Gardening

Our 2023 garden: No warning

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When I woke this morning and checked my weather app, just before it refreshed itself, I saw something I did not want to see!

2C/36F

Considering the time of that reading, it was entirely possible we had frost last night.

We had no frost warnings at all before I went to bed.

Not that we could have done much about it. All those support poles and trellises are great, but make it impossible to cover the plants. At least not with the material we have. The squash patch is just too big.

When I first started my rounds after feeding the outside cats (I tried for a head count and saw 26 or 27. I may have double counted one) and headed towards the gate cam, I was somewhat encouraged. Usually, even if we have a light frost, I would still see signs of it in the shaded areas along the driveway long after it melted elsewhere. I saw only dew.

Then I started checking the south garden beds. Everything looked fine as I made my way through. Even the Little Finger eggplant in the concrete blocks, and the Caveman’s Club gourd, seemed unchanged.

Then I saw the squash growing in the compost pile.

All the leaves were drooping.

Still, this area is a lot more shaded than others, especially in the mornings. The nearby beds of onions, carrots and the popcorn cobs drying on their stalks are frost hardy, so they were fine.

Going to the sign cam, I pass the Crespo squash patch. That spot doesn’t get shade until the sun is at its lowest in the winter, so even this time of year it gets the full morning sun.

The leaves were all drooping, and I think I might even have seen the remains of frost glittering on some stems. It’s done.

When I got to the main garden area, I was a bit more encouraged. The plants supported on trellises seemed to fair better. The melons did show some cold damage in areas, while others looked just fine. Even the tomato plants seemed mostly all right. Much to my surprise, all the pepper plants in their grow bags looked absolutely fine!

The squash patch, unfortunately, was completely done in. Half the patch gets more shade than the other. In the heat of the summer, the plants that got more shade were doing better than the ones that got more sun but, right now, it’s the rows that get more sun that are looking less damaged than the others.

I’ll leave them alone for now, and see what happens over the next couple of days.

The old kitchen garden, much to my surprise, was fine. Even the luffa! The peppers here also showed no signs of cold damage, the Classic eggplant and all the transplanted tomatoes in their plastic shields seem completely unaffected. Even the Spoon tomatoes looked undamaged, and I was able to pick a bunch of them.

What’s frustrating is that there were NO frost warnings. I found a site that gives temperatures for the past 24 hours, and I did find it dipped to -2C/28F at around 6am – in the city! When I did a search for our area, plus the areas north and east of us, where I know there are weather stations, the lowest recorded temperature was 5C/41F Yet, my own app showed we were at 4C/40F at a time when the past weather chart was showing 7C/45F.

Today, we’re looking at a high of 17C/63F, with an overnight low of 6C/43F Those overnight lows have been consistently wrong on the high side. Which means that we’re not getting any of the frost warnings that would normally be set off, once the temperatures are expected to drop low enough, even as the real temperatures drop below that warning threshold.

Again, there’s not much we could have done, but we would have at least picked all the remaining tomatoes and brought them inside. Including the mostly green tomatoes still out on screens under the market tent.

As things warm up today, I’ll head back out and reassess the damage.

I’m not sure what to do about the winter squash. All those big, beautiful Pink Banana and candy roasters! They are not fully ripe, but if we leave them out and the vines die back, will they continue to ripen? We certainly won’t be able to store them for the winter, but I don’t even know how edible they are at this stage.

Well, I just found the answer to my own question.

So, in theory, we can bring them inside and lay them out to continue to ripen. Since they won’t store for the winter at this stage, we could cook them and freeze them, instead.

I don’t think that will work with the melons as well, but those plants might survive.

Unless we get another frost with no warning again.

We really need a polytunnel.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 Garden: September garden tour (video)

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Last night was our average first frost night, and there was no frost. The garden survives another night!

Check it out. 😊

May the frost hold off at least as long as predicted. Cooler night means things are slowing down, so if we’re going to get to harvest things, we need as much time as possible for it to fully mature.

The Re-Farmer

It’s a trap!

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Well. Sort of.

This is set up across from our driveway now.

It took forever to go through the trail cam video files this morning! There was a constant stream of activity triggering the motion sensor – and that’s just the stuff that it catches. There was clearly more activity, beyond the range of the motion sensor, that I could see happening in the background when something closer triggered the camera.

