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!
While taking video of the peppers for the garden tour yesterday, I spotted what I thought was a tiny pepper beginning to form. It turned out to be the remains of a blossom. From what I could see, if it did develop into a pepper, it would be our first one.
Today, I went to take another look. After moving the dried remains of petals off, I did indeed find a teeny, tiny beginnings of a pepper.
An absolutely adorable little tree from, no bigger than the tip of my thumb.
I am so happy we have so many frogs this year. I wish they could make a bigger end on the mosquito population, though! Lots of frogs, but no dragonflies.
Gotta set up some bat houses at some point. Walking around this afternoon, the air was filled with the whining of mosquitoes. It’s absolutely insane, how many there are this year!!
Thankfully, I wasn’t needing to be out there for long. My daughter and I had our back to back medical appointments, after doing my mother’s med assist this morning, followed by a trip to the pharmacy, so we were away most of the day. Plus, it’s been raining off and on all day. Very happy for the rain, too! Not much to do in the garden right now, anyhow. Just see how much more the deer have eat, and stare perplexedly as all the things that just aren’t growing this year.
*sigh*
As my SIL once said about their own garden; if they had to live off of what they grew, they’d starve! They weren’t trying for any sort of self sufficiency. Just to supplement. We, on the other hand, are planning our garden out specifically to have a combination of fresh eating, freezing, canning and winter storage. Last year, we at least were able to freeze a few things. This year, I don’t think we’ll even have anything more than for fresh eating.
We do still have just under 50 days before first frost – a bit longer, if we go by the adjusted average, though I certainly won’t count on it. Who knows what might happen in that time! Maybe, things will actually start suddenly growing and producing and we’ll have a long and mild fall, with plenty to harvest at the end of the season.
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!
After a morning that turned out to be way more hectic than it should have been, going out to water the garden was a much needed stress reducer!
It actually did start raining a bit while I was watering, and it’s rained a bit more since then, but so little, the watering was still needed.
What I’d really like to see is a whole lot of rain going over all those wildfires. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be happening in the near future.
When watering the beds in the south east yard, I noticed more missing tops of greenery along one side of the winter sown bed. I’m actually not too worried about that, as the deer aren’t eating the radish pods I want to keep. I do have some lettuces I’m leaving to go to seed, though, so I might have to do something to protect what’s left in this bed. The other two have netting around them, and the little square bed has plastic around it. The deer can reach over, but I don’t think they like winter squash or corn plants. Corn cobs, yes, but not the plants.
It was when I got to the main garden beds that I found more damage.
Most of the damage was in the high raised bed, which is really just the right height for a deer buffet. A whole lot of beet greens disappeared. In the trellis bed (the next image in the slide show above), a single Hopi Black Dye sunflower lots its top. It will probably grow a new one, though.
While doing the watering, I was seeing all sorts of frogs coming out of the mulch. Some of them were huge! Well… huge for our native varieties of frog, that is.
There was one tiny one that emerged that really caught my attention, though. Would you look at that colour!!!
What an incredible green! That is not a common colour for frogs here, at all. It’s almost metallic.
I did the trees in the outer yard, too. To do that, I drag the hose out to the outer yard, where it almost reaches one of the Korean pines. Then I go back to get a couple of watering cans. I keep those next to the rain barrel (which still isn’t even half full) with water in them, so they don’t blow away.
Since they already have water in them, I got straight to the two furthest walnut trees. The one seed that had been almost dug up did survive, and a seedling has finally emerged!
As I was watering it, I notice the watering can seemed to be getting clogged. That happens a lot with this can. It has some algae, I guess it is, stuck to the inside that I haven’t been able to get off. It comes off in bits, which then clogs the holes in the rose. When that happens, I take the rose off and use the water to rinse off the stuff clogging it while still watering the plant.
Except that there wasn’t anything clogging the rose.
Then something landed in my hand before falling to the ground.
First, I grabbed some support posts and traded them out for three of the post I have with pinwheels at their tops. I put a couple in the corners of the high raised bed, where the beets are, and one at the end of the trellis bed where the sunflowers can be reached. The other end doesn’t have anything the deer like near the end, and the side that doesn’t have the trellis netting is lined with onions, which are a bit of a deterrent for deer, so it was really just the one end that needed something.
In the high raised bed, I put overlapping hoops on the sides, and one at the end. I set the hoops under the radish plants, so they’re not hanging almost to the ground anymore. Then I added a hoop to each end of the trellis bed, including the one that didn’t really need it. The asymmetricy without it was bugging me. 😄
I deer can still stick it’s head through, but they don’t have good depth perception, so I’m hoping the extra things in the way will prevent more carnage.
