Gardening

Our 2022 garden: peas, carrots, turnips, onions

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We got some gardening done! There was a break in the rain and we quickly headed out.

My daughter had the bigger job to get the peas in. We’ll be using the pea trellis we used for the purple peas last year, as we still need to do some work on the other trellis frames. The ground was prepped in the fall, but she had to work through it to pull weeds that were trying to reclaim the space, first.

Now it just needs to have some of the wood shavings, or maybe the stove pellets, added to protect the soil surface from crusting. It’s a light enough mulch that the seedlings won’t have trouble pushing through.

The edible pod pea packet turned out to have very few peas in it. Those are between the two labels on the front left side of the trellis. The rest has pod peas in sown. There are still some seeds left of those, which will probably be planted in with the corn.

This should be the last year this trellis, and the nearby beds, will likely be used for gardening. If all goes to plan, next spring, we’ll be planting food trees here. :-)

While she worked on that, I seeded the bed that was already prepped and mulched with the stove pellet sawdust.

My priority was to get more carrots planted, as they should have been started a while ago. I marked out short rows (making things more like square food gardening), as well as a perimeter line. I started with the Black Nebula carrots. The packet had a nice amount of seeds, and it filled about half the bed, which is about 14-15 ft long. Next, I planted the Uzbek Golden Carrots, which came as a freebie from Baker Creek. There were very few seeds in the freebie packet, and I was only able to plant 4 short rows. For the rest, I planted the Gold Ball turnip, which we got as a freebie from Heritage Harvest seeds, and the Purple Prince turnip at the far end of the bed. I still have some Purple Prince seeds left, but the others in the bed got used up.

We planted the last of our onions started from seed already, so for this bed I used the onion sets I picked up at the grocery store as back ups. I got two boxes of yellow onions – no variety name is on the box – and it took almost all of them to fill the perimeter at 3-4 inches apart. The bed got hosed down to settle the soil over the seeds and onion sets, then support posts were hammered into the ground to hold the netting, after cord is strung through the holes in the posts, and crisscrossed over the middle. This bed will not be getting anything else added to it, so it can be covered sooner rather than later. The other beds have room for transplants in their middles, so they will get their net covering once that is done.

In planting the onions, I naturally was able to grab the biggest sets, since they tended to be on top, so when the bed was completely surrounded by onion, I had a pile of tiny onion sets left behind.

Well, we can’t let those go to waste!

They went into the retaining wall blocks. Two already have shallots in them. After pulling weeds and roots from the empty blocks (the others that look empty had mint transplanted into them in the fall) and adding the wood shavings, I had 6 blocks ready. I was able to fill 5 of them; 4 with 4 onions each, and one with only 3. That one block at the side is still empty. There is a matching block at the other end that doesn’t have anything planted in it, but it looks like it has chives coming through!

We have one box of red union sets left. Depending on where they end up being planted, if we have any left over, I’ll be finding space of them here, too.