I was chatting with the Cat Lady this morning, and mentioned how all this activity would be driving away our missing cats. It probably isn’t helping bring that dog home, either. I was able to identify two pick up trucks, two minivans and a car, all involved in the search. She told me that it’s being shared all over Facebook right now. I haven’t seen anything, but I’m not in the groups it was being shared in. She sent me a screen cap. The group was a missing pet group for the city! That’s an hour’s drive away. Her thought was that the dog was probably stolen and taken up north. Apparently, that’s a common thing. I was able to let her know that the dog has been sighted here, so not stolen, at least.

I also shared with her my experiences with the owner, who was nice to my face, but not so nice behind my back. It probably never occurred to him that anyone would hear what he said about me, but all sounds from that direction really carry to the house, and the windows facing that way! My daughters hear way more than they would like.

I ended up sending an email to my brother that lives across from us through his wife (he doesn’t do tech very well. LOL), just in case they didn’t know what was going on. Their main driveway is a quarter mile up the road. The driveway across from us is just to the field, and they wouldn’t necessarily see or hear. I also mentioned our own lost cats, in the off chance they show up at their place. They are the closest home that’s occupied, and have plenty of their own yard cats. Butterscotch would remember their place. Maybe even Nosencrantz. It’s Marlee that would be completely out of her element, and we haven’t see any sign of her at all.

While talking about cats…

TTT has been at the small window in my room, squeaking away (what a strange, quiet meow she has!), wanting out. I’ve been trying to let her out of the room, but the kittens try for the door, instead. She’s so high strung, she backs off rather than goes through.

This morning, she was on my bed and accepting pets. Sort of. She spins and moves around so much, it’s really hard to pet her! However, I was able to pick her up and, while the kittens were distracted, take her out of the room. She’s been out before, but not for very long. It went rather well, so I just put her down and watched for a bit.

She’s still out.

We’ll see if she wants to stay out for good! I may be down to just the kittens in my room.

While doing my rounds this morning, I took some footage for a garden tour video, so that will be my project for today.

What I really want to do, though, is go for a nap. The kittens are actually sleeping right now. I might be able to get some sleep for a change!

Nah. Too much work to do!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 – and 2024! garden: planting and transplanting

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This morning, before I intended to continue working on the trellis bed, I wanted to transplant those volunteer tomatoes into the old kitchen garden.

Yes, it’s September, and our average first frost date is the day after tomorrow, but if the frost holds off long enough, they just might have a chance!

It was also a good time to amend the bed the Irish Cobbler potatoes were in. After removing the remaining mulch and loosening the soil (and finding a few tiny potatoes that got missed!), I worked in a bag of cow manure. I also noticed a couple of spaces in the walls where the grass clippings used as chinking was gone, so I found some scrap pieces of wood to put over the gaps on the inside.

Once the bed was prepared, I went and dug up the volunteer tomatoes. I don’t even water that bed anymore, so the soil was very dry. None of it stuck to the roots at all! I laid them out gently on one of the baking sheets we use to transfer seedlings in and out while hardening them off. Those are so handy! We need more of them, but Costco no longer carries them. They are SO much more expensive, elsewhere!

Anyhow.

I had seen one volunteer tomato had died; all it’s leaves just shriveled up for some reason. I left that one, but I still ended up digging out 9 tomato plants! All but one of them are where we’d had Spoon tomatoes planted, 2 years ago. I kept track of the one that came up where cherry and grape tomatoes were planted last year, and the year before.

I’d already given the bed a fairly decent watering, but once I knew how many transplants I had, I dug a hole for each of them, then gave each hole a deep watering. As for the transplants themselves, I trimmed off the lowest leaves and buried the bare stems all the way to the first set of leaves.

I happened to have exactly the right number of plastic rings that had been used to protect the peppers, etc. in the wattle weave bed, so those got put around each tomato plant. These will not only protect them from overnight chills, but from rambunctious kittens, too!

At this point, my alarm went off, reminding me that the post office was open again after lunch. I have a subscription on lysine for the outside cats, and it was in. When I got there, however, I had a pleasant surprise.

