2023 garden

Our 2023 garden: an actual little harvest!

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While doing my morning rounds for the past while, I’ve been able to snack on the occasional early pea pod. This morning, there were enough of them that I went and got a container to harvest them!

Not a large harvest, by any means. Basically, enough for one person – but it’s the real harvest, so I’m happy!

I’m glad I broke out the riding mower and mowed as much as I did yesterday. I got most of the area round the main garden beds. The rest out there is so rough, I’ll be using the push mower or weed trimmer. I also got the East yards done. The West yards have some things than need to be moved or trimmed first, that I left for today. Which might not happen, as the grass it now too wet. Last night, it rained off and on. Not enough to fill the rain barrel, but enough to give the garden a good watering.

But was it enough to do this?

One of the Black Beauty tomatoes got knocked to the ground. The stem is quite dry at the end, so it could have even happened yesterday. I suspect it wasn’t the rain that knocked it down, but a cat.

I picked it and now it’s sitting in the living room, in hopes it will continue to ripen.

The first African Drum gourd, in the main garden area, has started to bloom!

I don’t know that we’ll have enough growing season left for these. I tried starting them early enough indoors compensate for that, but these are among the ones that were sown a second time. The first ones that survived are at the chain link fence and, while they have been blooming for a while, there are still no female flower. Even the Crespo squash, which have also been blooming for a while, are almost all male flower. There were two female flower buds that started to form, but the first one wizened and fell off rather quickly, and now the second one looks like it’s doing the same.

Some of the winter squash are starting to show flower buds, though, which is encouraging. What’s discouraging is that the very few summer squash that are just germinating now seem to still get eaten by the slugs. They definitely prefer those freshly emerged leaves! Yes, I scattered out more cornmeal, but the rain washed that away.

I also quickly transplanted the one lemon cucumber that germinated. I ended up planting it in the mulched bed behind the compost heap, where we had ground cherries last year. I’d planted the three Ozark Nest Egg gourds along one side of that bed, but it looks like there’s only one left. For some reason, the cats really like to use the grass clipping mulch as a litter – but only where there is an open area around a seedling or transplant!

Anyhow.

The lemon cucumber is now right in the middle of the bed, with plenty of room to grow. If it survives, I’ll add something for it to climb.

We shall see!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: July Garden Tour video

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I was up way too late finishing this off, then set it to upload while I went to bed. It wasn’t until I watched it together with the girls this morning that I realized I’d inserted a video clip twice somehow. I don’t have the motivation to fix it! 😄

So there we have it: a tour of how the garden is doing, as of a couple of days ago.

I hope you like it! Feel free to watch it on YouTube and give it a like, subscribe, etc. if you wish. 😊

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: progress, damage and… damage control?

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While doing my morning rounds today, I was thrilled to see SO many pea pods!

It’s like they all exploded into existence, overnight. I’ve read that peas don’t like to be over watered, but they sure seemed to like the downpour we had!

Then, I found this.

The remaining three strawberry plants in the asparagus bed were eaten. One not as bad as the others, but a lot of leaf loss, for sure. I have to find some way to protect this bed, so the plants can recover.

What I really wanted to check – with some dread, I admit! – was the squash patch. Did the cornmeal work, or did my squash plants get decimated by the hundreds of slugs I saw last night?

Well… the good news is, there was no new damage to any of the plants, though a couple of seedlings will certainly not recover from the state I found them in last night.

There wasn’t a single slug, in any of the traps.

I could still see corn meal dusted on the mulch around each mound.

I didn’t see a single slug, live or dead.

Now, a live slug, I would not have expected to see. Not in the sun and heat we already had by then. But I did think I might see less cornmeal around the plants, and dead slugs.

It could be, they ate their fill, then crawled away before they died, but if that were so, I would not have expected to see so much cornmeal still visible.

So I’m not sure what to make of this. I mean, I’m glad there is no new damage to the plants, but for all I know, they’ll be back tonight.

Which means, when I head out to do my evening rounds, I’ll be looking closely at the squash patch!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: this means war!

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As I expected, the predicted thunderstorms went right past us BUT, we did get a wonderful downpour!

While it was raining, my daughter came to ask me to go outside with her; she was hearing bad sounding cat noises and, fearing a cat might be trapped somewhere, she wanted to have an extra pair of hands with her.

Well, it wasn’t a trapped cat. It was Shop Towel beating up The Distinguished Guest. I had to literally kick them apart, he had such a death grip on TDG.

In the process, I got completely soaked. When I got back inside, I decided to change straight into my pajamas. I considered skipping my evening rounds, but when the rain stopped and it was clear it was done for the day, I headed out in my pajamas.

