Gardening

Unexpected harvest, and other things

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We were having a lovely rain when I headed out to do my morning rounds. Though we have been getting the odd showers for the past while, things were still starting to dry out. With the high winds yesterday, I actually watered the old kitchen garden, when I noticed all the beet greens were wilted.

With the cooler temperatures and things in the garden winding down, we’re gathering things every few days or so, and the amount we harvest is getting smaller. Mostly, it’s just summer squash. My daughter had recently picked summer squash, so when I went through the garden beds this morning, I wasn’t expecting to actually pick anything.

I was rather surprised to find even a few larger summer squash! The Magda squash have been slow growing this year, so finding two of them large enough to pick is a treat. There are lots of little sunburst pattypans, and after my daughter had already picked the larger ones, I certainly didn’t expect to find more so soon. Yes, I know they can get much larger, but this is the stage we like them best. The only thing that wasn’t a surprise was the big zucchini. Usually, we pick the squash soon after the flowers fall off, but the flower on this one was solidly attached. Even though it was of a size we would normally pick it at, we left it. When I saw it this morning, I just had to pick it. Any bigger, and it’s going to start getting becoming a winter squash! :-D Maybe some day we will let some zucchini reach that point, but not this year. :-)

We are supposed to continue to get showers through the afternoon, but I’m hoping things will have a chance to dry up a bit. I really want to tackle that tree that came down in the wind. We really need to get started on any high raised beds for next year. If we can get even just one bed done, I will be happy. I also need to prepare three beds for the garlic we ordered. I were intending to order double what we got last year, but after talking about it with the girls – and looking at our budget – we got the same amount as before; a collection of racombole, purple stripe and porcelain music, 1 pound each. Though the beds they were planted in before are available, we want to rotate them into other beds that did not have alliums in it. Unfortunately, those beds are still being somewhat used right now! However, if I am able to get enough out of the tree to build a high raised bed, it will have fresh garden soil and amendments added to it, so it won’t matter if it’s in a location that had onions this year.

If it’s too wet to break down the tree today, I should still have tomorrow. The weekend is supposed to get quite hot, and we’ve got plans for Saturday. Next week, we’re supposed to get several days with rain, and then things start cooling down a fair bit. As long as I can get enough pieces cut, while it’s dry, we can get some progress on a bed.

Though our overnight temperatures have not been cold enough for frost, some of the more delicate plants were showing signs of what I would otherwise consider frost damage. Some of the cucamelon leaves are showing signs, and part of a Ozark Nest Egg plant had a vine that was growing the highest, suddenly start dropping this morning.

Everything is all winding down, which means things are getting busier. There’s a lot of work to prepare beds for next year, and getting it done often depends on the weather.

In other things, I’m happy to say that since we installed that shut off valve and, in the process, adjusted the pipe so it wasn’t touching another one, and padded it with vibration reducing material, that very disturbing noise we would sometimes hear seems to be gone. It’s hard to say for sure, since the noise didn’t happen every time the well pump turned on, but so far, it’s encouraging.

Something else seems to have gone away.

The woodchucks.

I haven’t seen any of them in almost a week, now. Usually, I’d at least see one peaking out of the entry to their den under the pile of wood, or eating the bird seeds near the living room window but, lately, nothing. I was wondering if they might have gone into hibernation, so I looked it up. They tend to hibernate from October to February, so it’s still too early for that. But then, the sites also said they mate after the come out of hibernation, and we so them going at it in the summer, so who knows.

Very strange.

Not that I’m complaining! :-D

Well, I got that backwards!

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You know, it’s a good thing that we labelled the things we planted in the garden beds, and left those labels there.

Because apparently, my memory sucks.

For the past while, I’ve been posting photos of our sunflower seed heads. Particularly the Mongolian Giant sunflowers.

The transplanted ones are much taller and stronger, and further along – at least in the row that wasn’t eaten by deer!

The other, direct seeded ones, next to the transplanted ones that got eaten, are developing their seed heads and blooming, but they are smaller and less robust plants. Even most of the eaten ones have been recovering and are producing seed heads. Their stems are stronger. They’re just shorter.

