homesteading

Our 2025 Garden analysis: final thoughts and plans for next year

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

All righty. Time to get my thoughts organized about how things went this year, and what I want to do next year.

When this post gets published, I’ll actually be at my mother’s place, doing some housekeeping for her and getting her apartment the way she wants it for Christmas. We’re already getting weather warnings for this weekend. Today’s high (Thursday) was -11C/12F. Wind chills at around -22C/-8F. Tomorrow (Friday, when this will be published) and Saturday, our highs are supposed to be -21C/-6F, but we are getting warning of wind chills dropping things to -40C/-40F. !!!!!

Then it’s supposed to start warming up again, up to a high of -5C/23F on Tuesday, before dropping again. There are no longer any predicted highs above freezing around Christmas, but we’re still expecting major swings in temperature.

I’m so glad the winter sown beds got that extra layer or straw.

Speaking of which, here are my final thoughts on how our 2025 garden did.

Winter Sowing

This was the big experiment this year. If it didn’t work, we would have had a very different gardening year, that’s for sure! The other part of the experiment was broadcasting mixes of seeds, some of them years old, which gave me the chance to restock with fresh seed, later on.

Two of the mixes were complete failures, but for very different reasons. The summer squash just never came up. If anything did sprout, they got rolled over by cats. Which is what killed off the “tall and climbing things” bed, and the winter sown flowers. I did see things start to sprout, but they didn’t survive long.

The root vegetables mix in two beds did really well, though one almost got chocked out by the insanely productive Jabousek lettuce seeds that were added. I’m even happier with the greens mix, having finally been able to grow kohlrabi, and those Swiss Chard were an excellent cut and come again crop.

In the end, if it weren’t for the winter sown beds that survived, we would have had a much less productive year! This is a major game changer for me, and I expect to keep doing this from now on. Not only did we get much earlier growth, but it saved me a lot of work in the spring.

The biggest problems

Cats.

I thought it would be the elm seeds, and they were definitely a problem in the expected places, too, but the yard cats were particularly destructive this year.

What I won’t do again, and what I’m doing instead

Definitely not broadcasting mixes. That did give me a good idea of what could be successfully winter sown in our climate zone, though. Particularly with the drought, heat and smoke we got this year. This time, the winter sowing was much more planned out. The beds also got more thoroughly mulched before the hard frosts hit.

With that in mind, we’ve planted carrots, peas, spinach, chard, kohl rabi, cabbage, beets, and Hedou Tiny bok choi. Plus, of course, garlic. There were also lots of little onions found while cleaning up the old kitchen garden that got transplanted. Those might bulb, or go to seed. Either one works for me.

I will also have to make sure to put cat proof protective covers on pretty much everything.

I was also happy with having radish pods instead of radish bulbs. There is a variety grown specifically for their pods that I might pick up at some point but, for now, we quite enjoyed the proliferation of pods to snack on and do quick pickles with. You get a LOT more food from a single radish by eating the pods, too. Definitely for winter sowing, though, as I’ve read they taste a lot stronger when they are direct sown in the spring.

Transplants

This was a really hard year for all our transplants. The heat, drought and smoke likely played a big part in that, but in some beds, it looks like tree roots invading the beds also played a part. We got very little out of our transplants. The ones we started indoors that did best were the Chocolate Cherry and Spoon tomatoes, even as stunted as they were. The worst were probably the melons. The pepper and eggplant plants did rather well, but to so much for blooming and productivity. The purchased herb transplants, on the other hand, did great in their tiny raised bed!

The biggest problems

The transplants were something we could protect from cats rather well. In the end, it was probably a combination of drought conditions and those tree roots. Not a lot that was in our zone of control that we could have done anything about.

What I won’t do again, and what I’m doing instead.

I won’t winter sow onions again. Instead, I will be starting them indoors for transplanting. I had hoped they would at least grow enough to use the greens and deter deer, but most of them simply got choked out.

We will, of course, still be starting seeds indoors to transplant in the spring, but we need to set up a seed starting area and the aquarium greenhouses in the basement. If for no other reason than we need to clear space in the cat free zone, AKA the living room. Now that cats aren’t allowed in the new basement anymore, I can open up the “window” between the basements, near the furnaces. That should help more warm air from the old basement to flow into the new basement and equalize things. There is the “doorway” (a vaguely door shaped hole cut into the wall when the new basement was built) but no real air flow between the two basements.

As for what we can do instead, for better success with our transplants… I honestly don’t know. There isn’t much I can do about heat waves. There are limits to watering during a drought, and not just due to the lower water table. Our well pump still needs to be replaced, if we dare risk the foot valve, so the more the hose is used, the more wear and tear on the pump. In the end, it comes down to the weather, really.

As for the tree roots, we need to cut that row of self-seeded trees down completely, and ensure no suckers start coming up at the stumps. My mother was adamant about not cutting those trees down, even though I see signs that someone tried to at some point. Probably my late brother tried to get rid of them. I recall my mother laughing about how angry he would get because she would stick trees all over the place, making it hard for him to take care of things.

Now my oldest brother owns the property, though, and he is very much in agreement with getting rid of them. He had issues with where and how my parents chose to plant trees, too, and we’re both now dealing with the consequences.

Other than clearing those trees out, the only other thing we can really do is more raised beds. The higher, the better but, for now, even low raised beds help. Once the trees are cut down, I’m even thinking of putting a long, higher raised bed over where they are, to make sure they get good and dead. That would also reclaim the garden space lost to my mother allowing those trees to grow after she transplanted out the raspberries that were there.

As for the purchased herb transplants, those did quite well. I certainly won’t turn my nose up at buying transplants to supplement anything we start indoors.

Yes, I will still be trying luffa again! 😄

Spring Direct Sowing

These where the most affected by this year’s climate conditions of all. It was pretty brutal.

We direct sowed pole beans, bush beans, corn, carrots, peas and more summer squash. I’ll add potatoes to this list as well. I think the potatoes did the best, even though they never reached the blooming stage. The summer squash and two types of beans were the worst.

The biggest problems.

There’s only so much I can blame on the drought. We haven’t had much luck direct sowing summer squash in the past, either. Granted, last year it was slugs that were the big problem, and this year, we had lots of frogs taking care of those for us!

In the end, though, I think most of our issues were the same as with the transplants. Too much heat, drought conditions (even with watering twice a day) and so much smoke. Plus, tree roots.

What I won’t do again, and what I’m doing instead

I will have to find space for them, but summer squash will be started indoors again, for transplanting instead of direct sowing.

Beans and corn; there really isn’t anything I can do differently with those.

The peas did surprisingly well, but we need to ramp up our deer protection.

The carrots need less tree roots competing for space. Those have been winter sown in the trellis bed. If I plant more in the spring, I need to be strategic on where, to avoid those roots.

The chard I direct sowed were a complete fail. I have more varieties to direct sow in the spring, and those will go in earlier. I suspect it was partly too hot when they were planted, and the soil too compacted by watering.

Soil compaction is an issue. We need to add more organic matter to our soil. Preferably something like peat moss (Canadian peat moss is ethically harvested) that will also increase the acidity.

That might be another issue for everything. Our soil is so alkaline, and most things do better in slightly acidic soil. I’ve been amending with Sulphur, but it’s really hard to increase soil acidity. Especially with dark grey zone soil like ours, that leaches everything so quickly.

More high raised beds will allow us to control for that more, but this is the sort of thing that takes years to amend, even the slightest.

Food forest and perennials

Happily, we got quite a boost with our food forest this spring, adding a plum, another variety of eating apple more suited to our climate zone, new cross pollinating varieties of haskap and gooseberry. I remember we had gooseberry here when I was a kid and so loved eating them when they were really really sour! I look forward to eating them again.

The biggest problems

Deer. Drought. The insane number of rocks I find when digging holes to plant in.

What I won’t do again, and what I’ll do instead.

I won’t underestimate how determined deer can be, nor assume they won’t like something! I got spoiled by them ignoring the silver buffalo berry and sea buckthorn, though they did go after that one highbush cranberry, over and over again, last year.

In the spring, I’ll be making more wire mesh cages for the fruit and nut trees. The berry bushes seem to be okay.

I really need to find a place to transplant those grapes to.

Now that I’ve got the new strawberry and asparagus bed, I’m thinking of slowly turning that section over to perennials. Not next year, though. I have other plans for there, first.

Final thoughts

There were a lot of things out of our control this year, and some things I am just not sure what went wrong. Like with the red noodle beans.

With so many changes to our garden this past year, and not being able to reclaim spaces we’d planted in, in previous years, it really isn’t a typical year at all. We did have some surprise successes (peas, crocus) and big disappointments (no melons and almost no squash at all!).

At least I can call it a learning experience.

Here is the last garden tour video I did, where you can see the beds that are already winter sown.

Planning ahead to our 2026 Garden

Obviously, some of that is already in and done, with the winter sowing. We’ve got quite a head start to next year’s garden already.

Doing that meant I got a lot of seeds in advance. I took advantage of some big sales and replenished my stock from MI Gardener.

Here is what I got.

No, we aren’t planting all of that!

But we will be planting both old and new seeds.

My daughters and I went though my seed inventory to make some decisions on what we’ll be planting next year, outside of what I’ve already winter sown.

I just went into the basement, where my seed bins are stored, to get my lists and diagrams. Since I was there anyhow, I went ahead and uncovered the window between the two basements. I’d covered it with a piece of rigid insulation and had poked holes in it to allow for some air flow, but it clearly wasn’t enough. Once that was down, there was a literal wind of warmer air coming in from the old basement! Wow!

So that will make a difference. I’ll have to keep an eye on the thermometer I’ve got over my seed bin. The new basement tends to stay between 10-13C/50-55F, all year. I don’t have a thermometer in the old basement, but it’s often warmer than the main floor!

I didn’t write a list the varieties we intend to plant yet, but have the seed packets set aside. We intend to grow fewer plants of more varieties in some things. The varieties will be listed in future posts, but this is what we’ve decided to grow this year.

To start indoors

Winter squash and gourds. The gourds are my “fun” thing to grow.
Summer Squash.
Melons.
Cucumbers
Onions – bulb and bunching
Eggplant – hopefully, a variety my daughter is not allergic to!
Tomatoes
Peppers
Celery
Herbs
Flowers

So… yeah, I’m going to need to make space!

That doesn’t leave much for us to direct sow in the spring!

Spring Direct Sowing

Corn – short season and not to short season
Beans – pole and bush. If I have room, beans for drying
Potatoes
Flowers

Succession sowing

Peas
Chard
Spinach
Carrots

One thing I will have for 2026 is more room to plant in. There is one bed in the old kitchen garden that took forever to re-work, but it is now ready for planting, and included supports to hold hoops or whatever I end up using to hold covers and protect the bed from critters.

The bed that was winter sown with tall and climbing things was a major issue and a complete fail. I did have mesh netting to protect from the seeds, but it couldn’t protect from playful kittens. I’ve been gathering the materials and will rework that bed, yet again. It will be taller, narrower by a few inches, and like the reworked bed in the old kitchen garden, it will have supports I can attached hoops or wire or whatever I need to cover and protect the bed from elm seeds and critters.

