beets

Our 2026 Garden: beets, bok choi, dwarf peas – and Judgement!

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I definitely want to start with the good news, before getting into the gardening stuff.

As I was putting things away in the sun room, I saw a cat in the cat cage jump out and meow a greeting. Nothing unusual about that, except that this cat had something around its neck that was flapping.

Which is when I realized, it was Judgement!

I haven’t seen Judgement in months!

We had put collars on the cats that got fixed, to make them faster to identify, but I also made sure they were reflective collars, so they would be less likely to get hit by a car or something. Most of the cats lost their collars long ago. Judgement had lost one or two already, but he still had a ratty yellow collar still on him.

I took it off and threw it away!

Now I’m hoping to see Syndol back, too! It’s not unusual for cats to disappear for the summer, then come back for the winters, but sometimes they don’t come back at all. So this was a nice surprise for the day.

My priority for today was to finish what I started in the old kitchen garden. The rectangular bed in particular needed a bit more work. I was able to pull more weeds and roots I could no longer see when I stopped last night. I also found the gap under one log was quite a bit larger than the hole the cats had made, so I found more sticks to push in front of it. The gap extended all the way to the corner, though, so I used the scrap board I’d been using when hammering stakes into the ground to lay across the opening on the inside, then added a few more sticks to hold it in place.

Then I could use the rake to level all the soil again.

The section of the wattle weave bed I’d prepped yesterday needed some clean up again. I kept having to chase cats out of the garden beds because they kept wanting to use the nice, soft, fluffy soil as a litter box!

After levelling the soil in the rectangular bed, I marked out four rows with stakes and twine. This required repeated removal of kittens. In the second picture, you can see what I planted and transplanted. In the row north of centre, I planted the mixed beets, so they wouldn’t overshadow the Hedou Tiny bok choi I sowed on in the row south of centre. The bok choi can get quite tall, after it has bolted and gone to seed, but for harvesting, they should only be about 2 or 3 inches tall. I do plan to leave one or two to go to seed to collect at the end of the season.

In the outside rows, I transplanted a whole bunch of the onions I’d been finding. On one side, I transplanted the ones that were clearly bulb onions. On the other, I transplanted the ones that look like they might be white bunching onions, except I’ve never tried to grow white bunching onions before.

In the next picture, you can see where I planted one packet of dwarf peas. I got two packets, but this is a very short row, so I only needed the one. The peas went in the back of the bed (north side). I’d already transplanted some onions at the end and at the front near the corner before. Today, I took the two garlic bulbs I’d found, broke up the cloves, and planted them in line with the onions. They filled the entire remaining front space.

Once everything was in, it all got mulched with leaves. Then I mulched around the herbs in the tiny bed as well. I didn’t cover them, as we’re still using them as needed. Before the hard freeze hits, I’ll cover them completely with a leaf mulch, and we’ll see how they survive the winter!

I also moved the raised bed cover over the rectangular bed for the winter.

I didn’t take final pictures, though, as I decided to take garden tour video, instead. I’ll be going through them and putting together a garden tour video. If I’m satisfied with what I took. Otherwise, I might take new recordings tomorrow, before I head into the city for the Costco shop. We’ll see.

At this point, the only bed I was considering winter sowing into is the small bed off to the side where the Albion Everbearing strawberries had been last year. It still needs to be cleaned up, and I plan to sow bread seed poppies there. That can wait until spring, though, if necessary.

As it stands now, other than mulching the transplanted strawberries and little things like that, the garden can be done for the year. The winter sowing is in, and anything left can wait until spring if I can’t get to it in the next while. We’re getting a bit of rain right now, and the next couple of days are supposed to be dry and cooler, but Sunday and Monday are supposed to get warm again, with plenty of sun, so there’s still the possibility of getting ahead of things for next year.

So, to recap, we have winter sown for next year:

Purple savoy cabbage
White and Purple Vienna Kohlrabi
Daikon Radish
White Egg turnip
Rainbow Mix carrots
Spring Blush peas
American spinach
Yellow Swiss Chard
Garlic
Hedou Tiny bok choi
Assorted Mix beets
Tom Thumb Dwarf peas

Then transplanted miscellaneous onions and garlic that were found during bed prep. Plus seed onions.