My saffron crocus bulbs were in! When I checked the tracking, it was telling me the package would arrive on Monday, so this was a pleasant surprise.

It also changed my plans for after I finished with the tomatoes.

Since we had to pull up all the Roma tomatoes, I had a lot of bamboo stakes available. I pushed in a pair of them inside each plastic ring. These will keep the wind from blowing them away – and the cats from knocking them about – and if the weather holds long enough for them to survive, they will be supports for the tomato plants, too.

I also had the soaker hose that had been used on the Roma tomato bed. It’s pretty long, though, so I was able to run it back and forth and around every plastic ring, using tent pegs to hold it in place on the curves.

Last of all, the mulch got returned.

It’s ridiculously late to be transplanting tomatoes in our area, but I wanted to give them a chance!

That done, I could move on to the saffron crocuses, which needed to be planted right away.

These are actually a zone 4 plant, and we’re zone 3, so they went into the same protected area we have our zone 4 apple tree, and where the girls planted tulips. This area has a mishmash of wire surrounding it, to protect them from the deer.

There are 20 bulbs in the package, and the need to be planted 4 to 8 inches deep, and 3 inches apart. I was originally intending to plant them in a 4 x 5 bulb block, in an area I was pretty sure there were no tulips growing, but after poking around with a garden fork, that went out the window pretty fast. The area is so full of large roots!

I ended up being able to start a longer trench, so I went with 2 rows of 10 bulbs, instead.

The instructions specifically said to NOT amend the soil with manure of fertilizer, to water them when planted, but to not water them again unless it was drought conditions.

In clearing out the soil, so many weed roots were removed that there was hardly any soil left. I would have to get soil from the remains of the truck load of garden soil in the outer yard we bought a couple of years ago.

After removing the top 4 inches of weed roots and dirt, I loosened the bottom with a cultivator tool, then gave the trench a very deep watering. Then I loosened the soil some more, tried to level it off a bit, and watered it some more!

After that, I went and sifted some garden soil into the wheel barrow to fill the trench, before getting the bulbs.

I did not expect them to be so…

…hairy.

The bulbs got laid out in two rows, 3 inches apart, then buried. I ended up needing to get a second small load of soil to cover them well. They got about 6 inches of soil, maybe a bit more, on top. It will, however settle over time. Compaction is another concern. I wanted to give them a final watering, but not with out a mulch, first!

Thankfully, we still have lots of grass clippings handy for mulch!

Once a thick layer was in place, I gave it another deep watering. I wanted that new soil, which was quite dry, to be moistened. The mulch is great for keeping the soil below moist, but if the clippings are very dry, they actually prevent moisture from getting through. The top will get wet, but the bottom – and the soil below – says dry. Kinda like how thatch works. So I made sure the mulch itself was very wet, all the way through, so that the water could moisten the soil, too.

Given the temperatures we can hit over the winter, these will need more protection before the ground freezes, as well the apple tree. It’s already sheltered and protected from the north and, now that the dead and dying trees are cut away, it gets full sunlight and warmth. Still, extra protection will be good! When the leaves fall, we can use that to mulch the entire area. In the spring, though, the mulch of the crocuses will need to be pushed aside, leaving only a light layer to protect the soil. The alternative would have been to plant them in pots and bring them in every winter, and frankly, I have no interest in doing that. It’s hard enough to protect our house plants from the cats! They’d just love some big pots of soil to dig in. 😄

Once the mulch was in place, I spread out the soil that had been removed as evenly as I could, and that was it.

We now have tomatoes transplanted that, if they survive, will be for this year, and bulbs planted for next year! These crocuses boom in the fall, so it will be quite some time before we know we will have any saffron to harvest.

I’m pretty excited to find out.

From the Vesey’s website:

Bulbs typically triple their flower output year over year. A package of 20 bulbs should produce enough saffron in the first season for the average family to enjoy sparingly.

Triple their output every year? That would be amazing!

But first, they have to survive our winters!

The Re-Farmer

Warming up, and a morning harvest

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While doing my morning rounds, I make a point of looking at the squash blossoms to see if any need to be hand pollinated. With the chilly nights we’ve been having – we dropped to 6C/43F last night – I’ve been finding bees in the flowers, curled up and covered in pollen.