While checking on them this morning, I noticed the labels at a direct seeded row in one of the blocks was lying on the ground, so I picked it up to push it back into the ground at the end of the row it was at.

Which is when I noticed what was actually written on it.

Hopi Black Dye.

Hold on. I thought this bed was all Mongolian Giant…

So I went to the other bed and looked at the label.

Mongolia Giant.

Which is when I remembered; I’d deliberately planted the Hopi Black Dye seeds in the southern bed, regretting that I’d put the Mongolian Giant transplants in the southernmost row, because they would shade the smaller Hopi Black Dye sunflowers.

One of the flowering seed heads is starting to droop as it matures, so I took a closer look, brushing off the spent flowers.

Yeah. That’s definitely purple.

For some reason, when I remembered transplanting the Mongolian Giants in the southernmost row of the two sunflower blocks, my brain decided that the southernmost block had also been direct seeded with Mongolian Giants. I’ve had it backwards for months. But now that I’ve actually looked at the labels after all this time, I remember that I’d direct seeded the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers in the southern block, where they would get more light, even with the taller transplanted Mongolian Giants shading them a bit. Which turns out not to have been an issue, since the transplants in that row were chomped by deer, and are now shorter than the Hopi Black Dye, so they are getting the most light of all the sunflowers out in these blocks.

Which means we have quite a lot of Hopi Black Dye sunflowers with seed heads open and developing, and only a few Mongolian Giants.

And that, my dear friends, is why I’ve gotten into the habit of labeling things, taking lots of photos, and using this blog as a journal for documentation, writing things down as soon as I can, as much as possible. Lord knows, I obviously can’t trust my own memory for things like this! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: late season growth progress

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We have been really fortunate with the frost holding off so far. If the long range forecasts are right, we won’t get a frost for at least two more weeks, possibly longer. Other areas in our province have already had their first frost, so I am really thankful that it’s held off in our area so far.

The continued mild temperatures is giving the garden more time to recover and progress, and we even have some new little surprises this morning!

We’ve got two more Ozark Nest Egg gourds forming! That makes for a total of three. I did not see these two when I checked the garden beds yesterday evening, so this is pretty much overnight growth.

This is one of the new ones, from outside the fence. They have such pretty flowers. :-)

The Tennessee Dancing Gourds are one I don’t have much concern over. Though there are a lot of little gourds developing still, there are quite a few “large” ones like this, that have reached their full size, but are still ripening on the vine.

One of the few remaining Halona melons came off its vine this morning. There are a couple of somewhat larger ones left that might have enough time to fully mature, plus a few more tiny ones that won’t.

In the background of the photo above, you can see the biggest Pixie melon in its hammock. These guys could really use the extra time, it looks like.

We’ve still got Red Kuri developing, and they are growing fast at this stage – and you can even see a new squash developing in one of the photos.

The mutant is my favourite! :-D I’m just fascinated by it. It’s shape is different than the other Red Kuri, which can be expected with cross pollination, but it is also getting bigger than the others. If this is the result of cross pollination with the nearby Teddy squash, I would have expected it to be smaller, not bigger! The Teddy squash are a miniature acorn squash and their mature size should be smaller than the Red Kuri. For a hybrid to be bigger than either parent type seems quite unusual. I hope this has time to fully mature, because I really want to see how it turns out!

Speaking of Teddy squash…

We have another new baby! Of the two plants, the one that had only a single squash developing, now has two.

The other plant still has four developing squash, with the one in the photo being the biggest.

While checking the Crespo squash, I was able to find an open line of sight to get a picture of the one developing fruit that I’ve been able to see so far. It should be interesting to see how far it gets, before the frost kills it all. We certainly won’t get the large, green, lumpy pumpkins we are supposed to, but even a little one will be interesting to see.

The cucamelons are an odd one for this year. The plants are growing up the fence rather well, will plenty of blossoms and fruit beginning to develop. Unfortunately, most never get past the size you see in the photo above. They just drop off.

I did find a single, mature cucamelon. Which I ate. :-D It’s the first larger one I’ve seen in quite some time. This suggests a pollination problem, unfortunately.

