Analyzing our 2024 Garden: odds and sots

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For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.

Okay, here is where we talk about everything else. The perennials, the food forest and so on.

Sunchokes, asparagus, grapes, zucca melon and walking onions

Sunchokes: last year, I didn’t harvest any at all so that we would have more growth and a larger harvest this year.

That plan worked out rather well! We got quite a lot of sunchokes, and the largest ones were replanted for next year. We’re still learning what to do with them, but this is something we know grows here and will come back every year.

The only downside is that I found quite a few tubers with chonky caterpillars burrowed into them. Some burrowed all the way in, where they died. Some, with half their bodies still sticking out of the tubers! I have no idea what these are, and need to figure out how to get rid of them.

Asparagus: We planted these purple years ago, and should be harvesting them by now.

We are not.

In planting the crowns, a trench was dug about a foot deep, then the bed itself was hilled to give them depth they are supposed to have.

Then we discovered that, in wet springs, a moat forms around our garage, including through the vehicle gate into the yard.

Which is where the asparagus is planted.

At that depth, even though the bed itself is above water, the crowns would be saturated.

We need to find another place to grow asparagus. I don’t know that we’d be able to salvage this purple variety. The challenge is finding a place where they can be left to grow for the next 20 years – and not get flooded out!

Grapes: In cleaning up around the storage house, we found two grape vines my mother had planted. We made a trellis for them and have been trying to keep the spirea from invading them, every since. Last year was the first year we looked to be getting a really good harvest.

The very morning I was planning to harvest them, I came out to find the trellis knocked down on one side, and all the grapes gone.

Racoons.

This year was shaping up to be even better.

Then one morning – while taking recordings for a garden tour video! – I discovered all the grapes gone, again. They had disappeared overnight.

Racoons.

I want to transplant these, perhaps on either side of an arbour they can climb on. Maybe closer to the house, where we can better protect them from racoons!!!

Zucca melon: This is one of those things I’ve been trying to grow for years. They are supposed to get huge – up to 60 pounds – and actually grow in our climate. They never seemed to do well.

This year, I thought we’d finally get some. We had strong and healthy transplants, and they went into the kiddie pool raised bed, so they wouldn’t get the elm tree roots invading them.

The slugs got them.

*sigh*

Next year, I want to try them again, but this time in the new bed the Crespo squash did so well in.

I just have to find a way to keep the slugs off!

Walking onions: When we first moved here, every spring, a single walking onion would appear along the edge of the old kitchen garden. There used to be a fence and a tire rim planter, with a tire cut in half and flipped inside out as the “pot” near that spot.

Every year, this one onion would grow, then something would smash it flat.

One year, I managed to keep it from getting broken long enough that it formed bulbils. I took some of those and planted them along the south side of the tiny raised bed nearby, where they would get full sun while being protected by the logs making up the raised bed wall.

At the same time, that side of the old kitchen garden was cleared as best we could, and my daughter planted flower bulbs as a border. We eventually added logs on the outer edge as a protective border, with a couple of openings line with rocks or bricks to walk through. In placing the logs, I was very careful to place one log outside of where I knew that one onion was.

It never came up after that.

The bulbils we planted, however, grew and thrived. When they formed bulbils, those were harvested to cook with, rather than allowing them to reach the ground and spread. We don’t want them to take over! These should continue to come back, year after year.

Milkweed, saffron, tulips and other flowering bulbs, wildflowers and … salsify?

Milkweed: When starting seeds indoors, I started some Shades of Orange Butterfly flower – a type of milkweed. Very few seeds germinated, and the ones that did, did not do well. When we were finally able to start transplanting outside, I was at a loss on where to put these sad little seedlings, as these were something I wanted to reseed itself, year after year.

Then I found one of our yard cats, passed away. He was buried in a bed that was supposed to get poppies in it, but we completely lost control of the weeds in it. After he was buried, I transplanted the milkweed on his grave, in hopes they would survive. They did not.

Tulips: My daughters planted tulip bulbs in an area of the west yard, not far from the old kitchen garden, several years ago. We had gotten rid of some dead crab apple and other trees around there, and there is a lilac hedge behind it – lilacs that are doing much better, now that they are not overshadowed by dead and dying trees! It’s a well sheltered and protected area – from the weather, at least!

Deer love to eat tulips.

After several disappointing years of tulips being eaten just before they started to bloom, we were starting to think the poor bulbs weren’t doing well enough to store energy to survive the winter.

After having to remove one last diseased crap apple tree, and the remaining stump of one that died long ago, we put in some fence posts and surrounded the entire area with bits and pieces of salvaged wire fending and chicken wire, with one side tied in place to serve as a gate for accees.

This year, much to our surprise, we had the most tulips blooming, ever! We even had some coming up in areas they hadn’t been in ages, and we thought for sure they had died.

Best of all – no deer damage!

I look forward to the tulips finally being able to spread through the area, as we originally planned for them.

Grape Hyacinth and snow crocuses: On the other side of the lilac hedge where the tulips are, is part of our maple grove. A few years ago, in one section, we planted 200 grape hyacinth bulbs. In another section, we planted snow crocuses. The hope was that they would spread and grow and eventually take over those areas, so we wouldn’t need to mow or weed trim it anymore.

This year, we did get both, but neither did as well as the year before. I think our late spring, with heavy rains and flooded out areas, was too much for them. They should continue to come back, year after year, though, and hopefully continue to spread and fill the areas they were planted in.

Wildflowers: I had picked up Western Wildflower and Alternative Lawn mixes of seeds. After we had a couple of branch piles chipped, we were left with bare patches of soil in the maple grove, and we tried planting them there. If any of them survived, though, I don’t know. We did have some things come up this year that might have been from these mixes, but I can’t say for sure. There was one that came up that I was very diligent about pulling and destroying, though. I don’t know if it was part of the mix, but we have them all over in the spruce grove. They have beautiful sprays of tiny flowers that turn into tiny little burs. If you walk anywhere near them, you’ll find your pant legs and sleeves covered, and they do NOT want to come out! Worse than burdock! They are almost as invasive as creeping bellflower or creeping Charlie.

We have an insulated tarp that we put over our septic tank. It’s large enough that we fold it in half to use it. When the tank was uncovered in the spring, I laid it out in the maple grove nearby and weighted it down. It stayed there all summer, in hopes of killing off anything growing under it, which was mostly creeping bellflower.

When it was pulled off, I found some things were still growing along the edges, but most of the weeds under there did seem to have died. I put the Western Wildflower mix into a shaker with some seed starting mix I still had and, after clearing and loosening the soil first, scattered the seeds over the area, raked it again to cover the seeds, then mulched it, as was done with the winter sown garden beds.

Hopefully, it will work this time, and we will have native wildflowers growing in this patch. If all goes well, I would want to harvest seed heads from it to scatter throughout other areas of the maple grove. There are just a few areas where we want to maintain clear paths of grass. The rest, we want to be taken over with flowers of all kinds.

I have not yet decided were to try the alternative lawn mix, again.

Salsify?: In preparing garden beds, I found a plant growing in an area I needed to dig up. I recognized the leaves as something that has been growing and blooming pretty wild. They are quite pretty, so I dug it up and transplanted it into one end of the low raised bed with the seed onions and Summer of Melons mix.

It grew very well, bloomed beautifully, and developed huge seed clusters.

Any time a seed cluster looked like it was ready to be blown away with the wind, I plucked the seeds and scattered them in the same area at the far end of the bed, where they could sprout next year.

As for what they are, it was suggested they might be salsify, which is something we actually have seeds for that we wanted to try growing. The roots apparently taste like seafood. The seed catalogs only had photos of the roots, not the flowers, but in looking online, the flowers did look like they could be salsify. When cleaning up the bed in the fall, however, the roots were completely different. Certainly not a tap root that one could use like a carrot or parsnip! It’s possible that just means they are a different variety of salsify, but I don’t know. Whatever they are, though, we might have ourselves quite a lot of them in that one spot where I was dropping the seeds!

