Yes, I just place our first order of seeds for next year’s garden. We might not need to order many seeds this year, considering how many we have left, but one thing we were out of completely was onions. Onions seeds only last one year, anyhow. Plus, today is the last day I can use the promo code from Maritime Gardening to get free shipping. 😁
This is what I ordered today.
I’m trying a new variety of yellow onion this year. Frontier. From the Veseys website:
Incredibly strong necks and consistent size! Frontier is a standout variety with our trial staff. Bulbs are golden, large and uniform with small necks that cure quickly. Ideal for fresh and storage markets, Frontier is long day hybrid onion with superb disease resistance. Matures in 100 days from transplant. Approx. 200 seeds/pkg.
I’m also trying a new type of shallot this year. Creme Brulee. From the website:
First Shallot AAS winner! An elongated shallot, Creme Brule has a citrusy flavour when eaten raw but when cooked, sugars are enhanced and do not leave an overpowering aftertaste. Bulbs are 4-5″ with a coppery pink skin. An attractive, easy to peel echalion, perfect for the home gardener or market grower! Matures in 95-100 days from transplant. Approx. 150 seeds/pkg.
I do still plan to try the Red Whethersfield onions again, and will probably get Red of Florence again, but those are from a different source.
Of course, I didn’t get just onions! I also got:
Yes, we will be trying to grow melons again (I’ll have a garden analysis post about this year’s melons coming up soon). We still have seeds, but I decided to get the Summer of Melons Blend. From the website:
Veseys exclusive! Best for the home gardener. This blend is the ideal solution to stretch out these beautiful summer flavours. It begins with sweet, early maturing hybrid varieties then keeps going through summer and into early fall. Maturity ranges from 75-85 days from transplant. Approx. 20 seeds/pkg.
I like having a variety, and having melons that mature at different rates – while still within our short growing season! – is bonus. It’ll also be a surprise, since the varieties included aren’t mentioned!
Veseys exclusive! Great range of colours and sizes. This exclusive Veseys blend contains a riot of shapes, sizes and colours that will bring your fall display to the next level. Some of the weirdest and wildest looking squash that we have seen in our trials. Ideal for both home and market gardeners looking for a great display without having to buy separate varieties. All are edible, and are strong vining types so they grow well together. Approx. 20-25 seeds/pkg.
I’ll have a garden analysis about our winter and summer squash, too, which was a real hit and miss situation. We do still have lots seeds from what we grew (or tried to grow) this past year. I have zero interest in having a “fall display” (who would we be displaying it for, anyhow? 😄). I like to try new varieties, but am hesitant to buy an entire package of seeds for something I’m not sure of. This way, we get just a few seeds of different varieties to try and – if they make it! – see if we like them enough to order more in the future. At some point, we’ll settle on one or two favourites and save our own seeds. Until we get to that point, we would be dealing with cross pollination, so any seeds we save as we’re experimenting would give us different results that may not be as good.
Just a small order for now. Soon, I’ll place another order for the red onions, so that we’ll have all the seeds ready to start them in January. Because, where we live, gardening starts in winter!
Our root vegetables this year were a mix of successes and failures!
First up, the successes.
Potatoes
We had three varieties of potatoes this year. We chose the varieties based on things like their storability, and their resistance to disease, as well as their flavour profiles. One time, the Purple Peruvian Fingerlings, were a potato we’d grown a couple of years ago and quite enjoyed. The other two were new to us: Irish Cobbler, a white potato, and Red Thumb Fingerling, a potato with both red skin and red flesh.
The original plan had been to plant them all in grow bags this year. We’d tried the Ruth Stout method last year, and both beds got flooded out, and there was very little left to harvest. We were going to repurpose old bird seed and deer feed bags for this. We have stopped buying both – we just can’t afford it anymore, with how much cat kibble we’re buying now – so it turned out we didn’t have enough for all three varieties.
This required a change in plans and, that early in the season, there were only a few places we could plant potatoes directly into the soil. So, the red and white potatoes went into low raised beds in the Old Kitchen garden.
The red potatoes went into the long, thin bed next to the retaining wall block, which got redone this spring, and when I ran out of room, into the short end of the L shaped wattle weave bed.
You can see how the Old Kitchen Garden beds the potatoes were planted into progressed over the years in this video.
The Purple Peruvians went into the grow bags.
So, how did the potatoes do this year?
Pretty darn good.
We harvested baby potatoes from the Old Kitchen Garden only a couple of times, since we didn’t really have a lot of any variety. The Irish Cobbler were the first to be ready to harvest, then the Red Thumb.
The Purple Peruvians, on the other hand, took an incredibly long time to mature, and did not get harvested until mid October. I’ve been going through my files to find photos of them – they were our biggest harvest – but it turns seems that by the time I was done harvesting them, it was too dark for photos!
As I write this, we have finished off our Irish Cobbler potatoes, but still have Red Thumb and Purple Peruvian Fingerling potatoes in storage.
Final thoughts on potatoes
I would consider all three varieties a success, this year. Especially the Purple Peruvians.
The smallest harvest we got was the Irish Cobblers. They were also the earliest maturing variety. They did seem to have issues with scab, however. They tasted good, however, and were a good potato for a variety of preparation methods.
The Red Thumb did quite well, and were also tasty. When cooked, they practically mashed themselves, so not a good variety if we wanted to do a hash or in a soup or stew. Having pink mashed potatoes as a side for Thanksgiving dinner was rather fun!
The Purple Peruvians seemed to take a lot longer to mature compared to the first year we grew them, with robust plants right up until the frost hit them. They are nicely prolific. The only “down” side is one of aesthetics. They do bleed their colour quite a bit, leaving fingers purple can changing the colour of any soups or stews they are cooked in!
