2021 garden

Our 2021 garden; made in the shade, and we have melons!

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While doing the evening watering, the girls spotted a couple of little melons last night! I just had to go looking for them this morning.

Aren’t they adorable?

The bigger one is about 2 inches long. I wasn’t expecting them to be fuzzy. :-D

These are the Halona melons. Still nothing among the Pixies – at least not that we can see. Lots of flowers, though.

In thinking of how to protect our Crespo squash from being nibbled on, and our new sprouts from the upcoming heat, I scrounged in the old garden shed and dug up some old, bent up, decorative wire border fences.

Most of the sections went around the Crespo squash. Whatever has been eating them has not tried to go past the hoops, so I’m hoping the new border will further dissuade it.

The ground here is so rocky, I wasn’t able to push all the wire “legs” into the soil! Enough are in to keep it from falling over, though, so it should be fine.

There were a few sections left, and they got used in the garden bed that doesn’t have a row cover on it. Then I used some bed sheets as shade covers. I neglected to take progress photos, though. :-/

There were 6 individual sections that got evenly spaced over the seedlings. The bundle of fencing had been tied with a fairly long ribbon, so I used that to join the tops of as many of the middle ones as I could. As I was laying the sheets down, though, there was nothing in the centre to support the ends. I had a short piece cut from a hula hoop left, so that’s now in the middle, on a couple of sticks in the ground to hold it up. It was too short to bend well, so there’s a kink in the hula hoop piece, but at long as it holds the sheet up, I don’t care! :-D

After that, rocks and bricks were used to pull the fabric taught and weigh it down.

For this bed, I could use some old Twin sheets. For the other two, I had some queen and kind sized sheets to use.

The one top sheet was easy enough, but the fitted sheets needed to have their elastics cut off, and one of them was cut in half and used to cover the ends of the rows. With these, the fabric could be secured by tucking it under the wooden frame. The sheet that was cut in half is barely wide enough on one frame, and a few inches too narrow on the other, but the ends are tucked, and in the middle of the row, the other sheets were laid on top to hold it in place.

So now our shade-loving seedlings have their shade, and protection from the heat of the day. We can uncover them when we start the evening watering, so they get some less direct light during a cooler time of the day. Then I can cover them again when I do my morning rounds.

We’re supposed to start hitting 30C/86F and higher, tomorrow, though the hourly forecast on one of my apps says we’re supposed to hit 32C/90F this afternoon. The record high for today is 33C/91F, set back in 2002. I think we were actually living in this province again in 2002, though I believe we moved back in the fall. The record low for today is 9C/48F, set in 1993.

Anyhow, we’re supposed to stay about 30C/86F for almost a week, and these sheets should help keep the seedlings a bit cooler. I’m considering whether it would be a good idea to moisten the sheets, too, but the extra weight of water might be too much for the frames to hold.

It should be interesting to see how these work out!

The Re-Farmer

Second row cover, a determined little bugger, and happy times!

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Today, I was able to find a piece of wood of the right size to put end caps on the second chicken wire row cover. When I headed out to start working on it this evening, I discovered…

… that little woodchuck is a determined little bugger!

Over the next while, I made sure to make lots of noise as I went past the stairs to make sure that, if the woodchuck were in there, it would run off.

My daughters told me earlier that they’d seen the littlest woodchuck in the birth bath, drinking water. At least it was just the little one. The big one would have knocked the bird bath right off its pedestal!

One of the things I was thinking of while adding the end pieces to the row cover, was how to support the chicken wire. I no longer had any hula hoop pieces, like I used in the last one. I thought I might be able to use some old hose pieces, so I went to the pile of junk and odd bits and pieces by the old garden shed. I had left a damaged hose there, and used pieces of it to hold the mosquito netting onto the hula hoops when we had that rigged up as a cover over one of the spinach beds. When I looked at the hose, though, it was so floppy from the heat, that I could see it would never be able to hold up the wire mesh.

However…

… among the miscellaneous bits and pieces, I noticed some wire that looked pliable enough to bend into a curve, yet stiff enough to hold up the chicken wire. I was able to cut three lengths that I could weave through the chicken wire, and was able to push the ends in between the boards the chicken wire was held by. It did the job really well!

