My daughter had noticed that some of the garlic scapes looked ready to harvest, so when I did my rounds this morning, I came prepared to grab them!
Our very first garlic scapes!
We’ve never had scapes before, and are really looking forward to trying them. Only 4 were ready to harvest this morning, but there are plenty more that we’ll be harvesting soon. So far, only one variety of garlic has scapes. A second variety is just starting to show the tips of them, while the third variety doesn’t have anything, yet. Between the three, we should have quite the extended season of them!
Now we have to figure out what to do with just 4 scapes. :-D
I also picked our first beet greens, lettuces and green onions this morning, along with more spinach. They’ve been around for a while; I just wanted to wait until the plants were robust enough before I went in among them.
Have you ever had scapes before? If so, what’s your favorite way to enjoy them?
While doing the morning watering, I noticed the grapes have babies!
The teeniest of bunches of baby grapes are now visible. :-)
Doing the watering this morning was a bit of a challenge, as we were having some pretty high winds. High enough to blow the water all over the place. :-D
As always, I check the weather frequently throughout the day. Especially before heading out in the morning. Between the app on my phone and the one on my desktop, I can usually get some idea of what to expect for the day. There are differences between them, but usually they’re pretty minor.
Today, not so much.
My desktop app, which is with The Weather Network, says we’ll hit our high of 31C/88F by 7pm, with variable cloudiness and no precipitation.
My phone app, with AccuWeather, says we’ll hit our high of 31C/88F by 6 pm…
… but around 4pm, it’s predicting thunderstorms, adding “Watch for a strong thunderstorm this afternoon; storms can bring gusty winds and even an isolated tornado.”
Tornado?
Yeeeaahhh…. I don’t think so.
This is definitely the most extreme difference I’ve ever seen in the forecast between the two apps!
Well, we’ll see what actually happens. I just went ahead and did the watering, in case we get no rain at all. That’s one thing about all the rocks and gravel where we live. It’s pretty much impossible to over water. Drainage is exceptionally fast!
The Re-Farmer
[addendum: our internet connection has been unusually bad of late. It took me four hours and three different browsers just to open the WordPress editor so I could write this post! Much of the problem is with our satellite internet provider. Apparently, they over sold and are in a permanent state of over capacity, now that so many people are working from home or staying home in general. One of our neighbours with the same provider contacted them for service only to be told their “slow speeds” were adding to the over capacity of their towers, and their contract is being terminated. Which makes no sense whatsoever. So… we’ll deal with the connectivity issues until the new Star Link service is available in our area!
Which is my long winded way of saying that, if posting becomes more sporadic, or the posts themselves start getting truncated, that is likely why!]
You just have to love how quickly things change, day by day!
The first ornamental poppies started blooming this morning. They have had bulbs for a while now, and then this morning, two of them exploded into full bloom. :-)
I was looking at the garlic yesterday evening, and seeing what might, possibly, could be, itty bitty garlic scapes starting to come up. They were so tiny, I couldn’t be sure.
This morning, there was no doubt. Our first garlic scapes are starting to form! We are really looking forward to when they can be harvested and trying different things with them. :-)
I have saved the best for last – check this out!
Our very first tomato flowers!! You can see the tiny little buds behind it, too.
These are the super tiny Spoon tomatoes. In reviews, people have warned that these self-seed very easily, because they are so tiny, it’s impossible to pick them all before they ripen and fall off the vine.
We’ve got no problem with that, and chose this location with that in mind.
I’m just so happy with how things are growing. Most of these are in new beds in new locations, with limited preparation. Every single plant that has survived is, for me, a total miracle. :-D I’m hoping how things are looking now are a sign of a very busy fall, preserving the harvest. :-)
It was a hot and windy day today, and my younger daughter and I ended up making a quick run into town, but we did get some decent progress in the garden.
My older daughter braved the hottest part of the day and added more soil to the 15 summer squash mounds.
I waited until it was cooler.
I added a stake near each plant. The stakes are some of the smaller poplars we cleared our of the spruce grove, trimmed to about 3-4 feet in length. In the foreground of the photo, there is a metal bar stuck in the ground. It has a point at one end. I can’t remember at the moment, where we found it, but it was a happy find! I used it, and a mallet, to make holes in the ground. Then the stakes, skinny end down, were pushed in as far as I could, beyond what I managed with the steel bar, then the soil carefully stomped down to secure it. As close to the plants as they were, that meant mostly just on one side. Once those were in, the area was mulched with straw. The idea is to secure the stems of the squash to the stakes, as they grow, and pruning the bottom leaves, little by little. We shall see how that works!