And finally, we have our potato bags.

I’m not sure what to make of these! They just don’t seem to be dying back. Oh, the two varieties at the far end are looking a bit like they are dying back, but they also got hit the hardest by the grasshoppers. The two fingerling varieties just keep on growing!

When we first decided to use the feed bags to grow the potatoes, I expected to continually add soil over time. It was after learning that all four varieties are determinate, not indeterminate, that I changed my mind. They would not benefit from having soil continually built up along the stems, so only a single layer was added to protect the developing potatoes from light, and that’s it. The purple fingerlings, however, just keep getting bigger and bigger. Which leads me to think that these may actually be indeterminate potatoes, and would have benefited from continually adding more soil. I don’t know. It should be interesting to see how many potatoes we get when we do harvest them. I don’t image we will be getting many, but we shall see. If we decide to go with grow bags again next year, we will have to make sure to choose indeterminate varieties, which means finding a source for seed potatoes that actually labels them as determinate or indeterminate.

Until this year, I didn’t even know that tomatoes had those labels, never mind things like potatoes!

It has definitely been a year of learning!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden; pixies and our grape harvest

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The girls joined me for the evening rounds last night, and my daughter found a ripe Pixie melon!

I had checked them in the morning, and none were coming loose from their stems, but by the end of the day, one of them finally did. :-) It isn’t even the biggest one that has a hammock to support it. Hopefully, this means the other Pixie melons were ripen soon. While we did pick one Pixie melon to taste test, it was still under ripe (still delicious, though!), which makes this the very first ripe Pixie we have picked.

Meanwhile, this morning, I finally picked grapes. Here is our harvest for this year.

Yup. That’s it. About a week ago, I did find another cluster with a whole three grapes on it, and I ate them.

This year, we will cover and insulate the grapes for the winter. These are supposed to be hardy to our zone, as far as I know without knowing the exact variety they are. However, even the hardy ones have a hard time things like month-long polar vortexes. Not even that one cold night in May that left us with no berries and almost no crab apples could be blamed for the lack of grapes. It took these so long to start budding, I feared the polar vortex had killed them off.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: morning in the garden

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Well, it is getting decidedly cooler when I do my morning rounds! Fall is just around the corner, but things are still holding out in the garden.

Here are the gourds growing on the south facing chain link fence. The yellow flowers that you see are the Ozark Nest Egg flowers.

If you look at the bottom right, you’ll see a white flower!

This is a Thai Bottle Gourd flower. The Ozark Nest Egg plants are going so well, they sort of hide that there is another type of gourd growing here. The Thai Bottle Gourd has leaves that are more rounded, while the Ozark Nest Egg leaves have points on them.

These gourds are not the only thing bursting into bloom.

This is the Crespo squash, recovered from critter damage and growing enthusiastically! I was not able to get all of it in this photo. All those arrows are pointing to flower buds, some of which are starting to open this morning. There are probably another dozen or so on the rest of the plant off the left side of the photo.

Hidden away in the middle, I found the first female flower!

I couldn’t get any closer because of the critter barriers, but that flower bud the arrow is pointing to has a baby squash at its base. Hopefully, it will get pollinated and not die off. Under the current conditions, I would hand pollinate, but that would require moving the critter barriers. Mind you, there’s no way any fruit that develop will reach maturity.

More on that, later.

There are only a few Halona melons left on the vines, but there are probably a dozen Pixie melons that have not yet ripened.

This is the largest of them. Since it has a hammock, I check it in the mornings by lifting it at the stem, to see if it is starting to separate, but it’s still hanging on tight!

The rest are more like these two.

I’ll have to double check, but I thought the Pixies had a shorter growing season than the Halonas. They are taking much longer than the Halona to fully ripen. I’m sure the drought conditions over the summer have something to do with that, but since we’ve started having rain fairly regularly now, I would have expected them to mature faster. Ah, well. We’ll see how they do!

This is the largest of the developing Teddy winter squash. This is roughly half of what it’s mature size is supposed to be, so they may still have time.

Our weird mutant Red Kuri is noticeably bigger! It makes me smile, every time I see it.

