bed, that means we’ll need 20 more trees to do the remaining beds.

We have more than that many dead trees to cut. It will only be a question of how solid they are, or if they have rot or ant damage to the trunks. A few of them are so big that I would want to split the logs cut from the bases of the trunks, lengthwise, and use them at the very bottom of the beds, so they’re not too thick. If the wood on all the remaining trees is sound enough, given their size, I am thinking we will probably need closer to 15 trees to finish the beds rather than 20. Considering we have probably another 24 dead trees to cut, that just means more beds we can build!

Just thinking of having a whole row of high raised beds here makes me very happy. I can hardly wait!

The Re-Farmer

Thinking of 2022; first seed order placed

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While we have already been picking up some seeds here and there for next year’s garden, still have some from this past year, and even have some seeds we have saved, last night I placed our first online seed order. We will have a “seed” budget over the next few months that will also include, hopefully, fruit trees and berry bushes as well.

A lot of stuff is still listed as out of stock. This is most likely because the sites are at the end of the 2021 catalogue year, and their 2022 products are not ready yet. Still, it meant a few things on my wish list did not get ordered, and I found alternatives, instead.

This order was with Veseys. I have been very happy with what I’ve had from them – even the stuff that ended up failing, like the mulberry tree, since they had no control over it getting hit with that one bitterly cold night that killed it off! :-D There are several other places we will be ordering from, month by month, but this is what I ordered last night, with why they were chosen.

All photos belong to Veseys, and I will link to their individual listings. (For future readers, if the links are dead, it’s likely because they no longer carry the item anymore.) All links will open in a new tab, so you don’t lose your place.

This past summer was a hard one for the winter squash. We did not get enough winter squash for storage, and that’s the main reason we were growing them at all. While we still have Red Kuri and Teddy squash seeds we can grow next year, I like variety. Hopefully, between them all, we’ll have at least something for the root cellar!

Georgia Candy Roaster Winter Squash

This is the long squash in the photo. I have heard from quite a few different places about how delicious these squash are, so I want to give them a try.

Winter Sweet Organic Squash

Another good storage squash that I chose specifically because the listing says they are best for eating several months after being picked. So this one is for the long haul!

Bresko Beet

We’ve tried different varieties of beets, and grew lots of them this year, but with the growing conditions, we got remarkably few beet roots out of it. I don’t know that we will order other varieties as well, but I don’t expect we will plant as many as we did, this past summer. The listing specifies that this variety is a good storage beet, so that’s a big selling feature for me. Pickled beets are fine and dandy, but having some for fresh eating will also be good.

Aunt Molly’s Organic Ground Cherries

I’ve been wanting to grow these for a while! Before our move, we did grow these in our balcony garden with success, and I just love them. Which is odd, as they are in the tomato family, and I can’t eat tomatoes unless they’re processed. One of the cold climate gardening sites I follow listed these as something they regret planting, as they became invasive, and they didn’t like how they tasted. It seems these can self sow and are hard to get rid of, once established. With I see as a bonus! These will be planted in a location that can be permanent, so they can self-sow as much as they want.

Conservor Organic Shallot

We will be trying these again! I really enjoyed the shallots we bought as sets, to replace what we tried to grow from seed, but they were used up very quickly. We need more for our household, and the sets only had 25 per bag! I want to try and grow from seed again. This time, we have what we need to ensure the cats’ won’t be able to get at them and destroy them again!

Red Baron Onion

Another one we will be trying again. When we started these seeds for our 2021 garden, I had used an cardboard egg tray for the “pot”. The cardboard just sucked the moisture right out of the growing medium.

We did plant the last of our seeds in Solo cups, though it was incredibly late in the season. What we did get got transplanted near our tomatoes. It didn’t really work, but while I was working on that bed yesterday, I found a single Red Baron onion in the ground, with just a hint of green on it. So I planted it back into the ground! Onions go to seed in their second year, so it should overwinter just fine under the mulch. We shall see! Even if it doesn’t, though, I look forward to trying to grow these bunching onions from see again.

Oneida Onion

Of course, we must have regular cooking onions, too! This is a variety I chose for its storage potential. I was happy with the yellow onions we grew from seed compared to the ones we grew from sets. We go through a lot of onions in this household, so I will probably be ordering other varieties as well – as long as we can find the room for all the growing trays when we start them indoors! At the very least, I want to get a variety of red onions I have my eye on, in another site.

