When I placed our order for fall garlic, I also ordered a pack of seeds for next year’s garden.
It felt kind of weird to order just one pack of seeds. Especially since the garlic will be shipper later, when it’s time to plant them in our zone.
This is a variety of tomatoes my daughter really wanted to try. We now have seeds for two colourful varieties of little tomatoes for next year. We will also be getting two other, larger sized varieties. For me, I will be getting paste tomatoes, while my daughter wants to get some sort of big, lumpy heirloom variety. :-D I think this time, we will start them indoors a bit earlier, so I don’t mind getting seeds will in advance. Last year, we ordered the majority of our seeds in early December, because so many were already selling out. I don’t expect there will be quite the same level of shortages as last year, but I still want to place our orders as soon as our budget allows.
Alas, one thing we won’t be ordering this year are the bushes we were talking about planting where the corn and sunflower blocks are now. We missed the deadline; they have already stopped taking orders for the year! We will need to make sure we can place an order as soon as they open up for orders again, next year. The saplings wouldn’t be shipped until spring, anyhow.
I think half the fun of gardening is planning for the next year’s garden! :-D
The Re-Farmer
ps: the package under the packet of seeds is a set of 12 inch drill bits my darling husband got for me. He’s the best!!
Today is likely to be the last hot day of the year. As I write this, we are currently at 26C/79F, with the humidex at 30C/86F. We are expected to reach 28C/83F with the humidex making it feel like 31C/88F. We are supposed to get a couple more days in the mid to low 20’s before the highs start dropping to the mid to high teens. So far, overnight temperatures are also still supposed to remain high enough that there are no frost warnings.
I headed out to do my rounds later than usual this morning, and we had already reached 22C/73F.
There has to be something wrong with the squash tunnel thermometer. It may have felt warmer than the 22C it was when I took this photo, but there is no way it was feeling like 42C/108F! Not even being in full sun, like it is, should result in that extreme of a difference. I suspect the dial is stuck. I haven’t been looking at it since the temperatures finally cooled down, so it may well have been sitting at this reading since our last heat wave.
In checking the sunflowers, there was only one little pollinator that I saw! I think the heat waves we had over the summer killed off a lot of our pollinators. There just wasn’t enough food to sustain them. The mild temperatures we are having means more of our sunflowers are actually budding and opening their seed heads, but I don’t know that they’ll have a chance to be well pollinated.
Some of the Mongolian Giants are finally taller than me. Hopefully, the opening sunflowers will lure any remaining pollinators to them. They may not have time to fully mature, even with our predicted mild temperatures, but they will at least provide some food for our surviving pollinators.
These are the Hopi Black Dye transplants that got chomped by a deer. They have all recovered surprisingly well, and are budding and blooming. They don’t need as long of a growing season as the Mongolian Giants, so it should be interesting to see if any of these get a chance to mature.
The green peas are enjoying the cooler temperatures we’ve been having, and I’m seeing more pods developing. This photo is of one of the pea plants growing among the Dorinny corn, the remains of which are being left to go to seed. The three blocks of sweet corn are still green, but they aren’t really growing. At this point, I don’t expect anything from them, really. They’re just there for the peas to have something to climb. Any pea pods we get is just gravy, as their main purpose is to fix nitrogen into the depleted soil in this area.
The winter squash and melons are the ones I am monitoring the most right now.
Remarkably, even as the plants are dying back, we are still getting fresh blooms, and the newer Red Kuri squash are getting noticeably bigger.
The mutant seems to have stopped getting bigger, and is now deepening in colour and developing a harder skin.
As this other, larger Red Kuri is still doing.
I did a nail test on the oldest of the developing Red Kuri, and you can see the mark left behind. Still not ready.
The Teddy squash are also still managing as well.
If we do end up getting frost before any of these larger squash can fully mature, we will still be able to harvest them and eat them. We just won’t be able to store them for long.
The melon vines are dying back faster than the winter squash vines, but their fruit are still hanging in there! I was able to pick this Pixie melon, only because the vine it was attached to had died back completely. I suspect it isn’t quite ripe.