The Food Forest: apple, haskap, mulberry, raspberries, sea buckthorn, silver buffaloberry, highbush cranberry and Korean Pine

Liberty Apple: this is the first variety of eating apple we’ve planted. It is a zone 4 apple, but we planted it near the lilac hedge by the old kitchen garden, where it should be more protected. It survived its first winter. Hopefully, it will survive this winter, too. It will be a few years before it starts producing fruit, though. We just need to keep it alive! As it grows, I’m hoping to be able to esplanade the branches, too.

Haskap: We planted these years ago, and we should have been getting lots of fruit by now. Unfortunately, they are not doing well where they are planted. I suspect it is because they are between an elm tree and a lilac bush, and there is too much competition for resources. There are also flowers that come up around them every year, but their root systems are very different, so I don’t think they could be a problem. I am thinking we should transplant them where we will be having the bulk of our food forest, but my daughters are concerned that transplanting them will kill them off.

The main problem, though, is that the “Mr. Haskap” variety, which is meant to cross pollinated with the “Mrs. Haskap” variety, blooms earlier. At most, we’d find a couple of berries, here and there, and that’s it. This year, we actually had the most berries yet.

A small handful of them. Which meant we at least had a chance to taste them!

They are very tasty.

I still think we need to transplant them.

Mulberry: last year, we ordered a Trader mulberry – a zone 3 variety. This is the second time we’d tried mulberry, and the first was killed off by a late and severe spring frost.

They were out of the 2 year size, though, and were instead sending out two 1 year seedlings, instead. They were so tiny, we didn’t transplant them at all. Instead, we potted them up and kept them indoors through the winter.

This spring, they were planted along the north edge of the property, in our main food forest area. Because these can get quite big, I wanted to make sure they were positioned where they would not overshadow other fruit trees. There is a lilac hedge along the fence line, and one of them was strategically planted in front of a gap in the hedge, where the deer have been getting through. This allowed me to plant it slightly tucked in among the lilacs for extra protection from the elements, until they get bigger. The other one was planted the distance recommended for the size they can get. There, I pruned back the lilacs to tuck it further in, in line with the first one. Both got well mulched, and have some salvaged wire fence around them, to protect them from critters.

This is their first winter. Hopefully, they will survive, and in a couple of years, we will get to find out what mulberries taste like!

Raspberries: My mother has grown raspberries here for as long as I can remember. They also pretty much grow wild. She had last transplanted raspberries in an area on the south side of the main garden area, under a crab apple tree and a chokecherry tree.

Not a good place for them.

There are also other trees planted between the house and the main garden area; my parents added more of the years, encroaching on what used to be part of their garden, rather than on the north side of the property. As a result, they create a lot of shade in places that used to be able to grow lots of vegetables.

We did get small amounts of raspberries to enjoy, though and raspberries, being raspberries, spread. In this case, near the crab apple tree, there had been a compost ring. When it was full, I moved the ring to another location and started to dig into the old compost pile, expecting to be able to use it.

That’s when I found out someone had been using it for garbage. I also found lots of larger branches in it.

After cleaning out as much garbage as I could find, we left the pile to break down more.

Then the crab apple tree got the fungal disease that’s killing off so many of them and died. I cleared that away, which has actually improved things, as the raspberries on that end now get more light.

The raspberries have taken over the old compost pile and are thriving in it, so this past summer, we had quite a lot of raspberries.

Which is good, because the purple variety of raspberries we got for the food forest area did not do well.

They actually produced fruit last year, which was their first year. I was expecting to get berries in their second year; most raspberries produce on second year canes. This year, only one of them survived the winter, and being a first year cane, did not produce. It also didn’t grow well.

We also have a couple of raspberries I bought for my daughter. They were planted in the main garden area, near the trees that are causing us so much trouble.

It turns out, deer like raspberry leaves, too.

They are now protected, but we’ll have to transplant them somewhere away from those trees!

Raspberries are something we want to grow lots of. We are working towards having early, mid and late season varieties. Along with the purple and red varieties, we want to add in a golden variety.

We were supposed to get more for this year, but the budget did not allow for it.

What we might end up doing is transplanting some of the ones in the old compost pile into the food forest area, too.

Sea Buckthorn: We bought a 5 pack of sea buckthorn, which were planted in the north east corner of what is now our main food forest area. The lilac hedge sort of peters out by this point, creating another gap the deer were taking advantage of. After planting them, they got a buck and pole fence put over them to protect them and keep the deer from running through the space.

They didn’t all make it. I suddenly can’t remember if we have two or three left. Sea buckthorn, however, needs one male for every 4 females for pollination. No male, no berries. It’s unlikely we have one of each, so we need to replace the ones that died. Which we intended to do this year, but the budget did not allow for it. The ones that did survive, though, do seem to be doing okay.

Silver Buffaloberry: These were purchased as a bundle of 30. Their placement was deliberate to double as a privacy fence as they reached full size. So far, we have lost maybe 3 in total, which is pretty darn good. It will be a few years before they reach full size and start producing berries. The berries are edible, but if it turns out we don’t like them, they will be good for the birds.

Highbush Cranberry: At the start of the two rows of silver buffaloberry, we had a pair of highbush cranberry. For some reason, the deer kept eating one of them. It is currently protected by and old saw horse, directly over it. It has survived! Both will also need several more years before they start producing fruit.

Korean Pine: I keep forgetting about the Korean pine, because they are the only things planted in the outer yard. We started off with 6 seedlings. We are down to three. They are supposed to be slow growing for their first few years, then start shooting up. This year should have been that first year of increased growth. They’re still quite small, protected under their chicken wire cloche. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to give them the care they should be getting. If only one survives, though, I’ll be happy. It’ll be years before we’ll have pine nuts to harvest, but one mature enough tree would be able to provide more than we need.

Conclusion and planning ahead

It was certainly a mixed bag with how these things went this year.

When it comes to these more permanent things, both food and flowers, we are in for the long haul. These are things that can take years to get where we want them to be.

We had intended to expand this year but our biggest struggle has been with the budget. Aside from everything becoming more expensive, we had so many things that needed to be replaced or repaired this year.

Oh, I just realized, I forgot one more thing: our rhubarb!

We have two patches on opposite corners of the old kitchen garden. The one in the south corner has given us rhubarb to harvest every year, but the one in the north corner has struggled. They both have ornamental crab apple trees growing over them, but the south one manages to get more light. The north one had some dead branches that got cleaned away this year, though. Between that and, I believe, the heavy rain we got this spring, the rhubarb in the north corner was the best we’ve ever seen!

At some point, though, they will need to be transplanted to a better, more open, location. That can wait a few years, though.

Which is pretty much the thing with all our plans for growing food. The ultimate goal is to be as self sufficient as possible. Part of that goal is to have as many things that are either perennial, or will seed themselves, year after year. I’m no spring chicken, and I know my years of mobility are limited. I’m already pretty broken.

Along with planning what we will be growing year after year, we are also thinking 2 years, 5 years, 10 years ahead. We want to add more fruit trees, and even nut trees, though there are few that will grow and produce in our zone 3 climate. As we add animals to our mix, growing food for them will also be part of the planning.

We’re in it for the long haul, though.

It’s a bit different in our situation, in that we don’t own this property, but have the freedom to do this. In the long term, this property could end up belonging to my brother’s grandsons. So all these things that we are doing could ultimately be there to benefit two little boys currently living in another province!

Who knows?

We just do what we can for now. I’m just thankful that we are here, and that we have such a good working relationship with my brother. Everything we do here is a benefit for him, too.

That makes me very happy.

The Re-Farmer

Oooh! Hate mail!

/ Re-Farmer / 10 Comments

Bahahaha!!!

While working on garden analysis posts to be scheduled for later, a couple of comments showed up in my dashboard, pending approval.

I won’t be approving them, but I just have to share them with my regular visitors.

I just love it when people make fools of themselves sending hate mail. Check this first one out.

Randy
3 hours ago
Pending

Analyzing our 2024 Garden: peas, beans, carrots and greens

You must be a total rookie gardener.