Not this morning!

These bees had made their way out to warm up in the sun!

You can even see how wet their “fur” is. That’s not from rain. That’s from the morning dew!

I am so happy to see so many bees this year. They got hit really hard the last two springs, and it’s good to see them recovering.

I also got a small harvest this morning.

We’ve got so many tomatoes inside already, waiting to be processed, and I still have the unripe Romas sitting on screens under the market tent, until we have room to move them indoors, but when they’re ripe, they’re ripe. They need to be picked!

Then there was just one, lonely zucchini. 😁 Which I’m quite happy with, since we almost had no surviving zucchini at all, this year!

With the overnight temperatures dropping lower than forecast, I find myself wondering if we should gather all the tomatoes and bring them in to ripen. We’ve got a couple of nights coming up that are now predicted to drop to 6C/43F overnight. Considering that we’ve been hitting that on nights we were supposed to drop to only 10C, it has me concerned. Sunday is the 10th – our first average frost date. We’re supposed to have a high of 18C/64F that day, and an overnight low of 6C/43F. The next day is supposed to have a high of 17C/63F, with no change in the low. After that, things are supposed to warm up again. Depending on how the forecasts change, we might be trying to cover the tomatoes, peppers and melons. There’s no way we can cover the squash bed. It’s just too spread out.

So many things depend on the weather right now. For things like the winter squash, peppers – only the Sweet Chocolates are far enough along to have ripe ones to pick – and our one eggplant that’s trying to grow fruit right now, a frost would mean no harvest at all. The carrots, onions and purple potatoes would be fine, at least.

Well, we shall see when the time comes. Just praying for the frost to hold off long enough for things to finish ripening, though even chilly nights will slow things down.

I know the bees would sure enjoy the warmth hanging around longer!

The Re-Farmer

Trellis bed progress, and we have a soot sprite

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Since I ended up driving around again today, once I was home to stay, I took advantage of the cooler temperatures and calmer winds to work on the trellis bed.

One larger base log was ready. The next step was to use a garden fork to loosen the soil from one marker to the other. Aside from pulling out as many weeds and roots as I could, I was also able to use a hoe to try and adjust the soil height. The log is, of course, wider at the base, plus the ground has a slight dip at one end, so I brought loosened soil from one end to the other, to try and make it to the log would be more or less level once on the ground. Plus, with the loosened soil, it wasn’t going to roll around out of position on me. Once that was on place, I could start debarking the log that would be set on top of it.

Debarking is pretty fast. It’s all those branch bits and lumps that slow things down!

After doing the top half, it started to get pretty painful on the back, so I used one of the poplar logs that will be vertical posts to raise the end. It worked for helping the back, but the saw horse kept rocking, and the poplar log kept wanting to roll! 😂

Once the smaller log was debarked, I use the baby chainsaw (electric pruner) to sort of flatten the base log from end to end. Mostly to get rid of some lumps where branches used to be. The smaller log was naturally flat next to a couple of branch stumps, so I took advantage of that and flattened the rest of the lot a tiny bit, to match the naturally flat part. It’s not a perfect fit, but I wasn’t really trying for one. I might level things off a bit more, but if I do, it’ll be when I have the chain saw set up, so I’m not killing the batteries on my mini chainsaw so quickly.

Next, it was time to work on the large log that will be the base log for the other wall of the raised bed. It had more branch bits to cut off than the other two, but once those were trimmed, debarking went quickly.

At that point, it was time to stop for the day – and for the draw knife to get a good cleaning and sharpening!

I expect to actually be home all day tomorrow, so I’ll be able to finally make more tomato sauce. When I get back to working on the bed, I plan to make use of the pieces of rebar I’d picked up for the shelter we could never get set up. I’ve got auger drill bits in that size. Once I’m satisfied with out the side logs are resting on each other, I will drill a pair of holes, then hammer in the rebar, so hold the logs together. When the time comes, the ends will be joined with 4′ logs, but first the ends of the side logs will have to be trimmed even. That will be much easier if I can do that while they are already secured into position.