When it comes to growing potatoes for our general needs and use, we will need to grow a lot more, but we are still figuring out what varieties we want to grow. As much as we like the Purple Peruvians and Red Thumb potatoes, I think we might want to move away from fingerling potatoes in general, other than perhaps as a side crop. Their smaller sizes and, in the case of the Purple Peruvians, uneven shapes, make them harder to handle, clean and peel. In the future, I think we will try varieties that have more even shapes and larger sizes, as well as being good for long term storage.
One last surprise
As I mentioned, we grew potatoes last year using the Ruth Stout, deep mulch method. Not only did the potato patches get flooded out, but they also got hit with slugs quite badly.
It seems, however, that we missed a few potatoes when we harvested them, and they showed up this year!
One of them, from the All Blue patch, got quite large and began producing seeds!
I didn’t try digging up the potatoes in the fall, but I did collect the seed balls. I haven’t tried opening any yet. From what I’ve read, these can be opened and the seeds inside processed much like tomato seeds. Seeds from potatoes will not be clones, as they are when the tubers are planted. I believe there are some rare exceptions, but the seeds each typically produce a new variety, like apple seeds do. I think that if we planted them, we’d still get something similar to the All Blue potato they came from, but the only way to find that out is to plant them and find out! I’ve read that, in the first year, potatoes planted from seed will only produce a single potato that can then be planted like any other potato and produce clones of itself. I don’t know if we’ll be able to experiment with this next year. It will depend on how much space we have. Still, I’d like to try it!
Carrots
We has several varieties of carrot seeds this year, and I’d intended to plant more. In the end, we only had space to plant two.
One variety was new to us; the orange Naval carrot. With those ones, we tried something else new: making seed tape.
The other variety was the Uzbek Golden carrot. We’d grown them last year and, while they did not get a chance to reach their full potential, it being such a bad growing year overall, we did enjoy them. This year, they did even better!
With these ones, we harvested them throughout the summer, as needed, then harvested the last of them after we had our first frosts.
Uzbek Golden Carrots, Gold Ball turnips, a couple of radishes and some onions that got missed.
There was some slug damage, and a few of them split, but overall they did very well.
These carrots are lightly sweet, crispy and delicious. They were a great carrot to eat raw, and also held up to cooking very well. This is definitely a variety we would enjoy growing again. I would like to find a Canadian supplier of seeds, though. It’s getting too expensive to order seeds in from the US.
As for the Naval carrots, we planted devoted an entire bed to them.
I definitely liked how the seed tape worked out. We planted an entire package of seeds, didn’t need to thin any of them, and got a very high germination rate.
We didn’t harvest many of them through the summer, though. Instead, we left them in the ground to try out a different method of storing them for the winter: in ground and under a heavy mulch. The idea is to be able to harvest fresh carrots during the winter.
This is our first “winter” harvest.
The carrots were noticeably smaller at one end of the bed, likely because that end gets less light, so that’s the end I harvested these from. Under the thick mulch, the ground was cold and did have ice shards in some places, but the ground was workable and the carrots could be dug out fairly easily. They were wonderfully crisp and fresh and very tasty! The ultimate test for this method of storage is yet to come, as winter isn’t even officially here yet, and things have still been pretty mild, compared to how our winters usually tend to be.
Final thoughts on carrots
I do wish we’d had the space to plant more varieties, but I’m happy with what we did plant. Both varieties are tasty. If I have anything to complain about, I’d say it’s that they are a bit harder to pull, as their greens come off easily. These need to be dug loose, first. I’d be doing that anyhow, so that’s not really an issue. These are definite winners.
Now for the losers. Mostly.
Turnips and Beets
This year, we planted varieties of turnips and beets we have tried before.
Last year, we got Gold Ball turnips as a freebie with a seed order. We tried growing them, but something ate the seed leaves as fast as they came up. So, we bought more seeds to try them again.
For the beets, we planted a variety called Merlin.
There were planted in the same bed, next to the Indigo Blue tomatoes, and bordered with yellow onions. I hoped that the onions would help deter any critters or insects that would want to eat the turnip and beet greens.
The turnips did seem to do rather well. They got quite leafy, enough though something was most definitely eating them. The leaves were filled with holes.
While we did harvest a few larger turnips, ultimately, they never reached their full potential. You can see in the photo with the Uzbek carrots above, how few there were, that were worth harvesting, by the end of the season. All bug eaten greens, almost no turnips. I think they tasted okay, but they probably didn’t taste the same as they would have, if they’d reached their full potential.
In the photo above, you can see where we planted the Uzbek Golden carrots, sharing a bed with the Black Beauty Tomato transplants in the foreground. The carrot seeds are covered by boards to protect them until they sprouted. In the bed on the left of the photo, the half on the lower left got the turnips, while the half on the upper left got the beets. You can see the labels marking where they are in there. (The white boards on either side of the tomatoes are there to protect the new transplants from high winds.)
The beets barely came up at all.
The first year we grew beets, they did rather well, but pretty much every time we’ve planted them since, they’ve been doing worse and worse. This year was, to be honest, pathetic.
In the case of this bed, however, I think there was something odd about the soil. Even the turnips grew stronger and healthier on the south end of the bed, but by the middle of the bed, they were smaller and sicklier. Then there were a few little beet seedlings that started to emerge, but by the north end of the bed, there was nothing. No germination at all. Even the tomato plants at that end seemed to be smaller and less healthy looking.