The first thing to do is keep the deer out of your garden. FENCES are your friend. Why on earth would you allow cats access to your garden? Can’t you afford a litter box?

There is a site called All America Selections (AAS). Go there to find varieties that work. Most things I grow were AAS selections, I have only been burned by AAS varieties a couple times.

When it comes to seed viability the smaller seeds last the longest. I keep carrot seeds for 5 years or more and they sprout while pea seeds only last for 2-3 years.

Hint: a good carrot variety is Scarlet Nantes, an AAS recommended carrot from the 1930’s, a consistent reliable producer, make sure you thin them or you get crap as you will with any carrot that isn’t thinned.

Green beans, yuck!

Cleary, this is someone who hasn’t read anything else on this blog, or he wouldn’t have said what he did about the deer or the cats, for starters. Nor any of the other stuff, to be honest.

Randy, I don’t know how you found this blog (interesting that your user name is not linked, so you get to barf all over people’s blogs, and no one can follow you back to your own profile or blog – what a coward!), but you might want to actually spend some time reading it before making judgmental comments. Otherwise, you’re just making a fool of yourself.

Actually, you’re making a fool of yourself, just writing trash like this.

Also, do you really think that I’m going to read some random person saying “Green beans, yuck!” and think, “oh, no! Some dude on the internet doesn’t like green beans! That means I need to stop liking them or growing them!”

Seriously. Get over yourself.

Oh, and then he left this comment, too.

randy
2 hours ago
Pending

Analyzing our 2024 Garden: peas, beans, carrots and greens

You are a total fucking idiot.

Einstein said the definition of stupidity was doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. You kept planting beans so the deer could continue to feast on your beans? STUPID!

Gardening is hard work and you don’t work hard to feed deer you moron! Put up some fences you dope.

Also, why would you create a blog to tell the world how stupid you are?

Wake up and die right.

Oh, Randy, you precious little snowflake. So stunning! So brave!

Thank for the laugh. You have no idea how much you’re embarrassing yourself.

The Re-Farmer

Change in plans… again??

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We had some bitterly cold temperatures last night – dropping to -24C/-11F, when I was awake to check. There was no wind chill, though. In fact, the “real feel” was slightly warmer than the actual temperature.

When heading outside to feed the yard cats, I found a whole crowd of them inside the isolation shelter – all in the top level, too!

Including the isolation babies. Both Kohl and her fluffy partner were in there.

With so many cats and one bowl in a corner, the littles weren’t able to get at the food as well, so I dropped a handful beside the fluffy boi.

In return, he even let me pet him.

Sort of. 😄

With the cold, a lot of the food trays still had a lot of food in them. None of the cats, understandably, want to be outside eating, and even in the sun room, they prefer to huddle together in their various shelves and beds and under the heat lamp. I saw several through the cat house window, near the heat lamp in there, too.

The food bowl in the isolation shelter, however, didn’t have a single crumb left in it, and even the water bowl was mostly empty. At this point, I think the top of the isolation shelter may be the warmest place around!

The insulated box nest, however, seems to be in the way. I am considering taking it out and putting it in the lower level, where the little box is. We had to take the cat bed out from there, since they were using it as a litter box. Since this box nest is insulated, it would probably get used more in the bottom level than it is in the top level. The food bowl can then be put in the middle where the box is now, and more cats can eat out of it at the same time.

Moving the box nest will require moving the entry box shelter away, so I’ll save doing all this for when I have a daughter available to help out.

Meanwhile…

My husband and I had plans today. We were going to head to the nearer city, where he can go in to exchange his cell phone, as the 2 year plan is up. He doesn’t use it much, but if he simply kept it, we’d be charged almost $700 for the balance on the phone. Or, he can return it and get a credit, but would have no phone. Alternatively, he can exchange it, have another phone on a new plan, and still get a credit.

So that’s what we were going to do and, thanks to a generous monetary Christmas gift from my mother, we were planning to have an actual sit-down dinner date, too. It might just have been to Subway or something, in the same shopping commons as the phone place, but it still would be a fun and rare treat for my husband.

With the cold, we waited until things warmed up in the afternoon before we started heading out. It was -19C/-2F and the time we left. I went ahead to take out the shopping bags in the back of the cab to make room for his walker while warming up the engine a bit. Since we haven’t been able to get the block heater cord repaired, I made sure to run the engine a bit while I was doing the morning rounds, too.

Soon we were loaded up and on our way.

We got maybe 5 or 10 minutes out, when it happened.

The console started dinging, and the “oil pressure low, shut of engine” light started flashing. The oil pressure gauge had suddenly dropped right down.

We already had the oil sensor replaced from the last time it happened.

So I popped on the hazards and pulled over.

Of course, the first thing I did was check the oil level. We had an oil change done when the sensor was replaced, so it should have been full.

It was. Looked pretty clean, too.

I still added a small amount. It was a fight to get the oil cap off (thank goodness we keep a stool in the truck, or I couldn’t have reached it!), and one of the first things I noticed was the interior. It looked almost as if the black plastic was blistered.

It wasn’t.

It was ice.

So I added a bit of oil, then cleaned out the inside of the cap as thoroughly as I could before putting it back and running the engine for a bit before checking the oil again.

Definitely plenty of oil.

Well, we weren’t going to take a chance. Once everything was put away, we turned around and went home, while my husband messaged our daughters to open the gate for us.

The warning light did not turn on again, and the gauge stayed within the range it was supposed to.

The gate was ready and open for us, so I pulled straight in to the garage, stopping only to get the walker out for my husband before pulling the rest of the way in.

As soon as we were inside and settled, I called the garage and left a message describing what happened. Our mechanic called back within minutes.

He asked a few more questions, and he basically confirmed what I already suspected. Most likely, there was a bit of ice from condensation getting into the sensor and triggering that warning. Basically, the engine needed to warm up longer. He has seen this before, but only with GM vehicles.

Hmmm.

Since we know there is plenty of oil, he basically said, if it happens again, it’s not a panic. That was the main thing. The last time it happened, the truck turned out to be almost completely out of oil, even though there were no visible signs of a leak, nor were we burning blue. There is a separate warning light for low oil, and that never turned on. Replacing the sensor also took care of the leak, and the oil level has been steady, since.

Well, I’ll take this as a sign we weren’t meant to go to the smaller city today.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be meeting with my brother at our mother’s for a visit. It’ll be earlier than usual, since he has to leave by noon, but this is his Christmas visit to my mother, as they’ll be visiting the grand kids for Christmas and New Year’s.

If the cold we got hit with last night is why this happened with the truck, though, it should be fine, tomorrow. We’re expected to dip below -20C/-4F for a few hours this evening, but start warming up throughout the night. By the time I should be leaving in the morning, we are expected to be warmer than we are right now. Long range forecast no longer says we’re supposed to get as warm as 6C/43F around Christmas, but it does still say we’ll be hovering around the freezing mark on those days. We will be doing our dinner on Christmas Eve. I will be setting aside a couple of meals and plan to go to my mother’s to have lunch with her on Christmas day.

Hopefully, the truck sensors will behave!

For the rest of today, though, it’s another home day, after all! I’ll be working on more garden analysis posts, instead. 😄

On a semi related note, a while back I wrote about how I was suddenly seeing ads on YouTube again. I ended up getting an updated version of Firefox and installing their adblocker, as it was the only one that still worked. I was still getting them on my phone’s app, to the point I could no longer play YouTube videos at all, they were so intrusive. Which meant, no playing background playlists to help me sleep.

Well, that has stopped as suddenly as it started. I no longer see YouTube ads on any browser I use, nor on my phone app. None of them had gotten updates, either.

Very strange, but I’ll take it!

Oh, this is too funny! I just got a message from the Cat Lady.

One of the cats they took from us was a muted calico we called Muffin. She was an outside cat friendly enough that we could get her into a carrier. She went to them to be spayed, get the usual vet checks, then go up for adoption. Instead, she bonded with the Cat Lady’s husband, and they are still inseperable.

