These were damaged quite a bit by that one cold night was had, shortly after they were transplanted. It set them back and, while I saw them blooming, I was beginning to think there would be no eggplants forming at all.
Today, while watering, I finally spotted some! In fact, in the space of a couple of days, there are now more eggplants forming that there are of the peppers, in the same bed. There are still only three peppers forming among the 9 plants. Just one eggplant has more than that forming!
Now, the question is… do we have enough season left for them? Normally, these would have 80 days to maturity from transplant. We have barely 30 days of growing season left before average first frost. I’m still going by Sept 10 as our average first frost date, even though the 30 year adjusted averages that just came out now says our average first frost dates are between Sept. 21 and 24. If I look at the monthly forecasts in my desktop weather app, we might not get frost until the second half of October. Since moving out here, we have had everything from a blizzard in October to first frost in November. So really, there’s no way to be sure. With how badly our transplants and spring sowing have been, in general, I’m really hoping for a long, mild fall. If that does happen again, we might actually have stuff to harvest and preserve for the winter. With the way things are going right now, we have just a few things we can harvest every couple of days, to supplement a meal or two.
While watering this evening, I am actually noticing some growth. I might be imaging things, but even the red noodle beans seem to be looking a bit greener, and a bit bigger. The Giant Fordhook chard I planted as a fall crop, where the Royal Burgundy bush beans failed, are still just barely there, but they are getting bigger! The winter squash are blooming – no female flowers, though – and I even spotted a couple of tiny zucchini forming! I don’t know if they got pollinated before the blossoms closed up. They weren’t open when I did my rounds this morning, or I would have hand pollinated them. The pumpkin vines are doing well. Two of them are quite a bit ahead of the others, and the female flower on one that I hand pollinated is now a growing pumpkin. I’m training that one up the trellis, so we’ll need to make a hammock to support the weight of the pumpkin. When the trellis is finished, it will be built to hold the weight of winter squash of all kinds, but we’re not there yet!
It isn’t a lot, but I’m pretty excited about any progress we get right now!
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!
In the bottom row, we have Tricolor Mixed bush beans, Rainbow and Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard, an Assorted Mix of beets, White Egg turnip, White Icicle radish and a rainbow blend of carrots.
In the middle is Bi-colour Pear gourds, my “just for fun” item, yellow scallop squash, Gill’s Golden Pippin winter squash, green scallop Bennings squash, Spring Blush peas and White Vienna kohlrabi.
In the top row is Red Beard bunching onions, Borage, American and Giant Noble spinach, Kandy Korn sweet corn, Purple Vienna kohlrabi, and an envelope to collect and store our own seeds in.
From this batch, these are the ones that will be planted this fall, before the ground freezes.
Rainbow and Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard
Assorted Mix beets
White Egg turnip
White Icicle radsih
Rainbow Blend carrots
Spring Blush peas
White and Purple Vienna kohlrabi
American and Giant Noble spinach
I am not sure about the Borage. I’ll have to do some research before deciding if those will be planted in the fall or started indoors in the spring.
Everything else except the corn and bush beans will be started indoors.
Bi-colour Pear gourds
yellow and green patty pan squash
Gill’s Golden Pippin winter squash
Red Beard Bunching onions.
Hopefully, starting the summer squash indoors next year will work. Direct sowing hasn’t been working out for those, for some reason. We didn’t have a slug problem this year, thanks to the many, many frogs, so that wasn’t the issue. We should be able to winter sow summer squash, but when I tried that for this year, none germinated. Most were old seeds, but there were new seeds in there, too. When I planted potatoes in that bed later, I did find a few seeds, but most seemed to have just disappeared. I did have to cover the bed with netting because of the cats, so they might have had something to do with the failure, too.
This, all on its own, is the makings of a decent garden for next year. We have other types of beans, winter and summer squash, melons, peas, corn and our own onion seeds. Of course, we’ll also be getting seed potatoes in the spring, and will probably try the little bell peppers and orange eggplants again. We have herb seeds that I might start indoors, if we have space, or we might cheat and buy transplants again, instead.
So there we have it! The beginnings of next year’s garden, much of which will actually be planted this fall.
