I did get messages back from the garage about the truck, but nothing about coming in. I’m not sure the problem is the sensor, after finding some oil on the ground in the garage yesterday. It was a while before I went out to move it today, so that I could check the oil levels, and see if there were any new oil stains under it.
There was. Just a couple of drops.
*sigh*
Oil levels were fine. I’m going to have to take a chance, though, and at least make a trip to the nearest Walmart. We’ve used the last of our canned cat food today, and the dry kibble is starting to get low, too.
It was a nice enough day that, after checking on the truck, I stayed out to clear some of the paths that got filled with drifted snow, after two days of high winds. Happily, the plows have gone by, so the roads will be clear. Things are supposed to keep warming up over the next few days, which is going to be quite a relief.
Of course, that makes me think of gardening!
The peppers and eggplant seeds that are set to pre-germinate aren’t showing any radicals yet, nor to I expect them to, this soon. Next on the list was things like tomatoes and herbs, but after watching the above video, I will just be doing the herbs, first. I sorted seeds I’ll be starting by how many weeks before last frost the packages recommend starting them. In theory, I could start the tomatoes in April.
I just really, really want to start more seeds! 😄
I realized it’s been a while since I updated about the onions. All four snail rolls now have seedlings.
They’re tall enough now that I raised the light a bit today. Should they get big enough to need “potting up”, they can be unrolled, more seed starting mix added, then rolled back up again. I made sure to leave enough excess length of the packing foam to accommodate extra width.
Just a little green growth to sooth the gardening soul, as winter drags on!
Today, I finally got around to starting our onion seeds.
Usually, I start onions by densely sowing them in trays. Onion roots can handle quite a bit of abuse. When it’s time to transplant, I just pull them apart as I go. The problem with that, is, the roots do get pretty tangled together, and there have been times when I’ve even had to use water to wash away the growing medium in order to get individual seedlings out.
This time, I wanted to try something different.
I’ve been seeing the “seed snail” method that got me curious. Basically, seed starting mix it laid out on a strip of something – plastic, cardboard, paper towel, etc. – and rolled up. Seeds are planted at depth at the top, covered with more seed starting mix, and it’s done. When it’s time to transplant, the roll is undone and there is less root disturbance when accessing the plants. If the plants need to be “potted up”, it can be unrolled, more starting mix added, then rolled back up again.
In looking it up more, I see people using this method for pretty much everything, including things with very large seeds that grow pretty big. I’m not so sure the method lives up to the hype for larger things in particular, but something like onions? It seems perfect.
The thing that I was most curious about was, the material used to make the roll. One article I read, which was not positive towards the method, used paper towel. I can’t imagine using something that practically dissolves in water, over time! Others described using heavy paper or cardboard. I don’t really have anything like that, in the size and shape needed. I’ve also found that using paper products tends to wick moisture out of the growing medium, away from the plants, and need more watering. Even with the biodegradable pots, I’ve found the pots themselves need to be kept wet, or they start drawing moisture away from the plants.
One thing mentioned as working well was the thin foam sheets used to wrap breakables for packing.
Did I still have some?
I quick look in a storage bin in the root cellar, and I found I had plenty!
So that’s what I used.
Before I started on that, though, I prepped the last of my seed starting mix from last year. It had quite a lot of pieces of wood and such, which would be more of a problem with a seed snail. I wanted to sift it, but didn’t have a sifter. In the end, I used a metal colander with finer holes all over, and sifted it into a giant mixing bowl.
I got quite a bit of larger material out. I also had some concern that I might not have enough sifted started mix for the project.
I had four seed options. There were our own saved seed, which is a mix of red and yellow bulb onions. Then there were the seeds I got from MI Gardener. Red Long of Tropea, which are very much like the Tropeana Longa onions we’ve successfully grown before. Red Wethersfield, which we tried but did NOT successfully grow before, and Red Beard Bunching onion.
I was at first thinking to do the bunching onions later, but they are 110 days to maturity, while the other two are 100 days to maturity, so I prepped four strips. I taped shorter pieced together for the length, then folded and cut them in half lengthwise. That resulted in two strips of about 31 inches, and two of about 29 inches long, and about 6″ wide.
