Yes!!! I now have the maize morado corn I thought I was getting from Baker Creek, based on the description and video they had at the time. Their name for the corn even changed at some point. It took quite a bit of searching, and I was very happy to find a source for these seeds. Since there were only 25 seeds per pack, I ordered four of them. For our purposes, planting only 25 seeds seems almost pointless. ;-) Plus, it was the only thing I was ordering from them, and with the cost of shipping, adding a few extra packets made it more worthwhile. Especially with ordering from the US and the dollar difference. I’m trying to focus more on Canadian sources, but none of them carry these seeds.
Last year, we started the Montana Morado/Mountain Morado corn indoors, then transplanting, and that ended up working very well. We will be doing that again. This year, however, we will work in making sure they are protected from critters, as much as we can, right from the start! I hope to be able to save seeds and, over time, acclimate them to our growing zone. This might take a few years, but I am determined! :-D
The corn was not the only thing in the package, though.
They also included some free seeds! :-) Dill Dukat. It’s not a variety I’ve heard of before. We’ve got dill seeds from plants my SIL gave us, but I’m more than happy to have another variety! From the description, these look like a good variety for harvesting more greens than the flowers or seeds, and I love dill greens!
I also really appreciate that they included the information insert for starting seeds. That was going the extra mile. :-)
While I am working towards ordering seeds from within Canada more, if I do need to order from the US for something, this company is definitely staying at the top of my list. I’m quite happy with them!
The US postal service, on the other hand, seemed to be having difficulties. :-D
When we decided to go ahead and cancel our old satellite service outright, instead of waiting until the end of the month, after finding how excellently the Starlink system was working, I was working on the assumption that we’d have all sorts of cancellation fees. So, just in case, I budgeted more than what we would normally expected the bill to be, on top of adding on the new Starlink bill.
We were in for a pleasant surprise. We’re actually going to get a couple hundred dollars for a credit. We do still have to send back their transceivers (not the entire dishes, as I was mistakenly told) and their modems/routers/whatever they’re properly called. The packaging should be here when the post office is open again starting tomorrow. I figure we’ll get our credit once they get their items back. Until then, it still freed up a large chunk of our budget.
What a wonderful sense of relief that gives us!
While we did try to stock up as much as we could, the outside cats are going through the kibble a lot faster than usual. Which makes sense. There isn’t much for them to hunt these days, and they will be burning a lot more calories in the cold we’ve been having. Tomorrow was expected to be a warmer day, so I was going to make an extra trip into the smaller city to stock up on more cat food.
Today, however, turned out to be warmer than forecast, and already we’ve reached the high that we were supposed to hit tomorrow. So I decided to make the trip today. At -17C/1F, it feels like summer! Even with the -26C/-15F wind chill, which is coming from the north, so we are well sheltered from it.
The outside cats were practically having a party!
I had a surprise this morning, too. As I was coming back from leaving kibble in the tray under the shrine, I was startled by deer running through the gate in the chain link fence at the south side of the yard! This is the first time I’ve seen the deer going through, while I was outside. Then, when I came around the house with seeds for the feeding station, the doe and her little one were there. They hung back near the compost ring, before finally running off into the spruce grove, but they stopped and looked back repeatedly.
When I was finally ready to head out, I took a peek around the corner of the house and, sure enough, they were back and eating the seeds! They saw me and watched for a while, but didn’t run off until I crossed the yard to the garage.
I’m okay with them being used to finding food at the feeding station. I want them to associate that spot with food, not our garden beds!
Speaking of which, the new wiggle room in our budget meant I could get a few extras along with the cat kibble. Though I didn’t get as much kibble as I intended. They were almost entirely out of stock of the affordable big bags. I only got three. If I’d bought the six I’d intended, there would have been maybe one bag left, and I wanted to leave more for others.
Along with a couple of bags of seed starting mix, I got a heat mat. One of the big problems we had with starting seeds inside the aquarium greenhouses (besides the cats constantly trying to get at them!) is that the house is just plain too cold. Using things like heated rice bags or small water bottles filled with hot water helped, but some things just never germinated. I’m pretty sure that’s the main reason the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers didn’t germinate until so much later.
