growing food

Our 2025 Garden: winter squash and finally some buds! Also, a general update

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It was still comfortably cooler when I did my rounds this morning, but we were set to have a hotter day again. And by “hotter” I mean a high of 23C/73F (we actually hit 24C/75F) and sunny. It was strange to be walking around the yard and hearing what sounded like the patter of rain, only to realize it was the sound of leaves falling!

I was very happy to finally see our very first Cosmos flower buds!

In the next picture, you can see the one group of asters is opening up nicely. I’m glad they survived the frosts we got at the start of the month, because – as with pretty much everything else but the winter sown beds – they are about a month or more behind.

In the last picture, you can see the remains of one of the peas I found a couple of days ago. *sigh* Of course the deer would eat the biggest one, too. There’s just the tiniest remains of a stem poking through the mulch, and a tiny branch that got left behind.

With today being so much warmer, I made sure to move the plastic off the winter squash. While condensation under the plastic showed that there was still moisture under there, they did need a very thorough watering. In the process, I found a few new female flowers and hand pollinated them.

I uncovered them in the morning, but these pictures were taking in the early evening.

This first group of photos is of the Baked Potato squash.

There were the two already developing ones, plus a couple to hand pollinate.

Then there was the Mashed Potato squash.

That group had a couple of small, older squash, plus some smaller ones that I’m not sure will make it, and finally one that I could hand pollinate.

There is nothing with the Sunshine squash. Those seem to be mostly dead. The transplanted zucchini seem to be making it, but are still very small.

I don’t know what the chances are of these surviving long enough to develop before the hard frosts come, but as long as they are covered when it gets cooler, they at least have a chance!

Then, finally, there is a pepper I found to pick.

Not quite ripe, but as soon as I lifted it to see, the stem broke off, so inside it went! It will continue to ripen indoors.

In other things, I headed out this afternoon to meet someone for a kibble donation. She’d suggested meeting at an intersection on the highway. I got there a little bit last. First, because I had to pull over while going through my mother’s town to check my phone. I kept getting notifications. One of them was to let me know that home care called and wanted to talk about my mother. Not the scheduler, but a coordinator covering for our usual coordinator. I asked my daughter to send me the number, then continued on my way. I caught up to a car that was driving a bit slower. Then it slowed down more, started signaling a left turn, started breaking…

Then kept on going.

They did this every mile for the next five or so miles. It wasn’t until we were in the last mile before the highway that the vehicle started signaling a right turn. I thought at the stop side ahead, but nope. They pulled over completely!

I’d say someone was very lost!

Meanwhile, I pulled over just short of the stop sign myself, where the woman I was to meet was already waiting with a large bag of kibble for us. It’ll be enough to last us until CPP Disability comes in, and I’ll be able to go to the city for a stock up shop. That will be after dropping the truck off for the insurance claim repairs, so I will be doing the shopping in a courtesy vehicle.

I’ll have to make sure to transfer over some of our hard sided insulated and non insulated grocery bags when I switch vehicles.

After picking up the kibble, I called the home care coordinator. It went straight to voice mail, so I left a message, giving my cell phone number, but adding that I would be driving and it would be a while before I could answer.

My next stop was at the pharmacy. Since I was heading out anyhow, I was able to pick up some prescription refills for my daughter. It was getting close to 4pm when I got there, and the home care office closes at 4, so I tried the number again as soon as I parked.

The woman had a bit of a laugh when she answered and it was me. She had just finished listening to my message!

It turned out to be about my mother’s inhaler. It’s out. There’s still two in the lock box, but they are a different type, so home care isn’t allowed to use them. We had a fairly long talk about that. I explained that I didn’t know why my mother was still on an inhaler, as it was a test to see if they helped with her breathing, and they’ve made no difference, confirming my mother does not have asthma. Plus, my mother went ballistic when I picked up her last refill and she saw how much it cost. She can afford it, but she expected it to be “free”. She still doesn’t understand that she has the provincial insurance or what a deductible is. I don’t know of this type of inhaler is even covered, though.

What I’ll be doing is calling my mother’s doctor’s office tomorrow, and trying to get a telephone appointment with her to talk about it. Then the doctor can send instructions to home care, either saying they can use the other type, or that my mother doesn’t need to use an inhaler anymore. Which is what I am hoping for.

We spoke about other things involving my mother as well. I told her about the person that’s coming to see my mother tomorrow for a mental health assessment. We talked about my mother’s declining mobility and increased pain. I mentioned that my mother should not be living independently anymore. She was really surprised when I mentioned my mother actually wants to go to a nursing him. Not being familiar with my mother’s file, she didn’t know that it’s been over a year since the paneling process has been started.

The main thing is that I wanted to stress how much more difficult my mother has been finding it to just get in and out of a chair, never mind walking around her apartment, or standing to cook for herself. Meals on Wheels is just three days a week.

We’ll see how that goes. At this point, my mother isn’t even on any waiting lists, which frustrates me to no end.

After that, didn’t take long to get the prescriptions and then head for home.

Our overnight low is supposed to be 13C/55F, so I will be leaving the winter squash uncovered for the night. Tomorrow is supposed to be ever so slightly cooler. If the forecast over the next few days is accurate, I should be able to leave them uncovered for three more days, and two more nights. We’re still supposed to be warm during the days, but overnight temps are looking to drop below 10C/50F more most nights after that. Around the middle of October, we’re supposed to get our first days with a mix or rain and snow, while overnight temperatures are supposed to drop below freezing before then. Of course, long range forecasts can change quite dramatically, so who knows.

It’s time to get the mostly done beds cleaned up and ready for winter sowing. We’ve got lots of leaves available to use for mulch right now, and I’d better start collecting them before they are blown away entirely.