Also, I really need to get this area mowed, before the next rains come!
I had found some trellis netting, so my daughter finished the last sections of pea trellis with that, along with adding soil to the summer squash. The peas are getting tall enough to start climbing! The peas I planted later, to fill the gaps left by those that did not germinate, are sprouting, too. I’m really looking forward to having fresh peas! I can’t remember the last time I had fresh-from-the-garden peas.
If you look to the left of the photo, you can see what is a problem in this area: all those tree seedlings! They are spreading through root systems, like quack grass. Usually, I would have mowed over them by now, but we’re going to have to cut them back by hand this year.
My younger daughter, meanwhile, went all out and thinned all three spinach beds.
Yes, this was taken after the beds were thinned!
The furthest one, under the netting, is the one that got the most deer damage, but parts of it are doing well. You can see at the end of the closer beds, the smaller spinach at the ends the deer got at.
With the spinach she gathered, I currently have two trays drying in the oven, and made myself a huge spinach salad for supper. The reason we went into town was to get ingredients to make spinach dips. Both cold and baked versions. :-) I’m really looking forward to that!
This last one is just to show how well the potatoes have been doing! At this rate, some of them are going to need topping up, soon! I’m very excited to see how productive these will be at the end of their season.
With today’s progress, my goal for tomorrow is to get working on that squash tunnel. The luffa needs something to climb! :-D
Today, I built what should be the last garden bed for the year. This one is for the climbers.
Here is what the space looked like when I started.
The original plan was to use the remaining chimney blocks, like the one in the photo, as planters along the chain link fence, but they remain in the basement until we can figure some thing out, and it is not a priority.
We’ve been saving up our cardboard, and had just enough to create a barrier layer, which got a thorough soaking.
The next layer was the straw, which is also the mulch to cover the path between the new bed and the flower bed beside it. I was able to get some of the straw at the bottom of the bale that has had time to start breaking down, too, which was great! This layer, like all the layers, got a thorough soaking – after I beat it flat with the back of a fan rake.
Then, because we had some, I emptied our kitchen compost along the fence line, which got tromped on before a soak.
There wasn’t much. We don’t get a chance to accumulate much for the compost pile. It tends to get used right away!
We still have grass clippings, so a thick layer of it got laid down.
We’ve been keeping our compost-safe paper for shredding, and I had a bag full to add for another layer. After giving it a soaking, my daughter tromped it down for me, while I went to get a load of soil. This was from the nearby tarp covered pile in the outer yard. When I pulled back the tarp, I just had to call the girls over to take a look!
The white tarp allowed enough light through for the weeds to start growing, and grow they did!! They were huge!
These are mostly lambsquarter, which are supposed to be edible and very healthy. Better than spinach!!! At least that’s what the breathless Pinterest images that have started to show up in my feed are all exclaiming. Maybe some day we’ll try them, but for now, they are growing in places we want other things to be growing (or, in the case of our soil pile, nothing to be growing!), so we’re pulling them. Still, it was something else to see how big they got under that tarp! It actually is encouraging, since we plan to build polytunnels and high raised beds in the outer yard, eventually.
Finally, a thick layer of garden soil was added to the new bed, with a trench down the middle to hold water. My daughter did catch me before I made the new bed too wide. With the one we made for the tomatoes, we’re finding it a bit hard to reach, even though we ended up narrowing it down when we added more soil for the transplants. We’ve noticed the same issue with the beds of spinach, carrots and onions. They’re only about 3-4′ wide, but they are low beds right now, and we’re short. It’s hard to reach the middle while bending down so far; our balance goes off kilter. Especially for my daughters who, unlike me, have not had their generous proportions surgically reduced. That really affects center of balance! It would not be an issue with the tall raised beds we plan to build, but we need to remember that, for low beds, they need to be narrower. Especially if we can reach from only one side, like these along the fence.
One thing that was an unexpected issue is that the chain link fence on this side is higher above the ground at the bottom than on the other side of the gate.
Which means that the damp cardboard flaps against the fence couldn’t quite hold the soil in some places! Which is fine. We’ll work around it.