With the heatwave returning, I am thinking to sacrifice some old sheets to use as shade cloths, draped over these frames. The problem is, there is still one more newly planted bed, and I am out of the materials needed to made another row cover like these. We are going to have to figure something out! We finally have the radishes, kohlrabi and kale sprouting, along with the chard. I’d like for them to actually survive!

After this was done, I banged around the concrete steps for a while and, once sure that there was no critter under there, brought over some bigger rocks and broken pieces of bricks to fill the hole in again. Hopefully, these are big enough and heavy enough that it won’t be able to dig through again.

I was just about to head back inside while the girls were getting ready to do the evening watering, when I had a very happy surprise.

My husband actually felt well enough to walk around outside! He got a tour of most of the garden beds, and even felt well enough to walk to squash tunnel. He didn’t use his walker – it may be a heavy duty walker, but even it can’t handled the rough ground out there – and he didn’t even use a cane! Granted, it was slow going, and walking over those old plow furrows took extra care, but he did it! Gosh, I can’t remember the last time he felt well enough to go outside, without needing to go to a medical appointment or something. I’m so happy! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden; new seedlings – plus critters

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Today, with repeated warnings for thunderstorms, and even the sound of thunder in the distance, we got only a smattering of rain this afternoon. Barely enough to get the ground a bit wet. :-( At least we’re a couple of degrees cooler than forecast. With the conditions we’ve had this year, our Rural Municipality officially declared an agricultural emergency. We had one last year, and I seem to remember there was an attempt by the province to declare one the year before, but it was rejected by the federal government. When I was growing up here, there were no such declarations. Whatever federal funding programs that are now available were brought in while we were living elsewhere, in cities.

It was during one of those times our skies were spitting a bit of moisture that I headed outside for a bit and made a point of checking the newly planted beds. Happily, we now have more seedlings appearing!

  • Swiss Chard
    “Bright lights”
  • Kohlrabi
    “Early Purple”
  • Kale
    “Russian Red”

Yes, these pictures were all taken after there was some rain. :-/

Both types of chard are showing seedlings, though I only took a photo of the one type.

It would be awesome if we FINALLY got some kohlrabi! We will be taken extra steps to try to protect these beds, since what’s growing in them are favoured by all kinds of critters. The red flakes you see on the ground around the seedlings are hot pepper flakes, which we hope will deter critters better than the sprays and granules we’ve bought.

Which leads me to why I headed outside.

I saw the woodchuck out by the old compost pile again.

Yes, I sprinkled the new mystery squash seedlings growing in there with hot pepper flakes, too.

As I came out, the woodchuck watched me for a while before finally running off and into…

*sigh*

…the old burrow we thought had finally been abandoned. We’re still running water into it, and collapsing the entrance little by little. The entrance is not being cleared, but they’re still squeezing in.

After seeing the woodchuck go in, I went and raided my kitchen cupboards again and dragged out a package of whole, dehydrated hot peppers. After giving them a rough chop, I scattered them in and around the opening.

At some point, we will be sure enough of it being empty, that we can finally fill it in. :-/

While heading back inside, I did get a chance to play with some more pleasant critters. Butterscotch’s junk pile babies!

Three of them like to come out to play with the stick, though they still won’t come close enough to touch. There’s that one tabby, hidden in the background, that just will not come closer.

I saw Rozencrantz’s babies – the other junk pile babies! – today, too, though I couldn’t get any pictures. The one that looks like Nicky the Nose is a bit braver and doesn’t run off until it’s sure if I’m coming closer. They like to play in the soil the cucamelons and gourds are planted. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that I’ve caught them actively digging into the edge of the bed! At least they’re not digging near the plants, themselves. :-/

While we are still getting thunderstorm warnings, when I look at the hourly forecast, the warnings disappear. Instead, we will have sun and clouds for a few hours, and then it switches to “smoke”, all night. There are quite a few wildfires in the province right now, including about 5 that are listed as out of control, but none are near our area. Fire risk, of course, remains high so we are still under a total burn ban. It looks like we won’t get to test out the firepit grill my brother and his wife got for us this year at all, nor the big BBQ that they passed on to us after getting a smaller one for themselves.

Maybe we’ll get a chance to use them in the winter!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: morning finds

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While doing my rounds this morning, I topped up the small bird feeder. As I took it down from its hanger, I heard something fly out from the plants below. It turned out to be a goldfinch. It flew onto a nearby lilac branch, and just stayed there, watching me.