I’m really looking forward to a more planned out winter sowing! We’ll need to prepare a bed to plant garlic in, too. None of those will go into the ground for at least a couple of weeks for the garlic, and probably longer for the direct sowing. I don’t want any of the seeds to germinate before the ground freezes.

It’s been slow going, but it’s getting done.

The Re-Farmer

Morning in the garden, and good grief, what a day

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It’s the noon hour as I start this, and it’s already been a day!!! It feels like it should be evening by now.

Morning was pretty typical. I had to get my daughter to help me with getting into the sun room as kittens swirled their way through the door under my feet. My main focus is to not step on anything while holding the kibble bowl high so I can see. Once I got some food out, my daughter was able to put a food bowl of fresh kitten soup into the cat cage, was wasn’t able to take the old one out, as she was in a vortex of hungry kitties! By the time I got back from adding food to the different feeding stations in the yard, things had calmed down. My daughter and I had the chance to snag Frank’s two babies that had sticky eyes – one had both eyes stuck shut, the other just one eye – into the bathroom to wash their eyes until they could open again.

Then I could do the rest of my rounds and check on the garden bed. I’m glad we did water it last night, as the predicted storms and rain we were supposed to get yesterday fizzled out and we got no real rain at all.

The first photo above is of the blooming luffa. One by one, male flowers in different clusters are blooming. Still no female flowers. Not that it matters at this point. It’s the middle of September. Under normal circumstances, we’d have fully developed luffa gourds right now.

I had a surprise when I got to the trellis bed. The one sunflower seed head that was opening up has gotten much bigger, just overnight. This particular sunflower also has multiple seed heads, two of which just exploded open overnight! I tried to get a picture of all the seed heads that are starting to open along the stalk and did get most of them. In the third picture, you can see four along the stalk, but there’s a fifth one hidden by a leaf at the bottom that is also starting to open.

In the next picture, you can see our first aster flower bud has finally opened! The package of memorial seeds these are from had a mixture, if I remember correctly, so I expect different colours from the others I see forming buds.

In the last photo, we have our “just for today” harvest. There was a handful of beans to pick this morning, along with a single zucchini. I decided to go ahead and harvest the last of the kohlrabi. The remaining plants don’t seem to be forming their… bulbs? … at all. I also grabbed a few Swiss Chard leaves.

There was one wonky purple kohlrabi that I decided to use right away in my breakfast, along with the chard leaves and stalks and a small Turkish Orange eggplant that I’d harvested previously. Those got stir fried to go along with some leftovers.

I didn’t peel the eggplant, partly because I’d picked such a small one. I did find the peels to be a bit on the bitter side.

My older daughter had used one to include in her stir fry last night. I’d gone to bed before she was done, so when I was talking to my younger daughter this morning, I asked how it turned out.

She told me, her sister had had to throw it away.

????!!!!

They may her lips go numb! They were the only new thing in her stir fry, so they were the only thing that could have been causing it. We’ve eaten eggplant before and she’s never reacted to any of them before, but those were the more typical purple varieties. The Turkish Orange is very different. Being so different is why I got the seeds to try.

I had no such reaction. I just found the skins bitter. Very strange! It does mean that we won’t be growing this variety again, though.

As I was setting down with my own breakfast, I noticed I had a phone message.

From home care.

Thankfully, it was NOT a call for me to come in. My mother’s med assist for this morning was scheduled for 8:50, and I was getting the message at past 9:30. The message was to let me know that there had been a last minute cancellation. They did find someone else to cover the med assist, but it would be much later; perhaps 9:45.

I called my mother right away to let her know. When she answered, she mentioned she was making her breakfast at the time, but didn’t say anything about no one showing up to do her meds. I told her about the message I got and when to expect someone to come. It was almost that time, so it was a short phone call.

That done, I finished my breakfast and was starting to upload the photos for this post on Instagram when my younger daughter came over to talk about what to work on today. She decided that this would be the day to do work on the yard and garden tools. So, for the next while, she got her supplies set up on the bench under the canopy tent while I gathered the various things that needed to be worked on. Some needing repairs, as well. It’ll probably take her a couple of days to work through them all.

After she was all set up (and we paused to wash kitten eyes again!) and working on cleaning and sharpening various cutting tools, I headed back in to work on this blog post. I got a message from my daughter who remembered there were some tools in the basement that needed to be worked on. Since I hadn’t started writing yet, I headed down right away to look for them. I knew I’d put all the ones that needed work into one container, but couldn’t find the container – in fact, I couldn’t even remember what container I’d put them in (it turned out to be an old plastic lunch box. 😄) – when the phone started ringing.

I was expecting an important call, so I started heading upstairs, promptly losing my slippers as I rushed up the stairs. The answering machine picked up before I got to the phone, and I heard my mother’s voice starting to rant at the machine.

I picked up the phone while she was doing that. It turned out she had tried to call my sister, first, and there was no answer, so when she called me and it went to machine, she was really upset. Was my sister gone on holidays already? She’s supposed to be gone for two weeks… I told her, I knew nothing about this. (This is the time of year for her church’s harvest feast – one of only two “Biblical” holidays they’re allowed to celebrate – but she’s not mentioned anything about it to me.)

My mother then started telling me how badly she was feeling. She was dying. She’d used the life line and talked to the responder, who asked her what she wanted them to do. She said, they kept asking what she wanted them to do until she finally told them to just leave her alone.

…

I told her, the proper response would have been to have them call an ambulance if she were feeling that badly!

She didn’t want an ambulance. She didn’t want the hassle (I can’t blame her for that!). She would need to someone to get her bag (her prepared hospital bag), her purse, and if she’s in the hospital “they” will come in and steal her stuff.