I went through our seeds to look at what needs to be started indoors and when. Actually, there’s two ways we can look at it. Most seed packets go by number of weeks before the last frost date. The other way is to look at how long until harvest, then count backwards from the first frost date in the fall.
Our first frost date, on average, is Sept. 10. For anything that requires more than 100 days to harvest, the latest we should have germination is about May 4. If we want to give up to 150 days, we’d need to have germination by April 30. I would calculate when to start the seeds from there, using the days to germination information on the seed packages.
Which isn’t too bad.
If we go by the package instructions using our average last frost date of June 2, we have several dates to go by. Four weeks puts us at May 5, six weeks at April 21, eight weeks at April 7, and ten weeks at March 24.
Having worked that out, however, there are still going to be things I plan to start earlier. Some of these, people on my Zone 3 gardening groups have already started!
The main one will be onions and shallots. With so many varieties and so many onions we want to plant, space would be the biggest issue… except maybe not. I found this, from MI Gardener.
Based on that method, we should have no problem planting all our varieties in just the big aquarium greenhouse.
The problem with that is, it’s currently housing several aloe vera plants to protect them from the cats, plus my daughter’s two remaining orchids. She’d had them safely hanging in front of the living room window, only to discover it was too cold for them there, and a couple of them died.
There is still the small aquarium greenhouse. Depending on what I have for growing trays, I could fit all the onions in there.
There are a few other things that need to be started very early, too. Among the things that can be started at 10 weeks are the eggplants and peppers (we will be starting just a few of those, since only 2 people in our household like them), the Sophie’s Choice tomato (just a few of those), the Cup of Moldova tomato (lots of those, since they are for processing), the Wonderberry (just a few of those) and the luffa (probably all the seeds we have left of those). All of these are things I’m seriously considering starting much earlier. Especially the luffa.
With those, we might be able to fit them all in the big tank, and still keep the orchids with them, but I have no idea where we can put the aloe vera pots that will be safe from the cats!
Among the things we can start at 8 weeks are the rest of the tomatoes, ground cherries, Crespo squash, Tennessee Dancing Gourds, and the Ozark Nest Egg gourds.
I think at 6 weeks is when I will start the kulli corn seeds which, according the the tracking information, has arrived in the city and should arrive at our post office in the next couple of days.
At 4 weeks, we need to start the cucumber, all the squash and melons, the rest of any gourds we will be trying this year, and the hulless pumpkins. It would also be the time for me to start the kohlrabi, if I decide I will try those again this year, since direct sowing them has been a complete fail for the past two years.
Everything else we’ve got can be direct sown, some as soon as the ground can be worked, and others after the last frost date.
I’m going to need more soil, but that’s something we can pick up little by little, as we need it.
I have to admit, I’m really torn right now about starting things too early. I know there are people in our zone that do it every year and have no problem, and others have started winter sowing outdoors, using this method. We don’t have a lot of milk jugs, but I’ve been keeping jugs from the distilled water for my husband’s CPAP, which would do. They are that blue, transparent plastic. Theoretically, we could set this up in the sun room, which does get below freezing, but still stays a lot warmer than outside. That would actually be a good experiment for the kohlrabi, now that I think about it. With so many yard cats, plus the deer, I’m not sure putting the containers outside would be wise, unless we can put some sort of protection over them. In theory, we could drag over the covers we made for the raised beds. They’re covered in snow right now, and probably frozen to the ground! :-D
For any experienced cold-climate gardeners reading this, what do you think? Would I be severely jumping the gun if I start our onions seeds this early? Or some of the tomatoes, the eggplant and peppers? What do you think?
With all but one order of seeds having arrived, I decided to do an inventory of what we have, including what we have left over from this past year’s garden.
I was a bit surprised by some of them.
One surprise was the Spoon tomatoes. We had two packets of those, and while I thought we had planted all the seeds, I found a surprising number of seeds at the bottom of each packet. So I combined them into one. There isn’t a huge amount, but it does mean we could start some indoors, if we felt like it. I don’t think we will, since we have so many other tomatoes. Plus, I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch showed up on their own in the bed we grew them in this past summer!