The bunching onions planted in the bed along the retaining wall are still looking wimpy after transplanting. Hopefully, all these onions will make things too stinky for the grogs to want to go after the lettuce and beets. A groundhog could easily tear through the net, if it really wanted to. It’s going to be the big garden area that will be the most difficult to protect, however.

~~~pause for real world interruption~~~

My older daughter and I just finished bringing the transplants in. We have so many strong, healthy tomatoes! It’s going to be a challenge to plant them all, since they’ll mostly be going into new beds. Maybe that’s where those grow bags and fabric raised beds will be the most useful!

We’ve got our work cut out for us, but I don’t know how much I’ll be able to do tomorrow, as I’ll be heading to my mother’s to help her run errands. She is suddenly taking her back no longer hurts – I guess it took that long for the meds to have their effect, but she still says that when she takes them, they do nothing. She feels up to going out for her errands, though. She has her telephone doctor’s appointment, so I will probably go over there early enough to be there for her appointment, in case she needs things explained to her.

The question for me will be, can her car make it through that one muddy spot on the road? I might have to take the van, even if my mother will need a stool to get in and out!

The Re-Farmer

Cheer in the gloom

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It started to rain again, while I was doing my morning rounds, but there were some bright colours to make an otherwise gloomy and overcast day a bit more cheerful.

The grape hyacinths are reaching their full maturity. At some point, I hope that they will take over this area, replacing the invasive greens that are already there. I don’t mind them too much in this area, and they don’t seem to be choking out the hyacinths, but they sure do take over when growing among less resilient plants!

Then there was this little bit of sunshine.

The very first of my daughter’s daffodils have finally bloomed! After last year’s failure to thrive, and not being sure they’d survive the winter, my daughter is quite thrilled at how well they’re doing this year.

I got the transplants outside, but for a while there, I thought we’d have to bring them back in. The rain started coming down pretty hard, but it slowed down and now seems to have stopped for a while, so they should be fine. Mostly, we don’t want too much water accumulating in their bins and trays.

Unfortunately, with how wet everything is, that means no progress on the garden. Everything is just too muddy. It’s frustrating, because we have so many things that should already be in the ground, like the peas, the potatoes, and the strawberries, as well as more cool weather things to direct sow. Then there are more beds to prepare for the warm weather crops to direct sow, as well as areas for all the transplants.

One of the things I did this morning was check out what’s in the barn. I’m eyeballing the remains of salvaged and scrap wood, trying to think if there’s enough to start building a chicken coop.

I also popped my head up into the old hay loft, climbing the ladder as high as I dared. My brother says there is a car port frame up there, but I can’t see it. There are still some bags of insulation left behind – there was a lot more, but it grew legs and walked away, along with so many other things. It’s the kind of insulation that’s like a powder and gets blown into the walls. They’re scattered about and I can’t see the corner my brother says it’s in. What I did see, however, was what temptingly looked like a stack of lumber. I will have to come back with a daughter or two, as I don’t dare go up there on my own. With my knees, will have difficulty getting back down again, and parts of the floor up there are rotted out. If there is salvageable material up there, I want to get it out and stored someplace more accessible. Even those old bags of insulation might come in handy at some point. Who knows.

Oh! A daughter just came by. There’s a break in the rain, so she wants to do some gardening. Let’s see what we can manage before the rain starts up again!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: beds prepped, spinach, onions and turnips sown

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With a steady rain all night, we’ve got a lot of standing water and mud in the yard again. The straw mulch where we will be planting our 5kg bags of potatoes got well soaked, though, so I don’t mind.

This afternoon, I finally had a chance to work on the garden again, and I’ve got some thing figured out, too.

The spinach sown in the high raised bed has started to sprout. There was room for one more row of spinach, so that got planted today.

Then it was time to work on the low raised beds.