I am so glad I did.

I discovered, we have a war going on in the squash patch!

I’ve been seeing some slug damage already, but the rain must have brought them out. The first couple of hills with summer squash seedlings, I found some munching away and started picking them off.

Then I saw what was in the mulch around it.

The little red dots that you see mark the slugs in just one small area – and it isn’t even one of the worst hills! Every single hill had them; even the ones that were resown and hadn’t germinated yet. I checked every plant, making sure to look under each leaf, and some of them were covered with slugs on the underside! While I took slugs off the plants themselves, there was just too many of them. Most of them were incredibly tiny, as if they’d hatched very recently, but there were plenty of big ones, too.

I went in to do some research on how to get rid of them. There is the well known beer trap, which does work. However, my daughters are the beer drinkers, and they don’t drink the cheap stuff. I’d have to buy beer, and the beer traps would need to be refilled every day. It could be done, but not the best option, and not something we could do right away.

Slugs apparently hate coffee grounds, so sprinkling coffee grounds around the plants to protect them would work. Especially if ground eggshells were also included. The girls have been drinking cold brewed coffee in this heat, but the grounds go straight into the compost bucket. So they will start keeping the grounds for me, spreading them on a tray to dry in the oven. It would take quite a lot of grounds for the size of our squash patch, so it would take quite a while to have enough to sprinkle around every plant. With so many slugs, they’d probably eat all our squash plants well before then.

Then I found out that slugs love cornmeal, but it kills them. It was recommended to make slug traps by putting a couple tablespoons of cornmeal into jars, then putting the jars out, laying on their sides, in the evening. By morning, they should be filled with dead slugs.

We buy cornmeal in large bags, but haven’t been baking cornbread lately, because of the heat, so we have quite a lot of it handy.

My younger daughter and I gathered up small jars that we’ve been hanging onto, put cornmeal in them, then took them out to the garden. I wasn’t going to use any of our good canning jars, so we only had eight jars.

We have 30 mounds in the squash patch.

I scattered the jars around, putting some on the mounds with more visible slugs. You can just see part of one of them in the above picture. Still, it just didn’t seem like it would be enough.

So I took an empty sour cream container – the 500ml size – and used an awl to punch largish holes in the lid, then filled the container with cornmeal.

In this picture, you can see that one of the seedlings is mostly eaten. There had been no damage on that seedling, this morning.

You can also see cornmeal sprinkled all around on the mulch. I used the sour cream container as a shaker and spread cornmeal liberally around every single hill. I really don’t care if the slugs get trapped in the jars or not. I just want them dead.

I really hope this works. With how many slugs I saw – and knowing many more would be hidden in the mulch or the grass – it’s entirely possible most of the squash plants would be eaten by morning.

I have never seen so many slugs in my life. Not even when living in Victoria, BC, where the banana slugs would be out like crazy after a rainfall. It is absolutely insane!

While doing this, I saw only one frog in the squash patch. We see more of them among the other beds, but the squash patch is too exposed for their comfort. The next step in the battle is to set up frog houses all around the squash patch. The challenge will be the heat, as there won’t be a lot of shade in the squash patch until the plants get bigger – and for them to do that, they need to survive the slugs! I could simply lay out some boards in places. I’ve got a stack of them that were used to protect the tomatoes from wind, when they were first transplanted. We’ve got broken ceramic pots that would work, if we also cover them with mulch to keep them shaded from the sun.

We’ve got a lot of frogs this year. I will happily enlist them to gobble up as many slugs as their round little bellies can handle!

This is war, and I’m willing to break out the big guns, if I have to!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: watering set up

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I was able to set up hoses in the three beds with tomatoes in them.

The black soaker hose is definitely the one I prefer to use. It does take longer, and directly waters only the soil directly below it, rather than the plants beside it, but if left running long enough, it allows for a gentle, deep watering.

As for the sprinkler hoses… they’ll do for now!

One of them – the one in the bed with the turnips – is a new dollar store purchase. The spray zone is larger than I expected, and I had to fuss with it so that the hose was on its side and spraying into the bed, instead of watering the grass in the paths! The connector does not rotate freely, though, making it difficult to attach the garden hose without twisting the sprinkler hose. I wouldn’t expect much out of a dollar store hose. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the end of the hose, which is just heat sealed, gives out. 😄

The other sprinkler hose is one of two I found while cleaning up around a junk pile in the yard. I have no idea how old they were, but one of them ended up cracking and had to be tossed, last year. This one has much tinier holes than the dollar store one, so the spray is gentler, but it seems like a lot of them are blocked or partially blocked. The holes were also so small, I couldn’t tell which side of the hose was “up”. Once I had that figured out, I set it to spray inwards as well, and ended up having to use bricks to hold it in place, as it is far less flexible. Later on, I’ll dig out the ground staples I picked up awhile back, and use those to hold the sprinkler hoses in position, and also keep them from flipping on top of the onions!

