For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.
Okay, I’m going to start with what turned out to be the largest category of food we grew in this year’s garden, as it really changed a lot for us. Oddly, that was because of how successful they started out!
One thing we had to seriously change up was how and what we started indoors. Last year, we were able to set up space in the cat free zone – aka: our living room – for the many trays and pots.
Too many trays and pots. We over did it.
That set up was no longer going to be an option this year, so we had to really consider what we would start indoors at all.
We also had a lot of issues with our large seeded starts, having to replant some things several times. So this year, we decided to try pre-germinating seeds. With large seeds, they were also scarified, first.
How it started
Let’s start with the melons.
We did still have some seeds left from previous years, but this year I decided to try the Vesey’s Summer of Melons Blend. We are still in the “try new varieties to figure out what we like” phase, though with this blend, we wouldn’t know what the varieties were. I figured we could look them up, once they ripened enough to be identifiable. The main thing was that the mix included early, mid and late season melons, for a more continuous harvest.
Which… didn’t quite work out as planned. More on that, later!
We also went with some we’d grown before; Sarah’s Choice and Pixie. We also added some Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon, a short season variety.
With the known varieties, I chose just a few seeds from each to pre-germinate. When it came to the Summer of Melons blend, not knowing what the varieties were, I started the entire package, which turned out to have 21 seeds in it. I figured there would be some losses, and we’d end up with less.
We ended up with a 100% germination rate on the blend, plus a near 100% germination rate on the rest.
That was a lot of seedlings!
It was much the same thing with the winter squash. We went with the wild bunch mix, skipping the other winter squash seeds we bought, and got another high germination rate using the pre-germination method. We also used it on some Crespo squash (a variety of Peruvian pumpkin), my last luffa seeds, some African drum gourds and the two free pumpkin seeds that are given out every year at the grocery store in my mother’s town, encouraging people to grow pumpkins for their pumpkin fest.
I am really, really happy with the pre-germination method, and will continue using it.
As for the summer squash, it was decided that these would be direct sown, rather than started indoors. I know my mother always direct sowed her zucchini here, and ended up with massive zucchini (she didn’t know they were supposed to be eaten while small), so I knew it could be done. My problem was, would the slugs destroy them, like the year before?
We ended up direct sowing the yellow Goldy zucchini in one of the chimney block planters by the chain link fence. In pots, we planted Magda squash (a pale green squash), Endeavor zucchini (dark green), and the new White Scallop pattypan squash seeds we picked up to try this year.
Later, when we found ourselves with a gap in a garden bed, it was filled with the last of our G Star pattypan seeds, and more Magda and White Scallops.
When it came time for transplanting, we had so many melons and winter squash, they filled four 18′ garden beds. A new growing area was added to fit the pumpkins and drum gourds, while the luffa went into the wattle weave bed in the old kitchen garden, where they had done so well last year, that we almost got a luffa to harvest! 😄
Oh, I almost forgot.
We also started Zucca melon seeds. That’s another experiment for me, as I’d really, really like to grow these massive melons. Then ended up being transplanted into a kiddie pool that got converted into a raised bed again. The Crespo squash went into a new bed in a completely different area.
The challenge
The first issue we had was having someplace to put the transplants. In the main garden area, my original intention was to expand with new beds that would eventually become trellis tunnels. However, the existing beds were in desperate need of cleaning up.
For a combination or reasons, including meeting mobility and accessibility needs, we will be making raised beds that are 4′ wide on the outside, with paths that are also 4′ wide. We also settled on them being 18′ long, and already had one new bed in those dimensions.
My daughter suggested that, since the existing beds needed to be cleaned up first anyhow, we should shift them into their permanent positions.
When we first made these beds, we basically eyeballed distances. They were roughly the same lengths, but slightly different widths, and some were crooked. The paths were not the same sizes either.
With some of the winter squash needing to be transplanted soon, we really needed to get at least one bed done quickly, and even had felled trees to prepare into logs to frame it with.
Of course, the job ended up being much bigger than expected.
Here is the start of the job.
Finishing it, however, had weather complications.
It eventually got done, but things were quite set back by the weather.
It took over a month to get the beds shifted, putting in transplants as we were able.
We did do interplanting as well. Peas and pole beans went in one bed of winter squash, corn in the other. The future trellis bed with melons planted in it shared the space with transplanted onions we found, and bush beans. The Crespo squash shared their bed with pole beans, too. I will talk about those in other posts, though.
How it ended
Late.
With the weather and late plantings, everything was set back about a month. The “Summer of Melons” blend didn’t give us any ripe melons until late in the season.
A trellis net had been added for them to climb and they grew pretty well. There were LOTS of melons developing, but it was ages before we could harvest any. In the end, we had to harvest most of then in an under ripe stage, before they could get killed by frost.
The winter squash were also late, but my goodness, they grew well! We ended up harvesting some that ripened on the vines and could be cured for winter storage, including one odd Crespo squash.
The two pumpkins we transplanted did fantastic, and we got some decent sized pumpkins out of them.
The African drum gourd had a really slow start. Then they started blooming like crazy, with fuzzy little gourds forming all over. Some even started to get pretty big. None made it to first frost, though. If we had not had everything set back so much due to the spring weather, we might actually have gotten some gourds this year.
The luffa gourds in the old kitchen garden were set back dramatically. Last year, they had grown really huge there, vining their way up into the lilac branches above. This year, they barely got tall enough to reach the lilacs at all. The weather just set them back way too much. We barely even got both male and female flowers out of the largest ones.
The summer squash was also set back and did quite poorly. The ones in the pots had to be replanted several times. Unfortunately, even with adding barriers, the kittens found their way onto the pots and would often use them for naps, so that sure didn’t help, either!
The White Scallop patty pans did not make it at all. I gave up after replanting three times.
The Magda did okay, but we only got to harvest a couple of squash from them. The green zucchini did eventually grow and produce, but we had next to nothing to harvest.
The Goldy zucchini in the chimney block planter by the chain link fence produced some harvestable squash, but very few.
In the main garden area, between the onions and shallots, I was sure we’d get nothing at all. The Magda squash never did germinate. We did get a few of G Star patty pans, and they grew really well. There were even a lot of little patty pans developing. Unfortunately, with everything set back so much, we never did get many in a harvestable size before the frost killed them.
The White Scallop squash took so long to germinate, I was sure they’d died off, but we did eventually get two plants. It took even longer for them to start blooming and developing squash. We did have a few just big enough to harvest, at about 2 – 3 inches across, but the frost hit not long after they finally began to produce.
The big surprise and success was the Crespo squash.
We ended up with three surviving transplants, with one having a damaged stem after the bin the transplants were in got knocked over by cats in the sun room. They went into a new small raised bed near the compost ring. We’ve grown there before, but found the area gets soggy, so it was built up a few inches. That alone made a huge difference when the spring rains flooded everything out.
The Crespo squash absolutely thrived in that location. The vines spread so far, I had to train them to not cover the paths I needed open. Some vines grew into the cherry trees behind them, started to climb the branches, and even started to produce dangling squash!
Once again, though, the late start and weather delays slowed the development of squash. The very first one to grow got to a certain size and just stopped growing, becoming a darker green and staying small. Others, however, kept growing and stayed the pale green colour they are supposed to be. The largest ones developed the deeply fissured lumps and bumps this variety is supposed to get.
In the end, only one got to a size that I would consider fully ripe, with two others that got pretty close. With the oldest one included, we got four squash off those vines, though where were quite a few more little ones that never got a chance to get big before the frost hit.