Hopefully, we’ll have a better growing year than this one, because something really weird is happening with this year’s garden. It’s been so frustrating. We should be at the peak of growth and harvesting right now, and there’s basically nothing – and not just because of the deer! I’ll be talking about that in my garden tour video, and you’ll be able to see exactly what I mean.
Speaking of which, time to try and record some video. The rain has stopped, but we’re supposed to get thunderstorms later this evening!
In the first image above, you can see the potatoes in the background. They are yellowing and dying back, even though they’ve never flowers, and there are no signs that they ever will. I’ve looked around and have been able to rule out insects or fungal disease, which pretty much leaves heat and lack of water. I’ve been trying to keep up with the watering, but it’s very possible I wasn’t able to keep up, with the heat that we’ve been having. Mind you, the wildfire smoke probably hasn’t helped anything, either.
I’ve avoided watering the garlic bed for a while, so it could dry out before harvesting. A quick loosening of the soil with a garden fork, along both sides, and they all came out quite easily.
We got some of the biggest garlic heads we’ve ever grown in there!
In preparing this bed before planting the garlic, I did trench composting with whatever organic matter was handy. Including kitchen compost and grass clippings. These garlic have the biggest, strongest roots we’ve ever had, and a few of them pulled up partially broken down grass clippings, and even some egg shells, with them. The roots seemed very happy with the trench compost!
Once picked, I brought them over to the canopy tent I’d set up for them, and sorted them on the bench. Some of the garlic was picked too late, and were starting to split. There was one garlic where the scape never made it out, and instead got stuck in the stem. The bulbils formed in there and broke through the stem. We could keep those and plant them, if we wanted.
Or eat them.
The remaining garlic was strung up on two lengths of twine and hung across the canopy tent to cure.
The garlic that got too big and starting to split was cleaned up and trimmed, and are now in the kitchen for immediate use.
That done, I was finally able to give the garden a solid watering. I even had a full rain barrel to use on the old kitchen garden. I didn’t do the new food forest trees, though. I wasn’t feeling that good, yet!
Tomorrow, the dump is open and, now that we have the truck back, we’ll be able to do a dump run. I’m also going to have to do a shopping trip large enough to make it worth driving to Walmart. I’m hoping to get that done early enough in the day that I can continue working on the new wattle weave bed later on. Since I have an abundance of willow switches in particular that are too short for the distance the verticals are set at now, I’m going to take advantage of those chimney blocks and go the completely the opposite direction. Each of the concrete blocks has a series of openings around the sides. The posts are inserted in those openings along one side, with four empty ones in between each post. It was an easy way to evenly space the verticals.
I’m going to try adding verticals, using thinner posts, in each of the openings between the posts that are already there. I’ve got six posts now, which means there are five sections where I can add four more verticals. Since these will be sitting on top of the retaining wall, there will be no need to debark them, which will certainly save time, and be easier on my hands!
What this should do is allow me to use the shorter, thinner and more flexible willow switches we have so much of, adding new lengths along the way, held in place more securely. Right now, with what I’ve got so far, the overlapping ends just sort of sit there, loosely. I could probably tie the overlaps together, but that rather defeats the purpose of weaving them in the first place!
One of the things I am planning to get, to plant in the outer yard, is basket willow. Properly coppiced, these can produce an abundance of really long, flexible willow. It seems weird to buy more willow, since we have so much of it around, but they are a different variety, and surprisingly not-straight, unless they’re really, really young. I was originally thinking to get basket willow so that we could… you know… make baskets. However, if the coppiced willow is allowed to grow long enough before harvesting, they would be ideal for wattle weaving, too.
That’s at least a couple of years in the future, though. For now, we make do with what we have!
The beans with the tomatoes are doing really well. At first, it seems that one of the seeds had not germinated, but it did eventually show up. That makes for a 100% germination rate of these old seeds.
Too bad a cat dug one of them up. *sigh*
In the foreground of the first photo, you can even see some of the self-seeded carrots coming up!
In the next image, you can see the second planting of beans coming up in between the corn. Of the first planting, there ended up being a total of three, maybe four, that came up, and only one of them came up strong and healthy. Considering these are the same seeds in the same bed, it’s hard to know why the first sowing failed so badly.
The last image is of the Arikara squash bed – and the corn in there is so much bigger than the ones in the other bed!
