Hopi Black Dye sunflowers

Our 2025 Garden: tomato harvest and the status of things

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After soooo much wonderful rain yesterday, I really wanted to see how things were going in the garden while doing my rounds.

When I got to the bed with the ripening Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes, I decided to go ahead and harvest them. They’re a touch on the green side, but they will continue to ripen inside. I also grabbed the few bush beans that were available to gather.

I rather like the effect of the tomatoes reflected in the stainless steel bowl I put them in!

The next photo is of the one developing pumpkin that I hand pollinated; there’s another on that vine, but its flower has now opened yet. I’ve added support to the vine itself, to take some of the weight off the plastic trellis netting, but the pumpkin has already gotten heavier enough to start pulling down on it again. We will construct a sling for it soon. The vine can handle the weight. The temporary plastic trellis netting cannot.

The Hopi Black Dye sunflowers have had a lovely growth spurt and are getting quite tall. They should have seed heads by now, though, so it’s unlikely we will get anything to harvest. Even the Red Noodle beans have started to show signs of growth. Just barely. I don’t expect them to even start climbing the trellis before the growing season is done.

Of course, I checked on the new food forest transplants. Especially the Opal plum, with its fresh new growth.

And newly missing leaves.

I guess all that rain washed off the anti-deer spray I used on it, and the protective frame.

I went and got the piece of chicken wire I’d used to try and protect the Albion strawberries last year. It turned out to be just long enough to to around the frame. This, at least, the deer will not be able to get through!

The big crab apple tree that has the small but delicious apples is just reaching its peak period. Many of the apples are looking very red right now, though there are still plenty that aren’t ripe yet, among them. We could probably start harvesting some crab apples now, though they’re so small, it’s a lot more work to use them for any cooking. I grab a few on the way by to munch on as I do my morning rounds.

I was debating which project to work on today, but everything it still so wet, I might just stick to indoor projects and start some laundry. No hanging on the line, today, even though we’re not expecting rain. It’s still too humid. We’re also still under an air quality warning for smoke, though we are now on condition yellow instead of condition red.

We have had enough rain that even the grass has come out of dormancy and had started to grow again. We might even have lawn to mow, instead of having just a few patches growing. The overgrown area where the old garden used to be is going to need cleaning up soon. I’d left the alfalfa that was coming up to bloom for any pollinators we might have – there’s a lot less these days, than in the spring, probably because of all the smoke. Their bloom time is ending now, and the burdock is starting to get big, will start flowering soon, so we need to cut all that back before the burrs get too nasty. We might be able to start on that tomorrow. Depending on how things go today, I should be able to go in with the loppers and cut back the poplars saplings that are trying to take over.

I didn’t get a picture but the rain came down so yard yesterday that the almost white lengths of maple used in the wattle weave bed in progress are now grey with splattered soil from inside the bed! Which is saying something, since the soil is all pulled into the middle, to make room to work on the wattle weaving.

According to the forecast, today and tomorrow are going to reach a relatively cool high of 19C/66F, but the day after, we’re expected to scream up to a high of 28C/82F, with a possible small rainfall in the early evening. Then its supposed to drop down to more humane highs, hovering around 20C/68F, for the next while. No more rain, though. The monthly forecasts sees only one more rainfall between tomorrow and the end of the month. It also says we can expect the temperatures to climb up to 31C/88F on the last day of the month, and 33C/91F by Sept. 1st.

We’ll see what actually happens.

If we’re going to get any sort of harvest with the winter squash or pole beans, we need to have all of September to be warm. Especially the overnight temperatures, and that’s where things get dicey.

What this does show me is that, as we build our raised beds, we’ll have to think ahead to including ways we can cover them to protect them during cold nights, or even create mini greenhouses, with frames that can go over relatively tall plants. I couldn’t cover the radish bushes to protect them from the deer, for example, because none of the covers I have had room for them, except the box frame which is currently protecting the corn bed. We are working to keep the same dimensions on all the beds, so the covers can be interchangeable. The beds in the East yard are all 3’x9′, and that’s the size we’re working with. The log beds in the main garden area will all be 4′ wide on the outside which, with the thickness of the logs, means about 3′ of growing space inside. They will all be 18′ long, so two covers will fit on each bed. Once we have chickens, some of those covers will be mobile chicken coops, too, so we can let the chickens clean up and fertilize the beds after they’ve been harvested from.

Every year has been a different gardening year – especially weather wise! – and every year, we learn a bit more of what conditions we can expect, and can plan around in the future.

That is a process I expect will never quite end, and I’m okay with that!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: updates, radish pods, temporary trellis, and volunteers!