My daughters discovered something about these little melons. After they are cut in half and the seeds scooped out, they make perfect ice cream bowls! I’m not big on ice cream, but I finally had some last night, in half of a Halona melon. It was quite excellent! :-D
I am glad we found these little, short season melons. They have been among the most enjoyed producers this year. I think we will try different short season varieties next year, but the Pixie and Halona are definitely varieties we would grow again. I’ve also saved seeds from some grocery store melons that I plan to try. They are larger varieties, but if we start them indoors early enough, and we don’t have another drought, we should be able to grow them. :-)
Heading out to do my morning rounds is pretty awesome these days. ALL of the kitties come running!
I even got to give Nosencrantz full body pets – but only while she was eating! Toesencrantz started to come close, but she was too nervous with me being so close, and kept going away. So I left, to give her a chance to eat.
The other eight kittens, plus Potato Beetle, converged on the kibble house! :-D What a crowd! Gosh, they’re getting big. :-)
While I was out by the furthest garden beds, I started hearing some exciting meowing. It took a while, but Rolando Moon came over from wherever she had spent the night across the road, all excited. She let me pet her, then followed me as I went around the garden and made my way back to the house. As we got closer to the house, she would start hissing in between her meows, even though there were no other cats in sight. She was sure on the lookout for a nasty Potato Beetle!
By the time we got to the kibble house, all the other cats were done eating and were gone, so she had a chance to have breakfast in peace.
There were a few squash large enough to pick this morning; a small enough harvest that I could fit them in my jacket pockets! :-D
I found another Madga squash ready to pick, and even one of the mutant sunburst patty pans – the one that’s part green, part yellow – was a nice size to pick, and even one zucchini was ready.
Just one.
While going through the squash tunnel, Rolando Moon ran ahead of me to the end, then flung herself to the ground, waiting for pets.
Right next to a zucchini.
When I had picked squash yesterday, I was carrying them in my arms rather awkwardly, and it looks like I dropped one! :-D
With the fix on our main entry door hinges giving out, we’ve been using the sun room to go in and out of the house. This requires going through a door into the old kitchen, where the cats are not allowed. The door is an old style door with a skeleton key lock on it – though there is no key for it anymore. From there, there is a pair of doors going into the sun room; in the summer, we leave the solid, inner door open. The outer door, which has a window with a screen that we keep partly open for air circulation, is a sort of buffer between the old kitchen and the sun room, in case an outside cat is in the sun room, or an inside cat sneaks into the old kitchen. There are a couple of them that REALLY want to get into the old kitchen!!
Finally, there are the sun room doors. Once again, for the summer, we leave the inner, solid door open, while the outer door, with its screen window partially open for air circulation, is one last barrier. I used to leave the sun room doors open while working outside and have to go in and out frequently, but sometimes an outside cat slips in to investigate and I accidentally close them in when I’m done, so I try to keep that one closed most of the time, too.
When I came into the sun room after finishing my rounds this morning, I spotted a cat jumping off the old wood cook stove in the old kitchen, though the window in the old kitchen door. My initial thought was the Fenryr had once again slipped by me so fast I didn’t see her.
Boy was I wrong.
You see, the old door leading from the house to the old kitchen has… issues. Sometimes, when it seems to be closed, the latch doesn’t actually catch. Then, after a while, the door simply pops open.
By the time I came back, it was wide open, and most of the cats were in the old kitchen, exploring.
As soon as I opened the door from the sun room, there was a rush of cats going into the sun room.
Thank goodness that outside door was closed!!
It took a spray bottle and a few minutes, just to get the cats out of the sun room and into the old kitchen, so I could close that door. Then it took a few more minutes to get them out of the old kitchen and into the rest of the house, so I could close that door. Only then could I empty my jacket pockets of vegetables onto the big freezer, though as I hung my jacket up, I spotted a Nicco in the little niche by the wood cook stove, hiding under my late father’s folded up wheelchair. At that point, I left her along, put things away and, by the time I came back, she came out on her own and I was able to get her to leave.
Inside and outside cats all together, I had 28 cats to deal with this morning! And I didn’t even see the three mamas, yet. :-D
It has remained too damp to try cutting wood, so I worked on a few other things today. One of them was to start getting the remaining chimney blocks out of the old basement, to where they will be set up for next year.