We got a bush bean collection last year that did surprisingly well under difficult growing conditions. This year, I wanted to try a pole bean collection, but it was out of stock, so I found individual ones to try. We may still get bush beans as well. I am also interested in getting beans for drying. We shall see.

Carminat Bean

Since everything purple seemed to do much better than other stuff in our garden this year, I figured a purple pole bean would be worth a try! They are supposed to be a high yield bean that stays tender even as they get larger.

Seychelles Bean

This pole been variety was new for Veseys for 2021. They are supposed to produce for a very long time. As they are also expected to grow up to nine feet tall, these, and the Carminat bean, should be great to grow on the squash tunnel.

Latte Corn

This past summer, we had a sweet corn collection with three different varieties. This year, I decided to get just the one – and we will be planting them closer to the house in next year’s garden! These are an early variety that can handle colder soil, which will be important for spring sowing. Also, they were on sale. ;-)

I plan to get a couple other varieties of corn from elsewhere as well, so we should still have three or four different kinds of corn next year. We shall see.

I decided to try turnips this upcoming year. A couple of varieties caught my eye.

Tokyo Silky Sweet Turnip

I chose this variety because they get harvested at such a small size, and are supposed to be mild and sweet. The leaves can be used like spinach, too.

Purple Prince Turnip

These are a fast maturing summer turnip that are also supposed to be harvested at a smaller size. The greens are also good for eating, so they are another dual purpose crop.

Eureka Cucumber

And finally, we have these cucumbers! I chose this variety for its dual purpose as well. Harvested at smaller sizes, they are a good pickling cucumber. Leave them to grow larger, and they are good for fresh eating, too.

So this is our start! Along with the garden beds we used this past summer, we will need to expand our garden even more for next year. We will likely need to build more trellises as well.

One thing we learned from this past year’s garden is, if we want to meet our goal of growing enough food to preserve through the winter for the four of us, we need a much bigger garden! Partly, we need to plant more of some things, because who knows how much will actually survive? Plus, a few packets I’d ordered turned out to have fewer seeds in them than I expected. As I place our orders, I’ll need to keep an eye on the quantities and decide; do I order more packets, or order more varieties?

Hopefully, we will not get another year of severe heat and drought conditions. Nor another year with a plague of grasshoppers. And be able to keep the critters out… There are so many things that can affect yield. Someone on one of the gardening groups I’m on, posted this little rhyme.

One for the rook
One for the crow
One to rot and
One to grow

Planting four times more than we think we will need seems a bit much, but after how things went this past year, there are some things it really does seem appropriate for! And that’s just food for us. When we get chickens and possibly goats, we will want to grow as much feed as we can. Plus, I want to eventually grow flour corn and things like wheat, chickpeas and flax. I’m even looking at getting sugar beets, and my daughters are interesting in growing hops for beer making. By the time we’re doing that, however, we’ll be growing in the outer yard!

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer

2022 garden preparation: fixing up the tomato bed

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Today, I took advantage of the lovely, warmer than forecast weather we are having, to clean up and redo the tomato bed.

Here is how it looked when I started. This is a new bed, built this spring, and I was very happy to see how deep and strong the roots on the tomato plants where, when I pulled them. I also saw the biggest, fattest worms I’ve seen this year!!

There were two goals to redoing this bed. One was to make sure the soil didn’t go through the chain link fence. When the bed was build, we laid cardboard down on the grass first, with the flaps up against the fence. That cardboard is pretty broken down now. We had to top up the soil part way through the year, and boards I’d scavenged from the barn were used to keep it from going through the fence. The other goal was to use the bricks to create a little retaining wall around the bed. When watering the tomatoes, no matter how gentle we tried to be, soil eroded into the path, exposing roots. Especially at the end by the vehicle gate, which got even more soil added to try and combat the erosion.

The first thing to do was move the soil away from the fence and pull up the boards. Then I went back along the fence with a hoe to make it as even as I could.

The boards were then put back, this time to fit in between the fence posts. Each section got one full length board, plus another cut to about 3/4 length. I snagged an extra board from the where the cucamelons were planted, on the other side of the people gate, to have enough.