I didn’t think we had any kohl rabi left, either. One of my daughters had done a second planting of those, and I thought she’d used the last of the seeds. The White Vienna is actually from the year before. We got two free packets of the Early Purple Vienne, and both got opened for some reason; my daughter probably missed the one I’d opened to do an early planting. We had no luck at all with kohl rabi this year and I plan on starting them indoors instead of direct sowing.
For the gourds, I want to do the Tennessee Dancing Gourds again. They did really well. I want to try the Ozark Nest Egg again; were it not for the drought delaying their development, we would have had lots of those. I also want to try the luffa again, because I’m a sucker for punishment, but will probably skip the Birdhouse and Thai Bottle gourds.
Though we still have seeds left from the summer squash collection, we also still have the other two collections I’d ordered by accident. I like having a good variety, and this year we’ll have green patty pan squash, too, so we’ll start just a few seeds of each. The Baby Pam pumpkin never germinated at all, but I think that had more to do with growing conditions. We have so many others, I don’t know that we’ll try them again. There are still Halona melon seeds left, but I also saved seeds from both the Halona and the Pixie, both of which did very well, plus some other seeds I saved from other melons we enjoyed.
I will happily grow more of the Teddy and Red Kuri (Little Gem) winter squash again, along with the new varieties we ordered. They may have had a hard time with the drought, but they were quite good, and they are much smaller varieties that – in more ideal conditions – are supposed to be prolific producers.
Not in the photo are the varieties of spinach and lettuce we still have lots of. They, and the chard, are for spring and fall planting, so we’ll have to plan those out – if we try growing chard again. We didn’t really eat them much. As for the radishes, I want to plant a just a few of each, much earlier, and leave them, as it’s the pods I’m after, not the root.
The carrots here are pelleted seeds, and there are still quite a lot. It’s easier to space the pelleted seeds when planting. With thinning not as much of a concern, I don’t think I used even half of each variety this past year. I will happily plant them again, along with the new varieties we got.
I was surprised to find the Merlin beets. I thought I’d mixed all the remaining beet seeds together to plant into the L shaped bed, but I guess I missed these. We were planning to plant only one variety next year, but it won’t hurt to have two. :-)
We have quite a bit of the green and gold bush beans left, but that packet of King Tut purple peas only has about 5 seeds in it, and those are seeds I’d saved myself. If I do plant those, they will be only for seed saving. I didn’t order any other peas this time, but those are something I can easily buy locally in the spring. As for the beans, we do have several varieties of pole beans, but bush beans tend to mature faster, so I might go ahead and do both.
These are all our new seeds, except for the Kulli corn that is still on the way. It seems like a lot, but for things like the squash and gourds in particular, we will only be starting a few seeds indoors for each. I would rather plant fewer of many varieties and see how they do, than have lots of one variety then discover it doesn’t like growing here. That, and it would get pretty boring eating the same variety of vegetable all year! For things like the onions… well, I’m finding we just can’t have too many of those!
The beginnings of our culinary herb garden is something I need to think about. We already have a mint that we found in the old kitchen garden, but I don’t know what kind they are. Not spearmint, is the most I can say for sure. Probably peppermint. I want to have permanent places for our culinary herbs, and the old kitchen garden makes the most sense, since it’s right at the house, but unless we start taking out the ornamental crab apple trees, and the double lilacs, roses and honeysuckles – which I have no intention of doing – there’s not a lot of well lit space left in there. I might try growing them in buried pots at first, so that as we build raised beds in there, they will be easy to transplant, and things like the mint will be contained.
One of the things about the squash is that, with their spreading habit, we can use them to reclaim more garden area. We’ll be growing potatoes using the Ruth Stout heavy mulching method again, for much the same reason. With so many climbers this year, we’ll need to build more trellises, too.
I’ve been talking to quite a few people who are looking to start gardening for the first time, out of necessity. There is a lot to consider. Especially in our Zone 3 growing zone. So if it seems like I’m spending an inordinate amount of time talking about gardening of late, that is partly way. I’ll be writing a post specifically for those who are suddenly finding themselves having to grow their own food, so if you have something specific you’d like me to include on that, or experiences you’d like to share, please feel free to mention it in the comments.
You can read about what we ordered from Baker Creek, and why, here.
