I wasn’t sure if it was going to get done. When I headed out this morning to feed the outside cats, it was decidedly unpleasant.
I also counted 38 cats. I haven’t seen that one tabby that I didn’t recognize, but none of the ones I did see were unfamiliar. Which means the crowd was congregating all at once!
I didn’t soak the kibble in the morning, because I knew it would freeze, so I saved that for the afternoon. I counted 32, that time. Including this little fluff ball.
Tomorrow evening, we are going to get Frank and Pinky closed up in the isolation shelter, so that they can have their fast (after a treat of wet cat food) and be easier to catch in the morning, for their spays. The other cats and kittens are not going to be happy with not being allowed in the isolation shelter for a month! We’ve got the first two that will be in there until it’s time to switch them out for about 10 days, and then we’ll have the next two set up in there for their recovery period. Assuming we can catch two more females. If we ended up with males, they won’t need that much time for observation and recovery.
After the second feeding, I did my evening rounds before it got too dark – these are being done earlier and earlier! Today, I made a point of checking the asters. I’d left the flower bed untouched, so that the Cosmos could shelter the memorial asters from the frost, and hopefully give them time to go to seed.
I collected some to bring inside for planting next year. I left others to self seed. I’m so happy they had enough time to develop seeds before the deep freeze hit!
It was nice enough out that I grabbed a rake and collected leaves to do some mulching, then did a bit of winterizing.
The first picture in the slide show above is where the tiny strawberries were transplanted. I have no idea if they will survive in their new location, but it is worth a try. In the next picture, you can see that the strawberries transplanted into the retaining wall also got mulched with leaves. Next was the saffron. I don’t know if I am being too early with this, or too late, since they are showing new growth. The one flower bud that is still there looks like it froze before it could open, so I left it. I had considered leaving those until later, as we are supposed to warm up a little bit over the next week, but then I saw cats digging around them to leave “presents”, so the mulch is to keep them away, too.
I didn’t mulch the little herb bed, as we are still able to harvest from them, but I did get a pile of leaves ready for when it’s time.
Now that our septic tank is empty, it’s time to get that area ready for winter, too. We’ll be setting the emergency bypass up, just in case, so I stretched out the flexible hose so that it can warm up in the sun and straighten out. I ended up sitting a short length of pipe into the far end to flatten it, because it kept sticking up into the air. The two lengths of PVC pipe we set over the pipe from the basement got shoved into the flexible hose at the other end to help straighten that out, too. In a couple of sections, I leaned boards and bricks and whatnot to get them to straighten out and flatten to the ground.
We did not get the straw bale I was hoping to get this weekend. It might still get delivered in the next while but, just in case, I set the insulated tarp over the septic tank and weighed it down.
The forecast now says we should reach highs of 5C/41F next weekend, and that should be pretty much it for the winter. Time enough for a few last things, like covering the herb bed and, if the straw comes in, using that in various places. I’ll take advantage of every warmish day we have right now!
I harvested the ones with the most orange colour, and there are still quite a few green and mostly green ones on the plants. From what I found, looking it up last night, these should be ripe. They are still firm, but not hard. One still has green on it I couldn’t see while I was pushing through the leaves with my pruner to cut the stem but, according to what I found last night, it should continue to ripen if kept at room temperature.
With the eggplant, and in the next picture, is a cluster of carrot seeds. I’m pretty sure these are Uzbek Golden carrot seeds, as the only other carrots winter sown in this bed were some old, pelleted Napoli seeds I had. Very few of those germinated. When I grew them before, none bolted to seed. Carrots normally go to seed in their second year, not their first, but every year we’ve grown Uzbek Golden carrots, there’s been at least one that went to seed early. At this point, there is just the one seed cluster that has fully dried off, and I didn’t want to be losing seeds into the garden bed. We have self sown carrots where we grew them last year. I’d wanted to collect seeds from them but, when I thought they were ready to collect, none of the seeds seemed to have developed. That would most likely be a sign of poor pollination. Clearly, some viable seeds did develop and fall to the ground, at least at one plant. The self seeded carrots are growing only in one area, not all the areas where there had been bolted carrots.
Amazingly, the “dead” pumpkin vines are still blooming.
That dead leaf is from the same vine as the flower. This heat we’ve been having has given a surprising boost to things I thought for sure were killed off!