Today, she is out with him, delivering Christmas bonuses and drinking Starbucks.

Muffin still hates the Cat Lady, for some reason – she’s never had any other cat behave like this towards here before. Muffin still tries to bite her, every day, even though she doesn’t have teeth anymore. But she adores the Cat Lady’s husband, attended Zoom calls with him, goes out to job sites, and when she has to stay home, sits at the window, crying for him all day. It’s got to the point that all these hardened contractors now look forward to seeing Muffin. Too funny!

Well, time to adjust my plans and see what I can get done, now that it’s turned out to be a home day.

The Re-Farmer

Analyzing our 2024 Garden: corn, peppers and eggplant

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For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.

Some things managed to work out pretty well, even with our rough start in the garden!

The Original Plan

Corn

Corn is something we’ve tried to grow a few times. The first year, we grew several varieties with some being grown more as part of our long term plan to break up soil that had never been gardened before, and prepare the area for a future food forest. I’ve also been trying to grow kulli corn – a deep purple Peruvian variety – for a number of reasons, though we’ve found ourselves growing Montana Morado, instead. Some worked well, some didn’t.

With our garden size actually being reduced after a flood year, instead of expanding, this year we weren’t necessarily going to grow corn at all. We just didn’t have the space prepared for such a nitrogen hungry plant.

However, I had a couple of short season sweet corn varieties I wanted to try somewhere, so when I found myself with larger spaces between winter squash transplants in the second bed, I chose Yukon Chief, which had the shorter growing season: a mere 55 days!

Peppers

We have been trying different varieties of peppers to find the ones the family likes most. Personally, I can’t eat peppers, so I have to rely on their feedback for this. Last year, we had a mix of success and fail with peppers. This year, my older daughter requested one type of hot pepper, and we figured we should probably cut back on the number of varieties to try out this year. So far, no one has really found enough difference between the varieties of sweet peppers to really choose any one type over the other.

Eggplant

We’ve tried two varieties of eggplant before. The first we tried was Little Finger, which was grown in grow bags. They didn’t thrive, but we did have a few little ones we could harvest that we did enjoy. We later learned that nearby elm trees had roots invading the grow bags – a whole row of them all along the north end of the garden, near the self seeded elm and maple trees my mother allowed to grow after she transplanted the raspberries they’d started growing through.

We tried them again another year, but they fared even worse, growing in one of the concrete chimney block planters by the chain link fence. It wasn’t until this spring that I found the blocks were completely choked out by elm tree roots.

So this year, I wanted to try them again, in a completely different area!

The Classic eggplant was new to use last year. Only one seedling started indoors survived. It went into the wattle weave bed and the plant grew strong and healthy, though it was late in producing. In the end, we had one roughly palm sized eggplant to try, plus a couple smaller ones.

I wanted to try both again, this year. I was rather liking the idea of being able to grow enough eggplant to make baba ganoush, or cook nice big slices of them over an open fire.

How it went

Corn

I was really, really happy with this variety! Having something that matured so quickly was amazing!

Sure, I probably planted them too close together, but that didn’t seem to bother them too much.

They do not grow very large cobs, but the corn was so tasty, I could eat them raw!

There were two problems, though.

One was, high winds. After they got mostly flattened after a day of high winds, I did what I could to straighten them and support them, only for them to get flattened again from another direction.

The other was, racoons. I’d actually harvested all the corn – or thought I did – when I found I’d missed a few cobs. I decided to leave them to dry on the cob, so harvest seed at the end of the year. That never happened, because the racoons tore them apart and ate them.

*sigh*

Peppers

Wow, did we get peppers!

The hot peppers – Cheyenne – were started much earlier indoors. For the sweet peppers, I still had seeds for a collection of early varieties, plus a variety that did very well last year, and even a few seeds left from one I’d tried to grow a previous year.

I ended up planting a few of each, thinking the older seeds would have a lower germination rate.

Which was sort of true.

We ended up with quite a lot of the hot peppers. They went into a raised bed in the East yard, in between the two varieties of eggplant.

The sweet peppers all went into the high raised bed, later to be interplanted with shallots.

They all did really well! Especially the ones in the high raised bed. They got so full of peppers that got so big and heavy, I found myself having to add supports to some of them – and others actually broke their stems from the weight!

What they didn’t do was ripen much.

As with everything else this year, they were well behind. I did have some I could harvest, with the purple Dragonfly and Purple Beauty peppers ripening fastest, then some Sweet Chocolate but I ended up harvesting a whole lot of unripe peppers before they could be killed off by frost.

The good thing about peppers is, they keep ripening after they’ve been harvested.

I did end up with enough peppers ripening indoors that some could be cut up and frozen, while others got dehydrated. The family actually got tired of eating peppers, like they did with tomatoes!

The exception being the hot peppers.

My oldest daughter is the only one that can eat them, and even then, just small amounts. These aren’t even an exceptionally hot variety of pepper, either!

We did try dehydrating a bunch. We don’t have a dehydrator, and use the oven for that. Unfortunately, the peppers made it so that we could barely stay in the kitchen while they were dehydrating, because breathing the fumes caused our lungs to start burning!

Once they were dry, though, they went into a jar. They should be processed into a powder, but no one wants to do it and accidentally end up breaking powdered hot pepper.

There was a LOT of green hot peppers, though, and they ripened very well indoors.

What I ended up doing was stringing them, and they are now hanging in the cat free zone (the living room) above where the heat vent is, to dry. It’s a lot slower, but it doesn’t create fumes.

Eggplant

We ended up with quite a few surviving transplants this year, which was really nice. They went into a low raised bed with the hot peppers. For this bed, I covered it with cardboard and thick paper as a mulch, then cut openings to transplant through. I moved the box frame cover onto it, and set up sheets of plastic around it to create a sort of open greenhouse situation, since the eggplants and peppers are all heat loving plants.

The plastic ended up being torn off by high winds.

Later in the season, I was able to try again, using stronger plastic and running paracord both inside and outside the plastic to keep it in place, which you can see in the last photo in the slideshow below.

The plants themselves stagnated in growth for a while, until things dried up enough that I could mow some lawn. Once they got a nice grass clipping mulch on top of the cardboard and paper, they really started to grow and bloom.

Eggplants have such lovely flowers.

We were able to harvest some small eggplant towards the end of the season, before they all got harvested ahead of a killing frost.

The setbacks means they never got particularly big, but they were big enough to get a taste of them!

My conclusion, and thoughts for next year.

For the corn, I most definitely want to grow them again. While I am happy with the Yukon Chief, I want to try the other variety, next year. I can’t remember the name of it right now, but it matures in 65 days, I believe. Wherever we end up planting them, I want to make sure to have something set up to support the plants so they don’t get knocked over by high winds as they get bigger. I have a few ideas that would involve fence wire or something like that, set up horizontally, for the stalks to grow through.

I also want to find more kulli corn seeds to try again, but maybe not next year. We shall see. I might buy some seeds (if they’re not sold out again), just in case we end up with enough garden real estate available. If it doesn’t happen, though, I’m hoping the few Montana Morado seeds that got included in the mix along the chain link fence will survive the winter and grow. For the number of seeds in there, if they do survive, I expect to have to hand pollinate them. Then I will leave them on their stalks to dry, and save more seed for next year.

We’re still trying out different varieties of sweet corn. Once we figure out what we like that grows well here, we will want to dedicate a larger area of garden space to be able to grow enough that we can can or freeze some. For now, my single packet of I think only 50 seeds will be enough.

As long as we can keep the racoons out of them!

For the peppers, we won’t need to grow hot peppers again for a very long time! I don’t think we want to grow so many sweet peppers again, either. I’m debating, for next year, picking up a variety that grows smaller “snack size” peppers, instead, but I haven’t decided yet.

As for the eggplant, I’m happy with how they did, under the circumstances. I do want to grow them again. I probably won’t grow them next year, though. I want to save the garden real estate for staples, instead.

Given what a rough start we had this spring, all of these did way better than expected, so I am very happy.

The Re-Farmer

Analyzing our 2024 Garden: strawberries and herbs

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For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.