???

I told her that if she’s really feeling that bad, have the Lifeline call an ambulance (911 seems to be too much for my mother to grasp), and the paramedics could make sure to grab her prepared bags.

No, she doesn’t want strangers. She needs us (me and my siblings). She needs someone around her all the time. She relies on us…

I told her, we can’t live with her! What did she want me to do for her?

She had no answer. She just kept on about how poorly she is doing, how hard it is to do things, and her breathing. She needs someone with her. She needs to be in a nursing home.

But she doesn’t want to go to the hospital. She relies on us… then she started trying to rag on about my brother; he doesn’t call, he doesn’t visit. They’ve actually just gone through a rather scary health emergency with my SIL while she was out of province, but they don’t want to tell my mother about it. My mother handles such information very badly and can be downright cruel. They just got back home today and my brother immediately had to go to work to take part in a couple of important meetings. His job is in internet security at an international level. This is at a level even I have a hard time grasping, it’s so above my pay grade, so to speak. Not something my mother can even begin to understand. I did tell her that he was at an important meeting right now, but added that we did arrange to come out to her place on Sunday, as she requested. I’d forgotten to mention it when I called her this morning.

That mollified her somewhat. She told me that she would “be brave” and hold out until Sunday.

*sigh*

What I told her I would do is call the home care office for her town as soon as I got off the phone with her. I’d let them know that my mother’s condition is deteriorating. All the home care coordinator can do, however, is update the files with this information and send it up the chain. It’s another department that makes the decisions on whether someone can go into a nursing home or assisted living facility. I had to remind my mother about how shocked her doctor was that they hadn’t already approved her for a nursing home.

I wish I’d thought of it at the time, but if my mother did decide to go to go to the hospital, that might be just the thing that would finally get her into a nursing home, like she wants. That’s the typical way it works; a person ends up in the hospital with a broken hip or something, and only then do they get to go to a nursing home from the hospital. My father was an exception. He was getting home care three times a day, but his care included things like helping him use the toilet, bathing and even eating. A hospital bed was set up in the living room next to the window, so he could see outside, with a commode nearby, because he could no longer take the two steps between the old and new parts of the house to get to the bathroom. It was the home care aids that said he’d reached a point where they could no longer provide the care he needed, and that got him into a nursing home right away. Six months later, he passed away.

It is so incredibly frustrating. My mother should not be living on her own. She insists that she can still cook and dress and bath and toilet herself, when I really don’t think she should be. Every time home care offers what they can for her, she turns it down.

Among my siblings, none of us are able to have her live with us and give her the care she needs. None of us have accessible enough housing, even if we did. She is struggling, but refuses to make the decisions she needs to be making. She expects everyone else to make those decisions which, in many cases, they aren’t even allowed to make on her behalf. This is not a new thing; she’s always been one to deflect responsibility to others. It’s just gotten more extreme as she gets older.

Anyhow.

After telling my mother I would call the home care coordinator as soon as I got off the phone with her, my mother kept me on the phone for another few minutes. I finally had to get almost rude to get off the phone so I could make the call!

By then, it was past noon, and she was probably on lunch. I got her voice mail and left a message about my mother’s condition deteriorating.

That done, I updated my siblings on our group chat, then went back to looking for the tools my daughter had asked for – and retrieve my slippers. The box I was looking for turned out to be on a shelf right at the bottom of the steps. I’d put it there specifically so it would be easy to find!

So I brought that out to my daughter and updated her, since all I was able to do was sent a message that I’d gotten a call from my mother and needed to make more calls.

Updating her also gave me a chance to catch my breath.

Now that I’m almost done this, I’ll soon be going into town to pick up prescription refills for my husband. I’m still half expecting a call, but if it hasn’t come in by now, it probably won’t. While in town, while I’ve got a strong data signal, I’ll have to try and set my phone up for Wi-Fi calling again. I can’t even get text messages right now. Which is a pain when I try to log into my bank account on my desktop. They don’t do it on my phone, but if I use my desktop, they always want me to input a code. Every. Time. I try to log in. The problem is, by the time the texted code gets to my phone, the log in session is expired. Sometimes, if I go outside and walk around the yard, it’ll come in faster, but I’m not always in a position to do that.

Frustrating.

Ah, well. It is what it is.

Time to get ready to head into town!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: eggplant and seed harvest

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Well, I went and did it. I harvested some of the Turkish Orange Eggplant, even though I really have no idea if they’re ripe or not.

I harvested the ones with the most orange colour, and there are still quite a few green and mostly green ones on the plants. From what I found, looking it up last night, these should be ripe. They are still firm, but not hard. One still has green on it I couldn’t see while I was pushing through the leaves with my pruner to cut the stem but, according to what I found last night, it should continue to ripen if kept at room temperature.

With the eggplant, and in the next picture, is a cluster of carrot seeds. I’m pretty sure these are Uzbek Golden carrot seeds, as the only other carrots winter sown in this bed were some old, pelleted Napoli seeds I had. Very few of those germinated. When I grew them before, none bolted to seed. Carrots normally go to seed in their second year, not their first, but every year we’ve grown Uzbek Golden carrots, there’s been at least one that went to seed early. At this point, there is just the one seed cluster that has fully dried off, and I didn’t want to be losing seeds into the garden bed. We have self sown carrots where we grew them last year. I’d wanted to collect seeds from them but, when I thought they were ready to collect, none of the seeds seemed to have developed. That would most likely be a sign of poor pollination. Clearly, some viable seeds did develop and fall to the ground, at least at one plant. The self seeded carrots are growing only in one area, not all the areas where there had been bolted carrots.