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I figured I should get some pictures of the East yard garden beds, now that they’ve got some fresh stove pellet sawdust mulch on them.

The beans with the tomatoes are doing really well. At first, it seems that one of the seeds had not germinated, but it did eventually show up. That makes for a 100% germination rate of these old seeds.

Too bad a cat dug one of them up. *sigh*

In the foreground of the first photo, you can even see some of the self-seeded carrots coming up!

In the next image, you can see the second planting of beans coming up in between the corn. Of the first planting, there ended up being a total of three, maybe four, that came up, and only one of them came up strong and healthy. Considering these are the same seeds in the same bed, it’s hard to know why the first sowing failed so badly.

The last image is of the Arikara squash bed – and the corn in there is so much bigger than the ones in the other bed!

I really like using the stove pellets to mulch around seedlings. The pellets land around the small plants, rather than on top of them. Then, after being watered, the pellets expand and fall apart, with the sawdust creating a nice, fairly thing, but really light, mulch. So far, it seems to be working out with anything I’ve used them around. It helps that the 40 pound bags are so cheap, and a little goes a surprisingly long way!

Once my rounds were done, my older daughter came out to help me remove the netting around the trellis bed. We had an unfortunate surprise while pulling it out, though. I’ve seen frogs – even large ones – squeeze through the rather fine mesh but, unfortunately, a garter snake didn’t make it. My daughter found it stuck around and under the corner of the bed. It hadn’t been dead for long, but long enough that a big beetle was chewing on its head. We had to cut a section of the netting off, because we couldn’t get it loose from the netting.

As my daughter said, it’ll be good when we no longer need to use netting! At least not this netting. It’s always a concern that a kitten or a bird will get caught in it. I never thought a garter snake would get caught!

We were being eaten alive by mosquitoes while we got the net down, stretched it out, folded it in half length wise, then started rolling it up on a bamboo stake for storage. They were after my daughter a lot more than me for some reason, so once the netting was rolled up enough, I sent her inside while I finished. It’s now tied off and in the garden shed. I made sure it was resting higher up in the shed so, hopefully, no critters will get into it.

That done, I brought out some of the trellis netting we’ve used in previous years. This netting has 4′ square spaces, making it easy to reach through to weed or harvest.

I started off by weaving a bamboo stake through one edge of the netting, where there is a pair of lines about a half inch apart, instead of 4 inches. I tied one end to the vertical post at the corner, then stretched out the netting flat before tying it to the next post. Then I added the next bamboo stake, weaving it into the netting and joining it to the first stake, before tying it off to the next couple of vertical supports, then did it again.

The netting ended on the third stake, so I added another piece of it to a fourth stake before joining the stakes and matching the netting up. That left a lot of excess netting at the end, but I just bunched that up and secured it while trying off the stake to the vertical.

I had woven in a plastic coated metal stake at each end of the bed to keep the netting straight. After the horizontal stakes were in place, I pushed the netting down so any excess was at ground level. I then took the garden stakes there were already in place to hold the protective netting that was there before, and used them in the trellis netting. Each one got woven vertically through the netting, then I used them to tighten things up a bit before pushing them into the ground. Where the two nets overlapped happened to be where there was already a longer bamboo stake, so I used that to join the sections together at the same time. Once all the stakes were woven through and pushed in the ground, I used ground staples to secure the netting to the soil, catching in the excess, to make it all fairly stretched out and tight.

I recall from using the netting before that the weight of plants climbing it can cause issues, so I added another level of horizontal bamboo stakes along the middle. These got tied to the vertical garden stakes, rather than the posts for the permanent trellis. This way, the netting is at a slight angle for the beans to climb.

Then it was time to weed.

This bed hasn’t been weeding since the protective netting was placed all around it. A lot of the self seeded onions I transplanted into rows were no longer visible.

I started weeding along the trellis side. I probably should have done it before the trellis net was added, but the mesh is open enough to reach through easily. The problem was more my hat constantly getting tangled in it!

As I was working my way along the beans, I spotted a little volunteer tomato plant! I remember finding volunteer tomatoes in this bed last year, too. I’m not sure where the seeds came from!

When I found one, I left it, thinking it would be fine were it was. Then I found another.

And another.

So I thought I would come back later and transplant them once I weeded and could see a space for them.

Then I found another.

And another.

And several others!

As I was working my way down the onion side of the bed and kept finding more even tiny tomato plants, I started pulling them up with the weeds, then transplanting them wherever I had enough space between the onions or the pumpkins. Then, when I finished weeding the bed, I went around the beans side to dig up the ones I’d left there and transplanted them.