I’m absolutely thrilled. I’ve been trying to grow these for years, and finally succeeded! I look forward to growing them again – this time with seeds saved from the biggest of them.
Thinking of next year
In general, I would say this year’s melons, squash and gourds were an overall success.
We did eventually end up with lots of melons to enjoy, though some had to be left to ripen off the vine for a while.
In the end, though, we basically planted too many. With the melon and winter squash mixes having such high germination rates, there were so many more plants than we intended.
Next year, we will do far fewer.
I’d still like to do Crespo squash again, or maybe try the Zucca melon in the bed the Crespo squash were in.
We got seeds for winter squash my daughter actually requested, though, and never used them. So next year, I want to try those. There is one variety my daughter chose because it’s described as an excellent soup squash. The other two are the Mashed Potato and Baked Potato varieties. I forget which one she actually asked for, so I got both.
I plan much the same with the melons. We will definitely grow melons again, and try another short season watermelon (we had only a single Cream of Saskatchewan melon show up, and it was about the size of a softball). At most, I am thinking only two varieties of melon, plus a watermelon, and only a few plants each.
As for the gourds, those continue to be my “fun” thing to grow. I want to get more luffa seeds from another source – I do want to grow some sponges! – and I want to grow large gourds for crafting purposes. Next year, I’m thinking of trying Canteen gourds again, as those are from a Canadian seed company that grows their seeds even further north than we are.
Conclusion
Aside from some drastic failures, such as the Zucca melon, or semi-failures, like the summer squash, I’d say this past year was a real success. Especially for the winter squash, though the melons did really well, too.
Next year, however, is already going to be very different.
I still had a lot of summer squash seeds from when I accidentally bought three collections instead of one. These included Endeavor Zucchini, Goldy zucchini, Magda squash and Sunburst pattypan squash.
For next year’s garden, we’re trying a winter sowing experiment. For summer squash, all the seeds we have – both old and new, zucchini type and patty pans – were combined, then scattered on a prepared bed in the main garden area. They got planted with some adjustments for spacing, then covered with a deep mulch of leaves and grass clippings for the winter.
In theory, once the snow melts and the mulch is removed so the warmth of the sun can reach the soil, and they should germinate once soil temperature is right.
With so many of these seeds being older, I don’t actually expect a high germination rate. Which would be okay. Otherwise, the bed will become overcrowded and I’d have to thin it.
All I’d really like is to finally get a good crop of summer squash.
Next year’s winter squash will be all new varieties to try, using seeds that were meant for this year’s garden.
We still have melon and watermelon seeds, so I don’t think we’ll buy new varieties to try next year. Same with the gourds, except the luffa. If I want to grow those, I will need to buy more seeds.
The main thing is that we will be growing fewer of them, so that they don’t end up taking over so much of the garden! There are quite a few other things that we were never able to plant simply because we didn’t have the space. Until we can get more progress on those new garden beds and trellis tunnels, we will need to be more selective on what we grow, and how much, for plants that take up so much space!
Corn and beans, in particular, were things we had so many seeds for, in so many varieties. Especially the Red Swan beans, though that was a mistake. I’d ordered a different, purple variety, because purple everything seemed to do quite well here. When I got Red Swan, instead, I contacted Veseys and they sent me another package.
Of Red Swan.
That happened a couple of times before I finally read on the website somewhere that they were out of the purple variety, and Red Swan as what they were sending out instead!
Oops.
When it came to beans, I’d hope to plant both bush and pole beans, in a variety of colours. I also wanted to try the beans my mother gave me, that trace back to what she used to grow here, when I was a child.
That didn’t happen. We simply didn’t have the space to plant many beans at all this year.
It was much the same with corn. We had many varieties to choose from. Mostly, I just wanted to have three types. The purple Montana Morado, the Tom Thumb popcorn, and one of the short season sweet varieties for fresh eating.
Well… two out of three is pretty good.
The purple corn.
As much as I’d like to grow the kulli corn, the seed source I’d found was out of stock. We’d grown the Montana Morado before a couple of years back (though we though we were getting an acclimated variety of kulli at the time), and they did well until something destroyed them.
This was all that survived from our 2021 garden.
The kulli corn we’d grown last year did absolutely amazing, growing into massive tall stalked that looked so strong an healthy – though high winds did try to take them down!
We had to add a lot of supports to the kulli corn and yellow pear tomatoes, after strong winds.
What they didn’t develop, however, was corn! Not a single tassel or cob!
So we went with the Montana Morado instead.
The Montana Morado got their own bed in the main garden area. I ordered a couple of packets of seeds, because there weren’t many per packet. It still wasn’t a lot, as far as corn goes, but this is an experiment for us. While the plants certainly didn’t thrive like the kulli stalks did last year, they at least produced cobs that we could harvest!
I waffled back and forth about interplanting beans with the corn as a nitrogen fixer, and did end up planting some Red Swan with them, late in the season, but more on that later.
Bonus for wanting the corn to use for flour is, no harvesting until the very end of the season.
There are a couple of things I wanted to do with purple corn. One was to make and try chicha morado, as the very concept of a drink made out of corn fascinated me. The other is to try making corn flour. For this year, the goal was just to have corn to try making flower, though we did try a few cobs for fresh eating.
We got almost exactly 1 cup of kernels. Just enough to try to make into flour, though we don’t have a mill. We were debating where to try the spice grinder in small batches, or the Bullet processor we’d been given, but were concerned the hard kernels would break them.
Then, one night, I heard a terrible crashing noise and went to investigate.
I found the container of kernels on the floor. A cat had somehow knocked it down.
We lost them all.
Every. Single. One.
*sigh*
Final thoughts on Montana Morado/purple corn:
Yes, we plan to try again but, gosh, that was disappointing to lose them all like that! We might wait another year or two before trying again. My source for the kulli seeds has them again, but they are insanely expensive – and in US prices, so quite a bit more, plus shipping, in Canadian dollars.
So that will wait.
The popcorn.
We got the Tom Thumb variety, which only gets a couple of feet tall. This is actually the second year we tried to grow them, but the location we grew them in last year, flooded. This year we planted them in a completely different area, both from the flooding and the purple corn. The two types of corn pollinate at different times, but the extra space reduced the chances of cross pollination, should we want to keep seeds.
When it came time to build frames to cover the raised beds, a priority was put on one that could go over the Tom Thumb corn, to protect it from deer or racoons. I’m rather happy with how it turned out, though I do want to stabilize the corners better.
As with the Montana Morado, these were grown to be harvested after they’d dried on the cob. These didn’t even get taste tested for fresh eating, so it was a very low maintenance crop! One we got a surprising number of cobs out of.
After they had their chance to dry on the cob indoors some more, we got a surprising amount of kernels.
We got almost exactly 6 cups out of them!
Final thoughts on Tom Thumb popcorn
We did a test pop, of course.
They didn’t pop. They just burned.
So we left them to dry longer, and stored them with a desiccant, before doing another test pop.
They still wouldn’t pop.
They’ve had more time to dry out and I’ll try again, but they should be dry enough. I’ve looked up about how to harvest and process kernels for popcorn, and we’ve done all that. The only thing I can see that might be the problem is that they still have too much moisture in them. Yet, they do need to have a bit of moisture in them, as that’s basically what makes popcorn pop.
I don’t know what to make of it!
I think we still have seeds left, but I don’t think we’ll try them again. In a way, it was a waste of space to grow these two varieties of corn, instead of a sweet corn that we could eat, freeze or can. We just didn’t have the space available to grow a third variety.
