mulching

Our 2026 Garden: deer damage? and infrastructure progress

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This morning, I made sure to give the garden beds a through watering before things got too hot.

I found this.

On the one hand, I was happy to see another poppy blooming.

On the other, I was sad to see one of the flower buds got chomped!

I have a suspicion that it didn’t taste very good, or the rest would have been eaten, too.

So… we’re down to just 3 Giganthemum poppies instead of 4!

The nasturtiums are kicking into high gear with blooms right now.

The transplanted Crackerjack marigold and white dwarf cosmos that were supposed to be red cosmos are still blooming, too. The bush beans in the high raised bed have flower buds, and I spotted a flower on one of the Caspar eggplant. There are also more flowers showing up on various types of tomatoes. The musk melon and watermelon transplants I bought have also been flowering, but I’m picking those off. The plants are still way too tiny, but they finally seem to be growing.

Once the morning watering was done, we all just stayed indoors and out of the heat. I even crashed for a couple of hours of much needed sleep.

In the afternoon, after the cats were fed, it was back into the garden. I had a lot of stuff I wanted to get done.

First, I wanted to work on the corn patch.

In the first image of the slide show above, you can see the corn leaves are starting to press up against the netting. This is not a tall variety, but it does get taller than this. I considered finding a way to make the hoops higher, but decided to just remove the netting completely.

Once the netting was off, the corn got a thorough weeding, and then mulched with grass clippings. Parts of where I mowed yesterday do not have Creeping Charlie, so the clippings were safe to use. You can see it all done in the second image. I have left the hoops. Corn gets knocked over by wind very easily, and the hoops will provide at least some support. I’m considering other ways of adding more support as well.

I’ve got the motion sensor deer scarer set to go off at night, though I’ve set one off when it was still dusk, so “night” is a very brought frame. Hopefully, it will be enough to keep them away – and the raccoons! I might have to switch it to be active both day and night, though that would mean I would be setting it off while tending the garden. Which I might be willing to put up with!

Once the corn was weeded, it got a thorough watering, then the mulch was added, then it got watered again. From there, I kept watering the beds until I got to the next one I wanted to work on.

It was hard to see through the turnip leaves, but it did seem the red noodle beans were getting bitter. So, I harvested most of the turnips, partly to let the beans have more light, then added the trellis supports for them to climb. They look like they’re just starting to throw out tendrils.

This bed also got grass clippings added to mulch between the remaining turnips, and between the turnip row and the beans. The daikon radish is looking good – the one survivor from the winter sowing is not only still blooming but starting to develop seed pods. We will have seeds to collect for next year. The onions along the radish side of the bed are looking good, but not to much the ones on the turnip side. Those might start doing better, now that most of the turnips were pulled and they’re no longer shaded out by large leaves.

There was one more bed to water in this area before I moved to the next beds I wanted to work on.

The first section was around the dwarf peas. I wanted to remove the netting, partly because it was a pain to get under it to collect ripe pea pods.

I left the hoops, but added the wire decorative fencing to keep the cats from lying on the peas. After weeding and watering, grass clippings were added. This bed already had some leaf mulch on it, but that was breaking down quite a bit.

I found a surprising number of self seeded tomato plants while weeding! I removed the protective plastic collar that had been around the mystery flowers I’d found and transplanted here. They’re large enough now that I don’t think they need it. Very few of the onions I’d found and transplanted here in the fall made it, but the garlic I’d ground and planted are doing rather well.

Next, I worked on the rest of the wattle weave bed.

The Florence Fennel was pushing up against the netting already, so I took it off completely. I’ll probably remove these hoops later, but left them for now. The fennel, chicory and strawberries, with the two surviving summer squash I’d transplanted from thinning the other bed, are now well mulched with grass clippings and well watered again.

There was one last bed I wanted to work on.

The summer squash.

After removing the netting, each surviving summer squash got its own stake for vertical growing. It looks like four spots, from three different types of squash, didn’t make it. Once the stakes were in place, I went to use garden wire to start securing the larger vines to the stakes, but I think I may have accidentally killed one of them. I moved the stem to put it up against the stake and heard a noise that sounded like it was pulled right out of the ground! It wasn’t, but it may have been pulled up and the roots damaged. I’ll probably know by tomorrow morning if I killed it.