We are well behind on direct sowing our cool weather crops, so I focused on the 2 1/2 low raised beds that my daughter and I had gone through, pulling out as many roots and rhizomes as we could. A few that we missed started growing again (there will always be some of those!), so I pulled out some more, before leveling the beds out. I decided to use the stove pellets as mulch for these beds. After leveling the soil in one bed (the back of a fan rake is great for leveling the soil), I’d scatter some pellets as evenly as I could over the bed, soak them with the hose, then work on the next bed. It generally took about 3 soaks before the pellets had expanded and broken up enough to be spread evenly with the back of the rake.

It always surprises me just how much sawdust is packed into those tiny pellets!

Once those were done, I gave them one last spray with the hose, then moved on to what will be a deep mulch bed for the 1kg package of potatoes. We had considered planting those in the low raised bed by the compost heap, but have decided the kulli corn will go in there. It’ll be easier for us to put a barrier around the wooden frame to keep the critters out. Potatoes need no such barrier.

In our second summer here, we started preparing an area for future gardening by mulching the area heavily with straw, and trying to kill off as many weeds as possible. You can read about those preparations here, here, here, and here.

Yeah. It was a big job, spread over months.

The next summer, we had our first garden, and all along the north side, we planted a row of birdhouse gourds. We’d started them indoors, but I thought our last frost date was May 28, the same as a town to the east of us, only for us to get hit with a frost on June 2 – which was the last frost date for a town to the north of us (our own little hamlet is too small to be on any of the frost date lists). The gourds didn’t really survive, and since then, this particular area has not been planted in.

The straw you see raked aside in the above photo has been there for 4 years.

The area was still mostly clear of crab grass, though I spent some time pulling those out. With the straw layer, the rhizomes tended to be running across the surface of the soil, so that made it easier to get them.

I knew we had a few moving boxes left in the basement. I thought there was three left, so I cleared an area to roughly match how much I thought those three boxes, opened flat in a single layer, would cover.

I was wrong.

There was 5 boxes left, so I laid them down folded in half, to get a double thick layer. This should be more than enough for the smaller amount of potatoes.

After soaking the cardboard, I put most of the old, wet straw back, then topped it with some newer straw to get a good, thick later.

This bed is now ready for potato planting.

While I was working on this, the girls got the fire pit going, and I finished just in time for a wiener roast. :-D

We’ve used that fire pit in the past month, almost than we’ve been able to in the past 4 years. No fire bans, this spring!

After the girls made sure I was fueled up, it was back to the low raised beds. Time to do some planting!

Look how big that garlic is!! They are just thriving, here.

For this half-bed, I marked out a grid, but planted in rectangular boxes. I started with some spinach – a variety called Space – planted around the middle of the bed. There are still some seeds of this spinach variety left, if we want to sow some for a fall harvest.

One those were in, the outer perimeter, I planted some onions. These are Red of Florence; the last of the onions we started from seed.

The centre of the bed was left empty. Later on, we’ll put in plants that we won’t be harvesting leaves from, or harvesting many times. Perhaps we’ll put some eggplants or peppers in the middle. There’s room for only a few plants in this half-bed.

There will be more room in the next bed.

The centre row was marked, but nothing is planted in it. On one side of the centre line, a third variety of spinach, Lakeside, was sown. On the other side, Tokyo Silky Sweet turnips were planted. Then, all around the perimeter the last of the Red of Florence onions were planted.

The onions being planted around the perimeter like this is to dissuade critters at least a bit. That is not our first defense, though.

These will be covered with netting. I’m not sure the bamboo stakes will hold those hoops very well, though. Trying to push them into the ground, I kept hitting rocks. In one spot, right at a corner, I just couldn’t get around a rock, so that one is more shallow than I would prefer. A couple of stakes broke while I was trying to push them into the ground. Since I couldn’t get them very deep, I ended up having to break the tops off of the rest, to be able to put the hoops on them.

Later, bamboo poles will be tied to the centre of the hoops to hold them steady and hold up the netting when it’s added on. Not until after something has been transplanted in the middle.

For the long bed, I grabbed pieces from the canopy tent that was dismantled. Those were easier to pound into the soil. Literally. I had a piece of would I could use as a mallet, and got them in pretty deep.

With the logs bordering the bed, the supports aren’t spaced very well. For the ones in the middle, most had to be squeezed into the spaces between logs. Which is fine. After something is transplanted in the middle, cord will be strung through the holes in the supports around the perimeter, then criss crossing across the middle to support the netting. With them so oddly spaced, it’ll be wonky, but it’ll work.