The blocks themselves are not too much of a problem. I can carry them well enough. The main problem is the stairs. If I could simply walk up the stairs, it would have been fine. However, I don’t do stairs well at the best of times, and these stairs have unfortunate dimensions, as well as being unusually steep, to fit into the space available. Which meant setting the blocks down on a step, then cautiously lifting it up, one step at a time, with one hand, while hanging on to the rail with the other. Slow going, and rather dangerous. :-/ Once at the top of the stairs, my husband would open the door for me, keeping the cats away, and slide it aside while I went for another. With his back injury, even sliding them was probably more than he should have done, but he managed.
For now, I only got three out. There are four more left in the old basement. There’s one more in the new basement, but I’m keeping that. It was the perfect height and solidity to use as a surface when I was doing some wood carving.
As I was carrying them out to the yard, with my husband getting the three doors I had to go through for me, while also keeping the cats at bay, I got curious as to how much they weighed. My husband estimated about 25 pounds, but I knew they had to be heavier than that. So I brought over our scale to weigh the last one before taking it out. It turned out to be 53 pounds, so not bad at all. Mostly just awkward. As I sit here writing this, I am starting to feel issues with my right shoulder, from lifting them up the stairs the way I I had to, though. :-/ Fifty three pounds is a bit much for one arm, while scrunched over and squeezed between two walls and a rail!
Of the ones that were outside, all but one were used for the retaining wall in the old kitchen garden. The last one is hidden behind the three I brought out, leaning against the tree. We will have a total of eight blocks by the time the rest are brought up from the basement.
This is where they are going to go, when it’s time to clean up the cucamelons and gourds. We were intending to have them here for this year’s garden, but were not able to get them out of the basement in time, so I want to get that done little by little until they are needed. In this spot, the ground slopes just enough that there is a larger gap under the chain link fence. The cardboard flaps we pushed up against the fence before adding the soil ended up falling under, and the soil started washing away when we watered, so I had to use boards I found in the barn to short it up. The blocks will eliminate that problem, and will make good “containers” to plant into next year.
With that done, I got a few other things done, including picking up more fallen branches from yesterday’s wind, eventually heading over to check out the Crespo squash. I’d noticed more flowers opening, and I wanted to see how the two squash that were forming were looking.
It was a pleasant surprise to look at one of them, and find another little squash developing!
Then I spotted another one, high above the hill they are planted in.
Then I spotted another…
And another…
And another!!!
Which is when a started to walk around the critter barriers, looking closely for any more, and counting.
I spotted twelve. !!! A full dozen, that I could see, baby Crespo squash!
Some were very tiny – even smaller than the one pictured above, while others were surprisingly large.
I did not expect a variety that produces such large fruit would also be so prolific!
The problem, of course, is this.
The first official day of fall is only 5 days away, and leaves are already starting to turn.
The certainly won’t have enough growing season left to reach the size shown in this photo from Baker Creek.
Well, at least I know that, if started indoors early enough and protected from critters, it will grow well in our area. I want to try these again, next year!
We were having a lovely rain when I headed out to do my morning rounds. Though we have been getting the odd showers for the past while, things were still starting to dry out. With the high winds yesterday, I actually watered the old kitchen garden, when I noticed all the beet greens were wilted.
With the cooler temperatures and things in the garden winding down, we’re gathering things every few days or so, and the amount we harvest is getting smaller. Mostly, it’s just summer squash. My daughter had recently picked summer squash, so when I went through the garden beds this morning, I wasn’t expecting to actually pick anything.