In the future, I think we’ll try a flour corn again when we have more prepared spaces. If we do find that we like having flour corn and actually use it, we would need to have a much larger space available to grow in, to make enough flour to be useful. That is still years in the future. Until then, we will continue to try small amounts as testers.
Next year, I want to focus more on growing a good, short season variety of corn, and we have seeds for at least two different varieties that fit that bill, ready and waiting to be planted.
Bush beans
In previous years, we have had great success with beans. The first year, we grew three types – yellow, green and purple – in rows about 25 feet long. The purple beans did especially well!
This year, I wanted to grow some bush beans, for their earlier harvest, pole beans for their later harvest, and shelling beans for dry storage.
Once again, we just didn’t have the prepared space for them.
In the end, we planted yellow and green beans in the high raised bed, which is only 9 feet long.
The yellow beans did okay, though a lot of the green beans in particular did not germinate. Most seeds were planted to fill the gabs, they they grew all right this time.
Then… this happened.
Turns out this bed is the perfect height for a hungry deer’s buffet!
We rigged a cover for the bed with poles and netting. Amazingly, the beans recovered, and we actually got some harvests!
Not a lot, but enough to include in our meals. Nowhere near enough for freezing.
Eventually, we were able to cover the bed with one of the garden bed covers we build this summer.
This worked out really well, as the netting could be lifted, and the openings of the fence wire used in the cover were wide enough to fit our arms through, so we didn’t have to remove the cover to harvest the beans. The only down side is that this netting is insane for catching on things!
One thing I found was that the slugs managed to get up into that bed!
This was a very bag year for slugs, but that will be covered more when we talk about the squash.
Still the beans did remarkably well under the circumstances!
Final thoughts on bush beans
While we will probably continue to experiment with varieties until we find ones we really like and can save seeds for, bush beans will probably be a staple crop for us. Especially purple ones, which seem to do best for some reason. Bush beans don’t need much done for them, and they are ready to harvest earlier than pole beans. Since we planted so few of them this year, we may not buy more for next year at all, and just go with what we already have.
The Red Swan beans.
There was some confusion when we got these, as I’d forgotten what I’d ordered, then realized what I ordered didn’t come in, and then… well…
I think we ended up with three bags of them, in total, by the time it was figured out!
These are a variety of bean that can be used for both fresh eating, and as a dried bean. They are also climbers. Since we had so many, when I decided to go ahead and interplant beans with the purple corn as nitrogen fixers, this was the variety I planted. I honestly did not expect them to have enough season left to produce edible beans, so it was a real surprise when they did!
They even got big enough to harvest!
They do turn green when cooked, rather than keep their red colour.
While they managed to grow pods, there was no chance they’d reach full maturity for harvesting dried seed pods. Which is okay. Having any pods at all from these was unexpected! They never even got big enough to climb the corn stalks.
Final thoughts on Red Swan beans, pole beans and dry beans
We will definitely be planting these again, with some left to mature for dry bean collection, and some for fresh eating, so we can figure out if we like them enough to keep growing. After all, there’s no point in letting all those extra seeds go to waste!
As for pole beans in general, we still want to try other varieties to see what we like, though for next year, we’ll probably go with the ones we got for this year, that never made it into the ground! Pole beans start to reach fresh eating maturity about the time bush beans are done, so having both will keep the harvests coming.
I also want to plant dry bean seeds we saved from last year that we didn’t have the space to plant this year, as well as experimenting with other varieties. We won’t go in that direction too far, though, as none of us enjoy dry beans quite enough to warrant having a lot of them. Mostly, having them will be part of our food storage and self sufficiency goals.
Peas.
Finally, we get to the peas!
This year, we planted a variety of pod peas we’ve grown somewhat successfully before, Dalvay. Previously, we’d grown them on trellises near the pole beans, way off in what will be our food forest area, as part of our efforts to amend the soil. Peas have yet to do very well for us, though they were growing in far from ideal conditions in that location. We didn’t plant in that area this year. Unfortunately, we didn’t have an alternate location ready for this year, either.
For the peas, though, I decided to plant them along the chain link fence this year, so they already had something to climb.
This area had had tomatoes growing in it for two years previously, and I felt it was time to switch up to a nitrogen fixer.
They did… okay. They certainly didn’t thrive in this location, which I found a bit strange. In fact, nothing did really well in this bed this year.
The peas did start climbing the fence, and we even got a few pods to harvest. Mostly, though, there were just a few pods I could snack on while outside.
Then one morning, I came out to do my rounds and discovered all parts of the pea plants that grew through to the other side of the fence, were gone. They all got eaten down to the same height, for the entire length of the fence!
Yup. It was the deer, again.
They did somewhat recover, only to get nibbled on again later on. We aren’t feeding the deer anymore – it’s just too expensive – so we don’t get the number we used to, but there are still a few that regularly come by. Usually, they just raid the compost pile, but every now and then, they help themselves to our garden.
*sigh*
So not only did they struggle in the new location, but with being eaten by wildlife, too!
Final thoughts on peas.
I like this variety of peas – the few times we were able to harvest them. At some point, I’d like to have enough pod peas to be able to can or freeze them!
As for why they didn’t do well in this location, when things had done well there before, I think the answer is above them.
We’ve been trying to cut back the branches on the Chinese Elm inside the fence, but in some places, that just resulted in new branches growing back even bushier. They are also too high to reach with our extended pole pruning saw.
Basically, that bed no longer gets as much light as it did over the past couple of years and, for the peas, that was a problem.
Since these trees also drop damaging amounts of seeds every spring, they are on the hit list. At some point, they are going to be taken down completely. They do, however, shade the yard and are among the few trees that are a partial wind break for winds from the south. I would rather not take them down until we have something to compensate for what we would lose when they’re gone.
However, given how much damage they are doing, we might just get rid of them and deal with the other issues later.
As for peas, I hope to plant them in different beds next year, and I’d like to try edible pod peas again. Eventually, I’d like to have both as staples in the garden.
In the end, when it comes to peas, beans and corn, the main hurdle we have is prepared beds to plant them in. We need to build a lot more raised beds of varying heights. We do have plans to build pairs of raised beds joined by trellis tunnels that has been started, and will continue to add more as we are able.
It’s the “as we are able” part that’s the problem.
Well, we do what we can with what we have available.
Last year, we grew tomatoes that were processed into tomato paste, rather than sauce. Cooking them down to a paste took many hours, and we filled a case of 125ml jars that got used up nice and fast! So this was something we were quite interested in doing again.
The variety of paste tomatoes we grew – Sophie’s Choice – was chosen partly because it was a rare variety. Yes, we saved seeds. The flavour was a bit on the bland side, so we wanted to try something different this year. So for paste tomatoes, we chose Roma VF.
We also wanted to have tomatoes that were good for fresh eating. I’m the only one in the family that can’t do fresh tomatoes. For these, we went a completely different direction and chose black tomatoes. Indigo Blue Chocolates for an indeterminate variety, and Black Beauty for a determinate variety.
Then, because they did so well a couple of years ago, I went ahead and got more Spoon tomato seeds. We did have a few seeds left, but when I saw the price per packet, and the number of seeds in them, drop to reasonable levels again, I ordered some.
Since then, I’ve started to see people and seed companies talking about Spoon tomatoes, so these miniscule tomatoes seemed to have found a following! These are also the only tomatoes that I can eat fresh, without gagging.
With wanting to have plenty of tomatoes to process into pastes and sauces, the original plan was to grow quite a lot of them. The first seeds we started indoors were the Indigo Blue Chocolate and Black Beauty, in March.
