Today was a much more pleasant day today. Still very humid. Kept getting rain warnings that never materialized. I didn’t end up needing to water the garden at all today, though it’ll get done again tomorrow morning.
This time I saw four bebbies with one adult. I also so the mama with her singleton, but didn’t get pictures of them.
Today was our day to head into town for birthday take out. Chinese food this time. Plus a quick trip to the grocery store for drinks, ice cream and cake, all of which my older daughter paid for, so it didn’t come out of our regular budget at all.
It has been so long since we got Chinese food from this restaurant. It’s one of those “special occasion” places. I think it may be two years since we’ve ordered from there!
By the time we brought that home and enjoyed… I don’t know whether to call it a late lunch or an early supper! – it was time for the outside cat feeding and evening rounds to be done. While doing my rounds, I spotted this…
A couple of hollyhock leaves have disappeared! Just two. I’d say it was a deer, and it didn’t taste very good, or it would have eaten more. They do like the yellow flowers that bloom in this area (which won’t happen for a while yet), so when the deer goes into the yard, all the flowers near that gate get eaten. I pulled them up from this end, to make room for the hollyhocks, so they’re going to have to work harder for their floral treat this year!
I also did some work in the chain link fence bed. In the morning, I’d raised the netting from the base so adjust the super sugar snap peas, and the larger surviving winter squash and melon vines trained up the chain link fence. The sunflowers are getting tall enough that they were starting to press against the netting. So, when I came back in the evening, I went through the recycling to get water bottles and adjusted things.
After moving the netting away from the top of the fence, I pulled the ends of the hoops out of the chain link spaces they were bent into. The tops got water bottles set over them, so they wouldn’t go through the netting. Then the netting was put over the ends of the hoops, and back over the fence. The hoops are still bent slightly towards the fence, but are now straight enough that the sunflowers have more room. At some point, the netting will have to be lifted off completely. At least from the top. Both sunflower varieties are supposed to get very large.
I headed back in but decided to go for a walkabout before calling it a day. I got distracted by the vines I could see climbing the lilacs and cherry tree by the house. The Virginia Creeper is severely invasive. I’ve been trying to pull them up by the roots for years, but they keep coming back.
It turned out to be a lot more vines than I expected!
The first image is all the vines I was able to pull off, smashed into a pile. The second is of the lilacs and cherry tree they were choking out. It was particularly bad at the cherry tree and dwarf Korean lilac. I’m going to need to get some pruning shears and get under there to clear away dead branches.
I didn’t get all the vines. Some are still high in the branches, having broken off as I tried to pull them out, and cannot be reached. Those will dry up where they are. I’m sure I missed others that are still attached to the ground. The sheer volume of just the ones I was able to find was quite surprising. By the time I was done getting as much as I could, the branches were much more open and airy! I’m sure I broke some trying to pull the vines out, though. They are remarkable strong! When it comes to trying to pull them from their bases, the outer “bark” tends to break, and the inner part of the vine is very slippery. I didn’t have a knife handy, so I did the best I could for now.
Now I have to figure out what to do with the pile of vines. They need to be burned but that’s way too much for our fire pit. I’ve mashed the whole pile into the wheelbarrow for now. They need time to dry up before we burn them, anyhow.
I’m glad I got it done, before the vines choked everything they were climbing!
I was rather late in heading out this morning to feed the outside cats and do my morning rounds. A thunderstorm rolled in when I normally would have gone out and lasted a couple of hours.
We got a lot of rain in a very short time! The upstairs window started leaking again; the same one that used to leak a lot when the snow started to melt in the winter, before we got the new roof. This is the second time it has leaked during a heavy downpour. I’ve contacted my brother about it, since he had the warranty papers and was able to pass on details he thought the company would need. He’ll let me know what he gets back from the roofing company.
The usual low spots that were finally drained were full again. Even the inner yard had standing water all over the place. I was rather hoping to be able to mow the lawn or at least do some weed trimming. Lawn mowing was out of the question and likely will be for a while, but I did managed to get the weed trimmer going to clear the paths in the old kitchen garden. It’s higher there so no standing water there. I kept trimming until I went through all three batteries.
The lower eavestroughs are terribly full of elm seeds that are sprouting. None of us are able to get up to them safely with a ladder. Last year I got a cleaner brush that can be used from the ground. It came with two brushes, and the first one broke rather quickly.
The second one broke before I could get very far with the cleaning.
*sigh*
My daughter has been looking into hiring someone to do it for us. Someone with a lift or a harness… and insurance. Meanwhile, I’ve just ordered a hose attachment, but it won’t get here for a couple of weeks.
After failing to get much done on the eaves, I switched to working in the garden. There are a couple of things I want to get done. One of them is to work over the entire area that was supposed to be planted with corn to loosen the soil, then scatter sow the tillage radish seeds I got a while back as a cover crop. These can grow up to 6 feet long and should be able to force their way through the layers of gravel, sand and clay under our shallow top soil. They are left to freeze and die off over the winter. The decomposing radishes create channels and enrich the soil, and the leaves can be worked into the topsoil to compost in place. At least, that’s what I’ve read they can be used for. Over time, this area will be getting a combination of perennials, annuals that self seed and can be treated as perennials, and possibly some shorter, 12′ long raised beds. We’ll see.
The exposed ground that had been under the black tarp is starting to get taken over, even though it’s pretty compacted. I will work on that later. For today, I decided to work on the small bed where I’d planted the giant poppies. A few actually survived, but the area was being overtaken by weeds.
I forgot to take a “before” picture, so the first one in the slide show below is after I’d started clearing around one side of the poppies.
The second picture shows the area all cleared. The soil here is really, really good. I could dig into it easily with my bare hands. Which I needed to do to try and get as many of the tree roots as I could.
*sigh*
With more than half of this little bed empty, I decided to transplant into it. In the next image, you can see a couple of little sprouts. One of those was quite a bit smaller this morning, and the other was barely breaking the surface. They just sort of exploded in a few hours! So I figured, why not. These are Canary Yellow melons, with 80 days to maturity. I made sure to get a photo of the label, since I haven’t been labeling anything from my own transplants. I’m using my photos as a record of what things end up where.
We have about 60-70 days left to our average first frost date. At this point, I’m counting on that Super El Nińo giving us an extended growing season.
I transplanted them in protective collars, then mulched the whole bed heavily with straw. The soil was still moist from today’s deluge but, once the straw was down, I gave the bed a thorough watering, focusing more on getting the straw soaked through.
In the last photo, you can see one of the poppy buds. This variety can potentially get poppy heads the size of a softball. I don’t expect to get any that big, considering how relatively small the plants are right now, but it should be interesting to see how large they do get by the end of the season. I did get another packet of the seed when I thought none had survived, but plan to save seed from these, too. The seeds are edible, but there won’t be enough poppy pods to harvest for eating. There should be plenty of seeds to save for planting.
Unfortunately, by the time I was done with this, my pain levels had kicked in pretty high. Once inside, I was able to take some painkillers, hydrate and start this post while my daughters made supper – and brought some over to me so I didn’t have to get up again! That was much appreciated.
Today, we’ve had rain off and on throughout, with a brief period where the sun actually came out. As I write this, we are under a severe thunderstorm alert, which is a whole lot better than the tornado alerts other areas were getting. Large swaths to the south and west of us got storm damage and at least one tornado touching down. We are very fortunate in our location. Even today, I could hear thunder, but all the storms went around us. Our weird climate bubble has protected us again!