The free seeds we got this time are an interesting addition! I was looking at them on the website, and had heard from people in local gardening groups that successfully grew them this past year. I decided against ordering them, since I was already ordering the Black Nebula carrots, and we still have seed left over from this year’s garden. However, now that we have them anyway, I’ll be happy to try them!
The delectable, lemon-yellow roots have a unique shape! These carrots have a fine-grained texture that is crispy and juicy with plenty of natural sugar. This variety hails from Uzbekistan and is popular across central Asia. Widely adaptable, this variety produced sweet roots even in the hot summer months during our Missouri greenhouse trials, but it is equally vigorous and tasty when grown in cool weather. Called “Mshak” in Uzbek, this variety is easy to grow in a range of soils and temperatures and the flavor is superb. We love this as a snacking or cooking carrot, and in Uzbekistan and Central Asia it is an essential ingredient in plov, or pilaf, a signature dish of that region.
Sounds like something that should grow all right in our region. The reviews for it are good, too.
At this point, we have only one more seed order still en route; the Kulli corn. Our next orders will be perishable stock, such as tubers, saplings and root stock. Those tend not to be shipped until ready for planting in our zone, but I still want to order them as early as I can!
It’s a good thing we’re planning to continually expand our garden over the years! We’re going to need more beds for everything we plan to grow this coming year, above taking into account the areas we grew in last summer will be used for planting berry hedges instead of vegetables next year. And we won’t even be planting everything I ordered this year! We still have a lot of work ahead of us before we reach our goal of growing sufficient vegetables and fruit to feed the four of us through the winter and spring, until the following year’s garden starts producing, with enough to share, too. I think we’re off to a pretty good start, though! As long as the weather co-operates. As much as I enjoy our relatively mild temperatures, we need more snow to help the water table recover in the spring, from this past summer’s drought!
We dropped from 0C/32F yesterday, to -16C/3F today – with a wind chill of -27C/-16F! I did NOT want to do a dump run today, that’s for sure, but we weren’t able to get it done on Saturday, since that’s when my awesome brother came over to mount our Starlink dish on the roof. So today, it was!
Since we were out anyhow, we swung by the post office. I am expecting my Baker Creek order in tomorrow, but I still got seeds, today! My second order from Heritage Seeds was in! That was really fast. :-D You can read about our first order, here, and our second order here.
There was an extra packet of seeds in there – and this time, I noticed the “free gift” sticker. I went back to our first order and, sure enough, the extra packet of seeds we’d found last time did have the sticker, too. I just missed it entirely!
Of course, I had to look up what it was they sent us! This is their description for “Gold Ball Turnip”.
Gold Ball Turnip (1854) (aka Orange Jelly)
Introduced around 1854, this wonderful heirloom turnip has yellow fine grained flesh and reaches peak flavor when harvested at 3” although the yellow globes will reach 4-5” at maturity. Great storage variety. One of the best tasting turnips. (45 days to maturity)
I had been considering turnips as a good storage vegetable. It’s not something we normally buy, but not because we don’t like it. We just like other things better, and I usually get rutabagas instead, because they tend to be smaller. However, no grocery store carries this turnip variety! I look forward to trying them. It certainly meets what we look for when deciding what to grow.
This order coming in was just the thing I needed to cheer me up on a chilly day!
Well, I just couldn’t resist. After looking over the Heritage Harvest site, then going over my budget, I went ahead and placed another seed order. We may not be able to plant them all, but we’ll at least have a good start on our own seed bank, if we don’t!
I am absolutely determined to grow gourds for crafting purposes. This company is in Fisher Branch, Manitoba, which is in the same zone, or colder, than we are, so we should be able to grow these here, too!
The first two, Apple and Canteen, were gourds I already had on my favorites list (a function the updated website doesn’t seem to have now), and had been out of stock, so I wanted to snag them while I could!
The third gourd, Yakteen, is a new variety for 2022. It is a type that can be eaten when young (which is supposed to be true of all varieties of gourds, but I don’t think they all taste good), or left to mature and be used for crafting, which is what I plan to use it for. It’s also listed as very rare, so saving seeds will be an important part of growing these.
