Yes, I just place our first order of seeds for next year’s garden. We might not need to order many seeds this year, considering how many we have left, but one thing we were out of completely was onions. Onions seeds only last one year, anyhow. Plus, today is the last day I can use the promo code from Maritime Gardening to get free shipping. 😁
This is what I ordered today.
I’m trying a new variety of yellow onion this year. Frontier. From the Veseys website:
Incredibly strong necks and consistent size! Frontier is a standout variety with our trial staff. Bulbs are golden, large and uniform with small necks that cure quickly. Ideal for fresh and storage markets, Frontier is long day hybrid onion with superb disease resistance. Matures in 100 days from transplant. Approx. 200 seeds/pkg.
I’m also trying a new type of shallot this year. Creme Brulee. From the website:
First Shallot AAS winner! An elongated shallot, Creme Brule has a citrusy flavour when eaten raw but when cooked, sugars are enhanced and do not leave an overpowering aftertaste. Bulbs are 4-5″ with a coppery pink skin. An attractive, easy to peel echalion, perfect for the home gardener or market grower! Matures in 95-100 days from transplant. Approx. 150 seeds/pkg.
I do still plan to try the Red Whethersfield onions again, and will probably get Red of Florence again, but those are from a different source.
Of course, I didn’t get just onions! I also got:
Yes, we will be trying to grow melons again (I’ll have a garden analysis post about this year’s melons coming up soon). We still have seeds, but I decided to get the Summer of Melons Blend. From the website:
Veseys exclusive! Best for the home gardener. This blend is the ideal solution to stretch out these beautiful summer flavours. It begins with sweet, early maturing hybrid varieties then keeps going through summer and into early fall. Maturity ranges from 75-85 days from transplant. Approx. 20 seeds/pkg.
I like having a variety, and having melons that mature at different rates – while still within our short growing season! – is bonus. It’ll also be a surprise, since the varieties included aren’t mentioned!
Veseys exclusive! Great range of colours and sizes. This exclusive Veseys blend contains a riot of shapes, sizes and colours that will bring your fall display to the next level. Some of the weirdest and wildest looking squash that we have seen in our trials. Ideal for both home and market gardeners looking for a great display without having to buy separate varieties. All are edible, and are strong vining types so they grow well together. Approx. 20-25 seeds/pkg.
I’ll have a garden analysis about our winter and summer squash, too, which was a real hit and miss situation. We do still have lots seeds from what we grew (or tried to grow) this past year. I have zero interest in having a “fall display” (who would we be displaying it for, anyhow? 😄). I like to try new varieties, but am hesitant to buy an entire package of seeds for something I’m not sure of. This way, we get just a few seeds of different varieties to try and – if they make it! – see if we like them enough to order more in the future. At some point, we’ll settle on one or two favourites and save our own seeds. Until we get to that point, we would be dealing with cross pollination, so any seeds we save as we’re experimenting would give us different results that may not be as good.
Just a small order for now. Soon, I’ll place another order for the red onions, so that we’ll have all the seeds ready to start them in January. Because, where we live, gardening starts in winter!
Our root vegetables this year were a mix of successes and failures!
First up, the successes.
Potatoes
We had three varieties of potatoes this year. We chose the varieties based on things like their storability, and their resistance to disease, as well as their flavour profiles. One time, the Purple Peruvian Fingerlings, were a potato we’d grown a couple of years ago and quite enjoyed. The other two were new to us: Irish Cobbler, a white potato, and Red Thumb Fingerling, a potato with both red skin and red flesh.
The original plan had been to plant them all in grow bags this year. We’d tried the Ruth Stout method last year, and both beds got flooded out, and there was very little left to harvest. We were going to repurpose old bird seed and deer feed bags for this. We have stopped buying both – we just can’t afford it anymore, with how much cat kibble we’re buying now – so it turned out we didn’t have enough for all three varieties.
This required a change in plans and, that early in the season, there were only a few places we could plant potatoes directly into the soil. So, the red and white potatoes went into low raised beds in the Old Kitchen garden.
The red potatoes went into the long, thin bed next to the retaining wall block, which got redone this spring, and when I ran out of room, into the short end of the L shaped wattle weave bed.
You can see how the Old Kitchen Garden beds the potatoes were planted into progressed over the years in this video.
The Purple Peruvians went into the grow bags.
So, how did the potatoes do this year?
Pretty darn good.
We harvested baby potatoes from the Old Kitchen Garden only a couple of times, since we didn’t really have a lot of any variety. The Irish Cobbler were the first to be ready to harvest, then the Red Thumb.
The Purple Peruvians, on the other hand, took an incredibly long time to mature, and did not get harvested until mid October. I’ve been going through my files to find photos of them – they were our biggest harvest – but it turns seems that by the time I was done harvesting them, it was too dark for photos!
As I write this, we have finished off our Irish Cobbler potatoes, but still have Red Thumb and Purple Peruvian Fingerling potatoes in storage.
Final thoughts on potatoes
I would consider all three varieties a success, this year. Especially the Purple Peruvians.
The smallest harvest we got was the Irish Cobblers. They were also the earliest maturing variety. They did seem to have issues with scab, however. They tasted good, however, and were a good potato for a variety of preparation methods.
The Red Thumb did quite well, and were also tasty. When cooked, they practically mashed themselves, so not a good variety if we wanted to do a hash or in a soup or stew. Having pink mashed potatoes as a side for Thanksgiving dinner was rather fun!
The Purple Peruvians seemed to take a lot longer to mature compared to the first year we grew them, with robust plants right up until the frost hit them. They are nicely prolific. The only “down” side is one of aesthetics. They do bleed their colour quite a bit, leaving fingers purple can changing the colour of any soups or stews they are cooked in!
When it comes to growing potatoes for our general needs and use, we will need to grow a lot more, but we are still figuring out what varieties we want to grow. As much as we like the Purple Peruvians and Red Thumb potatoes, I think we might want to move away from fingerling potatoes in general, other than perhaps as a side crop. Their smaller sizes and, in the case of the Purple Peruvians, uneven shapes, make them harder to handle, clean and peel. In the future, I think we will try varieties that have more even shapes and larger sizes, as well as being good for long term storage.
One last surprise
As I mentioned, we grew potatoes last year using the Ruth Stout, deep mulch method. Not only did the potato patches get flooded out, but they also got hit with slugs quite badly.
It seems, however, that we missed a few potatoes when we harvested them, and they showed up this year!
One of them, from the All Blue patch, got quite large and began producing seeds!
I didn’t try digging up the potatoes in the fall, but I did collect the seed balls. I haven’t tried opening any yet. From what I’ve read, these can be opened and the seeds inside processed much like tomato seeds. Seeds from potatoes will not be clones, as they are when the tubers are planted. I believe there are some rare exceptions, but the seeds each typically produce a new variety, like apple seeds do. I think that if we planted them, we’d still get something similar to the All Blue potato they came from, but the only way to find that out is to plant them and find out! I’ve read that, in the first year, potatoes planted from seed will only produce a single potato that can then be planted like any other potato and produce clones of itself. I don’t know if we’ll be able to experiment with this next year. It will depend on how much space we have. Still, I’d like to try it!