After filling the trench in the soil with water to soak it, I brought over the cucamelons that have sprouted (most did not, but that’s okay; we planted way more than needed!), as well as the gourds. The bucket and plant pot have the cucamelon tubers in peat that I dug up from last year, to see if they would grow this year. Time to dump them out and find out if they survived!
They did not.
Aside from a few wispy root clumps and what may have been the dried outer skin of a tuber, I found nothing. They had completely decomposed.
Well, that just left me with some peat I could make use of.
So I widened the trench I’d made before, added some peat to it, and watered it again.
Then it was time to do the transplanting.
The cucamelons were all in their own Jiffy pellets, so they were easy to space out. I planted even the tiny ones. If they make it, great. If not, at least they had a fighting chance! Our cucamelons from last year were quite prolific, even in less than ideal conditions. This location gets much more light, so I expect them to do even better, here. If all grows well, this fence will be completely covered with climbing vines!
Of the gourds, the pot that had 2 Ozark Nest Egg seedlings had sprouted a third! I’d forgotten I’d planted 3 seeds in the cups. The pot that first sprouted still had only one, plus there is the one Thai Edible Bottle gourd. These are in Jiffy pots, so the ones with just one seedling in them got planted whole. The one that had three in them, I gently broke it open along one side and sort of unrolled the contents to separate the seedlings. One of them just sprouted today, so it’s unlikely to survive, but who knows? It might do even better than the others. :-) I believe in you, little sproot!
That done, I had some more transplanting to do. I’d put the last of our Norstar onion seeds into a Solo cup, and they not only sprouted, but are starting to form bulbs!
The girls and I had talked about where to put them, and the border of the asparagus bed seemed the best place.
The onions are shallow growers, and there’s plenty of space between them and where the asparagus are, so this should be fine. At this stage, I doubt they will reach full maturity, but they will help deter critters and insects. There were more seedlings than would fit here, so I added the last of them in front of the Mosaic Mix tomatoes. There had been some bunching onions transplanted there before, but they were the tiniest, wimpiest ones that we probably shouldn’t have bothered with, and only 3 were still alive. Which is fine. There are more bunching onions in front of the Spoon tomatoes. We’ll see how these ones do!
That’s pretty much it for the transplanting. We should probably plant the one Hopi Black Dye sunflower that finally sprouted. Since there’s just the one, I’m thinking of planting it somewhere else, like in the old kitchen garden. The pink celery will go into a pot that we can move in and out of the sun room, as needed, but they are way too tiny to do anything with, yet.
Which means that tomorrow, it’s back to the other garden beds. The pea trellises need to be finished, the squash tunnel needs to be worked on, and the summer squash needs a garden soil top up, before getting mulched with straw. Somewhere in there, I need to actually mow around the main garden beds. It’s getting pretty out of control around there! For the old garden area, I’m seriously considering using the weed trimmer, instead. It’ll take longer, but I won’t have to worry about hitting rocks or lumps of soil with the lawnmower. Also, of course, weeding. Especially in the corn and sunflower blocks. All the stuff that barely grew there before have had the most moisture and inadvertent tending since… ever, and they’re really liking it! :-D
The main thing is that, aside from the pink celery and that one sunflower, we’re done the transplanting! Anything else that didn’t germinate by now, isn’t going to. We won’t be tending those pots anymore.
Aaaannnndd….
It was getting late, so I paused and took the pink celery seedlings indoors, then went ahead and transplanted the one Hopi Black Dye sunflower in the old kitchen garden, in the bed we planted the poppies in. So that’s done now, too!
I gotta say, I am so glad we got those transplants in, yesterday! I’m also glad we’re just getting rain today, and not the severe storms that other parts of our province is getting. Not that far south, either. The motion sensor on the garage security camera gets triggered by lightning. While checking the files, I could track the storm, over the span of a couple of hours, as it swept past us. None of the late night lightning was quite as dramatic is this one.
It was at about 6am when I woke to hear the rain coming down, hard. Of course I was concerned about our new transplants, and checked on them as soon as I could do my morning rounds.
Happily, none of the summer squash appeared damaged. In fact, a couple that were still looking droopy yesterday evening were looking tall and strong. Without a mulch to protect them, though, we’re going to have to add more soil to the mounds before adding the straw.
Even the littlest melon transplants at the squash tunnel were looking quite strong.