I was rather surprised to find even a few larger summer squash! The Magda squash have been slow growing this year, so finding two of them large enough to pick is a treat. There are lots of little sunburst pattypans, and after my daughter had already picked the larger ones, I certainly didn’t expect to find more so soon. Yes, I know they can get much larger, but this is the stage we like them best. The only thing that wasn’t a surprise was the big zucchini. Usually, we pick the squash soon after the flowers fall off, but the flower on this one was solidly attached. Even though it was of a size we would normally pick it at, we left it. When I saw it this morning, I just had to pick it. Any bigger, and it’s going to start getting becoming a winter squash! :-D Maybe some day we will let some zucchini reach that point, but not this year. :-)
We are supposed to continue to get showers through the afternoon, but I’m hoping things will have a chance to dry up a bit. I really want to tackle that tree that came down in the wind. We really need to get started on any high raised beds for next year. If we can get even just one bed done, I will be happy. I also need to prepare three beds for the garlic we ordered. I were intending to order double what we got last year, but after talking about it with the girls – and looking at our budget – we got the same amount as before; a collection of racombole, purple stripe and porcelain music, 1 pound each. Though the beds they were planted in before are available, we want to rotate them into other beds that did not have alliums in it. Unfortunately, those beds are still being somewhat used right now! However, if I am able to get enough out of the tree to build a high raised bed, it will have fresh garden soil and amendments added to it, so it won’t matter if it’s in a location that had onions this year.
If it’s too wet to break down the tree today, I should still have tomorrow. The weekend is supposed to get quite hot, and we’ve got plans for Saturday. Next week, we’re supposed to get several days with rain, and then things start cooling down a fair bit. As long as I can get enough pieces cut, while it’s dry, we can get some progress on a bed.
Though our overnight temperatures have not been cold enough for frost, some of the more delicate plants were showing signs of what I would otherwise consider frost damage. Some of the cucamelon leaves are showing signs, and part of a Ozark Nest Egg plant had a vine that was growing the highest, suddenly start dropping this morning.
Everything is all winding down, which means things are getting busier. There’s a lot of work to prepare beds for next year, and getting it done often depends on the weather.
In other things, I’m happy to say that since we installed that shut off valve and, in the process, adjusted the pipe so it wasn’t touching another one, and padded it with vibration reducing material, that very disturbing noise we would sometimes hear seems to be gone. It’s hard to say for sure, since the noise didn’t happen every time the well pump turned on, but so far, it’s encouraging.
Something else seems to have gone away.
The woodchucks.
I haven’t seen any of them in almost a week, now. Usually, I’d at least see one peaking out of the entry to their den under the pile of wood, or eating the bird seeds near the living room window but, lately, nothing. I was wondering if they might have gone into hibernation, so I looked it up. They tend to hibernate from October to February, so it’s still too early for that. But then, the sites also said they mate after the come out of hibernation, and we so them going at it in the summer, so who knows.
We have been really fortunate with the frost holding off so far. If the long range forecasts are right, we won’t get a frost for at least two more weeks, possibly longer. Other areas in our province have already had their first frost, so I am really thankful that it’s held off in our area so far.
The continued mild temperatures is giving the garden more time to recover and progress, and we even have some new little surprises this morning!
We’ve got two more Ozark Nest Egg gourds forming! That makes for a total of three. I did not see these two when I checked the garden beds yesterday evening, so this is pretty much overnight growth.
This is one of the new ones, from outside the fence. They have such pretty flowers. :-)
The Tennessee Dancing Gourds are one I don’t have much concern over. Though there are a lot of little gourds developing still, there are quite a few “large” ones like this, that have reached their full size, but are still ripening on the vine.
One of the few remaining Halona melons came off its vine this morning. There are a couple of somewhat larger ones left that might have enough time to fully mature, plus a few more tiny ones that won’t.
In the background of the photo above, you can see the biggest Pixie melon in its hammock. These guys could really use the extra time, it looks like.
We’ve still got Red Kuri developing, and they are growing fast at this stage – and you can even see a new squash developing in one of the photos.
The mutant is my favourite! :-D I’m just fascinated by it. It’s shape is different than the other Red Kuri, which can be expected with cross pollination, but it is also getting bigger than the others. If this is the result of cross pollination with the nearby Teddy squash, I would have expected it to be smaller, not bigger! The Teddy squash are a miniature acorn squash and their mature size should be smaller than the Red Kuri. For a hybrid to be bigger than either parent type seems quite unusual. I hope this has time to fully mature, because I really want to see how it turns out!
Speaking of Teddy squash…
We have another new baby! Of the two plants, the one that had only a single squash developing, now has two.