Amazingly, the “dead” pumpkin vines are still blooming.

That dead leaf is from the same vine as the flower. This heat we’ve been having has given a surprising boost to things I thought for sure were killed off!

The asters are soooo close to blooming!

I honestly thought the Cosmos would bloom first, as they grew so big so much faster. I don’t see any potential flower buds on them at all! Including the ones that do not have frost damage on them. They should have finished blooming by now, but there’s nothing. Very strange.

Today is turning out to be another hot one. We exceeded the forecast and hit 27C/81F, with the humidex at 28C/82F. As I write this, we’re at 26C/79F, with the humidex at 29C/84F. Currently, we have gusts of high winds and are under a severe thunderstorm watch. Parts of the province are under tornado warnings. Looking at the weather radar, it seems the system won’t hit our area for another three hours.

The high winds limit what I can do outside. From where I’m sitting as I write this, I can see a big maple and a corner of the spruce grove. It’s bright and sunny, with some clouds right now, but the wind comes and goes. Sometimes I’ll look up and there doesn’t seem to be any wind at all. Moments later I’ll look up because suddenly, the maple is being whipped around like crazy. This maple is HUGE and needs to have large branches that are bigger than some trees removed, before they break. Where they join at the main trunk is showing rot and, to be honest, I’m amazed one branch in particular hasn’t come down yet. I’ve removed parts of it that I could access, which may have taken off enough weight to help. Since then, things have grown back to the point that we have to duck under the branches when mowing the lawn under part of it. I might be able to get some of it down with the extended pole pruning saw, but most of it is simply too thick. Ideally, we’d have a lift or scaffolding (the scaffolding we have is meant for indoors, so it’s pretty short) and take it down in sections with a chain saw. My brother has all sorts of ladders that would allow us to reach, but the only thing there would be to secure a ladder to is other sections of the branch that needs to come down. Sections that would lift as weight was removed, potentially enough to lift a ladder secured to it right off the ground. Even branches this thick have remarkable bounce to them.

Ah, well. We’ll figure it out.

Unless it finally comes down in these high winds. At which point, it would be a pretty huge clean up job!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: first pepper, sunflowers and almost asters

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While doing my morning rounds, I just had to try for a picture of one of the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers.

This one is the tallest of the sunflowers, looking close to 7′ tall, taking into account that it’s in a low raised bed. It’s also one of several with seed heads that are working on opening up, late in the season as it is.

I have been checking on the asters. It’s so late in the year, but a few of them are so close to blooming!

Now, as long as I can keep critters like Sir Robin (visible in the second picture) from rolling over them or something, I still have a chance to collect seeds.

Remarkably, I actually had a harvest this morning!

Yes, the yellow bush beans are still producing. This is also the most zucchini I’ve picked at once, all year. I also finally picked our single ripe Sweetie Snack Mix pepper – which had a surprise little green pepper growing out of its top!

I am thinking it’s time to pick the Turkish Orange eggplant. I have confirmed that they do continue to ripen after being picked. In fact, I found out a whole bunch of information on harvesting them.

Today, we hit 26C/79F, which was warmer than forecast. It’s past 6:30pm as I write this, and it’s finally starting to cool down. I’m planning to head out to the garden to water what’s left, before things get too dark. Looking at the 10 day forecast, while we’re expected to cool down soon, it won’t be anything severe, so I should still not need to cover the garden beds. We’ll see as the forecast changes whether we’ll need to cover the winter squash beds, at least for the night.

I’m rather surprised by how the garden – parts of it, at least – is still chugging along.

The Re-Farmer

Sudden changes in plans, and morning photos

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First, a follow up from yesterday. It took many hours, but the debilitating pain that had set into my left hip during the night did recede. I found myself able to walk normally again – not even a limp! – but my hip still feels very… unstable.

Which turned out to be a good thing, because my evening plans changed completely.

Yesterday evening, after a very warm day, I took advantage of being able to walk again, headed out and watered what’s left of the garden. I was back inside and settled down with my supper when I saw there was a message on the answering machine.

From home care.

The message told me they had a last minute cancellation and there was no one to do my mother’s evening med assist (they are just a few hours apart and typically done by the same home care aide). I was, however, assured that Saturday and Sunday were covered.

I got the message about an hour after it was left, since I was outside when the call came – and about 15 minutes away from when my mother’s supper assists are scheduled this cycle.

It takes about half an hour to get to her place, even if I just grab and go. I did quickly call my mother to let her know I was on my way, got my husband to tuck my supper into the oven, and headed out.

When I got there, my mother did try to do her usual snarky comments about, have they hired me yet? and the usual giving me a hard time for covering for home care again. I’ve still been in a dark place in the last while and I just told her, please don’t. I’m not in the mood for it. She paused a moment, then said, neither am I.

She did, however, have a good day. My sister had come out on her day off. Being a Friday, it was my mother’s scheduled turn for the laundry room, so my sister took care of that for her, as well as doing her dishes and light housework. It was much appreciated.

I helped my mother settle in with her supper to take her supper meds with, so I could then get her bed time meds ready, and she asked if I wanted a piece of her birthday cheesecake that I got for her. She had just a couple of pieces left, and had already had one with my sister. I agreed, and it gave me a chance to ask my mother about when she wanted me to do her grocery shopping.

It turned out she was already working on her list. I asked if she wanted me to come back tomorrow (which would have been today), and she said she had an appointment with her hair dresser – someone who comes to her apartment to cut her hair, which is really nice! – in the afternoon. As we were going back and forth I suggested, I could just do it right then. That way, I wouldn’t have to come back over the weekend. My mother was surprised by this, as she thought the grocery store closed much earlier. It was too close to closing for the pharmacy, though, so that got skipped. She only needed one thing there, anyhow, and not urgently.