Last year, I scattered seed mixes and they did surprisingly well. This year, I’m hoping the more orderly plantings will survive the winter and give us a nice head start in the garden next year!

Not too shabby, I think!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: “just enough” harvests

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This afternoon, I harvested just a few things to use right away.

In the first image, I finally harvested that White Vienna kohlrabi I’ve been eyeballing for a while now! I also grabbed a smaller Purple Vienna kohlrabi.

They were peeled and quartered to go into a roaster with potatoes and carrots, including the Uzbek Golden carrots in the photo. I made sure to taste test them, first. If I had to choose, I’d say the Purple Vienna was tastier, but I think I might have allowed the White Vienna to get too big before I harvested it, so that might account for the taste difference. Once peeled, there’s really no visual difference between them.

In the next photo in the slideshow above, I picked some of the largest beets that had their greens eaten by deer. On one of the albino beets, you can see where the deer actually chomped off part of the beet root, too! These, I’m leaving for my daughters to get creative with.

I went to my mother’s this evening to do her med assist, as home care didn’t have anyone for her two evening med assists. I didn’t bring anything from the garden for my mother at the time, but I will be in her town again tomorrow. I’m meeting a friend as she drops her car off at the garage to be checked out. Originally, she was going to come by and pick me up on the way, but my mother’s almost completely out of her medications, so I want to make sure to get her bubble packs from the pharmacy – and that they get properly locked way in her lock box! Last month, she snuck one of the bubble packs away and hid it, for those days when home care simply doesn’t show up.

Since I’ll be leaving quite early to meet my friend, I’ve already prepared a bag with some fresh potatoes and some garlic bulbs from the ones curing under the canopy tent outside for my mother and left it in the truck. I had already promised her some garlic, and I think she’ll really like the fresh potatoes, too.

Also, I’m happy to say that my not being up to watering the garden this morning was not a problem. We got a lovely little downpour this afternoon!

Tonight is supposed to be a fair bit cooler. Hopefully, that means I’ll finally be able to get some real sleep!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: first large harvest, first flower bud, and a kitten fix!

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Gotta start with the kitten fix!

Eyelet is so flipping adorable.

Today and tomorrow are supposed to be in the 30C/86F or higher range. I made sure to water the garden beds last night. This morning, I gave everything another watering, including the food forest additions that need it. I even watered the raspberries growing on the old compost pile. I’m starting to see the first red berries, and might even be able to pick a few by the end of the day! The garden will get another watering tonight, and the whole shebang will get watered again in the morning. After that, we expect to be staying below 30C/86F again, at least for a few days, so I will probably just water in the mornings again.

While watering the high raised bed, I decided to do some thinning of carrots and beets.

I ended up harvesting some of the biggest beets we’ve ever grown!

The one white thing is also a beet. There were some albino beet seeds in the mix, but very few germinated, it seems. The Uzbek golden carrots are from the same bed. Some of those bolted, and I’m leaving one of them to go to seed.

In the other root vegetable bed, I’d included our collected lettuce seeds that basically took it over. More than we can possibly eat. I’ve been thinning those out and found several turnips crowded together, so I picked those. I found two others that have bolted and I’m leaving those to collect seed.

All along one side of the bed, the tops of plants have been monched. Looks like a deer has been snacking on the way by. !! The damage isn’t too bad and, after one got eaten, they seem to be leaving the radishes and their pods alone! All that extra lettuce is now protecting other things in the bed from deer.

In the greens bed in the old kitchen garden, after the spinach bolted and I pulled most, leaving some to go to seed, the Swiss Chard has started to grow. They were being choked out, before. There aren’t a lot of them, but a couple have leaves and stems large enough to harvest. Just a few.

While watering the flowers next to the high raised bed, I spotted some colour this morning.

Our very first nasturtium buds are appearing!

The Cosmos are getting tall enough they were starting to grow through the protective netting, so I removed that. I left the hoops, though, just in case I need to add something on the sides, to keep the cats out.