The plan so far.

Which, I’m sure, will change a few times before the garden is completely in!

Let’s start with the old kitchen garden, which is mostly winter sown. There is the short side of the L shaped wattle weave bed that is open. I intend to plant herbs there, including fennel, though we want that more as a vegetable than an herb.

The newly finished rectangular bed could have root vegetables planted in it, so I was thinking of more carrots. However, it might be a better place to plant summer squash in.

The open retaining wall blocks are now all filled with transplanted alpine or whatever they are strawberries. Those will be for perennials, since nothing else seems to want to grow in them.

I did the same with the retaining wall blocks by the chain link fence. Hopefully, they will survive the winter. It’s hard to say, being planted in concrete blocks, but all the chimney block planters did get mulched for winter insulation.

Once the longer bed at the other section of chain link fence is redone, I am thinking winter squash and/or gourds would be good to put there. They can be covered until they’re too big for cats to get into, can climb the fence, and are too spikey for deer to eat.

In the East yard, two out of three rectangular beds are winter sown. In the third one, I’m thinking a couple of varieties of tomatoes can go in there.

There is a 4′ square bed in this section, which will get white eggplants transplanted into it.

In the main garden area, one of the beds is sown with Daikon radish on one side, turnips on the other. Down the middle, I plan to direct sow pole beans.

The high raised bed will get bush beans.

In the trellis bed, the winter sown peas didn’t fill the entire row, so we will transplant cucumbers in the last couple of feet.

Of the three remaining 18′ beds in the main garden area, one will have peppers, celery and tomatoes. The other will get squash and/or melons. The third bed will get potatoes.

The area near where the new asparagus and strawberry bed is, is still covered with black plastic, which has mostly killed off the grass and weeds that took over what used to be a squash patch before. I plan to pull that back and use that area to plant two varieties of corn that mature at very different rates, so there should be no issue with cross pollination.

Further out is the area where the Albion Everbearing strawberries were. I plan to sow bread seed poppies in that location, as part of the plan to slowly convert that whole section to perennials, or self seeding annuals that can be treated as perennials.

What you’re not seeing in there is flowers or onions.

The onions will get interplanted all over the place. The bulb onions are saved seed, but the bunching onions are new, so those I’ll try to keep in one spot. Perhaps interplanted with the herbs in the old kitchen garden or something.

The space at the end of the high raised bed will have flowers again – hopefully including those self seeded asters – but I also intend to have both transplanted and direct sown flowers scattered all over, interplanted wherever I find the space.

Somewhere in there, I want to direct sow some of the saved Hopi Black Dye seeds.

If all goes well, I’ll have at least one additional trellis bed done, and we can finish our first trellis tunnel, though maybe not in time for spring planting. If my brother is able to get one of his tractors going and we start dragging dead spruces out of the spruce grove – maybe even cut more of the dead ones down – I will have the logs needed to continue building pairs of trellis beds and, if all works out, pairs of beds that will become polytunnels. Once the second bed for the first trellis tunnel is done, though, framing the existing low raised beds are priority. Those will be only one log high for now, while the trellis beds will be started at two logs high. I’ve got only so many dead spruces to work with, so building the beds up higher will be left after we’ve got all the beds framed out that need it. Over time, I’d like for at least half of the raised beds to be increased to match the high raised bed – 4 logs high. I’m finding that the perfect height for reach, and for my back. I do want to leave some beds lower for things that grow tall, like corn or pole beans. The trellis tunnel beds may eventually be increased to 3 logs high, but we’ll see.

Then there are the perennials and trees.

I’ve placed an order for some Manchurian Walnut, which is one of the few nut trees out there that are hardy enough to grow here – it’s actually hardy to zone 2b, which is what we are in Canadian. I could only afford to get one, rather than any of their bundles. It will be planted in the outer year. In the same order, I was able to get a bundle of five Bleu Basket Willow. Those will be planted beyond the outer yard, where they will eventually be coppiced and used to grow stems for everything from, yes, weaving baskets, to wattle weaving and even willow furniture, if we want. Over time, I plan to get two other varieties of basket willows that are different colours.

We might have to buy replacement Korean Pine, too. We shall see.

We’re also looking at other types of hardy fruit trees to get as the budget allows, such as pears, or varieties of cherry that actually grow and produce in our climate zone.

All in good time.

All done!

Well, there we have it.

In the end, 2025 was a really rough year for gardening. Yes, we were able to harvest and the winter sown beds made a huge difference, but nothing really reached its full potential, including the winter sown beds, as well as the surviving ones did. So many people in our region struggled with their gardens.

I know a lot of people have been going on about “survival gardens” or sharing those idiotic memes about how, if we all grew gardens instead of lawns, no one would starve. Hogwash. Obviously, I’m all for growing as much of your own food as possible, however you can manage is, and to be as self sufficient as possible. I absolutely encourage people to do that, every chance I get. Especially in these unstable times. But the hype and expectations I’m seeing out there are not helping. Years like this show exactly how little control we actually have when it comes to growing our own food. There are bad growing seasons like this, but even if you have an excellent growing season and your garden is doing great, one storm could wipe it all out. Or it could be destroyed by animals, insects or disease.

As the old saying goes, hope for the best, plan for the worst. There will always be things happening we have no control over, other than how we respond to it.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden analysis: direct sowing

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Okay, so we’ve gone over the winter sowing, then the very disappointing transplanting. How, we get into the direct sowing.

For direct sowing, we did summer squash, pumpkin, pole beans, bush beans, carrots, peas, corn, sunflowers and, to fill in space after losses, Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard. We also planted potatoes and, for a second try, flowers (which I covered a bit in my last post).

Sunflowers, Pumpkin, Corn, Beans and Chard

The pole beans we planted were the Red Noodle beans, in the same bed as the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers. This bed also had seed onions from last year, plus the oodles of tiny self seeded onions I found and transplanted in between the seed onions while preparing the bed.

The Red Noodle Beans germinated and started growing really quickly. I’d planted them along the trellis side of what will eventually be a trellis tunnel. They came up so fast, I rushed to put trellis netting up, even though the structure had only the vertical supports up.

I could have saved the effort. That initial growth spurt was it. They never got any bigger that what you can see in the above slide show. I had a few spare bean seeds left and ended up planting them in gaps between some sugar snap peas. Those stagnated just as much, in a completely different bed.

*sigh*

The Hopi Black Dye sunflowers, however, were a pleasant surprise. It took a long time, but they did finally germinate. They, too, stagnated and took a long time before they started blooming. Some had a single head, while other developed seed heads at almost every leaf junction.

Much to my surprise, they even survived some frosts and a few heads developed what I hope to be viable seeds, that I have saved.

In the same bed as the Red Noodle Beans and sunflowers, I planted the free pumpkin seeds that are given away at the grocery store in my mother’s town. This year, their packets (they limit one per person) had five seeds in it. Last year, they packets had three seeds.

There was no variety name given, but the town encourages people to grow the seeds and enter their pumpkins in their pumpkin fest, from which they later save seeds to give out for free the next year.

I planted them in protective collars, in between the self seeded onions and tomatoes I found in the bed.

The pumpkins where the last thing I direct sowed this year. All of them germinated, and the plants were all some of the healthiest squash we got. They actually came up faster than the sunflowers. When one of them started to develop a pumpkin, I trained that vine up the trellis netting – by then, it was obvious no beans would be climbing it.

They got some really huge flowers, too.

We only got one pumpkin, though. Other female flowers did start to develop little pumpkins, but they all died off.

These vines were very resilient. Even after they seemed to be completely killed off by frost, but we still had warmer days after, they started to grew new leaves and even started to try and bud!

At least we got one pumpkin out of it, with five plants. Last year, we had three plants, and got five pumpkins.

We left it on the counter for a while, where it continued to ripen, and the pattern left by the hammock supporting its weight disappeared.

For bush beans, I planted Royal Burgundy. The first year we grew these, they were fantastic, and we’ve been trying to grow them again since.

These went in along with the Spoon tomatoes.

We got three. One of them got eaten by a deer. It recovered, though.

Despite this, those three little plants actually did start producing! We got a remarkable amount of beans from then, considering how spindly they were!

That did leave me with a lot of open space, and I was out of bean seeds, so I tried planting Swiss Chard.

All I can say about those is, they germinated. Quite a few of them, actually. None of which grew beyond their seed leaves.

*sigh*

I hadn’t planned on it, but I also planted some yellow Custard beans. These were from old seeds that I had, and they went in between rows of corn and between tomatoes.

The bush beans were included in these beds partly for their nitrogen fixing qualities. Corn is a heavy nitrogen feeder.

I planted Orchard Baby corn, which is a short season variety. I got three rows of corn with two rows of beans in between them. The tomatoes got a few beans planted down the middle of the bed, plus one went into a gap between tomato varieties.

I had extra corn seeds, so those got planted around the Arikara squash, nearby.

The corn took a very long time to germinate. For a while, I thought they were going to make it.

In the main bed with the beans, that is.

Most of the beans didn’t germinate at all. Only two or three made it. I wasn’t surprised by that, as these seeds were a few years old, so I replanted them. Eventually, pretty much all of the beans did germinate, as did the corn in that bed.

The corn with the Arikara squash, however, did much better! They germinated faster, grew faster and produced cobs faster.

Not very big cobs, but there was something!

The main corn bed, however, took even longer for the tassels and cobs to form. Then, when we did…

We got corn smut on several plants!

As for the yellow Custard beans, they did eventually start to bloom and we even had beans to harvest, but the plants never grew even close to their full size or production. The ones planted among the tomatoes had a 100% germination rate, though one got dug up by a cat later on. They, too, struggled to grow, bloom and produce. We did, however, get yellow beans to harvest, later in the season.

Summer Squash and Potatoes

With the winter sown summer squash bed a complete fail, plus the small section of winter sown root vegetable mix by the garlic rolled on by cats, we had some open space to work with.

The winter sown summer squash bed became our potato bed.

While cleaned up the bed and digging a trench for the potatoes, I did find a couple of squash seeds but, overall, they seemed to have completely disappeared.

The potatoes we’d bought earlier and started chitting in the basement all failed. They started to grow shoots while in the basement, but I think it was too cold in there for them to do well. Once inside the portable greenhouse, however, they didn’t go any better – and then they got knocked over when the wind almost blew away the greenhouse, knocked over by cats and basically cooked in the heat of the greenhouse.

I got more seed potatoes. Those were chitted in the greenhouse, and did not get cooked.

With the cats seeing all freshly turned soil as an invitation, we made sure to put netting over the potatoes, right from the start. Over time, they got mulched, then mulched again.

On the one hand, they did seem to do well. They grew and got bushy and…

Then they started to die back.

Without ever blooming.

I don’t think I even found a flower bud on them.