Carrots
We has several varieties of carrot seeds this year, and I’d intended to plant more. In the end, we only had space to plant two.
One variety was new to us; the orange Naval carrot. With those ones, we tried something else new: making seed tape.
The other variety was the Uzbek Golden carrot. We’d grown them last year and, while they did not get a chance to reach their full potential, it being such a bad growing year overall, we did enjoy them. This year, they did even better!
With these ones, we harvested them throughout the summer, as needed, then harvested the last of them after we had our first frosts.
Uzbek Golden Carrots, Gold Ball turnips, a couple of radishes and some onions that got missed.
There was some slug damage, and a few of them split, but overall they did very well.
These carrots are lightly sweet, crispy and delicious. They were a great carrot to eat raw, and also held up to cooking very well. This is definitely a variety we would enjoy growing again. I would like to find a Canadian supplier of seeds, though. It’s getting too expensive to order seeds in from the US.
As for the Naval carrots, we planted devoted an entire bed to them.
I definitely liked how the seed tape worked out. We planted an entire package of seeds, didn’t need to thin any of them, and got a very high germination rate.
We didn’t harvest many of them through the summer, though. Instead, we left them in the ground to try out a different method of storing them for the winter: in ground and under a heavy mulch. The idea is to be able to harvest fresh carrots during the winter.
This is our first “winter” harvest.
The carrots were noticeably smaller at one end of the bed, likely because that end gets less light, so that’s the end I harvested these from. Under the thick mulch, the ground was cold and did have ice shards in some places, but the ground was workable and the carrots could be dug out fairly easily. They were wonderfully crisp and fresh and very tasty! The ultimate test for this method of storage is yet to come, as winter isn’t even officially here yet, and things have still been pretty mild, compared to how our winters usually tend to be.
Final thoughts on carrots
I do wish we’d had the space to plant more varieties, but I’m happy with what we did plant. Both varieties are tasty. If I have anything to complain about, I’d say it’s that they are a bit harder to pull, as their greens come off easily. These need to be dug loose, first. I’d be doing that anyhow, so that’s not really an issue. These are definite winners.
Now for the losers. Mostly.
Turnips and Beets
This year, we planted varieties of turnips and beets we have tried before.
Last year, we got Gold Ball turnips as a freebie with a seed order. We tried growing them, but something ate the seed leaves as fast as they came up. So, we bought more seeds to try them again.
For the beets, we planted a variety called Merlin.
There were planted in the same bed, next to the Indigo Blue tomatoes, and bordered with yellow onions. I hoped that the onions would help deter any critters or insects that would want to eat the turnip and beet greens.
The turnips did seem to do rather well. They got quite leafy, enough though something was most definitely eating them. The leaves were filled with holes.
While we did harvest a few larger turnips, ultimately, they never reached their full potential. You can see in the photo with the Uzbek carrots above, how few there were, that were worth harvesting, by the end of the season. All bug eaten greens, almost no turnips. I think they tasted okay, but they probably didn’t taste the same as they would have, if they’d reached their full potential.
In the photo above, you can see where we planted the Uzbek Golden carrots, sharing a bed with the Black Beauty Tomato transplants in the foreground. The carrot seeds are covered by boards to protect them until they sprouted. In the bed on the left of the photo, the half on the lower left got the turnips, while the half on the upper left got the beets. You can see the labels marking where they are in there. (The white boards on either side of the tomatoes are there to protect the new transplants from high winds.)
The beets barely came up at all.
The first year we grew beets, they did rather well, but pretty much every time we’ve planted them since, they’ve been doing worse and worse. This year was, to be honest, pathetic.
In the case of this bed, however, I think there was something odd about the soil. Even the turnips grew stronger and healthier on the south end of the bed, but by the middle of the bed, they were smaller and sicklier. Then there were a few little beet seedlings that started to emerge, but by the north end of the bed, there was nothing. No germination at all. Even the tomato plants at that end seemed to be smaller and less healthy looking.
The entire bed got the same amount of sunlight and water. This was one of the beds that had a sprinkler hose wound throughout. The problem could be in the soil itself, but after harvesting the grow bags at the end of the season, I think the problem may actually be that row of self seeded trees my mother allowed to stay. She’d had a row of raspberries there and, after transplanting the raspberries, she left the saplings to grow to be a wind break. In trying to clean up around there, I can see that attempts have been made to remove these trees in the past, and they’ve just grown back. It’s a mix of maple and Chinese elm, which means they are not only taking up space that used to be productive garden space, but are spreading seeds. Those Chinese elm seeds are the worst, and have been causing all sorts of problems. However, when working on the soil in these beds, pulling up roots and amending it, we find a lot of roots at the north ends of them. The bottoms of many of the grow bags the peppers were in were absolutely crowded out by tree roots that had grown in from below. Because of how these trees growing, I suspect that it’s the Chinese elm roots that are depleting spreading the most and winning the competition for nutrients.
Final thoughts on turnips and beets
We’ve had such poor results growing turnips and beets, I don’t know that we will try to grow them again, until we can plant them in higher raised beds. The one area we’ve grown beets in semi successfully, was in the East yard, near the spruce grove. When we cleared out where the old wood pile used to be, we found the best and softest soil of all under there. While my daughters have enjoyed what beets we’ve managed to grow in the past, with the Merlin variety being a favourite of theirs, I honestly don’t know if we like any of the turnips. I’ve selected turnips to grow as a good storage crop for food security, but it’s not much good for that, if we don’t actually like eating them. With the small turnips we’ve managed to harvest so far, we’re not getting their full flavour.
Which means we will likely skip trying to grow turnips and beets again for at least a couple of years. Once we have more, and more established, raised beds, we can try again.
Extras: more beets, plus radishes
After we harvested the garlic, we had an empty bed suitable for a fall crop. In it, we decided to plant spinach, beet and radishes.
We planted the Cherry Belle radishes, Lakeside spinach and Bresko beets.
I’ll cover spinach in another post, but in this bed, they started to germinate, then promptly disappeared. A couple of seedlings did survive, but didn’t grow much at all. The beets barely germinated, and what did germinate, soon disappeared. Only the radishes grew, and while we got decent looking plants, and a couple that shot up and started to bloom, there were almost no radishes worth harvesting. While I think insects or slugs got the beets and spinach, I suspect it was the nearby trees that did in the radishes.
Only one of us in our household actually likes radishes, however I’ve been curious to try radish pods. So far, we’ve never had radishes get to the point of producing any! Even though these ones were planted so late (my daughter that likes them ended up house sitting for a month, so she wasn’t here to eat what few we got!), the ones that started blooming are the furthest along we’ve had them grow.
