Gardening

Our 2023 garden: summer squash, peppers and onions

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Well, we have now planted as much as we can until we build the new trellis beds.

The first job was direct sowing summer squash. I forgot that we have 5 varieties. Which worked out well. There were four empty mounds from yesterday, so prepping another row of six mounds meant two for each type. Much less than we would normally plant per type, but this year we seem to be more about variety than individual quantity.

The last row will not be used this year, since it gets the most shade. Each mound got two are three seeds – all the seed packets are from previous years, and several of them had only five seeds left in them. With older seeds, we have to consider that some of them won’t germinate at all. The varieties we have are sunburst and G Star patty pans, yellow and green zucchini, and Magda.

Next, the grow bags were gathered and filled.

The low, black ones were “raised bed gardens” we got from the dollar store last year. The green ones I picked up from the dollar store this year, and they are really good! I folded them down to about half height. The fabric seems really strong, and they have sewn in handles that also seem really strong.

Four of two different varieties were planted in the wider black bags/beds. Two each of a third variety went into the green bags. They all got Red of Florence onions planted around them. These are Early Sunsation, Early Summer and Dragonfly.

The last five feed bags were filled, and each got one Cheyenne pepper in them, with more Red of Florence onions. The last bag got all onions.

We still have lots of each type of pepper (and you can see the one late germinating Spoon tomato!), which can be given way. I plan to continue to interplant the onions any chance I get. We started a lot of them, because we use a lot of onions, and ran out fairly quickly, last year.

Oh, I didn’t bother taking a photo, but I also planted a few beans. The row of green Lewis beans had a lot fewer come up than the yellow Custard beans. The gaps in the yellow beans are minor, but less than half the green beans either didn’t germinate, or didn’t grow well once they did (some have just stems left, as if the leaves just died off), so I planted more.

We have so many varieties of beans I hoped to plant this year, but at this point, my priority is to get a trellis bed built so that we can put in our melon transplants.

Thankfully, all of these are short season varieties, so we should still have plenty of growing season left for them. The pole beans, however might have to be skipped this year. We shall see.

A high priority over the next while will be to mulch around today’s transplants, and the summer squash mounds. That means cutting more grass and collecting the clippings!

It’s only the 10th of June today. We should still have time. Plus, it’s an El Niño year, which means we should have a warmer, wetter summer and fall, and a mild winter, too. Anything that extends our growing season, I will be thankful for!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: winter squash transplanted

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Well, I got them in, before things got too windy out there!

The winter squash were planted in the small Jiffy Pellet trays, six of each type. Of those where not all of them germinated, I still planted the empty pellets with ones that had germinated. They may not have had visible seedlings, but some of them did have roots showing through the pellet’s casing.

In the northernmost row, there are two Boston Marrow, two Winter Sweet and two Lady Godiva.

There were four Honeyboat Delicata seedlings to tranplant, but only two Little Gem/Red Kuri.

The North Georgia (I just noticed the typo I made when labeling the photo!) had the most seedlings, with five to transplant. There were three Pink Banana. That left four empty mounds. I’ve decided to fill one more row tomorrow, to direct sow summer squash in. We have four varieties, and I want to have at least two plants of each.

While I intend to mulch the rest of the patch with wood chips, I’ll be gathering grass clippings to mulch around the mounds of soil.

But not today.

Tomorrow is supposed to be cooler, with a predicted high of 21C/70F, which will be much more pleasant to work in. Especially since I plan to have enough soil brought over to fill grow bags.

Weather willing, we should be able to get quite a bit done tomorrow.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: starting on the squash patch

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Ah, but first, the important stuff!

How is the new mama and her grublings doing?

They have been transferred to baby jail and seem quite content. Decimous (or Decimus, as my daughter spells it) has been very quiet and attentive to her furry little worms.

My daughter has been staying in my room to supervise the family (the babies are so small, they could potentially squeeze through the openings of the cave) and keep an eye on how the other cats behave around them.

She fell asleep on my bed. I think she had a sleepless night last night, too!

Meanwhile, I headed outside and broke out the weed trimmer. I cleared around the pile of garden soil and then, since I had the trimmer out already, as much as I could reach around the burn barrel. I didn’t fell like adding another extension cord, so that area isn’t quite done, but close.

Then it was time to start hauling soil. I didn’t bother to sift it, though I did pause to pull out the biggest roots.

Where the sticks are, marks where we had squash growing last year. In each spot, we dug out the sod, then added fresh soil. Each squash got cardboard layers around them (we didn’t have enough to do the paths with cardboard, too), then mulched with straw, grass clippings, scythed hay – anything we could get our hands on. It took much of the summer to have enough material to mulch all the paths, too.