In checking these, I realized I made a goof in posting about them, yesterday. I’d said the two types of gourds were planted opposite each other at the far end of the tunnel. I completely forgot that, at the last moment, I changed my mind. Both types of gourds are on one side, with both types of winter squash, opposite them.
It was the corn I was most concerned about, and not just because of the downpour. I’m happy to say that none of them are looking at all drooping or stressed from root disruption. Some did look a bit tipsy from the pounding rain, though! We’ll see how they look, after a few days.
I’m thinking of leaving the little flags for a while. They flutter quite a bit, and might help dissuade deer from approaching.
These Crespo squash were planted a little while ago, and I’m just including them because I’m so happy at how strong looking they are. Even the little one has gotten noticeably bigger and stronger. A lot of things are. The bush beans are looking so fantastic, so quickly! The peas are getting tall enough that we’ll have to start training them up their trellises soon. The carrot sprouts are getting big enough that we can be more vigorous in weeding around them, and not be as concerned about accidentally pulling them up. The two spinach beds we were able to cover over first are looking downright succulent. The third one looks like it had been nibbled on more than I thought, but even so, it’s doing pretty darn good, too.
We don’t seem to have any purple kale coming up; they were pretty much the first things we planted outdoors, and should have come up long ago. The purple kohlrabi planted between the onions and shallots also doesn’t seem to be coming up, either. The onions are doing all right, though I have no idea how big they should be by now. The garlic, meanwhile, is growing like gangbusters.
We’d seen strawberry spinach seedlings earlier, but it seems only a few are still growing, though with those, just a couple of plants would be sufficient. It’s hard to tell them from the weed seedlings, though. The poppies are in a similar situation. I see a few seedlings that might be poppies, but it’s hard to tell with the weeds. That’s one down side of buying garden soil by the dump truck load. It may be a premium mix, but it’s also from a giant pile outdoors, so of course, it came with weeds. At least most of it is a local weed I well recognize, having pulled many of them from my mother’s garden when I was a child! :-D
The lettuces are a mixed bag. Some seem to finally be doing all right, while others seem to have just died off. We need to do a successive sowing of those, anyhow. The seed packets, which were in a Ziploc bag, ended up upside down and some of them spilled, so future sowing is going to be a mix of seeds! Which I don’t mind at all. :-) The beets meanwhile, are doing quite well, in all the beds. Even with the cats walking across them, and sometimes lying on them! The tomatoes are also looking really good, including the itty bitty transplants. Even the potatoes are coming up in all of the grow bags, now, and looking very healthy.
After doing my morning rounds, the girls and I made our trip to the city. We even used my mother’s car, partly to give it a good run on the highway, but also because it has air conditioning that works. ;-) I was very happy for those new tires when we found ourselves driving through some very solid rain. It was definitely coming down harder, the further south we went.
For now, we have a break from the rain, but we will likely get more again, before the system finally passes. I think everyone around here is breathing a sigh of relief. We needed this rain so much! And our
Yesterday, one of my goals was to start on the lawn. We have yet to mow the lawn this year, but with how little rain we’ve had, it’s not really that overgrown. Other than some straw we still have left, we’re out of organic material to layer and mulch with, so it would be good to have grass clippings again. At the very least, I wanted to get out the weed trimmer and do the edges.
Then I got a phone call.
My mother was letting me know my sister was on her way to visit her, and they were planning to go to the cemetery, which is just a few miles away from us. They were planning to come here, after.
*sigh*
We had talked about this possibility just the day before, so I can’t say it was too unexpected, but I had advised against doing a cemetery trip when we were supposed to get so very hot again. She also knew that I like to have a lot more notice before visits, so we can be prepared. My mother actually sounded apologetic when she was telling me they were coming over, and added that she was good with not going into the house if we didn’t want her to. Which isn’t the problem, but whatever.
So the girls did a quick rush to try and prepare things, like making sure everything was clear from the sun room doors, though the old kitchen, to the bathroom (so my mother wouldn’t have to use the main doors, with all the little sets of stairs), while I quickly used the weed trimmer around the yard, between the main garden beds, and a few other places that I thought my mother might want to get at with her walker. I had thought to move the picnic table to a shady spot in the south yard, but my daughter reminded me that, when we moved it to where it is now, after it was painted, it was pretty rickety, so it probably couldn’t handle being moved so far, again. So she set up some camp chairs in the shade, and we used an overturned bin for a table. :-D My mother and sister had even brought some fried chicken, so we had ourselves a picnic lunch in the shade, before touring the yard and garden beds.