I keep hearing that tomatoes should never be watered from above, because if the leaves get wet, they’ll get diseased. Not sure how they survive being rained on, if that’s true, but I try to avoid it if I can. With the setup I have now, the sprinkler hoses are still getting the leaves wet. Just from below, instead of from above! Still, it’s a lot gentler than using the spray nozzle on the hose, and while it will take longer to water the beds and it will mean moving the garden hose from bed to bed, it should be more efficient to water them this way. Plus, I can just hook up the hose and move on to other work until it’s time to move the hose to another bed.

When we convert these beds to high raised beds, I want to think about different watering systems to set up. Since we plan to fill the high raised beds hügelkultur style, they shouldn’t need a lot of watering, but some things just need more water than others.

I’m just looking at the forecast for the next week.

*sigh*

Why is it that the one day it’s not expected to be insanely hot, it’s also the day I will be driving my mother around, and won’t be able to do much work outside?

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: transplanting done!

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Now that the tomatoes and pepper transplants have been set up in town for give-aways, the remaining transplants have been done!

These are the pictures I uploaded on Instagram.

First image is the Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes that have started to develop.

In the matching pots are the herbs. The single oregano transplant is in the middle of a pot, surrounded by the second variety of thyme we have. The second pot has all the spearmint. For the pot themselves, I put a few inches of grass clippings on the bottom to keep the soil from falling through the drainage holes. Most of the soil is actually recycled out of other plant pots, with only a bit of a top up of garden soil, then the transplants were carefully mulched with more clippings. Doing the transplants freed up a couple of metal trays, so they’re now being used as drain trays.

We had already transplanted a couple of rows of onions in between the spinach earlier. The remaining spinach that bolted was pulled up, and my daughters took care of harvesting the remaining leaves. They discovered the Susan really, really likes spinach! We had to check to make sure spinach is okay for cats, and once that was confirmed, my daughter would hand her a leaf every now and then, as she stripped them off the stalks. It was amazing to watch her gobble them down! Even Fenrir came over and tried stealing some leaves, and got a few given to her, too.

We definitely need to stick to this variety of spinach. As bolted as they were when the plants were pulled, the leaves are still not at all bitter!

Now, the bed that had the spinach is completely filled with Red of Florence onions. There were still onion transplants left, so I cleaned up a bit more of the spaces the lettuce and bok choy were planted, in the bed along the chain link fence. Much to my surprise, there are quite a few lettuces that survived the smothering drifts of elm seeds. As for the bok choy, we’ll be lucky if the three or four I found survive at all. The empty spaces in the rows got planted with the remaining onion transplants, including a few yellow onions, and the other variety of red onions we’ve got. There were enough Red of Florence onions left that, after transplanting from end to end between the remaining lettuce and bok choy, I made holes in the mulch along the outer edge of the bed and kept on transplanting, filling about half the length of the bed. By the time I was putting those in, only really tiny ones were left. If they survive and develop fully, great. If not, we’ll still have lots.

Next, I worked in the wattle weave bed, and noticed one of the Sweet Chocolate bell peppers is getting quite big! The plant is still blooming, as are the other plants, so I expect we may get a decent harvest over the summer.

The tiny strawberry plants grown from seed got transplanted out. One of the three bunches of winter thyme did not survive being transplanted, so that left a gap I could fit several strawberries in. I did take out the self-sown walking onion as I kept transplanting strawberries wherever there was space between the herbs and bell pepper. It was neat having that onion show up on its own, but I don’t want walking onions settling into this bed. The strawberries are planted pretty close together, but it’ll give them a chance to get bigger, before they get transplanted to somewhere else next year.

There was still one surviving squash that I’m about 95% sure is more luffa, so I transplanted that next to the other two, and transferred the protective plastic ring to the new one. Hopefully, it won’t get shaded out by the potatoes too much.

I didn’t get a picture, but there was one last tiny Spoon tomato that emerged from the only Jiffy pellet that hadn’t had anything germinate when I potted them up. One of the Spoon tomatoes that got transplanted into the retaining wall blocks got broken, and is just a stem with a single branch, now, so I planted the baby tomato plant in the same block with it. Hopefully, at least one will survive.