So now, each pot is getting more fresh garden soil and, now that we have so much of it, the rest of the area will be mulched with wood chips.

There are still two rows that I did not add soil to. They get a lot more shadow, so I won’t do those unless we really need the space. Instead, I will work on filling grow bags, next. Those will likely get peppers in them.

After I took this photo, I removed all the sticks marking the spots. Then I went around with the spade and flattened each hill and spread them a bit. Finally, I went around with the hose and used a higher pressure setting to drill water into the middle of each mound of soil.

I’ve left them to absorb the water while taking a break from the heat and the sun. Later today, I’ll go back out and start transplanting what winter squash we have that’s ready. We’ve got some melons to transplant, too, but they’re still pretty small, so they can wait. With what space I have left, if there is any, I want to sow summer squash.

We seem to have reached our high for the day – we’re at 25C/77F and pretty windy – and things are supposed to cool down slightly from now on. Tonight, we’re supposed to have a low of 12C/54F. That is going to feel glorious! My goal is to get as many of the transplants in that we can right now, so we can start dragging out those trees my brother cut down for me and begin working on the permanent trellis beds. If we can manage to get those done over the next while, we might still have time to direct sow things into them, as long as they have a short enough growing season.

This gardening year isn’t quite working out as planned, but it’s getting done, little by little!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: transplanting mysteries

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Okay, so I managed to get a bit done in the garden this evening. Also, I had a wonderful surprise. Rolando Moon appeared! I haven’t seen her in at least a month, maybe two. At her age, we just never know if she’ll disappear and not return anymore.

I was also happy to see The Distinguished Guest wander into the north side of the property. Happy, that is, until I heard a cat fight and discovered he had attacked Pinky, and I had to chase him off. *sigh*

I had some squash that were getting too big for their pots that needed to go in, so I focused on the hill we grew pumpkins in last year.

This is how it looked after taking a weed trimmer to it, after the mowing around it was done. Those bricks had been placed under the developing pumpkins to keep them off the ground. The round thing is an ant trap. There was two of them, but one disappeared when it got caught by the push mower, last year.

They didn’t work. The ant hill is still there.

Thankfully, the bug spray I used seems to do a good job of deterring ants, too. I dug up the bed with a garden fork and pulled out as many weeds and roots as I could. The ground was crawling with ants, but while I had them on my boots, that’s about as far as they went.

Before, this hill had only ever had two plants transplanted into it. After weeding it and working the last of a bag of sheep’s manure into the surface, I raked it out into a flattish square.

I fit 6 transplants in. The row of three on the far right are Zucca melon, from a second seed start. In the middle row, the two in the foreground are African Drum gourd, also from a second seed start. The other four were in an unlabeled pot. I restarted both the Zucca melon and Drum gourd at the same time, but one unlabeled pot got mixed up. I think they are also drum gourds, but I’m not sure. At this stage, the leaf and stem shapes look almost identical.

We’ll figure it out soon enough, if they survive.

I then filled in the last of the space available in the wattle weave bed.

I had removed the protective plastic from the Sweet Chocolate peppers, and they now all have support stakes. I left the protection around the one Classic Eggplant, though it did get its own support stake, as did the luffa in the corner.

I transplanted one of each variety of pepper seedlings we had waiting. Between the luffa and the eggplant is Dragonfly. The three around the curve are the Cheyenne, Early Summer and Early Sunsation. I wanted to get at least one of each type transplanted, just in case we aren’t able to get things ready early enough to get the rest into the ground.

To the left of the luffa is the largest of the 3 mystery squash that germinated with some Roma tomatoes. I think they might be luffa, but I’m 100% not sure.

As I write this, it’s coming up on 8:30pm, and we’ve finally started to cool down a bit. What I got done wasn’t a lot, and certainly didn’t involve much physical exertion, but it still left me dripping with sweat. The next few days are supposed to be every so slightly cooler, and then things are supposed to heat up again. And physical exertion is going to be the main work, because we have to start hauling garden soil over to the squash patch, so we can start transplanting. We can’t even start that until I take the weed trimmer to the tall grass around the pile that couldn’t be mowed.

It’s going to be hot, sweaty and disgusting work, but we’re running out of time. It’s not just prepping spots for the transplants. This year, I was going to try direct sowing the summer squash, and those seeds should be in the ground already.

I suspect that by the time we finish building the permanent trellis beds, it’ll be too late to direct sow a lot of things. I might try, anyway. We could find ourselves with a long, mild fall again.

There’s only so much we can do, though. None of us area handling this heat well.

The Re-Farmer

Damp morning

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I headed out to do the morning rounds a bit earlier than usual. We’ve finally been able to arrange for our septic tank to be emptied (usually we try to get it done in April or May, or as soon as the snow is gone). The truck is coming some time this morning, so I wanted to make sure the gate was open.