I have to figure out what I can add to the sides of the trellis bed. Along the edge on the side with no trellis net, and thankfully where no seedlings were affected, I found evidence of cats burying their “treasures” in there already.

I had been thinking that today, I’d be cutting the maple suckers I’ve been allowing to grow larger, so use in the wattle weave bed. With how quickly it’s getting hot, I might not get to that. It’s also getting really windy.

A trip into town to refill water bottles is going to be needed, so I might do that and avoid the heat, and the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes are insane right now!!! Oddly, I get attacked my mosquitoes more in the old kitchen, while preparing the food for the outside cats, than outside. There’s one window that’s open just enough to allow extension cords through, so I assume that’s where they’re getting in, but so many of them? It’s brutal. Every now and then, I’ll see the back of my hand or part of my arm, and there will be five or six mosquitoes, sucking me dry. Thank God I don’t react much to mosquito bites!

I keep forgetting to look for our cans of bug spray, too.

I’m very happy with what is our first substantial harvest. All of which is from beds sown in the fall. Without that, we’d still have next to nothing to harvest!

Yup. Direct sowing in the fall is definitely going to be a regular thing for us from now on!

The Re-Farmer

Analysing our 2022 garden: carrots, turnips and beets

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Okay, it’s that time! I’ll be working on a serious of posts, going over how our 2022 garden went, what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t even happen at all. This is help give us an idea of what we want to do in the future, what we don’t want to do in the future, and what changes need to be made.

This year was quite a mixed bag, when it came to our root vegetables!

Let’s start with the ones we had more success with. Carrots.

We planted 4 varieties of carrots in 2022. Two varieties were seeds left over from the year before, and one was included in a seed order as our free gift. The older seed got planted between tomatoes and onions/shallots in the low raised bed by the chain link fence. The new seeds were planted in a low raised bed in the main garden area, along with a couple of varieties of turnips.

The Results:

The old seed – Kyoto Red and Napoli – seemed to start out well enough, but like so many other things planted in this bed, they were affected by the flooding. Especially at the end near the vehicle gate, which is the lowest area.

Still, we did manage to get a small harvest of both. A couple of Kyoto Red (the darker carrots on the right) bolted, so I left them to go to seed, but they never finished blooming before it got too cold.

Then there were the Uzbek Golden carrots (the free seeds) and the Black Nebula carrots.

It’s hard to tell in the above photo, but we got a lot of Black Nebula carrots – and a surprising amount of Uzbek Golden carrots! The free seeds didn’t have a lot in the packages, so I was pleasantly surprised by the quantity that we harvested.

As you can also see in the above photo, the turnips didn’t do so well!

We planted three varieties of turnips. Gold Ball, Purple Prince and Tokyo Silky Sweet. One variety we got as free seeds, Gold Ball, were planted near the Uzbek Golden carrots, and then the Purple Prince you see in the photo were planted at the end of the same bed.

More of those, plus the Tokyo Silky Sweet, were planted in other beds, shared with onions, spinach, and peppers.

Those were a total loss!

The Gold Ball turnips germinated quickly – and were just as quickly completely destroyed! Something completely decimated their leaves. The Purple Prince also were badly eaten, but enough survived to get that tiny little crop you see in the picture.

In the other beds, I know I saw some start to germinate but they, too, promptly disappeared! A total and complete fail.

Finally, there were the beets. We had four varieties to plant. They went into a small bed in the old kitchen garden, protected by netting.

They, too, were a complete loss!

The Results:

They had a decent germination rate, but that’s about it. They barely grew at all. Eventually, we took the netting off and pretty much abandoned the bed, other than watering them and occasionally weeding out the mint that kept trying to take the bed over again.

When it was time to clean up the bed for next year, however, we did find a tiny, sad little crop!

That’s all we got.

This is the third year we’ve grown beets and have never had a really good crop, but this was by far the worst year. We can’t even blame it on things like deer and groundhogs eating them! Nor can we blame the flooding we had, because this garden is next to the house, and slightly elevated. There was no flooding in that garden, even with the sump pump’s hose ejecting into one of the paths. Everything drains away from the house. Even one of the bottom corners, which was near where water collected and formed a moat around the storage house, is elevated enough to not be affected by the flooding.

