Gardening

Starting early

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With the expected heat today, I headed out earlier to do my rounds, and stayed out to do extra watering with the hose fertilizer attachment.

When I first went outside, at about 7:30am it was almost chilly. An hour later, the heat was already hitting. The above photo was taken between 8:30 and 9am. The thermometer read 25C/77F but my weather app listed only 17C/63F! Still, in the time I was out there, the temperature rose almost 10 degrees in under 1 1/2 hours.

Later on, after I’ve gone over the instructions, I’ll be going back out to use the Critter Ridder. I didn’t see any new damage in the cord and sunflower beds, but I think the big carrot bed is still being chewed on. Even the carrot greens in the old kitchen garden showed signs of being nibbled on, though nowhere near as bad as the others.

One of the things I found yesterday was another solar powered spotlight with motion detector. This one will be set up on the side of the house, over the old kitchen garden. I want to position it so that smaller creatures eating our vegetables will trigger the light. Hopefully, that will startle them away. We won’t be able to set the light up facing south, as instructed, but that area gets lots of light right up until sunset. Not even shade from the ornamental apple trees reach it, so I think it should be able to charge up just fine.

The girls set up their new box fan in their window and had it running while my older daughter could finally work on some commissions, all night. This morning, before heading to bed, she told me that having the van made the upstairs the most comfortable part of the house last night! Which is a HUGE difference.

The forecasts have changed for today. We were expected to hit 28C/82F as a high, but now they’re saying we will get a high of 31C/88F, with the humidex at 34C/93F. Tomorrow, we’re now supposed to hit a high of 36C/97F, and the day after, 37C/99F. On Sunday, we’re supposed to reach “only” 31C/88F with a chance of thundershowers. I don’t expect any thundershowers to actually reach us, but it would be nice! Until then, we’re just going to have to be diligent with that watering! The girls have been waiting until after 8:30pm to do the evening water while it’s cooling down, so as not to shock the plants with cold hose water. I’ll have to keep heading out early to water again, before the heat really starts to hit. As disappointed with the loss of our carrots and lettuces, and the one beat bed, I’m very happy with how the beans, tomatoes, onions, corn, sunflowers, squash and melons are doing! The peas aren’t very big, but they are blooming, including more of the purple peas. The cucamelons are also quite small, still, but more of them are big enough to start training up the chain link fence.

It’s worth heading out early to beat the heat and tend to them. Even for someone who really, really dislikes mornings! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Kibble house and other progress

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Today was our day to head into the city for out monthly shop, so my morning rounds were a bit earlier than usual. Which seems to confuse the outside cats! :-D

Yesterday evening, when things started to cool down, my younger daughter was a sweetheart and crawled around inside the upside down kibble house, to complete the first coat of paint. It was dark by the time she was done!

Once the paint is cured, we’ll flip it right side up again and start the second coat.

As I write this, in the early evening, we’re at 29C/84F. In the city, it was 30C/86F with a humidex of 34C/93F. Before doing the shopping, I was able to visit my brother, who lives not far from the city, and got a tour of their grounds and all the things that are growing. Or not growing, in some cases! Sounds familiar. They don’t have groundhogs/woodchucks/marmots (woodchuck is the Canadian name for them) right now, but are having to deal with rabbits. The temperatures were still increasing at the time, but it was just baking out there!

Some things are just loving this heat, though. Like these guys, still in their morning shade.

The two seedlings next to each other on the left are the Tennessee Dancing Gourd. The others are the Ozark Nest Egg gourds. They have had a pretty huge growth spurt in the last few days!

While in the city, I made a point of checking out the gardening section and picked up something I hope will work.

It was the only one that included groundhogs on their list of animals. When I was loading the van, I sent a picture to the girls, who looked up reviews. They are… mixed! Some people wrote that the squirrels were eating the stuff! :-D I figure it’s worth a try. It’s inexpensive, too, so we’ll be easy to pick up more if it does.

I might even dare plant in those empty spinach beds, now that there’s some hope that any sprouts won’t get immediately eaten.

With the heat wave we’ve got right now, I’ve changed up what I intend to plant. Lettuces are no longer on the list; those will be planted later in the season. I still intend to plant radishes, but don’t expect bulbs in this heat. They will be just for their seed pods. If we get bulbs, too, that’s just bonus. I also picked up some chard. I’ve never successfully grown chard before, but they are one of the few greens that actually like the heat, so they will be a sort of replacement until we can plant lettuce and spinach again.