The chain link fence is kind of wobbly, so I used the left over sections of board and placed them at the “seams” between each pair of boards, to support them from the weight of the soil.

Then, in a couple of sections, I also hammered pegs into the ground on the outside of the fence, for extra support.

That done, it was time to start working on the bricks.

First, I had a decision to make.

Should I make the bed two, or three, bricks wide?

I decided on two and a half!

This way, not only would the bed be a comfortable width, but there would be no corner to catch a foot on. Because I just know that I’d be doing that, constantly! :-D

Once that was decided, the soil was moved out of the way and the space where the bricks would go, leveled as well as I could with a hoe. Then the bricks were spread out along the length of the bed.

Would I have enough? It did look like it, but I wasn’t completely sure.

The next job was to use a garden claw to loosen the soil where the bricks would go, so I could push them down a bit. Not too far, though, because I didn’t want to lose any height.

By the time I reached the end, there was a gap of about two inches, so I just moved the bricks at the end to fill it!

Then is was time to level off the soil. This was also the time to pick out any remaining weeds and roots.

Then I went over it with a hose to wash the soil against the bricks and boards a bit more, and clean off any soil that got on top.

The final touch was to mulch the whole thing with leaf litter.

This bed is now ready for next year!

The tomatoes did so well here, we might use it for tomatoes again next year!

The boards and bricks around this bed are temporary. The wood will rot away, and there bricks are just sitting on the ground. At some point, we plan to get to the salvage place and see what sort of bricks and blocks we can find. Maybe even some paving stones. Once we have the materials, the path will be laid with bricks or paving stones, and the bed itself well get framed in a more permanent way. Until we are able to do that, though, this will be enough to keep the soil in this bed from washing away when we water it.

I was pretty much done when the girls finished their stuff inside, and came out to work on the last bed in the main garden area that needed to be cleaned up.

Since we have the straw bale now – and the chipper/shredder – I am thinking of running some straw through the shredder and using that to mulch the top of these beds over the winter.

Aside from that, these beds in the main garden area are now all done and ready for next year.

I’m pretty happy with how these are turning out!

The Re-Farmer

Filling the high raised bed.

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Today worked out to be a longer day than planned. I had intended to do a Costco trip to the city tomorrow but decided that 1) I didn’t want to deal with weekend crowds and 2) Halloween is around the corner, and I didn’t want to deal with even bigger crowds because of it! So I headed into the city this morning. After this, we’ll need to go over what’s left that we need to pick up, then make one more trip – after Halloween!

Once that was done and everything was put away, I headed to the finished high raised bed, to start filling it, modified hügelkultur style.

While making the bed, I tried to put all the scrap bits of wood inside, so the first order of business was to spread those out more evenly. Then the short logs that had been used to frame this bed over the summer were added to the bottom. There weren’t a lot of those, but we have plenty of piles of wood to raid. I tried to put the bigger pieces on the bottom, then smaller pieces on top, using them to fill gaps as best I could. Then I started adding bark to fill gaps, too. Ideally, there would be no gaps, but with so many odd shaped pieces of wood, that wasn’t really an option.

Thankfully, we have lots of bark debris. This spot used to have a pile of logs between the two spruces. There is just one long one with a weirdly shaped end left. It needs to be cut up before we can use it.

The nice thing is, along with the partially decomposed bark, I was able to pick up quite a bit of spruce needles. Not enough to increase the acidity of our very alkaline soil, but every little bit helps!

I added a couple of wheelbarrow loads of bark into here, and even went around the bed to pick up little bits of wood and handfuls of sawdust to toss in. I wanted to fill the gaps as much as I possibly could.

Next, a few shovels full of soil was added. This is the soil that had been dug out of this bed before the high raised bed was built. Just a very thin layer was added to fill in the gaps a bit more, and give the breakdown of the wood a bit of a boost of soil microorganisms.

Next came a nice thick layer of corn stalks that we saved, just for this! If we did not have the corn stalks, this layer would have been straw, because straw takes longer to decompose than the other things that will be added.

Yes, we have straw, now!

This got delivered while I was working on the corn stalk layer.

I broke that baby open almost right away!

With the layers, I was alternating between “brown” and “green” layers. The corn stalks were a brown layer, so the next layer (after a bit more soil) was grass clippings, which are considered a “green” element.