Conclusion:

With the carrots, things went pretty good, all things considered. For 2023, we will be trying a different variety of orange carrot, mostly because of how much the Napoli carrot seeds increased in cost. We enjoyed the flavour of all the carrots we grew, and I’ve ordered more Uzbek Golden carrots as well. I really like their nice, crisp texture.

As for the Black Nebula carrots, they are good, and I’m glad we tried them, but we won’t be growing them again; at least not any time soon. These are a very long carrot, and our soil compacts very quickly, which made thinning by harvesting pretty much impossible to do. When cooked on their own, their colour is very dramatic, but when cooked with something else, like in a soup or stew, their intense colour can make things look very… unappetizing! We still have lots, stored in a bin in a chilled location, and have discovered they very quickly become white, with capillary roots! It makes them look moldy. 😄 This isn’t a bad thing. Those little roots are collecting just enough moisture to keep the carrots firm and crisp, but they have SO MANY of these little roots, it actually makes it hard to clean the carrots in preparation for cooking.

So for 2023, we will still be growing carrots, but just two varieties.

As for the turnips… I don’t know that we’ll bother growing them again in 2023. When we do try them again, we will have to make sure that they are under floating row covers, as soon as the seeds have been sown. Turnip greens are supposed to be good for salads, too, but we never had a chance to find out if we liked them or not. I would have loved to try the Gold Ball variety. The main reason we wanted to grow turnips in the first place is because their bulbs are a good storage crop, making them something we want to include in our goals of self sufficiency. So we will definitely be trying them again. Just maybe not in 2023.

Finally, there are the beets.

I don’t know what went wrong with those. They should have done well, where they were. My daughters like beets, however, so we did order one variety to grow in 2023. I think we’ll have to be more selective on where we plant them.

Root vegetables are definitely going to continue to be a challenge for us, given what the soil it like here. It will take time – and more raised beds! – for us to amend the soil until root vegetables can reach their full potential. Which is something we’ve already been working on, and have long term plans for.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: surprise beet harvest!

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While working on the wattle weave bed in the old kitchen garden, I had to go around the beet bed constantly. Our beets did not do well this year, and in the end, I hadn’t bothered harvesting anything. It just didn’t seem worth it.

While working on the other bed, however, I sometimes had to stick a spade or garden fork into the ground to have them out of the way for a while, and a few times that meant sticking them into the beet bed.

Which is when I noticed that some of them actually looked useable.

So I harvested them.

This was all I got, out of the three varieties of beets planted in that bed. They’re so small, but my daughters like them at this size. They’ll be able to use them for maybe one or two meals.

Which is a heck of a lot more than I expected to get out of that bed!

At this point, we’re not sure if we’ll grow beets again next year. We’ve only been gardening for three years here, but each year has been worse than the one before. Perhaps we’ll try again, after we’ve built up the soil more and have better raised beds. If we do grow beets again next year, I think we’ll only do one variety, and save trying multiple varieties for the future. It’s hard to know which of the ones we tried are types we like, when we’ve yet to have a really good growing year for beets.

I’ll take what we can get for now, though!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: morning harvest, and first purple beans!

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Check it out! Our largest morning harvest, yet!

There were very few yellow beans to pick this morning. The bush beans seem to be winding down. There were more of the green pole beans to pick, though – and our first purple beans!

There are still a few peas on the first planting, while the second planting of peas are getting into their prime. I found more cucumbers than expected. Enough to make a decent size cucumber salad.

I finally picked the one Sophie’s Choice tomato that was looking like it could have been picked a while ago. It didn’t seem to be getting any redder, so I went ahead and grabbed it. I also grabbed the reddest Cup of Moldova tomatoes. The one that fell off while I tried to get the clip loose has ripened indoors, so there are two of them for my husband and the girls to taste test later on.

I picked what seemed to be the largest of the turnips to taste test as well. They are not a large variety and golf ball size is supposed to be when they have the best flavour. I also pulled a couple of the largest looking beets, to see how they are, and… they’re not doing well at all.

But we have something. And something is better than nothing!