While continuing my rounds, I checked out the Crespo squash, and they are looking great! They are all getting increasingly robust, and I’m seeing roots forming all along the main vines. Two of the vines have started blooming already!

I’m quite happy with how these are doing.

This early in the morning, everything was feeling wonderfully cool, and everything was still very wet! For all the rain we got, it did reduce the humidity, but not by all that much, really.

Which might explain this.

I don’t know where Gooby was when I first came out with the kibble, but he was there when I got back to the house, and completely soaked! Only Decimous had wet fur like him, but only on her lower half, not all over, like he was. All the other cats managed to stay almost completely dry!

We really, really need to get ahold of Decimous. She is so badly matted, I can see burrs stuck in her fur, there are some mats starting to dangle, I see bald patches and I’ve even found some of them in the yard. I’m guessing she’s been scratching at them. While I’ve managed to give her neck and ear scritches a few times, she mostly moves away before I can get close. Aside from trapping her (which is more likely to get other cats, first), if we even had a trap, trying to socialize her is the most we can do. It would be easier if we could offer her wet cat food, but if we did that, we’d have all the friendly cats crowding in for a treat.

Oh, and either she’s got a whole lot of mats around her belly, or she’s pregnant.

*sigh*

Well, we do what we can.

I now await the arrival of the septic truck. I want to be around when the septic guy gets here, mostly to make sure the cats stay away from the open tank while it is being worked on, and at some point I’m going to have to go out to pick up some packages. It seems that for one of them, Purolator decided not to leave the package at the store our post office is in, as they have been lately, but at the depot in the down my mother lives in. We’ve got two packages that are supposed to be in right now. When I check the tracking, it says that Canada Post had issues with delivery. Neither says they were to be shipped by Purolator, so I don’t know what’s going on there. What I really want to do is go back to bed. I got almost no sleep last night. It was finally a relatively cool and pleasant night, but I didn’t get to bed until late, and then got hit with busy brain. It wouldn’t be any better to get my daughter to drive, because I think she had an even worse night than I did.

We’ll see how it works out.

The Re-Farmer

Budding

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We’ve had all sorts of things budding and blooming in succession. The most recent buds developing is the pink rose bush in the old kitchen garden.

This rose was almost dead when we first moved here. It took years to help it recover, and prune away enough of ornamental apple tree above it, so it was finally getting enough light. Now it’s starting to thrive and has SO many buds developing!

The Re-Farmer

My whack job and, I can see!

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It’s past 6 as I write this, and we’re still at 31C/88F, with a humidex of 38C/100F. We’ve got all sorts of heat warnings going on. The hottest temperatures start at about 3pm, so I tried to do as much as I could outside, before we reached that point.

Today was a weed whacking day.

I was able to use the trimmer around all the raised beds. I could get in between them with the push mower, but that left a lot of tall crab grass and dandelions along the edges. The weed trimmer line can get under the logs a fair bit, so it makes quite a difference.

I also got the tall grass and weeds in the squash patch, then kept on going. Much of the area in the back is too rough for a mower, though my SIL did make a few passes across the area. I did the squash hill, and the corner on the left that’s in shadow.

I was really appreciating the shadows!

I did take a pause after the paths around the beds were done, to go to the post office.

My glasses were in!

The ones with the smaller lenses are what I wore as I continued working, as they were closer in size to my old glasses. They needed less getting used to. I didn’t want to be dealing with depth perception issues or head rushes while using the weed trimmer. I got use to the new prescription very quickly, though.

I’m wearing the larger lensed glasses now. Those are a lot like the glasses I used to wear through most of junior and senior high. I like the larger lenses, and I have better peripheral vision, but they do take a bit more getting used to seeing with.

After I finished the weed trimming and headed inside, I decided to try watching a movie on my desktop. I watched the entire movie, in one sitting, with zero eye strain! Not only that, but I can also tap or read messages on my phone, without having to take my glasses off!

I am quite happy with them, so far. I do feel nervous taking them on and off, though. The designs on both are a lot more delicate compared to my old glasses, so they feel very fragile. They aren’t, but it’ll take some getting used to!

After I had a chance to cool down and get used to my new glasses, I headed back outside to do a few things. One of those was to water all the garden beds. In this heat, even the stuff that is mulched is needing it.

Once again, I found so many frogs coming out from under the boards covering the Uzbek Golden carrots! I checked and saw that carrots were sprouted, so removed the boards. I set them along the edge of the bed, on top of the mulch, making sure to dampen the mulch first, so the frogs will still have somewhere moist and cool to rest under.