By this time, we had built the cat barrier, which allowed us to set trays on shelves, at least temporarily, and not have to worry about them getting destroyed.
We had a very high germination rate, which meant that when it was time to pot them up, we needed a lot of space!
With the red solo cups, they were first potted up with the soil only half way up. Once they grew big enough to need “potting up” again, we simply added more toil to the top of the cups, burying the stems so they could form more roots.
With our new indoor set up, we were able to start quite a lot of things indoors, but none thrived as well as the tomatoes! Not only did we have a very high germination rate, but we had almost no losses as they were potted up!
Eventually, when things were warm enough, the seedlings were transferred to the sun room, and then hardened off outside, before transplanting into the garden.
We soon found ourselves with a problem.
We were not able to get enough garden beds ready, before all those seedlings needed to be transplanted! The tomatoes got much bigger, faster, than we were ready for.
In the end, we got them into three of our long, low raised beds in the main garden area. One bed was filled with the Roma VF, with only a border of onions around them. We wanted to make sure to have the most of those, for processing later.
With the other two, they were each planted in a single row in the beds they were in, filling the beds half way, length wise, so that the other half could be used for the root vegetables we would plant later and, of course, room for the onions planted as a border around them.
That left the Spoon tomatoes, and at that point, I really didn’t know where to put them. In the end, I stuck a few of them into the retaining wall blocks in the Old Kitchen garden.
There wasn’t a lot of free space for them, but we got a half dozen in. Later on, a last Jiffy Pellet that had Spoon tomatoes in it finally germinated, so I stuck it at the end of the retaining wall, with a tomato plant that had broken in the wind.
That still left us with large numbers of tomato seedlings of all varieties – and nowhere to plant them!
I did find someone we could give a bunch of them to, but there were far more than they needed. In the end, I got permission to leave them outside the general store and post office for our little hamlet, with signs saying what they were, and recommending that seeds be saved. We had lots of peppers to give away, too!
I’m happy to say, they were all taken. I hope they grew well for people!
With the tomato beds, we were able to wind a soaker hose and sprinkler hoses throughout the beds so that they could be watered from below, which did free up quite a bit of time! I could just hook up the hose and go do something else, for most of the beds.
As for how ours did, I’ll talk about each variety.
The first that we were able to start harvesting from were the Roma VF. While they did start out rather well, they did get hit with tomato blight, and we ended up harvesting all the tomatoes, then pulling the plants for burning, rather than composting.
If you go through the Instagram slideshow of photos, you’ll see we were also able to harvest some Indigo Blue and Black Beauty tomatoes, too.
Both varieties of black tomatoes took a long time to ripen. Because of their colour, it was really hard to tell when they were ready to pick! Both were supposed to get a red blush on their bottoms, but ultimately, we had to go by the squeeze test to see if they were ready.
Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes
The Indigo Blue started to ripen first. These are a smaller tomato which, unfortunately, did have a tendency to split rather quickly, once they ripened. They have a nice, smooth shape to them, and their colours are lovely.
The Black Beauties, on the other hand, took a lot longer to ripen. They got so huge, so fast, and then… nothing. We kept checking them and they were rock hard for the longest time. They also had a tendency to split, more than the Indigo Blues did. Then, when we could finally pick some, their uneven shapes made them harder to work with. As for the flavour, my family was unimpressed. They did not live up to their descriptions on the website.
Then there were the Spoon tomatoes!
Where they were planted was not an ideal spot at all. It’s shaded by one of the ornamental apple trees, on the south corner. While they did grow quite tall on their bamboo stake supports, they did not get as lush and healthy as they did the first time we grew them, against the chain link fence. They were transplanted a bit late, too, so they took longer to ripen than before. As a result, we didn’t get a lot of them, relatively speaking, but there were certainly enough to snack on while we were out and about in the yard.
At the end of the season, when we got hit by our first frost, we harvested all the tomatoes left (except the Spoon tomatoes; we left them alone), bringing in the ripest ones, then spreading the greenest ones out on screens under the market tent to ripen.
Here, you can see the last of the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes set out in the sun, before they got transferred to screens.
We were able to process a sink full of Roma VF tomatoes into sauce for the freezer.
We had too many other things going on, though, and ended up freezing a lot of the tomatoes whole, to either cook as they are, process into more sauce, or into tomato paste. These can wait until slower, winter days.
The frustrating thing was all the left over, slowly ripening tomatoes. We just didn’t have the space to store them and keep them handy. Last year, we had a bin full in the dining room that the family snacked out of regularly, We weren’t able to do that this year. The end result was that many tomatoes started going bad before they could be eaten. Ultimately, way too many of them ended up in the compost heap, simply because they were forgotten.
Surprise tomatoes!
The last two years, we grew tomatoes in a bed along the chain link fence. This year, we grew other tings in there, but several self seeded tomatoes showed up, too!
It was September 8 when I transplanted them, and our average first frost date is September 10, so there was no way they’d have time to mature, but I figured I’d give them a chance! They did actually start to bloom. Even when the first mild frosts did, they were protected by the plastic rings I’d put around them and survived.
Final Thoughts on Tomatoes
As far as starting the seeds goes, they did amazingly well! I’m still blown away by the almost 100% germination rate. The transplants did really well, and I’m glad we were able to give the last ones away. Once they were in the ground, they all did mostly good, but I think our growing conditions and soil issues prevented them from doing as well as they should have.
Roma VF
As these ended up being harvested early due to tomato blight, I don’t know that they reached their full flavour potential. The family enjoyed them, but didn’t find the flavour exceptional. The tomato sauce we made was good but, again, the tomato flavour was nothing to write home about. We will try a different variety of paste tomato, next year.
Black Beauty
These are a pretty tomato, for sure, but they took so much longer to ripen, and had a real problem with splitting easily. My family was unimpressed with the flavour, and didn’t like working with the lumpy, bumpy shapes. I’m glad we tried them, but we will not be growing them again.
Indigo Blue Chocolate
These went over much better. They’re a smaller tomato, but still adequate for slicing and using in sandwiches. My husband likes to just eat the tomatoes with some salt, and quite enjoyed these that way. They were nicely productive, too. We will be growing these again.
Spoon
For all the set backs these had, they did surprisingly well. They’re also just a really fun tomato. I look forward to growing them again, just for the fun of them. Plus, they are the only ones I can actually eat, and it’s fun to have these tiny little tomatoes to snack on while working in the garden. Plus, being a rarer variety, I like the idea of keeping them going.
The challenge is going to be having enough space to grow the amount of tomatoes we would need for our long term goals. At some point, we want to be able to can and freeze sauces and pastes sufficient to last a year – basically, from harvest to harvest. For that, we’ll need to grow more tomatoes, which means we need to have more space to grow them in.
Which means we need to get our butts in gear to have enough raised beds for everything we want to grow. Even the low raised beds we have now, which have been amended for several years, will need to be made at least a little higher, with more amending.
All in good time. Little by little, it’ll get done!
First, the garlic, which was planted in the fall of 2022.
We planted garlic in one low raised bed, starting with cloves we’d saved from the one successful bed of garlic planted the previous year.
First, we had to reclaim and prepare the bed from the summer’s crop. Of our saved garlic, we got only 24 big cloves out of the six bulbs we kept! We then bought more garlic locally, rather than ordering it in, this time trying a soft neck garlic for the first time.
So how did they turn out in the summer?
Apparently, not good enough to warrant getting pictures of the bed as it grew. At least not any I uploaded into my dwindling WordPress media storage.