The other plant still has four developing squash, with the one in the photo being the biggest.
While checking the Crespo squash, I was able to find an open line of sight to get a picture of the one developing fruit that I’ve been able to see so far. It should be interesting to see how far it gets, before the frost kills it all. We certainly won’t get the large, green, lumpy pumpkins we are supposed to, but even a little one will be interesting to see.
The cucamelons are an odd one for this year. The plants are growing up the fence rather well, will plenty of blossoms and fruit beginning to develop. Unfortunately, most never get past the size you see in the photo above. They just drop off.
I did find a single, mature cucamelon. Which I ate. :-D It’s the first larger one I’ve seen in quite some time. This suggests a pollination problem, unfortunately.
And finally, we have our potato bags.
I’m not sure what to make of these! They just don’t seem to be dying back. Oh, the two varieties at the far end are looking a bit like they are dying back, but they also got hit the hardest by the grasshoppers. The two fingerling varieties just keep on growing!
When we first decided to use the feed bags to grow the potatoes, I expected to continually add soil over time. It was after learning that all four varieties are determinate, not indeterminate, that I changed my mind. They would not benefit from having soil continually built up along the stems, so only a single layer was added to protect the developing potatoes from light, and that’s it. The purple fingerlings, however, just keep getting bigger and bigger. Which leads me to think that these may actually be indeterminate potatoes, and would have benefited from continually adding more soil. I don’t know. It should be interesting to see how many potatoes we get when we do harvest them. I don’t image we will be getting many, but we shall see. If we decide to go with grow bags again next year, we will have to make sure to choose indeterminate varieties, which means finding a source for seed potatoes that actually labels them as determinate or indeterminate.
Until this year, I didn’t even know that tomatoes had those labels, never mind things like potatoes!
The girls joined me for the evening rounds last night, and my daughter found a ripe Pixie melon!
I had checked them in the morning, and none were coming loose from their stems, but by the end of the day, one of them finally did. :-) It isn’t even the biggest one that has a hammock to support it. Hopefully, this means the other Pixie melons were ripen soon. While we did pick one Pixie melon to taste test, it was still under ripe (still delicious, though!), which makes this the very first ripe Pixie we have picked.
Meanwhile, this morning, I finally picked grapes. Here is our harvest for this year.
Yup. That’s it. About a week ago, I did find another cluster with a whole three grapes on it, and I ate them.
This year, we will cover and insulate the grapes for the winter. These are supposed to be hardy to our zone, as far as I know without knowing the exact variety they are. However, even the hardy ones have a hard time things like month-long polar vortexes. Not even that one cold night in May that left us with no berries and almost no crab apples could be blamed for the lack of grapes. It took these so long to start budding, I feared the polar vortex had killed them off.
Well, it is getting decidedly cooler when I do my morning rounds! Fall is just around the corner, but things are still holding out in the garden.
Here are the gourds growing on the south facing chain link fence. The yellow flowers that you see are the Ozark Nest Egg flowers.
If you look at the bottom right, you’ll see a white flower!
This is a Thai Bottle Gourd flower. The Ozark Nest Egg plants are going so well, they sort of hide that there is another type of gourd growing here. The Thai Bottle Gourd has leaves that are more rounded, while the Ozark Nest Egg leaves have points on them.
These gourds are not the only thing bursting into bloom.
This is the Crespo squash, recovered from critter damage and growing enthusiastically! I was not able to get all of it in this photo. All those arrows are pointing to flower buds, some of which are starting to open this morning. There are probably another dozen or so on the rest of the plant off the left side of the photo.
Hidden away in the middle, I found the first female flower!
I couldn’t get any closer because of the critter barriers, but that flower bud the arrow is pointing to has a baby squash at its base. Hopefully, it will get pollinated and not die off. Under the current conditions, I would hand pollinate, but that would require moving the critter barriers. Mind you, there’s no way any fruit that develop will reach maturity.
More on that, later.
There are only a few Halona melons left on the vines, but there are probably a dozen Pixie melons that have not yet ripened.