We’ve got a couple more that are getting bigger, too. This is what the mottled green one should be looking like, which is why I suspect it was cross pollinated with the Teddy squash.

Here’s something that is NOT getting bigger!

The one luffa gourd is just… stalled. The plants are still blooming, but also starting to die off for the season. I started these quite a bit earlier, indoors, and they should have had enough time to develop gourds and reach maturity, but this summer was so rough on everything, I think we’re lucky to have even this.

We even had something to harvest! Not every morning, but at least every few days. We even still had a few beans left to pick. In the photo, I’m holding one of the mutant green sunburst squash. :-D I’ve been trying to let the sunburst squash have more time for the fruit to get bigger, but they seem to be developing more slowly than they did last year.

I just had to get a picture of the sunflower in the old kitchen garden. We can see it from the bathroom window, through the sun room, and it makes me smile, every time. :-)

As the season winds down, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the long term forecasts. Yesterday was our first frost date for the area, but it continues to look like we are not going to have any frost here, for a while. Of course, the forecast constantly fluctuates, and different sources have different forecasts. My Weather Network app has a 14 day forecast, and with today being the 11th, that puts the 14 day trend between the 12th and the 25th. The lowest overnight temperatures I’m seeing is for the 25th, at 6C/43F, with variable cloudiness.

My Accuweather app, however, is very different. The long range forecast on that one goes up to October 5. Up until this morning, all the overnight lows were above freezing, but this morning, there is now a single night – the 25th – where it says we will hit -2C/28F. It is also predicting thunder showers scattered about the province in that day.

If that is accurate, we have only two weeks before frost hits (which is 2 weeks longer than average, so I’m not complaining!). If we do get a frost, that will be it for the tomatoes, squash, gourds and melons. We have no way to cover any of these beds, so if we get any frost warnings, we’ll just have to pick as much as we can the day before. We should get plenty of sunburst squash, but I’m really hoping the Pixie melons and winter squash ripen before then. The gourd and Crespo squash just don’t have enough time left. Except the Tennessee Dancing gourds. They are so small, we should have quite a few to gather before the frost hits. We may be lucky, though. Aside from that one night that one app is predicting will go below freezing, overnight temperatures are supposed to stay mild into October.

The sunflowers will be a lost cause, though. There is no way the seed heads will be able to mature in so short a time. So many haven’t even opened, yet. Starting some of them indoors would have made the difference (well… except for being eaten by deer), had they been under better conditions. Not just with the weather, but the soil quality where they are growing. Had our only reason for planting them been for the seeds, they would be a failure, but they were planted there partly for a privacy screen, partly for wind break, and mostly as part of our long term plans to prepare the area for when we plant food trees there. Which means we had a success with 3 out of the 4 reasons we planted them. I do want to get more of these seeds to try them again, elsewhere.

For now, every night we have without frost is a help.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 Garden: still growing!

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Okay, before I get into it, I just have to share a laugh.

The phone rang just as I was about to start this post. It was clearly from a call centre, from the noise I heard in the background. After the usual greetings, the very polite person told me he was calling about our Visa or Mastercard… provider? I can’t remember the exact word he used.

Of course, I found this incredibly funny and started laughing.

I don’t have a credit card.

Too funny!

Anyhow.

While doing my rounds through the garden this morning, I found some new growth happening.

After seeing flowers for a while, now, there is finally an Ozark Nest Egg gourd starting to form! This is the first female flower I’ve seen. Hopefully, it has been pollinated and the new baby gourd will actually keep growing.

Meanwhile, among the sweet corn, I found…

… our very first green pea pod!

These peas were planted among the corn, late in the season, for their nitrogen fixing qualities, but peas are a cool weather plant, so we might actually have a decent amount to harvest before our growing season is done.