We seemed to have lost quite a few to the winter cold. I’d say we had almost a 40% loss on our saved garlic, which was hit the hardest. Interestingly, it was the soft neck garlic that did the best, as far as survival. We harvested all the scapes from both the hard neck varieties well before soft neck variety produced scapes. All produced decent, if not particularly large, bulbs at harvest time. As I write this, we still have some left to use for cooking. We did not save any for replanting. We just didn’t have enough to make it worthwhile.
Final thoughts on garlic.
We seem to have a problem with losing our garlic to the cold over the winter. For this fall’s planting, we got just one variety. They were all planted in the Old Kitchen garden, closer to the house. We made efforts to plant them more in the middle of the beds, as the outer edges of raised beds will freeze faster. That resulted in the 3 pounds of garlic we ordered being spread out over 4 raised beds. They also got a deep mulch. This winter should be a mild one, though, so the risk of loss due to cold will be reduced, too.
Also, we need to plant a lot more garlic. That one bed, even if we hadn’t lost as many as we did, was not enough to meet our usage needs. We could easily plant two or three times as many garlic. This fall, we planted 3 pounds of seed garlic, and while it’s more than what we planted last year, more would never be a bad thing!
We do have raspberries here that my mother has been growing for decades, descended from plants I used to pick from as a child. They are almost a wild variety. For our food forest, we want to include different varieties that mature at different times of the year. We’d purchased a red variety of raspberries a couple of years ago, but the deer kept eating them. They are protected now, but are not recovering well. So when these purple raspberries were planted, in an area we’d planted peas and beans in previous years, we made sure they were protected from deer.
They did rather well, too. These were supposed to be first year canes, so it was a surprise when we saw them starting to bloom. Yes, they actually produced fruit!
No new canes that would produce fruit next year emerged, though. Which means that when they died back after fruiting… well, it looks like they’ve just died.
I keep forgetting to contact Veseys about them.
[Edit: I have since remembered to contact them, and have been told this is normal, and they should start growing in the spring.]
Final thoughts of raspberries
We all love raspberries. This was actually a pretty good year for them, and the old raspberry bushes produced quite well. Especially since we cut away the crab apple tree that suddenly died of a fungal disease last year. It had been shading the patch quite a lot. This year, that end of the patch got a lot more sun, and they clearly thrived.
As for the purple Royalty raspberries, we did get enough to taste, and do like them. We will look to replacing the dead ones, while also planning to get a gold variety, plus another red variety. The long term goal is to have lots of raspberries from June through to August.
Our first apple tree
We have plenty of crab apple trees, most of which are dying of a fungal disease, so we have to be really careful about getting new apples. This spring, we got our first eating apple tree; a Liberty apple. It’s actually a zone 4 variety, so we needed to also give thought on where to plant it. It needed to get the full warmth of the sun, while also being sheltered from the cold winds. In winter, it will need extra protection to keep it from freezing.
For this, we chose an area in the west yard, closer to the house. There are ornamental crab apples nearby for cross pollination. We’ve got tulips planted here, which need protecting from the deer, with dead and dying trees that needed clearing away. So that all got taken care of, and the apple tree was planted closer to a hedge of lilacs for extra protection from the elements, while still getting that full sun.
We also got a pair of mulberry trees that are rated to zone 3. When we ordered one tree from Veseys, they did not have the size available for 2023, so we got two smaller ones, instead. They were so tiny, we ended up not transplanting them. Instead, they got potted up and kept indoors. As I write this, they are much, much larger, and their leaves have turned yellow and are dropping for the winter. If all goes well, they will come out of dormancy in the spring, we’ll harden them off and plant them in our food forest area when we are past our last frost date, in June, next year.
Final thoughts on apples (and mulberries)
Finding apples that are good for fresh eating, that are also hardy to our zone, is a challenge, but they are out there. So why did we get a variety that’s zone 4?
I’m a sucker for punishment?
The variety had qualities we were looking for, from flavour to storability. Hopefully, it will work out, and acclimate to our winters over time.
When it comes to apples, one tree should produce enough for a family, but they also often need another variety for cross pollination. So we might pick up one more variety of apple in the near future. What we really need to watch out for, though, is that fungal disease that’s killing off our crab apples. I’ve been researching about it, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Once it’s in the soil, it doesn’t go away. So if an area is badly infected, like where the row of crab apples are now, we would not be able to plant apples there again and expect healthy trees. Yes, there are ways to treat the tree, but it’s not really an option for us right now.
As for the mulberry trees, I’m pretty excited about those. I’ve never had mulberry before, but my mother remembers they had a huge mulberry tree behind their barn, when she was a child in Poland. As a food tree, they are known to be productive to the point of nuisance, so they will be planted well away from the house. There’s a gap in the lilac hedge on the north side of the property that needs to be filled in. That would be a good place to transplant these. Eventually, they should grow into towering shade trees, so we need to make sure they’re not going to cause problems for other things we want to plant around there.
Last minute addition: saffron crocus!
This year, I was really excited to find out Veseys got a Canadian supplier for saffron crocuses, acclimated to zone 4! So we took a chance and ordered some.
These were planted in a trench in the fenced off area about the tulips and the Liberty apple tree this fall. For the winter, they got a deep mulch to protect them. If they survive, they can be expected to produce flowers with harvestable stamens in the fall of 2024, and each year, they can potentially triple as they expand.
Of course, every year, they will acclimate more to our climate zone, too.
Final thoughts on saffron crocuses
We don’t really use a lot of saffron, so if even a few survive to produce next year, that will be enough for our needs. Long term, if they do well, who knows. We might eventually have enough saffron to be worth selling at the local markets or something. If not… well, it was worth a try!
Recovering Strawberries and Asparagus
Last year, our purple asparagus bed was flooded out. It didn’t really affect the strawberries that were interplanted with them, but the asparagus crowns were buried 2 ft deep. I wasn’t sure any survived. In the end, we did get some asparagus plants growing, but they have been set back, at least a year. This should have been the first year we could harvest any, but that just wasn’t going to happen.
As for the strawberries, they recovered quite nicely after the winter and were soon producing.
We ended up rigging up protection around the bed, and the strawberries did recover. In fact, they began producing again, quite late in the season, because of the deer damage, and were still trying to produce, right up until the first frost hit them!
Final thoughts on strawberries and asparagus
We planted a purple variety of asparagus, and the plan had been to plant a green variety the next year, and to keep adding more every year until we had enough for our family to enjoy regularly. Well, that didn’t happen. The challenge is, asparagus is a 20 year commitment. We have to find places to plant them that will not be used for anything else for 20 years, because I sure don’t want to be transplanting them in the future. Since we’re still struggling to clear up certain areas, we just don’t have the space that can be used that way.
After last year’s flooding, we now have an idea of where the more susceptible areas are that we either have to avoid, or where we’d have to make a bed raised high enough that flooding won’t be an issue.
So, yes, we do still intend to increase our asparagus beds, with both green and purple varieties. It’s just been delayed. As for the asparagus we have right now, I’m hoping they recovered enough that they will do better next year. I don’t expect we’ll have enough to harvest next year, though. Maybe in 2025.
Asparagus is definitely a long term planning sort of thing!
As for the strawberries, these were purchased transplants that were interplanted with the asparagus because I’d read they do well together. Over time, however, I am now thinking to get more strawberries to interplant around the food forest area, as a sort of ground cover, rather than having dedicated beds to just strawberries.
Strawberries from seed
Now we move on to an impulse purchase that did surprisingly well. I got a kit to grow strawberries from seed. It was marketed for kids, but strawberries are strawberries, and we just can’t get enough strawberries in this household!