I honestly thought the Cosmos would bloom first, as they grew so big so much faster. I don’t see any potential flower buds on them at all! Including the ones that do not have frost damage on them. They should have finished blooming by now, but there’s nothing. Very strange.
Today is turning out to be another hot one. We exceeded the forecast and hit 27C/81F, with the humidex at 28C/82F. As I write this, we’re at 26C/79F, with the humidex at 29C/84F. Currently, we have gusts of high winds and are under a severe thunderstorm watch. Parts of the province are under tornado warnings. Looking at the weather radar, it seems the system won’t hit our area for another three hours.
The high winds limit what I can do outside. From where I’m sitting as I write this, I can see a big maple and a corner of the spruce grove. It’s bright and sunny, with some clouds right now, but the wind comes and goes. Sometimes I’ll look up and there doesn’t seem to be any wind at all. Moments later I’ll look up because suddenly, the maple is being whipped around like crazy. This maple is HUGE and needs to have large branches that are bigger than some trees removed, before they break. Where they join at the main trunk is showing rot and, to be honest, I’m amazed one branch in particular hasn’t come down yet. I’ve removed parts of it that I could access, which may have taken off enough weight to help. Since then, things have grown back to the point that we have to duck under the branches when mowing the lawn under part of it. I might be able to get some of it down with the extended pole pruning saw, but most of it is simply too thick. Ideally, we’d have a lift or scaffolding (the scaffolding we have is meant for indoors, so it’s pretty short) and take it down in sections with a chain saw. My brother has all sorts of ladders that would allow us to reach, but the only thing there would be to secure a ladder to is other sections of the branch that needs to come down. Sections that would lift as weight was removed, potentially enough to lift a ladder secured to it right off the ground. Even branches this thick have remarkable bounce to them.
Ah, well. We’ll figure it out.
Unless it finally comes down in these high winds. At which point, it would be a pretty huge clean up job!
Today was definitely on the chilly side. Even overnight; apparently, we dropped to 3C/37F last night, which is colder than was forecast. I’m glad we got that plastic over the winter squash!
We’re supposed to drop to 4C/39F tonight, which means we can expect it to get colder. I never removed the plastic cover on the winter squash, though. We got rain last night, which means the squash didn’t get any natural watering, but I do have the soaker hose still set up with them. I rarely used it, as filling their collars with water several times was more efficient. Today, however, I lifted one corner of the cover, hooked up the hose, then covered it again, letting the soaker hose run for an hour.
We did reach our expected high of 12C/54F this afternoon, so the girls and I took advantage of it to get some final harvests done on some things.
I started off in the East garden beds, pulling most of the corn (I left some stalks just to have a bit of protection for the bush beans). There were very few cobs to harvest and, as you can see, they were very small. I did find some yellow bush beans to harvest, though, then later found a few of the Royal Burgundy in the main garden area.
The chocolate cherry had the most to pick green. There were a few Black Beauties and Sub Arctic Plenty to pick. These are now sitting near the window in the cat free zone (aka, the living room) to ripen.
I also picked as many dried super sugar snap pea pods as I could find, as well as the dried radish seed pods. The girls, meanwhile, pulled all the spoon tomatoes, then sat with the plants to pick up the ripest ones. That took long enough that I finished first, then joined them. We made sure to not have any little stems on them before adding them to the bowl. It’s a lot more difficult to get those off if they’re left for later! With the Spoon tomatoes, we did NOT harvest the green ones. They’re so tiny, it really wasn’t worth doing it. So those went into the compost with the vines.
I suspect we’re going to have another year of compost tomatoes next year, and that most of them will be Spoon tomatoes!
Later on, before covering the eggplant and peppers for the night, I harvested a couple of kohl rabi and Turkish Orange eggplant. I have no idea if the eggplant is right, but at this point, it’s unlikely the greener ones will finish ripening, even with protective covers. The plants were already drooping from last night’s cold, in spite of the cover and bottles of hot water to help keep them a bit warmer. I chose the two that looked the most orange, but the rest still have green on them. I don’t think eggplant is something you can pick and will ripen indoors, like tomatoes and peppers can.
The kohl rabi I picked are pretty small, and there are just a few left, but I wanted to snack on them. That bed is almost done.