When watering the Spoon tomatoes I transplanted last night, I found on looking like it has slumped over in the heat. It turned out to be snapped above the lowest branch. I broke the top off the rest of the way, but the remaining stem may actually do okay.

There is more weed trimming to do, but I’m done for the day. In fact, I’m seriously considering going to bed once I’m done this post!

That is, if the cats on my bed would give me any space.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: transplanting eggplants, onions and tomatoes

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I didn’t get outside to do some work until past 8pm, when it finally started to feel cooler. Thankfully, the days are still getting longer, because it was just past 10pm when I was done, and pretty much full dark by the time I finished putting things away.

There wasn’t time to work on the big stuff, but there was some small spaces I could work on.

The first area I worked on were the 4 empty blocks in between the gourds and Zucca melon. I had some potting soil mix left, so after digging around in the blocks and pulling out any roots I could find, I added a bit of the potting soil to top up each block a bit. There were a total of 5 Little Finger eggplant seedlings, but two were still quite small, so I planted them together. We’ll see how they do and if one will need to be thinned out. I had plenty of new grass clippings to mulch around them, too. I collected a wagon load, and when the eggplants were mulched, I used the rest to finally give the asparagus bed a deep mulch. Until now, only the strawberries in between them were mulched. I was happy to see one new spear of asparagus, already at the fern state, had showed up. That makes 5 out of 6 crowns in this bed that survived last spring’s flooding… if barely!

Our spinach is just starting to get big enough to harvest a few leaves here and there, even though they were planted so long ago. As they will likely bolt quickly in this heat, my daughter went ahead and harvested the largest plants earlier today. In between the spinach, I started transplanting some Red of Florence onions. We grew these last year and really liked them. These are the first of this variety that have been transplanted, and they’re going to be shoved in every place we have room, as we go along planting other things.

Next, I worked my way across the retaining wall blocks, clearing and weeding. Every other block had mint transplanted into them, to contain them. It will be a battle to get the rest of the mint that’s growing in the old kitchen garden, but these were originally from my late grandmother, so I don’t want to get rid of all of them. They don’t seem to have handled last winter very well, and one block’s mint seems to have died (!!! who ever heard of mint dying on its own? 😄). A few other blocks got onions that survived the winter, that I found while prepping the area. Some stayed in the blocks they were found in, while others got transplanted, so that each block had 3 or 4 onions in it. In the end, I found a total of 6 blocks were free. Those got dug into to remove roots, topped up with the last of the potting soil, and then I transplanted some Spoon tomatoes into them. Each tomato got a bamboo stake they can be clipped to as they get bigger, then mulched with grass clippings. It’s not the area I wanted to grow these in, but at least we’ve got some in the ground. At this point, we could give away all the remaining transplants.

Not too bad for just a couple of almost cool hours before things got too dark to see!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: first beans!

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After the hours spent in the heat yesterday, my older daughter was a sweetheart and fed the outside cats in the morning, and I got to sleep in a bit before doing the rest of the morning rounds. Though I watered things last night, I watered some garden beds more this morning.

Including this one.

Last night, I was just starting to see some green Lewis bean seedlings breaking soil. Overnight, both yellow and green beans have emerged, and some of the green beans already have their true leaves. It’s always amazing, how fast beans can grow!

While watering the bed with the carrots protected by boards, couple more frogs jumped out. The cool damp conditions the boards create for the carrots are conditions the frogs like too! We are thinking about what to use to make little shelters for them to use, once the boards are removed. Frogs are a good thing to have in the garden!

While the Irish Cobbler and Red Thumb potatoes are emerging, there are still not Purple Peruvians showing up in the grow bags, and those were planted first. When we used the feed sacks and grow bags before, they did really well, but now I’m thinking they might be getting too much sun and heat, where the bags are set up now. We didn’t really count on having such a hot start to spring this year!

I’m glad I tended the garden as much as I did this morning. I’m back from bringing my mother here for a visit, then driving her home again, and I am pretty wiped out. Being with her for about 3 hours took more energy out of me than working outside in the heat for 8 hours, yesterday.

That, however, is a conversation for a different post! 😄

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 Garden: got it done!

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I was able to head outside this evening and finish the transplanting I didn’t get to do this morning.

My daughter had mulched the tomatoes with shredded paper for me while I was out. I made a trench in the mulch and transplanted the Red Wethersfield onions. Almost the entire tray of onions made it into the bed. All the other beds are bordered with the yellow Talon onion. That leaves the Red of Florence onions to transplant, and there are a lot of those! We’ll squeeze them in where we can, where they can help protect other plants from insects and deer.

I hope.

So this bed is now done!

Now we have to get other beds prepared. I’m really hoping we get a good rain tonight, to help cool things down and reduce the humidity!

The Re-Farmer