As with the beets and turnips, I think radishes are something that we won’t grow again for a while. They do produce very quickly, if eating the roots is what we’re after, so we might tuck them in between other things as a sort of ground cover, but that’s about it. I do still want to grow some for their pods to try. Perhaps we’ll have an empty corner in a higher raised bed to tuck a few seeds in, and just let them be until the end of the season. That will be a last minute decision, depending on what space we have to work with, next year.
Which means that, for root vegetables, we’re basically down to potatoes and carrots!
Well. I guess that’ll make things easier to plan out next year! 😄
First, the garlic, which was planted in the fall of 2022.
We planted garlic in one low raised bed, starting with cloves we’d saved from the one successful bed of garlic planted the previous year.
First, we had to reclaim and prepare the bed from the summer’s crop. Of our saved garlic, we got only 24 big cloves out of the six bulbs we kept! We then bought more garlic locally, rather than ordering it in, this time trying a soft neck garlic for the first time.
So how did they turn out in the summer?
Apparently, not good enough to warrant getting pictures of the bed as it grew. At least not any I uploaded into my dwindling WordPress media storage.
We seemed to have lost quite a few to the winter cold. I’d say we had almost a 40% loss on our saved garlic, which was hit the hardest. Interestingly, it was the soft neck garlic that did the best, as far as survival. We harvested all the scapes from both the hard neck varieties well before soft neck variety produced scapes. All produced decent, if not particularly large, bulbs at harvest time. As I write this, we still have some left to use for cooking. We did not save any for replanting. We just didn’t have enough to make it worthwhile.
Final thoughts on garlic.
We seem to have a problem with losing our garlic to the cold over the winter. For this fall’s planting, we got just one variety. They were all planted in the Old Kitchen garden, closer to the house. We made efforts to plant them more in the middle of the beds, as the outer edges of raised beds will freeze faster. That resulted in the 3 pounds of garlic we ordered being spread out over 4 raised beds. They also got a deep mulch. This winter should be a mild one, though, so the risk of loss due to cold will be reduced, too.
Also, we need to plant a lot more garlic. That one bed, even if we hadn’t lost as many as we did, was not enough to meet our usage needs. We could easily plant two or three times as many garlic. This fall, we planted 3 pounds of seed garlic, and while it’s more than what we planted last year, more would never be a bad thing!
We do have raspberries here that my mother has been growing for decades, descended from plants I used to pick from as a child. They are almost a wild variety. For our food forest, we want to include different varieties that mature at different times of the year. We’d purchased a red variety of raspberries a couple of years ago, but the deer kept eating them. They are protected now, but are not recovering well. So when these purple raspberries were planted, in an area we’d planted peas and beans in previous years, we made sure they were protected from deer.
They did rather well, too. These were supposed to be first year canes, so it was a surprise when we saw them starting to bloom. Yes, they actually produced fruit!
No new canes that would produce fruit next year emerged, though. Which means that when they died back after fruiting… well, it looks like they’ve just died.
I keep forgetting to contact Veseys about them.
[Edit: I have since remembered to contact them, and have been told this is normal, and they should start growing in the spring.]
Final thoughts of raspberries
We all love raspberries. This was actually a pretty good year for them, and the old raspberry bushes produced quite well. Especially since we cut away the crab apple tree that suddenly died of a fungal disease last year. It had been shading the patch quite a lot. This year, that end of the patch got a lot more sun, and they clearly thrived.
As for the purple Royalty raspberries, we did get enough to taste, and do like them. We will look to replacing the dead ones, while also planning to get a gold variety, plus another red variety. The long term goal is to have lots of raspberries from June through to August.
Our first apple tree
We have plenty of crab apple trees, most of which are dying of a fungal disease, so we have to be really careful about getting new apples. This spring, we got our first eating apple tree; a Liberty apple. It’s actually a zone 4 variety, so we needed to also give thought on where to plant it. It needed to get the full warmth of the sun, while also being sheltered from the cold winds. In winter, it will need extra protection to keep it from freezing.
For this, we chose an area in the west yard, closer to the house. There are ornamental crab apples nearby for cross pollination. We’ve got tulips planted here, which need protecting from the deer, with dead and dying trees that needed clearing away. So that all got taken care of, and the apple tree was planted closer to a hedge of lilacs for extra protection from the elements, while still getting that full sun.
We also got a pair of mulberry trees that are rated to zone 3. When we ordered one tree from Veseys, they did not have the size available for 2023, so we got two smaller ones, instead. They were so tiny, we ended up not transplanting them. Instead, they got potted up and kept indoors. As I write this, they are much, much larger, and their leaves have turned yellow and are dropping for the winter. If all goes well, they will come out of dormancy in the spring, we’ll harden them off and plant them in our food forest area when we are past our last frost date, in June, next year.
Final thoughts on apples (and mulberries)
Finding apples that are good for fresh eating, that are also hardy to our zone, is a challenge, but they are out there. So why did we get a variety that’s zone 4?
I’m a sucker for punishment?
The variety had qualities we were looking for, from flavour to storability. Hopefully, it will work out, and acclimate to our winters over time.
When it comes to apples, one tree should produce enough for a family, but they also often need another variety for cross pollination. So we might pick up one more variety of apple in the near future. What we really need to watch out for, though, is that fungal disease that’s killing off our crab apples. I’ve been researching about it, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Once it’s in the soil, it doesn’t go away. So if an area is badly infected, like where the row of crab apples are now, we would not be able to plant apples there again and expect healthy trees. Yes, there are ways to treat the tree, but it’s not really an option for us right now.
As for the mulberry trees, I’m pretty excited about those. I’ve never had mulberry before, but my mother remembers they had a huge mulberry tree behind their barn, when she was a child in Poland. As a food tree, they are known to be productive to the point of nuisance, so they will be planted well away from the house. There’s a gap in the lilac hedge on the north side of the property that needs to be filled in. That would be a good place to transplant these. Eventually, they should grow into towering shade trees, so we need to make sure they’re not going to cause problems for other things we want to plant around there.
Last minute addition: saffron crocus!
This year, I was really excited to find out Veseys got a Canadian supplier for saffron crocuses, acclimated to zone 4! So we took a chance and ordered some.
These were planted in a trench in the fenced off area about the tulips and the Liberty apple tree this fall. For the winter, they got a deep mulch to protect them. If they survive, they can be expected to produce flowers with harvestable stamens in the fall of 2024, and each year, they can potentially triple as they expand.
Of course, every year, they will acclimate more to our climate zone, too.
Final thoughts on saffron crocuses
We don’t really use a lot of saffron, so if even a few survive to produce next year, that will be enough for our needs. Long term, if they do well, who knows. We might eventually have enough saffron to be worth selling at the local markets or something. If not… well, it was worth a try!
Recovering Strawberries and Asparagus
Last year, our purple asparagus bed was flooded out. It didn’t really affect the strawberries that were interplanted with them, but the asparagus crowns were buried 2 ft deep. I wasn’t sure any survived. In the end, we did get some asparagus plants growing, but they have been set back, at least a year. This should have been the first year we could harvest any, but that just wasn’t going to happen.