When they arrived, my sister passed me something my mother had for me. At her apartment building, they have garden plots available. My mother doesn’t do much gardening herself anymore, but she does tend the perennials that had been planted by some of her friends and neighbours who have passed on. The caretakers, unfortunately, have a habit of digging everything up at the end of the year, including a bush my mother described as having beautiful yellow flowers, followed by black fruit. She had no idea what it was; it was planted by someone who passed away some years ago. No one ate the berries, but it was lovely, and the caretakers dug it up and got rid of it. This spring, while tending some plants, she noticed that part of the bush had survived. Not wanting the caretakers to kill it off, she dug it up and put it in a pitcher with some soil. She wanted to give it to me to plant somewhere near the house. We have a grocery shopping trip arranged next week, and I was going to get it then, but with my sister coming over, they were able to bring it over early.
I’m pretty sure it’s a currant, though my mother says it’s different than what we have here. My sister, who is the one that gave my mother the currants that are here, thought it might be a gooseberry. Whatever it is, I made sure to transplant it as soon as things started cooling down a bit. I picked a spot right near where we’d had our picnic lunch. There is a flower bed with white lilacs taking up about half of it. After it was cleaned up, a couple of years ago, we were left with an empty spot that I decided to take advantage of.
I scraped away the wood chip mulch we’d put in, first – it was about 3 inches deep – and started digging. I had to shift the hole a few times, after hitting tree roots, but after clearing out a few bigger rocks, I finally had a space I could transplant into. It was bone dry. We don’t water this bed regularly, but I have been trying to water the lilacs and a low growing plant with variegated leaves I like. From how dry the soil was, you’d never know it had been watered recently! So I filled the hole with water, then got a wheelbarrow load of new garden soil.
After transplanting it into the hole with fresh garden soil, I put back some of the mulch and gave it another thorough watering.
So we now have a new, unplanned, fruit bearing bush in the yard. :-) Hopefully, it will survive.
Backtracking a bit; my mother and I had talked about her coming out to see the gardens later in the season, when things were more grown in, but she got a bit of a tour yesterday. I did appreciate her very visible efforts to not say anything negative, which is usually the only thing she’ll say. I think it’s a generational thing, or maybe a cultural thing, but my mother seems to believe in NOT saying positive things. Like it’s somehow bad to compliment people or something. I suspect it has to do with believing it would lead to pride or something along those lines, though I doubt that’s in any way on a conscious level. She did, however, manage a backhanded compliment on how healthy the garlic looked! So that’s progress. :-D
She was not up to taking the walker to the furthest beds, of course, but my sister did, with her ever-present camera, and she got lots of pictures. It was a long day for my mother, so they left almost immediately after touring the yard. Going to the cemetery, then coming here, was probably too much for her. :-(
After I’d taken care of the transplant my mother gave us, I started hearing thunder. We’ve been having thunderstorm warnings for a while, but they kept getting pushed back. We were hoping to at least get some rain! I could see the storm clouds, and the wind was picking up, so I brought our hardening off transplants back into the sun room early, and we even shut down our computers, just in case.
We got nothing. Not even a spit of rain.
By 9:30pm, I finally went back outside to water the garden beds. The rain did finally come, but not until about 5am this morning.
When I headed out to do my morning rounds, it was still raining! A lovely, steady rain. I got completely soaked. :-D So no pictures this morning. ;-)
While checking the garden beds, I had some more unexpected surprises. The sweet corn is coming up already!! New shoots, in all three corn blocks. I also found more Hopi Black Dye sunflower sprouts, but also some Mongolian Giant sunflowers have already sprouted! Clearly, they are loving our heat wave. The bush beans, meanwhile, are coming up like crazy. The purple ones are still a bit slower in coming up than the yellow and green beans, but once they do come up, the sprouts seem to be leafing out faster than the others.
I’m finding it awesome that so many things we direct sowed is sprouting already. We haven’t even finished putting out our transplants, yet! :-D
Of course, while checking the garden beds this morning, I was looking for deer damage. When I’d watered last night, I tied some plastic grocery bags onto a couple of the stakes supporting the Mongolian Giant transplants, as a noisy deterrent. Happily, there was no new damage.
Then I checked the trail cam.