The entire bed got the same amount of sunlight and water. This was one of the beds that had a sprinkler hose wound throughout. The problem could be in the soil itself, but after harvesting the grow bags at the end of the season, I think the problem may actually be that row of self seeded trees my mother allowed to stay. She’d had a row of raspberries there and, after transplanting the raspberries, she left the saplings to grow to be a wind break. In trying to clean up around there, I can see that attempts have been made to remove these trees in the past, and they’ve just grown back. It’s a mix of maple and Chinese elm, which means they are not only taking up space that used to be productive garden space, but are spreading seeds. Those Chinese elm seeds are the worst, and have been causing all sorts of problems. However, when working on the soil in these beds, pulling up roots and amending it, we find a lot of roots at the north ends of them. The bottoms of many of the grow bags the peppers were in were absolutely crowded out by tree roots that had grown in from below. Because of how these trees growing, I suspect that it’s the Chinese elm roots that are depleting spreading the most and winning the competition for nutrients.
Final thoughts on turnips and beets
We’ve had such poor results growing turnips and beets, I don’t know that we will try to grow them again, until we can plant them in higher raised beds. The one area we’ve grown beets in semi successfully, was in the East yard, near the spruce grove. When we cleared out where the old wood pile used to be, we found the best and softest soil of all under there. While my daughters have enjoyed what beets we’ve managed to grow in the past, with the Merlin variety being a favourite of theirs, I honestly don’t know if we like any of the turnips. I’ve selected turnips to grow as a good storage crop for food security, but it’s not much good for that, if we don’t actually like eating them. With the small turnips we’ve managed to harvest so far, we’re not getting their full flavour.
Which means we will likely skip trying to grow turnips and beets again for at least a couple of years. Once we have more, and more established, raised beds, we can try again.
Extras: more beets, plus radishes
After we harvested the garlic, we had an empty bed suitable for a fall crop. In it, we decided to plant spinach, beet and radishes.
We planted the Cherry Belle radishes, Lakeside spinach and Bresko beets.
I’ll cover spinach in another post, but in this bed, they started to germinate, then promptly disappeared. A couple of seedlings did survive, but didn’t grow much at all. The beets barely germinated, and what did germinate, soon disappeared. Only the radishes grew, and while we got decent looking plants, and a couple that shot up and started to bloom, there were almost no radishes worth harvesting. While I think insects or slugs got the beets and spinach, I suspect it was the nearby trees that did in the radishes.
Only one of us in our household actually likes radishes, however I’ve been curious to try radish pods. So far, we’ve never had radishes get to the point of producing any! Even though these ones were planted so late (my daughter that likes them ended up house sitting for a month, so she wasn’t here to eat what few we got!), the ones that started blooming are the furthest along we’ve had them grow.
As with the beets and turnips, I think radishes are something that we won’t grow again for a while. They do produce very quickly, if eating the roots is what we’re after, so we might tuck them in between other things as a sort of ground cover, but that’s about it. I do still want to grow some for their pods to try. Perhaps we’ll have an empty corner in a higher raised bed to tuck a few seeds in, and just let them be until the end of the season. That will be a last minute decision, depending on what space we have to work with, next year.
Which means that, for root vegetables, we’re basically down to potatoes and carrots!
Well. I guess that’ll make things easier to plan out next year! 😄
Things started out a bit rough, this morning. While I was in the kitchen, my husband opened the door to my room to let some of the bigger kittens in/out (usually we get both happening at the same time), when Soot Sprite dashed out.
The littles are still too little to be let out.
Unfortunately, my husband couldn’t catch him, but he also thought it was kinda cute, so he started following the Sprite around to keep an eye on him.
Right on down to the basement. The one place that we absolutely did NOT want him getting into. At Sprite’s size, there are too many places he can squeeze into that are not safe or healthy for him. We learned that when we had Beep Beep and Butterscotch have their kittens down there.
I put the food I was working on aside, protected from cats, then went down to see if I could catch him.
I could not.
Worse, I ended up losing sight of him entirely. I was pretty sure he’d squeezed under a counter shelf, but couldn’t be sure. That is one of the worse places (though not the only one) for him to be hiding in. When cleaning up in that basement, we weren’t able to move that shelf. We did clean out stuff inside it, though, which included things like pain cans that had spilled or leaked – it was a long time before we were able to clean out enough to finally get rid of whatever it was that was making the basement smell like a chemical factory! It’s very likely things leaked under that shelf, but we really don’t know.
I ended up messaging my daughters to see who was available to help out, and my younger daughter came down. Part of the problem was that, wherever Sprite ran off, the bigger kittens would run after him and tackle him, like it was a game, which it partly why he ended up disappearing entirely. My daughter had brought a toy to lure him, while I ended up going up and down the stairs with arm loads of other cats and kittens that were causing problems.
Have I mentioned that stairs and I do NOT get along?
My knees are just not stable enough. It isn’t too bad going up the stairs, but going back down is something else entirely. Basically, I have to take one step at a time and hang on to the door, the wall, the window ledge and finally the rail, to get to the bottom.
It took toys, wet cat food and finally letting Clarence (formerly Tweedle Dum) down to finally lure Soot Sprite out. He could barely squeeze his way out from under that counter shelf!!!
That done, my daughter could finally take a shower before heading out. She and her sister had a grocery shopping list and were thinking of going to town, but I took advantage of that to get one more bag of kibble before our stock up shopping, so we went to the nearest Walmart, instead. They carry a 10kg size that costs less than the 7kg sizes that are available locally. Not enough to drive all that way for just a bag of cat food, but worth it if we’re buying other stuff, too.
I made a point of not getting gas on the way out. I’d put some in on Wednesday, before taking the truck home, and got it to just above half. We’d had another trip into town for my husband’s medical appointment, but didn’t go anywhere yesterday. This is our first city trip, enough though it was to the smaller, closer city, so just a 45 minute or so drive, one way. After we did our shopping, we took a different route home so I could get gas at the same station I got gas at a few days ago.