I did get a chance to do my morning rounds, if a bit on the late side, in between rain. I was able to harvest more scapes.
At this rate, I’ll have enough to dehydrate a bunch, which will then be ground to a powder. I did that last year and it was the handiest thing ever!
Some time back, I had moved the seed tray of winter squash, melons and cucumber off the portable greenhouse frame and set it in the open on our front steps. I don’t know why I bothered, and yet…
The first image is of a Golden Hubbard seedling from the second sowing that finally germinated. The second image is a Canary Yellow melon.
Yes, I’ll transplant them somewhere, even though the chances they will produce fruit that reaches maturity is very low. Especially the Hubbard squash, which needs 95-110 days for maturity. The melon needs 80 days. We have maybe 70 days before our average first frost. Still, we have had years where we didn’t get frost until well into November. This year is supposed to have a Super El Nińo which, in our region, usually translates into heat waves and drought.
I actually poked around in the seed starting mix in the tray, and it looks like we will actually have more things popping up!
Yes, I will transplant anything that does. Chances of them reaching maturity may be low, but possible. I’d rather give them the chance. It certainly doesn’t hurt to try.
This afternoon, during that brief period we had sunshine, I got out the shake and feed fertilizer we picked up during our Costco trip. The instructions say to work the granules into the top couple of inches of soil, but that’s not really an option. Especially with the mulched beds. So I just scattered it. This stuff can also be applied in water. Between the rain we’ve been having and watering the garden in between, the plants will get something out of it. The granules are supposed to be a slow release over 3 months. Every little bit will be a help.
We shall see soon enough, I guess!
Meanwhile, I finally got around to editing the garden tour video I took on the last day of spring. I got one of my daughters to watch the video when I was done to check for any errors I missed or let me know if anything should be fixed or changed. When I messaged them to ask if one of them could come down, my older daughter was able to do it.
Apparently, it’s hilarious. She burst out laughing several times. Mostly because of the cats, but a few other things, as well. I wasn’t trying to be funny, which is probably why it actually was. It just finished uploading onto YouTube, so here it is now!
We had another chilly night last night, with temperatures dropping to 7C/45F Today reached 22C/72F, but we’re supposed to drop to 7C/45F again, tonight! In fact, over the next while, our overnight lows are expected to be below 10C/50F more often that above.
Not good for the garden.
This morning, after doing my rounds, I started on transplanting the purchased plants. I decided to plant the butternut squash in the bed along the chain link fence.
Each pot had two plants in it, so I prepped four spots. Unfortunately, there was no way I could separate them without damaging the roots too much. So I kept them together. I plan to train them up the chain link fence, and/or the sunflowers. You can see some sprouted sunflowers in the bottom of the above images. These went into the middle third of the chain link fence, and the two varieties of sunflowers each got half the entire bed, so the seedlings coming up next to the butternut squash would be the Mammoth sunflower variety. Both varieties should have stems strong enough to support climbing vines, if they get a chance to get big enough, first.
That job went quickly. The next one took quite a bit longer.
The rest of the transplants were to go into the bed in the main garden area that I had to put the insect netting over, to keep the cats out of the exposed soil. Newly exposed soil. The first thing to do was to remove the netting and hoops. I made a point of spreading out the netting and folding it up right away, because it was rather breezy and I didn’t want it getting blown around and tangled up.
Next, I went over the bed with the garden fork to loosen the soil and get rid of any weeds. There were hardly any weeds, which was nice for a change.
Once the soil was loosened and leveled, I spaced out the cabbage transplants to be more or less a foot apart. Or, slightly more than the length of my trowel. As this bed only recently had the plastic cover removed, the soil didn’t get much chance to be rained on. Moisture drains away and disappears so quickly, I made the extra effort to deeply water the planting holes before the cabbages were transplanted. I also made sure they were slightly below grade, so that any water would drain towards the plants. The dozen transplants took up about half the bed. Once they were in the ground, that half of the bed got a thorough watering, not just the plants. Then I started cutting up pieces of cardboard to set around the transplants as a mulch, which also got a soaking. Finally, I added straw on top of the cardboard and thickly along the edges. Then the straw got a soak.
The cabbages need insect netting to protect them, but the rest of the transplants need insects for pollinating, so I set hoops up over the cabbages only. For the entire bed, I’d made 7 hoops, but used 5 over the cabbages. I used the extra rods and connectors to add one more rod to the hoops. This way, the hoops could cover the width of the bed, including the straw mulch, completely. For the netting, I set it so that the salvage edge of one side was at the base of the hoops along one side, and the excess length was at the end of the bed instead of the middle. After clipping the salvage edge to the hoops, close to the ground, I pulled things snug to clip the netting close to the ground at the other side. That left me with a lot of excess netting, which got pulled up over the top and clipped on the other side as far as it could reach.
It isn’t set up yet when I took the last photo in the slide show above, but I later added weights along the edges of the netting between the hoops, too. I didn’t want to use ground staples as, with the straw mulch in place, they get pulled up very easily.
That done, it was time to do the melons.
For this, I had a large, heavy duty card board box that I could use to cover the entire remaining half of the bed. I decided to lay it down and cut squares out where the melons would be planted, first. It got moved aside after that, so the soil could get a good watering. Then I laid the cardboard down to give it a thorough soak, turned it over to soak the other side, then turned it back again to soak it some more.
For here, I have one pot of watermelon and three of muskmelon. All have two transplants per pot but, as with the butternut squash, there was no way to divide them without damaging the roots too much. Which means I have six muskmelon in three spots and two watermelon in one spot.
As always, the planting holes got a deep watering, before the plants were added. Again, I made sure they were planted into a slight depression for water flow, then the whole area got watered again.
That done, the straw mulch was added, including in the area that has nothing planted in it. If I find more transplants worth buying, I have room. I would just need to push aside the straw mulch, then cut a hole in the cardboard below.
The straw got a very thorough watering. If the straw is too dry, it’ll act as a thatch.
That done, and everything put away, I wanted to get some trellis netting out of the garden shed. Which meant disturbing our little furry family.
Things had been knocked about by the raccoons, and the wrapped balls of netting were coming undone and getting caught on things, which meant it took a while for me to get them. In the end, I grabbed several different types of nets and the tomato cage they were getting hung up on, just to not disturb the raccoons to much.
They didn’t seem to care.
The mama didn’t move. She actually seemed to be asleep. The babies just watched me. No chittering. No getting upset or scared. Not even looking particularly curious. They just stayed snuggled up to Mom and watched me.
These buggers have no business being that cute. 😄
The netting got set aside for now; the peas in the trellis bed are getting tall enough that the trellis netting will soon be needed.
Once everything was done and set aside, I got changed to head into town. My younger daughter forgot to call in her meds for delivery on Thursday and she just ran out of one of them, so she called her refills in when the pharmacy opened which, on Sundays, is at noon. My older daughter sent me funds to pick things up at the grocery store, too.
After picking up the prescription refills, I made a point of heading to the cash desk, just to show the cashier that there was nothing owing on the meds. Along the way, I passed a new display of what turned out to be bouncy balls. I had no idea. All I saw were all these round critter faces looking at me. Including a hilariously adorable dragon, though it took some doing to figure out that it was a dragon.
It called to me.