I finally dug a few up to see, and yes, there were potatoes. In fact, we were able to slowly harvest potatoes as needed, for quite some time.

With this bed, it seems that drought, heat and smoke were not the only problems.

The bed was also filled with roots from the nearby elm trees.

My nemesi.

Still, we did end up with a decent number of potatoes to enjoy.

The summer squash – Black Zucchini and White Scallop, went in near the garlic.

They, too, got a protective covering right away.

Summer squash usually don’t take long to germinate, but these took so long, I was actually surprised when some seedlings showed up.

I had planted several seeds in each spot and, when they got bigger, I thinned by transplanting.

The summer squash, however, also stagnated for so very long. They did eventually get bigger and we actually got a few zucchini.

I had to hand pollinate them, as the male and female flowers bloomed out of sink.

Only one white scallop squash survived, and that was set back even more than the zucchini. In the end, we got only one scallop squash to harvest.

It was very disappointing, but at least we got something, before the frosts killed them.

Peas and Carrots

The peas were among the first things we planted, and we had two varieties. Sugar Snap peas and Super Sugar Snap peas. We also had two varieties of carrots. The Uzbek Golden carrots were also in our winter sown mixes, plus we tried Atomic Red carrots this year.

The peas were already germinating when the carrots were planted. I’d already set boards out, which protected the carrots until they germinated, and then were used to keep the soil from eroding while watering, as this bed has no walls.

The peas were probably the best we’ve ever grown, even though they did not reach their full potential with the heat, drought and smoke.

There weren’t a lot of pods to harvest, but I could at least snack on them while doing my morning rounds – until the deer got at them.

*sigh*

The carrots were both successful and not successful. There was good germination, and we eventually did a fair bit of thinning by harvesting. Few got very big, though. At the end of the season, when it was time to harvest everything and prep the bed for next year, there were quite a lot of carrots.

Little carrots.

But will, we had something! In fact, once we concluded that we like the Super Sugar Snap peas more than the Sugar Snap peas, I was able to leave pods on select plants specifically for seed saving.

Flowers

I already covered this quite a bit in my last post, but we did direct sow flowers this year. The winter sown bed got destroyed, so we started over.

In the second photo of the above photo, you can see that cats were not the only problem we had, trying to protect the winter sown flowers. The wind completely destroyed the cover we put over them.

I found more Dwarf Jewel nasturtiums to try again. I also found some mixed Cosmos seeds, and decided to plant the memorial Crego Mixed Colors aster seeds I had.

My mother used to grow Cosmos, so I knew they could grew here. We also have wild asters growing, but not domestic ones, so I wasn’t sure on those. Nasturtiums are completely new.

The bed got protective netting as soon as it was planted.

They took so very long to germinate. The asters, longest of all.

The nasturtiums bloomed and we were able to collect seeds, but they were much smaller than they should have been. The Cosmos eventually got big and bushy, but by the time the started to bloom, it was late in the season and they were killed off by frost long before they could go to seed.

The asters were what I wanted to go to see the most, as they are in memory of an old friend. Thankfully, the Cosmos protected them from frost, and I did manage to collect seed.

Final thoughts.

This was a very rough year in the garden. It made me so very glad we had the winter sown beds! Much of what we planted, however, is stuff we will continue to plant. One really bad year is not going to stop that. Locations and varieties may change, but the staples will always be there.

Beans: as disappointing as this year was, beans are a staple crop and we will be growing them again; both pole and bush beans, to extend the season. By the time bush beans are no longer producing as much, the pole beans are ready for harvesting.

At least, that’s how it normally works.

I really want to grow red noodle beans again. They are supposed to do well in our climate zone. There’s only so much I can blame on the drought and heat, or even the smoke. Maybe not next year, though. I also want to grow beans for drying, but that will depend on space.

Corn: These were also disappointing this year, but I do plan to grow more next year. I’ve got way too many varieties of corn seeds, but I have more Yukon Chief, which is a super short season variety we’ve grown before, that I will be planting next year. I’m also going to be growing a sweet corn that matures later, so they can actually be planted close together and cross pollination should not be an issue. Corn is a heavy feeder and you don’t get a lot for the space they take up, but I just really like corn!

Sunflowers: I’ve got the saved seed from this year, and I’ll be trying those, next year. Each year we do that, the variety will get more acclimated to our area. At some point, we might even have enough to use the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers as a dye! At some point, I want to try the giant varieties again (like the Mongolian Giant we winter sowed, but everything in that bed failed), but probably not next year.

Chard: I’ve already got a new variety of those winter sown with our garlic. I might try others, both old and new varieties, with direct sowing early in the spring, but I’m quite blown away by how the ones I did direct sow never got past the seed leaf stage. Not sure what to make of that.

Pumpkin: we have a new variety of pumpkin seeds to try next year, which I will probably start indoors first. It’s the seeds we get locally that do amazing when direct sown, so I’ll likely get more of those next spring, too.

Summer Squash: Once again, we have new varieties to try. I might start them indoors again, too. Direct sowing just doesn’t seem to work well. I know my mother used to direct sow zucchini when she gardened here, but that was a long time ago, and the soil and growing conditions have changed quite a bit.

Peas: we already have some dwarf peas winter sown in the kitchen garden. I’ve got another new variety waiting to be planted in the spring, plus we have our saved Super Sugar Snap peas to plant next year. I’ve just got to figure out how to protect them from the deer!

Carrots: I’ve already got a rainbow mix of carrots, winter sown. Hopefully, they will do better, size wise, than this year’s did. I still have other varieties of carrot seeds, including saved Uzbek Golden carrot, which we quite like. I’ll probably direct sow some in the spring. It will, once again, depend on space available.

Potatoes: I’m still surprised by the potatoes that never bloomed. Of course, potatoes are a staple crop, so we’ll be planting them again. In digging them up to harvest them, and to clean up the bed in the fall, I found a LOT of tree roots had grown into the bed, which may have contributed to the problem.

We’ve got to do something about those trees!

For now, the amount of potatoes we grow is nowhere near enough to last us through a winter, but we’re still looking to find varieties that both grow well here, and that we like. In the future, as we reclaim lost garden spaces and continue to expand, the goal is to plant many more potatoes to store in the root cellar.

Flowers: Of course, I’ll be planting the saved memorial aster seeds, plus some dropped seed might come up on their own. We have new Cosmos varieties, Bachelor’s button, saved nasturtiums, and other flower seeds to plant. It’s more about deciding where to plant them, as some were specifically chosen so that they can self seed and be treated as perennials. Over time, we plan on having areas filled with wild flowers all over, to both attract pollinators and deter deer.

Well, if you’ve managed to slog your way through all that, congratulations! And thank you for taking the time! If you have any thoughts or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment.

While I tried to include quite a few images with this, since I’m posting images almost exclusively on Instagram (I’ve used up almost all the storage space that comes with my WP plan), it’s a bit messed up. So, if you want to get a better look at things, here are the garden tour videos I did in June and July.

I sounded so hopeful in June.

Not so much by the end of July!

Ah, well. It is what it is!

In my next post, I’ll be analyzing our perennial and food forest stuff, and then one last post in the series with an overall analysis, and what we’re planning on for next year.

We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, that’s for sure!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden analysis: transplants

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In my last post, I talked about the winter sowing we did. A definite head start, with a short growing season like ours. Still, things needed to be started indoors, too.

We “lost” a lot of beds that would have been available for transplanting to winter sowing, which limited how much we could start indoors. We also had some re-arrangements in the house that meant I could no longer use the living room, and the aquarium greenhouses, to start seeds indoors.

I had to use our basement.

Not the old basement, which is actually pretty warm. The “new” basement, which has more space, but is pretty darn chilly!

Here are a series of videos I made of our seed starting sessions, beginning with the things that needed the most time.

For winter squash, we went with four types. Baked Potato, Mashed Potato, Sunshine and Arikara – all new varieties for us. The Arikara squash are a rare variety, so I particularly wanted to grow them for seed.

Next on the list where peppers.

This year, we went with a Sweetie Snack Mix with orange, red and yellow mini bell peppers for my family to snack on. We’re still in the “let’s find a variety we really like” stage, and trying new things.

Pre-germinating seeds has been another game changer for us. We’ve had years were we’ve planted and replanted things several times before getting germination. This way, only seeds that have already germinated get planted, for a much higher success rate.

This year, we also got a portable greenhouse, so we could start taking the transplants outdoors earlier – mostly because of space issues – and to make it easier to harden them off when the time came.

In the following video, it first shows the kitchen garden winter sown bed getting its own little greenhouse cover, and then the assembled portable greenhouse.

By the end of it, you could already see we were having issues, as the cover started to tear, even as we were putting it on!

The next seeds to pre-germinate were tomatoes.

This year, after going over our seeds with my daughters, we went with four varieties. The Black Beauty and Chocolate Cherry, we’ve grown successfully before, and the family enjoys them. New was the Sub Arctic Plenty. These are a super short season variety that we could technically start outdoors, since they are supposed to mature in less than two months, but they got started indoors, too. Last of all were the Spoon tomatoes. Those were mostly for me, as they’re the only tomato I can eat fresh without gagging (I’ve since learned this is a reaction to one of the chemicals in tomatoes, much like with people who find cilantro tastes likes soap). The seeds have gotten very expensive, so I want to grow these specifically for seed saving, too.

Something I somehow did not get pictures of were the melons I started. I started pre-germinating those at the same time I potted up the pre-germinated tomato seeds.

I used up some older seeds and started Kaho and Cream of Saskatchewan melon. I also started older Sarah’s Choice melon and new Green Flesh Honeydew seeds. Last of all, I started some older Zucca melon seeds as well.

The Zucca melon and the Kaho watermelons didn’t make it. None germinated. The others did, though, and I was able to pot them up.

Starting seeds indoors in the cold and dark basement was a real challenge. A challenge made more difficult, as one of my aquarium lights, which are grow lights, since they were for aquarium plants, too, needed replacement bulbs. They need a size that I simply could not find locally, so I had to order them online. I was able to get them from Veseys, which also had them at a very reasonable price.

Still, with heat mats, lights and even a heater, we were able to manage it.

It took a while for some of them, but the pre-germinated winter squash seeds all made it. In fact, most of the seeds did really well. It took quite a long time for the eggplant and peppers to germinate – those were direct sown rather than pre-germinated. The colder temperatures did seem to set them back a fair bit.

I was more than happy to be able to get them out of the basement and into the portable greenhouse as soon as possible!

We were still having cold nights, though. I had a thermometer in there for a while and, in the morning, it was just as cold in the greenhouse as outside. To try and combat this, I dug out an old, black garbage can – one of many we’ve been finding around the property! – and set it up to be a heat sink – covered to make sure no critters fell in! The idea being that water inside the black container would absorb heat during the day, then slowly release it during the night.

I can’t really say it worked that well. Partly because it turned out to have a leak and, after several days, it would need to be refilled.

During the day, it got insanely hot in the greenhouse and, other than tying the door flap open, there’s no way to release the heat.