While the day was chilly, it was quite warm in the portable greenhouse! We have kept the “door” rolled up for quite some time but, yesterday, my daughter unrolled it half way and pulled the zippers down.
The thermometer in there was reading over 30C/86F, late this afternoon!
I’d moved our succulents and coffee plant into there yesterday evening. I’m glad I remembered to, as they likely would not have survived the night, but they would be very happy with the heat they got today! I’m hoping to keep those outdoors as long as possible, as they seem to be doing much better than in our living room.
In the next photo, you can see our first male luffa flower starting to bloom. They fell off when I moved a leaf to get the picture, but there were ants climbing around the stem and base of the flower. Which means, pollinators are still getting into the greenhouse. I still plan to hand pollinate, should the opportunity arise.
My daughter and I were checking on it when we spotted our first female flower buds starting to form. No visible baby luffa yet, they were were too small, but we knew they were female flowers, and those form in singles, while the male flowers form in clusters.
As of now, we no longer have any tomatoes in the garden. There are still bush beans, which will probably be killed off by the cold tonight. I’m debating when to just pick the green peppers and bring them in. I’m really surprised by how well the summer squash is holding out. I don’t expect things like the pumpkins, melons, bush beans, the stalled pole beans or sunflowers to survive tonight’s cold, but you never know. Things like the remaining radish plants that still have greener pods on them, the root vegetables, kohl rabi, chard, and even the tiny onions we’ve got growing in the old kitchen garden, can handle frost. We harvested some herbs at the last minute but I haven’t covered that bed with anything. The basil probably won’t make it, but I think the other herds might. We shall see in the morning.
Meanwhile, I’m now going to find some suitable containers, set up something to watch, then start opening up those dried pods and collect their seeds!
For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.
These are some things that turned out pretty different from our plans. Especially the tomatoes!
I’ll start, however, with the alliums.
Garlic, onions and shallots – how it started
The garlic, of course, was planted in the fall. They went where I had the space prepared and available, which was the old kitchen garden. The long, narrow bed along the chimney block retaining wall was filled, as well as the tiny raised bed along the south side. The short section of the L shaped wattle weave bed was filled, and the last cloved were planted down the centre of the larger rectangular bed, which still had tomatoes growing in it.
With all of these, I tried to plant the cloves a fair distance away from the walls of the beds. In planting garlic in raised beds previously, most of them disappeared, while the ones planted in ground in the main garden area did really well. My conclusion is that the ones in the raised beds simply froze. Even though they were well mulched on top, there was nothing extra insulating them around the sides.
The onions and shallots were started early, indoors. The yellow bulb onions were a variety called Frontier, which was new to us, along with a new variety of shallots called Creme Brulee. For red onions, we were going to try Red Wethersfield again.
With the seedlings, the onions and shallots did well, though the Red Wethersfield onions had a rougher time of it. In the end, though, we did have quite a few seedlings to transplant.
How it went
Hit and miss.
As with everything else, the garlic was delayed. In fact, it was so long before they broke ground that I started to fear we’d lost them all. As the season progressed, however, they did very well, and we got to enjoy plenty of garlic scapes when they finally appeared!
For the onions, I try to interplant them with other things in hopes that they will deter deer and other critters from eating the things they are planted with, or in some cases, just to fill in gaps.
With fewer Red Wethersfield seedlings, I tried transplanting them among the tomatoes in the old kitchen garden, then spread the last of the seedlings in the wattle weave bed.
The yellow onions were interplanted with tomatoes in the main garden area, before the last of them went into one of the newly shifted beds, filling a little more than half of it.
For some reason, I got it in my head that the Red Wethersfield were interplanted with the sweet peppers in the high raised bed. Those were the shallots. The last few shallots went into the same bed as the last of the yellow onions. I planted them at the far end of the bed, with a space in between, so there would be no confusions over what was where, with the space in between getting direct sown with summer squash.
The unexpected surprise, however, was all the onions we found while shifting and cleaning up various beds.
While reworking the long bed at the chain link fence, I found a number of onions that survived the winter. Those got transplanted to one of the low raised beds in the East yard.
As we were weeding and eventually shifting the beds in the main garden area, we ended up finding a lot of Red Wethersfield onions we’d planted the previous year, around the Roma VF tomatoes, that just disappeared. We assumed they all died.