Our plans for herbs and strawberries have had some rough times!

The Original Plans

Strawberries and herbs are among those things we intend to have as our more perennial food garden items. Most herbs can’t survive as perennials where we lived, but some might, and others will reseed themselves, if left to their own devices. Over time, we plan to use the old kitchen garden as… well… a kitchen garden, since it’s right against the house, so it will eventually have a lot of herbs in it. As for strawberries, these are something we expected to interplant in various areas, as well has having dedicated beds of them.

How it started

Herbs

Last year, we started tried a few herbs, in pots and in the wattle weave bed. We had a single oregano seedling survive, some spearmint, a non-specific thyme variety and lemongrass in pots. In the wattle weave bed, we had chamomile and German Winter thyme.

This year, we started only oregano and German Winter thyme indoors.

None of the oregano germinated.

On removing the mulch in the spring, I had some hope that the thyme in the wattle weave bed had survived, but they did not. So that’s where the new thyme got transplanted.

The chamomile, however, had reseeded itself!

We also have mint in the chimney block retaining wall, which trace back to my late grandmother’s garden, plus chives in one corner of the retaining wall, that come back every year.

Strawberries

We had four strawberry plants in the asparagus bed. They should have spread their runners and expanded by now, but the deer kept eating them. They did, however, survive the winter, and started growing again as soon as the soil warmed up.

The real surprise were the tiny strawberries we grew from seed last and transplanted into the wattle weave bed. As they were planted near the outside edge of the bed, I had some doubt that they would survive the winter, even under the mulch. They not only survived, but they thrived!

This year, I did buy some bare root strawberries, and they got their own bed. You can see how that worked out in this video I made.

Thanks to those elm trees, what started out as a very productive squash hill (the first place we tried growing Crespo squash) was barely recoverable. I could only hope that those layers of cardboard would keep the capillary roots from spreading upwards.

The main thing, though, is that we had some new, everbearing strawberries planted that I hoped would do better here, than the ones by the asparagus did!

How it went

Not too bad, for the most part.

Herbs

The German Winter Thyme did well again, in the same spot we grew them last year. We had the Black Cherry tomatoes growing behind them, and filled in empty spots with Red Wethersfield onion around them. The cats rolled all over the onions, but didn’t roll on the bushier thyme.

The chamomile grew and bloomed, but there wasn’t as many as last year. The Red Wethersfield onion was also planted around them and got rolled on, but the chamomile survived the cats.

The mint did okay but actually had to fight off an invasive flower (possibly creeping bellflower, but we never let them grow big enough to confirm) that keeps trying to choke them out, even in the chimney blocks! Which is saying a lot, since mint us usually the invader. I was able to do limited weeding, but these are growing in from below and it’s pretty much impossible to get them out completely. Basically, I just had to weed them enough for the mint to be able to get bigger, then they could crowd out the weed.

The chives, on the other hand, were their usual enthusiastically growing selves.

Strawberries

I was surprised at how well the ones by the asparagus did. They’re a few years old and normally past their prime, but we did get a few ripe berries out of them.

Then the deer ate them.

Deer really seem to love strawberry leaves!

Even putting a makeshift fence around them was not enough to deter the deer.

*sigh*

The new Albion Everbearing strawberries did really well. They grew and spread runners, which I spread around and set the leaf clusters against the soil to root, so we could expand them to other areas in the future. I had thoughts to use them as a ground cover in our budding food forest, for example. They bloomed and developed berries, and we even had a few ripe ones to taste.

Then the deer got them.

I didn’t have a fence around the bed, but I did have poles with flashy pinwheels to startle them away, but it wasn’t enough. I put a net around the bed and they started to recover, only for a deer to actually tear through the netting and get at about half of them. I had a short length of chicken wire I could put around the side with the hole, but by that time, there just wasn’t much season left for them to recover in. There was new growth, though, so I’m hoping they survived.

*sigh*

The runaway success story, though, is the tiny variety of strawberries we grew from seed. Being in the old kitchen garden, the deer don’t get to them, I guess. Too close to the house? I don’t know. They got big and bushy, strong and healthy, and were very prolific! I was really impressed with how they did.

Conclusion and plans for next year

Herbs

I had visions of having fresh culinary herbs to use with our cooking as needed throughout the summer, and gathering blossoms and leaves for herbal teas.

The problem is, we keep forgetting we have herbs in the garden.

With the chamomile, I didn’t want to harvest any blossoms as there weren’t that many this year, and I wanted them to go to seed, instead.

I did remember to use the thyme a couple of times, but that was it. I didn’t even harvest any to dehydrate.

In past years, we gathered fresh mint leaves to make fresh mint tea, but just never got around to it this year. In past years, we used chive blossoms to make infused oils and vinegars, but that didn’t happen this year, and I ended up deadheading them so they wouldn’t spread seeds all over the grass outside the chimney blocks.

Basically, we had so many things happening this year, including lots of things breaking down, that we just didn’t have the spoons left to do this stuff this year. We also went from a very wet late spring to a very hot summer that made doing anything outdoors more difficult.

As for the strawberries, those wonderfully prolific little strawberries – I don’t know if they are a while strawberry, or an alpine variety – the seed kit didn’t name them – that did so well…

The berries themselves just aren’t that big a deal. We have native wild strawberries in the maple grove that manage to produce berries even while choked out by creeping bellflower, and those have an intense strawberry taste. They’re just really tiny. These ones are larger, but they don’t have that intense wild strawberry taste. If they’re not perfectly ripe, they’re actually rather bitter. For that brief time of perfect ripeness, they’re good, but not as good as, say, the Albion Everbearing strawberries.

So while they are a success, they are essentially taking up space that we can grow something more suitable for a kitchen garden.

Which means that, in the spring, I will try and find a good place to transplant them, where they can grow wild.

I might actually transplant the Albion Everbearing strawberries into the old kitchen garden, where they will have better protection from the deer! I really want to expand our strawberries, because we love them so much. The ones with the asparagus, I’m considering a lost cause at this point, but if we can keep the Albion everbearing ones going and spreading, that would be fantastic.

We currently have the larger rectangular bed in the old kitchen garden winter sown with the “greens” mix – spinach, chard, kohlrabi and tiny bok choi, and if the strawberries get transplanted, they will likely go into the long, narrow bed along the retaining wall. So that leaves most of the wattle weave bed (assuming the chamomile reseeds itself successfully again) and the tiny raised bed potentially for herbs.

I’ve picked up seeds for basil and fern leaf dill, though I have seeds for other dill and herbs as well. I don’t know that I will try growing thyme again this year, and oregano just doesn’t seem to want to germinate for us, so I think I will try different varieties this year. If the winter sown greens actually survive and grow, and we have things to harvest, I think we will be more likely to remember to harvest herbs, too.

We will definitely have to find ways to keep the cats off the garden beds, though. I’ll need to build a cover to fit over the larger rectangular bed. The wattle weave will probably get hoops and netting.

The problem with all these barriers to protect our garden from cats and wildlife is, it makes it hard to weed and water them, too!

Next year, however, the old kitchen garden will be a lot further along in being a kitchen garden, too, so that would be another step towards long term goals. It’s slow going, but we are managing to eek our way towards them!

The Re-Farmer

Analyzing our 2024 Garden: peas, beans, carrots and greens

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For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.

Okay, time to take a look at things that did not turn out anywhere near how we originally intended!

The Original Plan

Beans

In the past, we’ve grown lots of different beans at once, mostly with great success. We enjoyed having almost daily harvests, for both fresh eating and for the freezer, and even tried a rarer variety of shelling beans that was suitable for our short season. I’m glad I saved those rarer seeds, because they no longer seem to be available from the company I got them from.

This year, I had many different types of bean seeds. Aside from the seeds I’d saved from the shelling beans we tried, my mother gave me a jar of seeds for shelling beans that trace back to what she grew here every year, decades ago. Along with the shelling beans, I still had seeds for pole beans that we really liked, a variety of bush beans that were good for both fresh eating and shelling, and more bush beans. My plan was to grow each type; pole and bush beans for fresh eating, plus shelling beans. It was just a matter of figuring out where, as I intended to do a fair bit of interplanting.