There is one massive turnip in the high raised bed. I’d left it to go to see, but it’s not bolting. What I thought was from the turnip turned out to be from another radish.
I need to look up recipes for pickling radish pods. I’ll have enough to harvest to be able to fill at least a pint sized jar or two, to do a quick pickle. Now that we finally have radish pods, it’s our grand experiment to see if we want to do this again next year – which would mean planting them this fall. I did order icicle radish seeds, but those won’t be grown for their pods (thought I might let one go to seed to actually collect seeds.
Anyhow. We’ll see how the new additions to to keep the deer from chomping more of my veggies!
Today and tomorrow are supposed to be in the 30C/86F or higher range. I made sure to water the garden beds last night. This morning, I gave everything another watering, including the food forest additions that need it. I even watered the raspberries growing on the old compost pile. I’m starting to see the first red berries, and might even be able to pick a few by the end of the day! The garden will get another watering tonight, and the whole shebang will get watered again in the morning. After that, we expect to be staying below 30C/86F again, at least for a few days, so I will probably just water in the mornings again.
While watering the high raised bed, I decided to do some thinning of carrots and beets.
I ended up harvesting some of the biggest beets we’ve ever grown!
The one white thing is also a beet. There were some albino beet seeds in the mix, but very few germinated, it seems. The Uzbek golden carrots are from the same bed. Some of those bolted, and I’m leaving one of them to go to seed.
In the other root vegetable bed, I’d included our collected lettuce seeds that basically took it over. More than we can possibly eat. I’ve been thinning those out and found several turnips crowded together, so I picked those. I found two others that have bolted and I’m leaving those to collect seed.
All along one side of the bed, the tops of plants have been monched. Looks like a deer has been snacking on the way by. !! The damage isn’t too bad and, after one got eaten, they seem to be leaving the radishes and their pods alone! All that extra lettuce is now protecting other things in the bed from deer.
In the greens bed in the old kitchen garden, after the spinach bolted and I pulled most, leaving some to go to seed, the Swiss Chard has started to grow. They were being choked out, before. There aren’t a lot of them, but a couple have leaves and stems large enough to harvest. Just a few.
While watering the flowers next to the high raised bed, I spotted some colour this morning.
The Cosmos are getting tall enough they were starting to grow through the protective netting, so I removed that. I left the hoops, though, just in case I need to add something on the sides, to keep the cats out.
I have to figure out what I can add to the sides of the trellis bed. Along the edge on the side with no trellis net, and thankfully where no seedlings were affected, I found evidence of cats burying their “treasures” in there already.
I had been thinking that today, I’d be cutting the maple suckers I’ve been allowing to grow larger, so use in the wattle weave bed. With how quickly it’s getting hot, I might not get to that. It’s also getting really windy.
A trip into town to refill water bottles is going to be needed, so I might do that and avoid the heat, and the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes are insane right now!!! Oddly, I get attacked my mosquitoes more in the old kitchen, while preparing the food for the outside cats, than outside. There’s one window that’s open just enough to allow extension cords through, so I assume that’s where they’re getting in, but so many of them? It’s brutal. Every now and then, I’ll see the back of my hand or part of my arm, and there will be five or six mosquitoes, sucking me dry. Thank God I don’t react much to mosquito bites!
I keep forgetting to look for our cans of bug spray, too.
I’m very happy with what is our first substantial harvest. All of which is from beds sown in the fall. Without that, we’d still have next to nothing to harvest!
Yup. Direct sowing in the fall is definitely going to be a regular thing for us from now on!
I’ve ordered seeds for next year’s garden already.
There’s a reason for that, though. For starters, we can already see how things went with direct sowing in the fall, and how they’re doing now. So while these are for our 2026 garden, some will be planted this year, before the ground freezes.
Another reason is, MI Gardener has refused to raise their prices making them more affordable, even when taking the dollar difference into account.
As low as their prices already were, they also have a 20% off sale, and free shipping to boot.
I took advantage of that.
Well. Just for the seeds. Everything in their site is on sale for a week, but ordering things bulkier than seeds over the border is not something I plan to do.
When I did the winter sowing, I made seed mixes using up a lot of our seeds that were starting to get old. All our radish seeds, spinach, a summer squash seed mix I’d accidentally bought extras of a few years ago, beets, Swiss Chard, etc. were all finished off when I made our seed mixes for the winter sowing.