There was one file triggered during the night. Off in the shadows, a single deer could be seen, walking through! It looked like it was going down the path between the corn/sunflower blocks, and the pea/bean beds. It didn’t stop or pause, but kept walking towards the spruce grove.
Today, I’m moving the camera again. I think I know where the deer came in, but there are a couple of places they like to jump the fence, and I want to cover both possibilities, if I can, and see if there are any other areas they might be coming through.
We shall see what the weather does today. Today’s expected high is “only” 25C/77F, with scattered showers. Which means we will probably not be able to use a power drill, with its 300 ft or so of extension cords, to finish assembling the squash tunnel. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get the summer squash in, though we might have to prioritize the Montana Morado corn. At least the place they will be planted is right next to what’s left of the pile of garden soil. We might end up having to use soil from the pile in the outer yard to finish transplanting. The good thing is, we actually have that second pile!
Pretty much all of the squash, both winter and summer, that we chose are small varieties that mature quickly. The one exception was the Crespo squash. Of the 6 seeds we planted, one came up and got quite large. After we moved our seedlings from the aquarium greenhouses to the sun room, a second seedling sprouted.
That’s good enough for me!
As these are supposed to grow quite large, we decided they will get their own space. Near where we will be transplanting the Montana Morado corn is a very rough area; one of the worst areas from the shoddy plow job that was done before we moved out here. The plow had been turned in this tighter area, creating a particularly large lump of soil in the process.
I figured, we may as well take advantage of it, and turn it into a squash hill!
Yeah. That’s basically a dirt and crab grass hill my garden fork is stuck on. I’d already started to loosen the soil at the top of it. The grass is so tall, you can hardly tell there’s a hill there!
I used the hose and water pressure to soak and break up the soil, which made it easier to pull out vegetation and roots. And rocks, of course. There are always rocks!
It was also the first level of watering, and boy did the soil need it!
The next step was to layer on some straw, which got thoroughly watered while a daughter brought over our kitchen compost bucket. When that got added in, it got another watering. If we had other organic matter I could have layered on there, I would have, but this will have to do.
Hhmm. I neglected to take a picture of the next stage, which was to bring over a wheelbarrow full of garden soil to top up the hill. After creating a bit of a hole in the middle, that got another level of watering, then a bit more garden soil was added, to level it off. That got another watering in the middle. After the straw was added all around it, everything got another watering. The straw will help keep the soil from washing away, as well as keep down the weeds and help keep the soil moist.
Finally, the squash got transplanted. Since there was one plant per cup, they got dropped right in, with almost no root disruption.
I still had a little bit of the peat and soil mixture we used for the tomatoes left in the kiddie pool we used to mix it in. That got turned back into dirt soup, and was added around the seedlings.
To help with watering them at root level, I cut the bottom off of one of the distilled water bottles we get for my husband’s CPAP, and buried it top down in the middle of the squash hill. Another spade full of soil was added around the container, because it kept trying to float out of the hole it was buried in! :-D
The final step was to pull some of the damp straw up around the seedlings.
While the plants are small, we will make sure to water the straw to keep it, and the squash hill, moist but once they get bigger, we’ll be able to deep water them at the roots, through the container in the middle, and avoid getting their leaves and stems wet.
The entire hill got another watering, and it was done!
I really hope this does well. I honestly have no idea how these will grow in our zone. In doing searches for it, I am just finding the Baker Creek seed listing, and my own blog posts!
Before I headed out to do my morning rounds, we had already hit 25C/77F. By the time I was done, it was already 30C/86F! Thankfully, there was still a breeze and some shade, so it didn’t feel too bad.
I made a couple of discoveries in the garden this morning, but before I get to those, I’ll back track to yesterday evening.
I used the cut off strip of mosquito netting left over from covering our lettuces and beets, some dollar store hula hoops, and lengths of old hose to cover part of the third spinach bed. This is just until we can make a wire mesh cover for it. I also took the trail cam from the tulips and moved it to overlook most of the garden. The only critter I saw in the files this morning was Nutmeg. :-D
After setting the netting up, I moved on to the far beds and blocks to water them. The water in the rain barrel is usually cool, but it was quite warm by the end of yesterday’s heat! On the plus side, it meant being able to use the watering can instead of the hose, and not shocking everything with cold well water, for almost everything. As the water level dropped below half, I started to refill it while still using the watering can, so it would be just cooler water instead of having to switch to the cold hose to finish watering.
I had company.