By the time I was done, I counted 14 volunteer tomatoes.

Or 15.

I actually counted 13, first, after all the weeding and transplanting was done. Then noticed one I’d missed, so I counted again and got 15. Then I counted again, as I was scattering stove pellets around the bed and counted 14. I counted again and kept getting 14, so I either keep missing one, or I double counted one before.

Of course, it’s also possible I missed some volunteers when I went back to find and transplant them. If so, they’ll be easier to see, soon enough!

The last photo was taken after I’d scattered the stove pellets, but I forgot to take one after it was watered and the pellets were all expanded and breaking up.

This bed now has Red Noodle beans and Hopi Black Dye sunflowers along one side. On the other is onions from last year, going to seed, plus a whole bunch of tiny self seeded onions that I transplanted after clearing and preparing this bed for the beans and sunflowers. Then there is the pumpkins, and now the volunteer tomatoes.

This bed is going to look really interesting, once everything has reached maturity!

Today, I remembered to take some pictures of the radish seed pods that I’ve been snacking on.

The first three pictures are all from the same plant. What a difference! Some pods have just one pea-sized seed “bubble”. Others are longer, looking like they have a couple of seeds developing in them. Then there was a branch that has seed pods of all shapes and sizes!

The last pictures is of a different variety of radish in the winter sown East yard garden bed, with distinctive red lines on them. The seed mix had four different varieties of radishes in it, and I don’t know which is which, though I’m guessing the yellow variety is the one plant I’m seeing with yellow flowers.

I’m really happy with how the winter sowing experiment worked. The last time I tried it, I did the mild jug version, and it failed completely. Now I know that sowing directly into the beds, then heavily mulching, is the way to go for a lot of things. There are a few things I will now plan ahead to winter sow, but not as a mix. Beets, carrots, turnips, kohlrabi, spinach, and radishes for their pods. Also, that one variety of lettuce I planted was insanely prolific, and good at self seeding! I’ll have to be careful when collecting seeds this fall! Oh, the tiny bok choy worked, as did the chard – when they’re not being overwhelmed by other plants! There are also tiny onions all over, but they’re so far behind, I don’t expect we’ll be getting any bulb unions this year. Which is okay. We have the ones that are going to seed, so we can start onions indoors, using our own seeds, in January or February. The turnips also worked out much better than any other time we’ve tried them, so I think we will run through the varieties again to see which ones we like best.

I get the feeling we’ll be doing a lot of direct sowing in the fall from now on! Just in a more organized way. Peas are something else that are supposed to be good for winter sowing – we just have to make sure the bed they’re planted in doesn’t get destroyed by cats, to find out!

Obviously, tomato seeds survive the winter just fine. What variety they are, I have no idea, but if we’re going to winter sow tomatoes deliberately, they’ll have to be a very short season variety, if we’re going to get anything from them. If the Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes turn out to be a variety the family likes, they would be an ideal candidate. Their growing season is so short, we could actually direst sow in the fall, then again in the late spring, to extend the harvest, if we wanted to.

We just need to be sure we actually enjoy eating them, first.

It’s taking us years to get things worked out, with a couple of major set backs along the way, but those set backs have actually helped us in our decision making for the future. Like now knowing that parts of our garden area are prone to flooding during wet years! Having beds raised even just a few inches has saved come of our plantings already.

I do look forward to when we can make the low raised bed higher, though. Working on the bed this morning, while much improved from working at ground level, was still pretty painful! Plus, the lower the bed, the shorter the reach. Even though these beds are 4′ wide on the outside, it was still hard for me to reach the middle of the bed. With the high raised bed, I can reach clear across, if I wanted to, without difficulty.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the morning’s work.

My next garden project will be finally working on the old kitchen garden bed that will get wattle woven walls, but I’m going to have to put another job higher on the priority list. When going through the trail cam files this morning, the gate cam had over 100 files – and this camera is set to just take single still shots. Most of those were from the poplars coming up on the other side of the fence, blowing in the wind. Which is not really a step back, since some of them, at least, are of a size that could probably be used in the wattle weaving!

Lots to do, and the weather is finally cool enough to get to it. I’m loving every minute of it!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: sprouts!!

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I just got back from giving the garden beds a watering for the evening. Tomorrow is not supposed to be as hot as today, but we haven’t gotten any of the rain that hit other parts of the province, some of which got serious thunderstorm warnings!

When I got to the trellis bed, I was rather blown away by how much bigger the noodle bean sprouts were, even compared to this morning.

They were not the only ones.