Yeah, the heat was off the scale on the thermometer in there! It got so hot that, on many days, I had to move the trays and bins of transplants outside and into the shade, so they wouldn’t cook.

Like the chitted potatoes, but that will be covered in another analysis post.

In the picture with the transplants, you can see that I did buy some this year. I decided not to start any herbs indoors – I just didn’t have the space for them, and my results have been hit and miss over the years. In the picture, I got on each of lemon thyme, English thyme, oregano, Greek oregano, lemon balm and basil. Later on, I also picked up two transplants of sage.

Then there was the wind.

Even with the structure being secured at each corner, we had one wind storm that was bad enough to knock it half over!

The old garden hose was draped over the top of the greenhouse to reduce flapping in the wind, which was an issue well before this particular wind storm knocked it over. I later set the bags of manure strategically on shelves to add more weight and keep it from being blown over again.

Thankfully, most of the transplants survived.

Eventually, they were being taken outside of the greenhouse to harden off, not just to keep them from being cooked. They recovered very well.

The one thing that wasn’t doing well was the luffa. Of the four seeds, three pre-germinated but only two survived to be transplanted into pots to live in the greenhouse for the summer.

As you can see in the slide show above, one of those surviving luffa was super tiny.

The stove pellets are something I like to add as a gentle mulch. When wet, the pellets expand into sawdust and are less likely to squish or smother young seedlings. They also hold moisture quite well. I find they’re also good to mulch in hard to reach areas. I can reach under leaves or between plants and drop a handful of pellets where it would be more difficult to use grass clippings, leaves or straw.

In the end, I found myself with what were probably the best transplants yet. It was looking to be a great start for transplants this year! Aside from the sad luffa, they were all strong and healthy plants, by the time they were ready to go into the garden.

Once the ground was warm enough.

Which took a long time, this year.

Winter Squash

This first slideshow is of three types of winter squash that were planted in one bed. I set protective collars around them to help with the still-coldish nights, but also to protect them from rolling cats, slugs and other critters.

I later set up a soaker hose but, in the end, I found it easier to use the protective collars to water them. Protective collars went around all the transplants except the peppers and eggplant.

With the drought conditions we had this year, I found that the collars really helped. I could water into a collar until it was full, then move on to the next one. By the time I finished watering from one end of the bed to the other, the first collars were drained of their water, and I would do it again. Most of the summer, I would water a bed in this way three times, twice a day. By the third pass, the water would finally be draining slightly slower. It was more efficient to water this way, than to water empty, mulch covered soil around the plants.

The Arikara squash had three survivors, and they went into their own little bed in the East yard.

Last year, in this bed, I had finally successfully grown Crespo squash. The vines got so huge, they even spread into the cherry tree suckers nearby and started climbing them! The bed got amended as much as I could, and I had confident expectations that another variety of squash would do well here again.

The three squash were transplanted with a cover of mosquito netting to keep the cats out. The netting was a bit too small, though, and didn’t cover it very well. Still, it was enough to protect the bed until things were big enough. I didn’t want it covered for too long, so the squash could be pollinated by insects. Later on, I would direct sow corn among them.

Melons and Spoon Tomatoes

Last year, we had brought the logs to frame a low raised bed, but didn’t get a chance to finish it. I was able to do that this spring, and that’s the bed that got the melons and Spoon tomatoes.

First, the melons.

I found some metal posts at the dollar store and first used those to create a trellis for the melons. In past years, they turned out to be far to heavy for the plastic netting I’d used, so I figured something stronger was in order!

In planting the Spoon tomatoes, I put a pair of bamboo stakes in each protective collar. Later, I added cross pieces to make a trellis to secure the Spoon tomatoes to, as I knew they could get quite tall and leggy.

I also direct sowed beans beside the tomatoes, and will talk about those in another post.

More Tomatoes

The other three varieties of tomatoes all went into one of the East yard garden beds.

In the first picture, you can see just how much growth there was with the winter sown bed in the background. That greenery is almost all lettuce!

You can also see that the Chinese elm seeds have started to drop.

The attempt at solarizing didn’t work. It did warm up the soil, though, and the weeds were much easier to pull at that size.

In the end, I had 9 Sub Acrtic Plenty, 5 chocolate cherry and 4 Black Beauty tomatoes to transplant.

I added a large, plastic coated metal plant stake into each protective collar, then wove in bamboo stakes to great a strong trellis. I knew the chocolate cherry could get quite tall. When we grew Black Beauty before, they didn’t get as tall, but were so heavy with tomatoes, I had to add more structural support to their trellis, because they were pulling it over! I wanted to make sure these had a good, strong frame to hold their weight.

Sweetie Snack Mix peppers and Turkish Orange eggplant

Next, the peppers and eggplant went into the wattle weave bed in the old kitchen garden.

The Sweetie Snack Mix peppers all fit into the short side of the L shaped bed. The Turkish Orange eggplant were planted around the tiny fruited strawberry plants that were already starting to bloom!

In cleaning one of the beds, I found some sort of flower. I decided to transplant it in this bed, too. Later, I added a second, different, flower of some type I found. Once they bloom, maybe next year, we’ll know what they are!

The peppers and eggplant all got wire tomato cages for support. Those came in handy, later, for other reasons!

The Herb Bed

Finally, there were the herbs.

This tiny bed had been prepped in the fall, but was pretty over grown already. You can see the walking onions outside the bed are doing really well already, too!

The cats also like to sit on top of the mesh, so before anything else, I added supports to it, then added a bamboo stake that was given to us, weaving it through the top. It was meant to keep the top from sagging under the weight of cats, but has turned out to be a fantastic handle.

This little bed is the perfect size for a few herbs. It even had room for a couple more.

Spur of the moment, I got some discounted sage and tucked them in as well.

So, everything went in and was looking good, though things were getting pretty late by the end of it. We had plenty of hot days in May, but the nights were too cold for the transplants, and the soil didn’t get much chance to warm up. I recall we even got a frost well past our old average last frost date. The last of our garden didn’t get in until the end of June.

It did not bode well for how the summer would go.

How things grew

Drought.

Heat waves.

Smoke.

A triple whammy that affected everything. I’m amazed we got anything at all.

Winter Squash

The winter squash was hit particularly hard, and not just by weather and smoke.

Those strong, healthy winter squash in the main garden area started blooming very quickly, even while still small. Just male flowers, but that’s not unusual.

This, however, was a first.

All the winter squash in that bed were hit with these tiny insects. Thrips, I was told they are. They were really bad. In the end, they were dealt with using a spray bottle with dish detergent in it, after washing most of them off with a hose.

None of the winter squash did well. After the first flowers appeared, they just stagnated. It was ages before they started blooming again. Plants that should have gotten big enough to completely fill and cover their beds barely covered their protective collars.

It took even more time before any female flowers showed up, and I made sure to hand pollinate as many as I could find. Usually, I had to open up a spent male flower to be able to do it, though sometimes, not even that was to be had.

By then, it was so late in the season, we started having to worry about cold nights. Not quite frost, yet, but cold enough to set them back. I really wanted to give what few squash had finally started to develop, the best chance they could. Thankfully, we did have a long and mild fall, but not mild enough for the squash.

I found a way to cover the bed.

We added jugs full of water to act as heat since, too.

It seemed to work.

It wasn’t much, but what we had were surviving.

We got times when the days would be cold enough that I didn’t uncover them at all during the day.

After a pretty severe frost, I finally decided to open it up and see what survived.

None of the Sunshine squash made it, but we did have some Baked Potato and Mashed Potato squash to harvest, including one decently large Baked Potato squash. That one was pretty close to the size they are supposed to be. We had something to harvest to try out, at least.

Then there was the Arikara squash.

They, too, stalled and stagnated. The corn that was planted with them, however, did better than the corn in the larger bed, so we could rule out soil issues. The above photo was taken after I’d salvaged the trellis from the melons to make a fence to keep critters from eating the corn before we could.

As with the other winter squash, the Arikara squash seemed to do well, then stalled, then started to grow again, then stalled.

When it got late enough to harvest the corn and pull the stalks, they had started to grow again, so I left the fencing.

In the above picture, you can see frost damage on the leaves – and flowers! There were even female flowers developing!

It was too late by then, but they continued to surprise me by starting to show new leaves and buds even after the entire plants looked like they had been killed off by frost.

Melons and Spoon tomatoes

Then there were the melons and Spoon tomatoes.

I took these pictures of progress on covering the paths with wood chips, but you can see the melon and Spoon tomato bed in both images.

The melons just… didn’t. Some tried to bloom, but the vines seemed to die back a bit, possibly from transplant shock, and then that was it. They never got better, even if a few did try to bloom.

The melons were a total loss.

The Spoon tomatoes, however, were a surprise.

The first surprise is that they stayed short and bushy. Every time I’ve grown them in the past, they got quite tall for such a small plant, and needed support. That’s why I made the bamboo stake trellis for them that I did. The absolutely stagnated, like everything else.

And yet, they were incredibly productive! I couldn’t believe how many tiny tomatoes we got off of these! Granted, they are so small that it takes about 50 or more to equal one small slicer tomato, but it was enough.

Yes, I did collect some just for seeds.

We also lost a lot of tiny tomatoes into the bed while picking them. When the frosts were coming, my daughters pulled them all, then all three of us sat together, picking off only the reddest tomatoes to keep, and the rest went onto the compost heap. Of the next couple of weeks, even with the frosts, I saw all those tiny green tomatoes turning red!

Not only will we probably have self seeded Spoon tomatoes in that bed, but in the compost pile, too!

More tomatoes

Then there were the other tomatoes.

*sigh*

One of the things I had to do was put netting around the bed.

The cats kept going in and trying to use is as a litter box.

I also interplanted them with beans as nitrogen fixers and a living mulch. Plus, some self seeded carrots showed up.

As with so much else in the garden, they did not do well. Everything stagnated, and nothing grew to their full potential.

The Black Beauty tomatoes were already something that takes a long time to ripen, but when we grew them before, they got large and bushy and were loaded with tomatoes. This time, we had hardly any show up.

The Chocolate Cherry did better, but still nothing close to when we grew them before.

The Sub Arctic Plenty barely grew at all. They did produce a few tomatoes, though.

Very few. These are a bush type, but they should have gotten much bigger and bushier, and produce more.

Having said that, we did eventually get Chocolate Cherry and Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes to harvest. Just a bit, here and there.

In the end, we had to harvest the last of everything before a frost hit, bringing them in to ripen indoors.

In the above first picture, there’s the last of the ripe Spoon tomatoes, along with the unripe tomatoes, that we brought in for our last real harvest. This included dry radish seed pods and Super Sugar Snap peas for seed saving.

Sweetie Snack Mix peppers and Turkish Orange eggplant

Then there were the peppers.

The plants actually did pretty well, though they didn’t get as large and bushy as they should have. One thing I did that I believe helped was prune the ornamental crab apple tree of branches overhanging that bed – discovering a whole bunch of hidden dead branches in the process. It took a very long time, but they did start producing, and we even harvested a couple of mostly ripe peppers off the plants.