I had done some recordings to make another garden tour video in the morning, but after going over them, I went back out to re-record most of them in the early evening. The final video will have a mix of both. I have this terrible habit of using the wrong words for things and not even noticing. Like saying “purple corn” when I meant to say “purple peas”. That sort of thing. I might have time to work on editing it this evening, but I’m not sure just yet. It depends on how things go after I get back from my mother’s, this afternoon.

We shall see.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: final harvest!

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Today, I went out to get together with some friends. When I got back, the girls were in the old kitchen garden, starting our final harvest!

I started off helping with the beets in the L shaped bed, before heading over to quickly do the beet bed next to the garlic.

What a difference!

In the old kitchen garden, all the beets were very small. I was expecting that in the bed along the retaining wall, since they had been eaten by the groundhogs, but I expected more from the L shaped bed.

The girls don’t take pictures like I do, so I just got a shot after they were done. The piles of greens in the beet beds include beets too small to keep. This will all be worked back into the soil. In the carrot bed, you can see the Kyoto Red fronds that had gone to seed, left behind as well. I figure those can be worked back into the soil, too. And if we find little carrots coming up in this bed next year, I’m okay with that! :-D

We got a lot more bigger beets out of the little bed by the garlic! Now that this bed is clear, we can build the last low raised box for it, and the bricks used to frame it will be used elsewhere.

Then my older daughter and I started picking the fingerling potatoes. Being able to dump a bag into the kiddie pool, then go through the soil to pick the potatoes, made the job very easy! We moved the bags away from the fence, so that the picked over soil could be dumped back against the fence before we moved on to the next bag, which also made it easier.

The Purple Peruvians are SO dark, it was hard to find them in the soil! We got a lot more of them than expected, and had to start using another container to hold them.

Of course, some of them got used for our supper! Here, you can see the Purple Chief on the left, and the Purple Peruvian on the right. I cubed them, as well as three types of carrots, added some garlic cloves, tossed them in flavoured olive oil and seasonings, then roasted them. I can hardly wait to try them!

While I worked on supper, the girls finished cleaning the vegetables and set out the beets and carrots in the sun room, with the ceiling fan going, since leaving them outside in the sun is not an option right now. There are three types of carrots here; Deep Purple, from Veseys, Kyoto Red and Lounge Rouge Sang from Baker Creek. It’s hard to tell which ones are the Lounge Rouge Sang, as the colour gradient isn’t very visible. All the beets from the small bed are on here, plus most of the beets from the old kitchen garden as well. We did take some straight inside, and a few of them are in the oven, too. They got peeled and chopped, tossed in olive oil and seasonings, then roasted at the same time as the potatoes.

With the beets, we may actually have enough to make it worthwhile to pickle them. I’m not sure. Mostly, though, we’ll just eat them fairly quickly. As for the carrots, I think we’ll either be eating them quickly, too. I don’t think there is enough to even be worth blanching and freezing.

It’s a very small harvest, considering how much we planted, but I’m still happy with it, since we came so close to not having anything at all.

Now our work is really cut out for us! All the beds can now be cleaned out and prepared for next year.

The Re-Farmer

Fall garden update: carrot and beet surprise!

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One last garden update to post, interrupted by having to make a run to the post office to pick up a package before they closed! :-D

With the kittens mashing down the netting on two of the beds in the old kitchen garden, I finally gave in and removed the mesh completely.

With the beets along the retaining wall, there isn’t much we can do about them anymore. If the deer eat them, it’ll be no more of a loss than it already is. I’ll be cleaning that bed up for the winter soon, and if there are any beets to harvest in there, that’s just bonus. The L shaped beet bed, however, will remain covered. The kittens haven’t been going after that one, and they are doing well enough that we don’t want the deer to eat them.

After removing the hoops and netting from the carrot bed, I found my first surprise. I did not plant this bed. My older daughter did. Two types of carrots, with kohlrabi down the middle.

Well, nothing came of the kohlrabi – I finally decided the big leafy plants that did show up were a weed of some kind, as I found them growing in other areas where kohlrabi has never been planted.