I stole the grass clippings from the nearby garlic bed, replacing it with straw. I was concerned the grass clippings might smother the garlic. Later, we will replace the grass clipping mulch on the other two beds with straw as well.

But not today.

With each additional layer of soil, I added a bit more than the previous soil layer. The layers were still pretty thin, comparatively speaking, but I could already notice the weight of it was causing the looser layers below to settle and sink. If I had any, I would have been using compost or manure to layer instead of, or in addition to, the soil.

The next brown layer was leaves.

The final green layer got all the bitter lettuce and frozen chard that had been pulled from the other beds. The kitchen compost buckets got added as well, so there’s also things like egg shells and coffee grounds in there.

Now, it was time to add the rest of the soil. This job actually took the longest, because I frequently stopped to spread it out, pull out the roots and rocks, break up clumps, and make sure any worms that hitched a ride were gently and safely buried.

I stopped adding soil when I was getting too many crab grass rhizomes and rocks to make it worthwhile anymore, and the last of it got raked out evenly, as did the soil in the raised bed.

The very last layer was a mulch of wood chips. Thanks to my mother’s generosity in getting us the wood chipper, we had enough to add a couple of inches to the top.

I expect the contents to settle and sink over the next while. We’ll probably be down a few inches, by spring. Which is okay. We will continue to add more organic matter to build it up.

I must say, I am so thrilled with the height of this. It is SO much easier on the back to work at this height! I don’t even have a back injury. I’m just old. ;-) It might be a bit low for my husband, if he ever wanted to do a bit of gardening, but he would be able to reach while sitting in his walker just fine.

One down, five more to go!

Eventually. :-D

Temperatures are expected to continue to be mild over the next couple of weeks; a few degrees above freezing during the say, and just barely below freezing overnight. We’re expecting some rain tomorrow, then possible rain and snow over the next couple of days. Which means we can still continue preparing garden beds for next year. I might even be able to start cutting down more dead trees before things start getting too cold. It would be good to have the lengths pre-cut to build more beds, even if building them ended up waiting until next fall. Mind you, there’s nothing stopping us from adding more beds to the main garden area, other than possibly running out of material to layer with. My only hesitation is that we intend to expend our garden area into the outer yard, where there is better sun exposure, and those will all be high raised beds. Perhaps by the time we’re ready to build those, we’ll be able to use materials other than salvaged dead spruce trees!

Gosh, I’m having so much fun with all this!

The Re-Farmer

High raised bed – it’s done!

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Oh, my goodness, what a difference having that new chainsaw made!

But before I could break it in, I needed to drag down the stuck tree, so I could use the wood in the high raised bed. Thanks to my husband very securely attaching the hooks I got to the rope I got – rope rated to 450 pounds – it was a simple matter to use the van to pull it out.

My goodness, where those top branches ever entangled! When I started pulling it, it didn’t fall, but stayed stuck until I got far enough that the tree was no longer dragging on the ground, but lifting up. At which point, it rolled up and got dragged over the compost ring, then finally it broke free from the branches and dropped.

Right on the cherry trees we are intending to cut away, so there’s no loss there!

After replacing a large divot of sod that got dragged out, I then used the baby chain saw to start cutting away the branches, and cutting away the top of the tree.

Then it got rolled onto the compost ring, so the rest of the branches could be trimmed off.

Finally, it was time to break out the new chainsaw!

Of course, I took the time to read the manual, first, then added chainsaw oil to the reservoir.

Then I measured out and cut a pair of nine foot lengths from the tree trunk.

The bucksaw does a great job, but the chainsaw did in mere seconds what would have taken me probably 5, maybe even 10, minutes, per cut, by hand!

Then, while I dragged the logs over to the high raised bed, I helped a daughter move the rest of the tree trunk aside, so they could set up the wood chipper. They cleaned up all the dead branches from the tree, as well as the little cherry trees we’d cut away to access the last tree we’d cut down.

They spent more time prepping the branches to fit the chipper and shredder, than actually doing the chipping and shredding! Unfortunately, the little spruce branches were so twisted, they ended up clogging the shredder chute to the point that my daughter had to take it off to unclog it. Once that was cleared up, they did a few celebratory shreds before heading inside to start on supper.