They weren’t expensive, so I bought one for my daughter and hid it in her bag of prescriptions. She loves dragons, and I knew she would get a giggle out of it.
The cashier started chatting about today’s weather, and how we are finally supposed to not get rain for a while. Where she lives, the flooding was pretty bad, but not as bad as an area south of her that got 12 inches of rain in 6 hours.
12 inches.
30 cm.
In six hours.
That’s just insane!
No wonder highways were being washed away!
That done, it was off to the grocery store to pick up a few things, then home.
My daughter loved the dragon. She thinks it’s hilarious.
By the time I got back from town, it was time to feed the outside cats, so I quickly did that while my older daughter made supper. After supper, I headed back outside again. First thing was to break out the weed trimmer and clear the grass away from several rocks in the west yard, so I could see them and not high them with the riding mower.
I am so thankful to my brother for letting us use their push mower and little riding mower. The riding mower they gave us years ago still runs but, for some reason, doesn’t cut. The grass just bends – and my brother had sharpened the blade when he repaired the chain that kept falling off. Our push mower lost pieces and couldn’t be repaired. We don’t have the funds to replace the push mower, and we can’t figure out what’s wrong with the riding mower. Thanks to my brother, we can still do the mowing.
I was able to do most of the inner yard. As I was moving into the West yard, where all the cat shelters are, I spotted a huge raccoon coming out of the catio, where it was stealing food! Not the mama, but a bigger one; likely a big male.
I didn’t even try to mow around the main garden area, nor did I start on the outer yard. That will wait for another day.
Not tomorrow, though.
On the way into town, I took a quick side trip to find where our garage’s new location is. It was very easy to find, and our truck is parked under the shade of a tree. Tomorrow morning, I will take my brother’s car into town to pay for the repairs and get the key, but will leave the truck there. After the funeral and internment, we’ll be able to switch vehicles, but I don’t know if we’ll be able to do that before the garage closes. It’s unlikely my mother will be physically up to anything beyond the funeral itself, but we are working out the timing so that we all arrive together with my mother, who will be using her wheelchair for this outing. Hopefully, it won’t be too difficult for her to transfer into my brother’s vehicle.
I really hope things work out well tomorrow. A part of me still suspects someone that believed our vandal’s lies about us might make a scene and try kicking us out or something. We shall see.
Time to go to bed. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.
Today we are expecting rain, off and on, with possible thunderstorms, until tomorrow morning. After that, we are expecting a break in the rain for at least a week. For the past while, more people are sharing images and information about damage in the region. This morning, I learned that an iconic building, known for a cheerful message to drivers on the highway passing by, is gone. Just… gone. Blown away. The highway that runs nearest us, with a second closed off due to a sinkhole, is now washed away clear across the lanes with a raging river running through it. The electric company has restored power to many places, but others will take longer to repair. They shared photos of sections where the cedar power poles were snapped like twigs, lying on the ground.
All of this is to the south of us. In our immediate area, we were very fortunate. There was some wind, hail and water damage in places, but nothing like what’s been happening in other areas.
There wasn’t any rain while I was doing my morning rounds, and everything seems to be doing well. The dwarf Korean lilac is coming into full bloom, and has a much more intense scent than the earlier varieties.
I also spotted a friend in the flowers. Always happy to see dragonflies. They eat mosquitoes.
I’ve got sunflower seeds emerging, as well as corn. The summer squash is getting big enough that I will soon be removing the protective collars, though one variety still has no seedlings germinated yet.
After doing my rounds and grabbing a quick breakfast, I headed into town with my brother’s car. My first stop was at a local greenhouse by a hardware store to see what I could find to replace some of the things we have lost. There’s just one place selling transplants locally, and there isn’t a lot to choose from, but I did find a few things.
I got two trays with a dozen green cabbages. I also got three pots of muskmelon, two of butternut squash and one of watermelon, all of which have two transplants in them. Not in the photo is the new watering can I got, just like the one that cracked over the winter, at a remarkably low price compared to where I’ve seen this style elsewhere. I probably should have got two.
All the transplants were 25% off, so that was a nice little bonus.
After that, I made a quick stop at the grocery store next door to get some basic fresh stuff, plus I was able to get a few extra items for stocking up because they were on very good sales. Then it was home, where I pulled up to the house to unload. It had started raining again, by then. After my daughter took care of the grocery items, I tucked the transplants into bins and set them in the portable greenhouse frame.
For something that lost its cover, it’s still getting a remarkable amount of use!
By the time I put the car back in the garage, it had stopped raining again, so I quickly changed into my grubbies and rubber boots to head into the main garden area. Between the weather and my pain levels, I haven’t been able to get to that area with the weed trimmer. There is one bed in there that was still covered with plastic, and that’s where most of the transplants will go.
The first photo is after I’d removed some things I’d had resting on the plastic to keep them out of the way, but hadn’t removed the various things weighing town the edges. Once I moved everything off the sides and at the far end, I used a garden hose to pressure wash the elm seeds and debris off the surface, first. Then the whole thing got rolled up and set aside.
You can see in the next image that the bed is pretty clear. There is one spot with a weed where there was a hole in the plastic, and weeds pushing up around the edges. I will need to clear those out but, before I do, I wanted the bed to get watered by the rain.
Unfortunately, pretty much as soon as the plastic was off, there was a cat going for the fresh dirt! Which meant I had to get it covered right away. Which I could do, now that I’ve got another hoop kit and a couple of 10′ x 20′ sheets of insect netting.
You can see that set up in the last photo. This is temporary and will be redone when it’s time to do the transplanting. For now, it just needs to keep the cats from using the bed as a litter box!
It started and stopped raining several times while I was working on this, so I was pretty wet by the end of it!
I really like this insect netting. The mosquito netting we have been using, which my daughter bought for us years ago, is great mosquito netting, but not as good for what we needed to use it for. The weave is so dense, it catches on the wind like a sail quite a lot for netting. The weave is also tight enough that, when I water through it, there needs to be enough pressure to push the water through. If the spray of water is too gentle, most of it drains right off. This new stuff is slightly more open, so both air and water will flow through more easily, while still being fine enough to keep the bugs out. It’s also got quite a lot of stretch to it, is more flexible and easier to work with in the wind.
I might be buying more of this insect netting. It’s also available at a 10′ x 40′ size. At some point, I’ll be making moveable cover frames, so having more that can be cut to size would be useful. For now, the 10′ x 20′ size is sufficient length to cover hoops over our 18′ long garden beds. The width is almost double what is needed, depending on how wide the hoops are set up.
Once that was done and stuff was put away, I did some harvesting. I picked a whole bunch of rhubarb (I got the missing ingredients for the rhubarb upside down cake my daughter likes to make), then cut some herbs.
Across the middle is lemon balm, and there is oregano at the bottom. On the left is chives, with blossoms and buds, and on the right, near the top of the photo, is walking onion greens with developing bulbils. I don’t actually want the walking onions to walk any further than they are now, so we’ll focus on trimming the bulbils more. We have so much chives and walking onion, we can start dehydrating them.
Looking at the weather radar, it seems we’ll be getting one more rainfall soon, but the main part of the system will be passing north of us. Which means that, tomorrow, I should be able to get those transplants in the ground.