I really like using the stove pellets to mulch around seedlings. The pellets land around the small plants, rather than on top of them. Then, after being watered, the pellets expand and fall apart, with the sawdust creating a nice, fairly thing, but really light, mulch. So far, it seems to be working out with anything I’ve used them around. It helps that the 40 pound bags are so cheap, and a little goes a surprisingly long way!
Once my rounds were done, my older daughter came out to help me remove the netting around the trellis bed. We had an unfortunate surprise while pulling it out, though. I’ve seen frogs – even large ones – squeeze through the rather fine mesh but, unfortunately, a garter snake didn’t make it. My daughter found it stuck around and under the corner of the bed. It hadn’t been dead for long, but long enough that a big beetle was chewing on its head. We had to cut a section of the netting off, because we couldn’t get it loose from the netting.
As my daughter said, it’ll be good when we no longer need to use netting! At least not this netting. It’s always a concern that a kitten or a bird will get caught in it. I never thought a garter snake would get caught!
We were being eaten alive by mosquitoes while we got the net down, stretched it out, folded it in half length wise, then started rolling it up on a bamboo stake for storage. They were after my daughter a lot more than me for some reason, so once the netting was rolled up enough, I sent her inside while I finished. It’s now tied off and in the garden shed. I made sure it was resting higher up in the shed so, hopefully, no critters will get into it.
That done, I brought out some of the trellis netting we’ve used in previous years. This netting has 4′ square spaces, making it easy to reach through to weed or harvest.
I started off by weaving a bamboo stake through one edge of the netting, where there is a pair of lines about a half inch apart, instead of 4 inches. I tied one end to the vertical post at the corner, then stretched out the netting flat before tying it to the next post. Then I added the next bamboo stake, weaving it into the netting and joining it to the first stake, before tying it off to the next couple of vertical supports, then did it again.
The netting ended on the third stake, so I added another piece of it to a fourth stake before joining the stakes and matching the netting up. That left a lot of excess netting at the end, but I just bunched that up and secured it while trying off the stake to the vertical.
I had woven in a plastic coated metal stake at each end of the bed to keep the netting straight. After the horizontal stakes were in place, I pushed the netting down so any excess was at ground level. I then took the garden stakes there were already in place to hold the protective netting that was there before, and used them in the trellis netting. Each one got woven vertically through the netting, then I used them to tighten things up a bit before pushing them into the ground. Where the two nets overlapped happened to be where there was already a longer bamboo stake, so I used that to join the sections together at the same time. Once all the stakes were woven through and pushed in the ground, I used ground staples to secure the netting to the soil, catching in the excess, to make it all fairly stretched out and tight.
I recall from using the netting before that the weight of plants climbing it can cause issues, so I added another level of horizontal bamboo stakes along the middle. These got tied to the vertical garden stakes, rather than the posts for the permanent trellis. This way, the netting is at a slight angle for the beans to climb.
This bed hasn’t been weeding since the protective netting was placed all around it. A lot of the self seeded onions I transplanted into rows were no longer visible.
I started weeding along the trellis side. I probably should have done it before the trellis net was added, but the mesh is open enough to reach through easily. The problem was more my hat constantly getting tangled in it!
As I was working my way along the beans, I spotted a little volunteer tomato plant! I remember finding volunteer tomatoes in this bed last year, too. I’m not sure where the seeds came from!
When I found one, I left it, thinking it would be fine were it was. Then I found another.
And another.
So I thought I would come back later and transplant them once I weeded and could see a space for them.
Then I found another.
And another.
And several others!
As I was working my way down the onion side of the bed and kept finding more even tiny tomato plants, I started pulling them up with the weeds, then transplanting them wherever I had enough space between the onions or the pumpkins. Then, when I finished weeding the bed, I went around the beans side to dig up the ones I’d left there and transplanted them.
By the time I was done, I counted 14 volunteer tomatoes.
Or 15.
I actually counted 13, first, after all the weeding and transplanting was done. Then noticed one I’d missed, so I counted again and got 15. Then I counted again, as I was scattering stove pellets around the bed and counted 14. I counted again and kept getting 14, so I either keep missing one, or I double counted one before.
Of course, it’s also possible I missed some volunteers when I went back to find and transplant them. If so, they’ll be easier to see, soon enough!