Looking at the long range forecasts, our overnight temperatures should be cool, but it’s not until October that we’re looking at temperatures just above freezing. If that holds out, that means our garden has another 20 days or so for things to grow. The beets and the surviving carrots can stay in the ground until it freezes, if we wanted to leave them. The few chard that made it are doing quite well, though I don’t think the radishes will have a chance to reach their pod stage. If they’d been planted for their roots, we’d have a whole three radishes to pick, but none of them seem to be growing into full sized plants. The lettuce that was planted for a fall crop is just reaching a size worth harvesting baby leaves while thinning things out a bit. The seeds were well spaced to begin with, so not a lot of thinning is needed.

It’s new growth like the Ozark Nest Egg gourds, the sunflowers that have not yet opened their seed heads, and the new squash and melons that I am hoping the weather holds off for. The Halona melons have been ripening nicely, and there aren’t a lot left on the vines, but there are still lots of Pixie melons. I picked the one melon to taste test, before it was fully ripe, and have just been waiting on the rest to reach that point where they will fall off their vines. It seems to be taking an oddly long time! There are a lot of little Red Kuri squash that just won’t have time to fully mature before the cold sets in, but I hope the Teddy squash will have time to mature. They are so small, they should be able to.

A lot of people on my gardening groups have already brought their green tomatoes in to ripen indoors. With our tiny indeterminate varieties of tomatoes, I don’t know that we’ll bother. We have ripe tomatoes to pick every two or three days, and that is working out quite well.

On the down side, while I’m glad I was able to finish the extensive mowing around the inner and outer yards, by the time I was done, I was in massive pain. Especially my hips, where I have bone spurs. I’m still in a lot of pain today, so that limits what I am physically able to get done outside, as far as manual labour goes. The temperatures are supposed to remain pleasantly cool for the next while; perfect temperatures to get caught up on the heavy work outside.

But not today.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: some pruning and cleanup – and we are forewarned!

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While doing my rounds this morning, I decided it was time to do some pruning and clean up around the squash and melons.

With the summer squash, I cut away a lot of the bottom leaves, and anything dead or dying. The zucchini didn’t really need it, but the sunburst squash needed quite a bit.

Noting for next year: while I am happy with training the summer squash to grow vertically, and will probably do it again next year, I now know to make extra certain the support poles are more secure. I thought they were, but as you can see in about the middle of the squash bed, one of them has fallen right over under the weight of the squash attached to it – and I’d already added a second support pole with it! The zucchini on the far right of the photo is also tippy.

We are in a strange sort of state right now, where the squash and melons are continuing to bloom and produce, recovering for the extreme heat and dryness over the summer, but also dying off as they reach the end of their growing season. A couple of Halona melon plants were completely died off and got taken out. The single melon on the ground ground had come loose from one of those.

The three biggest Red Kuri squash are coming along nicely. The mottled green one is quite noticeably bigger. With the colours and slightly different shape, I find myself wondering if it got cross pollinated with one of the nearby Teddy squash.

Speaking of which…

There’s a new one! Of the two plants, one of them now has four squash developing on it. :-)

After I finished pruning the squash and melons, I went through the other beds, doing a bit of cleanup, and found this.

We’ve somehow lost a sunflower!

It doesn’t even look like it was bitten – there is no sign of critter damage anywhere. It looks almost as if it were cut! It’s also in the middle of a row, in the middle of a sunflower block.

Very strange.

I took the seed head inside and put it in a very small bowl, shallow enough for the barely-there stem to reach the water. :-)

As I was finishing up in the garden, the grader went by on the road, and the driver stopped to talk to me. He let me know that he’d seen a black bear – a big male – on our quarter section, and he thought it was heading for the newly dug out gravel pit for water. He’d actually seen 7 bears, just today! The most he’d ever seen in one day – and it wasn’t even 11:00 yet, at the time I talked to him. He suggested we might want to pick up an air horn to carry with us, so if we see a bear, we can use the noise to scare it off.

One of our neighbours, about a mile away, has been posting photos of a bear that’s been raiding – and destroying – his bird feeders. I would not be expecting any to come to our feeding station, though. With both bird feeders broken, I’ve just been tossing a scoop of seeds directly on the ground, so there’s not a lot to tempt them. Especially since we have zero saskatoons and chokecherries this year, and almost no crab apples, thanks to that one cold night in May. Even the ornamental apples in the old kitchen garden, which would normally be full of tiny bunches of apples, and birds eating them, have nothing. No hawthorn berries, either. Between the drought and the wildfires, this loss of berries would be quite widespread, and the bears are starving at a time they should be building up their fat reserves for the winter.