Oh, I almost forgot, and neglected to take a photo. While doing my rounds, I checked the bed where I’d broadcast the giant poppy seeds in a small bed that got rolled on and dug into by cats. Much to my amazement, I actually found some poppy seedlings have emerged! Basically just one cluster of them in one spot. I don’t know if poppies can handle transplanting well. Otherwise, I’d thin by transplanting. I’ll have to look them up to see, first.
Meanwhile, I just realized that I went to the post office too early in the day. There are now parcels waiting to be picked up! I’ll have to go get them soon because, if I don’t get them today, I won’t be able to until Monday.
First, though, we got a few other things accomplished today.
Bug looks like she is doing quite well. She is eating with her usual enthusiasm and is moving like she’d never had surgery.
I did, however, make a confirmation.
We were pretty sure the mostly black cat in there was female, partly because the females have been so much harder to socialize. When talking to the rescue, I’d forgotten this one had been named Batman, and had told them this one and the black and white were unnamed. One of the rescue workers named this one Marta for the spay appointment.
Today, however, I was able to see dangly bits. She is a he.
Batman it is.
Unfortunately, part of the reason I could see dangly bits was because he seems to have diarrhea. His fur it all flattened along his back end. After what happened with Furriosa, I am bracing myself for getting bad news at the appointment. Granted, I still have no idea how we’re going to get them into carriers.
Meanwhile, poor Adam, having only recently lost a litter, is being chased by the boys already. It’s been raining all today and, when we were outing and abouting, I saw her trying to get a drink of water out of a puddle, followed closely by a tabby, her fur absolutely matted with mud.
Both she and Slick have not been showing up at much at feeding time, and when Adam does, she can’t stay long because the boys are too agressively after her.
*sigh*
One of the first goals of the day was to head into town to see my mother at the nursing home. My younger daughter came along to help me bring in my mother’s stuff I’d taken before her transfer. That allowed us to bring it all in, in one trip.
The last time I was here, it was to visit my aunt, and she was in a completely different part of the building. I must have looked pretty lost, because someone came right up to ask me who I was there to see! When we got to the right floor and started heading to the hallway, a guy gathering linens into a trolly saw me and told me he thought my mother was asleep.
We recognized each other from when my mother was still at the TCU! He works in both places. Most of the staff is rotates between various nursing homes and TCUs, but it was still quite funny to have someone who recognized me and knew who I was there to see, less than 24 hours after her transfer!
My mother woke when we came in and we put her stuff away where she directed us to. She has quite a nice room. Not as big as the single room she had at the hospital, but a decent size, and all to herself. She has a nice view of a park outside her window, and plenty of closet and storage space. My mother seems… not so much happier to be there, as relieved. There are still things to figure out as far as how things are done. My mother has gotten used to having her meals brought to her, for example, and here they encourage residents to come to the dining room to eat, if they physically can, to get them moving around as much as possible. There is a monthly calendar of events on her wall, and every day has three or for things going on, from sing alongs to physical activities, to church services and so on. They even have bingo, which my mother enjoys.
So we had a nice little visit before heading back out. Now that she is here, I can visit her more often, simply because I go to this town so much more often, and it’s closer than where she was before.
We are all so much happier with this place, not just my mother! It’s going to be so much better for her.
She was starting to have pain issues, as no one has applied Voltaren this morning, and she wans’t even sure if they had any (it’s not a prescription, so we have to supply it), so on the way out I talked to someone at the nursing station, asking if the doctor would consider getting my mother a prescription for the stuff that I have, which is the same active ingredient, but 5 times stronger, as Voltaren. She said they will bring it up with the doctor. With a prescription, we won’t have to keep track of her supply, and they’ll be able to order it in with her other medications.
Our next stop was the pharmacy to pick up the rest of my older daughter’s prescription, plus her sister and I found other things we needed to get for ourselves. My daughter hadn’t eaten yet and it was almost lunch time, so we stopped at the DQ for lunch, then got two more meals to go for my husband and her sister. A quick stop for gas, then a stop at the post office, where I was also able to pick up a 40 pound bag of kibble for the outside cats, then home.
After things were settled in and taken care of, my daughter and I headed back out and loaded my mother’s old mattress and box spring into the box of the truck. We FINALLY got them to the dump!
From the muddy paw prints on them, the cats are going to miss them. 😄
My brother and SIL had come out while we were in town, working on their caravan, so we popped over to get caught up with them for a bit – not going in because our boots were muddy, so we didn’t stay long. My mother had asked for a radio and my brother had one for her, so he gave it to me, since we’ll probably be seeing her before they get a chance to.
Our visit done, we headed inside for the next thing on my to do list.
Starting the last of our seeds for transplants.
These are the things that get started about 3 weeks before last frost date. Technically, we are less than that, but the way the weather has been, I don’t expect to get most things transplanted until probably the middle of June, though things like the onions can handle going in now.
With such a short time for these seeds, I decided to use my new hex cell planting tray. This has 6 rows of 12 cells, so they are pretty small.
I decided that I would start 12 different things, and see how it goes!
The first thing we had to do was make space and move the full spectrum LED light fixtures aside, then set up a heat mat. While my daughter filled the cells with pre-moistened seed starting mix, I went through my seed packets to decide on what to start.
I decided not to try and start any summer squash and will direct sow those.
I went with four types of melons (we have seeds for quite a few more); Canary Yellow, Tigger, Sweet Siberian Watermelon and Hale’s Best Jumbo cantaloupe. In winter squash, I chose Golden Hubbard, Black Futsu, Butterneck squash and Gill’s Golden Pippin. I also decided to try the Arikara squash again, because it’s a rare variety I want to save seeds from. I also chose the Cinderalla pumpkin (Rouge vif D’Estempes). Last of all are two types of cucumber; lemon and Eureka. These are older seeds, but I have a request for cucumbers this year. I have another variety we got as free seeds that I almost chose as well, but we’re not big cucumber eaters and two varieties will be more than enough.
After the initial filling of the tray with seed starting mix, my daughter was a sweetheart and cut up a sour cream container for me, to make more plant markers, because I was down to two blanks.
She cuts much neater, straighter markers than I do!
While she was working on that, I wrote the names and details for each packet on the markers. She finished before I did, and I have a nice stack of extra markers now.
The initial filling of the planting cells all got gently pressed down, leaving enough space for the planting depths of these larger seeds. My daughter started with the winter squash seeds, gently scarifying them first. Once I was done with the labels, I started at the other end of the tray with the cucumbers, then melons.
So we now have 12 rows with six cells planted, each. Hopefully, we’ll get a decent germination rate. I’m rather concerned about that, as it all seems so cold down there, and I don’t know that the heat mats are enough to make up for it. Half the time, they don’t even seem to be on. I realize that’s part of the temperature control, but it still feels wrong.
I ended up moving a couple of snail rolls around, putting two of them with the last batch of seed starts.
The orange current tomatoes are not looking very healthy, so I thought they might do better back on a heat mat, with less taller transplants overshadowing them. I also moved the roll with both the tarragon and summer savory. I’m actually amazing they are both surviving! They were in rough shape before going into the snail roll.
In the next picture, you can see the rest of the snail rolls. Things are getting way too big and need to be transplanted. I can’t pot them up any more at this point. No space.
Things are supposed to get quite a bit warmer – and drier – over the next while. There are even 30C/86F days in the forecast! Tonight, we’re supposed to drop to 6C/43F, but after that we’re supposed to get overnight temperatures above 10C/50, with lots of sunshine. That should finally warm the soil up. Even in the first half of June, where we’re expecting overnight temperatures to drop, they’re still expected to be above 6C/43F, which is where it needs to stay above consistently for the soil to have a chance to warm up and stay warm.