The trip ended up taking just over a quarter tank of gas – I can’t see the odometer to keep track, because we still can’t find where we can cycle through the computer display, and we’ve got that “service tire monitor system” warning. (Which should just be a battery change on the module.) Our model just doesn’t have the computer display buttons that are in the owner’s manual diagram, and there’s nothing else we can find.
The gas station in town we normally go to now has just switched to full service today, which was a nice surprise. Happily, the prices have also dropped a bit again. We are currently at 154.9¢/L When I added gas on Wednesday, it had dropped to 155.9
It cost $102 to fill our tank from the 1/4 mark – and that’s after my CAA discount!
Ouch.
As for mileage… it’s hard to say, considering the substantial difference in tank size between the truck and my mother’s car, and not being able to see the odometer, but I’m pretty sure it’s better for gas than my mother’s car. Probably about what the van did.
I’m glad to have a full tank of gas, but that was painful.
Once at home, I pulled up to the house to unload, then left my daughter to take care of putting things away while I parked the truck in the garage. I even managed to get it in far enough to close the door behind it.
Except….
Well, when I opened the door before we left, I had a bit too much momentum and opened it all the way. The pull strap broke off long ago, so I usually leave it down a few inches, so I can reach to pull it closed again.
Ah, the joys of being short! I could barely touch it with the tips of my fingers, never mind actually grab it to close it!
So I texted the family to let them know, then went to feed the outside cats. My husband, sweetheart that his is, came out to close the door for me. He’s probably the only one that can reach without jumping or standing on something. My older daughter might have been able to reach. Maybe.
We really need to replace that pull strap.
As for the drive itself, it was fantastic. It was a smooth ride, without any of the shuddering or creaking that my mother’s car does, that drives me bonkers. Also, it’s so nice to be driving a larger vehicle again! I can see!
Once we were home and settled in, I headed out to do some clean up in the main garden area. All the stakes and supports needed to be gathered and sorted and tied into bundles, along with tools and supplies. All those feed bags used as grow bags had to be bagged up for the dump, the tree roots growing through the felted fabric grow bags needed to be pulled out as much as possible – they didn’t dry out as much as I’d hoped, given the off and on rain we’ve been having – and everything put away in the old garden shed.
It was also time to harvest the last of the Uzbek Golden carrots, and see what there was among the turnips, beets and radishes.
Would you look at the size of some of those carrots! I am quite happy with this variety.
Much to my surprise, I also found a few yellow onions that got missed, including one fairly larger one.
In digging up the turnips and beets, I honestly did not expect to have anything worth harvesting, but there were a few little turnips of a useable size that weren’t all chewed up by slugs. This variety is meant to be harvested at about golf ball size, if I remember correctly, and these are pretty close to that.
The beets were a complete loss.
There was also one really big radish that I thought was actually the root from one of the two blooming radishes, but it turned out to be next to one of them. Only one other radish was big enough to harvest. I left the two that are still blooming alone. The bed cover I’d set over them got moved to the new trellis bed for storage for now.
What I found interesting about the turnips and radishes, though, it that most of them had lots of fresh new growth. The greens on both had been pretty damaged. Whatever insect has been eating them – I never did see what it was – seems to have gone away with the frost and cooler temperatures, and the greens were actually starting to grow and recover!
This is the last of what was in the main garden area, and as I’ve been writing this, my family has been enjoying the carrots as a snack while making supper! After this, we have the sunchokes to harvest, and the Red of Florence onion bed. The orange carrots will be left and harvested as needed, until it starts getting cold enough to deeply mulch them for winter storage. Beyond that, it’s just preparing the beds for the winter, and hopefully making more beds before the snow flies and the ground freezes. The garlic, saffron crocuses, strawberries, asparagus and the Liberty apple tree will all also need to be given an insulating mulch, but not too early. It’s a balancing act between covering them early enough that they don’t freeze too much over the winter, but late enough that they don’t stay too warm and start growing before the real cold hits.
Which, if the long range forecast is to be trusted (ha!), won’t be for a little while. We’re expected to be consistently below freezing, including daytime highs, in the middle of November. For now, though, we’re supposed to get heavy rains this evening and into the night, and we’re under a weather advisory, as the first Arctic air blast of the season is expected to hit us later this week. We’re still supposed to get days above freezing, though not by much, and we may even get a mix of rain and snow on Wednesday and Thursday nights.
I am so glad we have the truck NOW, before the weather turned! Thank God!
Well, I’m quite happy with how our Thanksgiving dinner turned out yesterday. The main reason is, just about everything on our plate was from our garden!
Starting from the top, going clockwise:
Uzbek Golden and Naval carrots, steamed, then tossed with butter, salt and pepper, and a touch of brown sugar.
Red Thumb fingerling potatoes – these are most definitely a mashing potato! – with butter, cream cheese, mayo mashed in, seasons with dill, salt and pepper.
North Georgia Candy Roaster squash. The squash was quartered and the cavity was coated with a mixture of ghee, brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves and a touch of salt, and roasted with the spatchcocked turkey. If we’d done the turkey without spatchcocking it, we wouldn’t have had room for both! 😄
Finally, at the top left, is the quick pickle of both types of carrots, turnip, radish and garlic, spiced with whole cloves and whole cardamom seeds.
I look forward to a time when the meat is also from our own animals.
Unfortunately, I completely forgot to cover the peppers and eggplant yesterday evening. By the time I remembered, it was past midnight and we already reached freezing temperatures, though of course, none of my weather apps agreed. When my daughter and I went out with the covers, there was already frost just starting to glitter on the ground. It was chilly, but the stars were incredible! So many, and so very bright!