I really appreciated the grader driver stopping to let me know. I have never seen a bear in our yard, but this is not a normal year, so we will have to keep our eyes open!

The Re-Farmer

So tired, but I got it done!

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I love having so much space around the house. I really do! But taking care of it is a … well… you know…

After all this rain, I got mowing done, but never had the chance to do the week trimming around the edges. The lawn needs mowing again already, even without more rain, which is a good sign. This time, I decided to do the trimming, first.

I started yesterday.

I got all the areas on the south side of the house, particularly around the kibble house, cat shelter, well cap and other things in front of the sun room that is hard to get to even with a push mower.

Then I went around the edges in the front yard, including the sidewalk to the small gate, which has sections tree roots have pushed upwards high enough the mower can’t go over anymore, without hitting it.

Doing the south yard includes trimming around the bed the haskaps are in, the bed where the white lilacs are, in between or around various trees, around the asparagus bed, around the potatoes in their bags, around the storage house on two sides, and the outside of the chain link fence. With pauses to McGyver a fix on the chain link vehicle gate that got backed into by our vandal a couple of years ago that really needs its hinges replaced, and to finally drag out some bricks and rocks from under one of the lilacs growing against the storage house.

Then the east yard got trimmed, including as much as I could into the edge of the spruce grove that has been cleared. There’s only so far I can go into there with the trimmer, as I need to get in there with the lopper to get the trees that are trying to grow back. There is a space between the house and where more lilacs and the cherry trees we are keeping, with the now-gone bird houses at either end, that is easier to use the trimmer on instead of trying to maneuver the push mower. Driving through with the riding mower is a bit tight, with the concrete stairs in the middle of the house. I also used the trimmer in an area we’ve been slowly clearing to access into the spruce grove, where we will eventually be building the cordwood shed that will be an outdoor bathroom, but for now will be access to the largest group of dead trees we need to cut down.

For the west yard, I just did the edge of the old kitchen garden retaining wall. The grass in the west yard is so sparse, I probably won’t mow it at all.

By the time all that was done, so was I, so I stopped for the night.

Today, I finished the trimming.

Sort of.

I finished the edges in the north yard, then worked around all the low raised beds in the main garden area. The ones that the onions were in have been left alone, and I’ve given up trying to weed the decimated carrot bed (which, amazingly, has recovering carrots in it!), and the paths in between have gotten so overgrown, it was getting hard to see the beds at all. That took a while to get done! While I was at it, I trimmed in between the raspberries as much as I could. Then I dragged the trimmer over to the Crespo squash and the Montana Morado corn. With the squash, I could only trim around the barriers we’ve put around it. It is recovering amazingly well, which is kind of sad, since there isn’t enough growing season left for them to develop any squash. As for the corn, I used the trimmer in between each row, being careful not to take out any of the peas that are growing with the corn, but falling into the paths. For the longer ones, I tried to get them to grow up the corn stalk they are closest to. I found quite a few pea plants that are blooming!

This area is the “sort of” part. It is so rough, the trimmer is the best way to cut the grass and weeds. Not today, though.

Then it was time to drag the trimmer over to the far garden beds.

Did I mention this is an electric trimmer?

Just as we need 300 feet of hose to reach the furthest areas of these beds, I needed 300 feet of extension cords. That allowed me to trim around the squash tunnel, most of the Dorinny corn and the transplanted Hopi Black Dye sunflowers beside them. The peas planted among the Dorinny corn are doing pretty good, too. I trimmed around the green pea trellises, too, even though there are no longer any peas growing there. Of course the purple peas and the three bean beds got done. It looks like I will be picking beans tomorrow. :-)

Then the corn and sunflower blocks got done, which meant going in between every row with the trimmer (there is just no way to weed this area anymore), again being careful not to take out any of the pea plants. Then the summer squash got done, and finally all the crap apple trees.