With four plants not making it, I found myself with four extra bamboo stakes, so I wove them across the vertical stakes on the inside, just a bit higher than the hoops. If I can find more bamboo stakes long enough, I’ll do the same on the outside row, too, just to help keep them stable and better able to hold weight.

Hopefully, the garden will survive the heat we’re going to have over the next few days. We’re expected to go above 30C/86F for the next three days, then the highs are supposed to be in the mid 20’sC (around 77F) for the rest of the month.

Definitely “water twice a day” weather.

It’s going to be brutal at the market tomorrow. Thankfully, we do have the canopy tent for shade, at least!!!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: maintenance and one last transplant, plus updates

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Today has turned out to be a fairly hot and muggy day. Depending on which weather app I look at, we’re either supposed to be raining right now (it isn’t) through to tomorrow, and then thunderstorm warnings for the next two days. Or, we will get scattered rain today, with more rain for a few hours, now and then, for the next two days. Once again, it looks like the more severe weather systems will go around us.

Our day started early, as my younger daughter and I needed to get to her blacksmithing workshop for 8am. We left an hour early, and just made it on time, partly due to skirting road construction and areas still damaged from the flash flooding. The road to the blacksmith’s acreage had visible damage, some of which has been repair, some still waiting to be patched. There were a couple of areas I could tell had been completely under water, with standing water and flood damage in the fields on either side.

When we got there, I started getting messages from the rescue about Sweetie. She is not doing well and bit someone again. They wanted to know when she can come back to us. After going over what we’ve got going on over the next while, it was worked out that someone will bring her here on Monday (today is Saturday). They did manage to get her spayed a week ago, so we will keep her in the isolation shelter for only a few days, so she can get used to the idea that she is back in familiar territory again.

My daughter’s workshop didn’t take as long as originally expected. There weren’t as many people signed up for this date, which is their only “build your own forge and take it home” workshop of the season, and only one person added the extra of including an electric blower to take home as well. My daughter wants a manual blower. In the end, the workshop was only about 2 hours instead of 4. When it was done, we loaded the table portion into the back of the truck and strapped it down, removing the firepot portion and putting that in the cab with the air duct for the blower. Then we headed to the smaller city nearby for a quick lunch and to pick up a few small things we would run out of before we do our next stock up shop on Tuesday.

Once we got home, we made some space for the forge in the side of the garage with my brother’s big riding mower and other equipment. Now, we need to build a structure for her smithy so set it up in permanently. In between, she wants to find a blower, and then get fuel.

With rain apparently on the way, I asked her to give me a hand with some maintenance in the garden. Plus, I had one Butterneck squash seedling to transplant.

The first bed we worked on was the summer squash. It was time to remove the protective collars. The finnicky part is lifting the netting high enough, without getting tangled up, to work in the bed. The “funnels” in between the groups of summer squash remain, as they get watered through those.

In the next image in the slide show above, you can see the fennel and chicory bed we worked on. The fennel was getting too tall for the netting, so we took it off, then added one more rod and connector to each hoop. The netting had been folded in half, but with the new height, we unfolded it before setting it back. There is still slack with the new height, but not very much.

In the next image, you can see the turnip, pole bean, daikon radish and onion bed we worked on next. The turnips and onions were getting crowded, so all the hoops here got on more rod and connector, too. We also took the opportunity to do some weeding, and add some straw for a mulch.

Once thing I’m concerned about with this bed is the red noodle beans. When I tried to grow them last year, they got to about the stage this year’s beans have reached now, and then… stopped. They never really got any bigger, and I never figured out why. I’m hoping that a different bed and consistent watering and fertilizing will help them grow. Once they get to when they can start climbing, we’ll take off the net set up a trellis. For now, though, there’s just no need.

This netting had also been folded in half and needed to be unfolded to fit over the new height, then secured. A job made much easier with my daughter to help!

The next image is something I’d actually done last night – I finally added a mulch in between the cosmos, marigolds and nasturtiums. The nasturtiums are quite small. They didn’t get very big last year, either, and I know they should be larger and fuller. No sign of any self-seeded memorial asters (I’m still unhappy that the seeds I saved indoors have disappeared), so the spaces are now all mulched.

In the last image, we have progress on the chain link fence bed. My daughter helped me raise the bottom half of the netting from end to end, securing it up so that I could work under it. After that, I could manage it on my own.