When the cold nights and frosts threatened, the wire tomato cages allowed us to cover them with old bed sheets we repurposed for the garden.

The pepper plants handled the cold surprisingly well, though. As with the tomatoes, most of these got harvested while still green, and brought in to ripen indoors before the hard frosts hit.

The Turkish Orange eggplant also stagnated and took a long time to start producing fruit, so it was very late in the season before we started seeing orange among the green.

Some did fully ripen on the plants, though!

It was so late in the season, I was collecting carrot seeds, too!

As with the peppers, the last of them were harvested green and brought in to ripen indoors. The plants themselves were not at all cold hardy. Yet, they surprised me. Even after I cut their stems at soil level to more easily harvest the unripe eggplant, I later found that they were sending up new growth!

Over time, as they ripened, we were able to use the peppers and even had enough to dehydrate a small bag’s worth.

As for the eggplant, we tried them out and they were okay tasting. Not particularly tasty, compared to other varieties, but that could have been because of the difficult growing year. One of my daughters, however, found that after eating them, with the skins on, her lips went numb. She’s never had this reaction to eggplant before. There’s something in this variety that she’s allergic to!

The Herbs

This was absolutely a success!

In the first picture, you can see the herb bed in the background, still green and producing, after several frosts, while the other beds are being winter sown. Everything except the basil, which got killed off with the first light frost. It was fantastic being able to pop into the garden and harvest a few herbs, any time we needed.

We were still harvesting as needed until it finally was time to mulch the bed for the winter. Even then, I mulched around the plants first, and we kept using them, before fully mulching them before the snow hit. The thyme, oregano, lemon balm and sage are all herbs that, in milder climates, are perennials. With proper mulching, these might actually survive the winter.

For a time, it did seem that they were stagnating, too, but there was a different solution for that. They weren’t getting enough light. We’d pruned the ornamental crab apple tree at that corner before, but much of it was grown back. After cutting way a major branch, the herbs, and even the winter sown kitchen greens bed, suddenly were getting so much more light!

I’m glad I bought the transplants, though, rather than trying to start them myself indoors. I don’t think I would have had as much success, otherwise.

Now we have one last transplant to talk about.

The luffa.

*sigh*

As with everything else, they stagnated. One grew a fair bit more – enough to actually climb up the greenhouse structure, and even bloom.

The other one also, eventually, started to grow, but these were both failures. They’ve grown better for us, out in the open garden beds, than in the greenhouse!

Final Thoughts

Starting seeds in the basement: we have no choice on this one. In fact, we are currently working on making space and figuring out how to bring the aquarium greenhouses into the basement, so we have have better control over temperature and light. The problem is, the big tank and the shelf it’s on are quite large, and we aren’t sure how we can get it around the bottom of the stairs without breaking anything! Also, one of my heat mats died, so we’ll need to get another.

Pre-germination: no change there. We will continue to pre-germinate as many seeds as possible

The portable greenhouse: I really loved having this, but we have a major issue. By the end of the season, the winds basically tore it apart. Plus, we’ve had a couple of cats jump up onto the roof, adding more holes. The cover is completely toast. The frame it still good, though, so we will probably look into getting better quality greenhouse cover material and basically make a new cover for it. Currently, it’s covered with a large heavy duty tarp and being used as another winter shelter for the cats. With no door flap, because that is gone.

Winter Squash: we will always be growing winter squash of some kind. This year’s failure had to do with things out of our control. I’d like to try this year’s varieties again, but another time. We’ve got other varieties to try in 2026 already. I’m still looking to grow the rare Arikara squash for their seeds, too.

Melons: same as with the squash. Growing conditions just killed them off this year. We have new melon seeds and new varieties, so we will be growing melons again.

Tomatoes: My daughters have suggested not to grow Spoon tomatoes again. Too many tiny tomatoes to pick. 😁 We have new varieties to try, including another tiny variety 😄, so next year we will likely have another three or four varieties again. Just not a lot of each.

Peppers: my daughters suggested that we just grow the Sweet Chocolate peppers we grew a couple of years ago, as they were enjoyed. I did pick up a different variety noted for having thick walls, so we might be doing two varieties of pepper next year.

Eggplant: with a daughter that has a reaction when eating the Turkish Orange eggplant, we won’t be growing those again. I did, however, get a white variety to try next year.

Herbs: total win, here. We plant to have many more herbs in the old kitchen garden, and we do have seeds to start indoors, but buying transplants is always a good option, too. Plus, with this particular little bed, we might even have our first perennial herbs – if the heavy mulch helps them survive the winter!

Luffa: Yes, I will be trying luffa again! I am determined to grow sponges. We’ve come so close in the past!

What we could really use is a polytunnel or a more permanent greenhouse.

All in good time!

As for this year’s transplants, they started out strong once they got out of the basement. It just was such a difficult year. We had modest successes, at least, but nothing that would feed us for any length of time! As my SIL once said, of their own garden: if we relied on our garden to feed us, we’d starve! One of our goals, however, is to grow and store enough produce for 4 adults from harvest to harvest. We can’t afford years like this too many times!

We were not the only ones that has such a bad gardening year, of course. Lots of people on my gardening groups really struggled.

Hopefully, next year will be better.

We will, however, be learning a lot from this year, to help make that happen!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden analysis: winter sown beds

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Our 2025 garden started in 2024, and not just by planting garlic in the fall. Inspired by a video from Gardening in Canada, I decided to give winter sowing a try. Now winter sowing in milk jugs, etc, but actually direct sowing into garden beds in the fall.

You can see where I did these in my October 2024 garden tour video.

This was a pretty risky experiment. After going through my seeds, I decided to make mixes of seeds and broadcast them. This gave me a chance to use up old seed, but it also cleaned out all the seeds I had in some categories, both old and new.

The garlic I planted was from saved cloves. Besides that, these are the seed mixes I made and direct sowed before the ground froze.

Seed combo 1
Root vegetables		Seed combo 2
Summer squash 		Seed combo 3
Kitchen garden 		Seed combo 4
Tall and climbing		Flower combos
Carrots: Uzbek Golden and Napoli
Beets: Bresko, Merlin, Cylindra and Albino
Turnip: Purple Prince
Radishes: French Breakfast, Champion, Cherry Belle and Zlata
Onions: saved seed (mix of red and yellow bulb unions)
Note: left over seeds from this mix were planted in a final bed with saved Jebousek lettuce seeds added in		Sunburst pattypan
White Scallop pattypan
Magda
Green zucchini: Endeavor
Yellow zucchini: Goldy














Swiss Chard: Bright Lights and Fordhook Giant
Spinach: Space, Lakeside, Bloomsdale and Hybrid Olympia
Kohlrabi: Early White Vienna and Early Purple Vienna
Bok Choi: Hedou Tiny (saved seed)
Shallots: saved seed
Onions: saved seed





Sunflowers: Mongolian Giant and Hopi Black Dye
Peas: Dalvay shelling peas (not saved seed) and King Tut purple peas (saved seed)
Bush beans: Royal Burgundy
Corn: Montana Morado (saved seed)
Onions: saved seed






Main garden area:
Nasturtium: Dwarf Jewel Mix
Butterfly flower: Orange Shades (milkweed)
Forget Me Not

Maple grove:
Western Wildflower Mix











In making these mixes, I had some Uzebek Golden carrot seeds left, 1 out of 2 packs of Hopi Black Dye sunflower, onion and Dalvay pea seeds left. All the rest, I used all the seeds I had. I really cleaned out my inventory in the process!

This is the video I made featuring the winter sown beds this past spring.

Let’s start with the complete failures, first. 😂

Summer Squash mix.

I was really looking forward to these. Unfortunately, not a single one germinated.

No, I can’t blame the old seeds.

I blame the cats. Mostly.

After the mulch was removed, the cats decided that this bed was a great place to roll around in. If anything survived the winter, I never had a chance to see them before they were crushed. In the end, my daughter and I completely redid the bed, digging a trench and planting potatoes. Which did much better, sort of, but I’ll cover those in my direct sowing post.

In the garlic bed, I was left with some space at one end of the bed, so I broadcast a bit of the root vegetable mix there. That, also, got completely rolled on by the cats – and I even saw things starting to sprout there! I did direct sow summer squash in that space later on, which I will also cover in the direct sowing post.

The winter sown summer squash, though, were a complete loss.

Tall and Climbing (mostly) mix

This mix went into a newly redone bed in the south yard, at the chain link fence. The fence would have provided a trellis for some things. The bush beans were there as nitrogen fixers.

I planned ahead on this. Knowing that this bed could be completely suffocated by seeds from the nearby Chinese Elm, I got mesh tunnel kits to protect this bed. These were dollar store purchases, and it took four of them to cover the entire bed from end to end.

As far as protecting from the seeds, they worked great.

They couldn’t handle kittens, though. Kittens that decided the mesh was great to play on, bending the wires under their weight, and to get under. They would use the bed as a litter box, but also just run around back and forth, playing. Or in a panic when they couldn’t find a way out again. The few things that started to germinate were completely crushed. Even the seed onions I found and transplanted along the edges were pretty much destroyed.

It was incredibly frustrating, and the bed was a total loss.

Self seeded lettuce; the only thing that survived in this bed!

The netting survived, but many of the wire supports were so badly bent out of shape, it wasn’t worth trying to straighten them out again.

The Flower combos.

There were two areas I winter sowed flower seeds. One was a purchased mix of wildflowers native to Western Canada. These are the sort of thing I would like to have growing among the trees, so it went into an area on the edge of the maple grove.

Unfortunately, yes, the cats caused damage there, too. The prepared soil was softer there, so they’d use it as a litter. The area was large enough, though, that if anything survived, there was still a chance.

I honestly don’t know if any survived. Nothing came up, but part of the issue in that area was the drought conditions and the fact that I simply didn’t water it regularly in the spring. It’s entirely possible that there are still surviving seeds in there that might germinate later on. I’d sown mixes of seeds in two other areas in the maple grove that also didn’t take, but since then, things have come up that I haven’t seen there before, so it’s entirely possible this will happen again.

For 2025, though, nothing seemed to have come up at all.

The other flower seeds went into a small bed at the end of the high raised bed, where I’d grown pumpkins last year. This one, I was able to water more regularly.

Yup. You guessed it.

Cats destroyed it. By the time I was able to cover it, it was too late. Nothing survived.

Starting over with flowers: much better!

I did replant that bed with more nasturtiums, Cosmos and some memorial asters, keeping them covered until they were too big to fit under the cover, and large enough that I didn’t think the cats would go into them anymore.

The nasturtiums did pretty well, though they were much smaller than they should have been. They bloomed and we were able to collect seeds from them. They did pretty good, but did not thrive to their full potential.

The Cosmos got really tall and looked great, but they were among the things that stagnated. It took so long before they bloomed that, even with a mild fall, they never finished blooming, and there were no seeds to collect.