This is the largest of them. Since it has a hammock, I check it in the mornings by lifting it at the stem, to see if it is starting to separate, but it’s still hanging on tight!
The rest are more like these two.
I’ll have to double check, but I thought the Pixies had a shorter growing season than the Halonas. They are taking much longer than the Halona to fully ripen. I’m sure the drought conditions over the summer have something to do with that, but since we’ve started having rain fairly regularly now, I would have expected them to mature faster. Ah, well. We’ll see how they do!
This is the largest of the developing Teddy winter squash. This is roughly half of what it’s mature size is supposed to be, so they may still have time.
Our weird mutant Red Kuri is noticeably bigger! It makes me smile, every time I see it.
We’ve got a couple more that are getting bigger, too. This is what the mottled green one should be looking like, which is why I suspect it was cross pollinated with the Teddy squash.
Here’s something that is NOT getting bigger!
The one luffa gourd is just… stalled. The plants are still blooming, but also starting to die off for the season. I started these quite a bit earlier, indoors, and they should have had enough time to develop gourds and reach maturity, but this summer was so rough on everything, I think we’re lucky to have even this.
We even had something to harvest! Not every morning, but at least every few days. We even still had a few beans left to pick. In the photo, I’m holding one of the mutant green sunburst squash. :-D I’ve been trying to let the sunburst squash have more time for the fruit to get bigger, but they seem to be developing more slowly than they did last year.
I just had to get a picture of the sunflower in the old kitchen garden. We can see it from the bathroom window, through the sun room, and it makes me smile, every time. :-)
As the season winds down, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the long term forecasts. Yesterday was our first frost date for the area, but it continues to look like we are not going to have any frost here, for a while. Of course, the forecast constantly fluctuates, and different sources have different forecasts. My Weather Network app has a 14 day forecast, and with today being the 11th, that puts the 14 day trend between the 12th and the 25th. The lowest overnight temperatures I’m seeing is for the 25th, at 6C/43F, with variable cloudiness.
My Accuweather app, however, is very different. The long range forecast on that one goes up to October 5. Up until this morning, all the overnight lows were above freezing, but this morning, there is now a single night – the 25th – where it says we will hit -2C/28F. It is also predicting thunder showers scattered about the province in that day.
If that is accurate, we have only two weeks before frost hits (which is 2 weeks longer than average, so I’m not complaining!). If we do get a frost, that will be it for the tomatoes, squash, gourds and melons. We have no way to cover any of these beds, so if we get any frost warnings, we’ll just have to pick as much as we can the day before. We should get plenty of sunburst squash, but I’m really hoping the Pixie melons and winter squash ripen before then. The gourd and Crespo squash just don’t have enough time left. Except the Tennessee Dancing gourds. They are so small, we should have quite a few to gather before the frost hits. We may be lucky, though. Aside from that one night that one app is predicting will go below freezing, overnight temperatures are supposed to stay mild into October.
The sunflowers will be a lost cause, though. There is no way the seed heads will be able to mature in so short a time. So many haven’t even opened, yet. Starting some of them indoors would have made the difference (well… except for being eaten by deer), had they been under better conditions. Not just with the weather, but the soil quality where they are growing. Had our only reason for planting them been for the seeds, they would be a failure, but they were planted there partly for a privacy screen, partly for wind break, and mostly as part of our long term plans to prepare the area for when we plant food trees there. Which means we had a success with 3 out of the 4 reasons we planted them. I do want to get more of these seeds to try them again, elsewhere.
For now, every night we have without frost is a help.
Okay, before I get into it, I just have to share a laugh.
The phone rang just as I was about to start this post. It was clearly from a call centre, from the noise I heard in the background. After the usual greetings, the very polite person told me he was calling about our Visa or Mastercard… provider? I can’t remember the exact word he used.
Of course, I found this incredibly funny and started laughing.
I don’t have a credit card.
Too funny!
Anyhow.
While doing my rounds through the garden this morning, I found some new growth happening.
After seeing flowers for a while, now, there is finally an Ozark Nest Egg gourd starting to form! This is the first female flower I’ve seen. Hopefully, it has been pollinated and the new baby gourd will actually keep growing.