In one of the empty protective collars, I transplanted the single Butterneck squash seedling. Then I mulched with straw tightly around the collars, and carefully around the sunflowers. I also made sure not to cover the furrow I’d planted the super sugar snap peas, from our own saved seed. There are seedlings appearing now!

After the straw was in place, I carefully removed the protective collars. The mulch will protect them from the elements now. Last of all, the netting was set back down and reset nice and snug.

Once that was done, and everything was cleaned up and put away, I checked on some of the other beds. The high raised bed needs a straw mulch, too, but I’ll do that later. Hopefully, tomorrow. The short season corn is getting tall enough to mulch, too, I think. I checked on the more recent sowing of carrots. No seedlings yet, but the frogs do love hanging out under the boards protecting the carrot seeds! I didn’t notice any cucumbers coming up, yet. I checked the garden beds in the east yard, too, and was happy to see my last sowing of bush beans, in the small square raised bed, have started to germinate.

I really hope things start catching up soon. Staples like carrots, peas and beans all seem to be under the weather. The winter squash and melons aren’t doing well, either, but they’re not quite staples in the same way. The garlic is doing great, and scapes have started to form. I expect to be harvesting some in the next day or two. I’m really looking forward to those! The potatoes are starting to develop flowers, with one variety developing faster than the other. We should be able to start harvesting baby potatoes soon, if we wanted to.

So that is garden progress today. Mostly just maintenance. I’m really liking the flexibility of the hoop kits. I still plan to build more covers for the raised beds, but for now, these are doing just fine. Being able to make the hoops higher as needed really helps.

The surreal thing of the day has been the time. When my daughter and I were starting for home, it felt like 2 or 3 in the afternoon, but it was just coming up on noon. When I finished in the garden and did the outside cat feeding, I was sure it was well past 5. Maybe even 6. Instead, it was just barely 3 when I got in! Meanwhile, I can see outside my window, the sky getting darker and the wind blowing the maple branches, and I feel like it’s almost bed time… and it’s not even 4:30 as I write this!

Very disorienting, that’s for sure!

😄😉

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: mulching the potatoes and garlic

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We have ourselves a downright cold day, for this time of year. As I write this, we’re at 11C/52F, with a humidex at 5C/41F Our expected high of the day is only 15C/59F

With that in mind, I decided to leave the transplants I purchased in their bins and will transplant them tomorrow. Today, I focused first on weed trimming around the main garden beds for as long as the batteries lasted. After I drained two batteries around the log framed beds, I switched gears to focus on the potato bed.

The potatoes had gotten big enough that they were pushing up the netting that kept the cats and elm seeds out. The first photo was taken after I’d removed the weights and ground staples holding the edges of the netting down.

There was enough debris and elm seeds on the netting that I took care to drag it well away from the bed before rolling it up. After the supports were removed, I got the weed trimmer going again. The battery lasted me long enough to finish around the potato bed and almost all the way around the garlic bed next to it.

With the potatoes, I brought out the wagon and started hauling straw from the round bale to mulch around the potato plants. It took 3 1/2 loads to get it all thickly mulched. Especially around the edges, where the crab grass and creeping Charlie keeps trying to invade.

Then, since I had half a wagon load anyway, I started mulching around the garlic bed. It already has a leaf mulch around the edges, but things are starting to grow through. A couple more wagon loads finished the job. The short distance that didn’t get cleared with the weed trimmer got an extra thick layer.

There is spinach and chard planted in between the garlic, and they are just not growing. I can see seedlings. They are there. They are just not getting bigger! I’ve had the same problem in previous years. The first time we grew spinach, we had three bed with three different varieties and they thrived. That was the last year we were able to grow really good spinach. Even the winter sown spinach we grew in the old kitchen garden were not as lush. That was also the only time we successfully grew chard. Every other time we tried to grow it, we’d get seedlings and that was it. They just stopped growing. I have no idea why.

The garlic is looking good, though. I’m looking forward to when the scapes start showing up!

When I was all done putting everything away and heading in, I was rather surprised when I checked the time. It was barely past noon. I hadn’t paid attention tow what time it was when I headed out, and the day felt like it should have been more like 5pm!