The memorial asters were also much smaller than they should have been, and took a very long time to bloom. They were, however, also protected by the Cosmos, when the temperatures started to drop and frost hit. The Cosmos protected them enough that they were able to go to seed.

Some of the seed, I allowed to drop to self seed for next year, but I collected others to direct sow in other areas next year.

Now let’s look at what did work – and these really made up for the losses!

Kitchen Garden mix

This mix went into one bed in the old kitchen garden. As things started to warm up, I dragged over a cover to put over it. This allowed me to first cover it with plastic, to create a mini greenhouse, which was later replaced with mosquito netting. This cover is strong enough to withstand the weight of cats!

The first things to show up in this bed was the spinach.

Lots of spinach.

More than we could keep up with, spinach!

Some varieties bolted rather quickly, though.

What got me really excited, though, was the kohlrabi. I’ve been trying to grow it for years and, with the old seeds I had, I honestly wasn’t expecting much. For the first time, we actually had kohlrabi to harvest! That was what really won me over to winter sowing. The only other time I came close to succeeding with kohlrabi, they suddenly got completely destroyed by flea beetles.

Another reason for the mosquito netting!

Different things showed up as the season progressed and space opened up. The kohlrabi did overshadow other things, like the Swiss Chard, though we were still able to harvest some from under the kohlrabi leaves, too.

What I didn’t see until they bolted was the Hedou Tiny bok choi (which I kept misspelling as hinou instead of hedou). They were already from saved seed, and only a couple of plants seemed to survive the shade of the kohlrabi, so I left them to go to seed.

The most resilient in this bed were the chard. We harvested those as cut and come again plants, and they just kept going and going! Even when I finally had to clean the bed up and prepare it for new winter sowing, we still had harvestable leaves.

The “fail” of the bed were the onion seeds. Actually, the bulb onions and shallots seeds, both from our own saved seed, were a fail in all the beds. Those really need to be started indoors in January or February. Heck, I could be starting them now, and it’s still the first week of December as I write this. We just don’t have a long enough season for them to be direct down. I had hoped, however, that they would start to grow enough that we could harvest the greens. The kitchen garden bed was the only one that actually had onions start to grow. In fact, when it was time to redo the bed, I found so many tiny onions and possibly shallots that I kept the larger ones and replanted them with the winter sowing!

I also found a surprise. Two full head of garlic somehow got missed when the bed was being reworked. They were sprouting, so I ended up breaking the cloves apart and transplanting them into the wattle weave bed in the kitchen garden, as part of my winter sowing for next year.

I was really impressed with how this bed did, and the experiment helped me make decisions for next year.

Root Vegetable mix

This mix ended up being spread out over three areas. The high raised bed in the main garden area, and a small space at the end of the garlic bed, got the same mix. When it came time to use the last of the mix, in one of the low raised beds in the west yard, I added Jebousek lettuce seeds I’d saved from last year.

The three areas turned out quite different.

The tiny area with the garlic, as mentioned earlier, was destroyed by cats rolling in the soil.

The high raised bed had mostly beets, radishes and carrots show up, plus some turnip. Including one giant turnip I allowed to go to seed, except a deer ate it. So that got harvested.

I allowed most of the radishes to go to seed as well, as I was growing them mostly for their pods. Eventually, the deer started going for those, too!

They really liked the beet greens.

*sigh*

Still, we were able to harvest beets and carrots – including the orange Napoli carrots from old pelleted seeds! – as needed. What we really got a lot of, though, was radish pods. We tried those out in a quick pickle.

Which we all enjoyed. I don’t like radishes in general, but found myself snacking on fresh pods pretty regularly. It turns out that winter sown radish pods are milder than spring sown ones.

The third bed also did really well.

I did end up putting plastic over this bed as well. Mostly, though, I found I had to try and keep cats from getting under it.

The only “problem” we had with this bed is the Jebousek lettuce. Which we quite enjoy eating. There was just so MUCH of it! I couldn’t believe it! They actually got to be a weed. We simply couldn’t keep up with eating it all and I ended up pulling a lot of it and leaving it as a mulch. Only to discover they would re-root themselves and start growing again!

The radish pods did really well, though. Even after the deer got at them, they recovered and started blooming again.

In the end, the few beets that germinated got choked out. No onions germinated, that I could see. I didn’t think the carrots were showing up, other than the odd one, but when I started cleaning up the bed at the end of the season, I kept finding carrot fronds, so I left them to grow until it was time to clean up and prepare the bed for the next winter sowing.

This is what I ended up finding.

That was way more than I expected!

So that’s how the winter sown seeds went. There’s still one more bed to cover.

Garlic

As always, our garlic was planted in the fall. When I took the mulch off in the spring, they were already up and growing. I was really happy with how they did!

Unfortunately, yard cats were still an issue, and I ended up having to cover the bed (and the potato bed next to it) with netting until the garlic started to get too tall. By then, they were not at risk from the cats anymore.

I’m really happy with how the garlic did – and with being able to harvest scapes again.

We ended up dehydrating some of the scapes, then grinding them to a powder. It turned out to be a fantastic way to be able to include garlic in our cooking, and I definitely want to keep doing that.

This was less garlic than we tend to plant, but we still got a good harvest of what are probably the biggest garlic bulbs we’ve ever grown.

The biggest ones were saved and set aside to be planted this fall.

Conclusion

In the end, winter sowing like this has turned out to be a real game changer for us, and I fully intend to keep doing this from now on.

We did mixes this time, which I will not repeat. Instead, I’ve chosen seeds, from my new inventory, to plant in a more orderly fashion. Which is already done.

So, for next year, along with the garlic and seed onions, I have already planted spinach, chard, kohlrabi, purple savoy cabbage (first time trying to grow cabbage), beets, Hedou tiny bok choi, peas, carrots and dwarf peas. You can see where those went in our October garden tour video.

The other thing we seriously need to address is how to keep things out of the garden beds. Elm seeds, cats, deer, flea beetles, snails (we didn’t have a snail problem this year, thankfully – probably because we had so many frogs this year!!), etc.

With that in mind, I’ll be completely reworking the bed along the chain link fence, making it slightly taller and with supports to hold any sort of cover we want to add. Early on, I’d like to be able to put plastic over it to create a mini greenhouse environment. Later, I want to put netting over it to keep the seeds and cats out. Maybe frost covers later in the season. So the supports need to be something I can easily change things up on, too.

I’m just really excited about how well the winter sowing worked. Obviously, not everything can be winter sown, but as we reclaim more garden space and build more beds, I expect that winter sowing will make up a significant portion of our garden, year after year.

The Re-Farmer

Processing saved seed, and more Christmas music

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My daughter has been working hard at organizing the cat free zone, aka: the living room, as it will be pretty much the only part of the house we’ll be doing any decorating and celebrating in. It’s where I’ve had saved seed set out to dry before processing them, and today I took them all down to my basement work area (another cat free zone) to process.

Most of the processing involved gently rubbing the pods and tufts between my hands to separate the seeds out, then very carefully blowing away the chaff. Some of the plant matter was heavier than the seeds, but I don’t mind a bit of chaff in there. The blue plastic bottoms from distilled water jugs I cut to use as protective collars in the garden came in handy. The divided bottoms and curled sides did a good job of holding the seeds, so most of the chaff could be blown away.

In the first photo above, bottom left, are the memorial aster seeds I was able to collect. Top left corner are the Jebousek lettuce seeds. Top middle are Uzbek Golden carrot seeds, and the top right are mixed red and yellow bulb onion seeds.

The tray in the middle has the purple asparagus seed berries I’d collected. Those had to be done a bit differently. Some of the berries were not completely dry, yet, but could still be opened up for their seeds. I just had to tear them open with my fingers.

Some of the seed berries were obviously damaged one way or another, and the seeds inside didn’t look too good. After getting as many of the seeds out as I could, I ended up using tweezers to select out the best, healthiest looking seeds, which you can see in the second picture of the slide show above. Since they weren’t all completely dry, once I got cleaned everything else up, I set the seeds back on the parchment paper and have left them out to finish curing. The new part basement, where this is set up in, is pretty cold as well as dry, so that will be good for the seeds.

Later on, I should test germinate some of these to see if they are even viable. I know asparagus has male and female plants, and this patch has both. Looking it up, it seems they can both self pollinate or cross pollinate. It would be nice we could start some from seed. Especially since the purple asparagus we planted this past spring did not come up.

Speaking of which, it’s that time of year when I do my garden analysis on how things went this past year, and how that affects our plans for next year. I’ll be doing a series of posts about that over the next while.

Until then, here is another bit of Christmas music, to help get into the mood for the season! Something much more traditional than yesterday’s selection.

The Re-Farmer

Books and trees

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I took advantage of some Cyber Monday deals on Amazon and ordered a couple of books on my wish list, last night. Just now, I placed an order for some trees that will arrive in the spring. (None of the links below are affiliate links. Links will open in new tabs.)

First up, the books.

One is Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills. Fourth Edition. I actually have a 1981 Reader’s Digest edition, Back to Basics: How to Learn and Enjoy Our Traditional Skills. I don’t know that these are connected, as the one I’m ordering has an Abigail Gehring listed as the editor. No Reader’s Digest listed anywhere. Looking at the preview of the one I ordered, it does seem to be an updated version of what I have. Which is an excellent book.

The other is 40 Projects for Building Your Backyard Homestead: A Hands-on, Step-by-Step Sustainable-Living Guide This one has even been shipped already, even though I ordered it just last night.

Both of these are supposed to arrive before Christmas but Canada Post hasn’t exactly been reliable of late. I believe they are technically still on a rolling strike. We shall see. I look forward to going through both of them over the winter!

Next are the trees.

One is a bundle of five Bleu Basket Willow. I’ve been considering for some time, where the best place to plant them would be. Willow propagates easily, so the plan it to expand them. The source, Prairie Hardy Nursery, also has two other varieties of basket willow in different colours that I plan to get, when the budget allows. The plan is to coppice them so that they can be used for things like wattle weave fences and, yes, weaving baskets. Thinking long term, these will be planted beyond the outer yard, and will need to include protection to keep the renter’s cows from crushing them by accident, until they get bigger.

The other is a single bare root seedling, as part of our food forest; a Manchurian Walnut. While we have black walnut planted, they may or may not have a long enough growing season here for fully mature nuts to form. Normally, they wouldn’t, but the ones I got were from a nursery in our province, so they are probably acclimated already. The Manchurian Walnut is hardy to zone 2b. It’ll be 10-12 years before they start producing. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best time is now! They are also described as fast growing, so we should be able to enjoy the tree for its beauty before it starts producing. As with the black walnuts, these will be planted in the outer yard. They are self fertile, though it is recommended they be planted in pairs for better production. Which we might do, when the budget allows.

The nursery opened for the sales season in November, and the dormant seedlings will be shipped in the spring. I’ll get an email in April to work out the best shipping date based on our last frost date. If I am able to order more trees between now and then, they actually have a code to include to combine orders, so as not to increase the shipping fees, and everything gets shipped together. The shipping costs are relatively high, but they include insurance. Most places don’t.