The ground staples will be used to tack the net down , but we still want to be able to easily life the sides, to harvest greens as needed.

The third bed was left for tomorrow. We have 2 more varieties of turnips to plant, or I might do carrots, first. They should have been sown about a week or more ago!

Beds will continue to be bordered by onions from sets. I’ve got 2 boxes of yellow onions and one of red onions, so there is plenty to go! :-)

The other thing that really needs to get done are the two varieties of peas. Hopefully, it won’t get too hot for peas over the next while! Meanwhile, we need to get those potatoes into the ground.

The next few weeks are going to be very busy in the garden! Lots to go in, in a very short time.

The Re-Farmer

Not much accomplished today

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The most predictable thing about plans seems to be that they don’t tend to last very long! :-D

I didn’t get anywhere near as much accomplished today as I’d hoped. I did, however, manage to finish planting the garden bed with peas, carrots and onions. At least until it’s safe to transplant out the tomatoes.

The row of onions and shallots, started from seed, that I transplanted yesterday made up only half the length of the bed. I had two boxes of shallot sets and decided to use those to finish the row.

Some of them are already starting to sprout! Which means the yellow (2 boxes) and red (1 box) onions need to get in the ground as soon as we can, as I’m sure they’d be much the same.

Of the two boxes of shallots, by the time I was done, there was only 5 shallots left. We decided to plant those in a couple of the retaining wall blocks along the old kitchen garden.

Which means that right now, all our shallots, both the sets and the ones grown from seed, are planted.

I noticed by the end of the afternoon that the plumb flower buds were starting to open! It was quite a warm one.

One thing I did manage to accomplish was a much needed trip to the dump. I’m glad we waited; from the condition of the road to it, it got flooded over, too. It did mean we had a lot more than usual to dump off.

While I was putting our glass into the separate bin they have for it, I noticed something very odd.

Canning jars.

Canning jars with the metal rings still on them.

Canning jars with glass lids!

They were in excellent condition, too!

I was sorely tempted to take them as they were, but we already have a lot of those old style canning jars and glass lids. It’s the rings that are getting as rare as hen’s teeth. I checked with the custodian about doing a bit of dumpster diving, and he leant me his reaching tool. In the end, there were only five rings that I could see, though there were quite a few more canning jars. What a waste. Especially with canning supplies being increasingly hard to come by in some places. These old style jars may not be considered safe for canning anymore, but they can still be used for dry canning, and the rubber rings are still available.

Between these and the ones I found in a bucket in the storage house, I think I have about 15 or 20 of these rings in total, and all in very good, useable shape.

In other things, I’d called the clinic on behalf of my mother and got a telephone appointment for her at just before noon. After letting her know about the appointment and talking about her pain situation, I got busy with other things and didn’t get a chance to call her back until much later. Just before 4pm, in fact. That’s when I found out the doctor hadn’t called her! The clinic stops answering the phone at 4pm, so I quickly called them again to find out what happened.

It turns out the appointment I made for my mother wasn’t for today. It was for Monday. I swear, I never heard a date. Just a time. We’d talked about a few things, and I was so focused on getting a doctor to call her as soon as possible, I must have simply missed it.

So that got straightened out, and I called my mother back to let her know. I was happy to hear that she was feeling a bit better. She says it improves if she doesn’t move at all. !!!

I’ll have to call her on the weekend and see about doing a grocery trip for her. She insists she’s well supplied… then starts talking about being almost out of milk, and maybe there’s something else?…

:-D

Tomorrow is out, as I should be making the trip into the city for the monthly shopping. At least the Costco portion of it.

One of the things on my to-do list was to contact a local electrician about our fried outlet. I know he works in the city, so I was going to wait until later. Then I got a phone call from my brother. He’d been thinking about what happened, and the photo I sent him, and was considering coming over to look at it himself. He’s done most of the new wiring here and is every bit as qualified an electrician; he just never bothered to get his ticket. If all goes well, he will be coming here on Saturday morning to see what he can do.