As I went by again, on my way to the garden, I saw it again.

I came withing a few feet of it, and it just stayed there. Like it was trying to sleep and wondering what this idiot human was doing at 5:30 in the morning!

A few days ago, I noticed we’d lost a few sunflowers, among the Hopi Black Dye rows, and a couple of sweet corn. Off hand, I would have thought “deer”, but it was odd. There were just a few nipped plants, and they were in the middle of the rows, in roughly the middle of blocks, not along the edges as I would expect from a deer going around the roped off blocks.

Nothing showed up in the garden cam, which told me that whatever it was, it was too small to trigger the motion sensor where the camera was set up. So I repositioned the camera (mounting in on that flag stand was the best rig ever!) to hopefully catch something.

When checking the beds before watering them, I was disappointed to find this.

The second Crespo squash find has had its end nibbled off, too. Only as far as the hoop barrier, but then, the only vine had been nibbled about the same amount, and there was no barrier at all at the time.

Unfortunately, we don’t have another camera for this end of the garden.

As for the sweet corn…

Three corn plants were nibbled on. In the middle of a row, and in the middle block of the 3 corn blocks!

Just those three. Nothing else in the area was nibbled on.

It was a gorgeous 18C/64 when I first came out, but by the time I finished using the new action hoe to finish weeding a second row, it was already getting too hot for manual labour. So I headed indoors and checked the trail cam files, to see if whatever did this was captured.

Well, waddaya know. Do you see those two “lights” on the left?

Those are the eyes of two big, fluffy raccoons!!! And the far one could be seen coming out of the roped off area, while the nearer one was on the outside of the roped area.

*sigh*

So it is likely these guys that have been nibbling our sweet corn and sunflowers. We have not been seeing deer on the trail cams lately, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been going elsewhere in the yard. The water level in the kiddie pool is down, but not by much, so I don’t think anything as big as a deer has been using it.

The more stuff like this I see, the more I am thinking we are going to have to invest in a guard dog. A large breed that loves our cold winters. Which is a weird thing to think of, in our current heat.

As I write this, we’re at 33C/91F with a humidex of 36C/97F, and our high is predicted to be 34C/93F… oh, wait. My weather app icon on my desktop just changed. We’ve just hit 34C. The humidex is supposed to reach 37F/99F. Which is actually a bit lower than was forecast, a few days ago. But then, the weather forecasts have been unusually off this spring and summer. It’s one thing to be off by a couple of degrees, or even the continual calling for rain and thunderstorms that never happen. It’s when they say things like “rain will stop in X minutes”, and there’s no rain at all, anywhere in the region. Or “rain will start in X minutes”, but if I look at the weather radar, there isn’t any rain showing in the entire province, nor even in provinces on either side of us, nor the states to the north of us. Frustrating!

Still, over the next two weeks, the temperatures are expected to hover just above or below 30C/86F. One of my apps has a 25 day forecast, so it’s running into August, where, we’re expected to hover around the 25C/77F range. The average temperatures for both July and August in our area is 25C/77F, so I guess that’s about right. I was planning to plant spinach and lettuce in late July. I guess we’ll find out if it’s too hot for them or not!

One thing about our expanded gardening this year. We are continually looking at things and saying, “okay, so next year we’ll do this” or “next year, we’ll not to that.” :-D It would all be a waste, if we didn’t learn anything from it! :-D

Now.

What to do about the raccoons…

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: new sprouts, and… I must not compare!

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While the girls were doing the evening watering, I headed out to check some of the beds they hadn’t got to, yet. I thought I saw something this morning, and I wanted to check.

I did see something – and by evening, I saw more somethings!

The radishes are starting to sprout already!

  • “Champion”
    24-30 days to maturity
  • “Cherry Belle”
    21-27 days to maturity
  • “French Breakfast”
    23-29 days to maturity
All three varieties were showing sprouts!

Here’s hoping these ones don’t disappear, like the ones we interplanted with our sweet corn!

I have been keeping a close eye on our summer squash, too.

This sunburst squash is of a size I would normally pick, but there is only one this big, so I will leave it until there are others to pick with it. We also have more of the green zucchini that is almost big enough to pick.