The last photo was taken after I’d scattered the stove pellets, but I forgot to take one after it was watered and the pellets were all expanded and breaking up.
This bed now has Red Noodle beans and Hopi Black Dye sunflowers along one side. On the other is onions from last year, going to seed, plus a whole bunch of tiny self seeded onions that I transplanted after clearing and preparing this bed for the beans and sunflowers. Then there is the pumpkins, and now the volunteer tomatoes.
This bed is going to look really interesting, once everything has reached maturity!
Today, I remembered to take some pictures of the radish seed pods that I’ve been snacking on.
The first three pictures are all from the same plant. What a difference! Some pods have just one pea-sized seed “bubble”. Others are longer, looking like they have a couple of seeds developing in them. Then there was a branch that has seed pods of all shapes and sizes!
The last pictures is of a different variety of radish in the winter sown East yard garden bed, with distinctive red lines on them. The seed mix had four different varieties of radishes in it, and I don’t know which is which, though I’m guessing the yellow variety is the one plant I’m seeing with yellow flowers.
I’m really happy with how the winter sowing experiment worked. The last time I tried it, I did the mild jug version, and it failed completely. Now I know that sowing directly into the beds, then heavily mulching, is the way to go for a lot of things. There are a few things I will now plan ahead to winter sow, but not as a mix. Beets, carrots, turnips, kohlrabi, spinach, and radishes for their pods. Also, that one variety of lettuce I planted was insanely prolific, and good at self seeding! I’ll have to be careful when collecting seeds this fall! Oh, the tiny bok choy worked, as did the chard – when they’re not being overwhelmed by other plants! There are also tiny onions all over, but they’re so far behind, I don’t expect we’ll be getting any bulb unions this year. Which is okay. We have the ones that are going to seed, so we can start onions indoors, using our own seeds, in January or February. The turnips also worked out much better than any other time we’ve tried them, so I think we will run through the varieties again to see which ones we like best.
I get the feeling we’ll be doing a lot of direct sowing in the fall from now on! Just in a more organized way. Peas are something else that are supposed to be good for winter sowing – we just have to make sure the bed they’re planted in doesn’t get destroyed by cats, to find out!
Obviously, tomato seeds survive the winter just fine. What variety they are, I have no idea, but if we’re going to winter sow tomatoes deliberately, they’ll have to be a very short season variety, if we’re going to get anything from them. If the Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes turn out to be a variety the family likes, they would be an ideal candidate. Their growing season is so short, we could actually direst sow in the fall, then again in the late spring, to extend the harvest, if we wanted to.
We just need to be sure we actually enjoy eating them, first.
It’s taking us years to get things worked out, with a couple of major set backs along the way, but those set backs have actually helped us in our decision making for the future. Like now knowing that parts of our garden area are prone to flooding during wet years! Having beds raised even just a few inches has saved come of our plantings already.
I do look forward to when we can make the low raised bed higher, though. Working on the bed this morning, while much improved from working at ground level, was still pretty painful! Plus, the lower the bed, the shorter the reach. Even though these beds are 4′ wide on the outside, it was still hard for me to reach the middle of the bed. With the high raised bed, I can reach clear across, if I wanted to, without difficulty.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with the morning’s work.
My next garden project will be finally working on the old kitchen garden bed that will get wattle woven walls, but I’m going to have to put another job higher on the priority list. When going through the trail cam files this morning, the gate cam had over 100 files – and this camera is set to just take single still shots. Most of those were from the poplars coming up on the other side of the fence, blowing in the wind. Which is not really a step back, since some of them, at least, are of a size that could probably be used in the wattle weaving!
Lots to do, and the weather is finally cool enough to get to it. I’m loving every minute of it!
Today was much cooler than the last little while, and I took full advantage of it!
Which means it’s now almost 10:30 and I’ve only now been able to settle down to start writing some posts. They will be much shorter than my usual rambling! 😄
Things are looking quite good in the garden right now.
The sugar snap peas are developing all sorts of pods, though none are ready for eating yet. Some of the plants are starting to die back at the bottoms already, though. I had hoped for a longer growing season with them!
In the next image, there’s the largest of our developing kohlrabi. I am so thrilled with those! I will most definitely be getting more seeds and planting a bed of them in the fall for next year. Winter sowing worked really well for us with those!