Rolando Moon has a thing about drinking from puddles! Once the water was absorbed by the soil, she decided to roll on the damp soil, then just hung out. I guess it’s nice and cool. At least she tended to stay in the middle, which is more of a trench for water, as the beans are planted on the sides. No beans are coming up yet.
Nutmeg was also hanging around. I caught him lying across some pea plants, chewing on the trellis twine! The little bugger! :-D
When I checked everything this morning, things were still damp and didn’t need to be watered, but I also spotted a whole lot of these…
The radishes are sprouting! The one in the photo is of the daikon type radishes, but I was seeing sprouts for the watermelon radishes in all the rows they were planted in, too. I was aware that radishes sprout quickly, but I’ve never grown them before, so this was a very pleasant surprise. They most certainly were not there when I was watering last night. :-)
Then I found another lovely sight.
The first potato leaves have emerged through their mulch! There are the purple fingerling potatoes. Sifting around in the mulch in the grow bags, I found other shoots coming through the soil, but these are the first ones to break through and leaf out. :-) I really look forward to seeing how these do in their grow bags.
We have a whole lot of squash transplants ready to go out, but I’m starting to rethink what to do with the summer squash. The plan was to make more beds like with the beans and peas. However, we have that long arc where we’d planted the sunflowers last year. In removing some of the old grass clipping mulch to use under some new beds, I couldn’t help but notice how much better the soil is, underneath. It’s still rocky, but we basically have a long row of soft soil, bordered by concrete hard soil. I’m thinking we should take advantage of this. It will need far less amending than starting new beds. I’m also planning to try staking the summer squash this year, but with our without stakes, deer don’t like those prickly squash plants, so it could act as a sort of fence for the rest.
I sorted through our transplants while hardening them off, and we have a lot of nice, strong melons. Between those and the winter squash, and the two types of gourds that successfully germinated, we might not actually have room for it all on the squash tunnel. So I’m thinking we can plant as much as we can fit of each type at the squash tunnel, then whatever is left over can be planted in other areas. Without trellising, these should spread out quite a bit over the ground, and we’ll be able to give them lots of space, and we would just need to haul soil over to make hills, rather than beds. This would allow us to compare how well they do, between left to grow on the ground, or up a trellis.
What I might end up doing is getting the Montana Morado corn done, first. They are doing very well, but will start outgrowing their cups soon. Since the toilet paper tube pots didn’t work out, I’m really hoping they won’t suffer from transplant shock too badly. In zone 3 gardening groups. I’ve read from people who warn against transplanting corn completely, because they don’t handle it well, to people who say they do it all the time, every year, and have never had issues. I suspect type of corn can make a difference, and I seem to be the first person in all of these groups to try and grow purple corn in our zone!
After getting the Dorinny corn planted yesterday, we could take a break from manual labour in the garden for a day or two. Which makes this the first Sunday I’ve been able to take as a day of rest for a while.
Well. Sort of.
For some reason, I did not sleep last night. At all. At 4am, I found myself chatting with my SIL. She had been driven out of bed by pain, so she got up to watch the sun rise. Which is why I ended up outside by 5:30 am, doing my rounds and watering the garden beds, haskaps, the newly planted mulberry and the nearby cedar. We did get some rain during the night, which was wonderful, but it still wasn’t enough to skip the morning watering. Most of the rainfall missed us, it seems. We’re supposed to continue to get rain over the next while, and possibly even thundershowers, but we’ll see if any of it actually falls in our area.
I did, at least, get a nap in after I finished my rounds. Unfortunately, as I’d somehow thought yesterday was Friday instead of Saturday, I hadn’t phoned my mother as I’d intended. I woke to a message my brother had sent a couple hours earlier, telling me he’d called our mother and she was talking about going to the grocery store with her walker. By the time I called and got through to her, she had made her trip. It was just a little one, though, so I will be going over later in the week to help her make a larger trip.
We needed to make our own trip to do some shopping; it should have been done yesterday, but I just wasn’t up to the drive. I still wasn’t up to it, today, but my daughter was able to do the driving, so we headed out this afternoon to the smaller city, where they have a tiny little Walmart. Cat food was one of the things we needed to get more of. It seems people have been making a run on the big bags of kibble, because there was almost none in stock! At least, not of the affordable stuff. I grabbed 2 of the last three bags on the shelves. While there, I also took a look in the gardening section and discovered that all the hoses longer than 10′ were completely out of stock too.