While watering the beans, my daughter noticed this…

Some of the purple bean flowers are starting to open! When I checked, some of the green ones were also starting to open, but they’re harder to see than the purple beans, with their amazing, bright colours.

While I’m excited to see them starting to bloom, I have to remind myself not to compare. I’m on several gardening groups for cold climate gardening, zone 3 gardening, and local gardeners. Today, someone posted pictures of their huge pea plants, and the basket of peas they had picked, just today.

These are our peas.

The purple peas are doing a bit better than the green peas. They are flowering and growing pods. But they are also struggling. They started out doing well, but have basically just stopped growing. By this time, they should be well up the trellises, much larger, and much closer to having pods that can be harvested.

It’s similar with the bush beans. The purple ones are doing better than the others, as they have from pretty much the start, but they are all a lot smaller than they should be. The sweet corn is also a lot smaller than I am seeing in other people’s gardens, which have corn the size of our purple corn, that was started much earlier and transplanted, or the Dorinny corn, which was seeded before last frost. Even the renter’s corn in our field is about waist high now.

I have to admit; seeing how well other people’s gardens are doing, in spite of the heat we’ve been getting right now, is sometimes rather discouraging. These are gardens in the same climate zone we are in, and many of them planted even later than we did.

I have to remind myself that these are completely different gardens, many of them established years ago. Even the new gardens are in very different situations. There are many reasons why our peas, corn and beans are looking stunted. The heat, certainly. Perhaps we’re not watering them as much as they need under current conditions. Maybe it’s because their roots have made their way through the thin layer of nutrient rich soil and into the nutrient poor soil, below, and even our fertilizing them isn’t enough to make up for it. Maybe it’s all the weeds and plants that were there before we planted. We don’t have access to good compost, we ran out of mulch and can’t get more, etc. The critter damage adds to the problems, but that’s a different issue altogether.

Plus, of course, we’re gardening in temporary locations. Even the beds that are where we will be gardening permanently will have high raised beds built in them, so the current beds are going to be completely redone.

From the start, as we planned where to plant different things, we knew that if we got anything at all from the farthest beds in particular, that would be a win.

But, my goodness, it sure would be nice to have a big basket of freshly picked peas right now! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: nibbles and attempted nibbles

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While doing my morning rounds, I found that something had tried to get under the floating cover on a beet bed.

It seems than an onion did its job of guard duty!

This particular union had been falling over on its own before, and when I picked it up, I could see it’s roots were gone and it had started to rot a bit.

There is now a brick where the onion used to be. LOL

Unfortunately, other things were not so lucky.

While our Crespo squash has not been bothered since we put distractions around it, for the first time, I’ve found some of our Montana Mordao corn has been nibbled on. Just two little ones, right at the corner, suggesting a passing deer. The flags I left from marking where to transplant seem to no longer be enough to keep them away.

Project for this evening, when things cool down a bit: place distracting things around the purple corn.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: time for a hair cut!

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It was a rough night for me, last night. Very little sleep, and the pain levels are just high enough to make any position uncomfortable after only a short time. Thankfully, my husband was well enough this morning to head out do all the food bowls for the cats, and refill the bird feeder, allowing me to postpone the rest of my morning rounds until later in the day.

Once I did get out, the first thing I noticed was the haze. I know we don’t have fires nearby, but we’re getting smoke. I’ll have to check the fire maps later, and see what the current status is.

The other thing I noticed was Junk Pile cat. Who looked at me and growled.

Now, why would she do that?

Because she had brought her kittens over, and they were around the cat shelter! I saw some furry little butts disappearing behind it, so I carefully went around, giving them lots of space, to check on the potatoes and grapes. I saw a little grey and white kitten run across to the storage out, while a little tuxedo squeezed under the cat shelter.

A tuxedo?

Yup. She had more kittens with her this time! There were at least three, possibly four. I was just catching glimpses of them, though later on I saw the tuxedo under a tree by the storage house, watching me from a safe distance.

I am so glad she’s bringing her babies over to the food bowls!! Hopefully, they will be moving into the inner yard now.

Before finishing my morning rounds, I got the hose going to refill the water barrel at the far beds. Unfortunately, it is still leaking. I’ll have to pinpoint exactly where, then empty it enough that it can dry and I can try sealing them again.