Peas

We haven’t had much luck growing peas. Between growing conditions and deer eating them, we just never got many! At best, I’d find a few pods to eat while I was doing my morning rounds.

We still have quite a lot of seeds for shelling peas, but we also wanted to get edible pod peas. I hoped to grow enough that we could put some in the freezer, but to at least have enough for fresh eating.

Carrots

Carrots were going to be the only root vegetable for this year. I had lots of seeds for the delicious Uzbek Golden carrot, and made seed tape with a decent amount of them. We also still had pelleted seeds for an orange variety called Napoli. I wanted to grow plenty of both, so that we could freeze or can or store for the winter. Carrot seeds don’t age well, so the seeds would need to be used up. Especially the older pelleted seeds.

Greens

We actually intended to cut back on these. We’ve tried growing a variety of lettuces but, for some reason, they seem to get bitter, even if they aren’t bolting. We also found that, for the amount we actually use them, we may as well just buy them from the grocery store when we feel like it. The only exception to this was spinach. We all like spinach, but have not had much success with them over the past few years. The first year we grew them was amazing, but that was pretty much it for them doing really well. Still, we wanted to at least grow spinach this year, and that was about it for greens.

What we actually did

Beans

We tried two types of pole beans this year. Carminat, a purple podded bean, and Seychelle, a green podded bean. Both did very well the first year we grew them. They were prolific, and we quite enjoyed eating them. The Seychelle beans were interplanted with the Crespo squash. The Carminat got planted along one side of a winter squash bed.

For bush beans, we ended up with only a small space left, where we planted Royal Burgundy beans; a variety we’ve grown before and enjoyed eating.

That was it. Just three varieties ended up being planted.

Peas

For peas, I planted Dalvay shelling peas – something we still had a lot of seeds left for – on the other side of the winter squash bed the Carminat beans were planted in. We also got some edible pod peas that went into one of the low raised beds in the East yard, where a few onions we’d found were transplanted at one end. Nowhere near as much as I’d hoped to plant, but all we had room for.

Carrots and Spinach

These went into the same bed as the edible pod peas. The peas got a trellis net down the middle, carrots were planted on either side, then the spinach along the outside. The idea was, with each thing maturing at different rates, the spinach would be done first, then the peas, until the bed was left with lots of room for the carrots to grow, along with the few onions left to go to seed.

How it actually turned out

Not good.

Beans

The seeds for the pole beans must have been too old. With the Seychelle beans, I planted them by the Crespo squash twice, but we only got three survivors.

The Carminat beans had more survive, but there are a lot of gaps in between plants. I was out of seeds, though, so I tried filling the gaps with Seychelle beans. Only one, maybe two, survived.

With the bush beans, the first sowing didn’t succeed at all – and these were new seeds! I was able to buy more and tried again. This time, we had a nice, short row of bush beans emerge. They did quite well…

Until they got eaten by deer.

They recovered and started going well again.

Then got eaten by deer again.

Amazingly, they recovered again!

We did get beans to harvest from all three types. Some days, I was quite surprised by how many I was able to gather!

Peas

The edible pod peas were another one that needed to be sown twice. With the first sowing, I think 3 in total finally germinated. I bought more seeds and replanted, but the new packet had about half as many seeds, so all we got was one row in the 9′ bed.

The shelling peas did better, in that maybe half of what I planted germinated. These, I could at least “blame” it on them being older seeds.

All the peas and beans got trellis netting to climb. The shelling peas needed to be trained up theirs. The edible pod beans were better climbers. Neither variety of peas thrived, but the edible pod peas did better, and got quite tall. I ended up having to put netting around the entire bed they were in, though, after discovering some eaten by deer. Even with the netting in place, deer were able to reach higher parts of the plants and eat them!

Carrots and Spinach – plus chard, kohlrabit and Jebousek lettuce!

We were only able to plant the Uzbek Golden carrot seed tape; one row on either side of the peas. I hoped to plant more elsewhere, but there just wasn’t the space for it. They did okay, even as we lost control of the weeds in this bed. The real surprise was when several of them went to seed! Carrots are biannual, so they should not have gone to seed in their first year.

The spinach did very poorly. They sprouted, but only a few got leaves large enough to be harvested, and even then, not enough to be worth harvesting at all.

Once it became clear the spinach was done for, I pulled them out and tried planting chard. I had some seeds for two varieties that got mixed up (a cat got at the baggie the seed packets were in and chewed them up!), so those got planted in the same space the spinach did.

They didn’t do well, either, and I only partly blame that on losing control of the weeds in that bed.

Meanwhile, with the Purple Caribe potatoes that failed, I found myself with a gab in the bed that needed filling. I’ve been wanting to grow kohlrabi for some time, with zero success. The first time was almost a success until they got decimated by flea beetles. I think slugs got the other attempts.

I had seeds, though, so I tried them as a fall planting, and amazingly, they started out doing really well!

Until the cats started rolling on them.

They survived the cats, though, and I had some hope to actually have kohlrabi to harvest.

Meanwhile, next to where I planted the kohlrabi, a self seeded Jebousek lettuce appeared. We got these as free seeds a couple of years ago. The first year, the seedlings got almost completely choked out by elm tree seeds. The few that survived, we allowed to go to seed and just left them. The deer ate them, but some did survive to go to seed, so we had a couple show up the next year. They got left alone, too, and went to seed, though I believe they got deer eaten, too. So when a couple of plants showed up again this year, with the kohlrabi nearby, I set up netting over the bed. It didn’t keep the cats out, but it mostly kept the deer out. The wind kept blowing the bottom of the netting loose, no matter how many ground staples, bricks or rocks we used. Which is how deer managed to get at them, anyhow. But they recovered! In face, on of them ended up growing two new stems around the eaten part, and we allowed them to go to seed.

How it ended

Beans

Considering how few bean plants actually survived, pretty darn good. We barely had enough beans to harvest fresh for a few meals, but we enjoyed having them at all. I would still recommend the Carminat and Seychelle varieties of pole beans, and the Royal Burgundy bush bean is such a survivor!!!

When I found some Carminat pods that got missed and were getting too big for fresh eating, I left them, and now we even have seeds saved!

Peas

The peas did poorly over all. We never really had more than a few pods to harvest. Mostly, there would be two or three that I would harvest to eat while I was doing my morning rounds.

Carrots

While we never had a lot of them, I was really happy with the Uzbek golden carrots. They are really tasty, and I would definitely recommend the variety. As for the ones that went to see, the flower clusters never actually produced developed seeds, so I don’t know what to make of that.

The Greens

I wish I knew what was going on with spinach in our garden. We had that one amazing year, plus one decent year in the high raised bed, and that’s it.

The first year we grew chard, they did well, but they didn’t do well this year. Again, I’m not sure why.

The kohlrabi… well…

The flea beetles got them.

I really wasn’t expecting that to happen so late in the season, but they just showed up one day, and the poor plants were black with them.

As for the Jebousek lettuce, they went to seed which I happily collected at the end of the season.

Plans for 2025

Things are going to be very different next year!

With our winter sowing, I ended up making three mixes of seeds. One of them is all root vegetables, including the last of the pelleted carrot seeds and some of Uzbek golden carrots. I also added four different beet varieties, one variety of turnips, four varieties of radishes, plus saved onion seeds. Basically, I just emptied out my old seed packets. How many will actually germinate, I have no idea. We shall see in the spring!

Another mix I made is all greens. The last of our Swiss Chard (two varieties), four varieties of spinach, two of kohlrabi, and the Hinou Tiny Bok Choi seeds I’d saved from the few plants that survived being smothered by elm tree seeds, last year. This mix also has both onions and shallots from saved seed added in.

I ended up making a third mix of seeds. These include two types of sunflowers, Dalvay shelling peas, plus a few King Tut pea seeds I’d saved from previous years, the last of my Royal Burgundy bush beans, a tiny amount of Montana Morado corn seeds that I managed to save after the cats knocked the entire bowl of seeds over and, of course, onion seeds.