As for the strawberries, they recovered quite nicely after the winter and were soon producing.
We ended up rigging up protection around the bed, and the strawberries did recover. In fact, they began producing again, quite late in the season, because of the deer damage, and were still trying to produce, right up until the first frost hit them!
Final thoughts on strawberries and asparagus
We planted a purple variety of asparagus, and the plan had been to plant a green variety the next year, and to keep adding more every year until we had enough for our family to enjoy regularly. Well, that didn’t happen. The challenge is, asparagus is a 20 year commitment. We have to find places to plant them that will not be used for anything else for 20 years, because I sure don’t want to be transplanting them in the future. Since we’re still struggling to clear up certain areas, we just don’t have the space that can be used that way.
After last year’s flooding, we now have an idea of where the more susceptible areas are that we either have to avoid, or where we’d have to make a bed raised high enough that flooding won’t be an issue.
So, yes, we do still intend to increase our asparagus beds, with both green and purple varieties. It’s just been delayed. As for the asparagus we have right now, I’m hoping they recovered enough that they will do better next year. I don’t expect we’ll have enough to harvest next year, though. Maybe in 2025.
Asparagus is definitely a long term planning sort of thing!
As for the strawberries, these were purchased transplants that were interplanted with the asparagus because I’d read they do well together. Over time, however, I am now thinking to get more strawberries to interplant around the food forest area, as a sort of ground cover, rather than having dedicated beds to just strawberries.
Strawberries from seed
Now we move on to an impulse purchase that did surprisingly well. I got a kit to grow strawberries from seed. It was marketed for kids, but strawberries are strawberries, and we just can’t get enough strawberries in this household!
What started out as this…
… became this.
Yes, we actually got a few mature strawberries!
These got transplanted in the wattle weave bed along with some herbs, peppers, eggplant and luffa. Eventually, the Old Kitchen garden will be mostly an herb garden. I honestly didn’t know if they’d make it, or if they’d produce this year at all, they were so tiny.
The kit did not say what variety the strawberries were and, from the looks of the berries, they seem to be a type of wild strawberry. We only got maybe 4 or 5 ripe berries to try, and they were tasty, but not as tasty as the variety that were bought as transplants.
Final thoughts on strawberries from seed
Since this was a spur of the moment experiment, my expectations were not high, so it doesn’t mean much to say they exceeded expectations! Once transplanted, they did really well. I don’t think I’ll grow strawberries from seed again, though. The ones purchased as transplants were more productive (even after the deer got to them) and much tastier. We’ll see if these survive the winter. They are mulched, but they were planted along the edge of the bed, so are still susceptible to freezing. For all I know, they will produce larger berries once firmly established. We shall see.
Sunchokes
I kept forgetting about the Sunchokes, aka: Jerusalem Artichokes, this year! They are in a permanent bed next to the asparagus, and this is their second year. Last year, we’d planted 10 tubers in two rows. In the fall, I harvested half the bed, replanted 5 of the largest tubers, leaving the other half of the bed untouched. The sunchokes came up quite well from both halves. They grew nice and tall and…
That’s it.
Like last year, they never boomed. I never even saw any buds forming.
This was all we harvested last year.
I was going to harvest some this fall but, in the end, I just left them. We should have more to harvest, next fall. Instead, we cut the stalks and lay them down on the bed and covered them with a grass clipping mulch. As Sunchokes are native to Canada, they probably don’t need a mulch at all, but it won’t hurt.
There are people on some of the local gardening groups on Facebook I’m part of that also grow sunchokes. I saw several people talking about how they’ve been growing them for years, and they have never bloomed, wondering what they were doing wrong. Some old time gardeners have said theirs have never boomed, either, but they still get a good harvest every year. At least I know it’s not just here!
Final thought on Sunchokes
So, obviously, I don’t have much to say about the for this year, since we skipped harvesting them. When we did try them, we liked them, so I do want to let them grow and multiply, so that we can have larger harvests. After learning that other people in our zone that have grown them for years and never had them bloom, I guess that means we don’t have to transplant them somewhere else or something. We can just leave them were they are. Hopefully, next fall, we’ll be able to get a good harvest out of them.
Everything else
This is a follow up on the things we planted the year before.
We planted a bundle of 5 sea buckthorn. Two survived. They are still surviving and growing bigger. Eventually, we will get more to add to the privacy hedge. If all goes well, we’ll have at least one male sea buckthorn, and will eventually get berries.
We planted two highbush cranberry. Last year, the deer ate one of them, it recovered, and they at it again. I put an old saw horse of that one to protect it as it recovered again. This year, it was growing well, as was the other one, which is still unprotected. Amazingly, towards the end of the season, the one with the saw horse over it to protect it got eaten again! Given how late in the season this happened, I don’t know if it will recover.
Deer chewed Highbush Cranberry.
We planted 30 silver buffalo berry in two curving rows, to eventually act as a privacy screen. It looks like we’ve lost 2 of them, possibly 3. One, I expected, as I’d accidentally pulled it up last year while weeding, but one or two may have died before fall, too. Some of them are getting pretty big, while others are still quite small. With last spring’s flooding, one end of the rows was completely underwater, and they handled it just fine. It will be a few years, yet, before they get large enough to start producing berries.
We had planted 6 Korean pine in the outer yard. We have 4 survivors. This year, they were still quite tiny, and are still covered in their chicken wire cages for protection.
From what I’ve read, they grow very slowly for the first 5 years, then start to really shoot up, and eventually become very large trees. We got 3 yr old seedlings, which means this was year 5 for them. We shall see if they get their first growth spurt next year!
Final thoughts on our food forest.
Our long term goal is to have as many perennial food plants as we can manage. Fruits, nuts, berries, tubers, whatever. We’ve got a good start on it, and hope to add more to it every year. For some things, like the sea buckthorn and silver buffalo berry, these are multipurpose plantings. They should be prolific enough – eventually – to provide winter food for the birds, while the bushes themselves will be privacy screens and living fences. The far flung areas we’d planted corn, beans, squash, etc. last year were done to help prepare and amend the soil for permanent planting, and this year, only one small area was used to grow squash in. Next year, we hope to plant a fruit tree or something in that spot.
We are trying to be very selective on what we plant and where. We need to leave lanes open, wide enough to drive through, to be able to get at fences, etc. There is also the lane we will keep open because there is a telephone line buried under it. That means we need to consider root systems, as well, when locations are decided on.
The one thing we planted out there this year – the Royalty raspberries – appears to ultimately be a failure, since they produced this year, instead of next year, and died back. So very little progress was made in that area this year. We do have some black currant bushes that I am thinking of transplanting out there. They are closer to the house, but under trees. They bloom in the spring, but have almost no berries. They simply don’t get enough sunlight.