The rest that I ordered are all on their new-for-22 list. It was really hard not to order more from my old favorites list! I already have other varieties of most of those, so I didn’t. The only exception is…
… the Red Noodle bean. I have two other varieties of pole beans, in different colours. None are as long as these get, though – they can reach 16-20 inches in length! There’s only 25 seeds in a packet, and I was already planning to get a third variety of pole bean, so this fits in.
These are Little Finger eggplants. We are not big eggplant eaters, but it’s not because we don’t like them. It’s just that, with X amount in the grocery budget, they tend to get passed over. I don’t know if we’ll be up to growing eggplants this year, but these are supposed to be good container plants, so they would be a nice thing to have tucked somewhere on the south side of the house. In the end, it will probably depend on how much space I have to start things indoors.
These are Purple Beauty peppers. My husband and older daughter are the ones that like peppers, so having a few plants for them would be nice. And if we’re going to grow peppers, why not a variety that isn’t available in stores? :-)
Here we have the Kaho watermelon. They are an early variety that grow to only 2 – 4 pounds. Watermelons were not something I was planning to try, yet, but with an early variety, it might be worth starting a couple of plants indoors, if we can fit them.
Finally, we have the Wonderberry. Something I have never heard of before. These fall into the category of permanent plants, as they are supposed to self-seed prolifically. We will have to plan out where we grow them, but once we do, we should have berries, year after year. That makes them worth trying, in my view! Plus, they are drought tolerant. Bonus points on that one!
So this is my second order from Heritage Harvest Seed. I look forward to seeing how the seeds we get from them do in our zone, compared to ones we have ordered from other seed companies that are not as far north as this one.
I was really excited to find Heritage Harvest Seed. First because it is a company from Fisher Branch, Manitoba. They are even further north than we are. Which means we can be confident that anything we order from them will grow here!
Also, they specialize in rare and endangered seeds. I love going through the site and reading the descriptions, which include things like the history of a particular plant, or the efforts made to find seeds, and so on. Quite a few things ended up on my wish list the moment I saw “extremely rare” added to the description!
There’s no way we could possibly order everything on my wishlist! However, when I placed my order, I did include things we will not be able to plant this year, but which I hope to plant in the future.
It was so hard not to order more than I did!
Here is what I settled on. All photos belong to Heritage Harvest Seeds.
Here we have a very different corn than I’m used to; Tom Thumb Popcorn. It is a small variety, growing to about 2 feet high, that produces many cobs that are only 2 or 3 inches long. They make an excellent popcorn, and are a short season corn. Popcorn is one of our few regular snack foods, and we’re always running out, so if we can grow our own, that would be awesome. :-)
This is the one variety of tomato that we are growing, not as a snack food for my husband and older daughter, but as something to preserve in the larder. I’ve been looking for a paste tomato to try, and settled on Cup of Moldova. It is listed as extremely rare. It is an indeterminate variety that is good for making sauce, which means it should also be good for making tomato paste. That is what I am growing them for. As it is a rare variety, we will definitely be keeping seeds, too.
Here is another red onion I decided to try. Tropeana Lunga. The Baker Creek onion I ordered is similar to this, and this one is also an Italian variety.
This makes a total of five different varieties of onions we have seeds for, but I don’t mind. We use onions a LOT. The hard part will be finding the space needed to start them indoors.
We’ll figure something out!
Last time, I ordered these seeds from Baker Creek. They failed completely, and we don’t know why. Perhaps ordering Strawberry Spinach from a Canadian, zone 3, source might make a difference? I don’t know. We will do what we can to improve the bed we’ll be planting them in as well. I do hope they work out this time. I was really looking forward to them!
Though we’ve ordered pole beans, I wanted to have at least one variety for dry beans, rather than fresh eating. These are Blue Grey Speckled Tepary, and were once a staple food in parts of the US and in Mexico. They are also drought resistant and heat tolerant – which, after this past summer, is a big deal!
This is the third variety of hulless pumpkin seeds that I ordered; Styrian hulless. This variety was used to press for oil, and the fruit can reach up to 20 pounds in size! The description noted it as being very productive and dependable.