And that’s it. These are the last of the surviving transplants – though when I went to get the trays, I spotted a hulless pumpkin seedling show up in one of the trays! All the other trays left behind are with things that did not germinate at all, for some reason. The Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon. Both varieties of cucumbers. The Birds Egg and Apple gourds, and a few other things. I’m not sure what to make of a zero percent germination rate. Since so many things have this habit of suddenly germinating, later on, I am not quite ready to count them as a loss, but even if they did germinate, for most of them, it’s too late in the season for them to be able to reach full maturity by the end of the growing season.

While I was walking around, setting up to transplant the onions, I kept hearing a cracking sound from the spruce grove. The cracking really started to increase, so I stopped to watch as the one tree my brother cut down for me that got stuck on other trees, started to fall. It got hung up again, but there was enough wind that it fell further still. It’s still stuck on other trees, but is now at about a 40° angle, instead of an 80° or so angle! It should make it easier to finally get it down the rest of the way, I hope. That one tree is almost enough to build a complete bed in the size I’m after!

After so many delays and distractions, it felt so good to finally get progress done outside! The one thing I want to do before working on those trellis beds is re-sow some of the summer squash. Then, it’ll be time for some manual labour!

I’m quite looking forward to it.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: first Indigo Blues, and bye-bye transplants!

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This morning, I made sure to get a picture of our newest tomatoes.

These are the first Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes forming! We’ve got more Romas forming, too but, so far, no Black Beauties. They are blooming, though.

After I finished my morning rounds, I put the remaining transplants into as few containers as I could fit them, then loaded them into the car. Last night, I made sure to write out labels on Post It notes. When I went to the post office yesterday, and asked the store owner if I could bring my extra transplants, she had indicated a counter to leave them on, but there was no way they’d fit on there. There is a picnic table outside the door, though, so after clearing it with her, that’s where I set them up. She was really surprised to see just how many transplants I had! I told her a bit about the different varieties. I managed to squeeze 22 Romas into two bins, and all the Spoon tomatoes into one tray. Fifteen in total, I think. I didn’t really count as I combined the two trays into one. There were only 7 or 8 Black Beauties left, so they fit into one bin easily enough. The tomatoes are all so tall and really, really need to get into the ground!

I knew which group of peppers were the hot ones, so I had those set aside in a smaller tray. I had the bell peppers in groups by variety, but after taking the labels out when I transplanted half of them, I lost track of which was which! I still stuck labels on the tray with information about each variety.

This general store can get very busy, since it not only has the post office, but also sell liquor and gas. I hope that people will take all the transplants today but, if not, they are sure to be taken tomorrow. Our little hamlet is having it’s annual picnic and parade tomorrow, and the parade goes right past the store. The store itself is closed on Sundays, so having them on the picnic table works out well.

With these gone, I have just a few things left to transplant. The spearmint will go into a pot. Only one oregano survived, and I’m not sure how healthy it is, but I’ll try transplanting it somewhere as well. There are also the second variety of thyme to transplant, and I might just put those in a pot, too. That leaves the last of the onions to transplant. Today, I plan to pull the last of the bolting spinach and will transplant the onions there. If there are any left over, I’ll use them to fill spaces near the peas, where the lettuce and bok choy were choked out by the Chinese elm seeds. Thankfully, the trees are now done dropping seeds for the year. I also plant to re-sow some summer squash. They have a short enough season that there is still time for them to grow.

Once all the surviving transplants are in the ground, I can finally turn my attention to building those trellis beds! If I can get that done fast enough, we might even be able to direct sow a few other things with really short growing seasons, but at least that is no longer an urgent thing.

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: melons transplanted – finally!

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First, the cuteness!

Decimus has taken to wandering around and exploring the house, which gave me the opportunity last night, to get a good look at her babies. Three of them still have their eyes closed. The bitties are getting big enough that, after squirming their way out of the cat cave, they can squirm their way back in again, all on their own!

I was going to my mother’s this afternoon, so I was outside early to get some work done in the garden. I hoped to be out there before it got too warm, but we were above 20C/68F in almost no time at all. Ah, well. At least I got some progress!

We had very few melons germinate. Of the four types we tried (all short season varieties), there were no watermelon, only two Sarah’s Choice, three Pixie and four Halona. I had intended to transplant them into the new trellis beds, but the seedlings really needed to get into the ground.

So I made do.

I used the kiddie pool that has come in so handy over the past few years! We definitely need to get another one before the end of the growing season.

I punched some holes for drainage, then put a layer of grass clippings over the bottom. A couple of wheel barrow loads of soil was enough to fill it. The soil got a soaking, then a layer of grass clipping mulch, and another soaking.