That sifted seed starting mix was absolutely beautiful to work with! So soft and fluffy!
Each strip got a layer of starting mix about a quarter inch thick, laid out right to the edge of one end and the bottom. The top had about an inch empty, and the other end had about 8″ empty. I had my work surface covered with a repurposed clear garbage bag, which actually made it easier to roll them up. I could lift the plastic up against the base of the snail, to keep starter mix from falling out.
I prepped masking tape ahead of time. Four were labelled. After rolling up the snails, I used a black piece of tape to hold it together near the bottom, before tucking it into a bin. After they were all rolled, I sowed the seeds and added the labelled strips of tape to hold it together near the tops.
In the first picture here, the seeds are sown, more seed starting mix was set on top and every so gently tamped down to get rid of any air gaps. In the next picture, they’ve been topped with vermiculate.
Once topped with vermiculate, they got a very thorough watering with a spray bottle, then more water was added to the bottom of the bin they’re in, so they can be watered through capillary action, too. Last of all, the bin’s lid was laid on top to act as a moisture dome.
This was all done in our basement dungeon. I don’t have any of the grow lights, the heat mat, trays, etc. ready. I won’t need them for quite some time yet. So these went upstairs to the cat free zone (aka: the living room). It’s not particularly warm there, but warm enough. Plus, the window gets full sun only for a few hours in the morning, so we have supplementary light above.
It should be interesting to see how this method works out.
In the past, when densely sowing seeds in trays, I would usually finish off the package. This time, there are seeds left in all three packets – plus there is lots of our saved seed. So there is the possibility of trying again, if this doesn’t work, as long as they get started early enough.
Anyhow. The main thing for now is, the onion seeds are started!
I definitely want to start with the good news, before getting into the gardening stuff.
As I was putting things away in the sun room, I saw a cat in the cat cage jump out and meow a greeting. Nothing unusual about that, except that this cat had something around its neck that was flapping.
We had put collars on the cats that got fixed, to make them faster to identify, but I also made sure they were reflective collars, so they would be less likely to get hit by a car or something. Most of the cats lost their collars long ago. Judgement had lost one or two already, but he still had a ratty yellow collar still on him.
I took it off and threw it away!
Now I’m hoping to see Syndol back, too! It’s not unusual for cats to disappear for the summer, then come back for the winters, but sometimes they don’t come back at all. So this was a nice surprise for the day.
My priority for today was to finish what I started in the old kitchen garden. The rectangular bed in particular needed a bit more work. I was able to pull more weeds and roots I could no longer see when I stopped last night. I also found the gap under one log was quite a bit larger than the hole the cats had made, so I found more sticks to push in front of it. The gap extended all the way to the corner, though, so I used the scrap board I’d been using when hammering stakes into the ground to lay across the opening on the inside, then added a few more sticks to hold it in place.
Then I could use the rake to level all the soil again.
The section of the wattle weave bed I’d prepped yesterday needed some clean up again. I kept having to chase cats out of the garden beds because they kept wanting to use the nice, soft, fluffy soil as a litter box!
After levelling the soil in the rectangular bed, I marked out four rows with stakes and twine. This required repeated removal of kittens. In the second picture, you can see what I planted and transplanted. In the row north of centre, I planted the mixed beets, so they wouldn’t overshadow the Hedou Tiny bok choi I sowed on in the row south of centre. The bok choi can get quite tall, after it has bolted and gone to seed, but for harvesting, they should only be about 2 or 3 inches tall. I do plan to leave one or two to go to seed to collect at the end of the season.
In the outside rows, I transplanted a whole bunch of the onions I’d been finding. On one side, I transplanted the ones that were clearly bulb onions. On the other, I transplanted the ones that look like they might be white bunching onions, except I’ve never tried to grow white bunching onions before.
In the next picture, you can see where I planted one packet of dwarf peas. I got two packets, but this is a very short row, so I only needed the one. The peas went in the back of the bed (north side). I’d already transplanted some onions at the end and at the front near the corner before. Today, I took the two garlic bulbs I’d found, broke up the cloves, and planted them in line with the onions. They filled the entire remaining front space.