In weeding and shifting the other beds, more surviving onions were found, and even a couple of shallots. All of these got transplanted into the newest low raised bed, where most of the Summer of Melons were transplanted. As onions are biannual, I was very excited by this, as it meant they would be going to seed, which we could collect for next year, instead of buying more.
All of these transplanted onions took and most of them did very well. We found ourselves with many onions blooming.
How the harvest went
More hit and miss!
With the onions that were allowed to go to seed, we found ourselves with many, many flower clusters. They bloomed and bloomed and bloomed!
They bloomed for so long, I wasn’t sure we’d get any finishing their cycle so we could have seed to collect! I did end up being able to collect quite a few flower clusters that had dried on their stems and set them to continue drying out in the cat free zone. I collected the last of them, some of which were still rather green, and set them to dry in the cat free zone, after we had our first frost, which onions can handle.
Every flower in those seeds heads have three seeds in them.
We got quite a lot of seeds, just from the first batch harvested. The second batch took longer to dry out, but they eventually did, and I was able to separate out the seeds. Which meant I have seeds from yellow bulb onions from previous years (Oneida, I believe), Red Wethersfield onions, plus some shallots from previous years (I can’t remember the names of the varieties we tried before, just now), all mixed together!
The Red Wethersfield onions we planted this year, though, were a complete loss.
The cats killed them.
The yard cats just love the garden beds in the old kitchen. They loved to go in between the tomatoes in the larger rectangular bed and just chill, or they would roll around luxuriously – all over the onions! Even when I tried sticking plastic forks into the soil beside them, hoping the tines would deter the cats, they just squeezed in between them and rolled around, anyhow. When I finally cleaned up that bed at the end of the season, I did find a few tiny survivors, though. I saved them, and they can be transplanted in the spring.
The yellow bulb onions and the shallots that shared the bed with them also had cat issues! They actually grew quite well, and we did get a couple of decent sized bulbs out of them. Those where the ones that didn’t get rolled on by cats! At least, not right away. We simply could not keep the cats off that bed, and they really, really liked to lie on the onions or roll in the soil. They didn’t kill the onions, but broke the stems, which meant the bulbs could not grow any bigger.
The shallots had cats rolling on them, too, but they had the extra problem of fighting for resources. While I tried to remove as many of the elm roots that invaded the soil, it doesn’t take them long to grow back, and they send their capillary roots up into the softer, moister soil. They will even force their way through the bottoms of grow bags, as we discovered last year.
The yellow onions that were interplanted with the tomatoes fared better, even though the tomato plants ended up completely overshadowing them. More on that when I talk about how the tomatoes did, in another post.
Still, we managed to get a decent harvest, which was cured and braided, and we now have plenty in the root cellar.
The real success, though, where the shallots that were planted with the peppers. I did not really expect to have a good harvest from them, but when I started reaching around the pepper plants to pull them, I found a lot of nice, big shallots!
These, too, we left to cure, then braided, and are now in the cat free zone, where we can access them more easily to use in our cooking.
Oh, and then there was the garlic.
Usually, they would have been ready to harvest in June or maybe July.
They weren’t ready to harvest until the fall!
We did have really good bulbs, though. Not the biggest, perhaps, but certainly not small. In fact, there were enough good sized bulbs to make them worth planting!
Conclusion, and plans for next year.
Things are going to be pretty different, next year!
One thing will stay the same, and that is the garlic. Those are already planted in the bed where most of the yellow onions were. After spacing them out, I changed my mind and started them at the north end of the bed, where the shallots were, instead of the south. The south end of the bed gets shade for longer periods of the day, because of the trees closer to the house. Starting from the north end means the soil will warm up faster, in the spring.
I was really, really happy with how the shallots turned out this year. We’ve struggled to grow shallots every year, but this year they did fantastic in the high raised bed, in between the sweet peppers. As for the red and yellow onions, it was disappointing that the cats did so much damage – especially for the Red Wethersfield onions. At least we got a harvest with the yellow onions!
BUT…
We have seeds.
Lots of seeds.
This year, we are trying the winter direct sowing. I ended up making a couple of different mixes of seeds, and included onion seeds in the shakers. In the last bed that got winter sown, it got shallot seeds added in, too. So we now have several beds already sown with onions and shallots. Being cold hardy plants, they should start germinating before the other seeds in the mixes do which, hopefully, will go a long way in keeping critters away when the other seeds start to sprout.