Checking the temperature again. It hasn’t changed, except for the “real feel”, which has dropped to 4C/39F. Tomorrow’s high is supposed to be 21C/70F, and it’s expected to be the hottest day for the next 10 days or so.

Welcome to spring in the prairies.

The Re-Farmer

Much progress made – and now she does it?

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I’m happy to say that I pretty much finished all the stuff I needed to get done before the hard freeze hit, but I just had to share this first.

One of the adult females we’ve been trying to get is Adam. She sometimes allows us to pet her, but we just haven’t been able to get her into a carrier.

As I was going through the sun room this evening, I spotted her.

That’s her, peeking at me from one of the carriers, back in its spot on the shelf.

Well, at least she associates carriers as a cozy spot to hang out. If only she would do this when we can get her to a vet for a spay!

*sigh*

The first thing I needed to do when I headed outside this afternoon was set up the emergency diverter for the septic, now that the tank area is covered in straw. In the basement, I grabbed a length of foam pipe insulation to put around the pipe first, then pushed it as far as it could go against the wall. When the ejector froze last winter, every time the pump turned on and greywater was pumped out the emergency bypass, I would hear vibrating noises of pipe against concrete that always got me nervous. I’ve become rather paranoid about our septic system! The pipe insulation I used is one of several lengths I found in the old basement that is meant to go over water pipes, not the larger pipe from the septic, but it’s split lengthwise, so I could get it around the half that was against the wall. That’s all I need.

Once outside, I had to remove the insert plug my brother had put on the outside end, which was secured with a steel ring hose clamp. The plug he got has the ridges that help keep it from being pushed out by pressure, plus the tightened the ring enough to squeeze the end of the pipe tightly. Basically, it would have been a great permanent plug. Unfortunately, it’s not meant to be permanent. It’s meant to be taken out as needed. An ordinary, temporary, end cap would have sufficed, but my brother is very thorough! It took considerable effort, and an adjustable wrench, to finally get it out. Plus a flat head screwdriver to create space between the pipe and the plug, just to be able to move it at all!

Once the end was open, I could set it into the PVC pipe I had ready. Then I used the collection of boards, bricks and scrap pieces of Styrofoam insulation to create a gradual slope from the rigid pipe and along the flexible hose so that grey water could be diverted far from the house, into the maple grove.

Hopefully, we will never need to use this again, but it’s good to have it set up and ready, just in case!

The down side of having that set up is that it blocks access around that corner of the house from where the bale is. Once the emergency diverter was set up, I got the wagon and the wheelbarrow to get straw to the various areas I wanted to mulch. When it came time to do the old kitchen garden, I had to go the long way around with the wagon and wheelbarrow loads of straw. Not a problem. Just a bit inconvenient.

The first area I worked on was in the main garden. The above picture is a little preview. By the time I was done, light was starting to fade fast. I decided to do a quick, impromptu garden tour video. I’ll be working on editing that tonight, and will likely have it ready to post tomorrow. I have a few hours to kill before I have to go to my mother’s for her bed time med and personal care assist.

Before I finished for the night, I grabbed one more wheelbarrow load of straw and set it by the covered greenhouse. Tomorrow, I plan to clear out the water bowl house and set straw on the floor, removing the huge crocheted blanket entirely. We’ll set that over the kibble house roof as extra insulation. I expect to have leftover straw, and will find other places to leave it for the cats. The cats really, really like the straw! The last thing to do will be to rake up around the bale to clean things up, then cover it with a tarp for the winter.

I am so glad we were able to get another straw bale this year – and that the renters had one to spare! Next year, when it’s time to use straw as mulch on the garden beds, I plan to run it through the shredder chute on the wood chipper, first. In the past, I tried using the push mower to shred the straw, but it clogged up the air filter so quickly. We only have my brother’s push mower now, so I’m not going to be doing that with his equipment!

Getting this last bit of progress done before things got too cold feels so good! 😊

The Re-Farmer

Progress outside!

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I wasn’t sure if it was going to get done. When I headed out this morning to feed the outside cats, it was decidedly unpleasant.

I also counted 38 cats. I haven’t seen that one tabby that I didn’t recognize, but none of the ones I did see were unfamiliar. Which means the crowd was congregating all at once!

I didn’t soak the kibble in the morning, because I knew it would freeze, so I saved that for the afternoon. I counted 32, that time. Including this little fluff ball.