Meanwhile…

I started working on the high raised bed by first taking it apart! I cut away the notches in the base logs so that the cross pieces would sit lower, and no longer have that gap that was there before. I also was able to clean up the cuts and make adjustments, as needed.

The new nine foot lengths were thicker than I thought, so after I put the bottom cross pieces back, I used the new logs for the next level.

I ended up not needing to cut notches in them at all. Instead, I was able to just adjust and cut the notches in the next level of cross pieces to fit.

It was SO much faster and easier to cut the notches with the chain saw! Pretty much every notch we’d cut before needed modification.

I used smaller, thinner, logs at the top, which turned out to be a pain. These are from higher in the tree, which meant they were not as straight, and had more little branch stubs all over. I ended up having to trim logs along their lengths to get rid of lumpy bits, so things would sit against each other better.

Then I went and cut two more four foot lengths to do the last cross pieces.

There we have it! The high raised bed is built!

Standing next to a corner, it’s just barely reaches my hip. For mobility and accessibility purposes, we could probably have gone higher than this, but I think this will be fine.

Now, we just need to fill it! We’ve got old logs for the bottom, with corn stalks, leaves, grass clippings and garden waste to layer in. I’ll add thin layers of soil in between each layer of organic matter before topping it off with soil for about the depth of the top logs.

That will be a job for tomorrow!

I may have had to juggle the budget a bit to get that chainsaw, but it was worth every penny. There is no way I could have finished this today, without it. In fact, I have my doubts I would have been able to finish it before winter, at the rate things were going!

About the only other thing we might end up doing with this is maybe get some short pieces of rebar, drill holes through the top couple of logs and set the rebar in them to really make sure the logs stay in place.

It’s really a horrible, messy, slapdash job, but it will still probably last us many years.

Now we just need to cut down more dead trees, so we’ll have the material to build more!

The Re-Farmer

First time canning, and garden clean up progress

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Just a bit of catching up on how things went yesterday.

The short version: Long.

It went long. Very long!

For me, it was working on pickling beets using the water bath canner. Until now, we have only done refrigerator canning, and my only experience with water bath canning was helping my mother, as a child. This is the first time I’ve done it myself, from start to finish.

It took WAY longer than I expected!

I have a Ball cookbook of canning recipes. The pickled beets recipe was for a half dozen 500ml jars. They had the basic pickle recipe, but also variations. After looking over our quantities of beets, I figured I could do two batches, with one batch being a “sweet pickle” using cloves and cinnamon sticks instead of the pickling spice mix of the basic recipe.

One batch called for 10 cups of beets. I decided to use up as much of the little beets as I could. Since they would be blanched and trimmed, and their small size would pack tighter than cubed larger beets, I made sure to grab more than 10 cups. I figured, if there was extra, we could just include them with supper or something.

While the first batch was blanching, which filled the blanching pot I found stored in a barely accessible space in the kitchen, I prepped a second batch to blanch. At the same time, I cooked the liquid with the pickling spice bag, and had everything ready to do the sweet spice version.

I was all ready to can the first batch, when I realized I had a problem.

These are the first batch of fully prepared beets.

I doubt I could have filled three jars with that, never mind six!

So I added the second batch.

I still wasn’t sure there would be enough to fill the six jars I had prepped in the canner!

The next step was to put them into the pickling liquid and bring it to a boil, then start filling the jars. After my first jar, I realized I would likely have another problem. Not enough liquid! So I started the spiced version going and continued. I ended up being able to do only four jars with the basic pickling liquid, and the last two got the sweet spice version.

I started working on this before my daughters headed out to work in the garden. They came back four hours later, and I was JUST reaching the point where I actually start putting beets into jar. Most of that time was spent scrubbing beets, blanching beets, removing the outer skins, trimming the tops and tails, and waiting for water to boil.

I know “a watched pot never boils”, but my goodness, it takes a long time for large amounts of water to come to a boil!

But, if finally got done! Our first time canning AND our first time canning our own produce!

Pulling my first jar out of the water, though, was a bit of a surprise.

I mean, I know our water is hard, but wow! For the jars to come out with a layer of scale like this is crazy! You can see on the jar on the far right, where I wiped some of it with a paper towel. They’re going to need to be washed!

I finally had a chance to remove the rings and check the seals, just a little while ago, and they all came out fine! I made sure to keep track of which ones had the different pickling liquid, for when the scale gets washed off and they can be labelled.