The next image is of the Hinou Tiny bok choy. These are from seeds we managed to collect from the couple of plants that survived being smothered by elm seeds a couple of years ago. The seed pods were really tiny. These are huge, in comparison! Amazing what not being smothered by elm seeds and choked out by elm roots will do, eh?
I neglected to get a photo, but the radish seed pods are starting to develop. I’ve got several different types of radishes now producing pods, and some are large enough to give them a taste. I don’t like radishes in general, mostly because of their bite. The pods have a mild radish flavour and just the tiniest bite. I’ve started to snack on the pods when I work in the garden now. Not very many, though. I do want to have enough to harvest and try pickling, as well as eating fresh.
The last photo is of our grape vine friend. I wasn’t sure if I’d find any of them again (I found two, before). I was able to get hold of the collapsing trellis the grapes are on and tip it away from the storage house. I don’t want it climbing the walls and getting into the exterior blinds again. I’d also like to be able to get around the back of it to get rid of the spirea that’s invading, but everything’s just too big right now.
With today being cooler, I didn’t water the garden this morning, but I did give it a watering this evening. Of the summer squash I thinned by transplanting, we have definitely lost the one that was transplanted into the high raised bed. There’s another among the winter squash that may not make it but, we’ll see. It looks like most of the transplanted strawberries will survive, too, though I don’t expect to get anything from them this year.
The second sowing of beans in between the corn has come up, with a high germination rate. I don’t know what happened to the first sowing, but at least the second one made it! The seedlings are large enough now that I scattered more stove pellets over the bed of corn and beans, as well as the tomatoes and beans bed. I went ahead and added some to the Arikara squash and corn bed, too. The corn in that little bed is getting really big, compared to the ones in the corn and beans bed!
Tomorrow, I need to snag a daughter to help me get the protective netting off from around the trellis bed. It will still need protecting from the cats, somehow, but it needs a serious weeding, and I have temporary trellis netting to add to the back for the Red Noodle beans.
All in all, things are doing pretty good. I can’t help but feel we’re quite behind on things, except for the winter sown stuff. I should check my photos from last year and see how things were at about this time and compare.
Last year, we planted a little plot of Albion everbearing strawberries. They did fantastic!
Until they got eaten by deer.
Repeatedly.
They even tore through the net barrier I’d put around them, and I ended up having to use some leftover pieces of chicken wire. By then, there wasn’t much of the season left, but the bed did get heavily mulched for the winter, with some chicken wire draped over the whole bed for protection.
I did remove some of the mulch in the spring, but in the end, the bed got severely neglected this year.
Amazingly, some strawberries survived.
The strawberries I’d planted in front of the new asparagus bed, however, did not. Not a single one made it. I had simply taken too long before planting them, I think.
We do, however, now have a third Jersey Giant asparagus fern growing! So I still have some home for the rest of those, and the purple asparagus.
The first thing to do was to find and dig up the Albion strawberries and see how many there were.
I’m afraid I had to be pretty rough with them. The crab grass rhizomes were bad enough, but I was also finding new elm roots invading from below. When I planted this bed, I’d dug up as many roots as I could, then covered the bottom with several layers of carboard before adding fresh soil on top, in which the strawberries were planted.
You’d never know I’d done all that, from the roots I was finding!
Those elm trees have got to go.
I actually found quite a few more strawberry plants than I expected! In the end, I found 10 plants, plus a runner with fresh roots in it, though no leaves yet.
All of these went into a bucket with some water while I worked on where to plant them.
At first, when I thought there were just a few, I had expected to plant them at one end of the bed with the Spoon tomatoes, but there were enough that I decided to reclaim the space I’d planted bare root strawberries in that failed. The shallow trench they were planted in were, of course, filled with elm tree seedlings, along with plenty of other weeds.
There was still some soil left in the old kiddie pool we used as a planter last year, so once the weeds were cleared out, I used that to fill in the shallow trench the strawberries had been planted in. This was more for the asparagus, since I didn’t feel I’d been able to cover the crowns properly on that side.
While clearing the weeds out, I did not find a single sign of the bare root strawberries that had been planted there.
Totally my own fault. They should have gone in the ground as soon as I got them. Instead, they sat for about a month.