In the first image, you can see four of the five collars around pumpkin seeds – and they are all sprouting! Nothing in the fifth one, yet, but these were the very last seeds I planted, and they’re already up! I remember last year, being amazed by how fast these free pumpkin seeds grew, too.

I have also confirmed, and you can see in the next photo: we have sunflowers! Not a lot, but the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers are starting to sprout. I wasn’t sure if these seeds were still viable or not, so anything we get of those is bonus!

While watering the new asparagus and strawberry bed, I got another pleasant surprise. I am pretty sure I planted the bare roots and crowns too late; I had not expected it to take so long, or I would have stored them properly. And yet, I found a single Jersey Giant asparagus, sprouting along the stake I place to mark where the crowns were planted. It’s so adorable!

I spent a fair bit of time working on the snap pea bed, carefully using the hose to pull weeds without also pulling the peas and tiny carrots out. As I worked my way from one end to the other, I was startled to find a bean sprout. Several of them. I had completely forgotten that I’d planted the last few bean seeds in the gaps between pea plants in one row! Gosh, the red noodle beans germinated fast!

Meanwhile, the Royal Burgundy bush beans I’d plant much earlier, beside the spoon tomatoes, have finally shown signs of life. All of two beans have sprouted. Hopefully, this means more will show up.

I didn’t bother trying to get a photo, but I also saw more corn seedlings showing up in the corn and yellow bush bean bed. Still very few, while the leftover seeds that got planted with the Arikara squash have more sprouting, and the earlier ones are getting quite big!

The Black zucchini has been doing really well. I planted three seeds in three spots, and 8 out of 9 seeds are now sprouted! With so many sprouting, I will probably have several to thin by transplanting, later. Even where the White Scallop square are planted, one seedling has appeared. Last year, those ones took three tries and a much longer time before any germinated, so that makes me very happy.

So far so good! I have to keep reminding myself that I finished planting everything such a short time ago. It just feels so late in the season. Probably because we had that heat wave in May.

On a completely unrelated note…

We seem to be missing three kittens.

Caramel’s tabby, Li’l Rig, and her tortie, Wormy, are nowhere to be seen. Yesterday, I spotted Caramel “luring” Li’l Rig into the maple grove on the north side of the inner yard. I strongly suspect she has taken them across the road. I was really hoping that, after I brought Li’l Rig back to the sun room yesterday evening, she wouldn’t try again. Caramel has been hanging around the house, which seems very strange for her to do, if she took her babies onto the property across the road.

Their brother, Havarti, is the biggest of the litter, is still very much around. He is so active and independent, I doubt he’d follow his mother anywhere right now. The other two are much smaller and were both recovering from oogey eyes. I can’t find them to check if their eyes still need washing.

The third missing kitten is Zipper. He was the sickest and the last on the road to recovery. He did seem much improved but, to be honest, in looking for him, I was looking for a body. No sign of him, anywhere. I do hope he’s okay. I can’t imagine he would have followed Caramel across the road.

I’m probably going to go outside one more time and do a walkabout. Maybe I’ll find him then.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: beans, sunflowers and unexpected transplants

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I managed to get it done, just as the rain started to hit!

I think I can now officially say, our garden is in! Sure there are some things, such as fall spinach, that can be planted, but for all our expected spring planting, it is done.

Yay!

I waffled between planting along the chain link fence in the south hard, or in the trellis bed in the main garden area. In the end, I decided to go for where I knew there would be the most sunlight.

The first image above is how the bed looked, after the mulch was pulled off. Last year, we grew melons along one side, onions for seed on the other. The onions were replanted in the fall, with just one half of the bed being prepped, then covered with leaves for mulch. The other half had melons mulched with cardboard, bark and grass clippings and, in the fall, I just pulled the melon plants and left the rest in place to protect the soil.

That made cleaning the bed up much easier!

This bed does have an issue, though. You can see that – sort of – in the next two images.

To make these beds, we’re using logs as straight and even as we can find. Which is surprising difficult. Especially when looking to use 18′ logs. With this bed, on the trellis side, one of the logs was quite bent. We put that one on the bottom, with the bend going into the bed, while the top log is straight. That’s what the remaining three vertical trellis support posts are going to be secured to.

What that means, though, is that there is an entire log, just inside the top frame of the bed, in the middle. The bend is extreme enough that there’s an actual gap formed between the two logs. Over time, it won’t matter as much, as we are aiming to eventually make the beds all 4 logs high. Until then, though, the gap is getting stuffed with skinny pieces of wood, bits of bark and even grass clippings and dried leaves.