It’s interesting to see people’s reactions to this heat wave. There is a lot of “this is going to be the new normal” sort of panic out there. Which is curious. I checked the historical data. We’re supposed to hit 34C/93F in a couple of days, then it will drop back down to average temperatures. The record high for June in our municipality is 37C/99F, in 1995. The record low is 0C/32F in 2009. That’s just our area. As hot as it is right now, we’ve been hotter – and much colder – in the recent past, and “normal” just means the average over a span of 30 years, +/- 5 to 10 years. You’d think we’d be used to it by now, but every time things swing to one extreme or the other, we tend to freak out a bit! :-D

While I was in the city, the girls were finding ways to help the outside cats deal with it. The water bottles we put hot water in to protect the tomatoes when there was a chance of frost, are now filled with water and in the freezer. An ice pack was added to the bird bath, and the frozen water bottles will be put into the cats’ water bowls. A plastic coffee can was filled with water and put in the freezer yesterday. Today, it was placed near where Butterscotch’s kittens are, so they can rub against it to cool down, if they wish.

In the past, we’ve tried filling balloons with water and freezing them, then removing the balloon and leaving the ice in the cats’ water bowls and the bird feeder. It worked, but I think using water bottles as ice packs is better. No garbage, and they can be refrozen and used over again.

So far, we’ve only seen Butterscotch drinking from the bird bath with the ice pack. :-D

The ones having the hardest time is the girls. The upstairs gets insanely hot. My older daughter can’t work, because she has to shut off her computer and drawing tablet, because they are over heating. They haven’t been able to sleep from the heat, so they’ve been hanging out in the cooler living room, or my room, as much as possible. We want to put in a window air conditioner upstairs, but the entire second floor has only 4 outlets, and only 2 of them can handle the power needs of an air conditioner – and those are being used to power their computers!

Well, we won’t be able to do anything about it this year. I was able to get them a box fan today, to fit in one of their windows. Once that’s set up and cat proofed, they can use it to bring in some cool night air. The pedestal fan they have right now just moves warm air around!

We’ll deal. I’m more concerned about making sure our gardens are doing okay!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: more firsts – and more damage!

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I will start with the good stuff, first!

Like these teeny, tiny first fruits!

These are the miniscule Spoon tomatoes! Several plants are now showing baby tomatoes, and they are so tiny and green, the only reason we could see them was because we were wrapping twine around stalks to the chain link fence to support them. Only now have enough of them gotten big enough to do that.

While watering the Montana Morado corn this evening, my daughter called me over to see some new growth.

Most of these handled their transplanting well, and the larger ones almost all now show these developing spikes. I somehow didn’t expect them to show up until the corn was taller, but we’ll see.

Now for the unhappy stuff.

While watering the corn and sunflower beds, I made a point of checking more closely where I saw the deer in the trail cam. Sure enough, a couple of corn had been nibbled on. I also found some Mongolian Giant sunflowers had been nibbled on. None of the larger, transplanted ones.

Then I saw this, while watering the Dorinny corn. The surviving plants are much larger – almost as large as the transplanted Montano Morado corn. Now, we’re down even more!

Three of the largest corn plants were chomped right down. :-(

While I was watering, my daughter came over from watering the old kitchen garden to ask me if I’d harvested the lettuces.

No. No I hadn’t.

Almost every single block with lettuce in it was eaten.

It was the groundhog.

I had hoped we’d driven it away, as it doesn’t seem to be using the den we’d found, anymore. We’re still spraying water in it, and this evening I left the hose running into it long enough to flood it. Wherever it’s gone to make a new den, it didn’t go far. This afternoon, while I was putting the DSLR on its tripod back at the living room window after vacuuming, I happened to see it just outside, with what looked like a dandelion leaf in its mouth. I called the girls over and it heard me, running off behind the house. The girls went outside to chase it off, but either it was already too late, or it came back.

Interestingly, it didn’t touch the beet greens.

I am not happy.

In watching the deer on the trail cam, they seem to be just nibbling as they go by. So after I finished watering, I took some bamboo stakes and set them up around the corn and sunflower beds, then used twine to join them, and the stakes that were already there, at two heights, around three sides. I ran out of twine just as I was finishing, so only a small section has one string instead of two. It won’t stop the deer, but if they’re just passing through, it’ll sort of guide them away.