Then I decided to take some short logs from the old kitchen garden retaining wall and set them along the little wire fence, to prevent erosion and water run off.
That done, I thoroughly watered the newly added soil. It was bone dry in that little pool. Once everything was well hydrated, I spaced out the strawberry plants in between where the asparagus crowns were planted.
Once those were in and watered again, I went and got more grass clippings to mulch both the strawberries and the asparagus.
Then, because I had enough for it, I got more loads of grass clippings and mulched the potatoes.
They’re not as big and juicy as they could be; we haven’t had a lot of rain, and the undergrowth is starting to crowd them again. We need to get under them with the loppers and clear it all out again.
All in all, things are going pretty good in the garden. At least, for our region. I have to keep reminding myself of that when I watch gardening videos, and I see all these people posting about their huge plants and amazing harvests. They all tend to be at least a month ahead of us!
I’m happy I got as much done this evening as I did. I’m not sure how much I’ll get to go tomorrow. Not only will it be hotter, but I’ll be driving my husband to his appointment. Thankfully, the AC in the truck works fine, because that heat is going to be brutal on him.
After tomorrow, the highs are supposed to drop a bit for the next while, then get right back up to the “heat warnings in effect” level again.
On the plus side, the peppers and eggplant will be just loving these temperatures!
The first image is of the Spoon tomatoes in the main garden area. I’ve been seeing tiny tomatoes developing for a while now. I had expected them to get much taller before forming tomatoes – when we’ve grown these before, they always got really tall and lanky. This year, they seem to be staying short and bushy. I’m not bothering with pruning side branches away, after seeing some videos about that from Gardening in Canada, so I was expecting them to be bushier. These are still indeterminate tomatoes, though, which are more of a vining type. Which is why I made sure they had a nice, sturdy trellis to climb. We’re just into July, though, so maybe they’ll still get taller. We’ll see.
In the second image, we have our first sugar snap peas developing. There are quite a few more flowers blooming now, too. Most definitely the biggest, strongest and healthiest peas we’ve ever grown, this year. I don’t know if it’s the location, this year’s weather, or what, but I’ll take it!
The final photo is my morning surprise. There are Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes forming! Yes, these are super short season tomatoes but, like the Spoon tomatoes, the plants haven’t really grown much since being transplanted. The plants are so short, the developing tomatoes are inside the protective collars!
The Chocolate Cherry and Black Beauty tomatoes are getting taller, at least, and getting to the point that I’ll need to start clipping them to their supports, soon. Those, we’ve grown before, and I am expecting them to get quite a bit taller – but then, I was expecting the Spoon tomatoes to get quite a bit taller, too! There were flowers blooming on all the tomato varieties when I transplanted them, but I remember that the Black Beauties took a very long time to ripen. The plants had loads of tomatoes, and I remember they tended to crack and split a lot, long before we had any ripe enough to pick.
It should be interesting to see if there is any difference in how quickly they ripen, this time around.
I can appreciate mornings. The cooler temperatures and softer lighting are great. Especially for working in the garden. Unfortunately, my body just can’t handle it. I’ve never been a morning person. The absolute best scheduling I ever had was when I worked the night shift at a gas station. I was alert and motivated all night, slept well all day; physically and mentally, I was at my best!
Unfortunately, I’m not able to do that now, and this time of year, I find myself being awakened earlier and earlier, no matter what time I make it to bed. This morning, I was up at 4 – 4:30 and just could not get back to sleep.
Still, I managed to get some thing done in the garden after doing my morning rounds.
I finally got this bed weeded. I had to wait until things got bigger. I still had to be really careful, and pulled only what I was 100% sure was a weed. In the first photo above, you can easily spot the nasturtiums and Cosmos. In the second photo, there are little sprouts of what I hope are the asters. I’ve never grown asters from seed, and I’m not sure what they are supposed to look like at this stage. I’ve even looking at photos online and am still not 100% sure. There are just too many things that look like this at this stage!
I couldn’t get everything, of course. I’ll be weeding those awful elm seeds all summer, I’m sure.
I had a surprise when I got to the winter squash bed. I’m not sure what these are.
Those are insects of some kind. They were only on the blossoms, and only on the squash. They’re so tiny, I can’t make out any identifying features. I tried asking in a gardening group and did get a response of one possible thing, but on looking them up, they seemed much bigger. Pretty much anything would be bigger! The solution was to spray with soapy water, so later in the day, I tried that. The blossoms were closed by then, though, so I don’t know how much good it did.