Once the mulch was removed, I went over the bed with the garden fork first, to loosen the soil and make it easier to pull the weeds. As I went along, I started to find other things besides weeds, though – and I was not at all surprised. The onions that had gone to see had dropped some of their seed before they could be harvested.

Once I got to where the onions had seeded themselves, I worked a lot more carefully, and gathered every one that I could find.

Along the way, I also found a couple of plants I recognized as the flower I allowed to grow at one end of the bed, last year. I removed those as well.

It wasn’t part of the plan, but since I had them, every since baby onion I found got transplanted. The flowers got transplanted at the opposite end of where we grew them last year.

While preparing to transplant the onions, I also carefully pulled some of the onions that were growing against each other, broke them apart, then replanted them separately.

One half of the bed had fewer onions survive than the other, so that was the first area I started transplanting onions the tiny onions. I still had enough left over that I made a second row for the rest. They filled a little over half the bed’s length before I ran out, so there’s still room to plant something else, if I wanted to.

After that, I planted the two flowers (possibly a wild salsify) I’d found, then marked off two more rows in the soil in the other side of the bed. Those were for the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers and the Red Noodle beans.

There were not enough sunflower seeds to fill the row. I spaced them about 6 inches apart, which is close for sunflowers. I don’t expect a 100% germination rate, though. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if none germinated. These are older seeds.

The red noodle beans, on the other hand, are fresh seed. These got planted nearer the edge of the bed, where they will be able to climb the trellis that will be built on that side of the bed. After filling the row from end to end, I had only 6 bean seeds left. So I stuck them into some of the gaps among the sugar snap peas, since they have a trellis already prepared. The planted rows then got marked off at the ends with plant stakes, so that if I decide to plant something else there, I know where the open spaces are.

Oh! I completely forgot! I was going to plant the pumpkins in this bed!

I can still do that. For those, I plan to set up plastic collars to mark where the seeds are.

In fact, I see the rain has passed and the sun is out. I’ll go do that right now!

The Re-Farmer

Morning in the garden

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We had another very foggy morning, so I didn’t head out to do my rounds, then into the garden to do a bit of harvesting, until later. It has been a few days since I picked anything. With the colder overnight temperatures, things are not ripening as quickly. Though the forecast was for overnight temperatures was for 7C/45F, we actually dipped down to 4C/40F. There were no frost warnings, but at those temperatures, if I’d known they were coming, I would have done something to help the more tender plants.

I didn’t pick any sunburst squash at all; they’re growing a lot more slowly, so I’m leaving them to get bigger. They seem to be handling the chill nights all right, otherwise.

It now looks like we will have several mature heads of Hopi Black Dye sunflowers! That would be so awesome. I might even be able to save seeds to plant next year.

The middle of the three blocks of sweet corn are a bit of a mystery. There are so many cobs like this; they have almost no husks on them, and the cobs are not developing well. It’s only this one corn block that’s like this. Very strange.

Speaking of corn, the renters started harvesting their corn yesterday, and I could hear them already out there this morning. Yesterday saw their three dump trucks going back and forth all day. When I checked the trail cam files, the newer camera, which saves 3 stills and 1 short video every time the motion sensor is triggered, had almost 340 files for me to check this morning! I noticed the trucks did not have any corn cobs in them, though. Their corn was still very green, and it looks like the entire corn plants got ground up, cobs and all. I think it was a very bad year for corn, overall, both in gardens and in fields!

That one big Pixie melon finally came off its vine today! I’m surprised by the other ones. The vines have now died off completely, but those melons are still very firmly attached! The beans are still doing amazingly well, with lots of small pods still developing, and even flowers still blooming. There are lots of tomatoes, too, but with the cooler night time temperatures, they are taking longer to ripen.

Well, it looks like things are finally warmer and drier out there right now. Time to go finish some projects outside! :-)

The Re-Farmer

At the gate, and after the rain

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While doing my rounds this morning, I found a strange thing at the gate.

The twine was caught around the lock and the caribiner, which usually hangs over one side of the gate, was hooked onto the chain link.

Right off the bat, I knew this was NOT our vandal. If it were, there would have been actual damage, like the locks being glued again, or something like that.

Needless to say, I was quite curious when I sat down to look at the trail cam files. I had a pretty good idea who did it.

I was right.

When my daughter’s package was delivered, the driver tried to shove it into the gate, then used the chain to try and hold it in place. The problem is, the gate moves in the wind. When the cameras were triggered again, less than 15 minutes later, I could see the package was already half-falling. My the time my daughter came over to get the package, about half an hour after it was dropped off, it was on the ground.

It’s a good thing it wasn’t fragile!!