Heading out this morning, the frost was still heavy on the ground. At the last minute, I decided to take video for another garden tour. It will probably be the last one for the year. I’ll start putting that together in a bit, as I wait for things to warm up a bit more before going back outside. The forecasts for a milder October have all changed, though we’re still expected to get a few days at 10C/50F and above – though again, that depends on which app I’m looking at. It’s still nothing to complain about. After all, we could be having snow right now!
So here we are. October. Thanksgiving weekend is coming up.
Our first year here, we had a blizzard on Thanksgiving weekend.
Yesterday, we rained quite a lot, all day, and we’re supposed to continue to have showers off and on today. It should be good for the septic truck to come in, though, and not sink into the ground. I’ll have to give him a call later on.
It was pretty damp while doing my morning rounds. Not as many cats made appearances when I started putting food out. Nosencrantz was there, which I’m happy about, even if she still won’t let me bring her back into the house. Oh! I had a surprise last night. I saw Driver! We haven’t seen him in months! Even his sister, Adam, isn’t around as much, now that there’s no need for a creche mother, but she was around last night and this morning, too.
Now if only Butterscotch and Marlee would make appearances!
Speaking of appearances, that poor dog is still missing. The owner still has a trail camera set up in my brother’s driveway, across from ours, but I don’t know if the dog is coming by. I’m seeing posts on our local community FB page from the owner, every now and then, and he’s mentioned having a feeding station set up, but not knowing if he’s feeding the dog, or the wildlife! Wherever that’s set up, it’s not near our place. We have never seen the dog triggering our own trail cams, but it would have to come pretty close for an animal that size to trigger the motion sensors, given how our cameras are angled.
While going through the garden beds, the rain seems to have been well enjoyed by what’s left! Looking at the melons, I think we may as well harvest some under ripe ones, since their stems appear to be drying up completely, but some of them are still on live vines! Even the peppers are still surviving, though with the cooler temperatures, they don’t seem to be ripening. Not that I can tell with the Dragonfly peppers. They are completely dark, right from the start. I could probably have harvested a yellow patty pan this morning, but decided to leave it to get bigger. Even the green zucchini and zucca melon vines are showing fresh new growth! Even the Spoon tomatoes are still producing, the the transplanted volunteer tomatoes have had a growth spurt, and most are now taller than the plastic rings protecting their bases. Not that I expect any tomatoes from them, but I’m curious to see just how far they will get before it gets too cold. Several of them are even blooming! The Sweet Chocolate peppers in the wattle weave bed have more ripe brown peppers on them, and many more green ones developing.
What amazes me are these.
Yes! We have strawberries! The strawberries we started from seed are blooming and producing berries! Very tiny berries. Not much bigger than wild strawberries. I don’t remember the kit packaging these came from has having a variety name on it. If they survive the winter, we’ll see if the fruit it produces will be any bigger, next year.
This berry was quite tasty, though!
I’m even more amazed by these Classic Eggplant. Our one surviving transplant of this variety is now the only one with eggplants growing on it! The Little Finger eggplants by the chain link fence are still stagnated, and just a fraction of the size of this one.
Well, we now know we can’t plant gourds or eggplants in the blocks that make up that bed!
We don’t expect the eggplant to reach full size, this late in the season, but they can at least be eaten at this stage.
Looking at the forecast, we’re supposed to get another rainy day tomorrow. The day after, the rain is supposed to finally end, but overnight temperatures are supposed to reach a low of 2C/36F. Which means potentially frost. I think we may actually make the effort to cover some things, like this eggplant. I think, with the peppers, it’s time to cut our losses and just pick what we can. The only ones that did well are the ones we started really early, indoors. The other 4 varieties were short season varieties that, in theory, we should have been able to direct sow. Yet some of the plants are just starting to bloom now, while the others that have started to set fruit have done so so late, they no longer have time to mature. Even the hot peppers, which were so much further ahead, are completely green. They should have started turning red quite a while ago. We might just dig one of those up, bring it indoors and treat it like a house plant. We did that once, during our attempts to garden in the city before we moved, and it worked really well.
Oh, for crying out loud. I just momentarily looked at the weather app again, and the overnight low expected on Friday just changed to 1C/34F.
I understand why the weather predictions keep changing, but it does get frustrating. Especially since they tend to be off by quite a bit, in our area, since the weather stations are all so far from us.
Everything in the garden is on borrowed time right now, but it would have been nice if the warmer temperatures predicted on the long range forecasts a while back had actually been at least close.
And a lovely morning, with faces like this, saying hello.
Unfortunately, he was just in some sort of altercation – I never heard a thing, but my daughter went running outside, earlier. There’s a puncture wound on the paw, but he wasn’t favouring it in any way.
I tried doing a head count this morning. I counted 37! Then I counted again and got 34. So I counted again and got… 34. This count included Nosencrantz (yay!), Rolando Moon (yay!) and Shop Towel (boooooooo!!!). Shop Towel is the likely cause of that puncture wound.
We had a fantastic time, yesterday! Having company for a cook out gave us the excuse to do things that tend to slide, when it’s just for ourselves. One of those things was to empty the fire pit of ashes, level the bottom as much as we could, then re-set the concrete blocks that are there to hold the old oven racks we saved for fire pit cooking, as well as solidly setting up the four fire bricks we found here and there around the property, to set the Dutch Oven on, so the legs won’t sink into the ground. The ashes were dumped near the garden, to later be used in garden beds.
My younger daughter took on the job of getting a fire going, then burning it down to get the coals needed for the Dutch Oven. Since the set up for it is right near the fire itself, one side would be really hot, so she set a timer to rotate the oven every 15 minutes or soo.
It turned out awesome!
The inside of the pot was first rubbed with ghee, which can handle the hot temperatures better than, say, olive oil or normal butter. Some slices of bacon went on the bottom. The beef was seared in a pan before going into the pot – with the legs on the Dutch oven, we can’t do a sear in the pot itself unless it’s been heated over a fire/coals.