Over time, we will keep adding more to the area, as the budget allows. Pears, plums and gooseberries are on the list, and I’m seriously considering transplanting our haskap bushes. The “male” haskap, which is supposed to be the right variety to cross pollinate the two “female” varieties, is done blooming before the two other even start. I think they’re just planted in a bad spot. Too many tree roots, and too many of those perennial flowers that my mother planted there. Even though I’ve cleared them away from around the haskaps, they get so big, they still cover the bushes – and the haskaps are supposed to get big enough that it shouldn’t be an issue! We shall see.
The experiments.
Last year, there were two things we planted that, while annuals, could be treated as perennials, because they self seed so easily. Wonderberry and Aunt Molly Ground Cherries. With those, I let them drop fruit to see if they would come back this year.
They did not.
We might still get some ground cherries in the future, but they were much more fragile a plant than I expected. They broke easily, as I reached under to find and pick ripe berries, and the patch itself got flattened by wind and had to be supported. If I do plant them in the future, I’d want to have some sort of supports for them, and I don’t know if they’re worth the extra effort!
That is where we are at now, with our fall plantings and perennials. Not a lot of progress there, this year, unfortunately. When it comes to perennials – especially trees – it can take years before they start producing, so delays in progress add years, rather than months, to having food production! At least things like berries produce faster and fill the time gap a bit.
Since moving out here, our gardening plans have changed a few times. Our original 5 year plan had us starting to garden around year 5, after focusing on cleaning and clearing first the inner yard in the first two years, then the outer yard over the next 2 or 3 years, before eventually moving beyond the outer yard, which is rented out.
It’s now been 6 years. The inner yard – specifically the spruce grove – is still not cleared and cleaned up. We had to start on parts of the outer yard earlier. Some things had to be dropped completely.
Gardening, however, started early, and I’m glad it did. We started off with a couple of reclaimed patches of ground. Each year, the garden beds were expanded and we grew more things.
Until this year.
All the best laid plans, indeed! We ended up with a garden perhaps half the size of the previous year.
Early in 2023, though, we still thought we’d be able to do a larger garden. Many seeds were purchased, and orders were placed for things that would be delivered in time for spring planting. Here is a video I did, going through our seeds – old and new – and starting our onions and luffa.
Even in April, I still thought we’d be able to meet most of our goals, and was able to get started preparing a couple of low raised beds.
I also did a spring garden tour in April, where I talked about our plans.
Among the things that changed was the shed we were supposed to get, that would have been fixed up to be a chicken coop. The person that had the shed to get rid of ended up throwing it away. It did not survive the winter.
Getting the dead trees to build more raised beds didn’t work out as planned. Slowly over the summer, we did get wood harvested, but felling dead spruces resulted in trees getting hung up and stuck on other trees.
That was just the beginning of plans that fell through.
All was not a loss, though. For what we did manage to get, there were some successes and failures, as there are every year, and that’s what I’ll be going through in this series of blog posts analyzing our 2023 garden. With what we’ve learned in the past few years, we should be able to make adjustments and do better next year.
It’s been a gorgeous day today! We’ve hit 8C/46F today; warmer than forecast. I took advantage of it, and made our first “winter” harvest from the carrot bed. This bed has a deep mulch of grass clippings on it, plus one of the covers we made for the raised beds is being stored on it for extra protection.
I found Rolando Moon curled up on the mulch, under the cover, enjoying a nap in the sun!
I harvested from the far end of the bed, where it gets more shade and the carrots are smaller. There were some icy shards in the soil and under the mulch, but the ground was not at all frozen. It’s been so mild, though, it probably wouldn’t have been, even without the mulch!
This is today’s harvest of naval carrots, after washing the big dirt off. They just need to be scrubbed individually before eating.
I did, of course, have to try one out. It was incredibly fresh and crisp, and quite tasty.
It’s too early in the season to make conclusions, but so far, storing them in ground looks like it’s going to work out just fine. I don’t know how it’ll do if we start hitting -20C/-4F or colder, but with this being a strong El Niño year, we may only hit those temperatures as overnight lows.
Harvesting these reminded me; I want to do a series of 2023 garden analysis posts, like I did last year. This year’s garden was very different from what was planned or expected! We will have much to think about, for next year’s garden!
Yes, all this time, the Red of Florence onions we harvested awhile back have been sitting on a screen in the old kitchen. With how cold it gets in there, they’ve been fine, and we’ve been using them as needed, but it’s starting to get too cold. Today, I was finally able to finish processing the last of them.
You should be able to go through the slide show of images above.
The first step was to cut away the shriveling green parts and the roots. When I was done, the bulbs filled my giant colander in a heap!
While I was working, the cats in the sun room were going nuts, trying to see what I was doing, so I opened the door and let them in with me. Quite a few came in to explore! One of the males is aggressively friendly. I was using the top of the chest freezer as a table. He jumped up onto it and was eager for pets. Thankfully, he was okay with head boops and arm rubs, because my hands were busy. If, however, I reached for the kitchen shears beside him instead of petting him, he would attack my arm! He even started biting, so I had to take him off the freezer repeatedly before he finally stopped.
Once the screen was clear, I had to figure out what to do with it. We made this as a barrier for the old basement door, so we could keep it open and allow cool air to circulate, while also keeping the cats out. It’s made with 1 inch wire mesh. I took it into the sun room and figured out a way to use it for the cats. It is now resting on one level of the shelf in front of the window on one side, and the cat cage on the other – though it did need propping up on the cat cage to make it level. Hopefully, it’ll stay. I then took a spare sheet of rigid insulation and cut it slightly longer than the screen. With how the frame and centre support is, I was able to fit the insulation under the screen, in between the long sides. The sheet was just narrow enough for that. Without support, of course, it started to sag, but this sheet had been used for something else and already had some holes in it. I was able to use one near the side and zip tie it to the screen, then made a couple more holes as far as I could reach on the other side and added another zip tie. Not that the cats’ weight would be on it, as the screen would hold them. It was just to keep it from sagging. The cats can walk on the wire, but there was another chunk of the insulation that I put on top, so it would be more comfortable. They’re probably scratch the heck out of it. They just love scratching at that insulation!
Before I set that up, though, I put the remains of another sheet against the window that’s missing the inner pane. It doesn’t fill it – we tried cutting pieces to fit before, but the insulation kept wanting to fall away, no matter how we tried to secure it – but it’s enough to reduce the chill from that window where it counts.
So now the cats have a sort of “cave” against that wall, covering the space we set up for them. It gives them another level to climb on that is under the shop lights. I have those set to turn on with the motion sensors, after dusk, and the insulation under the screen will help keep some of their own body heat in, underneath. Also, they won’t get blinded every time one of them moves. Yes, I have the lights set at their lowest level of brightness, but when it’s night, it still seems really bright!
Hopefully, the racoons won’t knock it off or something.
Once that was done, it was back to the onions.