Going through the trail cam files was interesting for another reason: several files caught huge flashes of lighting from last night’s storm! I even saw a deer and her little one, hurrying up the driveway, while the sky light them up repeatedly.

Yesterday blew past our expected high of the day, reaching at least 30C/86F, possibly 32C/90F. That was followed by a wicked thunderstorm that passed over us around 11pm. It was awesome! Of course, we lost internet well before that. It rained enough that I found our rain barrel by the sun room, which had only a few inches of water on the bottom, full to overflowing.

We *really* need an overflow hose on that thing.

The garden loved the rain, too!

I was seeing huge new blossoms on the summer squash. Even the Ozark Nest Egg and the luffa gourds had new flowers opening. So did the Tennessee Dancing gourds, but they never really stopped blooming, so that wasn’t a lot of change.

The Crespo squash is seeing more flowers opening, too, and some of the developing fruit is noticeably bigger! These two are the ones closest to the barriers than I can get clear photos of, but there are quite a few more getting bigger like this.

The sunflowers are loving the deep watering, too. And just look at this Hopi Black Dye seed head! It is getting so very dark!

I even had a baby harvest this morning.

The larger melon is a Pixie melon. There are still lots of those. The little one is a Halona melon. The remaining melons on those vines are not getting any bigger, as the vines are pretty much completely died back now. Most of the melons are all very securely attached to their vines, though. This little one was feeling a bit softer, so I had it with breakfast. :-)

I even was able to pick some peas! With our first green peas, I did find a pod or two, but between the drought and the critters, that was about it. This is the most I’ve picked at once, this year.

That longest pod is the size they would all be reaching, if growing conditions were better.

I suppose I really should have left them for another day, as these were a bit on the small size, but I couldn’t resist.

I had them with my breakfast, too. :-)

The melon wasn’t as sweet as larger ones we’d picked, but it was definitely ripe. The peas were also probably not as sweet as they would have been under better growing conditions. They were both still quite tasty, though!

Last night’s storm had blown the door to the outhouse closed. I opened it again and things were still a bit damp. It’s been a few hours now, so I am going to head out and see if I can start painting!

The Re-Farmer

So much colour

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The sunflowers are so cheerful looking!

This is the Hopi Black Dye sunflower that has the one seed head that I think will have time to fully mature – and it has four more bright and cheerful seed heads opening!

I don’t know why my phone’s camera blew out this shot, but you can still see what a deep, dark purple is developing as the seeds mature.

When my mother found out I was planting sunflowers, she immediately mocked me, telling me that the birds would eat them all. This is the first sign of birds eating them I’ve seen this year. :-D

Not too long ago, while working on supper, I decided to dig into the potato bags and see what I could find.

The Norland (red skin, white flesh) and Yukon Gem (light brown skin, yellow flesh), we have picked before, but this is the first time I tried to find any of the fingerling potatoes, Purple Chief (purple skin, white flesh) and Purple Peruvian (purple skin, purple flesh). I did not find a lot, but I’m hoping it’s because I just wasn’t digging around in the right places.

I currently have them roasting in the oven with our own onions, both red and yellow, three types of summer squash, and purple beans. The only thing in there we didn’t grow ourselves was celery. Oh, and the dill we got from my brother. :-) I’ve got three chickens roasting, too, so we shouldn’t need to cook for the next couple of days! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: still growing!

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Today is likely to be the last hot day of the year. As I write this, we are currently at 26C/79F, with the humidex at 30C/86F. We are expected to reach 28C/83F with the humidex making it feel like 31C/88F. We are supposed to get a couple more days in the mid to low 20’s before the highs start dropping to the mid to high teens. So far, overnight temperatures are also still supposed to remain high enough that there are no frost warnings.

I headed out to do my rounds later than usual this morning, and we had already reached 22C/73F.

There has to be something wrong with the squash tunnel thermometer. It may have felt warmer than the 22C it was when I took this photo, but there is no way it was feeling like 42C/108F! Not even being in full sun, like it is, should result in that extreme of a difference. I suspect the dial is stuck. I haven’t been looking at it since the temperatures finally cooled down, so it may well have been sitting at this reading since our last heat wave.

In checking the sunflowers, there was only one little pollinator that I saw! I think the heat waves we had over the summer killed off a lot of our pollinators. There just wasn’t enough food to sustain them. The mild temperatures we are having means more of our sunflowers are actually budding and opening their seed heads, but I don’t know that they’ll have a chance to be well pollinated.

Some of the Mongolian Giants are finally taller than me. Hopefully, the opening sunflowers will lure any remaining pollinators to them. They may not have time to fully mature, even with our predicted mild temperatures, but they will at least provide some food for our surviving pollinators.