Once everything else was done, I came back outside to give the onions a hair cut. :-D

It was on one of the gardening groups I’m on that I saw someone post pictures of the green onions they had just harvested and bagged up for the freezer. I know it’s recommended to trim onions grown from seed, down to about 3 inches, before transplanting. I hadn’t thought about trimming them, other than to gather greens for the day’s cooking, before harvest. The gardener that posted the pictures said that trimming them meant more energy going towards growing the bulbs. If the greens start falling over, the onions stop growing for the season. I knew that last part, but it never occurred to me that the growing season could be extended by trimming. I’ve never grown onions before, and the onions my mother grew were left in the ground to come back, year after year, so I never saw her doing that, either.

The yellow onions sets that I bought locally got really large greens. I quickly ran out of space in my colander, and had to come back to do the bigger shallots, then the other onion bed. The red onions (from sets) and the other yellow onions (from seed) did not have as many large greens, but the colander still got pretty full again! All the greens completely filled our giant metal bowl. Thankfully, it has a lid, because the cats were VERY curious! It’s full enough that the lid is sitting on top of greens, but at least that cats can’t get at them. Onions are toxic to cats, but that doesn’t stop them from being very curious about them!

We’ll have a lot of washing of greens to do, and then they’ll be coarsely chopped. We will probably dehydrate a couple of pans of them in the oven, and the rest will get frozen.

We’re going to have enough to last us quite a long time! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden; summer sowing

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Finally! I got the summer sowing done, in all three empty beds. :-)

Before I started on that, though, I made another attempt at trying to keep the woodchuck out of our carrot beds.

I’d read the Epsom salts are a thing they don’t like, while also being good for the garden. We didn’t have a lot left, so one of the beds was a bit sparser. We shall see if it helps, any.

Then I got to work on the first empty bed. This is the one that’s slightly wider, and that I’d already started to prep, and sized the mesh cover for.

I laid the board down as something to walk on, when we tend it later. The piece of scrap wood in the middle is a divider. In the foreground, I planted the Bright Lights Swiss Chard, and on the other side of the divider are French Breakfast radishes, with two short rows of each.

The tool you see in the middle is what I’m using as a hoe. The metal is quite thin, compared to most garden tools. If anyone knows what that is called, I’d love to know!

The second bed got three things planted in it.

Towards the middle of the bed is one long row of Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard.

You know, I hope we actually like Chard. :-D

The row on the outside has Cherry Belle radish in the foreground, and on the far side of the brick is the Russian Red kale.

In the last bed, the Early Purple Vienna kohlrabi are planted on the outside, and Champion radish is planted on this inside.

Later in the month, these beds will have spinach and lettuces planted in them. The kale is a frost hardy plant and I’ve read it tastes better after being hit with a frost. I planted the radishes sparsely, as they can get quite big when allowed to go to pod. We can start harvesting the chard in less than a month, and they should be done before first frost. By putting the taller plants that will be there for the rest of the growing season on the west side, I hope that they will help provide shade for the lettuces and spinach, and we can maybe plant them a bit earlier, as long as the soil doesn’t get too warm for germination.

We will have to monitor all our beds frequently. In the last little while, we’ve seen quite an increase in grasshoppers. Some people in the local gardening groups I’m on have had major problems with them, and they seem to be slowly making their way north.

I admit, this one was rather cute. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this sort of colour before!! I find myself wondering if this is grasshopper albinism, or a species that happens to be almost white in colour!

With the seeds sown, I worked on weeding around one of the onion beds for a while, then dragged my aching butt over to the water barrel at the furthest garden bed to fill it. The spray plastic coating we’d used to seal cracks had started to come loose on the inside, so I went to pull it off while I was filling the watering can. A huge chunk peeled off, and the barrel promptly started to leak at one of the cracks. We still have a bit of the silicon sealant left, so last night, I patched the crack. It should be cured by now, and I wanted to refill the barrel with water. That was when my daughter came out to let me know she needed to pick up a parcel in the mail and go to the grocery store in town, so I set that aside and headed in. Not before I got her to help me position the adapted wire mesh cover.

I had deliberately planted everything in shorter rows, leaving a lot of empty space at the ends of the beds, because of the length of these covers. We set the cover as far to one side as we could, and I was happy to find the row lengths worked out just right. They are completely covered, and the cross pieces at each end are beyond the ends of the rows, so no seedlings will be squished.

