crocus sativa

Our 2024 Garden: I got work done!

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

I was able to get a few things done outside today, and I am so happy!

While waiting for the septic guy to arrive and replace the pill switch in our tank (yay! That’s done!), I took the time to remove the mulch in the old kitchen garden beds. At this point, the mulch is insulating the soil from the warmth instead of the cold, so it needs to come off.

I hope you can see the Instagram slideshow okay.

There is garlic planted in the tiny raised bed with its own cover, the long and narrow bed against the retaining wall, the short part of the L shaped wattle weave bed, and down the centre of the rectangular bed in the middle.

In front of the tiny raised bed is some walking onions. I’d planted bulbils for last year, but basically just left them be. They produced new bulbils and now both the onions from last year, and their bulbils, are starting to send out new shoots! I could plant the new bulbils somewhere, but the whole point of walking onions is that they plant themselves.

While uncovering the long section of the wattle weave bed, I found what looks like surviving thyme and strawberries! I wasn’t sure if they’d make it through the winter. It should be interesting to see if the chamomile self seeded or not.

These had a grass clipping mulch, which has just been set aside for now. We’ll use it again, after the ground is thawed an as we are able to plant things.

By the time this was done, it was coming up on 2pm, which is when the post office opens for the afternoon, so I headed out. Not only did I get the packages I was expecting, but the missing pieces from the shelf I got to make into a multilevel cat bed came in. A job for tonight will be to take care of that.

When I got home, the septic guy was here, so I stayed around the area as he went in and out from the tank to the basement, so make sure no cats got too curious about the open tank! That gave me the opportunity to move the mulch over the saffron crocuses we planted in the fall, and I got a real surprise, there!

They had already sprouted – and look how long those leaves are! This mulch should have been removed awhile ago. Hopefully, the shock of being exposed to sunlight won’t set them back too much. I’m really surprised they were already growing, considering the soil under the mulch is still quite frozen! These are supposed to be hardy only to zone 4, but our mild winter seems to have been excellent for them. So far, it looks like one corm didn’t make it, but now that it’s uncovered it might still show up.

After the septic guy was done and headed out, I was able to keep working on the bed by the chain link fence. I ended up finding another buried piece of sidewalk block! I was able to get the entire bed reworked and somewhat weeded, then replaced the brick border to make the narrower bed. I was able to pull out quite a few weed roots, but not everything, so when it was done, I covered the entire surface of the bed with clear plastic from bags we normally use for our recycling. Because the bed is now so narrow, I cut the bags along the sides to make long pieces. It took 4 of them to cover the bed, to solarize them. Something else I learned from Gardening in Canada that I want to try.

The idea is the direct contact plastic will basically cook those roots. Hopefully, this won’t take too long. Once I can remove the plastic, I want to plant some of these…

I’ve decided I will plant the Purple Caribe potatoes in this bed. I won’t be able to hill them, but if I plant them deep enough – something that can actually be done in this bed – I won’t need to.

Oh! I’m just watching that video again and she says the soil should be deep watered first. I haven’t got any hoses set up, since we still dip below freezing some nights. It’s too late in the day to do that now, so I’ll get the water turned on from the basement and set up a hose in the morning.

We’ve got a few more warm days, then in the middle of next week we are supposed to get a bit chilly with some rain and possibly some snow. By next Sunday, we should start getting highs in the double digits (Celsius) again, and stay there.

I wasn’t planning on chitting the potatoes but, after looking at the forecast, I think we can go ahead and do that, while waiting for better conditions to plant them in. That will give us time to prepare the area we want to plant the German Butterball potatoes, and even do some solarizing there, too.

Things are going to get busy!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 – and 2024! garden: planting and transplanting

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

This morning, before I intended to continue working on the trellis bed, I wanted to transplant those volunteer tomatoes into the old kitchen garden.

Yes, it’s September, and our average first frost date is the day after tomorrow, but if the frost holds off long enough, they just might have a chance!

It was also a good time to amend the bed the Irish Cobbler potatoes were in. After removing the remaining mulch and loosening the soil (and finding a few tiny potatoes that got missed!), I worked in a bag of cow manure. I also noticed a couple of spaces in the walls where the grass clippings used as chinking was gone, so I found some scrap pieces of wood to put over the gaps on the inside.

Once the bed was prepared, I went and dug up the volunteer tomatoes. I don’t even water that bed anymore, so the soil was very dry. None of it stuck to the roots at all! I laid them out gently on one of the baking sheets we use to transfer seedlings in and out while hardening them off. Those are so handy! We need more of them, but Costco no longer carries them. They are SO much more expensive, elsewhere!

Anyhow.