The first batch of onions I cleaned up was for dehydrating in the oven. I have four baking sheets, but they are too big to fit side by side in my oven. This oven does not have an element on the bottom, though, so I was able to put a baking dish on the bottom for elevation, and that allowed me to fit three trays in.
For the first tray, I tried slicing the onions long ways and laying them out on a cooling rack in the baking tray. I could only fit about 1 1/2 larger onions on the tray that way. For the second one, I tried cutting them on the round and laying them out on another cooling rack, but they just fell through the openings. I ended up putting parchment paper down instead, the laid out the slices. The rings didn’t want to separate, so I cut the rest in half lengthwise, first, then sliced them. They still needed to be broken apart aggressively before the pieces could be spread out evenly. Still, I was able to fit about 3 larger onions on, that way. For the third tray (I didn’t bother taking a picture of that one), I just chopped the onions and spread them out. That was another 3 or 4 larger onions.
Those will take a while to dry, so the rest of the onions got chopped up for freezing. I would have wanted to dehydrate more, but chopping and freezing is a lot faster!
For that part, I tried out a trick I think I saw on Pinterest. Loading into freezer bags is a real pain. I’ve tried several different ways to support the bag, but the best I could come up with was to put it in a large measuring cup. It would still be floppy, but not as much.
This time, I got out our canning jar lifter. The slide lock part of the bags gets turned inside out, as I usually do to keep the locking parts clean. This lip then fits over the curved jar lifting end, while the flat handles act as a stand. The lifter can be opened as wide as the folded over part of the bag allows, and holds it tight. After filling the bag with the chopped onions – I fit 2 1/2 cups per size medium bag – the lifter can be squeezed together to free the top. After the flipped over part is flipped back again, the lifter can be opened wide, allowing plenty of room for the filled bag to be removed.
My goodness, I wish I’d known about this trick long ago! This was the easiest, fastest filling of freezer bags I’ve ever done!
I had to stop chopping part way through, as my back was starting to give out (yes, I even used a stool to raised one leg while I worked), which was a good time to have the supper my daughter made for me. Then it was back at it.
In the end, there were 14 freezer bags filled. All but one of them went into the big freezer. Before sealing the bags, I would close it most of the way, then stick in the short end of an elbow straw in the last gap and suck out the air to vacuum seal it. One of the bags lost its vacuum. I couldn’t see a hole, but there had to be one, somewhere. So that bag went into the fridge to use right away.
I’m quite happy with our onion haul this year. Even though one variety failed completely for some reason, we still have plenty of cured and braided onions, both yellow and red, to use throughout the winter, as well as some shallots, and now we have 13 bags of chopped onions in the freezer, 1 in the fridge, plus more dehydrating in the oven. It should be interesting to see how long this supply lasts us through the winter.
One thing about these Red of Florence onions; their shape makes them SO much easier to cut up! Plus, they taste good, so win-win!
It’s supposed to start snowing later, so it’s a bit of a now or never day to get those beds mulched before the ground freezes! I’m so glad my mother decided to have me come over to her place tomorrow instead of today.
If you scroll through the Instagram slide show above, you’ll first see the carrots that we are overwintering in the soil, harvesting them as we need to, rather than harvesting them all at once and having to process them for the winter. Quite a few people swear by this, and say the carrots taste so much better when stored this way. There was the remains of a pile of grass clippings next to that bed, so it was the fastest to get done. I used up pretty much the entire pile – I didn’t bother digging too far into the snow around the edges – and piled it right on top of the snow layer. The snow will also act as an insulator, as well as add needed moisture, come spring time. I put the cover back on, partly as a way to store it, but also to keep the grass clippings from being blown away. This is the only bed where that would be an issue.
Next is the old kitchen garden. All the garlic now has a thick layer of mulch, plus the chamomile, thyme and strawberries grown from seed are covered.
I also finally picked that last big luffa gourd. I’d forgotten about it! It’s now sitting in the living room to dry out.
I also remembered to put a deeper mulch on top of the saffron crocuses, plus a nice, thick “donut” of mulch around the Liberty apple tree. Both are zone 4 plants, so they need extra protection in our zone 3 temperatures. Some time ago, I added the tree protector. It’s wrapped around the stem and the bamboo stake together until it reached the bottom branches, and then got wrapped around the bamboo stake. As the sapling gets taller, the wrap can be adjusted accordingly. This area also has the fencing wire around it, so it should be safe from deer, but this will also protect from rabbits and other critters. Mind you, the yard cats do a great job of keeping the small critters under control, so we don’t have any rabbit or mouse problems, but there are other creatures that might try to eat a nice, juicy young sapling!
All of this pretty much finished off the huge pile of grass clippings that was next to the high raised bed! There’s just the dregs along the edges, buried under snow. Those are really full of crab grass rhizomes, anyhow. I was pulling quite a few of those out of even the deepest parts of the grass pile!
Last of all, we covered the asparagus and strawberry bed, and the sunchokes. We ended up not harvesting any. I decided to leave them to propagate, and we’ll have more plants to harvest from, next year. In theory. Instead, I decided to use the loppers to cut the stems and lay them down while my daughter raided the straw pile for more mulch.
The surprise was discovering half the sunchoke plants had lost their tops! Some time between when I did my morning rounds, and when we came over to tend to the bed, a deer had come around and eaten them!
The straw we used is what had been moved off the area the trellis beds are going on. It had been used for our Ruth Stout method of growing potatoes and melons that instead got flooded out, in our 2022 garden. So it’s had some time to break down, and the pile was quite damp! We used most of it to make a nice, deep mulch over the asparagus/strawberry, and sunchoke beds.
In the spring, these mulches will be removed (the carrot bed should be empty before then) to allow for the plants underneath to get sunlight and warmth and start growing. In the wattle weave bed, the chamomile should have reseeded itself by now. The thyme in there might actually survive the winter. It’s hard to say, as they are close to the wall of the bed, which means they’ll get cold from the side. Even with the mulch, they might freeze too much. This is why I made sure to plant the garlic well away from the walls of the raised beds they are in.
If all goes well, we’ll have a nice head start to our 2024 garden!
Oh!!! I just found out our lysine order is in already!
It occurred to me that these guys are coming up on 6 months old. The Cat Lady was looking into getting 5 slots for the cheap spay and neuter day, including Toni, Ghosty and a couple of outdoor males, but I just asked if her if we could get the 5 oldest kittens done, instead. She still wants to get Toni done, too, so she’ll see if she can get 6 slots. She might be moving next month, though, and things are really hectic for her and her family right now (and their 27 or so cats!!), so she’ll get back to me on that one. I told her I’m less concerned about Toni than I am about having 5 kittens old enough for their first heat (well… three female kittens going into heat with intact males around!). Ghosty, depending on how things go with the move, would not be coming back, as she’s found a home for her.
Speaking of large numbers of cats, I did a head count outside this morning. Including Shop Towel/Sad Face, I counted 38.