This is another one I picked when I saw it listed as extremely rare: Boston Marrow Squash. There is an interesting history behind it, but the real selling point was the description including “…makes the best pumpkin pie I have ever tasted!” It’s also a good storage squash. Even if we only grow a couple of plants, I want to make sure to save seeds from it, to keep the variety going.
Yes, I picked a wheat. The historical Marquis wheat, which is supposed to have excellent baking qualities.
We don’t have anywhere to grow wheat right now, but it is something we do want to do, so we can grind our own flour. Wheat seeds can last for a very long time, so I don’t mind getting some now, while we can, for future use.
This one is my wild and crazy purchase. The Zucca Melon; a variety that was saved from near extinction. I highly recommend clicking on the link and reading the story behind it.
These can get massive – anywhere from 60 – 120 pounds, and is described as …“a cross between a vegetable marrow and a hippopotamus”.
How can anyone resist that?
I’ll probably grow only one or two plants, and hopefully will be able to save seeds.
This makes the last of my seed orders for this month’s budget. I may still order things that won’t get shipped – or billed – until spring, but we shall see. For now, I’m done.
The garden will be expanding quite a bit again, and this time we should have more fruit trees and berry bushes. Hopefully, we will have a good growing season, too, and not have to deal with drought and heat waves again!
Last year, we grew the Montana Morado corn, from Baker Creek, which I thought was maize morado, or Kulli, from Peru. They turned out to be a US hybrid.
There was certainly nothing to object to about the corn itself, but once I learned about maize morado, I just got it in me that I really, really want to grow Kulli corn, here in the middle of Canada.
After much searching, I found a source that I could order from: Mary’s Heirloom Seeds.
This image belongs to Mary’s Heirloom seeds.
While the company is based in Texas, the corn itself is from the Andes Highlands. From what I’ve been able to find out, the Highlands have two seasons; summer (dry) and winter (wet). The temperature swings are more moderate than what we have. It’s a mountainous region, filled with microclimates, so it’s hard to know how to compare to the zone system we use in Canada and the US. With how hot and dry our summers can get, it may actually do all right here. It requires 120 days to maturity, so I will be starting them indoors, as we did with the Montana Morado.
The seed packets have only 25 seeds in them, so I ordered four, since I wasn’t ordering anything else. Even so, the cost of shipping wasn’t much less than the cost of the seeds!
As with so many other things, the main issue will be protecting the corn from critters. If we can manage that, I feel we will be able to grow this successfully, here. This is a corn that can be eaten fresh while young as a sweet corn, dried for a flour corn, used as a dye, and of course, used to make chicha morado.
I may not have made my shopping trip to the city today, but that didn’t stop me from shopping!
I have already placed my first seed order for next year’s garden from Vesey’s. That order is in, including a correction. We’ve got a monthly seed budget right now, so we will continue to place orders throughout the winter, for seeds, seedlings, roots and tubers.
For this past year’s garden, we ordered seeds from two places; Vesey’s, which is where we had ordered seeds for the previous year’s garden from, and Baker Creek; Rare Seeds. We were quite happy with both places. This year, I plan to order from other Canadian sources I found, but we still have items we wanted to get from Baker Creek.
This is the order I placed with them last night. All photos belong to Baker Creek.
I had already ordered onions, but did not have a red onion, yet. This is the Red of Florence onion; a long day onion (important when growing onions as far north as we are) that is a rare Italian variety, noted for its “balanced” flavour – whatever that means!
I like its shape, and think it would be a lot easier to cut!
The description says it can be planted in the fall or spring, but I doubt that applies to our zone!
This is the Black Nebula carrot, described as the darkest carrot they’ve ever seen, and it’s supposed to be exceptionally healthy. We already have a couple of other varieties of carrot we can plant, but I enjoy trying new types, and purple things did well for us in our 2021 garden. Plus, I consider carrots a staple food, so the more, the better!
As long as we can keep those groundhogs out!
Here we’re into something rather different – hulless seed pumpkins! I’ve ordered three different varieties, including two from Baker Creek. I really like pumpkin seeds, but hulled pumpkin seeds at the store is pretty expensive, so when I discovered there are hulless varieties, some of which can be eaten straight out of the fruit, I just had to give them a try!
I plan to try growing only a couple of each variety, so we can see which one we like best.