Meanwhile, my daughter was able to get her old laptop going again. She can’t work on her commissions on it, but she can at least get online, and can contact her clients about the delay.

And that’s about as much as I managed to accomplish today, and yet I’m feeling so very tired and sore, you’d think I had actually finished filling that low raised bed I’d intended to do today. *sigh*

I’m also falling asleep at the computer. I think an “early” (as in, before midnight) bed time is in order!

The Re-Farmer

Finally!

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The surviving tulips are starting to open!

This area had a double tulip collection planted, with 10 bulbs each of Orca, Pinksize and Double Brownie, and 8 bulbs each of Black Hero, Pamplona and Vanilla Coup planted in it, plus some Bulls Eye tulips off to the side. Aside from the Bulls Eye tulip (which Veseys no longer carries), we’re not sure which is which, anymore!

The tulips weren’t the only things starting to bloom.

The surrounding plum trees have exploded with flower buds!

Everything is about a month behind, but the flowers and leaves are finally appearing!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: peas, carrots, onions and more prep

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One of things we started indoors were the four seeds we managed to save from the King Tut purple peas we tried to grow last year. All for successfully germinated, and were really needing to be either transplanted, or potted up.

Potting up didn’t make sense for these, so today, they got transplanted! Being peas, they are frost hardy, so we didn’t have to wait until after our last frost date.

I did change were they were meant to be planted. I was originally thinking of using the same pea trellis we used for them last year, but there’s just 4 of them, so we’ll save the trellises for the green peas we’ve got.

As the purple peas were already looking to climb, I decided to put them here.

This is where we grew tomatoes very successfully last year, and tomatoes will be grown here again this year. It got completely reworked in the fall.

This bed was going to get a mulch of wood shavings, too, but I also did the concrete blocks on the other side of the small gate, too.

We’ll be looking at planting some climbers in here, that can use the fence as a trellis.

The bag of wood shavings left over from last year got finished off in the long bed, and most of the new bag got used up, too! There was enough to mulch the haskaps (the male haskap is blooming!) and there’s still a bit left over.

All the mulch got watered as I laid it out, as the wind was picking up and threatening to blow it away. Once it was laid down, all the mulch got watered again, multiple times, as I worked.

Of course, the bed didn’t stay looking pretty like this for long!

This bed is going to be intensely and strategically planted! Along with the purple peas, there will be tomatoes planted all along the fence. Just inside where the tomatoes will go, there will be carrots, as they are good companion plants. On the outer edge, near the bricks, will be onions, as a critter deterrent.

In the bowl are the last of the pelleted Kyoto Red seeds from last year.

Clearing out a row to plant the carrots was a bit of a challenge, as there were sticks in with the leaf mulch that had to be removed. With pelleted seed, the carrots could be spaced as they were planted. I still got only half way down the row before running out of seeds. The other half is now planted with Napoli carrots; another pelleted variety from last year. With the Napoli, there are still a LOT of seeds left, so we have the option of tucking them around other things, too. We have 2 other new varieties that are not pelleted seed, so I will likely use cornstarch gel to help plant those.

There were not a lot of the Oneida yellow onions we started from seed to transplant, but it was still close to the half way mark. Of the onions we stared from seed, we have one tray or red onions left, but there’s quite a few of those, and I didn’t want to split them up. We also had a few shallots started from seed – a whole 7 of them survived – so I used those, and there’s still half the row left. We have shallot sets, too, so I’m thinking of using some of those to finish off the row. That will be another job for tomorrow!

As for the peas, I cut some of the plastic bottles from distilled water we have so many of, to put around the peas, to protect them from the wind. One of them blew away while I was transplanting onions. I’d tried to push it into the soil, but there turned out to be too many little sticks in the leaf litter. :-D Once I got that fixed, I added the sticks to help keep them from blowing away. They are the sticks sold for toasting marshmallows, broken in half. We got a package for cookouts last year, but I’ve been using them as supports for some of the taller squash and gourd plants that were starting to flop around a bit. They work really well for that!