So I did her grocery shopping and got everything put away. As we were chatting, she asked how I was and I mentioned I was out of sorts and explained a little bit about why. My mother had heard of the assassination but, of course, she only heard it from the TV news – “that guy from the states?” – and Canadian news has been lying about Charlie Kirk at every turn. Especially the CBC. So I told her who he really was. None of which was talked about on the TV.

I don’t think it’s possible to hate the mainstream media enough. I’ve had plenty of personal experience as to how dishonest and manipulative they are, over the span of decades, yet it still surprises me, just how bad they can be.

I didn’t stay too long, though, and was soon back home and having my supper. Then I noticed a notification on my cell phone.

I had a voice mail message.

My cell phone never rang.

After fussing with it for a bit, I realized the Wi-Fi calling had been turned off again – my phone keeps doing that on its own, and I don’t know why. I wasn’t able to get the message because there wasn’t enough signal. I couldn’t even go through the process of getting the wi-fi calling set up again, which required once again confirming my identity. I ended up having to go outside and wander around the yard, trying to find a strong enough data signal, to finally get it set up. Only then could I finally listen to the message.

It was home care.

The scheduler was very apologetic, but there was another cancellation. There was no one to do my mother’s morning med assist for today.

*sigh*

We were already planning to do a dump run, then a trip to a Walmart, and now I had to go to my mother’s again. The timing for it worked out, but it did mean almost another hour extra of driving.

So I called my mother again, thankfully getting her before she went to bed, and let her know I’d be back in the morning. She was not impressed. None of us are. My husband is getting right ticked off. He even went online to try and find somewhere to complain. What he did find were some forums with many, many other people in the same home care region we are in, having to deal with the same problem.

With the time scheduled for my mother’s morning med assist in mind, I managed to get to bed early and, happily, I did not have a repeat of what happened to my hip the night before. I still don’t know what triggered it in the first place!

I did my morning rounds early. There isn’t much to do in the garden, so things are done faster these days.

I did have to get a picture of that one Hopi Black Dye sunflower again.

Every day, more and more of it is actually developing seeds and they’re starting to bloom! I’m still amazed it survived the frosts.

In the next picture, you can see a huge cluster of tree mushrooms I found. I’d heard a cat commotion by the collapsing log building by the fire pit and checked to see what it was. It turned out to be The Grink, chasing after Sprout’s little calico (Sprout, once again, is AWOL). It was way up in a tree next to the log building. I did get The Grink away enough that the little one was able to get down.

Speaking of little ones…

Frank is such a good mama! And her littles are getting used to being handled. The one kitten who’s eyes have been getting stuck shut seems to be past the worst of it. No eye washing needed today!

The next photo is of, I think, one of Slick’s little tabbies. It was enjoying the cat bed in the catio that we moved over to lure the garage kittens to the house. They’re not using the catio since we moved it, but the littles are enjoying it! The garage kittens still seem to be using the garage as “home base”, but I am seeing them near the house a lot more often now.

Last night, I was hearing that we were supposed to have a dense fog this morning. It wasn’t too close around the property as I was doing my rounds.

Then I started driving to my mother’s.

I had to pull over at one point, just to take pictures, about a mile from home. When I was driving between the trees, there wasn’t much, but as soon as I cleared the trees and reached fields, it was like driving through a wall!

Keep in mind with the above photos, that the camera “cleans up” the shots, so the fog was actually denser than it appears in the photos.

Very moody.

Also, by the time I was heading out, the sun was fully up and we had bright sunshine!

Once I got onto the highway, it was even thicker, to the point that I had to reduce speed due to lack of visibility. I did eventually catch up to a shadow that turned out to be a car. Then we’d go through a section of highway bordered by trees, and the fog would disappear and we could see just fine. Then we’d enter a section surrounded by fields, and it would be like driving into a wall of fog.

Then… it was gone. Such a stark delineation!

When I got to my mother’s she was really struggling. She was still in bed and really didn’t want to get up. I can’t blame her! She’s had a sleepless night, too.

Yesterday’s grocery shopping trip had missed a few things. Particularly milk. It wasn’t on her list and I’d considered getting some anyway, but my mother has specifically said she had milk. I figured my sister had brought her some. It turned out my mother was thinking she had enough to last until I came to do her grocery shopping… on Sunday.

The day she told me she didn’t want to have her grocery shopping done on anymore…

She was so out of sorts, though, one minute saying she needed milk, then asking me to check and see if she needed milk (she did), and not to get this other thing that got missed, or maybe something else or…

I finally told her to just enjoy her breakfast, and I would get her some milk. The rest could wait.

Then, as I was heading out the door, I hear “and apples!”

😄

So that was a short shopping trip.

That done, I headed home where my daughter had things ready to start loading up the truck for the dump run. When we got to the pit, we were happy to see that they had finally cleared the wall of garbage at the pit edge. There was room to turn again!

Once we were finished there, we continued on, first making a stop at a gas station in town, along the way. The price there was still $1.409, whereas in my mother’s town, it was $1.419 With all the extra driving, I was down to a quarter tank. I really try to avoid letting it get below half. I asked for $50 in gas, and it didn’t even get me to 3/4 of a tank. By the time we reached the Walmart, I was at half a tank again.

*sigh*

I had a short shopping list for myself – mostly more cat food – while my daughter had a list for herself and her sister. She couldn’t find everything on it, though, so we decided to go to a regular grocery store further on. As we were driving to it, we passed an independent gas station.