After running out of twine, I used the last of our yellow rope and strung it from one of the support posts of the squash tunnel, through the pea trellis supports, and joining it to one of the new stakes I put in around the Peaches ‘n Cream collection corn blocks. I then stole another bamboo stake and used it to put a second, higher line at the Dorinny corn.

This leaves the beds in that corner with either twine or rope along the north sides of the Dorinny corn, the pea beds and the northernmost Peaches ‘n Cream corn block, all along the east side of the corn and sunflower beds, and the south side of the southernmost corn block.

Later, we will be stringing the aluminum tart tins I picked up to flash and spin in the wind.

Once we get more twine and/or rope, we’ll put up more to guide the deer away from the garden beds.

I also want to put a barrier and distractions around the Montana Morado corn. So far, they have been untouched, but I would rather lose any of the other corn completely, then this variety.

I also moved the garden cam and hopefully it will cover more of the garden beds.

There are lots of things we can do about the deer, even though we can’t put up anything permanent, like fencing, right now. The groundhog, on the other hand, is a different issue. It can get through or under most things, and now that it’s eaten all the lettuce, there is nothing to stop it from going after the beets. Unless it just doesn’t like beets.

This critter has got to go!!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 Garden: first fruits!

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With the heat we’ve been having, and a heat wave hitting us starting today, it’s been hard on a lot of the garden. Not everything, though. The squash and gourds are just loving it! As long as we can keep up with the watering, of course.

It was while watering the summer squash last night that I spotted the first bebby.

Yay!!!!!

I got this next photo this morning.

Several plants have little green bebby squashes growing. We have two types of green zucchini, and it looks like we have both starting. So far, no yellow zucchini and no pattypans. When my daughter transplanted these, she forgot to keep track of the different types, so they are all mixed up. It’ll be a surprise, every time we see new ones!

I noticed that some of the summer squash had gotten to the point where they could use support, so I gently tied a few of them to their stakes this morning.

When it got dark enough last night, I did make sure to head back into the garden to test the new motion sensor light. It has an on/off switch, but without being charged yet, and too much light, there was no way to know if it was actually going to work. It did at least get enough time in the sun to charge before dark.

It was indeed on, and working!

But was it doing its job?

I don’t know. I just checked the garden cam and saw a single deer go by in a couple of files. The first one stopped and snuffled at the edge of the corn block, but did not nibble anything. Then it kept going, walking right through a bean bed! The second deer didn’t stop to snuffle anything, but also walked right through the bean bed.

*sigh*

If either of them triggered the light, it was after the camera stopped its 15 second recording.

Unless we happen to be looking out a window when something triggers the camera, we just won’t know.

I might shift the garden cam’s stand a bit, to cover that area.

Meanwhile…

Check out those potatoes!!!

They are just loving these grow bags.

When we did these bags, the idea was to keep filling the bags as the potatoes grew, to have more potatoes in the bag. However, it turns out that potatoes, like tomatoes, come in “determinate” and “indeterminate” types.

Determinate types grow their tubers all in one layer. They need to be hilled to protect the tubers from the sun, but there is no benefit to keep hilling them higher and higher in a tower or grow bag.

Indeterminate types, on the other hand, will keep producing tubers up their stems if they get buried. So adding more soil or mulch and increasing the height will increase the yield.

Which meant I needed to figure out which we had. Seeing how tall the Norland potatoes are, I thought they might be indeterminate, but nope.

All of these types are determinate. Adding more to the bags will not mean more potatoes, and will not help the plants themselves. Hilling them as we already have is enough.

Well, that saves us a bit of work.

Also…

They are starting to develop flower buds!

Both types of fingerling potatoes have plenty of buds on them. One plant of the Norland potatoes has buds. So far, nothing on the Yukon Gem. Which is good. The fingerlings were chosen for their shorter growing season, and short term storage and eating, while the Norland and Yukon Gem are both types that mature later and can be stored longer. Not that I expect we’ll have enough to last us the winter, but we’ll at least be able to have them for a while after harvesting.

This year’s garden seems to be one of extremes: things are either doing really, really well, or not at all! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Squash tunnel mods, and what is that? Oh!

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I had to make another trip into town today, because I forgot something yesterday. I’ve been making more errand trips in the last few days than I do in most months! But that’s okay, because it gave me a chance to find and pick up other things.

Like these modifications to the squash tunnel.