Meanwhile, among the sweet corn, I found…
… our very first green pea pod!
These peas were planted among the corn, late in the season, for their nitrogen fixing qualities, but peas are a cool weather plant, so we might actually have a decent amount to harvest before our growing season is done.
Looking at the long range forecasts, our overnight temperatures should be cool, but it’s not until October that we’re looking at temperatures just above freezing. If that holds out, that means our garden has another 20 days or so for things to grow. The beets and the surviving carrots can stay in the ground until it freezes, if we wanted to leave them. The few chard that made it are doing quite well, though I don’t think the radishes will have a chance to reach their pod stage. If they’d been planted for their roots, we’d have a whole three radishes to pick, but none of them seem to be growing into full sized plants. The lettuce that was planted for a fall crop is just reaching a size worth harvesting baby leaves while thinning things out a bit. The seeds were well spaced to begin with, so not a lot of thinning is needed.
It’s new growth like the Ozark Nest Egg gourds, the sunflowers that have not yet opened their seed heads, and the new squash and melons that I am hoping the weather holds off for. The Halona melons have been ripening nicely, and there aren’t a lot left on the vines, but there are still lots of Pixie melons. I picked the one melon to taste test, before it was fully ripe, and have just been waiting on the rest to reach that point where they will fall off their vines. It seems to be taking an oddly long time! There are a lot of little Red Kuri squash that just won’t have time to fully mature before the cold sets in, but I hope the Teddy squash will have time to mature. They are so small, they should be able to.
A lot of people on my gardening groups have already brought their green tomatoes in to ripen indoors. With our tiny indeterminate varieties of tomatoes, I don’t know that we’ll bother. We have ripe tomatoes to pick every two or three days, and that is working out quite well.
On the down side, while I’m glad I was able to finish the extensive mowing around the inner and outer yards, by the time I was done, I was in massive pain. Especially my hips, where I have bone spurs. I’m still in a lot of pain today, so that limits what I am physically able to get done outside, as far as manual labour goes. The temperatures are supposed to remain pleasantly cool for the next while; perfect temperatures to get caught up on the heavy work outside.
Yesterday, I finally was able to tend to the last of the beet beds.
You can see why there was no hurry.
This beet bed got quite a bit of critter damage before we were able to cover it with the netting, and never really recovered. I think I lot of that has to do with the ornamental apple trees shading it too much.
This bed has four varieties of beets, planted in blocks. One variety does seem to be recovering a bit better. Those are the chioggia, if I remember correctly.
Just for the sake of comparison, this is the L shaped beet bed right next to the little one (after being weeded). These were planted on the same day, with the last seeds of all the varieties mixed together. In this bed, the critters did get at the end in the photo a bit, and it recovered a lot more, even though it has more shade than the rest of the L shaped bed. It still gets a lot more sun than the one along the retaining wall!
This is after weeding and loosening the soil a bit. The soil is really compacted for some reason (it got fresh new garden soil, just like the other beds). Very few of the beets seem to be developing their roots.
After planting the L shaped bed with the mixed seeds, I still had some left, so I scattered them in the sapce on the very left of the photo, which is pretty much right at the trunk of one of the ornamental apples. This spot never got covered. Not only did it get eaten by critters, but cats and kittens like to roll on it. Amazingly, there are still tiny little beets trying to recover in there!
Before putting the netting back, I did add pairs of sticks to hold the net above the greens a bit. Hopefully, it will dissuade kittens from jumping on it! :-D
This netting had been originally used to create a wall on the outside of the blocks to keep deer away from the lettuce that was planted there – only to have the groundhogs eat them all. To hang the net, part of it was torn so it could be placed around a tree trunk for support. That’s the tear you see at the end in the photo. The long side of the inside is pegged down snug. The long side along the retaining wall got shoved between the soil and the blocks. Though I could roll lengths of wood into the ends and weight it down with bricks, there is nothing I can do about the tear right now. I think it should be fine.
It doesn’t look like we’re going to get many beet roots out of here at all this year, but who knows? As long as the weather stays mild overnight, they will be left to grow as big as they can before we harvest them. Plus, we can still eat the greens. :-)
The Re-Farmer 