Then it was off to town with my daughter, with a quick stop at the post office along the way. I took advantage of the trip to pick up a few things at the grocery store and, as I was wandering down the aisles with the shopping cart, I suddenly realized I was getting the shakes and feeling dizzy. Usually I have to use the shopping cart as a walker because my knees will suddenly dislocate or a hip will give out, but this time, I was using it to not fall over. It took me a while to realize what was going on.

I’d forgotten to eat again.

*sigh*

I did have breakfast, but it was a small meal, and after I finished my last blog post, I headed straight out to work on the garden. It was well past lunch time by then. Had my daughter not come out to get me, I would have been out there for quite a while longer before noticing anything was wrong. Thankfully, I was able to grab something I could eat in the car while my daughter drove home.

Sometimes I’m an idiot, but I enjoy the work so much, I didn’t notice the time or how long it had been since I’d had anything to eat or drink.

I had been planning to go out again and do some weeding, or dig through some sheds to see what I can salvage to make another row cover, but I think that will have to wait until tomorrow.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: this morning in the garden

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I love how, every day, there seems to be something new or different in the garden!

While doing my rounds, one of the first things I do after putting food and water out for the cats (or like today, just water, as my husband was feeling good enough to go outside and do their food), is check the nearby potatoes.

They are so huge and lush, you can barely see the grow bags! Of everything we planted this year, nothing is doing as well as the potatoes.

Hopefully, that means we’ll have lots of potatoes, and not just lots of greenery!

Potato flowers are such pretty little things!

While checking the tomatoes, I tried looking for the baby tomatoes we’ve been seeing and had a hard time finding them. Then I found this “huge” spray of tomatoes I’ve somehow missed seeing all this time!

“Huge” being a relative terms, for the world’s smallest tomatoes! :-D

While heading back down the driveway after switching out the trail cam memory card, I had to pause to get this photo.

There are less of these flowers than last year, and they are blooming later. Like so many other things, they had been damaged by that one cold night in May, and it’s taken this long for them to recover. We don’t water down here at all, and we’ve had no rain, so it’s amazing to see them at all. Such resilient flowers!

I was weeding the big carrot bed this morning, which is rather difficult right now. I sometimes wonder why I bother, considering how much they’ve been eaten. I accidentally caught a remaining carrot frond while pulling up a weed, and pulled a carrot up with it.

I’m… kinda glad I did.

If they have this much root after all they’ve been through, there is still a chance for them! We won’t get any big carrots, and my hopes of having enough to can are certainly dashed, but we might still have something worth harvesting.

As for this little guy, I washed it off with the hose and ate it, and as small as it was, it was tasty.

So that’s encouraging.

I had another surprise waiting for me in the old compost pile nearby.

Amazingly, there are more mystery squash coming up, next to the stems of the chewed up ones!

Of course, nothing will come of them after sprouting this late in the season, but we might at least see them get big enough to determine what they are.

I find these two Hopi Black Dye sunflowers in the old kitchen garden very interesting. The bigger one was the first of the seeds we started indoors to germinate. That was after the ones we’d direct sown outside had already germinated. The smaller one, which has the label next to it, germinated some time later. Right now, both of these are bigger than the ones that germinated first, in the large beds. The difference, of course, is the soil. The other ones are planted in an area that has not been amended or planted in before, while these are in a garden we’d been working on for 3 summers already

As for the tall plant behind the smaller sunflower, we still don’t know what it is. :-D

I was happy to see that many of the poppies have seen quite a growth spurt, and the ones that were under rhubarb leaves are getting stronger.

Then there is this plant, nearby.

When we were preparing the bed next to the retaining wall, there was a compact plant growing in it. Unsure of what it was, other than “some kind of flower”, we dug it up and transplanted it between the rhubarb and the chives. It quickly grew from a compact, bushy plant to the tall, leggy thing you can see in the photo.

I also now recognize it, though I still don’t know the name.

Do you see those sprays at the ends? With the small round things hanging down?

When it starts blooming, this plant has lovely, delicate little flowers.

Which then become some of the most annoying little burs, ever. It isn’t possible to go near one of these without ending up with masses of tiny burs stuck in your clothes, that are harder to get out than burdock! I’ve had some get so thoroughly stuck in my clothes, not only was I not able to get them completely out, but they managed to stay stuck after several washings!