The price on their sign was $1.349

After we finished at the grocery store (my daughter still had trouble finding one item!), I made a point of stopping at that gas station again and added another $30.

The price on the pump was $1.299

That $30 sure went a lot further!

From there, we could finally head home, unload, and finally settle in. Today was originally supposed to be just a dump run day, and instead I was out for most of it.

It’s been hotter today than yesterday, and it just now starting to cool down for the evening, so I’ll be heading out to water things again before bed. The next three days are supposed to be as hot, or hotter, than today, so still no need to cover garden beds yet. After that, the temperatures are supposed to drop quite a bit. Enough that I will probably keep the winter squash bed covered both day and night. I’m still amazed that was have any squash developing at all, so I want to give them every change to mature!

Getting outside and being productive has also been good for my overall mood, too, so the more of that, the better.

The Re-Farmer

Yeah, probably

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So many people have been struggling with their gardens this year.

As always, there would be a combination of factors. Where we are, we had a weird spring with hot days, but cold nights, resulting in it taking longer for the soil to warm up enough for seed germination . We also had drought conditions and heat waves, while other areas had very cold summers. All of which we’ve had before.

Then, there’s this.

We’ve had bad wildfire years before, too. I remember in one of our early gardening years, we had drought conditions and also a lot of wildfires. There was so much smoky in the air that particular matter collected on our glasses. I would wash mine off with soap and water, but one of my daughters just used a cloth, as usual, not realizing what was on her lenses. She ended up scratching her lenses, both inside and out, before she realized what has happening.

So yeah. We’ve had it all before.

This year, however, has had the most fires in 30 years. We currently are not under any air quality warnings, but the fires are still burning. As I look at the live fire maps, we still have 94 fires that are “uncontained”, 13 are “being held”, and 14 that are “contained”. We’ve had 4 new fires in the last 7 days.

That’s just one province.

The mountains in south and central BC, all across the territories and northern prairie provinces and into Ontario, is a mass of fires. Then there are the more isolated fires in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. Every province and territory in Canada, except PEI, I think, is dealing with wildfires.

So while we’ve had all these conditions before, affecting our ability to grow food (small or large scale), when it comes to the smoke, this year really kicked it up a notch.

Between that and… politics, shall we say… food prices are looking to keep skyrocketing.

It’s been a rough year all over.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: some final harvests, and we do still have a “hot house”!

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Today was definitely on the chilly side. Even overnight; apparently, we dropped to 3C/37F last night, which is colder than was forecast. I’m glad we got that plastic over the winter squash!

We’re supposed to drop to 4C/39F tonight, which means we can expect it to get colder. I never removed the plastic cover on the winter squash, though. We got rain last night, which means the squash didn’t get any natural watering, but I do have the soaker hose still set up with them. I rarely used it, as filling their collars with water several times was more efficient. Today, however, I lifted one corner of the cover, hooked up the hose, then covered it again, letting the soaker hose run for an hour.

We did reach our expected high of 12C/54F this afternoon, so the girls and I took advantage of it to get some final harvests done on some things.

I started off in the East garden beds, pulling most of the corn (I left some stalks just to have a bit of protection for the bush beans). There were very few cobs to harvest and, as you can see, they were very small. I did find some yellow bush beans to harvest, though, then later found a few of the Royal Burgundy in the main garden area.

The chocolate cherry had the most to pick green. There were a few Black Beauties and Sub Arctic Plenty to pick. These are now sitting near the window in the cat free zone (aka, the living room) to ripen.

I also picked as many dried super sugar snap pea pods as I could find, as well as the dried radish seed pods. The girls, meanwhile, pulled all the spoon tomatoes, then sat with the plants to pick up the ripest ones. That took long enough that I finished first, then joined them. We made sure to not have any little stems on them before adding them to the bowl. It’s a lot more difficult to get those off if they’re left for later! With the Spoon tomatoes, we did NOT harvest the green ones. They’re so tiny, it really wasn’t worth doing it. So those went into the compost with the vines.

I suspect we’re going to have another year of compost tomatoes next year, and that most of them will be Spoon tomatoes!

Later on, before covering the eggplant and peppers for the night, I harvested a couple of kohl rabi and Turkish Orange eggplant. I have no idea if the eggplant is right, but at this point, it’s unlikely the greener ones will finish ripening, even with protective covers. The plants were already drooping from last night’s cold, in spite of the cover and bottles of hot water to help keep them a bit warmer. I chose the two that looked the most orange, but the rest still have green on them. I don’t think eggplant is something you can pick and will ripen indoors, like tomatoes and peppers can.

The kohl rabi I picked are pretty small, and there are just a few left, but I wanted to snack on them. That bed is almost done.

While the day was chilly, it was quite warm in the portable greenhouse! We have kept the “door” rolled up for quite some time but, yesterday, my daughter unrolled it half way and pulled the zippers down.

The thermometer in there was reading over 30C/86F, late this afternoon!

I’d moved our succulents and coffee plant into there yesterday evening. I’m glad I remembered to, as they likely would not have survived the night, but they would be very happy with the heat they got today! I’m hoping to keep those outdoors as long as possible, as they seem to be doing much better than in our living room.

In the next photo, you can see our first male luffa flower starting to bloom. They fell off when I moved a leaf to get the picture, but there were ants climbing around the stem and base of the flower. Which means, pollinators are still getting into the greenhouse. I still plan to hand pollinate, should the opportunity arise.

My daughter and I were checking on it when we spotted our first female flower buds starting to form. No visible baby luffa yet, they were were too small, but we knew they were female flowers, and those form in singles, while the male flowers form in clusters.