What I did notice is that there are three carrot labels, not two. Which I sort of noticed before, when I weeded the bed and added the hoops, but for some reason, never stopped to actually read the label. Along with the Deep Purple and Lounge Rouge Sang, there are Kyoto Red! If you look at the photo, towards the far end of the bed, you can see carrots that have gone to seed. Those are the Kyoto Red. Like the ones planted in the main garden bed, after the groundhogs ate the greens, they got tricked into acting as if they were in their second year and started to develop seed heads. The other two varieties didn’t.

This morning, I decided to pick some, and ended up up quite a few. The ones on the far left are the Kyoto Reds. There were very few that haven’t gone to seed, so I only got a couple of them. The purple ones are obvious the Deep Purple variety, but when I’d picked from that bed before, they were not this dark purple, and I thought they were the Lounge Sang Rouge!! I hadn’t picked any from the other row, as they did not need any thinning.

Which means we got to try two new varieties of carrots today! My daughter decided to use up the summer squash we had in the fridge and make a soup, and she included a few carrots as well. After they were sliced up, we tried each of them. The Kyoto Red, unfortunately, was bitter. They may not have been going to seed, but tasted like they were ready to. The other two tasted fairly similar. We’ve had the Deep Purple before, and they tasted much the same as I remember from last year. The Lounge Sang Rouge seemed to be a bit sweeter.

When cut, the Kyoto Red was that deep reddish-orange colour, all the way through. The Deep Purple carrots were purple with a pale orange, almost yellow, ring inside. The Lounge Sang Rouge was a solid pale orange.

After picking the carrots, I used the rain barrel to water the old kitchen garden, then went on to water the loan beet bed that we made in the spring, next to where the fall garlic beds. This bed was planted with Merlin beets, only. That bed is covered with netting, too, tacked down on the long sides with tent pegs, and the excess netting on the ends rapped around boards to weigh them down. After watering it, I decided to lift the boards at the ends to see how the beets looked.

I ended up picking a couple from each end!

I should have held these differently; there was one quite large beet, but it’s underneath. It’s about the size of the other three, all together!

I’m rather pleased with these – and I know there are larger beets in the middle, from when I last tended it. I’d found a groundhog had managed to squeeze it’s way under the netting, when it was only weighted down with rocks and bricks.

We don’t plan to harvest the beets for a while; possibly not until after first frost. When we do, however, we should have enough to make it worth doing some canning!

Aside from the deer and the groundhogs wanting to eat them, beets have been among our most successful vegetables. We planted a LOT of beets this year, which we may not do next year, but I’m sure we will plant them again. We’ll just have to decide on what varieties we want, and if we want to try some new ones.

And that’s it for our fall garden update! The other parts of the garden were pretty much unchanged, so there’s nothing to really say about them. :-)

I am so incredibly grateful that our growing season has been extended this year, and am glad our drought and critter ravaged garden has had a chance to recover and continue to produce as much as it has!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: the last beet bed

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Yesterday, I finally was able to tend to the last of the beet beds.

You can see why there was no hurry.

This beet bed got quite a bit of critter damage before we were able to cover it with the netting, and never really recovered. I think I lot of that has to do with the ornamental apple trees shading it too much.

This bed has four varieties of beets, planted in blocks. One variety does seem to be recovering a bit better. Those are the chioggia, if I remember correctly.

Just for the sake of comparison, this is the L shaped beet bed right next to the little one (after being weeded). These were planted on the same day, with the last seeds of all the varieties mixed together. In this bed, the critters did get at the end in the photo a bit, and it recovered a lot more, even though it has more shade than the rest of the L shaped bed. It still gets a lot more sun than the one along the retaining wall!

This is after weeding and loosening the soil a bit. The soil is really compacted for some reason (it got fresh new garden soil, just like the other beds). Very few of the beets seem to be developing their roots.

After planting the L shaped bed with the mixed seeds, I still had some left, so I scattered them in the sapce on the very left of the photo, which is pretty much right at the trunk of one of the ornamental apples. This spot never got covered. Not only did it get eaten by critters, but cats and kittens like to roll on it. Amazingly, there are still tiny little beets trying to recover in there!