I had seen one volunteer tomato had died; all it’s leaves just shriveled up for some reason. I left that one, but I still ended up digging out 9 tomato plants! All but one of them are where we’d had Spoon tomatoes planted, 2 years ago. I kept track of the one that came up where cherry and grape tomatoes were planted last year, and the year before.

I’d already given the bed a fairly decent watering, but once I knew how many transplants I had, I dug a hole for each of them, then gave each hole a deep watering. As for the transplants themselves, I trimmed off the lowest leaves and buried the bare stems all the way to the first set of leaves.

I happened to have exactly the right number of plastic rings that had been used to protect the peppers, etc. in the wattle weave bed, so those got put around each tomato plant. These will not only protect them from overnight chills, but from rambunctious kittens, too!

At this point, my alarm went off, reminding me that the post office was open again after lunch. I have a subscription on lysine for the outside cats, and it was in. When I got there, however, I had a pleasant surprise.

My saffron crocus bulbs were in! When I checked the tracking, it was telling me the package would arrive on Monday, so this was a pleasant surprise.

It also changed my plans for after I finished with the tomatoes.

Since we had to pull up all the Roma tomatoes, I had a lot of bamboo stakes available. I pushed in a pair of them inside each plastic ring. These will keep the wind from blowing them away – and the cats from knocking them about – and if the weather holds long enough for them to survive, they will be supports for the tomato plants, too.

I also had the soaker hose that had been used on the Roma tomato bed. It’s pretty long, though, so I was able to run it back and forth and around every plastic ring, using tent pegs to hold it in place on the curves.

Last of all, the mulch got returned.

It’s ridiculously late to be transplanting tomatoes in our area, but I wanted to give them a chance!

That done, I could move on to the saffron crocuses, which needed to be planted right away.

These are actually a zone 4 plant, and we’re zone 3, so they went into the same protected area we have our zone 4 apple tree, and where the girls planted tulips. This area has a mishmash of wire surrounding it, to protect them from the deer.

There are 20 bulbs in the package, and the need to be planted 4 to 8 inches deep, and 3 inches apart. I was originally intending to plant them in a 4 x 5 bulb block, in an area I was pretty sure there were no tulips growing, but after poking around with a garden fork, that went out the window pretty fast. The area is so full of large roots!

I ended up being able to start a longer trench, so I went with 2 rows of 10 bulbs, instead.

The instructions specifically said to NOT amend the soil with manure of fertilizer, to water them when planted, but to not water them again unless it was drought conditions.

In clearing out the soil, so many weed roots were removed that there was hardly any soil left. I would have to get soil from the remains of the truck load of garden soil in the outer yard we bought a couple of years ago.

After removing the top 4 inches of weed roots and dirt, I loosened the bottom with a cultivator tool, then gave the trench a very deep watering. Then I loosened the soil some more, tried to level it off a bit, and watered it some more!

After that, I went and sifted some garden soil into the wheel barrow to fill the trench, before getting the bulbs.

I did not expect them to be so…

…hairy.

The bulbs got laid out in two rows, 3 inches apart, then buried. I ended up needing to get a second small load of soil to cover them well. They got about 6 inches of soil, maybe a bit more, on top. It will, however settle over time. Compaction is another concern. I wanted to give them a final watering, but not with out a mulch, first!

Thankfully, we still have lots of grass clippings handy for mulch!

Once a thick layer was in place, I gave it another deep watering. I wanted that new soil, which was quite dry, to be moistened. The mulch is great for keeping the soil below moist, but if the clippings are very dry, they actually prevent moisture from getting through. The top will get wet, but the bottom – and the soil below – says dry. Kinda like how thatch works. So I made sure the mulch itself was very wet, all the way through, so that the water could moisten the soil, too.

Given the temperatures we can hit over the winter, these will need more protection before the ground freezes, as well the apple tree. It’s already sheltered and protected from the north and, now that the dead and dying trees are cut away, it gets full sunlight and warmth. Still, extra protection will be good! When the leaves fall, we can use that to mulch the entire area. In the spring, though, the mulch of the crocuses will need to be pushed aside, leaving only a light layer to protect the soil. The alternative would have been to plant them in pots and bring them in every winter, and frankly, I have no interest in doing that. It’s hard enough to protect our house plants from the cats! They’d just love some big pots of soil to dig in. 😄

Once the mulch was in place, I spread out the soil that had been removed as evenly as I could, and that was it.

We now have tomatoes transplanted that, if they survive, will be for this year, and bulbs planted for next year! These crocuses boom in the fall, so it will be quite some time before we know we will have any saffron to harvest.

I’m pretty excited to find out.

From the Vesey’s website:

Bulbs typically triple their flower output year over year. A package of 20 bulbs should produce enough saffron in the first season for the average family to enjoy sparingly.

Triple their output every year? That would be amazing!

But first, they have to survive our winters!

The Re-Farmer