If they sprout.
We’ll find out in the spring!
There are still plenty of seeds left, so we have the option of starting some indoors as well, if we want, but I don’t think so. We do want to keep growing onions and shallots, and if the winter sown seeds don’t survive, not starting any indoors means none to be had at all. Their growing season is just too long. I will take that change this year, though.
Onion seeds are only good for about a year. I might end up giving the rest of the seeds away or something, so they don’t go to waste.
Once onions go to seed in their second year, however, they go to seed every year.
In getting the bed ready to plant the garlic, however, I found more onions and shallots that got missed. The bed that had onions interplanted with tomatoes now has summer squash winter sown in it, and I found more missed onions while preparing that bed, too.
The Summer of Melon’s bed that had the transplanted onions in it got half-prepped for the winter. Just the side that had the onions and bush beans. (The other half will wait until spring)
All of the onions that were in there, plus the others I found in preparing other beds, were replanted in the cleaned up half of the bed. I was even able to separate them out by colour, and found myself with half the bed now planted with Red Wethersfield, and the other half with yellow onions, plus a few shallots in the very middle, as a divider.
We should have plenty more onions going to seed for us next year, too!
In the end, for all the issues we had, I would say this was one of the best years for garlic, onions and shallots we’ve had yet.
I hold out home that, with the winter sowing, next year will be even better.
Today is October 10, and yes, we have garden progress!
Last month, the 10 was our average first frost date, so I took garden tour video. I might do that again, later today, depending on how other things go. I might also leave it for the middle of the month. We shall see!
While doing my rounds this morning, I finally pulled the red onions in the high raised bed and set them to cure.
The strong fence wire on this cover was perfect to hang them on! Only a few didn’t have enough greens to hang them, so they got set out on the frame to cure.
After I took this photo, I also gathered the whole three shallots that were left by the summer squash, and hung them on the frame wire, too.
I am perplexed by these onions. As far as I can remember, these were supposed to be the Red Wethersfield onions, which have a round, flattish shape. These look more like the Tropeana Lunga or Red of Florence onions we grew before, but we didn’t have seeds for those this year.
So I decided to look at my old post about planting in this bed.
Well, that explains it.
These aren’t onions.
They are the Creme Brulé shallots.
I completely forgot that I planted shallots in this bed. I was sure I’d planted Red Wethersfield in here!
It’s a good thing I use this blog as a gardening journal!
So… those shallots are HUGE! Their size was another reason I didn’t think they could be shallots. Particularly since the ones planted in the bed with the yellow onions and summer squash were so much smaller.
Which had me wondering…
Where are all my Red Wethersfield?
Well… I did know where some of them were, but did they survive?
I had planted some of them among the Forme De Couer tomatoes, but we weren’t able to keep the cats off of them. This was all I could find. A few got planted in the wattle weave bed, but I could see no sign of those.
I was sure I had more transplants than this, though!
Ah, well.
I will be keeping these. As we clean up and prepare the beds for the winter, I will find a place to transplant them, then mulch them over the winter. Hopefully, they will survive the winter and go to seed next year, and we can try again.
As for the bean pods with the onions, those are the Carminat purple pole beans I’d left to go to seed. There had been at least a couple more pods, but I couldn’t find them. With one, I did find the torn remains of the pod, so I’d say the racoons were at it again.
These are all the seeds that were in the bods. It looks like only one is damaged.
They will sit in the cat free zone to dry a bit more, now that they are out of their pods, then I’ll package them up for next year. These do grow very well here, so when we plant them again, I want to mark off one or two plants to specifically leave for growing more seed.
Meanwhile, it’s getting close to the time to plant garlic for next year. I will select our largest heads of garlic in the root cellar, rather than buying more.
Which means we will have onion seeds (with still more to collect from the garden), pole bean seeds, and garlic from our own garden for next year. I’ve also saved seed from that blue squash we had to harvest when it broke off its own stem, and we plan to save seed from that one big Crespo squash. There is the possibility of cross pollination with the Wild Bunch Mix winter squash we grew, though, so any seed we save there may not be true to the parent, even if I was able to hand pollinate from the same plant.
It doesn’t look like those Uzbek Golden carrots that bloomed are producing any seed. The flowers are died off, but there’s no seed. Perhaps because these are first year blooms? I don’t know.