This past year, we got the Giant Rattle bread seed poppy, which we will be growing again from seed we’ve saved. Next year, we will find a spot for these Hungarian Blue, where they can self sow and be treated as a perennial.
Well, I couldn’t resist! Though we still have seeds, when I saw the Crespo squash was back in stock, I ordered a fresh packet. I was really impressed with how vigorously these grew, and how well they recovered after being repeatedly damaged by deer and groundhogs. If there had been enough growing season left after that, I’ve no doubt we would have had quite a few squash. We will try these again, and take precautions from the start, to ensure the critters don’t get to them!
That is it for our Baker Creek order this time. While I have loads of others in my wish list. Since we are ordering from several other places this year, and I am trying to focus on Canadian sources as much as possible, I don’t expect to be making another order from here.
Since we ordered SO many things for this year, and expanded how much space we were gardening in, I decided to go over groups of things in separate posts, in no particular order and spread over the next few days.
This is the last post in this series.
The utter and complete failures!
It was such a very difficult growing year this year. We had to deal with drought, heat waves, difficulty watering things due to the beds being so far flung, deer, groundhogs and a plague of grasshoppers.
Yet, we still managed to harvest food from our garden, and with some, we even had enough to freeze and pickle.
There were some things, however, that just didn’t work.
One of these was the Baby Pam Pumpkin.
I have no photos, because there was nothing to take photos of!
When we started these indoors, we only planted a few seeds, not the entire package.
They did not germinate. At all.
I highly doubt there was something wrong with the seeds. Veseys seeds have always been of very high quality. We had a number of issues with starting things indoors, and those were more likely the reason.
These little pumpkins were chosen for their short growing season, small size and their reputed excellent flavour. I think I’d be willing to try them again, when we start our other squash indoors. We already have so many others, though, it might be something we will try again further in the future.
Another fail was the Strawberry Spinach. These were broadcast in a new bed we made, near where the asparagus crowns were later trenched. They did seem to sprout, and then they disappeared.
Assuming the sprouts we saw were even Strawberry Spinach!
I want to try these again. This spot was chosen because they are known to self seed easily, and this could be a permanent spot for them. We’ve grown them before in a balcony garden, years ago, so I know we like them. I plan to get more seeds for this coming year. Once this bed was finally abandoned, it got very weedy, so in the spring, it will need a lot of clean up of as many roots as we can. It’s already got new garden soil on it, but a bit more won’t hurt. The seeds are so fine, a mulch might be too much for them, but perhaps if we cover them with the clear plastic we have, first, then with netting until the start getting big. Maybe that will work?
We shall see.
Then there was the Illinois Everbearing Mulberry.
We took a chance on this one. It was a zone 4 plant, but with a good microclimate and winter protection, I thought we could make it work. I remember my mother being able to grow things I later learned were zone 5, quite successfully, so I knew it was possible.
It started out so well, too! We had a wonderfully warm May, and Veseys sent it out when it was the right time of year for transplanting in our zone. Once transplanted, it took well and soon sprouted healthy leaves.
Then we got hit with that one really cold night in late May.
Our last frost date is June 2. Typically, that means hitting temperatures at or just below freezing. Maybe as low as -2C/28F or so.
If I remember correctly, we hit -8C/18F.
It was devastating.
With the month having been so warm, we had things blooming all over. Most of the lilacs, the crab apples, chokecherries and Saskatoons were all blooming. Even the highbush cranberry I uncovered in the spruce grove the year before had flowers.
That was it for the lilacs blooming, and we got no fruit. Even the grape vines, which hadn’t even started budding yet, were set back.
Unfortunately, we had completely forgotten about the mulberry tree. If we had remembered, we could have done something to protect it from the cold, but we didn’t. I’d read that, when hit with cold, mulberries can drop all their leaves, but then grow them back and recover. I held out hope for months, even continuing to water it during the drought. I even thought there might be a possibility that it would make a come back next spring.
All possibility of a recovery ended just a little while ago, when I discovered that even the remaining stem was gone, having been eaten by deer.
That poor little tree.
Since then, I have found a nursery that has a cold hardy, white mulberry available. It was an accidental discovery on their land, and that parent tree has survived temperatures of -40C/-40F. It’s a lot more expensive then mulberries at other nurseries, but no other place has any this cold hardy.