As for the vertical supports, I am changing my mind on how to do those, again. I’d been planning to set the posts inside the raised bed, before they were filled. Setting them in the middle of the beds would result in a trellis tunnel that is 6′ apart across the top, and would give access to both sides of the bed for planting and weeding.

The more I think about it, though, the more potential problems I can see with doing it that way. Primarily, I’d have to treat the bottoms of the posts to prevent rotting. I was planning to debark and char them. With the winds we’ve been having, though, the chances of being able to get a fire going to do that don’t seem pretty good. Also, finding straight horizontal pieces that are 6′ long is going to be harder. I have enough vertical supports to have 4 posts for each of what will be 4 beds like this. I could try to harvest more poplar to have more verticals, but finding nice straight ones in the right size has not been as easy as I thought it would be, and I don’t want to be wasting trees. So if we have 4 verticals per bed, they would need to be 6′ apart, and I would need three 6′ pieces per bed – or 12 in total, for the 4 beds we plan to build here. If the trellis tunnel sides are also 6′ apart, that adds another four 6′ pieces needed per tunnel, making 20 horizontals in total.

Now I’m thinking I should attach the vertical supports to the outside of the beds, along each side of the tunnel space. I can see a few advantages to this.

First, I won’t have to dig any post holes.

Second, if they are attached to the outside of the beds, they won’t be buried in soil and I won’t need to treat them to keep them from rotting.

It will also be easier to find shorter, straight pieces for the horizontals, plus it will be easier to reach and work on the tops to attach them. Right now, I’m just aiming to do one low raised bed with a trellis wall. Even if we manage to get the second half done, the horizontals at the top don’t need to be until later. Plus, it will be much easier to attach 4′ lengths onto the verticals later on, than 6′ lengths with half a garden bed to work around.

By not having the verticals in the middle of the beds, they won’t take up growing space. Also, these beds are 18′ long, and 4′ wide on the outside. Our raised bed covers are intended to be interchangeable, at 9’x3′. Without the verticals inside the bed, we’ll be able to fit a pair of them over one 18′ bed, if needed. The logs are wide enough that the actual growing space will be closer to 3′, so the covers will have frame support.

The main reason I wanted to put them down the middle of the bed was to be able to reach the growing space from both sides. It had been my intention to reuse the hardware cloth and chicken wire from the old squash tunnel for this. However, as long as we use something with large enough openings, we’d still be able to tend the bed, through the trellis, just like we’ve been able to do with the cover currently on the high raised bed, made with the stronger fence wire and larger openings.

The one real drawback is now to secure the verticals to the walls. I might still have to dig post holes.

I’ll figure that out, when the time comes.

In other things…

I did the running around I had to do; since I had to go to Staples to get the printer ink we needed, and it shares a parking lot with a Walmart, I took advantage of that and picked up a few things, including more of the shredded cat food the cats in the isolation ward prefer. Or maybe it’s me that really prefers it. It’s much easier to divide into bowls than paté.

Once we had the printer ink, we could print off the label we needed (frustrating to have to buy colour ink to print something that is black and white text!), then pack up the RAM that didn’t work with my husband’s computer and drive to a Purolator depot.

There is one thing that’s new right now.

When feeding the cats outside for the evening, I was able to catch a little black kitten.

I brought it inside.

It’s just the tiniest little soot sprite!

My younger daughter has always wanted an all black cat. Now, she will have one.

So far, it is not too keen on this whole “indoors” thing, and being surrounded by strange kittens. It doesn’t even seem to recognizes its brother. However, it quite enjoyed its first taste of wet cat food! I can hear it wandering around behind me, sometimes giving out a strange, hoarse little meow.

It will take time, but Pom Pom is starting to warm up to attention now, and hopefully that will encourage Sprite to accept attention from humans, too. If things go well, I hope to have it well socialized by the time my daughter gets back from house sitting. 😊

The Re-Farmer

Swinging

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While checking on the garden yesterday evening, I noticed some of the melons were getting pretty heavy, so I dug out something I’d made the first year we tried to grow melons, and succeeded. This morning, I got some photos.

Melon hammocks!

I might have to make more. There are quite a lot of melons getting nice and big in the makeshift trellis!