Since the meat would need quite a long time to cook, I used whole small onions from the ones we had to harvest early, because they’ve been cat crushed, whole Irish Cobbler potatoes, and big chunks of Uzbek Golden carrots. When we grew the Uzbek carrots last year, like so many other things, they did not grow to their full size. This year, they did much better! The ones I dug up for the pot were big, thick buggers! There are still plenty in the garden.
There’s a whole bulb of garlic in there – all three massive cloves of it! 😄
For seasoning, I used the truffle salt we were gifted with, and I cut up one of the sprigs of fresh pepper and scattered them about. Last off all, I added about a litre of water.
In the future, I’ll have to make sure to add more water. The photo was taken right after the pot was removed from the coals. The cast iron stays hot for a long time, and by the time we were eating, it was getting pretty black against the iron!
I neglected to take a picture of the roasted Pink Banana squash.
We also had hot dog fixings, if anyone wanted to roast some wienies, and if we were really into it, we had burger patties ready and waiting in the fridge, so there was plenty for everyone when company arrived. Especially since they brought pizzas, pie and ice cream! They also were incredibly generous and brought us FOUR big bags of kibble! 9.1kg size bags. Between that and a generous cash donation we received from a dear friend, it’s going to be a huge help with stocking up for the kitties for October.
Oh, and it looks like we have a new favourite local pizza place. They tried a place that opened in a new location recently. They’ve been around for a while, but I had no idea. I’ve walked past the previous location many times, but it was such a hole in the wall, I thought it was somehow part of the Greek restaurant, next door! There were no signs to say it was anything else. I think this new location will be much better for them. People will actually be able to see they exist!
We had a fantastic evening. We even managed to do a walk around the inner yard and garden beds before it got too dark to see.
It gets dark so fast, this time of year!
My husband was able to join us for the cook out for quite a long time. The longest I’ve ever seen him manage in ages. Of course, he then had to go inside and medicate to the gills, and he’s paying for it today, but he got to spent time with his family, and he really, really misses that. We’ve had to turn down invitations to see family simply because it’s so painful for him to travel, and he’d have to leave so quickly. So for us to have some of his family be able to make a last minute visit to our place is really, really special for him.
It was such a perfect night for it, too. Things got pretty hot during the day – our predicted 22C/72F turned out to be 25C/77F – but the evening temperatures were just ideal. Even after our company left, my daughters and I stayed out to tend the fire and let it burn itself down (leaving the most perfect cooking coals, and nothing we needed to cook anymore! 😂), because we just did not want to go inside. I felt ready to go to bed outside, it was so gorgeous! This, on the last day of September, too!
It was a bit disorienting when we did finally make it inside. After hauling everything in, putting things away, I finally started my computer, settled in and…
It was barely past 10:30pm.
It felt like it should have been at least midnight!
We did end up getting a solid rain last night, starting at maybe 4 or 5 am. The forecasts were predicting a thunderstorm today… or maybe tomorrow. Now, I’m seeing more rain in the forecast, but no storms. I’m also now seeing predictions for overnight lows of 0C/32F on Friday, when earlier long range forecasts weren’t expecting anything that low for another couple of weeks. It changed, every time I look a tthe forecasts, it seems!
We shall see.
Anyhow.
We had an absolutely fantastic day yesterday, and such a great visit. I’m so glad they were able to come out!
With the popcorn harvested, I needed to find someplace to put the box cover. While removing the chicken wire, I figured out a great spot for it.
The onions had a cover simply because I had one. It made weeding impossible, but with onion tops growing through it, it couldn’t be conveniently moved aside.
Since these covers are all 9’x3′, it fits perfectly on top of the box cover. This would be an ideal set up to protect taller plants! I just used the twist ties that were holding the chicken wire to fasten the two covers together. The onion bed is basically a storage spot for them, but now I can access the onions for weeding!
And yes. Those are new squash blossoms in the compost ring in the background!
While checking the other garden beds, I had a little surprise.
The largest melon had picked itself! 😆
I even found a pattypan large enough to harvest.
That’s the size we enjoy the patty pans best.
My daughter gets back from house sitting soon. We will save tasting the melon for when she gets back. 💚
In other things…
When feeding the outside cats, I tried to do a head count. It takes a while for them to all show up. I eventually counted thirty – then three more kittens ran into the yard!
After my rounds were done, I did a dump run. The car was already loaded, because when I tried to do it 2 days ago, it was closed.
I was glad to be able to air out the car, later!
As I was returning to the house, I spotted Nosencrantz slinking away from the kibble under the shrine, and disappear behind the pump shack. She is looking big and fluffy, and is acting incredibly shy. I wish I knew why! At least we know she’s still around.
Now, if only Butterscotch and Marlee would show up!
While doing my morning rounds, I found some new critter damage around. Both corn beds were hit, though not too badly. A few other things were nibbled on, including the way too under ripe Boston Marrow that I had left on the vine. It had gotten about 6-7 inches long and was even looking like it was trying to ripen since the plant was hit by frost. Now, there’s just a bit at the end of the stem left.
Thankfully, the critters seem completely uninterested in the peppers, melons, carrots and onions!
So this morning, I harvested the corn, starting with the popcorn.
In the first couple of photos above, you can see the damage. The slugs were quick to take advantage of the situation!
I did gather all the fallen kernels I could find. I don’t want them reseeding themselves in this bed.
There were still a decent number of cobs to harvest. The stalks will be used in the layers filling any new beds we manage to get done this year.