We plan to order one, as soon as we can squeeze it out of the budget. Mulberries are known for producing a LOT of berries; enough for our own uses and what we can’t reach, the birds can enjoy. Another reason I want to get a mulberry tree is because of my mother. She shared stories with me of a mulberry tree they had in Poland when she was a child. A huge tree, bigger than their barn. When I found out that mulberry trees were available to grow in Canada, I just had to give it a try.
Hopefully, the next one we get will survive!
Another failure for us was the Chinese Pink celery, though that is entirely my fault. I didn’t pay enough attention to the instructions. It wasn’t until we were starting other things indoors that I realized these should have been started in January or February, not April!
We did actually get seedlings, and I even transplanted one little bunch, but nothing came of it.
I am still very curious about these and would love to try them again.
Maybe not right away, though.
Ah, the radishes.
I ordered a couple of varieties for my younger daughter. Daikon and Watermelon. These were interplanted with the corn. The Daikon radish in particular is known to help break up hard soil, which would have been quite beneficial in that area.
It was very exciting when they started to germinate! We were seeing them all over.
Then they disappeared without a trace.
A while later, there was some late germination, but those disappeared, too.
I have no idea what happened to them. We weren’t having problems with insects at the time. Birds, maybe? I just don’t know.
It was quite disappointing.
Then, later on, I decided to try again, this time with seeds I picked up at the grocery store.
Oh, I completely forgot about the chard!
It was not a failure. At least not the Bright Lights chard. As a fall planting, they grew very well, but we didn’t eat a lot of them. They weren’t a big hit with the family, and we didn’t really know what to do with them. They sure handled the frosts well! The second variety was a fail. Only two plants survived the grasshoppers. Barely.
As for the radishes, they got decimated by the grasshoppers. In the end, all we got was this.
Two French Breakfast radishes, which were left to grow because I was after pods, not roots.
We got neither.
I do plan to try radishes again, but very different ones. I’ve found a source for tillage radishes – they can grow many feet long, and are used as more as a cover crop, because they do such a great job of “tilling” the soil, and are left to decompose, further amending it. They can also be used as a forage crop, so planting them away from the house could be useful in luring the deer away. I’m also looking at picking up some sugar beets to try. They also help break up the soil, can also serve as a forage crop – or we can actually try making our own sugar from them. Our province used to be a major producer of sugar from sugar beets for many years. I figure it’s worth a try, at some point.
We have a couple more complete failures here. The Early Purple Vienna kohlrabi, and the Russian Red Kale.
These were both free seeds from Baker Creek. I really like kohlrabi and tried planting White Vienna the year before. Of all the seeds I’d planted, only 4 survived, and only 2 got large, but none ever got a chance to form their bulbs. The final killer was flea beetles.
This year, we didn’t even get that.
As cool weather crops, both got planted the earliest, but as far as I can tell, none germinated. I even tried planting kohlrabi again, as a fall crop when the radishes, lettuce and chard were planted.
Nothing.
Now, I don’t mind the kale not working. I’m not a big fan of kale, though I did enjoy kale chips that we’ve made in the past. I’m willing to try different types and maybe find that I do like them, after all.
Kohlrabi, on the other hand, is something I really enjoy, but only buy rarely as a treat. I’d love to be able to grow my own. The problem is, I don’t know why they failed this year. I can’t even be sure if they germinated, or if something ate all the seeds. Or maybe they did germinate, and something ate all the sprouts?
I have no idea.
But I really, really want to grow kohlrabi!
I think, if I have the space for it, I will try starting some indoors. Maybe transplants will survive!
Final analysis:
In spite of the complete failures, and all the other challenges we had in the garden this past year, I’m still pretty happy with it all. I heard from so many others that lost their gardens entirely, so we have much to be thankful for.
Plus, all those challenges now, means we have a better idea of what we can do in the future, whether its by focusing on hügelkultur beds and mulching as a way to conserve water during drought conditions, to knowing what critters we need to protect our food from (the groundhogs were an unexpected problem!), and so on. We’ve learned a great deal.
Which means that even the failures are really successes, in the end.
The Re-Farmer 