What started out as this…
… became this.
Yes, we actually got a few mature strawberries!
These got transplanted in the wattle weave bed along with some herbs, peppers, eggplant and luffa. Eventually, the Old Kitchen garden will be mostly an herb garden. I honestly didn’t know if they’d make it, or if they’d produce this year at all, they were so tiny.
The kit did not say what variety the strawberries were and, from the looks of the berries, they seem to be a type of wild strawberry. We only got maybe 4 or 5 ripe berries to try, and they were tasty, but not as tasty as the variety that were bought as transplants.
Final thoughts on strawberries from seed
Since this was a spur of the moment experiment, my expectations were not high, so it doesn’t mean much to say they exceeded expectations! Once transplanted, they did really well. I don’t think I’ll grow strawberries from seed again, though. The ones purchased as transplants were more productive (even after the deer got to them) and much tastier. We’ll see if these survive the winter. They are mulched, but they were planted along the edge of the bed, so are still susceptible to freezing. For all I know, they will produce larger berries once firmly established. We shall see.
Sunchokes
I kept forgetting about the Sunchokes, aka: Jerusalem Artichokes, this year! They are in a permanent bed next to the asparagus, and this is their second year. Last year, we’d planted 10 tubers in two rows. In the fall, I harvested half the bed, replanted 5 of the largest tubers, leaving the other half of the bed untouched. The sunchokes came up quite well from both halves. They grew nice and tall and…
That’s it.
Like last year, they never boomed. I never even saw any buds forming.
This was all we harvested last year.
I was going to harvest some this fall but, in the end, I just left them. We should have more to harvest, next fall. Instead, we cut the stalks and lay them down on the bed and covered them with a grass clipping mulch. As Sunchokes are native to Canada, they probably don’t need a mulch at all, but it won’t hurt.
There are people on some of the local gardening groups on Facebook I’m part of that also grow sunchokes. I saw several people talking about how they’ve been growing them for years, and they have never bloomed, wondering what they were doing wrong. Some old time gardeners have said theirs have never boomed, either, but they still get a good harvest every year. At least I know it’s not just here!
Final thought on Sunchokes
So, obviously, I don’t have much to say about the for this year, since we skipped harvesting them. When we did try them, we liked them, so I do want to let them grow and multiply, so that we can have larger harvests. After learning that other people in our zone that have grown them for years and never had them bloom, I guess that means we don’t have to transplant them somewhere else or something. We can just leave them were they are. Hopefully, next fall, we’ll be able to get a good harvest out of them.
Everything else
This is a follow up on the things we planted the year before.
We planted a bundle of 5 sea buckthorn. Two survived. They are still surviving and growing bigger. Eventually, we will get more to add to the privacy hedge. If all goes well, we’ll have at least one male sea buckthorn, and will eventually get berries.
We planted two highbush cranberry. Last year, the deer ate one of them, it recovered, and they at it again. I put an old saw horse of that one to protect it as it recovered again. This year, it was growing well, as was the other one, which is still unprotected. Amazingly, towards the end of the season, the one with the saw horse over it to protect it got eaten again! Given how late in the season this happened, I don’t know if it will recover.
Deer chewed Highbush Cranberry.
We planted 30 silver buffalo berry in two curving rows, to eventually act as a privacy screen. It looks like we’ve lost 2 of them, possibly 3. One, I expected, as I’d accidentally pulled it up last year while weeding, but one or two may have died before fall, too. Some of them are getting pretty big, while others are still quite small. With last spring’s flooding, one end of the rows was completely underwater, and they handled it just fine. It will be a few years, yet, before they get large enough to start producing berries.
We had planted 6 Korean pine in the outer yard. We have 4 survivors. This year, they were still quite tiny, and are still covered in their chicken wire cages for protection.
From what I’ve read, they grow very slowly for the first 5 years, then start to really shoot up, and eventually become very large trees. We got 3 yr old seedlings, which means this was year 5 for them. We shall see if they get their first growth spurt next year!
Final thoughts on our food forest.
Our long term goal is to have as many perennial food plants as we can manage. Fruits, nuts, berries, tubers, whatever. We’ve got a good start on it, and hope to add more to it every year. For some things, like the sea buckthorn and silver buffalo berry, these are multipurpose plantings. They should be prolific enough – eventually – to provide winter food for the birds, while the bushes themselves will be privacy screens and living fences. The far flung areas we’d planted corn, beans, squash, etc. last year were done to help prepare and amend the soil for permanent planting, and this year, only one small area was used to grow squash in. Next year, we hope to plant a fruit tree or something in that spot.
We are trying to be very selective on what we plant and where. We need to leave lanes open, wide enough to drive through, to be able to get at fences, etc. There is also the lane we will keep open because there is a telephone line buried under it. That means we need to consider root systems, as well, when locations are decided on.
The one thing we planted out there this year – the Royalty raspberries – appears to ultimately be a failure, since they produced this year, instead of next year, and died back. So very little progress was made in that area this year. We do have some black currant bushes that I am thinking of transplanting out there. They are closer to the house, but under trees. They bloom in the spring, but have almost no berries. They simply don’t get enough sunlight.
Over time, we will keep adding more to the area, as the budget allows. Pears, plums and gooseberries are on the list, and I’m seriously considering transplanting our haskap bushes. The “male” haskap, which is supposed to be the right variety to cross pollinate the two “female” varieties, is done blooming before the two other even start. I think they’re just planted in a bad spot. Too many tree roots, and too many of those perennial flowers that my mother planted there. Even though I’ve cleared them away from around the haskaps, they get so big, they still cover the bushes – and the haskaps are supposed to get big enough that it shouldn’t be an issue! We shall see.
The experiments.
Last year, there were two things we planted that, while annuals, could be treated as perennials, because they self seed so easily. Wonderberry and Aunt Molly Ground Cherries. With those, I let them drop fruit to see if they would come back this year.
They did not.
We might still get some ground cherries in the future, but they were much more fragile a plant than I expected. They broke easily, as I reached under to find and pick ripe berries, and the patch itself got flattened by wind and had to be supported. If I do plant them in the future, I’d want to have some sort of supports for them, and I don’t know if they’re worth the extra effort!
That is where we are at now, with our fall plantings and perennials. Not a lot of progress there, this year, unfortunately. When it comes to perennials – especially trees – it can take years before they start producing, so delays in progress add years, rather than months, to having food production! At least things like berries produce faster and fill the time gap a bit.
Since moving out here, our gardening plans have changed a few times. Our original 5 year plan had us starting to garden around year 5, after focusing on cleaning and clearing first the inner yard in the first two years, then the outer yard over the next 2 or 3 years, before eventually moving beyond the outer yard, which is rented out.
It’s now been 6 years. The inner yard – specifically the spruce grove – is still not cleared and cleaned up. We had to start on parts of the outer yard earlier. Some things had to be dropped completely.
Gardening, however, started early, and I’m glad it did. We started off with a couple of reclaimed patches of ground. Each year, the garden beds were expanded and we grew more things.
Until this year.
All the best laid plans, indeed! We ended up with a garden perhaps half the size of the previous year.
Early in 2023, though, we still thought we’d be able to do a larger garden. Many seeds were purchased, and orders were placed for things that would be delivered in time for spring planting. Here is a video I did, going through our seeds – old and new – and starting our onions and luffa.
Even in April, I still thought we’d be able to meet most of our goals, and was able to get started preparing a couple of low raised beds.