As of now, we no longer have any tomatoes in the garden. There are still bush beans, which will probably be killed off by the cold tonight. I’m debating when to just pick the green peppers and bring them in. I’m really surprised by how well the summer squash is holding out. I don’t expect things like the pumpkins, melons, bush beans, the stalled pole beans or sunflowers to survive tonight’s cold, but you never know. Things like the remaining radish plants that still have greener pods on them, the root vegetables, kohl rabi, chard, and even the tiny onions we’ve got growing in the old kitchen garden, can handle frost. We harvested some herbs at the last minute but I haven’t covered that bed with anything. The basil probably won’t make it, but I think the other herds might. We shall see in the morning.

Meanwhile, I’m now going to find some suitable containers, set up something to watch, then start opening up those dried pods and collect their seeds!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: still blooming, ripe yet? and tiny harvest

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After the hot days we had recently, the 14C/57F we had when I headed out this morning felt cold! We were supposed to reach a high of 16C/61F, but that changed to 15C/59F, which is what we’re at right now, as I write this in the late afternoon.

We are supposed to drop to 7C/45F tonight, then down to 5C/41C tomorrow night. Which means we will want to cover the more cold intolerant plants.

Which are still blooming. In fact, some are blooming more than ever right now!

The pumpkin blossoms are huge!

All male. No female flower blooming.

Unlike the Arikara squash. We finally have a couple of female flowers blooming, but the male flowers that had bloomed have died off a while ago, so there is nothing to hand pollinate with.

The winter squash are also blooming. Male flowers again, as the female flowers are done, though I was (hopefully) able to use male flowers that had bloomed the day before to hand pollinate them. There was even some zucchini to hand pollinate, too. The White Scallop squash finally has a single flower blooming, but there’s no sign of any female flowers.

I think I have figured out how I can cover the winter squash bed. There are a surprising number of developing squash right now, considering this year’s growing conditions, and I want to give them the best chance of surviving. This bed was made narrower than the 4′ that was marked for when it gets a permanent frame around it, but I think the Pexx pipe I used to make hoops is flexible enough to be used. I’m thinking of covering them with the mosquito netting we have. It wouldn’t be enough to protect from an actual frost, but it should be enough to keep them insulated. Especially if we add a few jugs of hot water around the plants before putting the netting on.

That’s a project for this evening.

Both the eggplant and the peppers are still blooming, though I don’t think they are setting any more fruit. The Turkish Orange eggplant looks really intersting!

There are two photos in the slide show above. I’m not sure how to tell when they are ripe, but in the back of the second photo, there is one eggplant that is a very deep orange, so I’m thinking they need to be at least that dark. The cover we have for the eggplant isn’t long enough to cover the ends well, but I plan to include bottles of hot water at each end to give the most exposed plants at least some extra protection. The peppers will be fine.

I also picked a few Chocolate Cherry and Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes this morning.

We will probably have to pick the remaining unripe ones tonight, or maybe tomorrow, as we have no way to cover this bed. It already has netting around it. We just don’t have anything that will protect from cold that’s large enough to cover them.

Looking at the 10 day forecast, it looks like we’ll need to cover the beds every night for the next week, before overnight temperatures start warming up again. Enough time for little squash to mature? No. But who knows what the weather will actually do over the next while! The old average last frost day, which I’m still going by, is Sept. 10, but we might get cold enough to get frost on the 6th.

Well, whatever happens, happens. We’ll deal!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: late starts, and our largest harvest yet.

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With all the extra stuff that needed to be done yesterday, I did finally get to water the garden yesterday evening. The poor Turkish Orange eggplant were drooping so badly!

This morning, I made sure to give it another watering, before things got too hot – we’re supposed to break past 30C/86F, and the humidex will make it feel even hotter! Before I did, though, I checked on things and got a harvest done.

I’ve been hemming and hawing for a while now about the corn. Being a short season corn, with only 65 days to maturity, they should have been ready to harvest a while ago but – like everything else – they were way behind. In the process of taking a closer look, I found something else.

Our very first female Arikara squash flower buds. There had been only male flowers until now, but now that we’ve got some females about to bloom, there isn’t a male flower to be seen!

*sigh*

Today is the last day of August. We’ve got one more hot day, and then things are going to cool right down, with overnight temperatures low enough that we’ll need to cover some things.

While watering, I also spotted new female flowers on the Mashed Potato and Baked Potato squash. I’ll have to check them again this evening and see if they opened up and can be hand pollinated.

Why I bother, I have no idea. They won’t have enough time to mature, and they are in beds we won’t be able to cover.

Ah, well. You never know. It’s not like weather forecasts don’t constantly change!

I came prepared to do some harvesting, including stainless steel container for the Spoon tomatoes.

I decided to go ahead and harvest some of the corn. Since the stalks had one cob each, I pulled the entire stalk on the ones that looked ready enough. Handily, the beds are right next to the compost pile.

While I was picking beans and corn, I had company.

Sir Robin was absolutely fascinated by the reflections inside the stainless steel bowl and was busy trying to catch whatever he was seeing.

Then he… well… did this!

It turns out, he’s a perfect fit. 😄

In the next picture, you can see I got a whole bunch of tiny corn cobs. This is not a large cob variety of corn, but they should have been bigger than this. A few little ones had so few developed kernels on them, they weren’t work keeping. So I just ate them. 😄

It was SO nice to finally pick a decent amount of beans! Finally!

The one Sub Arctic Plenty tomato looks like it should have been picked earlier. I think the heat got to it a bit. There was a decent amount of chocolate cherry tomatoes to pick this time.

The carrots are from the bed that was sown in the spring, rather than the ones sown in the fall. With the Atomic Red ones, it’s still somewhat of a thinning by harvesting situation. The Uzbek Golden carrots were planted using home made seed tape, so spacing was not an issue.