One thing they didn’t have was the hardwood pellets we are switching to, in place of cat litter. All but two of our litter boxes have been switched to the pellets. The cats have gotten used to the pellets already, which is great. Using the pellets has meant no more dust, and no more smell! They also need to be cleaned out less frequently, since they don’t get scooped, but emptied completely after several days. We just have to figure out how to dispose of the pellets during a burn ban.
Getting more of the pellets meant going to Canadian Tire. I haven’t been to this location since before the restrictions, and had heard they didn’t accept medical exemptions, or even Mingle Masks. I’m happy to say that I had no issues at all. At least not with my medical exemption. Finding the pellets was something else entirely! I found the type I’d picked up before in the seasonal section, but in one of the groups I’m on, people talked about switching to the pellets and mentioned getting them at Canadian Tire – but the ones they were talking about were much cheaper. Even the bag I did get was cheaper than litter, but it wasn’t what people were talking about. My daughter tracked down an employee who said they were by the cash desks on the way out, so we went and looked. That’s where the automotive section was, so we were confused. We looked around some more, then finally found a different employee. She looked it up on her phone and found exactly what I’d seen people talking about. It turned out we had to go through the cash desk first, pay for them, then someone would bring them to us.
Once we knew that, we made a side trip to the garden centre, first. My daughter has a birthday next month, and I wanted to pick up an early birthday present for her. She’s been really wanting to have raspberries, and the ones my mother had transplanted in the old garden are not doing well. I’m still not sure why she chose to plant them under the apple and chokecherry trees, and in the middle of flowers. They’re not getting anywhere near enough light. We weren’t going to get more until next year, but she has been wanting them so much, I decided to surprise her. :-)
Once in the garden centre, we found their raspberries and I got my daughter to choose which variety she wanted. There was only two to pick from, and she chose a heritage variety that produces a small yield in June, then a larger yield in September. We got two plants for now. While there, I was very happy to find lady haskaps, and picked one up.
We will harden these off a bit before we transplant them. We’re not sure, yet, where the raspberries will go. Over the next while, we plant to pick up varieties that have different coloured berries, so these will be the first of many! The lady haskap will be planted between the two we have now, though off to one side of the bed, to maintain the spacing they need. The male haskap has opening blossoms, while the struglling female is finally starting to open its leaf buds. We definitely won’t be having any berries this year! With this new female plant, though, we will hopefully start having some next year.
After finding the plants we wanted, we went to pay for them, and asked about the hardwood pellets. We didn’t have someone bring them to us, because it turned out the stack was in the exit vestibule. No wonder we couldn’t find them! The 40 pound bags were only $7 each, so we got two. We’d taken my mother’s car for the trip, since it hasn’t been driven enough. Next time, we’ll be using the van, so we’ll have the space to get more and be well stocked.
While doing my rounds this evening, checking the garden beds, giving the newly planted corn an extra watering (my other daughter had watered while we were gone, but it’s pretty much impossible to over water in this area), and checking out how well my daughter’s tulips are growing, I found the plum trees are in full bloom, now!
The rain we got was enough for them to fully open. It’s remarkable, how much of a difference even a little bit of rain can make, when things are as dry as they have been!
Last night, the girls had popped outside after dark and called me over to see the sun room window. I had the aquarium lights set up vertically on the inner side of the shelf our seedlings are on, and it was causing confusion!
There were moths all over the window, trying to get at the lights, including this beauty!
They won’t have as much light to attract them tonight, though. In checking and watering the seedlings (and finding a whole bunch of new sprouts, including another Crespo squash!), I noticed the Montana Morado corn and Mongolian Giant sunflowers, in their long bin, were getting leggy, reaching for the light coming through the Western windows. I set the brighter of the aquarium lights up above the bin, which should help with that problem. At the rate these are growing, I might have a problem keeping the light high enough above them, that they won’t get too close to the fixture; this one actually puts off some heat, too. With what I’ve got to support the light fixture right now, it’s about as high as it can go, unless I can find something else to hold it in place. We will have to figure that out!
Even on my “day off”, I just can’t stop thinking about the gardening! I can hardly wait to continue setting up the rest of the beds we need and, now that the peas are starting to sprout, finish their trellises and build the squash arches.
I suppose I should let the girls have some of the fun, too… ;-)
The Re-Farmer 