Basically, I used this as an opportunity to finish off packets of older seeds, of seeds that I had only a few of.

We do still have other bean seeds that I want to grow. I don’t think I need to buy more seed, but can use what I have. I also want to try edible pod peas again. It will all depend on how many garden beds are available, really. All our plans to expand the garden again seem to get kiboshed, so we’ll see how that actually turns out.

I still have plenty of Uzbek Golden carrot seed tape and loose seeds, and they need to be planted, as the germination rates drop quickly with carrots. I can see sticking those in any place we have room for them.

With greens, if the winter sowing fails, we likely won’t try to plant more (though I do still have several varieties of lettuce seed we could sow) and the bed would probably be given over to something else.

In the end, I think the priority for next year will be with beans, as they seem to do the best here, even with the odds stacked against them. If we have the space to give over to them, I’d really like to plant those rarer shelling beans, and collect more fresh saved seed. We had only a small amount to cook and taste when we grew them, and they are well worth it.

Peas, beans and carrots are things that are staple crops for us, with some types of greens being bonus. We will probably still be trying new varieties, especially with peas, as we try to find something that will successfully grow here, but if things go as they should, they will be part of our garden, ever year.

The Re-Farmer

Well, d*** What a thing to come home to

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Today is now 2 weeks since Kohl and the fluffy boy were spayed and neutered, so it was time to open up the isolation shelter.

I did today’s morning rounds, starting with feeding the outside cats, as usual. When I got to the isolation shelter, I saw Eye Baby’s messed up eye was stuck shut and his nose all crusty. When I opened the sliding window to put food in, he was much more interested in escaping! So I grabbed him and took him inside, where I held him while my daughter washed his face.

Once his face was cleaned up, I put him in the sun room, under the heat lamp. Then I opened up the isolation shelter and put the entry box over the ramp.

Then I went back for the jug of warm water to top up the various bowls. I found Eye Baby on one of the plant stands we have for them to use to get up onto the platform and other shelves. I scatter kibble on it, as some of the cats prefer to eat there, rather than at the trays on the floor. He was eating quite enthusiastically.

When I returned to the isolation shelter, an adult white and grey was already inside and going for the food bowl. The fluffy male was just outside the entry box, saw me and dashed back into the isolation shelter!

There was no sign of Kohl, anywhere.

I kept an eye out for her as I continued my rounds. I didn’t see her until I was back in the sun room. I found Eye Baby in a cuddle puddle in one of the cat beds. As I tried to get a picture, Kohl emerged from somewhere and photobombed me! So I picked her up and cuddled her for a while. She seemed quite happy to be out of the isolation shelter.

Not long after, I started heading out to the garage to go to my mother’s. I found a whole bunch of adult cats in the isolation shelter – plus the fluffy boy! I did try to pet him through the sliding window, but the best I could get was some finger sniffing.

Everything seemed to be going well, though. The cats were really liking having access into the isolation shelter again.

From there, it was off to my mother’s town. I left early so I could make a quick stop at a small department store before going to the gas station. I’d seen that gas prices had dropped to $1.229 a few days ago, but it was back up to $1.309 So I just got $30 in gas to top it up a bit.

By then it was past 11am, which is when their fried chicken is ready, so I got chicken and wedges, plus a couple of smoothies, for my mother and I to have for lunch, as she doesn’t get Meals on Wheels on Thursdays.

When I got to her place, I saw her water jugs already set out on her walker; there is a tap on the laundry room with softened water that she uses for drinking and cooking water. She was talking to someone on the phone when I knocked and went in, so I just left the bag of food on the table, then went to refill her water jugs. She was done on the phone by the time I got back, and told me her niece (who is also my godmother) was wanting to pop by some time today.

So we had our lunch, then went over her shopping list. A few things got added to it, and then I headed out. She didn’t need much, so I wasn’t gone for long, even though I went to a couple of different places to get it all. I did get a couple of extra things for her that weren’t on her list, but I that knew she would be good with, and were within her budget. She was quite happy with the changes.

I didn’t stay too much longer, as there was going to be social activities in the common room this afternoon, and my cousin was going to visit some time after that. My mother was going to have a very full day!

While I was in town, my husband asked me to pick something up, but I hadn’t seen it in the stores, so on the way home I made a side trip to the town closer to us. I found what he needed, but on the way back, I realized I really needed to go to the bathroom, so I stopped at a full serve gas station.

The gas prices here were $1.229!

When I told the gas jockey to put in $20 (which came very close to filling my tank!), I told him what the price was in my mother’s town. He was very surprised, and told me they were expecting their prices to go down again, soon!

That done, I could finally head home. After bringing stuff in and catching up with my younger daughter, she mentioned going the litter in my bedroom/office. She hadn’t had a chance to empty the bucket yet, though. With using stove pellets for litter, we’ve been tossing it behind the outhouse to compost. Since I still had my boots on, and didn’t want the bucket to freeze in the old kitchen, I went through to dump it out.

When I opened the old kitchen door into the sun room, the first thing I saw was a white and grey kitten, lying on the floor next to the door to outside.

It was Eye Baby!

He had been there long enough that rigor was starting to set in.

Damn, damn, damn. He seemed to be doing so much better this morning! What happened in the few hours I was away?

Since we can’t bury him right now, he went into the branch pile for cremation. There are now two kittens in there.

I’ve since updated the Cat Lady about this, as she helped us so much with him, providing him with medication for his eye and antibiotics for longer treatment. Yes, he was still sickly – that’s why we put him into the isolation shelter – but still. It was a real surprise, after how he seemed just this morning.

Damn.

After taking care of Eye Baby’s remains and finishing my errand, I gave the outside cats their evening feeding early, and topped up their water as well.

There were SO many cats inside the isolation shelter! The food bowl was completely empty, so I put a generous amount in there.

Fluffy boy was still in there, and was very interested in the food bowl, but there were adult cats in the way. Fluffy was on the shelf above, so I gave him a handful there. He was shy about my reaching out to him, but was willing to eat.

I even got to pet him! After a couple of times petting him, he even stopped acting like he was about to run away, and fell under the magic of ear skritches.

Kohl, meanwhile, prefers the sun room, and comes right over for cuddles.

I’d hoped we’d find homes for the two of them before we opened the isolation shelter, but the only people that expressed an interest when the Cat Lady put the word out about them were people who lived too far away to make it practical. I’m not sure about the legalities of cross border pet adoptions, either!

The Cat Lady is feeling really bad that they didn’t have space for Eye Baby, even though she knows they probably would have ended up keeping him permanently, and being another very expensive cat.

Speaking of which, she updated me on Button.

Not only is he deaf, but he’s now almost completely blind! He’s had so many tests since they took him in, they’re just done with it. He can no longer find his food bowl, and they constantly keep an eye out for him. Even their dog has been helping! He’ll actually pick up Button and carry him to the food bowls, or to his cat bed, or out of harms way. The Cat Lady has fallen completely in love with Button, as has one of her daughters. He’s such a unique looking cat, with his eyebrows and deep blue eyes, he’s actually had a few people express interest in adopting him, but nope: they are keeping him. I expect he will not be long lived, with all the health problems he’s turned out to have, but he’s wildly loved and is having the best life he could possibly have.

We are such sucks for the cats.

The Re-Farmer

Analyzing our 2024 Garden: tomato and potato surprise

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For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.

As with so many other things in our garden this year, things did not go as planned or expected!

Tomatoes – how it started

This year, we were planning to cut down on how many tomatoes we were going to plant. I wanted a paste tomato for making sauces and, by request, we were going to have a few cherry type tomatoes for fresh eating. Two, maybe three, varieties.

For the cherry tomatoes, we had Chocolate Cherry and Black Cherry. For the paste tomato, I tried San Marzano this year, so see what the hype was all about.

Then we got free seeds with one of our orders, for Forme de Ceour tomatoes, a slicing tomato, so we had to try those!