I took advantage of the chicken wire on the box frame and set out the cobs to dry out in the sun and wind. I moved the pinwheels over, to keep the birds out. We’ll bring them inside at the end of the day, as we have no place to set something like corn to cure, outdoors. Things like onions and tomatoes get ignored, but the skunks, racoons and birds would have quite a good time with the corn!
Obviously, this is still not a lot of popcorn. This is a test crop. Once things are will dried out, we’ll make some popcorn from in and see if we like it. If so, we’d be wanting to plant a whole lot more than this, to provide enough popcorn for the family! If we don’t find it’s worth it, we’ll test other varieties until we find something we like enough to keep growing.
Even with having a few critter damaged cobs that were worth salvaging, the losses were a lot higher in this corn. Some of the stalks didn’t even develop cobs in the first place. The few cobs we had were also set out on the wire to dry. In the second photo, you can see spots of white in places. Those are kernels that were chewed on, revealing a snow white interior!
Again, there isn’t much there, but we’ll have enough to make some corn flower to try out. I still want to try growing the South American kulli corn and acclimate it to our area, but if this corn’s flour turns out nice, I’m certainly not going to turn my nose up to a glass gem variety that’s bred for norther climates.
When it comes to growing something like corn with the goal of self sufficiency in mind, once we have found varieties we like, we would need to grow a LOT more to have enough to preserve/store. This year, we didn’t even have the space to try any of the sweet corn seeds I got! If we are going to be growing sweet corn, flour corn and popcorn, not only would we need more space to get the quantities we would need, but they’d have to be kept well apart from each other, so avoid cross pollination. Which may not be too much of a problem, since the different types of corn would start pollinating at different times of the year, but it would still be a good idea.
The bed with the purple corn still has beans in it that survived the frost. They are just there to fix nitrogen in the soil, as corn is such a heavy nitrogen feeder. I don’t plan to harvest any more of them, and the plants and roots can be left in the soil to break down, when the bed is prepared for the winter.
On a completely different topic…
As I was about to bring the purple corn to the chicken wire, with the popcorn, when I saw Broccoli going by – with three kittens following along! This would be a second litter for her, as she was among those that had kittens really early in the season. One looked like a tortie, one looked like a tuxedo, and one seems to be a long haired black and white – more black than white. I saw that one later on, in the shelf shelter, where I’d put some kibble earlier in the morning. I was only able to get a brief video, but my hands shake quite a bit, which is greatly exaggerated when zooming in.
So… three more babies. 😑 I’ve lost complete track of how many there are this year!
My next surprise was not as adorable.
I came into my room to find a couple of small bins filled with crafting material, and the stuff that was on top of them, crashed onto the floor among other things that got dragged down as they fell. A couple of the kittens have discovered the top of the wall shelf and are very determined to get up there, no matter how much I try to block it off!
After cleaning that up, I went to my computer. I don’t know what they stepped on, on my keyboard, but all the shortcut icons in my task bar were gone. Even the start button was greyed out, like when you put the cursor over it. Except, the cursor wasn’t even near it. I tried clicking on the start button, and nothing. I did get that spinning icon that shows when the computer is busy with something, but it wouldn’t stop or go away. I ended up having to do a hard shut down and just hoped it would revert to normal when restarted. Thankfully, it did, and I was able to upload files from my phone and start this blog post!
We really need to start letting the bigger kittens out of the “isolation ward”. I’d hoped to have at least a couple adopted out by now, but still no takers. The problem with letting them out is, they’d eventually make their way into the new part basement, where we keep a number of litter boxes. The girls will need to kitten proof it as best they can, first. There are places the kittens could get into that the adult cats can’t fit in anymore, where they could potentially come into harm or just plain get stuck.
Speaking of the girls, my house sitting daughter will be home in a few days! It will be good to have her back. I’m not sure she’ll feel the same, though. She’s been in a cat free house, with no one to clean up after but herself, for several weeks now! 😂😂
They’ve already got plans for a Hannibal marathon when she gets back, so she’s at least looking forward to that! 😁
Well, time to grab a late lunch, then get back outside. It’s a beautiful day out there, and I want to get as much done out there as I can!
On my way home from running errands yesterday, I was able to stop at the post office and found our garlic order had come in earlier than the tracking information has said, the last time I looked. Since I then ended up going to my mother’s to get her to a dentist, that meant the garlic went into the ground today.
Before I get into that, though…
I followed up with my mother and, sure enough, she isn’t going to fill her new prescriptions. She already takes sooooo many pills, you see.
She also feels great. My mother has an amazing constitution!
The pharmacy had called her about the prescriptions, she told them how she was feeling and what she was doing (at least she’s following the instructions about things like swishing with salt water), and he said he would hang on to her antibiotic prescription for her, just in case she needed it.
I brought up about getting her dentures done after things are healed up, to fill the empty spots, but she’s already hedging on that. When I mentioned she might have problems eating (she already was, with the top tooth breaking off), and she told me she’ll just eat soft food. *sigh*
We’ll see how that goes.
On another note, I also found a message from the financing company when I came in from planting the garlic. They’ve found a deal that fits our budget, and have already told our mechanic to look for a vehicle that fits the amount. Which is pretty much what I’d told our mechanic we could afford payments on, almost two years or so ago, when I first asked him about getting a vehicle. Whatever we get will be $10,000, maximum, after taxes. The only thing was the banking records I’d sent in to show proof of income. Since I logged in to my bank account, it only had my name on the statements, even though it was for a joint account. It looked like the income was in my name, instead of my husband’s. So we were able to get around that, and the final confirmations can now be made. After that, it’ll just be waiting for our mechanic to find a vehicle for us that’s within the price limits.
I’m really trying not to get my hopes up, but wouldn’t it be amazing if he found something in time for us to be doing our big monthly shops in the city?
So… that’s done as far as can be for now.
Meanwhile, I got some gardening for next year done!