Except the jars we open to taste test! :-D

By the time I was done, it was full dark, so it wasn’t until this morning that I could get a photo of the girls’ hard work outside.

They got three of the four remaining beds in the main garden area done – and most of that time was spent on just one of them! The first two weren’t too bad, but the third one was filled with crab grass, and it took them ages to get as many of the rhizomes out as they could!

I am amused by all the cat footprints in the loose soil! :-D

I’m glad they were able to get these done. Today turned out to be a write-off for outside work, but I will cover that in my next post. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden cleanup: progress and plans for the day

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I worked on some of the garden beds yesterday, until it got too dark to keep it up. Here is what I managed to get done.

The first bed I worked on was the beet bed by the garlic, as this one will be getting a box frame soon. I started by removing the bricks and rocks around the edges, some of which you can see in the background.

I had to come back this morning to get a picture of this area. The beet bed had a row of red bricks along one side, which I moved over by the tomato bed. Then I went around the house and yard to pick up all the red bricks I could find and brought them over. When this bed gets cleaned up, we’ll re-do the boards along the fence, so that they fit better between the fence posts and line the entire length of the fence, to keep soil from washing through the chain link. The rest of the bed will be framed with these bricks, to keep the soil from washing into the path.

Amazingly, even though the vines are quite dead, there are still tomatoes ripening. I did not expect that, with the temperatures we’ve been having!

The beet bed then got weeded, and lengthened to match the garlic beds. I also moved the soil more towards the middle. I will not be digging out the soil to do the layering like I did with the others on this one. We only have wood enough to make a box frame one board high, so even though the boards I found are wider than the ones used in the other beds, it still won’t make a bed as deep as the others. This bed also got layers of material buried in it as it was made this spring, and quite a lot of the new garden soil was added, so it won’t need as much material to fill it. Once the box is built, it’ll pretty much just be laid over the existing bed. About the most I’ll do is make a “foundation” of old boards, like I did with the other two beds. Once that’s in place, I will make a trench in the middle of the soil and bury more organic material from the compost pile, but that’s about it.

The next area I worked on was a quick job. I just had to spread out and level the soil from the potato bags (and even found a few missed potatoes!). Nothing fancy is happening here. There are some lilies that need to be broken up, and they will be transplanted here.

The last spot I worked on before it started getting too dark was where the poppies had been. One of the things my daughters and I observed over the summer is that we needed to make areas to walk through, without stepping on plants. So at one end, by the rhubarb, I used the flat stones I found under the old wine barrel planter along the spruce grove as stepping stones. The rhubarb covered the poppies that had been planted near it, so I’m considering transplanting those somewhere else completely, but that won’t be done until the spring. We have only three interlocking bricks, so I used them as stepping stones at the end nearer the laundry platform.

The poppies that were here would have self seeded, which my loosening of the soil would have disturbed, but that’s okay. I did harvest a few little pods. I will broadcast more seeds some time over the next few days, then do it again in the spring. Once they have established themselves, this should end up being a permanent bed for Giant Rattle Breadseed Poppy. I do plan to get another variety of edible poppies I found from a Canadian source, but those will be planted in a completely different area.

So that’s as far as I got, yesterday evening. Today, I won’t be working on the garden clean up at all. My daughters will be working on that, later today. It’s supposed to warm up a bit more, but I’m really hoping the winds will die down. They made things quite bitter while I did my rounds this morning!

I’ve asked them to take before and after pictures for me. :-D

As for me, I have decided that I will can some of our beets. After going over my recipes, we do have enough to pickle. My daughter has been doing refrigerator pickles with the summer squash, which is great, but they take up a lot of room in the fridge, so I want to do water bath canning, so they will be shelf stable. I should at least get a half dozen 500ml jars.

I’d better get started!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: final harvest!

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Today, I went out to get together with some friends. When I got back, the girls were in the old kitchen garden, starting our final harvest!

I started off helping with the beets in the L shaped bed, before heading over to quickly do the beet bed next to the garlic.

What a difference!

In the old kitchen garden, all the beets were very small. I was expecting that in the bed along the retaining wall, since they had been eaten by the groundhogs, but I expected more from the L shaped bed.