As much as we’d like to reduce that population, we really need to reduce the indoor population first. It’s just not healthy for them, mentally or physically. The Cat Lady, once they move to their new home, will be able to convert a heated shed into a place just for cats. That’s something I wouldn’t mind finding a way to do. Too bad we can’t use the storage house for that! We need more sheds, anyhow. The ones we have are either fallen apart, falling apart, or jammed full of junk. Or, in the case of the warehouse that used to be my late brother’s workshop, filled with my parents’ stuff my mother insists we keep. Not that we’d use that for cats. We need a workshop more!
Ah, well. All in good time.
With the temperatures dropping below freezing consistently over night from now on, I pulled the bed of Red of Florence onions, yesterday.
There was enough to half fill the wheel barrow, plus there were a few too small to bother keeping.
Their necks are still too “fleshy”, so we won’t be able to cure them like we did with the other onions we harvested already. We’d had a night and morning of consistent rain, so these were also pretty damp. We have the hardware cloth “door” we made to keep the cats out of the old basement when we keep the door open in the summer. It does double duty for laying out vegetables. I was able to set it up in the old kitchen and laid the onions out to dry a bit. From there, we will need to process them; some for freezing, some for dehydrating. This is on top of the onions we’ve been able to cure and braid for casual use. We got a very decent haul of onions this year, but only the yellow onions, plus these ones. Oh, and the shallots. We also had the Red Wethersfield onions, but not one of them survived transplanting! I’ve no idea what happened to them, but I want to try that variety again before we conclude that they just won’t grow here.
The high for today, and the next couple of days, is expected to be 3C/37F. After that, the highs will be lower, and reach just above or below freezing. So far, the overnight lows are not expected to drop very far, and remain just a few degrees below freezing, but we will no longer be seeing overnight lows above freezing from here on. It’s still not too bad, though. Nothing severe or extreme. Also, we don’t have the snow that other parts of the country got yesterday, including the city we lived in before moving out here!
There was a thin layer of ice on the outside cats’ water bowls. It’s starting to be time to bring warm water out for them when we feed them. It’s time to put the hoses away and cover the taps, anyhow. The electrical in the cat house needs to be plugged in and tested, so we can plug in the huge heated water bowl in the water bowl shelter, plus the terrarium heat bulb inside, with its timer set to turn it on at dusk. I’ve already set up the smaller water bowl in the sun room and plugged it in.
Still lots to be done, but as long as we get the essentials taken care of, the rest can wait until spring, if necessary.
I counted 37 or 38 this morning. Plus Shop Towel. He came over to the kibble house and seemed okay at first -I was even just starting to be able to touch him – but then one of our friendly males came by and he attacked. I chased him off and he actually stopped to attack another cat that had been startled by the commotion and happened to be running in the same direction.
*sigh*
Also, yes. That tuxedo has a messed up eye. That’s the one that had a badly infected eye, but we could never catch him to clean it up. Not the tuxedo that lost its eye entirely. I haven’t seen that one in a long time.
Today looks like a day where not much is going to get done outside. It looks like it’s been raining for most of the night, judging by how much water is pooling in our driveway, and is still raining now. It’s expected to continue raining until the evening.
Which I’m okay with. It’ll be good for the ground to get a lot of moisture before the snow hits and the ground starts to freeze. That will benefit any young trees, like the apple we planted in the spring, and the Korean Pine in the outer yard, as well as the garlic and saffron crocuses that were planted not long ago. A good, deep watering before winter is a good thing.
Oh, I need to remember to contact Veseys about those purple raspberries. I double checked and yes, I was remembering correctly. They are regular cane raspberries, not primal cane. Primal cane raspberries produce berries on new canes every year, so you can literally mow the whole patch down in the fall, and they will produce new shoots in the spring. With regular cane, berries are produced on second year canes, which then die off, leaving the fresh first year canes to survive the winter and produce the following year. What we should have gotten in our order was first year canes, and we should not have had any berries this year at all. Instead, the canes planted this year would have produced berries next year, while also having new canes come up that would produce berries the year after. There were no new canes that came up. Just the ones we planted, that produced berries, instead. It seems highly unlikely, but we either got second year canes in stead of first year canes, or conditions somehow “tricked” the raspberries into acting as though they’d gone through a winter. This can sometimes happen with biannuals like onions or carrots. For example, the year we had groundhogs eating our carrot greens, quite a few went to seed after their greens started growing back. I can’t think of anything that happened with the raspberries that could have simulated that sort of annual pattern, though.
Anyhow…
Days like today – rainy and overcast – always make me feel really, really sleepy. I’m resisting the urge to crawl back into bed!
Yesterday, I got out the Montana Morado corn cobs that had been set aside to continue drying in a cardboard box before trying to remove the kernels. Unfortunately, a few small cobs were still to unripe and started to get fuzzy instead, but we still got this out of it.
It came out to almost exactly a cup of kernels.
I’m waffling between keeping some as seed for next year, or just processing the whole thing. We don’t have a corn mill, but we want to make flour out of it to try. We might have a coffee grinder strong enough, but I think my daughters want to try using our larger mortar and pestle. Which is still pretty small, but we’d be doing it in batches, anyhow.
The other thing that happened yesterday was related to the truck financing.
Yes. We have the truck.
Yes. We have signed the financing documents with the lender, and the finance company representative that’s been helping us all this time.
Yes. The lender had actually said it was done, after we’d sent in a cell phone bill in my husband’s name as yet another proof of ID.
Then yesterday, they told her the cell phone bill wasn’t good enough. They wanted more.
By this point, the entire office was in an uproar about it, I was told. She’d gone to her managers about it, and they were getting involved with the lender to get this mess fixed up. It’s gotten so bad, she was starting to think someone else at the lender’s office had a problem with her, and was messing with the file because of it. We’re not the only file of hers that’s had issues, but none to the point we’re at now. Not only was the entire office getting involved to help out, she herself had stopped working on all other files but ours. The problem is, we already gave them pretty much everything we had. I did eventually sent in an image of my husband’s CPP Disability T4, which only has information they already have on it. They kept wanting something with my husband’s name and address that was sent within the last 30 days (the updated proof of income not being good enough, since they sent it to use digitally, apparently), but most of what we have is all done online, and/or is in my name.
Eventually, a manager had an idea, and suggested we contact the electric company and have my husband’s name added, then have them generate a bill with both our names and our mailing address to send in. This manager had to do that, themselves. They are in a different province, however, and in our province the electric company is run by the government.
I tried it anyhow. I logged in, but the name is one thing that cannot be changed by the client. I found a phone number, though, and after going through the automated system, eventually got to where it would sent me to a customer service rep. All lines were busy, of course, but I had the option to get a representative to call me back, rather than sitting on hold, so I chose that.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait too long. After explaining the situation, the rep was able to do it in her software, but when I logged out and logged back in (refreshing the page didn’t work), on my end of it, our names were all mixed up. She tried again, and basically removed my last name entirely, and that finally worked out by showing “[my name] & [my husband’s entire name as it shows on his birth certificate]”.