Tomorrow evening, we are going to get Frank and Pinky closed up in the isolation shelter, so that they can have their fast (after a treat of wet cat food) and be easier to catch in the morning, for their spays. The other cats and kittens are not going to be happy with not being allowed in the isolation shelter for a month! We’ve got the first two that will be in there until it’s time to switch them out for about 10 days, and then we’ll have the next two set up in there for their recovery period. Assuming we can catch two more females. If we ended up with males, they won’t need that much time for observation and recovery.

After the second feeding, I did my evening rounds before it got too dark – these are being done earlier and earlier! Today, I made a point of checking the asters. I’d left the flower bed untouched, so that the Cosmos could shelter the memorial asters from the frost, and hopefully give them time to go to seed.

It worked!

I collected some to bring inside for planting next year. I left others to self seed. I’m so happy they had enough time to develop seeds before the deep freeze hit!

It was nice enough out that I grabbed a rake and collected leaves to do some mulching, then did a bit of winterizing.

The first picture in the slide show above is where the tiny strawberries were transplanted. I have no idea if they will survive in their new location, but it is worth a try. In the next picture, you can see that the strawberries transplanted into the retaining wall also got mulched with leaves. Next was the saffron. I don’t know if I am being too early with this, or too late, since they are showing new growth. The one flower bud that is still there looks like it froze before it could open, so I left it. I had considered leaving those until later, as we are supposed to warm up a little bit over the next week, but then I saw cats digging around them to leave “presents”, so the mulch is to keep them away, too.

I didn’t mulch the little herb bed, as we are still able to harvest from them, but I did get a pile of leaves ready for when it’s time.

Now that our septic tank is empty, it’s time to get that area ready for winter, too. We’ll be setting the emergency bypass up, just in case, so I stretched out the flexible hose so that it can warm up in the sun and straighten out. I ended up sitting a short length of pipe into the far end to flatten it, because it kept sticking up into the air. The two lengths of PVC pipe we set over the pipe from the basement got shoved into the flexible hose at the other end to help straighten that out, too. In a couple of sections, I leaned boards and bricks and whatnot to get them to straighten out and flatten to the ground.

We did not get the straw bale I was hoping to get this weekend. It might still get delivered in the next while but, just in case, I set the insulated tarp over the septic tank and weighed it down.

The forecast now says we should reach highs of 5C/41F next weekend, and that should be pretty much it for the winter. Time enough for a few last things, like covering the herb bed and, if the straw comes in, using that in various places. I’ll take advantage of every warmish day we have right now!

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the garlic bed is now DONE!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll share about that in my next post.

See you there!

The Re-Farmer

Finally mulched the new food forest additions

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It was getting ridiculously hot and muggy, but I wanted to finally get a good mulch around the newest food forest additions. I had just gone around them with the weed trimmer and, with the rain we’ve been having, it would grow back fast if it didn’t get covered.

Of course, I forgot to take a “before” picture, before I started! 😄

In the first to photos above, I had just laid out the first wheelbarrow load of wood chips. Before that, I moved out the hose I had set up in the rain barrel, taken away pieces of wood from when we had our pea and bean trellises out there that were weighing down the cardboard, and removed the leaky rain barrel and my watering can. I left the cages and the metal spinner.

The plum tree already had the largest area mulched with grass clippings, so I added the wood chips only up to the wire mesh. With everything else, I mulched closer in, but still made sure to leave a “donut hole” around the plants themselves. There was also a pile of grass clippings set aside when the area was prepped for planting, so I went ahead and added that in, too. With that added in, it took 4 1/2 wheel barrow loads to mulch the area, nice and thick.

After I got the two “after” pictures, I set the rain barrel back between the gooseberry and apple, making sure the cracked side was facing the middle. One of the sticks I’d removed earlier had been under the opposite side of the barrel to tilt it slightly towards the cracks, and that was returned as well.

By the time I was done, I was dripping with sweat, and we hadn’t even reached out high of the day, so headed back inside once this was done. I still want to head out to take garden tour video, but not quite yet!

I did get some video, though. I had gone back to the paths I’d worked on earlier today, and wow, those ants work fast!

This was just one small section in the video. You can even see one ant going by, carrying an egg. Already I can see openings to tunnels, all over the place! Those buggers work fast!