The first is a solar powered, motion sensor spot light. Hopefully, it will get triggered by deer or other critters going after the garden and startle them away. Putting it at the beet or carrot beds would probably have been more useful, but we don’t have anything south facing that we could mount it to. If this works, we can get more (and better quality ones) and install posts to mount them on.

We’ll test it out tonight when, hopefully, it will have enough charge to light up, and we can make sure it is in the on position.

I also finally picked up a thermometer.

Wow.

According to my desktop app, we’re at 23C/73F right now, but out in the corner garden, in full sun, we’re at 32C/90F.

Where the squash tunnel is, there is no shade, even in the early morning hours. It is full sun from sunrise to sunset, so this thermometer will likely always read on the high side. I still wasn’t expecting a 9C difference, though!

Once these were up, I went to change the batteries on the garden cam. In the process, I noticed something very odd in the ground. A strange line of holes.

You can sort of make it out in this photo below.

It’s in between the red dashed lines I added. My foot is at where the line ends.

The meandering line made me think it was following a root or something, but why where there holes in the ground here at all?

When I tipped the camera stand down so I could access the battery case, I found myself right over this line, and quickly saw what made it.

Red ants.

And the line lead back to this.

The camera focused in the wrong place, though. It’s that blurry, reddish area in the background.

That is a red ant hill.

I don’t know their proper names, but we mostly have two types of ants here. Red ants and black ants. The black ants burrow into the ground, creating low hills in the grass with the soil they displace. They are not aggressive, but their burrowing can be destructive, killing off any plants at the roots.

Red ants build their hills with spruce needles, which they will drag over surprising distances. They will build hills on or in logs, under rocks, in the cracks of sidewalks or paving stones, or they’ll just make a hill on the ground, like this one. These hills can become quite large. The one in the photo is about mid-size. Red ants are more aggressive and will bite if disturbed.

We have quite a few red ant hills. A couple of the maple logs behind the house, from the trees cut away from the roof, now have red ant hills in them, their hollow middles stuffed with spruce needles. The metal ring used to contain the fires made to burn out diseased apple tree stumps is still out near the garden, with pieces of metal covering it. I’d moved them to put some invasive vines in the ring for future burning, only to discover it was half filled with spruce needles, and crawling with red ants! And now I’m seeing this new hill, near the garden cam.

As long as they don’t start building hills in the garden beds, we’ll leave them be.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: NOOOOoooo!!!!!

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I am so very, very unhappy right now.

I went out to do the evening watering, and also add some shredded Irish Spring soap to the decimated beet bed, in hopes the deer will leave it alone and it can recover.

While weeding in the carrot bed in the main garden area, I noticed some greens had been nibbled on. It was only at one corner, so I figured it might have been a deer, though I didn’t think deer liked carrot greens. With discovering the groundhog had made a den in the nearby pruned branch pile, I looked it up, and it turns out they will eat carrot greens. So I figured I would add some of the soap shavings to the carrot bed, too.

I was too late.

The entire bed was decimated this afternoon!

All of it.

The bed was split between two types of carrots. They were pelleted seeds, so we were able to space them as we planted them, and they were doing really well. No thinning needed. Now, they’re all gone.

I am pretty sure that, if we can deep the deer away, the beets will be able to at least somewhat recover, but will carrots? I have no idea. We do have left over seed for both types, and I considered using one of the empty spinach beds to plant more, but we’re at the end of June. We don’t have enough of a growing season left to start over.

We do have two other types of carrots in the old kitchen garden, but these were specialty carrots, and had a lot less seed in the packets. They were also planted later, so they were not as far along as these ones.

I added the soap shavings to the bed anyhow, and the girls have covered it with one of the covers we used on the spinach beds. Not that these can stop a ground hog, but still.

Meanwhile, we’ve been trying to encourage the groundhog to move on. We don’t have a live trap, and even if we did, where would we release it? We are surrounded by farms. I don’t want to pass the problem on to someone else!

Anyhow.

One of my daughters came out while I was watering and went to the branch pile to see the den, only to see the groundhog looking back at her! She started to tear apart the pile, and then I passed the hose to her so she could start spraying water into the den. The groundhog came out and hid the branches. They never saw it go away, though.

While they were doing that, I continued watering from the water barrel by the peas and corn. I was afraid of what I would find when I got there, but these far flung beds were unharmed.