Then I left it for the water to be absorbed and dealt with another problem. Overhanging tree branches! The row of trees my mother allowed to take up where she used to have a raspberry patch includes a bunch of Chinese elms. Around this spot, their branches were getting quite large and dense, and hanging down low enough that I kept getting my hat caught in them. I cut away quite a lot of the branches and some of the smaller trunks. The goal is to get rid of all of them, but that will wait until I can get out there with a chain saw. For now, I just needed to clear the area around our container garden area.

That done, I have the new bed one more soak, then got the transplants. The two Sarah’s Choice went into the middle, while the others were spaced around them. They’re a bit densely planted, so I wanted to make sure they could climb. I had picked up some more of those large plastic coated, metal stakes this spring, so I had enough to put six around the outside, plus one in the middle. I then used the broken canopy tent pieces that had previously been used to support the protective boards around the newly transplanted tomatoes, and some zip ties to attach horizontal pieces around the perimeter. Last of all, I added a couple of shorter plastic coated metal stakes across the middle, for the Sarah’s Choice melons to climb. If necessary, we can add another level of horizontal pieces higher up.

There is a risk that the plants on the outside will end up shading out the ones on the inside, but I hope this makeshift trellis will allow them to climb and still allow light through. When we grew the Pixie and Halona before, it was a drought year, and the greenery didn’t get very dense.

So those are finally in!

Once done, I left early enough to hit the post office before going to my mother’s. While at the store, I talked to the owner, and got the okay to bring our extra tomato and pepper transplants over tomorrow, as giveaways.

I’ve since come back from doing my evening rounds, giving the melons one more watering, to settle things in. In spite of the rain we had yesterday, I found the Crespo squash, the low raised beds, grow bags and the squash patch all needed watering! Some of the summer squash are coming up, but I think I will need to replant a few.

While transplanting the winter squash, I included some of the Jiffy pellets that did not germinate, just in case. Sure enough, a few of them have actually germinated, and the new seedlings are looking stronger that some of the transplants! The transplants should have gone into the ground earlier. There is one winter squash that has been lost, though, and from the slime off over the remains, I’d say it got eaten by slugs. We have a lot of frogs this year, but they’ve been hanging out in the low raised beds. We should set up some little frog shelters around the squash patch to encourage them to hang out and eat the snails!

I’m really happy with how the potatoes are doing. Even the Purple Peruvians, which were the last variety to emerge, are now showing flower buds. I even spotted a couple of Indigo Blue tomatoes forming!

The only problem I have is the cats! While watering the beds, a couple of them decided to lie in the ones I hadn’t got to, yet – right on top of the seedlings! They like to lie on the mulch, and don’t care if that has them lying across seedlings, too, the buggers! Some onions and turnips got a bit shmushed, but I think they’ll recover.

I will be quite happy to pass on all those leftover tomatoes. I’d hoped to get the rest of the Romas into the ground, but with all the delays that keep popping up, I don’t know that I’ll have anything built to plant them in fast enough. Once they’ve been passed on, I will be able to take more time to get it done right, and not have to rush. I’d still like to get it built in time to plant any really short season crops we’ve got, but at this point, I am willing to let a lot of the direct sowing we intended to do, slide for this year. I’m still debating whether to plant some pole beans with the Montana Morado corn. I keep waffling back and forth on that. We shall see.

The next few days will be modestly hot, so I hope to catch up on the outside work!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: a morning harvest!

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I’m really impressed with this variety of spinach we tried this year. The plants are finally starting to bolt, but the leaves have not become bitter at all!

I picked some spinach to use for today, but the whole bed will need to be harvested. We can dry the excess leaves, and plant something else in the bed.

I thought I would be picking the last of the garlic scapes, but a couple more showed up overnight that should be ready to pick tomorrow. I don’t know if two scapes could be considered a harvest, though. 😄

Several of the strawberries I was expecting to pick this morning were gone. I found their remains on the mulch nearby. There were a few others that I could pick. They clearly did not get fully pollinated and are misshapen, but my goodness, they are tasty little morsels!

Once these are done, there won’t be anything that can be harvested for some weeks, or even months, and there are still things that need to go in the ground. The squash – including the mystery squash I transplanted near the rose bush – are finally looking like they’re getting stronger. I keep having to remind myself, we’re still in the middle of June. We’re actually ahead of the game a bit. It’s the heat that’s messing with my perception. Well, that and on some of my local and Zone 3 gardening groups, there are people sharing pictures of their huge gardens and the things they are already harvesting. !!!

It’s the delay in building things that’s really eating at me, though. It’s driving me absolutely bonkers So very frustrating!

Ah, well.

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: summer squash, peppers and onions

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

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

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

Next, the grow bags were gathered and filled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Re-Farmer