Crud. I’m going to need to get ant traps to get rid of them, since they’ll cause lots of damage here, and these ants are biters. I hate having to kill them, though.

While we currently have sunshine, heat and humidity where we are, I’m happy to say that there is a large system of rain passing over the north of our province, where most of the wildfires as still burning. There’s a possibility of up to about 100mm (just under four inches) of rain by tomorrow!

I think, over the next few days, I’m going to have to start setting up supports around some of our beds. Looking at the long range forecast into September, we might actually drop to potential frost temperatures in the first week. Even in the next week ahead, we have at least one night where we are expected to drop below 10C/50F. The eggplant seem the most intolerant of cold, but we’ve finally got some female flowers on the winter squash showing up! If we can just stay above 10C/59F for another month, we might actually have something to harvest.

Ah, well. Whatever happens, we’ll just have to deal with it!

The Re-Farmer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then it was time to weed.

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

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

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

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

And another.

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

Then I found another.

And another.

And several others!

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

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

Or 15.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: rescuing neglected strawberries, mulching potatoes and more

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Last year, we planted a little plot of Albion everbearing strawberries. They did fantastic!

Until they got eaten by deer.

Repeatedly.

They even tore through the net barrier I’d put around them, and I ended up having to use some leftover pieces of chicken wire. By then, there wasn’t much of the season left, but the bed did get heavily mulched for the winter, with some chicken wire draped over the whole bed for protection.

I did remove some of the mulch in the spring, but in the end, the bed got severely neglected this year.

Amazingly, some strawberries survived.

The strawberries I’d planted in front of the new asparagus bed, however, did not. Not a single one made it. I had simply taken too long before planting them, I think.

We do, however, now have a third Jersey Giant asparagus fern growing! So I still have some home for the rest of those, and the purple asparagus.

The first thing to do was to find and dig up the Albion strawberries and see how many there were.

I’m afraid I had to be pretty rough with them. The crab grass rhizomes were bad enough, but I was also finding new elm roots invading from below. When I planted this bed, I’d dug up as many roots as I could, then covered the bottom with several layers of carboard before adding fresh soil on top, in which the strawberries were planted.

You’d never know I’d done all that, from the roots I was finding!

Those elm trees have got to go.

I actually found quite a few more strawberry plants than I expected! In the end, I found 10 plants, plus a runner with fresh roots in it, though no leaves yet.

All of these went into a bucket with some water while I worked on where to plant them.

At first, when I thought there were just a few, I had expected to plant them at one end of the bed with the Spoon tomatoes, but there were enough that I decided to reclaim the space I’d planted bare root strawberries in that failed. The shallow trench they were planted in were, of course, filled with elm tree seedlings, along with plenty of other weeds.

There was still some soil left in the old kiddie pool we used as a planter last year, so once the weeds were cleared out, I used that to fill in the shallow trench the strawberries had been planted in. This was more for the asparagus, since I didn’t feel I’d been able to cover the crowns properly on that side.

While clearing the weeds out, I did not find a single sign of the bare root strawberries that had been planted there.

Totally my own fault. They should have gone in the ground as soon as I got them. Instead, they sat for about a month.

Then I decided to take some short logs from the old kitchen garden retaining wall and set them along the little wire fence, to prevent erosion and water run off.

That done, I thoroughly watered the newly added soil. It was bone dry in that little pool. Once everything was well hydrated, I spaced out the strawberry plants in between where the asparagus crowns were planted.

Once those were in and watered again, I went and got more grass clippings to mulch both the strawberries and the asparagus.

Then, because I had enough for it, I got more loads of grass clippings and mulched the potatoes.

By this time, it was getting pretty late, and I was being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

I did continue watering the rest of the garden beds for the night, though. As long as I was moving the mosquitoes weren’t as bad.

While I was watering the grapes, I spotted some friends.

We haven’t seen these in a couple of years! They are Abbott’s sphinx Sphecodina abbottii  and look VERY different, at different stages of development.

Around the edge of the spruce grove, I paused to check on the wild saskatoons growing there.

We actually have ripe berries developing!

I got a picture, then I ate them!

They’re not as big and juicy as they could be; we haven’t had a lot of rain, and the undergrowth is starting to crowd them again. We need to get under them with the loppers and clear it all out again.