Moving that branch pile is going to be a priority, and we’ll continue to convince the groundhog to move on, on its own. Depending on how things go, and if we can figure out where we can release it, I might be able to borrow a live trap from my brother. When I told him about the groundhogs I saw in the outer yard, he told me about catching and releasing one from their own property, so I know he’s gone one large enough. The groundhog in the garden is bigger than the two in the outer yard.

*sigh*

I am not a happy camper right now!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: decimated!

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When doing my rounds this morning, I gathered more garlic scapes and did some weeding in the beet bed next to the garlic. They were doing very well, and I was planning on gathering some beet greens later in the day, to include in a salad or something.

This afternoon, I made a quick trip into town, then drove into the yard to unload the van. As I was unloading, something about the beet bed across the yard looked… off. So I made a point of checking it after putting the van away.

No wonder it looked off, even from a distance!

It’s been decimated.

And yes, those are deep hoof prints in the soil.

Planting the onions around the beets wasn’t enough to keep a deer out.

The crazy thing is that this happened during the day. We were indoors, but we were still moving about and near windows. The girls can see this bed from their windows upstairs, and they saw nothing. In the summer months, we never see deer in the yard. At most we see them on the trail cam going through the gate, and I haven’t even been seeing them on the garden cam at all, and even then, we only see them at night, or very early in the morning.

The beets might recover, though I’ll have to find a way to cover it again. The mosquito netting on the hoops kept blowing off. I’ll see if I can make a cover for it using the chicken wire we got for the squash tunnel. It’s a 50′ roll, so there will be more than enough to spare.

I’m not sure when I’ll be able to do it. We’ve been hearing thunder for a while now, and my desktop weather app just popped up with a severe thunderstorm warning. Because of the thunder I was hearing, I had checked it before starting this post, and it was still saying only 60% chance of rain, so something changed in just the past few minutes! From the looks of the trees outside, I might be shutting down my computer soon!

Well, at least the weather will keep animals sheltering themselves, instead of eating our garden! It’s a good thing we planted so many beets in the old kitchen garden, too. Even if this bed doesn’t recover, we will still have lots of beets.

The Re-Farmer

Pretty in Purple and Pink

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I had been wondering about our variety of purple peas not blooming yet, while the green peas that were planted later now have quite a lot of flowers. Earlier today, someone on one of the local gardening groups I’m on had posted a photo of her purple peas that just started to bloom, so that was reassuring.

Then, while doing the evening watering, my daughters spotted our first purple pea flower!

Aren’t those colours amazing? Wow!

I am so looking forward to how these turn out!

The Re-Farmer

Growing things

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When we got that one really cold night in late May, most things survived (the new mulberry sapling, sadly, did not) just fine. However, anything that was budding lost their flowers. Including almost all of the lilacs.

This Korean lilac usually blooms after the common lilac, but with the warmth we’d had earlier in May, it was starting to bud, too. This morning, I found this single spray of flowers blooming on it. It does look like it may be putting out more buds, though. We won’t get the mass of tiny flowers that is usual for this lilac this year, but there will be some, at least.

Then there’s this poor mock orange, by the laundry platform. February’s deep freeze had already decimated it. More of it has died off since the May frost. Yet this thing is amazingly resilient, and it now blooming!

I want to transplant this to a more protected location, once we figure out where that is. There is another on the East side of the house that didn’t get as damaged by the May frost, however it isn’t thriving there, either. Too dry against the house, and sunlight only in the morning. It is also starting to bloom, but like its leaves, the flowers are much smaller. We can water it regularly, but there isn’t much we can do about the lack of sunlight, so I figure that one will get transplanted, too, at some point.

The little furry flowers are growing, too! (The fourth one was playing the the bushes, so I couldn’t get a photo of it.)

When I put food out in the mornings, Butterscotch is at the kibble house along with the other yard cats, but these guys are learning to come out to their own food and water in the mornings now, too.

At the squash tunnel, I found our first Pixie melon flower!

We definitively need to get more mesh soon for that last section of the tunnel. The Halona melons are getting tall enough that we’ll need to start training them up the tunnel walls, in a very short while.

These are in the carrot bed in the old kitchen garden. They are growing where the white kohlrabi was planted. I’m hoping that’s what they are, and not just some similar looking plant of my mother’s, pushing its way through! :-D This little garden always had a variety of things growing in it, but mostly flowers. Very determined flowers! When we first cleaned out this garden, then laid down cardboard and layers of straw, leaf litter and grass clippings, many still managed to push their way through. In digging out by the house to make the path, then building the beds we planted in this year, during which I removed many, many roots, you’d think that would have set them back, but no. They’re pushing their way through soil paths, the straw paths, and even the deeper soil of the new beds. It would be rather impressive, if they were not so invasive, and crowding out our vegetables!