We shall see.
That done, I was able to head outside and get other work done, but that will be in my next post.
In my last post, I talked about the winter sowing we did. A definite head start, with a short growing season like ours. Still, things needed to be started indoors, too.
We “lost” a lot of beds that would have been available for transplanting to winter sowing, which limited how much we could start indoors. We also had some re-arrangements in the house that meant I could no longer use the living room, and the aquarium greenhouses, to start seeds indoors.
I had to use our basement.
Not the old basement, which is actually pretty warm. The “new” basement, which has more space, but is pretty darn chilly!
Here are a series of videos I made of our seed starting sessions, beginning with the things that needed the most time.
For winter squash, we went with four types. Baked Potato, Mashed Potato, Sunshine and Arikara – all new varieties for us. The Arikara squash are a rare variety, so I particularly wanted to grow them for seed.
Next on the list where peppers.
This year, we went with a Sweetie Snack Mix with orange, red and yellow mini bell peppers for my family to snack on. We’re still in the “let’s find a variety we really like” stage, and trying new things.
Pre-germinating seeds has been another game changer for us. We’ve had years were we’ve planted and replanted things several times before getting germination. This way, only seeds that have already germinated get planted, for a much higher success rate.
This year, we also got a portable greenhouse, so we could start taking the transplants outdoors earlier – mostly because of space issues – and to make it easier to harden them off when the time came.
In the following video, it first shows the kitchen garden winter sown bed getting its own little greenhouse cover, and then the assembled portable greenhouse.
By the end of it, you could already see we were having issues, as the cover started to tear, even as we were putting it on!
The next seeds to pre-germinate were tomatoes.
This year, after going over our seeds with my daughters, we went with four varieties. The Black Beauty and Chocolate Cherry, we’ve grown successfully before, and the family enjoys them. New was the Sub Arctic Plenty. These are a super short season variety that we could technically start outdoors, since they are supposed to mature in less than two months, but they got started indoors, too. Last of all were the Spoon tomatoes. Those were mostly for me, as they’re the only tomato I can eat fresh without gagging (I’ve since learned this is a reaction to one of the chemicals in tomatoes, much like with people who find cilantro tastes likes soap). The seeds have gotten very expensive, so I want to grow these specifically for seed saving, too.
Something I somehow did not get pictures of were the melons I started. I started pre-germinating those at the same time I potted up the pre-germinated tomato seeds.
I used up some older seeds and started Kaho and Cream of Saskatchewan melon. I also started older Sarah’s Choice melon and new Green Flesh Honeydew seeds. Last of all, I started some older Zucca melon seeds as well.
The Zucca melon and the Kaho watermelons didn’t make it. None germinated. The others did, though, and I was able to pot them up.
Starting seeds indoors in the cold and dark basement was a real challenge. A challenge made more difficult, as one of my aquarium lights, which are grow lights, since they were for aquarium plants, too, needed replacement bulbs. They need a size that I simply could not find locally, so I had to order them online. I was able to get them from Veseys, which also had them at a very reasonable price.
Still, with heat mats, lights and even a heater, we were able to manage it.
It took a while for some of them, but the pre-germinated winter squash seeds all made it. In fact, most of the seeds did really well. It took quite a long time for the eggplant and peppers to germinate – those were direct sown rather than pre-germinated. The colder temperatures did seem to set them back a fair bit.
I was more than happy to be able to get them out of the basement and into the portable greenhouse as soon as possible!
We were still having cold nights, though. I had a thermometer in there for a while and, in the morning, it was just as cold in the greenhouse as outside. To try and combat this, I dug out an old, black garbage can – one of many we’ve been finding around the property! – and set it up to be a heat sink – covered to make sure no critters fell in! The idea being that water inside the black container would absorb heat during the day, then slowly release it during the night.
I can’t really say it worked that well. Partly because it turned out to have a leak and, after several days, it would need to be refilled.
During the day, it got insanely hot in the greenhouse and, other than tying the door flap open, there’s no way to release the heat.
Yeah, the heat was off the scale on the thermometer in there! It got so hot that, on many days, I had to move the trays and bins of transplants outside and into the shade, so they wouldn’t cook.
Like the chitted potatoes, but that will be covered in another analysis post.
In the picture with the transplants, you can see that I did buy some this year. I decided not to start any herbs indoors – I just didn’t have the space for them, and my results have been hit and miss over the years. In the picture, I got on each of lemon thyme, English thyme, oregano, Greek oregano, lemon balm and basil. Later on, I also picked up two transplants of sage.
Even with the structure being secured at each corner, we had one wind storm that was bad enough to knock it half over!
The old garden hose was draped over the top of the greenhouse to reduce flapping in the wind, which was an issue well before this particular wind storm knocked it over. I later set the bags of manure strategically on shelves to add more weight and keep it from being blown over again.
Eventually, they were being taken outside of the greenhouse to harden off, not just to keep them from being cooked. They recovered very well.
The one thing that wasn’t doing well was the luffa. Of the four seeds, three pre-germinated but only two survived to be transplanted into pots to live in the greenhouse for the summer.
As you can see in the slide show above, one of those surviving luffa was super tiny.
The stove pellets are something I like to add as a gentle mulch. When wet, the pellets expand into sawdust and are less likely to squish or smother young seedlings. They also hold moisture quite well. I find they’re also good to mulch in hard to reach areas. I can reach under leaves or between plants and drop a handful of pellets where it would be more difficult to use grass clippings, leaves or straw.
In the end, I found myself with what were probably the best transplants yet. It was looking to be a great start for transplants this year! Aside from the sad luffa, they were all strong and healthy plants, by the time they were ready to go into the garden.
This first slideshow is of three types of winter squash that were planted in one bed. I set protective collars around them to help with the still-coldish nights, but also to protect them from rolling cats, slugs and other critters.
I later set up a soaker hose but, in the end, I found it easier to use the protective collars to water them. Protective collars went around all the transplants except the peppers and eggplant.
With the drought conditions we had this year, I found that the collars really helped. I could water into a collar until it was full, then move on to the next one. By the time I finished watering from one end of the bed to the other, the first collars were drained of their water, and I would do it again. Most of the summer, I would water a bed in this way three times, twice a day. By the third pass, the water would finally be draining slightly slower. It was more efficient to water this way, than to water empty, mulch covered soil around the plants.
The Arikara squash had three survivors, and they went into their own little bed in the East yard.
Last year, in this bed, I had finally successfully grown Crespo squash. The vines got so huge, they even spread into the cherry tree suckers nearby and started climbing them! The bed got amended as much as I could, and I had confident expectations that another variety of squash would do well here again.
The three squash were transplanted with a cover of mosquito netting to keep the cats out. The netting was a bit too small, though, and didn’t cover it very well. Still, it was enough to protect the bed until things were big enough. I didn’t want it covered for too long, so the squash could be pollinated by insects. Later on, I would direct sow corn among them.
Melons and Spoon Tomatoes
Last year, we had brought the logs to frame a low raised bed, but didn’t get a chance to finish it. I was able to do that this spring, and that’s the bed that got the melons and Spoon tomatoes.