We ordered only one type of garlic this year; three pounds of Purple Passion hard neck garlic.
Since the bed I’d intended to plant them in still has the Jebousek lettuce that I’m allowing to go to seed in it, we had to change our plans. I decided the old kitchen garden, where we’d planted the red thumb potatoes, would do.
I wasn’t sure how many cloves we’d have, so I decided to prep both the long, thin bed, and the end of the wattle weave bed. The old mulch was removed and the soil loosened. I’ve got one bag of sheep manure left. Though I kept the bag covered with a mat, it was still quite wet from the last time it got rained on, so I spread it out by the hand full. I used about half the bag on the two beds, then worked it into the soil. Once that was done, I gave the beds a deep, thorough soaking.
I then left the water to be absorbed and went inside for a while. When I came back out, I soaked it again, then moved over to the tiny raised bed. The shallots in there could have been harvested a while ago, but I was letting the self seeded poppy pods dry out, first. There were still a few tiny green pods, but I left those. Once the pods were trimmed, I could remove the cover and pull out the poppy plants, the self seeded dill, and some of the weeds, then gather the shallots. They’ve been there long enough, they’re already cured.
In the photo with the gathered shallots, you can see some seedlings above them. Those are Chinese elm. They have remarkably long and persistent tap roots. Once the shallots were gathered and removed, I made sure to carefully loosen the soil first, so I could get those out without breaking them.
This bed was redone last fall and, my goodness, the soil was so nice and loose! Almost no compaction at all. It was great! Once it was all cleaned up of weeds and roots, I worked in a few hand-fulls of manure, too.
While I was working on that, my daughter was able to come out and help. She started by separating all the cloves from the bulbs while I finished with the tiny raised bed. I figured it could be a back up bed, in case there were more bulbs than could fit in the other two beds.
By the time the tiny raised bed got a good soaking, my daughter had finished separating the cloves from one bag, though she did find one bulb had started to rot. Only one clove out of that one was salvageable.
In the past, we planted two types of garlic in a pair of low raised beds. By spring, one bed was almost a complete loss, while the other had maybe half of them survive. Since the ones that survived all seemed to be closer to the middle of the bed, it seemed that they had frozen, even under the mulch. We can mulch the top, but not the sides. So for these ones, I wanted to make sure they were planted away from the sides. I used a stick that had been used as a garden marker to make holes to put the cloves in. With the long, thin bed, I made three staggered rows. It took about 1 1/2 bags to fill them. In the wattle weave bed, it is wider at the end, then narrows a bit as it goes towards the corner, so I was able to get a couple of rows with 4 cloves, then the rest with 3.
I fit the rest of the second bag in there, with room for only 4 cloves from the next bag. My daughter finished planting those, then counted the rest, while I started making planting holes in the tiny raised bed. That bed could only hold another 17 cloves, in three staggered rows, and my daughter counted about 32 or 36 – they moved around in the bag, so she wasn’t sure.
There was only one place that made sense to plant the remaining cloves, and that was the bed with the volunteer tomatoes transplanted into it.
So while she planted in the tiny raised bed, I pushed aside the mulch in the bed with the tomatoes, made more planting holes at the end by the rose bush, then down the middle, working around the soaker hose, making sure I had more than enough, then watered each individual planting hole with the jet setting on the hose. In the end, the remaining cloves fit all down the middle, between the rows of tomatoes, and we didn’t need to plant closer to the wall at the end of the bed.
If we hadn’t been down that one bulb that had gone soft, we would have had to try and find yet another spot to plant a few last cloves! As it is, we just managed to fit them all.
After all the cloves were covered, they got watered again to settle the soil around the cloves, then lightly covered with mulch. The mulch itself got a light watering, just to dampen it. When things start to get colder overnight, they’ll get a thicker mulch but, for now, it’s more to protect the soil.
I am quite happy to have so much garlic planted! The only thing is that, if we get the mild fall being predicted, they might actually grow too much before winter hits. That’s where a good, thick mulch will come in handy.
It feels so good to be already started on next year’s garden!
The Tom Thumb popcorn could probably be harvested now, but I’m going to leave the stalks for as long as I can before we do that. Just to make sure the kernels get all the time possible to fully mature and dry out on the stalks. So far, the critters seem completely uninterested in both corn beds!
Today was not as hot as yesterday, but still quite warm, hitting 21C/68F while I was working outside. Which is good for the remaining beds that will not be harvested for some time, like the Red of Florence onions next to the popcorn, which still have a lot of growing to do.
A real surprise this morning was seeing a bright yellow flower in the squash patch! The yellow patty pan squash plant is still alive, in spite of all the frost damage, and one of the female flowers actually bloomed this morning. There are several more female flower buds, too, but there are no male flowers to pollinate, so nothing will come of it. The green patty pans have squash that were big enough to survive the frost, and they are getting bigger, too. Even on the green zucchini, we found one little zucchini that had gotten bigger and could be harvested!
Later in the day, I finally cleared the tiny raised bed in the old kitchen garden, which required snipping off the dried poppy pods that had grown through the wire cover. These self seeded poppies have openings in their tops, so when I put them upside down in the container, the seeds just poured out. It really shows how these self seed so readily. The Hungarian Blue poppy pods do not have these openings, so are less likely to self seed.
Another surprise is seeing flowers on one of the volunteer tomatoes that got transplanted! They’re still so tiny, but they seem to really like where they were transplanted to.
I was going to plant garlic in the bed by the chain link fence, after it was reworked, but the garlic came in yesterday. The Jebousek lettuce is blooming now and I want to save the seeds, so the garlic had to go somewhere else.
Which is what my next post will be about!
I’m just loving that we’re past the middle of September, and there’s still gardening happening!
The Re-Farmer 