I also did a spring garden tour in April, where I talked about our plans.
Among the things that changed was the shed we were supposed to get, that would have been fixed up to be a chicken coop. The person that had the shed to get rid of ended up throwing it away. It did not survive the winter.
Getting the dead trees to build more raised beds didn’t work out as planned. Slowly over the summer, we did get wood harvested, but felling dead spruces resulted in trees getting hung up and stuck on other trees.
That was just the beginning of plans that fell through.
All was not a loss, though. For what we did manage to get, there were some successes and failures, as there are every year, and that’s what I’ll be going through in this series of blog posts analyzing our 2023 garden. With what we’ve learned in the past few years, we should be able to make adjustments and do better next year.
I tried to do a head count this morning, while feeding the yard cats. I got either 34 or 35. Rolando Moon was not around, but Sad Face was there this time.
I still don’t know which ones are the new ones. All 15 cats in this photo are regulars, as far as I can tell. There’s that spotty grey tabby, on the water house roof, that I was talking about yesterday, that I hadn’t seen in a while.
I ended up spending most of the day in the van with a friend, two cats and our aquarium fish in a bucket, while my daughter took a walk around downtown until I messaged her to come back.
What a mess the whole thing turned out to be.
It gives me the willies, just thinking about it.
On a completely different note…
I’m going against my brother’s wishes today. Partly.
Last week, I got a call from someone interested in some of the old vehicles we’ve got lying around. He’s interested in restoring vehicles which, to me, is a lot better than just selling them for scrap! I did tell him it was my brother that owned the place, and we were going to wait until the weather was better for him to come out. He called last night, and talked about his son and a friend coming over, late this morning. I did tell him, he wasn’t going to be able to get anything out right away. He’d have to see, to understand.
Then, of course, I told my brother. I would never sell anything without talking to him, first, since this is all his stuff.
My brother said, don’t let them in.
???
We were messaging, so he called and we talked about it.
There were a few concerns he had. The first was that this was someone trying to take advantage of me and offer less than the vehicles are worth – and I sure as heck wouldn’t know what they’re really worth. Still, I think my brother doesn’t realize just how far gone some of those vehicles are. I didn’t even know which one the guy was interested in; he’d said a Ford truck, but there are several of those!
Another concern my brother had is that these vehicles have basically been used as storage. They have all sorts of things in them he might want to keep. He’d have to go looking through them all, even if we were just going to call a scrap dealer, to make sure nothing was hauled away that shouldn’t be. That won’t happen until spring, at the earliest.
And finally, there’s the question of how to transfer ownership. As far as we know, none of these vehicles have any sort of ownership papers left. It wouldn’t matter for something going for scrap, but if a vehicle is going to be restored, registered and insured, there needs to be some sort of paper trail. It’s something he and my parents had to deal with, years ago, and it was a major pain to find a workaround.
So when the guy called this morning, as I asked him to, so I could open the gate, I told him I had bad news and explained the situation.
In the end, though, I decided to let them come and take a look. I honestly don’t think they’ll find anything worth buying, but looking wouldn’t hurt. It turns out he’s not only interested in looking at the ones in the old hay yard, but was wanting to see the vehicles way out in the car graveyard, too. He knows nothing will change hands, but he will bring along pen and paper and write out which (if any) he’s interested in, and an offer. I can then pass that on to my brother.
I hope my brother understands that I’m actually trying to help him out with this. Of course, if they don’t see anything they’re interested in, it won’t matter either way. In the end, we really need to get those old vehicles out. If for no other reason than they are a hazard for the renter’s cows!
So I’ve got the gate open, and am keeping an eye on the security camera live feed for them, and we’ll go for a walk together. The guy is even bringing his wife along. 😊
I’m happy to say, they are recovering nicely. You’d never know they’d all just undergone surgery!
In this photo, you’re being looked at by Shadow in the Dark. The boys definitely seemed to get more energetic faster, which makes sense, since they didn’t have open surgery like the ladies.
The other kitten is Pom Pom, who is just getting big enough to be done. He’s quite a bit bigger than his siblings, The Beast and Soot Sprite! Hard to believe they’re from the same litter.
Also, he is getting some very distinctive white fur on his sides. I’ve noticed that in some of the outside kittens, too. Pointy Baby was the first cat we’d see to develop that pattern, which suggests there’s some paternal genetic connection between them.
Anyhow. All is good with the post-op kitties, and they are so very happy to be allowed out of the room again!
Today, I had a chance to experiment with cornbread again. Last time, I did a strawberry version. This time, I did the exact same thing, except with bananas.
It’s still cooling as I write this and oh, my, does it look good! I can’t wait to try it! This time, we have enough extra that if it goes over well, we can make another one.
Next time I experiment, I think I’ll try apple.
On a completely different note, as we come up to our 6 year anniversary of all 4 of us finally together again, here at the farm, I went looking at some of my posts from back then.
Oh, my.
My husband and younger daughter were already here, and today was the last day my older daughter and I had to get things done, before the movers arrived in the morning.
We had no idea just how bad that would turn out.
Reading over those old posts again makes me shudder.
I know at some point, my husband and I will likely have to move somewhere that is more accessible for limited mobility, but at this point, I’m still thinking, I never want to move again!!!!
Thank God my brother now owns the property. If my mother were still our “landlord”, we probably would have thrown in the towel and found a way to move out, years ago.
Yep. We’ve been plugging away on here for 6 years now!
At this time six years ago, my husband, with our younger daughter as his mobility assistant, had flown out earlier than planned, as my FIL was suddenly hospitalized and we weren’t sure he would make it. They stayed here at the farm, with a car loaned to them so they could travel to the hospital in the city. The house had been empty for two years and it showed. Thankfully, my FIL recovered and is still with us.
Meanwhile, my older daughter and I were doing everything we could to sell, give away, donate or throw away as much as we could, while packing other things in preparation for the movers, and for our own drive out in the middle of November.
In the middle of all this, we decided to start this blog to document our adventures getting here, and living here. We had such plans!
A lot sure has changed in six years!
We still have plans, but things had to shift quite a bit. Some have pretty much fallen off the priority list entirely, while others that were intended for later had to be dealt with earlier.
For all the unexpected challenges we’ve faced, I’m still glad we were able to make the move. From what I hear, things were we used to live have only gotten much, much worse (don’t ever live in a housing co-op, unless, perhaps, if it’s managed by a separate, professional property management company!!). I’m also incredibly thankful we weren’t living in the city when the world went insane in 2020, and still hasn’t recovered from.
While cleaning up my parents’ stuff in the first couple of years, I found an old journal of mine, written “to” my husband. In it, I’d found long forgotten dreams and plans of being able to buy this farm from my parents (unrealistic dreams, since my parents intended the land to go to my brothers; girls didn’t get land!) and build as self sufficient a life as possible – what today would be considered homesteading and off grid living, but no one really used those terms that way, back then.
It’s taken over 30 years, and some very unexpected twists and turns in our lives, yet here we are. Getting old and rather broken, but with the help of our daughters and the excellent stewardship of my brother as our “landlord”, we’re actually starting to live that dream.
It’s that time of year! Time to look over our goals for the past year, see what got done, and reset new goals for 2023.
One major goal we had was to get the branch piles chipped. We got an estimate and planned on getting it done slowly over the year, as we could afford it.
With that in mind, I contacted the tree company and asked for an estimate to get all the dead trees cut down, but left as whole as possible, so we could salvage the wood for lumber. It would simply be faster and safer to hire someone. Unfortunately, to get them all done, it would take a 4 man crew and the estimate was $4000. Not something we could afford. Even just doing 5 trees closest to the house was beyond budget. It took until August before we could do it, and we just booked them for 3 hours (what we had a budget for) to do the big branch pile.