After I took this photo, I pulled it up. Even though it is in the flower bud stage, it still tried to stick to my clothes!

It did not go into the compost, but into the fire pit for eventual burning.

If we ever get to light the fire pit this year. I suspect not.

While things have finally cooled down today – in fact, it actually got chilly last night! – and we are no longer getting heat warnings on our weather apps, we are now getting air quality alerts. There are a number of fires burning in our province right at the moment. I’d actually been smelling wood smoke for a while before we started getting the alerts, and with our heat and dryness, I was very concerned. None of the fires are near us, thankfully, but we’re still getting some of the smoke.

Today will be our coolest day for the next while, with a high of only 18C/64F so I will be taking advantage of it and getting things seeds sown in those empty spinach beds! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: photo bomb!

/ Re-Farmer / 7 Comments

I am so thankful that things cooled down overnight. The garden beds were watered thoroughly last night, and didn’t need to be done again this morning. It was all I could do to drag myself outside this morning. The past week or two has started to catch up to me, and the pain levels are getting pretty high.

While doing my rounds, I noticed one of the Ozark Nest egg gourds has reached a new stage of growth! :-)

Flower buds and tendrils have appeared. :-) The others aren’t quite there, yet. :-)

While the Spoon tomatoes had started to show fruit for a while, we now have tomatoes developing on the Mosaic Medley tomatoes. It should be interesting to see what kinds of cherry and grapes were included in the mix. :-)

This morning, I decided to go ahead and pick the biggest of the summer squash that we have right now.

Our first squashes of the summer! Two green zucchini and a Magda squash.

And a Nutmeg photo bomb. :-D

The littler bugger would NOT let me get a picture without him!

I noticed something interesting on one of the Crespo squash this morning.

All along the vine of the bigger one, these white shoots have appeared. Some are almost an inch long. There is nothing like this on any of the other squashes and gourds. I have no idea what they are.

If anyone knows what these are, I’d love to hear it!! My best guess is that, if these were on soil instead of over straw, they would root the vine to the ground.

Before heading indoors after finishing my rounds, I grabbed the twine and worked on filling in the gaps between the wire mesh of the squash tunnel.

I didn’t add twine all the way to the top. I figured, if we need to, we can add more later. Once done, a moved a few plants over to where they now have support to climb.

Quite a few plants are already starting to support themselves as they climb higher. Even some of the winter squash. A few of them did need to have a bit of twine looped around to lead them towards the trellis, rather than the path.

It should be interested to see how well the squash tunnel holds out, once things start climbing higher. This is not the strongest or most stable of structures, but I think it should hold.

Now that it’s no longer dangerously hot outside, I have quite a lot to catch up on. I’ll be seeing what I can scavenge out of the barn, too. That will still wait a little while, though. I have my court date this Friday for the restraining order against our vandal, but our province it still locked down. There was a slight easing of restrictions, so there’s a possibility the court rooms will be open, but while the rest of the world has moved on, our provincial dictators just don’t want to let go, no matter how many lives and businesses are destroyed for an illusion of safety.

Our vandal has been laying low, but we did happen to cross paths recently, as I was coming home from errands in town. I had to drive around him, walking on the road to our driveway, while turning off the main road. I never saw him on the trail cam files when I checked the next morning, so at least I know he didn’t try going into our driveway again. I did call my mother to remind her to check the call display before answering her phone. He was with someone else, and I’d smiled at her as I drove past, to show appreciation for them moving aside for me, and I was still smiling when I passed our vandal. He just stared at me, which is a change from his usual response of turning his back to me as I drive by. I think, because I was driving my mother’s car at the time, he didn’t realize who I was until then. Anyhow, from some of the messages he’s left on my mother’s answering machine in the past, if I smile while driving by, it’s because I’m laughing at him because I got the farm (I still don’t know why he thinks my mother gave me the property). Seeing me sometimes triggers him, and if he got drunk again, there was a good possibility that he would start calling my mother again, so I wanted to warn her.

Well, I think I’ve taken up enough time while writing this, and will try calling the court office again. I’d called earlier and left a message, but that last time I did that, they didn’t call back until the next day, so I’ll try again.

I am really tired of this whole mess. It should have been done with, one way or the other, more than 6 months ago.

The Re-Farmer