She could not, however, generate a statement for me. The change would not show up until the next billing cycle, which I wouldn’t get until the middle of next month.
The personal information page, however, had our names and mailing address on the same screen, so I hoped that would be good enough. I did a print screen and save as PDF, and sent that in.
I have not heard anything since, which tells me it may finally have been accepted!
We are all just blown away over how this has been made to be more difficult that it should be. They had more than enough to establish my husband’s identity. It just sounds like someone had a bee in their bonnet and wouldn’t let go.
Then I got a call from my mother.
Now, when I last spoke with her on Tuesday, I made sure she knew that I would not be available on Wednesday or Thursday, because we were getting the truck on Wednesday, and my husband had a medical appointment on Thursday. My sister was planning to visit her on Wednesday, so she would be able to help my mother with groceries, etc.
Well, she helped with the groceries, at least.
When my mother called, she told me she had run out of her prescriptions, which come in bubble packs. She had planned to take her walker and go to the pharmacy, but it’s been raining and unpleasant. She said she also had a letter from the doctor to give to the pharmacist, and what was I doing tomorrow?
So we arranged for me to come over today so we could have lunch together, and then I could help her with the pharmacy.
I headed out earlier to pick up some gas, first, and would normally have picked up some fried chicken for lunch from there as well, but it was too early in the day for that. They wouldn’t have any for quite some time. Instead, I went to the Chinese restaurant by her place and got take out. Yes, even though she told me she didn’t want to eat from there anymore, because she’s decided they use cats for meat. Well, she did enjoy her meal – then told me not to get food for her from there anymore, because she things they are using cat meat. She claims she saw on the news that a restaurant in the city was caught doing this, and now assumes all Chinese restaurants do this, but 1) the first time she told me about the cat thing, she told me it was one of her neighbours that told her they were doing this and 2) when asked, she couldn’t tell me anything about this story she heard, other than it was in the city. No idea where in the city, or even how long ago she heard this.
The thing is, this is a small town, and there are only so many options. The gas station has fried chicken she loves, but she’s decided she’s not supposed to eat it because it’s bad for her (even though she only eats it rarely). There is a restaurant she goes to pretty regularly that specializes in fried chicken, among a wider menu, but she complains because their food is always cold and not as good, so that’s out, too. There’s another restaurant, but it doesn’t do take out, and finally, there’s the Chinese food place. Which has excellent food at prices even she used to make a big deal out of, because they give so much food for the money. That’s it. Those are the only options for take out. The remaining alternative is for her to make lunch and 1) I wouldn’t want to make her do that work and 2) … let’s just say, my mother’s food combinations don’t always work out. My brother always bring food when he visits, because he has gotten physically ill from food she’d slapped together to make a meal. This isn’t even a “make do with what you have” thing. My mother could be a great cook with some thing. With others… frankly, I’d rather eat cat.
Anyhow. I brought lunch, she ate and enjoyed it, but chastised me for it. Knowing she will complain about anything I bring (when my sister brings her food from the Chinese restaurant, my mother speaks glowingly about it), I’ll just bring whatever I want that is available.
For the rest… Well, I’ll make it as short as I can. Overall, it was a good visit, but there were a number of concerns that came up.
First; my mother is really struggling, physically. Her knees are hurting her a lot, but she still refuses to take the T3s, because they are “narcotics”. Even though she took a pain killer before she left, it was clearly not enough.
Second; my mother’s cognition is failing. The “letter” for the pharmacist turned out to be the new prescription from the doctor for her bladder concerns. A prescription my mother declared she would not fill, when we got into the car after her appointment. She doesn’t trust the doctor because she’s female and not white. When the pharmacist brought out her bubble packs, my mother was shocked, because she though she wouldn’t be getting them, because of this “letter”. When she found out it was to have a new prescription on top of the unchanged regular prescriptions (for all that she complains she’s taking soooo many pills, she really isn’t), she was upset. She completely forgot that she had a new prescription and what it was for, but filled in the blanks by deciding it was a letter – a letter she thought the pharmacist somehow already knew about, even though she had the only copy – that said what she wanted it to say.
Third; she’s having trouble keeping her medications straight. We went over them after I got her home, and she had a couple of them mixed up. Which wouldn’t matter too much, if she were simply taking them when she was supposed to, but she keeps trying to drop this one or that one. She had tried to tell me on the phone that she was feeling better without them, but today, she was telling me how bad she was feeling without them. It also turned out she had changed when she was taking one of them that was supposed to be taken before bed, which basically negated the whole point of that particular medication helping her while she’s lying down. She was taking it with her evening pills, but she takes those so early in the evening, it wouldn’t be useful by the time she got to bed.
Oh, when I had the chance, I asked her why she didn’t get her refills while my sister was there to help. She said she still had a day left, so she didn’t bother. We’ve all been trying to tell her, she needs to get her refills before she runs out, but she seems downright offended by that idea. As if there were some sort of law against it.
In the end, was I was looking up her medications to tell her what each specific pill was for, she got me to write it out. which leads me to one last concern. Her anger issues. It’s not even a new thing. It’s just more hair trigger. As I was writing things out, she was at first happy to see how I was printing it out so clearly and easy for her to read – but then got angry that it too me two lines to write out the description and information, then what the pill was for. Then she wanted little drawings of the pills and was furious because I didn’t make the doodle where she though it should be, etc.
I was able to de-intensify things well enough but, my goodness, that gets exhausting.
Still, it got done. She has her medications, including the new one. I told her (as did the pharmacist), to try it for the 30 days. He only gave her half the prescription, since it’s basically a test. If, after 30 days, she finds it helps, she can let the pharmacy know and they’ll add the next 30 days into her bubble packs. If they don’t help, she can just stop using them. I added that it could take about a week to for them to start working, so to go keep taking them for the 30 days.
I won’t even get into the other stuff that came up. The medications thing was enough to suck the energy out of me on its own, but of course, it wans’t the only thing.
I had left early enough that I could have done some work outside (something else she gave me a hard time about), but by the time I got home, I just didn’t have the spoons anymore. After updating the family – and writing an email to my siblings about the medication things and the concerns I was seeing – I’d pretty much reached my limits.
The problem is, next week, the cold weather is supposed to finally hit us. Which means things need to be prioritized differently. Getting that second trellis bed started has just dropped down the list over things like mulching the garlic more, as well as covering the orange carrots we plan to store in ground for the winter, etc. We’ve been leaving that last bed of onions as long as possible, but we’re going to have to take the whole thing in and process them for freezing right away.
As glad as I am to have the truck and to be able to bring my husband to a medical appointment in it, it looks like those two days were the last really pleasant ones we’re going to have for the year. Since then, it’s been overcast and rainy. Tomorrow is supposed to be a bit better, and then that’s it.
Ah, well. There’s only so much we can do. The world won’t end if it doesn’t all get done.
Right now, I need to decompress and get some solid sleep!
The Re-Farmer 