I look forward to when we have permanent and portable trellises. I am really happy with how some of our climbing vines have been doing. Especially the melons in their kiddie pool raised bed! There are three varieties in there, but they are all climbing so vigorously, the vines are all twisted around each other. We’ll figure out which is which, when it’s time to harvest them.

The Re-Farmer

Evening harvest and a change in plans

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Well, I’m going to be running around tomorrow, after all.

But first, while doing my evening rounds, I found myself bringing in a small harvest.

At first, I thought I’d just grab the few ripe Indigo Blues I spotted, but then I noticed the Red Swan beans, among the purple corn. The plants are small and sparse, but once I started looking around the leaves, I kept finding more and more larger bean pods! The yellow zucchini was one I looked at this morning and thought would wait until tomorrow or the day after, but it was noticeably bigger by the evening.

I really should know better than to move the peppers to see how ripe they are. Where the sun hits turns brown rather quickly, while the parts in shade stay green longer. They are completely ripe when they are all brown. The problem is, their stems are fragile, so when I move a pepper to see the other side of it, it just snaps right off!

Which is fine. My daughter is using it for her meal right now.

Meanwhile…

While still at my mother’s, I got a message from my husband letting me know there was something to pick up at the post office. One of the packages was RAM for his computer. He was very excited about it.

Some time later, I came out and noticed he wasn’t in his room. Eventually, I found him in the living room, reading on his tablet.

Not a good sign.

He had installed the RAM, which was absolutely the right hardware for his computer, but when he turned it on, it wouldn’t work. He just had a black screen with a spinning circle on it.

Turns out, this is a known problem with his brand of computer. It doesn’t like being upgraded.

After fighting with it for a while, he reinstalled the original RAM.

And it still didn’t work.

His computer was dead.

At which point, he pain killered up and lay down for a while, because installing the hardware really did a number on his back. When he couldn’t handle being prone anymore, he moved to the living room.

At least he was still able to research his issue, then try something else.

Ultimately, he was able to get the original RAM working again, and he has a working computer again.

He’s also going to return the RAM.

That requires printing out a return label.

The printer is in my room. We don’t need to print a lot of stuff, but the self cleaning uses a lot of ink, anyhow. I’m out of cyan and magenta. You’d think we’d still be able to print out a black and white label, but nope. Even when it’s set to black and white, if more than one colour of ink is out, the printer simply won’t print.

Which means that tomorrow, I have to go to the nearest place that sells this brand of ink.

Which is a Staples, in the smaller city.

Then, after the ink is installed the the labels printed, I’m going to have to go to a Purolator to send the return out.

Which is driving to either the town we usually go to, or the town my mother lives in. Considering were the Purolator depot moved to in town, there isn’t really any difference in time or distance between them.

So I’ll have a couple of hours, more or less, of driving to get the ink and bring it home, then another 45 minutes to an hour of driving to get to a Purolator.

A significant portion of the refund is going to have to go back to paying for the gas and ink!

Well, so much for starting on that tomato sauce tomorrow.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: the end of the Roma VF

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I noticed the leaves on the Roma VF were looking like they got a fungus. I don’t know if it’s tomato blight or something else, but they needed to be pulled.

I started by picking the ripe and almost ripe tomatoes first, then my daughter and I picked the green and mostly green tomatoes and pulled up the bamboo stakes. Then she pulled the diseased plants, while I picked ripe Black Beauty and Indigo Blue tomatoes.

The green and almost green Roma are currently on the screens under the old market tent, while the ripe and almost ripe went into a box for indoors. These corrugated plastic boxes are very handy, but they have air circulation holes on the bottom and sides that are a bit big for some of the tomatoes, so I lined the bottom with carboard egg trays to keep them from falling out.

The Roma tomato plants will be allowed to dry out and will get burned with our paper garbage. That might be a while, since we are actually getting rain today! I’m even hearing a bit of thunder.

We now have a whole lot of very ripe tomatoes ready for processing. I’ll be doing more tomato sauce, first. I’m thinking of dehydrating some in the oven, late, and preserving some of the dried tomato in olive oil.

I’m still looking at recipes for making tomato sauce using roasted tomatoes and figuring out how I want to do them. I want to use as few cooking vessels as I can get away with, so there’s less to wash up! 😄

The Re-Farmer