They’re smaller this year. When picking them, I tuck the coils over a finger to carry them. Last year, I was putting them around my wrist.
After I was done my rounds, I headed inside for breakfast and planned to go back out to start working on the trellis bed. In the end, I didn’t make it. I was falling asleep in my chair. I finally gave up and went for a nap. Something I’ve found myself having to do fairly regularly.
I get better sleep in those 1-2 hour morning naps than in an entire night! It is a bit disorienting to wake up and it’s still morning, though. 😄
My goal for today was to get started on the remaining vertical supports for the permanent trellis bed.
As good as I felt, this put me outside at the hottest part of the day.
My goals got shifted, and progress was made. Just on something else!
I just got back from giving the garden beds a watering for the evening. Tomorrow is not supposed to be as hot as today, but we haven’t gotten any of the rain that hit other parts of the province, some of which got serious thunderstorm warnings!
When I got to the trellis bed, I was rather blown away by how much bigger the noodle bean sprouts were, even compared to this morning.
In the first image, you can see four of the five collars around pumpkin seeds – and they are all sprouting! Nothing in the fifth one, yet, but these were the very last seeds I planted, and they’re already up! I remember last year, being amazed by how fast these free pumpkin seeds grew, too.
I have also confirmed, and you can see in the next photo: we have sunflowers! Not a lot, but the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers are starting to sprout. I wasn’t sure if these seeds were still viable or not, so anything we get of those is bonus!
While watering the new asparagus and strawberry bed, I got another pleasant surprise. I am pretty sure I planted the bare roots and crowns too late; I had not expected it to take so long, or I would have stored them properly. And yet, I found a single Jersey Giant asparagus, sprouting along the stake I place to mark where the crowns were planted. It’s so adorable!
I spent a fair bit of time working on the snap pea bed, carefully using the hose to pull weeds without also pulling the peas and tiny carrots out. As I worked my way from one end to the other, I was startled to find a bean sprout. Several of them. I had completely forgotten that I’d planted the last few bean seeds in the gaps between pea plants in one row! Gosh, the red noodle beans germinated fast!
Meanwhile, the Royal Burgundy bush beans I’d plant much earlier, beside the spoon tomatoes, have finally shown signs of life. All of two beans have sprouted. Hopefully, this means more will show up.
I didn’t bother trying to get a photo, but I also saw more corn seedlings showing up in the corn and yellow bush bean bed. Still very few, while the leftover seeds that got planted with the Arikara squash have more sprouting, and the earlier ones are getting quite big!
The Black zucchini has been doing really well. I planted three seeds in three spots, and 8 out of 9 seeds are now sprouted! With so many sprouting, I will probably have several to thin by transplanting, later. Even where the White Scallop square are planted, one seedling has appeared. Last year, those ones took three tries and a much longer time before any germinated, so that makes me very happy.
So far so good! I have to keep reminding myself that I finished planting everything such a short time ago. It just feels so late in the season. Probably because we had that heat wave in May.
On a completely unrelated note…
We seem to be missing three kittens.
Caramel’s tabby, Li’l Rig, and her tortie, Wormy, are nowhere to be seen. Yesterday, I spotted Caramel “luring” Li’l Rig into the maple grove on the north side of the inner yard. I strongly suspect she has taken them across the road. I was really hoping that, after I brought Li’l Rig back to the sun room yesterday evening, she wouldn’t try again. Caramel has been hanging around the house, which seems very strange for her to do, if she took her babies onto the property across the road.
Their brother, Havarti, is the biggest of the litter, is still very much around. He is so active and independent, I doubt he’d follow his mother anywhere right now. The other two are much smaller and were both recovering from oogey eyes. I can’t find them to check if their eyes still need washing.
The third missing kitten is Zipper. He was the sickest and the last on the road to recovery. He did seem much improved but, to be honest, in looking for him, I was looking for a body. No sign of him, anywhere. I do hope he’s okay. I can’t imagine he would have followed Caramel across the road.
I’m probably going to go outside one more time and do a walkabout. Maybe I’ll find him then.
The Re-Farmer 