I’m always amazed by the Royal Burgundy bush beans. We have only three surviving plants, and one of those got chomped by a deer. Yet even that one had beans to harvest today! The plants are still really prolific, considering how small they are and how delayed their growth has been.

It wasn’t until later, when I was watering the summer squash, that I realized I missed a zucchini! Just one, though I found a couple that I was able to hand pollinate.

I’m quite happy with this harvest. Sure, we’ve had better in previous years. A harvest like this was something I had picked every couple of days throughout the summer but, for how things have gone this year, this is pretty amazing!

Also, it took forever to pick all those little Spoon tomatoes. Aside from the plants being stunted and short this year, it was pretty painful to pick them from the low raised bed. It did help that I could put a foot on the log wall when I needed to, to take some of the pressure off. In theory, I should be squatting to pick them, but I can’t squat with the condition of my knees, so I’m having to bend over, instead.

Thankfully, I got the harvesting and watering done before it got too hot. The watering got interrupted for a while as I spent some time with my brother, going over my mother’s car. It’s going to need a new battery, and that tire was almost flat again. My brother will take care of a few things on it, and we will take care of emptying it out and getting it detailed, and then it’s going to be sold.

As much as it would be good to have a second vehicle again, we just don’t have the budget to insure and fuel two vehicles anymore – and I would really use the space the car it taking up in the garage! That addition was made to be a work/storage space. My mother’s car is just small enough to fit in there, as long as the passenger side it close enough to the wall, so the driver’s side door can be opened wide enough to squeeze out. I would rather store things like the lawn mowers, snow blowers and wood chipper in there, so that the other side they are stored in can be a work shop again. When I was building the cat isolation shelter, I had to keep our vehicle parked outside for months, so that I had the space to build in.

All in good time. There is no hurry, but it would be nice if we could sell it before the winter.

Winter is on my mind a lot these days, even when we’ve got heat like today!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: MI Gardener seed haul (video)

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Yes! They finally came in! My last two orders from MI Gardener. USPS tracking simply told me they had arrived at a facility in Canada. That’s it. Not even that it arrived as destination. Just… Canada. Somewhere. 😂

I picked the packages up before I headed to my doctor’s appointment, so it was some time before I was home and able to open them up. I went ahead and did a seed haul video as I got them out.

I just realized I goofed in the video. The first order of seeds I did was on July 8, and there were no sales when I placed that order. Then I placed an order on August 1st, for a 25% off sale. Then a 40% off sale started the next day, so I placed a third order. If you visit the links, you can read more about each item. Links will open in new tabs.

With that caveat, here is my seed haul video.

While the video was uploading, I headed outside for my evening rounds and checked out a few things.

The first image is the Jebousek lettuce in the bed that self seeded in the garden bed by the chain link fence that was basically destroyed by cats getting under the mesh cover. There will be plenty of seed to collect, soon.

The next two images are of ripening Turkish Orange eggplant. Whether we enjoy these or not, these are not something I will be growing again until we have a polytunnel or a greenhouse or something. They are way too sensitive to cooler temperatures!

In the last image, we have our FIRST luffa flower buds. These clusters are the male flowers. The female flowers have a single flower on the end of a teeny developing luffa gourd. Who knows. Inside the portable greenhouse, it might still have time to fully develop. Unlikely, but one can hope, right? 😁

While out there, I even managed to pick a small handful of purple bush beans.

We’ve been having a fair bit of rain in the last while, so I haven’t been watering the garden. When checking it last night, things looked a bit dry, so I figured I’d do some watering. With our Dark Grey Zone soil, overwatering isn’t really possible.

I couldn’t belief how dry things were! It really showed when I was filling the upside down plastic jugs by the summer squash, and the collars around the winter squash. It took a shockingly long time to fill them with water, it was draining into the thirsty soil so quickly. Almost faster than the hose could fill them! I refilled them two or three times before it finally started to drain more slowly.

It got dark before I could water the old kitchen garden, so I did that, this morning. It, too, was really dry.

They should be good for a while, though. We weren’t supposed to get any rain today, but as I was driving back from my appointment in the late afternoon, I drove into a wall of rain. It was coming down so hard that I was seriously considering pulling over to wait it out. It let up a bit, though, but as I drove the last couple of miles to home, I was fully expecting to get completely soaked while opening the gate.

But then, it was gone. When I reached the gate, had all but stopped. By the time I closed the gate up again and was heading for the house, the clouds parted and the sun came out!

The deluge was welcome, though. We still have a lot of wildfires right now. Most are in the “monitored” category, so nothing is being done about them for the moment. Some are listed as either “being held” or “under control”, with a few that are still listed as “out of control”. We are no longer under any alerts for air quality from the smoke, so that’s a good sign.

Tomorrow, I’m off again to the city for our Costco shopping trip. A good time to be doing it, as we’re going to be getting some really hot days coming up. Depending on which app I look at, we’ve got a couple of days that might even exceed 30C/86F! I’ll see if the garden will need watering in the morning; if it doesn’t, I’m pretty sure it’ll need it by evening! We might be watering twice a day again, if the forecast is accurate. By next week, though, it’s supposed to drop right down, and we’re supposed to get overnight lows of 5-6C/41-43F We’ll be covering some of the garden beds again, in that range. They’re no longer predicting overnight lows at or below freezing in the second week of September anymore, which is when we would typically expect first frost.

At this point, my focus is getting more on being ready for next year. There isn’t much more we can do about this year’s garden if the temperatures drop. Things are just too far behind.

Ah, well. We’ll see what happens when it happens!

The Re-Farmer