The girls don’t take pictures like I do, so I just got a shot after they were done. The piles of greens in the beet beds include beets too small to keep. This will all be worked back into the soil. In the carrot bed, you can see the Kyoto Red fronds that had gone to seed, left behind as well. I figure those can be worked back into the soil, too. And if we find little carrots coming up in this bed next year, I’m okay with that! :-D

We got a lot more bigger beets out of the little bed by the garlic! Now that this bed is clear, we can build the last low raised box for it, and the bricks used to frame it will be used elsewhere.

Then my older daughter and I started picking the fingerling potatoes. Being able to dump a bag into the kiddie pool, then go through the soil to pick the potatoes, made the job very easy! We moved the bags away from the fence, so that the picked over soil could be dumped back against the fence before we moved on to the next bag, which also made it easier.

The Purple Peruvians are SO dark, it was hard to find them in the soil! We got a lot more of them than expected, and had to start using another container to hold them.

Of course, some of them got used for our supper! Here, you can see the Purple Chief on the left, and the Purple Peruvian on the right. I cubed them, as well as three types of carrots, added some garlic cloves, tossed them in flavoured olive oil and seasonings, then roasted them. I can hardly wait to try them!

While I worked on supper, the girls finished cleaning the vegetables and set out the beets and carrots in the sun room, with the ceiling fan going, since leaving them outside in the sun is not an option right now. There are three types of carrots here; Deep Purple, from Veseys, Kyoto Red and Lounge Rouge Sang from Baker Creek. It’s hard to tell which ones are the Lounge Rouge Sang, as the colour gradient isn’t very visible. All the beets from the small bed are on here, plus most of the beets from the old kitchen garden as well. We did take some straight inside, and a few of them are in the oven, too. They got peeled and chopped, tossed in olive oil and seasonings, then roasted at the same time as the potatoes.

With the beets, we may actually have enough to make it worthwhile to pickle them. I’m not sure. Mostly, though, we’ll just eat them fairly quickly. As for the carrots, I think we’ll either be eating them quickly, too. I don’t think there is enough to even be worth blanching and freezing.

It’s a very small harvest, considering how much we planted, but I’m still happy with it, since we came so close to not having anything at all.

Now our work is really cut out for us! All the beds can now be cleaned out and prepared for next year.

The Re-Farmer

On growing garlic

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This year, I joined a number of gardening groups on social media. Either local groups or cold climate/zone 3 gardening groups. It’s pretty cool to see how many first time gardeners have been joining the groups and asking all sorts of questions.

This is the time of year for planting hard neck garlic, as we did yesterday, and there is a LOT of discussion on these groups right now, and people are sharing some really good links.

One really good video I saw shared was uploaded just yesterday, and it give a lot of good information. I think you’ll enjoy it, too.

He talks about hard neck garlic, soft neck garlic, seed garlic and even using store bought garlic, too.

I didn’t realize Elephant garlic isn’t actually garlic!

He talks about lots more, including harvesting “wet garlic”, which was something I wondered about when checking our own garlic last year.

Among the most discussed things I’ve been seeing in the gardening groups has been how deep to plant the cloves. There is a LOT of differing, even conflicting, advice. The thing is, the conflicting advice isn’t necessarily wrong. There can be quite a bit of variance, based on climate zones. For those in zone three, like myself, this was an excellent link that was shared. I also found this video, specific to planting garlic in zone 3.

I found it interesting that he says to leave the curing garlic out in the rain!

For those who aren’t necessarily in colder climates, here’s a video from MI Gardener (published September, 2018)

A lot of gardeners on my groups get seeds from MI Gardener, too, and are very happy with what they get.

There is a lot of information and advice out there, but if you can’t follow all of it, you know what? You can still get good garlic! We didn’t plant our cloves as deep as recommended for out zone, yet they survived the Polar Vortex just fine. We don’t have compost or manure to add, and we still got decent sized bulbs. That’s one of the beauties of gardening. You can do all sorts of things “wrong”, and chances are, you’ll still get decent results. What works in your own specific garden may also be quite different from what works in other places, too, so it will always be a learning experience.

Which is half the fun of the whole thing!

For those reading, do you have other things you plant in the fall? I’ve read about a number of vegetables that can be seeded in the fall, and plan to try it in the future, as we get our garden more established. If you plant garlic, do you plant hard or soft neck varieties? What works for you?

The Re-Farmer