This bed now has only tomatoes to be transplanted into it, and that won’t be until after our June 2 last frost date, just to be on the safe side. We will be adding netting after the tomatoes are planted. The decorative wire garden fencing that you see in one of the photos above will be placed right up against the bricks, to hold the net away from the net, which will be attached to the top of the fence. The tomatoes and onions should be fine, but the carrots will need to be protected from critters. The net won’t stop a determined groundhog, but between that, the onions and the carrots, we hope the greedy buggers will decide they’re not worth the effort!

While I was working on this, my younger daughter was working on one of the low raised beds in the main garden area.

The girls cleaned up these beds last year, and this one was the worst for crab grass.

It still was. It took my poor daughter hours to get it done, diligently and carefully pulling up all the roots she could. Unlike me, she’s agile enough that she can kneel down on the ground to work, but she still knackered her back in the process. Once inside, she ended up having to put on her corset she made for herself, to use as a back brace just so she could sit upright at the table! She plans to continue with other beds tomorrow, and will likely just wear the darn thing from the start.

Her sister ended up helping me bring the transplants back inside after everything we done. She was up sick much of the night, but was finally feeling better. It was a bit of a juggle, since the chitting potatoes were sitting on the platform the seed trays and most of the bins sits on. Those had to go outside and onto the roof of the cats’ house until all the transplants were brought into the sun room, then we had to figure out how to fit the potatoes back in! Some ended up on the swing bench under the platform. Potato Beetle has lost his favourite bed for now. :-D

I fully expect we will expand our garden again, next year, which means starting more seeds indoors. Having at least a small, portable greenhouse is going to be increasingly a necessity! We almost got one this year, but the funds ended up being reallocated. Mind you, we still haven’t gone into the old hay loft, where my brother tells me there is the frame for a carport. If all the parts and pieces are there, we’d just need to get the plastic, and we’ll have a polytunnel. I can’t get up into the hayloft anymore – my body is too broken to clamber up there – so I’ll have to ask the girls to do it.

Well… that last paragraph got quite the interruption. I hadn’t realized my mother had phoned and left a message while we were working outside. She called again. It seems the painkillers the doctor prescribed for her back pain are not helping at all, and she’s in a lot of pain. Can’t sit, can’t stand, can’t lie down… She’s convinced the doctor gave her the wrong medication. She called the pharmacist, and he assured her she got the right meds. I guess she now thinks the prescription was a mistake? So tomorrow morning, when the clinic is open, I’ll give them a call. Hopefully, either her doctor, or the doctor that saw her in the ER, will be available to call her today and talk to her about it.

My husband is feeling very sympathetic for her. She’s entering his world, and is completely unprepared for it.

My plans for tomorrow may be changing, if I find myself having to drive my mother somewhere!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: sad garlic

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I’m mentioned in previous posts, that two of our garlic beds are not doing well. We planted all three beds at the same time, last year.

While doing my rounds this morning, I caught one of the yard cats being… inappropriate… in one of the low raised bed and chased it off. On checking the damage, I saw it had dug up one of the cloves we planted last year.

That is most definitely a dead clove. You can see that it had started to sprout, which would have been the fall growth before the snow fell. It does seem like cold killed a lot of these off.

This garlic is from the bed planted with Rocambole garlic.

There were 90 cloves planted in this bed. This morning, I counted maybe 7, including what looked like a tip just barely breaking through.

The bed with Purple Stripe in it is doing a bit better, in that there are more emerging, but it still looks like less than half have survived the winter, and they are all so very tiny.

I am curious as to why these beds did so poorly over the winter, while the Porcelain Music planted in the low raised bed in the main garden are doing to very well right now. Could it be, that the slightly higher boxes offered less protection than the lower, log framed bed?

Well, whatever the reason, I hope what few have survived manage to do well, even if they are quite a bit behind in growth. It may just mean we’ll be harvesting them later in the summer.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: Eagle Creek potatoes are here!

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Oh, I am so happy! The potatoes we ordered from Eagle Creek have arrived!

I appreciate their sense of humour!

As for the growing directions, for most of them, we’re doing the Ruth Stout deep mulching, so we won’t be hilling them. We specifically chose determinate varieties with that in mind. You can read about what we ordered, and why, at this post.