I found some metal posts at the dollar store and first used those to create a trellis for the melons. In past years, they turned out to be far to heavy for the plastic netting I’d used, so I figured something stronger was in order!
In planting the Spoon tomatoes, I put a pair of bamboo stakes in each protective collar. Later, I added cross pieces to make a trellis to secure the Spoon tomatoes to, as I knew they could get quite tall and leggy.
I also direct sowed beans beside the tomatoes, and will talk about those in another post.
More Tomatoes
The other three varieties of tomatoes all went into one of the East yard garden beds.
In the first picture, you can see just how much growth there was with the winter sown bed in the background. That greenery is almost all lettuce!
You can also see that the Chinese elm seeds have started to drop.
The attempt at solarizing didn’t work. It did warm up the soil, though, and the weeds were much easier to pull at that size.
In the end, I had 9 Sub Acrtic Plenty, 5 chocolate cherry and 4 Black Beauty tomatoes to transplant.
I added a large, plastic coated metal plant stake into each protective collar, then wove in bamboo stakes to great a strong trellis. I knew the chocolate cherry could get quite tall. When we grew Black Beauty before, they didn’t get as tall, but were so heavy with tomatoes, I had to add more structural support to their trellis, because they were pulling it over! I wanted to make sure these had a good, strong frame to hold their weight.
Sweetie Snack Mix peppers and Turkish Orange eggplant
Next, the peppers and eggplant went into the wattle weave bed in the old kitchen garden.
The Sweetie Snack Mix peppers all fit into the short side of the L shaped bed. The Turkish Orange eggplant were planted around the tiny fruited strawberry plants that were already starting to bloom!
In cleaning one of the beds, I found some sort of flower. I decided to transplant it in this bed, too. Later, I added a second, different, flower of some type I found. Once they bloom, maybe next year, we’ll know what they are!
The peppers and eggplant all got wire tomato cages for support. Those came in handy, later, for other reasons!
This tiny bed had been prepped in the fall, but was pretty over grown already. You can see the walking onions outside the bed are doing really well already, too!
The cats also like to sit on top of the mesh, so before anything else, I added supports to it, then added a bamboo stake that was given to us, weaving it through the top. It was meant to keep the top from sagging under the weight of cats, but has turned out to be a fantastic handle.
This little bed is the perfect size for a few herbs. It even had room for a couple more.
Spur of the moment, I got some discounted sage and tucked them in as well.
So, everything went in and was looking good, though things were getting pretty late by the end of it. We had plenty of hot days in May, but the nights were too cold for the transplants, and the soil didn’t get much chance to warm up. I recall we even got a frost well past our old average last frost date. The last of our garden didn’t get in until the end of June.
It did not bode well for how the summer would go.
How things grew
Drought.
Heat waves.
Smoke.
A triple whammy that affected everything. I’m amazed we got anything at all.
Winter Squash
The winter squash was hit particularly hard, and not just by weather and smoke.
Those strong, healthy winter squash in the main garden area started blooming very quickly, even while still small. Just male flowers, but that’s not unusual.
All the winter squash in that bed were hit with these tiny insects. Thrips, I was told they are. They were really bad. In the end, they were dealt with using a spray bottle with dish detergent in it, after washing most of them off with a hose.
None of the winter squash did well. After the first flowers appeared, they just stagnated. It was ages before they started blooming again. Plants that should have gotten big enough to completely fill and cover their beds barely covered their protective collars.
It took even more time before any female flowers showed up, and I made sure to hand pollinate as many as I could find. Usually, I had to open up a spent male flower to be able to do it, though sometimes, not even that was to be had.
By then, it was so late in the season, we started having to worry about cold nights. Not quite frost, yet, but cold enough to set them back. I really wanted to give what few squash had finally started to develop, the best chance they could. Thankfully, we did have a long and mild fall, but not mild enough for the squash.
After a pretty severe frost, I finally decided to open it up and see what survived.
None of the Sunshine squash made it, but we did have some Baked Potato and Mashed Potato squash to harvest, including one decently large Baked Potato squash. That one was pretty close to the size they are supposed to be. We had something to harvest to try out, at least.
They, too, stalled and stagnated. The corn that was planted with them, however, did better than the corn in the larger bed, so we could rule out soil issues. The above photo was taken after I’d salvaged the trellis from the melons to make a fence to keep critters from eating the corn before we could.
As with the other winter squash, the Arikara squash seemed to do well, then stalled, then started to grow again, then stalled.
When it got late enough to harvest the corn and pull the stalks, they had started to grow again, so I left the fencing.
In the above picture, you can see frost damage on the leaves – and flowers! There were even female flowers developing!
It was too late by then, but they continued to surprise me by starting to show new leaves and buds even after the entire plants looked like they had been killed off by frost.
I took these pictures of progress on covering the paths with wood chips, but you can see the melon and Spoon tomato bed in both images.
The melons just… didn’t. Some tried to bloom, but the vines seemed to die back a bit, possibly from transplant shock, and then that was it. They never got better, even if a few did try to bloom.
The melons were a total loss.
The Spoon tomatoes, however, were a surprise.
The first surprise is that they stayed short and bushy. Every time I’ve grown them in the past, they got quite tall for such a small plant, and needed support. That’s why I made the bamboo stake trellis for them that I did. The absolutely stagnated, like everything else.
And yet, they were incredibly productive! I couldn’t believe how many tiny tomatoes we got off of these! Granted, they are so small that it takes about 50 or more to equal one small slicer tomato, but it was enough.
Yes, I did collect some just for seeds.
We also lost a lot of tiny tomatoes into the bed while picking them. When the frosts were coming, my daughters pulled them all, then all three of us sat together, picking off only the reddest tomatoes to keep, and the rest went onto the compost heap. Of the next couple of weeks, even with the frosts, I saw all those tiny green tomatoes turning red!
Not only will we probably have self seeded Spoon tomatoes in that bed, but in the compost pile, too!
More tomatoes
Then there were the other tomatoes.
*sigh*
One of the things I had to do was put netting around the bed.
The Black Beauty tomatoes were already something that takes a long time to ripen, but when we grew them before, they got large and bushy and were loaded with tomatoes. This time, we had hardly any show up.
The Chocolate Cherry did better, but still nothing close to when we grew them before.
The Sub Arctic Plenty barely grew at all. They did produce a few tomatoes, though.
In the above first picture, there’s the last of the ripe Spoon tomatoes, along with the unripe tomatoes, that we brought in for our last real harvest. This included dry radish seed pods and Super Sugar Snap peas for seed saving.
Sweetie Snack Mix peppers and Turkish Orange eggplant
Then there were the peppers.
The plants actually did pretty well, though they didn’t get as large and bushy as they should have. One thing I did that I believe helped was prune the ornamental crab apple tree of branches overhanging that bed – discovering a whole bunch of hidden dead branches in the process. It took a very long time, but they did start producing, and we even harvested a couple of mostly ripe peppers off the plants.
When the cold nights and frosts threatened, the wire tomato cages allowed us to cover them with old bed sheets we repurposed for the garden.
The pepper plants handled the cold surprisingly well, though. As with the tomatoes, most of these got harvested while still green, and brought in to ripen indoors before the hard frosts hit.
The Turkish Orange eggplant also stagnated and took a long time to start producing fruit, so it was very late in the season before we started seeing orange among the green.
It was so late in the season, I was collecting carrot seeds, too!