You know those cartoons, where a character is going through a spooky forest, and the tree branches turn into hands that clutch and grab? That’s what crab apples trees do. It’s almost impossible to walk under them without getting snagged! Thank goodness I was wearing my cap. The last time I worked under them and forgot to wear one, I found myself having to untangle branches from my hair. There is just something weird about how these apple branches catch onto everything!!

What I didn’t even try to do, besides skipping the old garden area by the purple corn and Crespo squash, is anything in the maple grove. Once again, it is so sparse, I will likely skip it.

I look forward to when the areas between the trees are filled with moss, flowers and other lawn replacements we are working towards.

Anyhow. That was it for the day!

The mowing will wait until tomorrow.

Until then, the girls are watering the garden beds for me right now. This is the first time they’ve needed to be watering since we finally got rain. That’s the longest time we’ve been able to go without watering, all summer.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: little surprises

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I am happy to say that whatever had been eating our Teddy winter squash seems to have gone away!

These little guys are still around, and getting “big”. I found a 4th one of them, too.

I love how fuzzy they are at this stage!

While looking at the other beds, I had a few little surprises.

I am not only finding more of King Tut purple pea pods, but there are more flowers, too! This just amazes me. These should have been done long ago, even under ideal growing conditions, but they’re still chugging along!

I am leaving any pods that develop to go to seed, for next year. I figure something that could not only survive our drought, but is still managing to produce, is well worth planting again!

Then there are the green peas that were planted among the corn.

Some are starting to bloom! This one is among the sweet corn in the northernmost block. These are the tiniest of the corn. The peas are a real mix in their progress. Some are barely more than seedlings, while others are growing more enthusiastically.

This is one of the biggest pea plants I found, growing among the Dorinny corn that I’m leaving for seed. I’m even finding some among the purple corn that is also being left for seed at this point.

If things stay mild, we might actually have green peas to pick. The ones we planted in the spring did not handle the drought well, and hardly any pods developed. These late planted ones are getting much better temperatures right now.

This has been such a difficult year for gardening, I’m happy with anything we get!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: the last beet bed

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Yesterday, I finally was able to tend to the last of the beet beds.

You can see why there was no hurry.

This beet bed got quite a bit of critter damage before we were able to cover it with the netting, and never really recovered. I think I lot of that has to do with the ornamental apple trees shading it too much.

This bed has four varieties of beets, planted in blocks. One variety does seem to be recovering a bit better. Those are the chioggia, if I remember correctly.

Just for the sake of comparison, this is the L shaped beet bed right next to the little one (after being weeded). These were planted on the same day, with the last seeds of all the varieties mixed together. In this bed, the critters did get at the end in the photo a bit, and it recovered a lot more, even though it has more shade than the rest of the L shaped bed. It still gets a lot more sun than the one along the retaining wall!

This is after weeding and loosening the soil a bit. The soil is really compacted for some reason (it got fresh new garden soil, just like the other beds). Very few of the beets seem to be developing their roots.

After planting the L shaped bed with the mixed seeds, I still had some left, so I scattered them in the sapce on the very left of the photo, which is pretty much right at the trunk of one of the ornamental apples. This spot never got covered. Not only did it get eaten by critters, but cats and kittens like to roll on it. Amazingly, there are still tiny little beets trying to recover in there!

Before putting the netting back, I did add pairs of sticks to hold the net above the greens a bit. Hopefully, it will dissuade kittens from jumping on it! :-D

This netting had been originally used to create a wall on the outside of the blocks to keep deer away from the lettuce that was planted there – only to have the groundhogs eat them all. To hang the net, part of it was torn so it could be placed around a tree trunk for support. That’s the tear you see at the end in the photo. The long side of the inside is pegged down snug. The long side along the retaining wall got shoved between the soil and the blocks. Though I could roll lengths of wood into the ends and weight it down with bricks, there is nothing I can do about the tear right now. I think it should be fine.

It doesn’t look like we’re going to get many beet roots out of here at all this year, but who knows? As long as the weather stays mild overnight, they will be left to grow as big as they can before we harvest them. Plus, we can still eat the greens. :-)

The Re-Farmer