After doing battle with the remarkably strong bag and metal staples (I ended up having to cut it open! LOL), we had our three varieties.

The one kilogram bag of Caribe potatoes is 2.2 pounds, and the 5kg bags of Bridget and All Blue are 11 pounds each, so we’re looking at just over 24 pounds of potatoes here. :-)

They’ve already started to sprout!

These are all the Caribe potatoes in the 1kg bag. There’s actually more of them than I thought there would be. Though we could split some of the larger ones, I’m not going to bother. These could be planted right now, if we wanted.

Here are the All Blue. There were quite a few large ones, so they got cu smaller, and will need a few days for the cuts to dry before planting them.

Here are all the Bridget potatoes. A fair number of them got cut smaller, too.

The Bridget and All Blue potatoes are meant for the two heavily mulched beds we just finished. While they are left to chit and the cut edges to dry, we will give the straw mulch repeated soakings with the hose. Hopefully, between that and the rain we’re supposed to be getting, off and on, for the next while, the straw will get good and moist, and keep the layer of carboard under it moist as well.

Now we have to decide where the Caribe potatoes will go. With how many potatoes there turned out to be, the spot I was thinking off will not be large enough. Perhaps these will do well in that low raised bed that we need to finish filling.

Finishing that bed will be a job for tomorrow, then.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: light mulching

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After finishing my morning rounds, I remembered to check the tracking information and saw that our potatoes were ready for pick up. After picking up the nice big, heavy bag, I made a spur of the moment purchase and got some more wood shavings. We still had a small amount left over from last year, but since we can’t quite use our wood chipper yet, I decided it was worth picking up another bag. I’m glad I did!

One of the issues we have with our soil is that, when it’s watered, it develops a hard crust at the time, which seedlings have difficulty breaking through. One way to reduce that is with mulching – and that’s something we don’t have in the old kitchen garden right now. A straw mulch would be too much for what we’ve got in there right now. We do have lots of the hardwood pellets we use for cat litter, but I decided to use the shavings, too.

For some things, I could use the shavings for a slightly thicker mulch, such as around the irises and daffodils, and that one onion that predates us and keeps coming back, no matter how many times something managed to crunch it. The onions along the retaining wall are super tiny still, so they just got a very light mulch, as did the area we planted poppy seeds in, and the tiny patch with lettuce seeds next to the rose bush. More can be added later, as things grow, if necessary.

I even mulched one of the retaining wall blocks. Last year, we found a mystery bulb lying on the grass. We weren’t sure which of the bulbs we’d planted had lost one, so I just stuck it into this cube to see what came up. Nothing did, so it was quite a surprise to see what looks like a tulip emerging this year!

For the beds that are covered with netting, I still used the hardwood pellets, since they can fit through the net. It was a bit difficult to get it to spread evenly, since they wanted to roll into the furrows seeds were planted in, but those are what we want to protect from crusting, anyhow.

All the mulch got watered, so they can help keep the soil moist, and for the hardwood pellets to break up into sawdust. The seedlings should be able to push through the sawdust just fine.

Over time, the crusting problem will lessen as more organic matter like this mulch, breaks down into the soil. Definitely a long term process, but that’s par for the course! This garden has already been 4 years in the works, since we started cleaning it up and prepping it, our first summer here!

Ah, but what about those potatoes we finally picked up?

That will be in my next post! :-) I am really happy with them!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: first Yakteen gourd!

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We had started some Yakteen gourd seeds indoors a while back, but none germinated. There was also one pot with hulless pumpkin in it that didn’t germinate, so I took the last 6 seeds we had left and replanted them in the three pots.

One has finally germinated!

Since I took this photo this morning, the seedling has fully emerged from the soil.

So far, there’s just the one, but I moved all of them to the sun room. Hopefully, more will germinate. This is one of those rare varieties that I want to save seeds from, to keep it going. This is really late for starting indoors, but maybe we’ll have another long and mild fall – to make up for how long it took for winter to let go, only to have a cold, wet “spring”.

We got a lot of garden related stuff done today, and I took lots of pictures, so I’ll be making several shorter posts rather than one huge one!

The Re-Farmer