As with the peppers, the last of them were harvested green and brought in to ripen indoors. The plants themselves were not at all cold hardy. Yet, they surprised me. Even after I cut their stems at soil level to more easily harvest the unripe eggplant, I later found that they were sending up new growth!
Over time, as they ripened, we were able to use the peppers and even had enough to dehydrate a small bag’s worth.
As for the eggplant, we tried them out and they were okay tasting. Not particularly tasty, compared to other varieties, but that could have been because of the difficult growing year. One of my daughters, however, found that after eating them, with the skins on, her lips went numb. She’s never had this reaction to eggplant before. There’s something in this variety that she’s allergic to!
In the first picture, you can see the herb bed in the background, still green and producing, after several frosts, while the other beds are being winter sown. Everything except the basil, which got killed off with the first light frost. It was fantastic being able to pop into the garden and harvest a few herbs, any time we needed.
We were still harvesting as needed until it finally was time to mulch the bed for the winter. Even then, I mulched around the plants first, and we kept using them, before fully mulching them before the snow hit. The thyme, oregano, lemon balm and sage are all herbs that, in milder climates, are perennials. With proper mulching, these might actually survive the winter.
For a time, it did seem that they were stagnating, too, but there was a different solution for that. They weren’t getting enough light. We’d pruned the ornamental crab apple tree at that corner before, but much of it was grown back. After cutting way a major branch, the herbs, and even the winter sown kitchen greens bed, suddenly were getting so much more light!
I’m glad I bought the transplants, though, rather than trying to start them myself indoors. I don’t think I would have had as much success, otherwise.
Now we have one last transplant to talk about.
The luffa.
*sigh*
As with everything else, they stagnated. One grew a fair bit more – enough to actually climb up the greenhouse structure, and even bloom.
The other one also, eventually, started to grow, but these were both failures. They’ve grown better for us, out in the open garden beds, than in the greenhouse!
Final Thoughts
Starting seeds in the basement: we have no choice on this one. In fact, we are currently working on making space and figuring out how to bring the aquarium greenhouses into the basement, so we have have better control over temperature and light. The problem is, the big tank and the shelf it’s on are quite large, and we aren’t sure how we can get it around the bottom of the stairs without breaking anything! Also, one of my heat mats died, so we’ll need to get another.
Pre-germination: no change there. We will continue to pre-germinate as many seeds as possible
The portable greenhouse: I really loved having this, but we have a major issue. By the end of the season, the winds basically tore it apart. Plus, we’ve had a couple of cats jump up onto the roof, adding more holes. The cover is completely toast. The frame it still good, though, so we will probably look into getting better quality greenhouse cover material and basically make a new cover for it. Currently, it’s covered with a large heavy duty tarp and being used as another winter shelter for the cats. With no door flap, because that is gone.
Winter Squash: we will always be growing winter squash of some kind. This year’s failure had to do with things out of our control. I’d like to try this year’s varieties again, but another time. We’ve got other varieties to try in 2026 already. I’m still looking to grow the rare Arikara squash for their seeds, too.
Melons: same as with the squash. Growing conditions just killed them off this year. We have new melon seeds and new varieties, so we will be growing melons again.
Tomatoes: My daughters have suggested not to grow Spoon tomatoes again. Too many tiny tomatoes to pick. 😁 We have new varieties to try, including another tiny variety 😄, so next year we will likely have another three or four varieties again. Just not a lot of each.
Peppers: my daughters suggested that we just grow the Sweet Chocolate peppers we grew a couple of years ago, as they were enjoyed. I did pick up a different variety noted for having thick walls, so we might be doing two varieties of pepper next year.
Eggplant: with a daughter that has a reaction when eating the Turkish Orange eggplant, we won’t be growing those again. I did, however, get a white variety to try next year.
Herbs: total win, here. We plant to have many more herbs in the old kitchen garden, and we do have seeds to start indoors, but buying transplants is always a good option, too. Plus, with this particular little bed, we might even have our first perennial herbs – if the heavy mulch helps them survive the winter!
Luffa: Yes, I will be trying luffa again! I am determined to grow sponges. We’ve come so close in the past!
What we could really use is a polytunnel or a more permanent greenhouse.
All in good time!
As for this year’s transplants, they started out strong once they got out of the basement. It just was such a difficult year. We had modest successes, at least, but nothing that would feed us for any length of time! As my SIL once said, of their own garden: if we relied on our garden to feed us, we’d starve! One of our goals, however, is to grow and store enough produce for 4 adults from harvest to harvest. We can’t afford years like this too many times!
We were not the only ones that has such a bad gardening year, of course. Lots of people on my gardening groups really struggled.
Hopefully, next year will be better.
We will, however, be learning a lot from this year, to help make that happen!
Once the frame for the low raised bed was finally assembled, it was time to set up a trellis, then do some transplanting.
This time, I got to use actual new, never before used by anyone else, metal posts to hold the wire! I had picked up four of these posts at Dollarama, and they seem like a really good product.
Rather than set the posts right at the freshly attached end logs, I set the end posts about a foot in from the ends, which turned out to be roughly 15′ apart in the 18′ bed, so the other two were set about 5′ apart. And by “feet”, I mean literally my booted feet. 😁
At the end closer to those trees we need to get rid of, I had to actually dig around with the garden fork to pull up the rocks I kept hitting, trying to push the post in!
Then I went to the old squash tunnel and snagged the last 2″ square wire mesh. There’s still one section with chicken wire on it. I find the 6 sided shapes bend and stretch out of shape too much for my liking, so I’m not sure what I’ll use that for.
The square wire mesh was about 18′ ong, so there was excess to work with.
One of the things about these posts is that they have hooks on them to hold stuff like this, which you can see in the second image of the slideshow above. There’s four hooks like that, with the opening facing up, along the top 2/3 or so, then two in the bottom third, facing the other way.
Very convenient, except it was remarkably difficult to get all of them hooked up at the same time!
It was still much easier to get the wire mesh up evenly than on the salvaged T posts I used for the pea trellis.
Once the trellis was done, it was time to finally do some transplanting!
Once again, the trellis posts dividing the bed into 3 sections came in handy, as I had three types of melon to transplant. There were four each of the honeydew and Sarah’s Choice (cantaloupe type) melons. Then there were the Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon. There are two larger plants, plus one really tiny one I probably shouldn’t have bothered with, but I can’t just toss the poor thing!
I decided to transplant all of them melons on the East side of the trellis, so they will get the morning sun, and the three watermelons would be on the south end of the bed.
As with the winter squash, I set up collars made from 4L water bottles that my husband uses for his CPAP humidifier. Those are turning out to be very handy!
Once I spaced out each collar and set them into the soil, just enough to keep them from blowing away, I added a handful of manure into each. That got well mixed into the very, very dry soil, the collars reset in place, and then I made low trenches in the soil around them, to drain water down towards the roots.
Then everything got a thorough soaking. Which got sucked up like a sponge, so I did it again.
Even with filling the collars with water, as well as the trenches around them, when I dug down to plant the melons, I was still reaching super dry soil!
Everything got another thorough watering, once the transplants were in.
Then I grabbed the wagon and headed to the outer yard to rake up grass clippings to use as mulch. Thankfully, that area is far enough away that it’s not filled with Chinese elm seeds! The inner yard is practically drifted with them.