It’s slow going, but little by little, we’re getting it things done!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: beets, bok choi, dwarf peas – and Judgement!

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I definitely want to start with the good news, before getting into the gardening stuff.

As I was putting things away in the sun room, I saw a cat in the cat cage jump out and meow a greeting. Nothing unusual about that, except that this cat had something around its neck that was flapping.

Which is when I realized, it was Judgement!

I haven’t seen Judgement in months!

We had put collars on the cats that got fixed, to make them faster to identify, but I also made sure they were reflective collars, so they would be less likely to get hit by a car or something. Most of the cats lost their collars long ago. Judgement had lost one or two already, but he still had a ratty yellow collar still on him.

I took it off and threw it away!

Now I’m hoping to see Syndol back, too! It’s not unusual for cats to disappear for the summer, then come back for the winters, but sometimes they don’t come back at all. So this was a nice surprise for the day.

My priority for today was to finish what I started in the old kitchen garden. The rectangular bed in particular needed a bit more work. I was able to pull more weeds and roots I could no longer see when I stopped last night. I also found the gap under one log was quite a bit larger than the hole the cats had made, so I found more sticks to push in front of it. The gap extended all the way to the corner, though, so I used the scrap board I’d been using when hammering stakes into the ground to lay across the opening on the inside, then added a few more sticks to hold it in place.

Then I could use the rake to level all the soil again.

The section of the wattle weave bed I’d prepped yesterday needed some clean up again. I kept having to chase cats out of the garden beds because they kept wanting to use the nice, soft, fluffy soil as a litter box!

After levelling the soil in the rectangular bed, I marked out four rows with stakes and twine. This required repeated removal of kittens. In the second picture, you can see what I planted and transplanted. In the row north of centre, I planted the mixed beets, so they wouldn’t overshadow the Hedou Tiny bok choi I sowed on in the row south of centre. The bok choi can get quite tall, after it has bolted and gone to seed, but for harvesting, they should only be about 2 or 3 inches tall. I do plan to leave one or two to go to seed to collect at the end of the season.

In the outside rows, I transplanted a whole bunch of the onions I’d been finding. On one side, I transplanted the ones that were clearly bulb onions. On the other, I transplanted the ones that look like they might be white bunching onions, except I’ve never tried to grow white bunching onions before.

In the next picture, you can see where I planted one packet of dwarf peas. I got two packets, but this is a very short row, so I only needed the one. The peas went in the back of the bed (north side). I’d already transplanted some onions at the end and at the front near the corner before. Today, I took the two garlic bulbs I’d found, broke up the cloves, and planted them in line with the onions. They filled the entire remaining front space.

Once everything was in, it all got mulched with leaves. Then I mulched around the herbs in the tiny bed as well. I didn’t cover them, as we’re still using them as needed. Before the hard freeze hits, I’ll cover them completely with a leaf mulch, and we’ll see how they survive the winter!

I also moved the raised bed cover over the rectangular bed for the winter.

I didn’t take final pictures, though, as I decided to take garden tour video, instead. I’ll be going through them and putting together a garden tour video. If I’m satisfied with what I took. Otherwise, I might take new recordings tomorrow, before I head into the city for the Costco shop. We’ll see.

At this point, the only bed I was considering winter sowing into is the small bed off to the side where the Albion Everbearing strawberries had been last year. It still needs to be cleaned up, and I plan to sow bread seed poppies there. That can wait until spring, though, if necessary.

As it stands now, other than mulching the transplanted strawberries and little things like that, the garden can be done for the year. The winter sowing is in, and anything left can wait until spring if I can’t get to it in the next while. We’re getting a bit of rain right now, and the next couple of days are supposed to be dry and cooler, but Sunday and Monday are supposed to get warm again, with plenty of sun, so there’s still the possibility of getting ahead of things for next year.

So, to recap, we have winter sown for next year:

Purple savoy cabbage
White and Purple Vienna Kohlrabi
Daikon Radish
White Egg turnip
Rainbow Mix carrots
Spring Blush peas
American spinach
Yellow Swiss Chard
Garlic
Hedou Tiny bok choi
Assorted Mix beets
Tom Thumb Dwarf peas

Then transplanted miscellaneous onions and garlic that were found during bed prep. Plus seed onions.

Last year, I scattered seed mixes and they did surprisingly well. This year, I’m hoping the more orderly plantings will survive the winter and give us a nice head start in the garden next year!

Not too shabby, I think!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 garden: winter sowing kohlrabi and cabbage, and prepping the next bed

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I got back from the city early enough, and it was still warm enough, to get some progress done in the garden.

My first priority was to winter sow in the east yard low raised beds. Two of these beds were already prepped, but not covered in any way, so they did require some clean up. The cats have been using them as litter boxes!

Some of their “presents” were astonishingly huge.

Ew.

My original plan had been to do the kohlrabi and cabbage on the outside of the beds, then have peas down the middle of one, while leaving a gap in the middle of the other to plant pole beans in the spring.

I forgot. The kohlrabi and cabbage will need to be covered in netting to keep them from being decimated by flea beetles and cabbage moths. Having something growing on a trellis in the middle is probably not a good idea!

In the first picture below, the beds are cleaned up, leveled and rows marked out.

In the second picture, you can see the planted rows of purple and white kohlrabi. If I had gone ahead with the plan to grow pole beans down the middle, these rows would have been further apart. I decided to stick with just the two rows and moved them closer to the middle. These raised beds are more prone to freezing than the beds in the main garden area, simply because the boards are so much thinner than the logs used in the longer beds. We’ve lost almost entire beds of garlic over the winter due to excessive cold, even with a mulch. I’m hoping that, with sowing them closer to the middle, deep mulching them with leaves, plus the predicted milder winter we’re expected to have, they will survive. The plant spacing for these, according to the package, is 4-6 inches, so I tried to scatter the seeds with my little hand seeder fairly lightly. If they survive and germinate, they will still need to be thinned later on, but not by too much. Hopefully, if I have the space, the will be thinned by transplanting.

In the next picture, I have the Purple Savoy cabbage. This is the first time we’ve tried to grow cabbage. I originally planned to have two rows on the outside, then peas in the middle, but decided to do three rows of cabbage. As they need about a foot per cabbage for spacing, I tried to scatter two or three seeds every foot or so, though a few spots accidentally got quite a bit more! You can sort of see a grid in the soil, from where the seeds were covered and the soil gently pressed down, while the rest of the rows I made with a hoe remain untouched.

Grommet REALLY wanted to “help” me with the sowing!

I had made sure to rake up plenty of leaves into the wagon and the wheelbarrow before I started, and was able to give the beds a good mulching for the winter. Then I transferred one of the raised bed covers for the winter. There is another one on the third bed I could move over, but I decided against it. That cover’s wire mesh does not have hoops to support it. Cats would knock that flat and out of shape in a heartbeat. So it’s up on top of the box frame one the other bed, which I’ve found surprisingly useful. I plan to make more 3′ x 9′ covers like this over time, but we need to buy more lumber for it, first.

That done, it was time to shift over to the old kitchen garden.

The cats have been having a field day in the cleaned up wattle weave bed, so that got a clean up, first. My plan is to winter sow dwarf peas in the back of the south facing section of the wattle weave bed, and transplant any onions, etc that I found in the rectangular bed in the front.

That… might not quite work out! At least, not so much for the onions part.

The first thing was to harvest the remaining Swiss Chard. It wasn’t until I uploaded the pictures onto Instagram that I realized I forgot them outside! They should be okay overnight.

In the second picture, you can see an area on the south side of the bed, where the cats dug into the dirt. I suspect there was a mouse or something that got their attention for them to dig it out that much. There had been grass clippings chinked in the gap between the logs, but that disappeared. It’s been filled repeatedly, and the cats keep pulling it out. So one of the things I needed to do was find a way to block that gap in a cat proof way.

Once the chard and remaining kohlrabi roots were cleared out, it was time to loosen the soil, pull the weeds and set aside any little onions I found.

I found so many, I started just tossing them with the weeds after a while!

What I really wanted to find out is what was going on with what looked like a cluster of garlic coming up, and another cluster of what I thought were onions but, as they got larger, the leaves started to look like some sort of ornamental allium, instead.

In the next picture, you can see that there were two entire bulbs of garlic that somehow got missed! I planted garlic in here a couple of years ago. This year, two garlic bulbs grew among the seed mix in this bed. They grew into nice sized bulbs that got harvested.

Now I find two full bulbs of garlic that somehow got missed over two growing seasons! I will probably separate the cloves and transplant them.

Next to the garlic is the cluster of alliums growing near by that did turn out to be onions. Several of them were growing together like bunching onions, rather than bulb onions, but I’ve never grown bunching onions. They are large enough that I will probably transplant them, too.

In the next photo, you can see most of the other onions I found while cleaning the bed. There were so many tiny ones! One red onion was quite large. I will transplant the larger ones, but I don’t know if I’ll bother with the teeny ones.

While working across the bed, I was finding a surprising number of roots. Some were definitely from the rose bush at the end of the bed, but it’s possible others were from the ornamental crap apples and the double lilac. It definitely made the job take longer. As I worked my way up the bed, I took advantage of having lots of old stakes handy from the bed along the retaining wall, before the wattle weaving was added on top of the retaining wall blocks. Some of the largest, strongest ones were used to stabilize the top side logs, as their supports were getting old and starting to break.

To block the gap, I used some flat pieces of scrap wood that were in the corner, then a whole bunch of old stakes, on the inside of the wall. Once the bed is done and ready for planting, these will be mostly buried and hidden from view.

As you can tell by the last picture, and the flash needed for the pictures of the onion and garlic, I had to stop before it was all finished. It was simply getting too dark. I was working by the light of the shop lights at the sun room window by then, and those were on only because their motion sensors were being triggered.

I don’t have anywhere to be at tomorrow, so I’ll be able to finish the job then, and do more winter sowing. I should also be able to clean out that little bed off by itself in the main garden area, where I’ve decided to plant bread seed poppies. Since I didn’t winter sow a variety of peas I’d meant to plant between the cabbage, I’m considering finding somewhere else to winter sow them. Once the dwarf peas are planted, that’s two varieties of peas that are winter sown, so leaving the third variety I was planning to winter sow for the spring would be fine, too. I also have our own saved sugar snap pea seeds that can be sown in the spring.

The rectangular bed that’s being cleared now will have beets and tiny bok choi winter sown in it, probably interplanted with some of those onions and/or garlic I’ve been finding! I was thinking of planting something down the middle, but I can’t for the life of me remember what that was right now. I’ve got diagrams drawn out, but those are in the basement, along with my seed inventory.

So that’s the garden and winter sowing status, for now. We should have a nice head start into next year’s garden, if this works out.

I will also be making what will probably be my last garden tour video of the year. Last year, I ended up doing my October video using video recorded on November 1, because the video I’d taken on October 31 was done too late in the day, and everything was too dark. So I want to make sure to get it done earlier, and earlier in the day.