Well, that didn’t quite happen. Instead, they came and stayed all day. It took 8 1/2 hours, but they did the big branch pile in the outer yard, two in the maple grove, and one at the far end of the main garden area. We paid what we had cash for, and were told we could pay the rest off as we are able. We’ve got one more payment left! We also now have a lovely large pile of wood chips for the garden and tree plantings.
There is still one large branch pile in another area, but that one is getting so old and broken down, they might not be able to chip much of it. We are still clearing things in the spruce grove – something that we will slowly continue working on, probably for several more years. With the wood chipper we have, we should be able to clean up a decent amount of it ourselves, but will probably be calling them in, with their huge, industrial sized chipper, again.
Meanwhile, they left us with neatly stacked logs, cut to about 4 ft lengths, some of which we could salvage for other things, like this small garden bed, and some temporary barriers.
Eventually, the logs along the perimeter will be replaces with a low rock wall.
So getting one goal accomplished – getting the branch piles chipped – has helped us accomplish other goals, like build up some garden areas, and get some much needed mulching done.
There were several other gardening goals we worked towards, with some met, some partially met, and some delayed. As you saw in the chipping video, we got berry producing shrubs planted. Three of the five sea buckthorn didn’t make it and will need to be replaced, and I’m not sure if the one deer damaged highbush cranberry will make it, but the silver buffalo berry did quite well – which is surprising, since at one end, they all ended up under water! The Korean Pine was planted, with four out of six surviving the year.
We will be getting an apple tree and a new, cold hardy variety of mulberry in the spring. The diseased and dying crab apples still need to be taken down. We are looking to get three different colours of raspberries as well, each maturing at different times.
Our goal to expand the gardens and increase our food self sufficiency progressed, but didn’t succeed very well, due to flooding and a really bad growing year. Which means that this year, we’ll be working to improve things more, taking into account what areas saw the most flooding damage. Building up high and middle height raised beds will be a big part of that, as well as permanent trellis tunnels with middle height raised beds at their bases.
We didn’t accomplish more clean up in the spruce grove, mostly due to flooding issues and then never being able to get back to it once the flooding was done. So that goal continues. We’ll just have to slowly keep taking down those dead spruces ourselves, so we can use the wood to build raised beds with.
Speaking of wood to salvage…
One of the shed roofs finally collapsed with the heavy spring snows. I started to do some clean up of the collapsed roof and discovered much of the roof had forged nails in it!
As we continue to clean up and dismantle the shed, we plan to salvage the forged nails. We should be able to salvage a decent amount of useable wood that can be used to build something else.
Getting chicks in the spring of 2022 was a goal that was not met, nor were we able to build a chicken coop. I want to build a mobile, winter hardy chicken coop. This past summer, I took a look at an old wagon in the car graveyard that has a chassis that looks like it can be salvaged, though the wooden walls are quite rotted. I’ve since learned from my brother that this wagon is close to 100 years old, and he was quite pleased that we are interested in finding a way to save it and use it. I’m hoping we can use some of the salvaged wood from the shed and be able to build a chicken coop on the wagon base, but I’ll have to empty it and drag it out, before we can see for sure what we have to work with.
For me, building a chicken coop and having chickens is a priority, but my daughters are not on board. They are convinced having chickens will be far more expensive – particularly in vet bills – than we can afford. There is another priority that we can all agree on, though, and that is the outdoor kitchen. It will be built about where the collapsed shed is; in front of it or, if we can get it dismantled fast enough, in the same spot as the shed. It will be built mostly of whatever material we can scrounge up, but there are some things we will need to buy for it. If we can arrange a trip to a salvage yard, we should be able to get most of what we need – if budget allows.
Another ongoing goal is cleaning up that horrid junk pile. We still need to hire someone to haul it away, but it’s jut not working out. It is, however, getting slightly smaller.
We finally got this pile of unsalvageable logs from the branch pile, built up over burnable garbage too large for the burn barrel, burned. In the process, I started burning the old, rotten pallets I’d cleared from where there used to be a wood pile for the furnace. We were going to have those hauled to the dump, too, but we may was well burn them as we can, rather than pay someone to haul it away. If we only burn them in the one spot, when they’re done we can clean up the nails and stuff out of the ashes, later.
So… goals for 2023.
Continue to expand the garden, with permanent structures. That will require cutting down more dead spruce trees for the wood to build high raised beds like the one we’ve got so far (which did very well in its first growing year). We will also need to build permanent trellis tunnels, plus portable trellises that can be used in different beds, year after year.
We need to add to our food forest, with fruit trees and berry bushes. We really should be planting more nut trees, too, since they take so long before producing, but that will depend on the budget.
We need to dig up the buried hose that stretches from the house to the tap in the old garden area and replace it, now that the branch pile that was in the way is gone. What I would like to do is get a heavy duty hose and run it through a buried pipe. If we do it right, we’d be able to replace the hose, as needed, without having to dig a trench again. I suspect there will be issues with very large tree roots as we dig up the old hose, though. Some of them were not there when the tap was originally installed. Still, having that tap would make watering the garden much handier, plus it would allow us to set up a vegetable washing station, if we want.
We need to dismantle the collapsed shed, salvaging what we can in the process.
We need to build a mobile, winter hardy chicken coop.
We need to start on our outdoor kitchen, even if it’s just to build a timber frame and a roof.
Oh, my younger daughter has a goal of building a forge so she can start working on blacksmithing.
The cordwood outdoor bathroom is still a goal, but we need to get a certain group of dead spruce trees cleared first, since they will be felled and hauled out through the area we plan to build it. Until then, the old outhouse will have to do! It still needs its roof repaired and the outside painted, but it was surrounded by water for a long time, and we never got to it when the water receded. With the flooding we got, we now know we’ll have to build up the base for the cordwood building higher than the current ground level than I’d originally thought. It didn’t quite have standing water there, but it sure was close!
It will be at least a year before we can start on the cordwood outdoor bathroom. Perhaps we’ll be able to do a smaller cordwood practise building somewhere else, in the mean time. A replacement garden shed, maybe.
We really need more storage sheds. The ones we’ve got are mostly collapsing and falling apart, and the one that isn’t, is full of my parent’s stuff, that we’re basically not allowed to get rid of. There’s lots of useable stuff in there. We just can’t get at it! That will be a multi-year project. Among the limitations is the cost of lumber, and having to keep them small enough that we don’t need building permits for them. Nothing exceeding 100 sq ft, and nothing wired for electricity or plumbed. Anything that’s open ended, like hay or animal shelters, or things that can be moved, don’t need a permit and can be much larger.
Hhmm… I’m glad I looked that up. Our outdoor kitchen plan is open ended. That means, no permit needed, even if it goes over 100 sq ft. Good to know!
I would really, really like to have the well in the old pump shack checked and see if it can be activated again. At the very least, the pump itself needs new leather gaskets. It’s entirely possible that it’s the only thing that needs to be done, though I suspect work will need to be done in the pipes. Water is our major weak spot. If we lose electricity, we have no pumps. No pumps means no water. Having the outhouse and being able to cook on the BBQ or the fire pit is great, but not having access to water is a much bigger deal.
I think those are our primary goals for 2023. I’m sure some will change and new ones will be added, as circumstances dictate.
Hopefully, 2023 will be a much more productive year than 2022 was!
The Re-Farmer 