We are slowly getting to the point where we will be able to save more and more of our own seed. I don’t expect to be 100% using our own seed, if only because I like to try new things, and we are still working out what varieties we like best in some things, but I do expect to be able to grow at least 90% of our garden from our own seed within a few years.
Just a little big closer to our goal of being as self sufficient as possible!
I hadn’t planned on harvesting anything while doing my evening rounds.
My garden had other plans!
I ended up using the bottom of my shirt to carry everything, because I didn’t have my usual giant colander that I use for harvesting and washing the produce.
My shirt got very loaded down!
Before I got to that point, I spotted these seed heads.
While shifting and preparing the low raised beds, I spotted a small plant I recognized as a flower that shows up in our main garden area. Rather than tossing it with the weeds, I decided to transplant it into the log framed bed, with the onions I’d been finding. I had no idea if it would survive a transplant.
Well, not only has it survived, it has thrived! It has become quite large and, while the flowers are not particularly large, the seed heads are amazing! Each one of those puffs in the photo are bigger than the palm of my hand.
I don’t want it to seed itself in the raised bed, so whenever the seed heads open like this, I gather the seeds and let them loose in an area just north of the beds. I figure at least some of them will manage to germinate, in the spring.
While checking on this bed, I also spotted one of the larger melons starting to look a bit yellow. I went to pick it up and it fell off its vine, so I included it in my harvest.
Since this from the Summer of Melons mix, I have no idea if this is a variety that turns yellow like this at maturity. I suspect not, to be honest. Still, we’ll crack it open and see what it’s like inside. So I’m not sure if this is a “first” for the melons or not.
You may notice something else different in the photo.
A bright red Cheyenne hot pepper! Red from stem to tip! There was another, next to it, that is about half red. We grew these previously, in grow bags, but they stayed green. When we had frost predictions, we tried to protect them, but were late covering them up one nice. The next morning, I harvested all the green peppers that weren’t frost damaged, and we set them up in the living room. They did turn red as as they dried, eventually, but they didn’t look very palatable. So I’m very happy to have some ripening while still on their plants!
I think I could have harvested several Dragonfly peppers. Some are quite large and so dark a purple, they look black. I will wait a bit, though. I think we’d end up with too many to use quickly, so I want to be prepared to dehydrate some of them, before I bring them in.
As for the cherry tomatoes, they got all mixed up while I was carrying them in my shirt. I honestly can’t tell the difference between the Chocolate cherry and the Black cherry! I’ll have to ask the family if they can tell the difference by taste.
I’m really quite happy with the harvests we’ve been getting. I had been so sure that we’d have almost nothing to harvest regularly this summer, except maybe tomatoes, since we have four varieties. Granted, this is the sort of harvesting we should have been getting in July and early August, not in September, but I’m just so happy to have anything at all!
If the temperatures stay mild enough, though, we should have a pretty awesome harvest of winter squash and melons! I’m quite looking forward to it!
Okay, I still need to catch up on my garden analysis drafts, but I had to do an extra gardening post!
We had the one purple potato from last year that showed up and grew quite large. I left it be, and for the first time, I had a potato that produced “fruit”.
I collected these after the plant was finally killed off by frost.
We’re having to rearrange our living room (the cat free zone) so we can do our Christmas celebrations in there. I needed to move out the variety of seeds and seed pods, plus these potato berries, there were on a screen to dry. These berries didn’t really dry, though the most frost damaged ones did start to get wrinkled and a few had to be tossed when they started to mold.
Today, I decided to see what they looked like inside.
They actually do have similarities to tomatoes! Really small, round, hard tomatoes. 😄 I was able to squeeze seeds out of quite a few of them. I didn’t collect seeds from all of them, as they have so many, it wasn’t long before my little plate was covered.
I have no idea if these had enough time to mature into viable seeds. From what I’ve read, each seed is genetically different from the parent plant. Since these came from All Blue purple potatoes, I would expect them to still be purple potatoes, but who knows? I’d have to try growing some! I’ve got the collected seeds drying on the plate for now. The rest went into the compost bucket. I suppose it’s possible some of those might germinate in the spring.
It should be interesting to find a quiet corner of the garden somewhere, and give some of these a try!
The Re-Farmer 