Once the melons were surrounded by mulch, it got yet another thorough watering. I wanted to make sure the mulch was wet all the way through, not just on top.
As these get bigger, I plan to train them up the trellis as best I can. Last year, we had a 4″ plastic trellis net, and it really sagged under the weight of the vines, so I’m hoping this set up will work better. I will probably still have to add cross pieces at the tops. The wire extends about 4″ above the top hook on the posts, so I should be able to weave supports through the mesh fairly easily. The posts also have holes in them so, if necessary, I can use twine or something to stake them out at the ends, so the weight of melons doesn’t pull them towards the middle.
That took care of one half of the bed.
I have decided that I will plant our Spoon tomatoes in the other half.
Several of them are staring to bloom now! These are indeterminants that can grow quite tall, so they will have their own individual supports, plus the trellis, to hold them up. I’ve got nine Spoon tomato transplants, so there will be room to plant something else with them, if I wanted to. Some bush beans, perhaps.
I’m hoping to be able to get them in tomorrow morning, since the bed is pretty much ready, and there’s even extra mulch waiting in the wagon for them. My daughter has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, and we’re planning on leaving early. Chances are, we’ll need to go to the pharmacy after her appointment, and I will likely take advantage of the driving around to do some of the shopping we weren’t able to do during our stock up shops, so it might be a long day of driving around! Which means the morning will be pretty much the only time I’ll have available to get any more transplants in.
After the Spoon tomatoes are in, that leaves the peppers and eggplant to be planted in the old kitchen garden, and the rest of the tomatoes should fit in one of the low raised beds in the East yard. The other low raised bed will have our short season corn planted in it, with more bush beans planted in between.
By the time those are in, the elm seeds should be done dropping, and I can finally do something about that bed along the chain link fence. The mesh tunnel may be all bent up, but it’s still doing its job of keeping the bed from being suffocated by seeds. I’ll be replanting the bed with my remaining packet of Hopi Black Dye sunflower seeds, and pole beans.
I might skip planting into the chimney block planters at the other section of chain link fence entirely, this year. I’ll have to see how badly the elm roots have invaded. There’s still the trellis bed that still needs work, but can be planted in before that’s done. Plus, the bed in the old kitchen garden that will be getting wattle weave walls added. It could probably be planted in before that’s done, too.
It feels like I’m way behind on getting the direct sowing done, but it’s only June 2 today – our previous average last frost date. Which means most things couldn’t actually be safely direct sown until after today, anyhow! We had so many insanely hot days, lately, everything feels off.
We got 4 of the 5 Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon seeds potted up, as well as a couple of Honeydew. There were still 2 Honeydew seeds, and the Kaho melon seeds, that were not germinated, so we ended up combining them into one tray. I’d gotten rid of the one Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon seed that didn’t germinate, as it seemed like it was not viable, but the remaining Honeydew seeds look like they might still germinate. I’m not sure about the Kaho seeds, though. They may simply be too old.
With the pre-germinated seeds potted up, there wasn’t room in the tray for the container with the remaining seeds, plus the container with the Zucca melon seeds, so they got stacked. The large Zucca melon seeds would need longer to germinated, but it does seem like it’s taking too long. I’m not sure we’ll get any at all this year. We shall see.
My daughter and I then went through some of my herb seeds to figure out what else we could be starting inside. In the end, I decided that I will buy transplants, instead, for the ones we want. I also seem to be missing some seed packets! I’ve no idea what happened to them.
We also talked about some of the flower seeds. I’d picked up some Baby’s Breath for my daughters, as my older daughter in particular really likes them. They looked them up and, apparently, they are considered invasive in our area. Which I find strange, since we already have some in a small flower garden where my mother had planted them, ages ago. They barely survive and are certainly not spreading! It’s part of the reason I got more seeds.
Once we were done, my daughter ended up staying in the basement for a while longer to use the exercise bike, so we could keep the heater on for longer. Later, we both headed outside to feed the cats, then go through the garden beds. I wanted to make sure she was on top of the plans I had, in case they had to take over for me for some reason.
She was very happy to see that her tulips are coming up, and we even spotted a few grape hyacinths emerging. No sign of the snow crocuses, though. We pulled back the black tarp to check out where I was thinking of planting the asparagus and strawberries, and it does look like the weeds and crab grass have been killed off well enough to use the space. The only issue will be the roots from the nearby elm trees, and I’m really hoping we can finally cut those down this year. In trying to clean the area up, I found stumps that showed others have tried to clear them away in the past, and they grew back, so I’ll have to take that into account when we finally get those taken down. It still blows me away, how much their roots have been getting into the garden beds and choking things out.
We checked on the beds that I want to cover with the netting, and had to refill more holes dug by the cats. Very frustrating, that we couldn’t cover them because of the wind.
Speaking of the wind, in the next photo of the slide show above, you can see an area in our spruce grove I was finally able to get to. I tell that we lost a few trees over the winter, and saw some that look like they came down within the past day or two. Cleaning up in there is going to be a huge job!
We checked on the netting I put over the bed at the chain link fence yesterday. Much to my surprise, one of the supports at an overlapping section had been completely pulled up and almost took a few others with it! It seems like the extra netting with the drawstring that would normally be the end of the row cover got caught somehow. Hopefully, that won’t happen again, and there was no damage.
The portable greenhouse was getting some wind damage, though.
In the last photo in the slideshow above, you can see the tear along the zipper. It has gotten bigger – big enough that cats could easily fit through, if they wanted. I’m not sure how to reattach it to the zipper. I did add some clear duct tape above the tear, in hopes it will prevent it from tearing more. We also found a tear in one corner where the tie downs are attached. The loop of fabric the cord was tied to actually tore loose from the plastic. The loop is part of a tie that is fastened to the frame itself on the inside, so it can’t go very far. The clear duct tape came in handy to cover the hole and, hopefully, prevent it from getting worse. I know the covers on these little greenhouses don’t last long, but we don’t even have any plants in it yet! High winds were why I’d hoped to set it up in a corner closer to the house, but the ground is just too uneven there.
I’ve been looking at 6mm greenhouse plastic online. What I’d really like to do is get a roll of it, but that’s well out of budget right now.
I keep looking at various notifications on my weather apps, telling me things like, light rain coming soon, or, rain will end soon. The problem is, we’ve had NO rain at all. According to the weather radar, we’ve got a system right on top of us, and we’re supposed to get rain for the next couple of hours, yet I’m not seeing a drop of rain out my window. At this rate, I’m going to have to hook up the hoses and start watering the winter sown beds! I might even have to fill the rain barrel I’ve set up with the hose, to have warmer water for the garden beds, because we sure aren’t getting any rain to fill it! Nor are we expecting any, for weeks.
Tomorrow is supposed to be a cooler day than today, though with the wind, today felt downright chilly. I’m really hoping the wind dies down, so we can get those nets set up. Given my pain levels today, it’s probably good I’ve got an enforced day of rest.
My husband, sweetheart that he is, ordered some Tai Fu lotion (not an affiliate link), that came in today. We’ve used this stuff, in balm form, in the past and it helped, but we were a lot less broken back then. I’m looking forward to trying it when I go to bed tonight. I hope it helps. Lord knows, the prescription stuff I tried a few years ago didn’t do much, and I’m hurting a lot more these days, then at that time. Between the lotion, and today’s enforced rest, I’m hoping to be able to get some work done tomorrow!
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!
The Re-Farmer 