Then there were the mystery compost ring tomatoes!

Oh, and a couple of mystery self seeded tomatoes. 😄

When starting them from seed indoors, I planted just a few seeds of of the cherry and slicing tomatoes, but a lot more of the paste tomatoes, with the expectation of processing and canning them.

The problem was, we had a very high germination rate, and I just can’t bear to toss away strong, healthy seedlings. Which means we ended up with considerably more transplants than intended.

And almost all of them survived transplanting!

How it went

Let’s start with

The Black Cherry tomatoes.

Those got transplanted into the wattle weave bed, along the back of the long side if the L shape. Each transplant had a protective collar round them, held in place with a pair of bamboo stakes that would later be used to support them as they grew.

The collars are something I will continue to do in the future. My husband goes through a lot of gallon jugs of distilled water for his CPAP humidifier, so we’ve got lots of them available. The tops and bottoms are removed, and they get placed over the transplant. This protects them from wind and, in the early parts of the season, from cold spring nights.

It also protected the transplants from rolling cats.

Bonus, the collars came it handy for spot watering. Fill the collars with water, and it slowly absorbed right at the base of the plants, rather than spreading across the garden bed.

The Black Cherry tomatoes – there were 7 of them – THRIVED!!! They got incredibly tall, growing up the stakes, then into the lilac branches above. They produced so many clusters of tomatoes, the branches couldn’t really hold the weight. We ended up having to find ways to add more support as they got bigger. It did take a long time for them to start ripening, though – again, due to our unfortunate spring weather.

The Forme de Ceour tomatoes

We ended up with 9 or 10 transplants. They went into the larger rectangular bed in the old kitchen garden, near the wattle weave bed, with the garlic down the middle, and Red Wethersfield onions interplanted with them.

They, too, absolutely thrived! I’m sure it helped that the sump pump hose was set to drain against the base of the bed, at the high end of the garden. With so much rain this spring, the pump was going off many times a day until well into late summer. Which means this bed got watered from below, frequently, and with our soil drainage, they would never had gotten over watered.

They were also quite prolific, and were among the first to start giving us ripe tomatoes, which my family assures me were quite delicious. They got so heavy with tomatoes that the weight actually broke some of the stakes supporting them!

The Chocolate Cherry tomatoes

There were 7 of these that got transplanted into the chimney block planters at the chain link fence, leaving one empty block for the Goldy zucchini to be planted in.

They grew pretty well, but did not thrive, like the others did. They produces lots of tomatoes, but they were slow to ripen, and few ripened at a time. I now think the chimney block planters themselves may be part of the problem.

The San Marzano tomatoes.

While we started the most of these from seed, an unfortunate falling tray accident did quite a bit of damage.

With the spring weather and inability to work on the main garden beds, I ended up planting the largest and strongest plants into the retaining wall chimney blocks. These blocks have mint in alternative blocks, with chives at one end, so they went into the open alternating blocks.

These did not do well. The plants never got particularly strong or healthy, and they produced few tomatoes.

When a bed was finally ready in the main garden area, the last transplants – the weakest ones – finally got into the ground.

They did fantastic. Even the one that was so spindly, I debated just tossing it rather than transplanting it, recovered and thrive!

I was never able to keep up with pruning these ones, so the side branches soon splayed out in all directions, so the point I was sure they had crushed most of the onions growing in between them. We ended up winding jute twine around the stems until we could lift them up and tie them off to their bamboo supports.

They did not, however start to ripen until very late, and when they did, we never got a lot of them. As a determinate variety, they should have all ripened pretty much at the same time, but they did not.

The Mystery Tomatoes

When harvesting potatoes from the bed along the other section of chain link fence, I uncovered a volunteer tomato. I ended up transplanting it to one end of the bed, so I could harvest the potatoes. It grew quite well, considering how late in the season it showed up. It produce large amounts of small tomatoes. Small enough that I don’t think they were survivors from when we planted a Mosaic Mix of cherry and grape tomatoes, but too big to be the Spoon tomatoes we’ve grown there in another year.

None of them ripened before frost.

Then there were the compost ring tomatoes!

These were from the seeds we dumped into the compost after processing last year’s harvest. The plants got massive. Eventually, I could see some that I could recognize as most likely from the Indigo Blue we grew last year. Others were clearly Roma VF.

But then there were the round ones. We never grew red tomatoes like that. I have no idea where they came from!

How it Ended

So.

Many.

Tomatoes.

With first frost approaching, my daughter and I harvested all the green tomatoes in one evening, along with the last of the winter squash.

Two of those bins are almost all San Marzano. One has Forme de Ceour on the bottom. Two are all the cherry tomatoes, plus a few Forme de Ceour as well – and the last of the patty pans, which you can see beside the cat.

The real surprise was the compost ring.

The plants were so strong and dense, I had to cut them away to reach the tomatoes – and there were so many tomatoes hidden under the foliage! The foliage was so dense, the tomatoes were actually looking blanched.

This bin is just from the compost ring. In one corner, you can see the dark Indigo Blues (most likely). The rest would be the Roma VV.

Those round tomatoes, though, with one looking quite red. I have no idea what they are. We never grew tomatoes like this. We haven’t even bought tomatoes like this in the store!

It’s been months since they were harvested, and we still have a box with ripening tomatoes in it, in the kitchen.

My tomato Conclusion

This was a successful year for most of the tomatoes. As with everything else, they were about a month behind, but most were very prolific.

I don’t know that we’ll be growing tomatoes next year, though.

I don’t eat fresh tomatoes. They make me gag. I can eat them after they’ve been processes, as long as they are a sauce or a paste. My family likes fresh tomatoes.

They are getting sick of tomatoes! 😄

When we weren’t able to process them fast enough, we put whole tomatoes into the freezer to be processed later.

We still have some from last year.

The problem is, they end up buried in the freezer and we don’t get to them.

Hopefully, this winter, we can make a project of processing them, if only to free up space in the freezer!

If we do grow any tomatoes next year, they will likely be another cherry type tomato, and not many of them. Or, we will get more volunteers!

The Potatoes

We bought two new varieties of tomatoes for this year. We got a couple of 3 pound bags of German Butterball, a later season variety, and Purple Caribe, and earlier season variety.

We ended up planting a third variety.

But first, we had to amend soil, to try and increase the acidity.

Once the soil was amended, there were only enough Purple Caribe to plant in 2/3rds of the bed. We still had some Red Thumb fingerlings from last year left – they were looking pretty wizened and sprouty by then! I planted the largest, healthiest looking ones, and the rest went into the compost ring.

It was a while before we were able to plant the German Butterball variety, in one of the low raised beds in the East yard.

How it went

With the Purple Caribe not well at all. About half of them never grew. We had a few plants that we could harvest, leaving two late bloomers to grow as long as possible. There were very few potatoes to harvest.

They were good potatoes, though.

The Red Thumb did much better, which was a real surprise. We got a decent harvest out of them, considering how few were planted.

The German Butterballs were left in the ground for as long as I felt we could get away with. I’m quite happy with the harvest I got out of them, too. We didn’t plant enough to keep for the winter, but we do still have some left now. We’re saving the last of them to have with our Christmas dinner.

Potato Conclusion and thoughts for next year

We are still in the “finding what kind we like” phase with potatoes. I would definitely be okay recommending the German Butterball potatoes. I wish I knew what happened with the Purple Caribe potatoes. This is the second time we’ve tried to grow a caribe type. The first time, the area we planted in got flooded. We had flooding this spring, but where the Purple Caribe failed would not have been affected by it. The Red Thumb fingerlings were a pleasant surprise. These are good potatoes and, clearly, do well when kept and used as a see potato. The only problem is, as a fingerling potato, they are harder to clean and peel for cooking, and just take so much longer to prepare because of that. So while they are good, I think we will move away from fingerling types completely.

Next year, I do want to grow potatoes again. I have just not decided on a variety yet, and am not even sure where I would grow them at this point.

All in all, though, I would consider the potatoes as successful this year, and am happy with what we got.

The Re-Farmer