All in all, things are going pretty good in the garden. At least, for our region. I have to keep reminding myself of that when I watch gardening videos, and I see all these people posting about their huge plants and amazing harvests. They all tend to be at least a month ahead of us!

I’m happy I got as much done this evening as I did. I’m not sure how much I’ll get to go tomorrow. Not only will it be hotter, but I’ll be driving my husband to his appointment. Thankfully, the AC in the truck works fine, because that heat is going to be brutal on him.

After tomorrow, the highs are supposed to drop a bit for the next while, then get right back up to the “heat warnings in effect” level again.

On the plus side, the peppers and eggplant will be just loving these temperatures!

😄😄

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: potatoes mulched and carrots planted

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One of the things I was able to get done while it was still cooler this morning, as I was finishing up with watering the garden beds, we to finally mulch the potato bed.

This bed had the summer squash winter sown in it and I made a point of saving the leaf mulch along one side, to be added as the seedlings came up. Except they never came up. Now that the potatoes are planted here and have had a chance to, hopefully, start rooting themselves, and I think I even saw some potato leaves starting to poke through, I decided it was time to return the mulch. I will not be hilling the potatoes, just mulching them.

The bed got a deep watering, first. Then I lifted the netting along the one side and basically just tossed handfuls of leaves over the soil, trying not to include any dandelion flowers with it! Quite a lot of dandelions were growing right through the mulch on the one side, so I pulled a lot of that, too. Once the mulch was in place, it got another thorough watering.

The next thing I worked on was planting carrots on either side of the sugar snap peas.

That job required some damage repair, first. When I watered the bed this morning, I found something had been digging into the edge, all along one side, undermining things.

So the very first thing to do was put the soil back into the bed. I was going to just use a hoe, at first, but realized there was a lot of creeping Charlie trying to creep its way into the bed again, so after removing the protective boards, I went through it all by hand, removing as many of the roots as I could, before replacing the dug away soil.

There isn’t a lot of space between the peas and the edge of the bed, though. Just enough for one row of carrots. I created a slight trench to plant them in, as we are expecting drought conditions this year, and a trench will have any rainfall flow towards the carrots, rather than washing away down the sides of the bed. I used the jet setting on the hose to basically drill water into the trench. This both ensures the water gets quite deep, but the water helps level out the trench itself for planting.

This side got the Atomic Red carrots I got from MI Gardener this year as back up seeds. While we do have carrots coming up among the winter sown beds, there don’t seem to be a lot of them, and I do want to have quite a lot of carrots to store for the winter.

After the seeds were sown, I used the mister on the the spray nozzle to “bury” the seeds a little. Then I put boards back over the trench. Two of the boards that were there before were pretty broken up on the ends, so I traded them for more solid ones that were weighing down the plastic on the bed that’s still solarizing. Three boards wasn’t quite long enough, but I already had a short scrap piece for the last bit at the end.

The boards had been placed along the outside of the peas, and mulch down the middle of the bed, to keep the cats from using the bed as a litter box. They would still walk across the bed, though, and would end up moving the boards. Every now and then, I’d find a board rotates with one end over the peas and the other hanging off the edge of the beds. To prevent that, I got out some of the short bamboo plant stakes I picked up at the dollar store that came in packs of 25. I stuck a bunch of them into the soil along the boards, to prevent the boards from moving if a cat walked over it.

That still left the problem of whatever was digging all along the side of the bed. For that, I went into the stacks of short logs that had been used to frame these beds, before they were shifted over into their permanent positions. I dug out the straightest ones I could find and jammed them into the soil along the sides of the bed. Hopefully, they will be enough to deter the digging.

I repeated the process on the other side. On this side, I used our home made seed tape with Uzbek Golden Carrots. These are older seeds, though, so I doubled them up. Thankfully, the wet soil was enough to keep the wind from blowing them away! A final misting, and they got covered with boards, too. Only one of these had to be traded out. I found more short logs to set on that side of the bed, too.

Over the next while, we’ll keep checking under the boards to make sure things are damp, and to remove them as soon as we see seedlings starting to come up.

Eventually, more protection will be added to this bed, to make sure the deer don’t eat the peas. I still haven’t decided just how to do that, though.

One job down! How many more could I get done today?

I’d figure that out, after lunch and hydration!

The Re-Farmer