Here is what I ordered today. I ended up taking three screen caps of the entire order, to get all the little thumbnail images.
Borage: this is an herb I’ve been meaning to get for a long time. Many uses, and a great pollinator attractor.
Kandy Korn Sweet Corn: I have the super short season Yukon Chief for next year already. Having a longer season variety means we can have a longer season for corn, and no overlap on pollination times, so we can still save seeds.
Fordhook Giant and Rainbow Swiss Chard: the same types that I finished off in my winter sowing seed mixes, these will be planted in the fall.
Giant Nobel and American Spinach: while I am looking to save seed from what we have now (we didn’t eat much spinach this year; they bolted too quickly), these are new varieties that I hope will do well. They will be planted in the fall.
White Egg Turnip: all our turnip seeds were used up, so I will be trying this interesting looking variety for our fall planting.
White Icicle Radish: these will be sown in the fall, but not for their pods, though I will probably allow at least one go to seed. My younger daughter likes the daikon radish, which was sold out. This is a smaller relative, and I think she will enjoy these. I recall seeing a variety of radish sold specifically for their large seed pods that I’ll keep an eye out for as well.
Spring Blush Pea: a new variety to plant in the fall, along with other peas we still have.
Bi-Colour Pear Gourd: my “for fun” item.
Purple Vienne Kohlrabi: I used up the last of our old kohlrabi seeds to plant in the fall, and most of the ones that are growing now are the purple ones. Definitely doing to plant more in the fall!
Red Beard Bunching onion: I’ve tried a red variety of bunching onion twice before, and they didn’t succeed. I want to try again with this variety. For bulb onions, we will have our own seed.
Assorted Beet Mix: I planted the last of our beet seeds in the fall, and have the most robust beets growing right now. I decided to go with a mix this time. I like variety!
Green Scallop Benning’s Squash: we’ve got white scallop squash, but they don’t seem to like germinating here. We have more seeds for next year, but I want to try a green variety, too.
Gill’s Golden Pippin Squash: a new and versatile variety to try. I have lots of different types of winter squash seeds, still, both large and small. I like variety!
Tri-colour Green Bean mix: we have a number of different beans left, but the first bush beans we ever grew were a tri-colour mix, and they were the most successful we’d ever grown.
Rainbow Mix Carrot: to plant in the fall. We still have a couple of varieties of carrot seeds left, so we could also start some in the spring, as space opens up, too.
White Vienna Kohlrabi: of our old seeds, it looks like only a couple of the white kohlrabi germinated. These will be planted in the fall. I think they will fair better, not in a mix.
Yellow Scallop Squash: because I like variety, and I really like patty pan squash!
While I will probably pick up other seeds for next year between now and spring, between this order and what I still have in my seed bin, we don’t actually need anything else, besides things like potatoes. It may still be July but, with fall planting in mind, plus working on getting more beds either reworked or made new, I hope to have a larger garden next year, and get a head start on it, this year. After all, almost half of our growing season is already gone!
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!
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!
I’d planted three groups of three seeds of Black Zucchini and White Scallop squash. The zucchini almost all came up – one spot had only two come up – but the white scallop squash saw only two germinate, in one spot.
That left me with two empty spots – and those were being filled with tiny elm seedlings taking over!
So the first thing I had to do, after taking the protecting netting off, was move the mulch aside and get in with the hand cultivator to weed as much as possible.
That took a while.
I really, really hate those elm seeds.
With the white scallop squash, I simply moved the smaller plant into the empty spot beside it. I did the same with the zucchini that had only two plants growing. Then I very carefully removed the extras from the other two spots that had all three zucchini seeds germinate.
I turned out to be wrong. I must have dropped a seed or something, because one of them had four!
I found spaces for them in other beds. Two went into gaps between the three types of winter squash, which are still recovering from getting hit with that one cold night. One went into the end of the bed with the Spoon tomatoes in it. Those all got protective plastic collars. The last one went into an open space in the high raised bed, left from harvesting some radishes and turnips.
Thanks to my SIL using their big zero turn mower on the outer yard, I had a whole lot of grass clippings available. I needed more mulch around the original summer squash bed, plus the one in the high raised bed got a grass clipping mulch, with a final watering to soak the mulch.
Hopefully, the transplants will survive alright. Squash don’t like their roots disturbed, but there was no way I could take them out without using a lot of water and washing the roots off completely. Those ridiculous elm seedlings were wrapping their tap roots around everything!
The Re-Farmer 