Thankfully, it looks like the weather will hold for a while yet, and I should be able to get other things done before the snow flies. We’ll see how that works out!

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: winter sowing peas, carrots, turnips and radishes

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After all the rain we had, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to work in the garden today, though today’s weather was supposed to be better. I had to head to the pharmacy, so I figured I would know when I came back.

I ended up in town a lot longer than expected!

My daughter’s prescription, that they did not have in stock yesterday, the main reason to go back to the pharmacy. My husband had ordered refills for delivery, so I figured I would get his bubble packs while I was at it. My daughter wasn’t feeling well enough to come along, unfortunately. I headed out and got to the pharmacy shortly after 11am.

That turned out to be an oops. They don’t get their inventory orders in until the afternoon. Typically around 1pm.

Also, since my husband’s refills were ordered for delivery on Thursday, and today is Tuesday, they weren’t ready yet, either. Those were left for delivery. I asked about my daughter’s meds, as I thought she got a partial refill, but no, she hadn’t gotten any of this one at all, and she needed them.

At first, I was going to head home then come back tomorrow until I remembered I was going into the city tomorrow. So I gave them my cell phone number and told them I would stay in town, and they could call me when the meds were ready.

That left me with quite a bit of time to find something to do, so I ended up doing a lot of walking!

Most places were closed for the season, but I did remember there’s a second hand store, so I went to check that out. I ended up spending a whole dollar when I left…

I already a similar drinking jar at home, but it’s colorless. They had a couple like that, but only one in this green tinted glass, so I got it.

I did enough wandering around that my left hip was starting to talk to me. Not pain – it hasn’t hurt like it used to since I got that injection at the sports injury clinic – but it started feeling like it was about to give out. By then, it was past 1:30, so I went to the pharmacy. I was just going to sit and wait, since they hadn’t called me yet, but they are so on top of their customer service, I had someone asking if I needed help before I had a chance to! It turned out they were working on my daughter’s prescription right then, so I didn’t have long to wait.

From there, I headed home, where my daughters had a late lunch waiting for me. The weather was good and things were relatively warms, so as soon as I finished eating, I decided to go for it, and headed to the garden.

My focus for today was to get winter sowing done, and I decided to do the sowing planned in the main garden area, first. The first thing I needed to do was a lot of raking of leaves! Once I had both the wagon and the wheelbarrow filled, I started at the trellis bed.

This bed already has seed onions planted along the non-trellis side. I chose the Spring Blush peas for the trellis side, and the rainbow mix of carrots in the middle.

The rows I planted in remain marked with stakes and twine. There is room between the carrots and the onions to plant something else. Fresh bulb onion transplants, perhaps, or more carrots.

In the second photo above, you can see the row of peas is shorter! There were only 25 peas in a packet. I should have bought two! I planted a pea every 6 inches or so, but it would have been good to plant the full row and have them more densely planted, in case some don’t germinate. As it is now, in the spring, I can plant something else in the remaining space that can use the trellis.

Once that was done, I covered the whole thing with a deep mulch of leaves. I actually ran out and had to get more.

Then I decided to finally use that pile of cardboard that I’ve had set aside for the entire season! I used it to cover where the next trellis bed will be built, as well as the path, to kill off the grass below. If I’d had enough, I would have put cardboard on the other paths, before I put wood chips on them as a mulch. The dandelions in particular had no problem growing through the mulch, and you can barely even tell the wood chips are there anymore. *sigh*

There was still enough time and light to work on the next bed.

The only problem was, that bed had turned into a pool!

I removed everything that was holding the plastic down and just started rolling it up. The piece of wood I used to roll up the excess is long enough to rest on both sides of the bed, so there was space below. Rolling it up meant pushing the water further and further to the end before it could finally overflow the plastic. Which meant that only the very end of the bed got an extra watering.

I left that to drain while I went to rake up more leaves.

In the next photo, you can see where I planted the Daikon radish and White Egg turnip. Those went on the outsides of the bed, leaving the middle for a spring sowing of probably pole beans. I’m planning to plant bush beans in the high raised bed.

In the last photo, the bed is mulched with leaves. Once again, the stakes and twine were left to mark where things were planted.

By this time, it was getting quite dark and it was time to stop for the day. The beds that I have winter sowing planned for in the main garden area are now done. In this area, there are still two beds that need to be cleaned up but, if necessary, that can wait until spring.

I did move my supplies over to the east garden beds. Two of those beds will get winter sowing, hopefully tomorrow afternoon, after I get back from the city. That will be the warmest part of the day. Those beds will get kohlrabi and cabbage sown into them, as those beds will be easier to cover with insect netting to protect from flea beetles and cabbage moths.

After that, I have one bed in the old kitchen garden that still needs to be harvested of alliums and Swiss Chard, and then I will be doing winter sowing in there and the wattle weave bed. The only other area that needs to be cleaned for winter sowing is the square bed off to the side of the main garden area that I’d grown the Albion Everbearing strawberries in, last year. The survivors got transplanted along the new asparagus bed, and I’ve decided the space may as well be used as a permanent poppy bed, since I expect those to self seed readily, and it can be treated as a perennial bed. However, if I run out of time to winter sow those, they can still be done very early in the spring.

So there we have it! Four more things winter sown for next year.

From the predictions I’m seeing, it’s supposed to be a mild winter, but other sources say a harsh winter. We shall see! Hopefully, the winter sowing will survive and we’ll have a head start to next year’s garden!

With how short our growing season is (I’m not counting on the newly revised averages yet), every little bit will help.

One of these years, I hope to get enough to actually can or freeze again! The last two years have been pretty brutal. If we depended on the garden for food at this point, we’d starve! :-D

Little by little, it’s getting done, and I’m feeling pretty good about it so far!

As long as the weather holds…

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: winter sowing spinach and Swiss Chard, and a small harvest

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I had a wonderfully productive day in the garden today, so I am splitting things up into a couple of posts.

I decided to shift gears today. After looking at what I was wanting to winter sow and where, I decided to leave cleaning up the last two beds in the main garden area for later. Possibly until spring, depending on how things go over the next while. I needed to move on to other areas. Areas I knew would be faster to work on, since I wouldn’t be dealing with the roots and rocks situation!

The priority was going to be the old kitchen garden, but first I decided to do the winter sowing in the garlic bed. I didn’t want to have the plastic cover over the garlic for too long, as I was concerned the mini greenhouse it created might mess with the garlic.

Here is how it looked, after the plastic was removed.

I’d already raked up as many leaves as I could stuff into the wagon and the wheelbarrow for mulching.

As for the plastic, I was going to roll it up for storage, but remembered the low raised bed I had recently cleaned up. The cats have been digging in it, so I tided that up, then just shifted the sheet over.

The boards and bricks that had weighted down the sides against the hoops before are now being used to keep the plastic snug against the soil, and from blowing away. I found a short log that I could roll the excess up into. Later on, I did take all those rocks you can see at the end, and set them on the plastic, under the roll. It is slightly elevated, and the wind was moving it around quite a bit, considering how litter wind we had today. The rocks weighing down the other end weren’t enough, so I found a short board I could wrap the plastic around and weighted that down with the rocks. If it were spring, this would be a good solarization set up. For now, it’ll just keep the soil a bit warmer, and keep the cats from leaving me more “presents”. 😄

Then it was time to get back to the garlic bed, and clear away the hoops. With the twine marking the three rows of garlic, I used those as a guide while using stick to create furrows in between. I went back over them with my hands to lightly compact the bottoms for better soil contact – and remove as many little rocks as I was able to!

For the varieties, I chose American Spinach and Yellow Swiss Chard.

I didn’t mark the rows, so this picture is to help me remember what I planted and where!

I chose this variety of spinach because, after reading the back, it seemed the most appropriate for the location, as well as winter sowing. The Yellow Swiss Chard is a new variety, with an unusual colour for Chard, so I wanted to give it a go. Both packets still have seeds left, so we could potentially do another sowing in the spring, after these have germinated.

The seeds got lightly covered, and gently tamped down, again for better soil contact. I had made the furrows deep enough to form shallow trenches. The soil was damp and didn’t need watering – I don’t want them to germinate too early! – but next year, the trenches will help hold water, in case we end up with another drought year. Plus, it makes it easier to see where the seeds were sown.

You can see that in the next picture, along with the “first” mulching of grass clippings taken from other beds. Because the garlic is so close to the outside of the bed, and the bed has no log frame, I wanted to give the sides extra insulation. When the leaf mulch is removed in the spring, the grass clippings will be left as erosion and weed control.

I was originally going to remove the twine and stakes marking the garlic rows, but decided to leave them, and put the leaf mulch right on top, which you can see in the last photo. I finished off both the wheel barrow and the wagon of leaves before it was done. I got another wagon load to finish mulching the garlic bed, and had just enough left over to mulch the Albion Everbearing strawberries I’d transplanted from their original choked out bed to beside the new asparagus bed. The strawberry plants were still very green! Hopefully, they will survive the winter and we’ll have nice, big strawberries next year.

So the garlic bed is now DONE!!!

With the stakes left behind, the bed will be visible after the snow falls. This area gets very flat with snow in the winter. If we can get at the beds this winter, I would want to dig snow out from the paths and onto the winter sown beds for even more insulation – and moisture – in spring.

That done, I started moving my tools and supplies over to the old kitchen garden, where I wanted to work next, but first, I decided to gather a small harvest.

I dug up just a few Jerusalem Artichoke plants around the edges of the bed, and this is what I was able to gather from under them. I will leave the rest of the bed to overwinter. Later on, I’ll use loppers or something to cut the plants, which are still very green, and drop them on the bed as a sort of mulch.

The Jerusalem Artichokes (aka: sunchokes) did not grow very tall this year, compared to others. I did water it at times but, I’ll admit, it was largely ignored this year. As with everything else, I think the heat, the drought and the wildfire smoke set them back. I think they also got less light this year. The Chinese Elm trees beside them had been pruned, but the branches have grown back. I want to get rid of them entirely, because of the billions of seeds they drop in the spring, but for now we’ll just try to prune them again, when we can.

As for the sunchokes, I noticed a difference this year. For starters, I didn’t find any of those grubs I found so many of, when I harvested this bed completely, last time. Sometimes, I’d find them half burrowed into a tuber – both living and dead! Other times, I’d see the holes, then find a dead grub inside when cutting open the tuber. I was not impressed! This time, I saw zero grub damage. Sweet!

The tubers themselves are actually less nubby, too. A lot of the ones we harvested at the end of the season last year had so many nubs on them, they were hard to clean. This time, there are a couple of nubby ones, but most are smoother. Which I much prefer!

With leaving the rest of the bed to overwinter, I hope that we will have a much better growing season overall, and a lot more plants to harvest from. That seemed to work out when we did it before, as last year’s harvest was quite decent.

This done, I could finally move on to the old kitchen garden and start on the beds there.

Which did take longer than expected, but for a very different reason this time!

I’ll share about that in my next post.

See you there!

The Re-Farmer