Before putting the netting back, I did add pairs of sticks to hold the net above the greens a bit. Hopefully, it will dissuade kittens from jumping on it! :-D

This netting had been originally used to create a wall on the outside of the blocks to keep deer away from the lettuce that was planted there – only to have the groundhogs eat them all. To hang the net, part of it was torn so it could be placed around a tree trunk for support. That’s the tear you see at the end in the photo. The long side of the inside is pegged down snug. The long side along the retaining wall got shoved between the soil and the blocks. Though I could roll lengths of wood into the ends and weight it down with bricks, there is nothing I can do about the tear right now. I think it should be fine.

It doesn’t look like we’re going to get many beet roots out of here at all this year, but who knows? As long as the weather stays mild overnight, they will be left to grow as big as they can before we harvest them. Plus, we can still eat the greens. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: tending the old kitchen garden

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As much as I love all the rain we’ve been having, I was happy to have a mild, sunny day to get some work done outside. I finally got around to tending the big L shaped beet bed in the old kitchen garden.

This bed has had almost no tending, since we put the floating row cover on it to keep the critters out. This is how the two sides looked before I started.

Here is how it looked after a good, solid weeding!

There actually wasn’t a lot of weeds in there. After fighting my way through all the beet greens, following strands of weeds to their bottoms so I could pull them out by the roots, I found that there wasn’t much to pull out. The beets were actually choking out the weeds! Most of them were long and leggy and spread out, trying to reach the light, so when I pulled something out by the roots, I found I was removing quite a lot more plant than expected. The exception were all the sprouting Chinese Elms. It’s remarkable how deep and solid the roots are for a sapling that’s just a couple of inches high.

The beets themselves did not need any thinning, though I did accidentally pull a few out with the weeds. I wasn’t seeing a lot of beet roots developing, though. Hopefully, all the rain we’ve been having will result in a growth spurt!

When it came time ot put the netting back on, I took advantage of the big package of tent pegs I found in the garage. The sides of the netting was pulled tight and snug to the ground, so nothing can casually push its way under the netting. No more rocks and bricks to try and keep it down. For the ends, I wrapped the netting around boards, then weighted those down. There is lots of slack in the netting for the leaves to grow, though I don’t expect them to get much taller than they are now.

That done, I worked on the carrot bed next. One of the inner hoops had come down, the doweling holding it in place breaking off completely. Another was well on its way down, too.

Which made for a good time to tend the carrots, too.

There are two types of carrots in this bed, and these ones have been going to seed. Carrots do to see in their second year, so it seems the grounhogs eating their greens has fooled the carrots into thinking they are in their second year.

Carrots gone to see do not produce much of a root!

These carrots got weeded, but did not need any thinning. The other variety did need thinning.

Check these out!!! This is a variety from Baker Creek called Lounge Rouge Sang.

The two orange ones at the top of from the other carrots that had gone to seed, but had enough root that I wanted to keep them.

I checked my records, and those are supposed to be the Deep Purple carrots, from Veseys!

Here you can see what the Longue Rouge Sang carrots should look like, when fully mature. I just love the colours in them, and am happy to see that even the little carrots that got thinned out are showing them.

I’m so excited to see carrots! After the groundhog devastation, I really didn’t know if they would recover enough for us to have any at all. It’s a shame we couldn’t cover the larger carrot bed in the main garden area, too!

Once the bed was cleaned up, and I found new sticks to use to hold the PVC pipe hoops in place, the sides were pegged down tighter to the ground. The only places I used rocks to weigh the netting down was at a couple of corners, where there was excess netting to gather.

I still don’t know what the big green thing in the middle of the bed is. I had hoped it was the White Vienna kohlrabi that was planted there, but I not longer think that’s what they are. I’ve seen them pop up in a few other places, too. They don’t look like a weed, is about all I can say! I’m leaving them, just to hopefully see what they are. I’ve also left quite a bit of the mint that has been making it’s way through. In time, I hope to transplant them somewhere contained. For now, I just try to keep it under control so it won’t take over the garden – and we will still have at least a bit of mint to harvest if we want! :-)

There is still one more bed of beets by the retaining wall, covered in netting, that needs to be cleaned up, but that will have to wait for another day.

The Re-Farmer