These are the Hopi Black Dye transplants that got chomped by a deer. They have all recovered surprisingly well, and are budding and blooming. They don’t need as long of a growing season as the Mongolian Giants, so it should be interesting to see if any of these get a chance to mature.

The green peas are enjoying the cooler temperatures we’ve been having, and I’m seeing more pods developing. This photo is of one of the pea plants growing among the Dorinny corn, the remains of which are being left to go to seed. The three blocks of sweet corn are still green, but they aren’t really growing. At this point, I don’t expect anything from them, really. They’re just there for the peas to have something to climb. Any pea pods we get is just gravy, as their main purpose is to fix nitrogen into the depleted soil in this area.

The winter squash and melons are the ones I am monitoring the most right now.

Remarkably, even as the plants are dying back, we are still getting fresh blooms, and the newer Red Kuri squash are getting noticeably bigger.

The mutant seems to have stopped getting bigger, and is now deepening in colour and developing a harder skin.

As this other, larger Red Kuri is still doing.

I did a nail test on the oldest of the developing Red Kuri, and you can see the mark left behind. Still not ready.

The Teddy squash are also still managing as well.

If we do end up getting frost before any of these larger squash can fully mature, we will still be able to harvest them and eat them. We just won’t be able to store them for long.

The melon vines are dying back faster than the winter squash vines, but their fruit are still hanging in there! I was able to pick this Pixie melon, only because the vine it was attached to had died back completely. I suspect it isn’t quite ripe.

My daughters discovered something about these little melons. After they are cut in half and the seeds scooped out, they make perfect ice cream bowls! I’m not big on ice cream, but I finally had some last night, in half of a Halona melon. It was quite excellent! :-D

I am glad we found these little, short season melons. They have been among the most enjoyed producers this year. I think we will try different short season varieties next year, but the Pixie and Halona are definitely varieties we would grow again. I’ve also saved seeds from some grocery store melons that I plan to try. They are larger varieties, but if we start them indoors early enough, and we don’t have another drought, we should be able to grow them. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Well, I got that backwards!

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You know, it’s a good thing that we labelled the things we planted in the garden beds, and left those labels there.

Because apparently, my memory sucks.

For the past while, I’ve been posting photos of our sunflower seed heads. Particularly the Mongolian Giant sunflowers.

The transplanted ones are much taller and stronger, and further along – at least in the row that wasn’t eaten by deer!

The other, direct seeded ones, next to the transplanted ones that got eaten, are developing their seed heads and blooming, but they are smaller and less robust plants. Even most of the eaten ones have been recovering and are producing seed heads. Their stems are stronger. They’re just shorter.

While checking on them this morning, I noticed the labels at a direct seeded row in one of the blocks was lying on the ground, so I picked it up to push it back into the ground at the end of the row it was at.

Which is when I noticed what was actually written on it.

Hopi Black Dye.

Hold on. I thought this bed was all Mongolian Giant…

So I went to the other bed and looked at the label.

Mongolia Giant.

Which is when I remembered; I’d deliberately planted the Hopi Black Dye seeds in the southern bed, regretting that I’d put the Mongolian Giant transplants in the southernmost row, because they would shade the smaller Hopi Black Dye sunflowers.

One of the flowering seed heads is starting to droop as it matures, so I took a closer look, brushing off the spent flowers.

Yeah. That’s definitely purple.

For some reason, when I remembered transplanting the Mongolian Giants in the southernmost row of the two sunflower blocks, my brain decided that the southernmost block had also been direct seeded with Mongolian Giants. I’ve had it backwards for months. But now that I’ve actually looked at the labels after all this time, I remember that I’d direct seeded the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers in the southern block, where they would get more light, even with the taller transplanted Mongolian Giants shading them a bit. Which turns out not to have been an issue, since the transplants in that row were chomped by deer, and are now shorter than the Hopi Black Dye, so they are getting the most light of all the sunflowers out in these blocks.

Which means we have quite a lot of Hopi Black Dye sunflowers with seed heads open and developing, and only a few Mongolian Giants.

And that, my dear friends, is why I’ve gotten into the habit of labeling things, taking lots of photos, and using this blog as a journal for documentation, writing things down as soon as I can, as much as possible. Lord knows, I obviously can’t trust my own memory for things like this! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: morning in the garden

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Well, it is getting decidedly cooler when I do my morning rounds! Fall is just around the corner, but things are still holding out in the garden.

Here are the gourds growing on the south facing chain link fence. The yellow flowers that you see are the Ozark Nest Egg flowers.