Still, it’s nice to see all the growing things. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden bed prep, and dealing with the heat

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The weather forecast said that we would be cooler today.

They lied.

When I did my morning rounds, it was already above 20C/68F, and we easily hit 28C/82F this afternoon, with a humidex above 30C/86F. Which meant that we spent as much of the day indoors, out of the heat, as we could. Thankfully, the way things are oriented, we can keep certain windows open to allow a cross breeze without heating the house up.

The cats appreciate that.

Yes, we leave the little step ladder at the door, just so they can look out the window! It was so funny to watch these to, with their matching positions, heads turning and tail tips twitching, in unison! Hard to believe that little Layendecker is now just as big as Cheddar! With the smaller cats, three of them can fit up there, but these big boys fill up the whole stop step! :-D

I did have to make a run into town, as we ran out of kibble for the outside cats. While I was there, I picked up some ingredients for my daughters. Yesterday, they finished off one of the giant bowls of spinach to make a spinach soup.

We’d already finished off one giant bowl, mostly through dehydrating (using the screens in the sun room didn’t work, so we did batches in the oven). When making the soup, that huge bowl cooked down to a remarkable small amount in the stock pot! :-D With my trip into town, the girls have enough to make a huge batch of baked spinach dip, which we plan to enjoy while watching watching Sherlock Holmes, with Jeremy Brett and David Burke.

It’s going to be a late one, though. We didn’t get back from working on the garden until past 10pm. I had tried going out a bit earlier to start prepping the spinach beds to plant in again, but those beds are in full sun. I wasn’t interested in getting heat stroke! It didn’t get cool enough to head out again until past 8:30pm.

The girls did the evening watering while I worked on the beds.

The logs were added after we’d started making the beds, so once I’d cleared away the remains of the spinach plants and the weeds, I took advantage of the situation to level the beds out, and create a bit of a ridge around the edges, to help keep the water from draining down the sides – and taking the soil with it. I used a garden fork to loosen the soil, to more easily pull the roots out. I was most pleased with how keep the tines could go, without any sort of resistance. This bed would handle root vegetables very well!

I had “help” while I was working.

Nutmeg could not get enough attention! :-) While I was pulling out roots and weeds, he kept getting under me, demanding pets, and rolling around in the freshly turned soil, sometimes rolling right off the edge of the garden bed – just like his brother does on our beds, indoors! Unfortunately, when I was using the garden fork, he had a terrible habit of suddenly lunging at the fork to “catch” it, even as I was stabbing it into the soil.

This bed was surprisingly different from the first one. When pushing the fork into the soil, I would quickly go through the raised part of the bed – about 8 inches – then hit solid. I wasn’t hitting rocks. Just rock hard soil! The last bed was much the same, though not as bad as this one. There is a difference between them. The first bed I worked on had been a squash bed, mulched with straw, last year. These two beds were a last minute change. When I’d prepped the area last fall, I’d made three smaller beds oriented East-West, where three pumpkin hills had been. This spring, I decided to make these two larger beds, oriented North-South. The soil beneath would be a mix of soil that had been turned in the fall, and walking paths. It’s remarkable what a difference that one season of use the previous year has made in the soil of that first bed.

All three beds are now prepared and ready for planting! We will be planting lettuces in succession along one side of each bed.

Since the radishes we interplanted with the corn all disappeared, and I ended up picking up more. Three different varieties to try, though I couldn’t find a daikon type that my daughter likes. They are fast maturing, so we should be able to grow some radishes, and still be able to grow more spinach in these beds for a fall crop.

We’re not actually fans of radishes in general, so we won’t be planting many. I do want to leave some to fully mature. I’ve read that radish pods are very tasty, but it’s not something available in stores, and I’d like to try them. From what I’ve read in the past, radishes used to be grown for their pods, not their roots, and the pods can be canned as well. It should be an interesting experiment. I’m still disappointed that none of the ones we planted earlier survived, even though they did germinate so quickly. I had specially ordered those varieties for my daughter. :-(

We’ll just have to try them again, next year!

Well my other daughter had just swung by to inform me that the baked spinach dip is ready! I am really looking forward to it! :-)

The Re-Farmer