If you look at the bottom right, you’ll see a white flower!

This is a Thai Bottle Gourd flower. The Ozark Nest Egg plants are going so well, they sort of hide that there is another type of gourd growing here. The Thai Bottle Gourd has leaves that are more rounded, while the Ozark Nest Egg leaves have points on them.

These gourds are not the only thing bursting into bloom.

This is the Crespo squash, recovered from critter damage and growing enthusiastically! I was not able to get all of it in this photo. All those arrows are pointing to flower buds, some of which are starting to open this morning. There are probably another dozen or so on the rest of the plant off the left side of the photo.

Hidden away in the middle, I found the first female flower!

I couldn’t get any closer because of the critter barriers, but that flower bud the arrow is pointing to has a baby squash at its base. Hopefully, it will get pollinated and not die off. Under the current conditions, I would hand pollinate, but that would require moving the critter barriers. Mind you, there’s no way any fruit that develop will reach maturity.

More on that, later.

There are only a few Halona melons left on the vines, but there are probably a dozen Pixie melons that have not yet ripened.

This is the largest of them. Since it has a hammock, I check it in the mornings by lifting it at the stem, to see if it is starting to separate, but it’s still hanging on tight!

The rest are more like these two.

I’ll have to double check, but I thought the Pixies had a shorter growing season than the Halonas. They are taking much longer than the Halona to fully ripen. I’m sure the drought conditions over the summer have something to do with that, but since we’ve started having rain fairly regularly now, I would have expected them to mature faster. Ah, well. We’ll see how they do!

This is the largest of the developing Teddy winter squash. This is roughly half of what it’s mature size is supposed to be, so they may still have time.

Our weird mutant Red Kuri is noticeably bigger! It makes me smile, every time I see it.

We’ve got a couple more that are getting bigger, too. This is what the mottled green one should be looking like, which is why I suspect it was cross pollinated with the Teddy squash.

Here’s something that is NOT getting bigger!

The one luffa gourd is just… stalled. The plants are still blooming, but also starting to die off for the season. I started these quite a bit earlier, indoors, and they should have had enough time to develop gourds and reach maturity, but this summer was so rough on everything, I think we’re lucky to have even this.

We even had something to harvest! Not every morning, but at least every few days. We even still had a few beans left to pick. In the photo, I’m holding one of the mutant green sunburst squash. :-D I’ve been trying to let the sunburst squash have more time for the fruit to get bigger, but they seem to be developing more slowly than they did last year.

I just had to get a picture of the sunflower in the old kitchen garden. We can see it from the bathroom window, through the sun room, and it makes me smile, every time. :-)

As the season winds down, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the long term forecasts. Yesterday was our first frost date for the area, but it continues to look like we are not going to have any frost here, for a while. Of course, the forecast constantly fluctuates, and different sources have different forecasts. My Weather Network app has a 14 day forecast, and with today being the 11th, that puts the 14 day trend between the 12th and the 25th. The lowest overnight temperatures I’m seeing is for the 25th, at 6C/43F, with variable cloudiness.

My Accuweather app, however, is very different. The long range forecast on that one goes up to October 5. Up until this morning, all the overnight lows were above freezing, but this morning, there is now a single night – the 25th – where it says we will hit -2C/28F. It is also predicting thunder showers scattered about the province in that day.

If that is accurate, we have only two weeks before frost hits (which is 2 weeks longer than average, so I’m not complaining!). If we do get a frost, that will be it for the tomatoes, squash, gourds and melons. We have no way to cover any of these beds, so if we get any frost warnings, we’ll just have to pick as much as we can the day before. We should get plenty of sunburst squash, but I’m really hoping the Pixie melons and winter squash ripen before then. The gourd and Crespo squash just don’t have enough time left. Except the Tennessee Dancing gourds. They are so small, we should have quite a few to gather before the frost hits. We may be lucky, though. Aside from that one night that one app is predicting will go below freezing, overnight temperatures are supposed to stay mild into October.

The sunflowers will be a lost cause, though. There is no way the seed heads will be able to mature in so short a time. So many haven’t even opened, yet. Starting some of them indoors would have made the difference (well… except for being eaten by deer), had they been under better conditions. Not just with the weather, but the soil quality where they are growing. Had our only reason for planting them been for the seeds, they would be a failure, but they were planted there partly for a privacy screen, partly for wind break, and mostly as part of our long term plans to prepare the area for when we plant food trees there. Which means we had a success with 3 out of the 4 reasons we planted them. I do want to get more of these seeds to try them again, elsewhere.

For now, every night we have without frost is a help.

The Re-Farmer