Once everything was in, it all got mulched with leaves. Then I mulched around the herbs in the tiny bed as well. I didn’t cover them, as we’re still using them as needed. Before the hard freeze hits, I’ll cover them completely with a leaf mulch, and we’ll see how they survive the winter!
I also moved the raised bed cover over the rectangular bed for the winter.
I didn’t take final pictures, though, as I decided to take garden tour video, instead. I’ll be going through them and putting together a garden tour video. If I’m satisfied with what I took. Otherwise, I might take new recordings tomorrow, before I head into the city for the Costco shop. We’ll see.
At this point, the only bed I was considering winter sowing into is the small bed off to the side where the Albion Everbearing strawberries had been last year. It still needs to be cleaned up, and I plan to sow bread seed poppies there. That can wait until spring, though, if necessary.
As it stands now, other than mulching the transplanted strawberries and little things like that, the garden can be done for the year. The winter sowing is in, and anything left can wait until spring if I can’t get to it in the next while. We’re getting a bit of rain right now, and the next couple of days are supposed to be dry and cooler, but Sunday and Monday are supposed to get warm again, with plenty of sun, so there’s still the possibility of getting ahead of things for next year.
So, to recap, we have winter sown for next year:
Purple savoy cabbage White and Purple Vienna Kohlrabi Daikon Radish White Egg turnip Rainbow Mix carrots Spring Blush peas American spinach Yellow Swiss Chard Garlic Hedou Tiny bok choi Assorted Mix beets Tom Thumb Dwarf peas
Then transplanted miscellaneous onions and garlic that were found during bed prep. Plus seed onions.
Last year, I scattered seed mixes and they did surprisingly well. This year, I’m hoping the more orderly plantings will survive the winter and give us a nice head start in the garden next year!
I got back from the city early enough, and it was still warm enough, to get some progress done in the garden.
My first priority was to winter sow in the east yard low raised beds. Two of these beds were already prepped, but not covered in any way, so they did require some clean up. The cats have been using them as litter boxes!
Some of their “presents” were astonishingly huge.
Ew.
My original plan had been to do the kohlrabi and cabbage on the outside of the beds, then have peas down the middle of one, while leaving a gap in the middle of the other to plant pole beans in the spring.
I forgot. The kohlrabi and cabbage will need to be covered in netting to keep them from being decimated by flea beetles and cabbage moths. Having something growing on a trellis in the middle is probably not a good idea!
In the first picture below, the beds are cleaned up, leveled and rows marked out.
In the second picture, you can see the planted rows of purple and white kohlrabi. If I had gone ahead with the plan to grow pole beans down the middle, these rows would have been further apart. I decided to stick with just the two rows and moved them closer to the middle. These raised beds are more prone to freezing than the beds in the main garden area, simply because the boards are so much thinner than the logs used in the longer beds. We’ve lost almost entire beds of garlic over the winter due to excessive cold, even with a mulch. I’m hoping that, with sowing them closer to the middle, deep mulching them with leaves, plus the predicted milder winter we’re expected to have, they will survive. The plant spacing for these, according to the package, is 4-6 inches, so I tried to scatter the seeds with my little hand seeder fairly lightly. If they survive and germinate, they will still need to be thinned later on, but not by too much. Hopefully, if I have the space, the will be thinned by transplanting.
In the next picture, I have the Purple Savoy cabbage. This is the first time we’ve tried to grow cabbage. I originally planned to have two rows on the outside, then peas in the middle, but decided to do three rows of cabbage. As they need about a foot per cabbage for spacing, I tried to scatter two or three seeds every foot or so, though a few spots accidentally got quite a bit more! You can sort of see a grid in the soil, from where the seeds were covered and the soil gently pressed down, while the rest of the rows I made with a hoe remain untouched.
Grommet REALLY wanted to “help” me with the sowing!
I had made sure to rake up plenty of leaves into the wagon and the wheelbarrow before I started, and was able to give the beds a good mulching for the winter. Then I transferred one of the raised bed covers for the winter. There is another one on the third bed I could move over, but I decided against it. That cover’s wire mesh does not have hoops to support it. Cats would knock that flat and out of shape in a heartbeat. So it’s up on top of the box frame one the other bed, which I’ve found surprisingly useful. I plan to make more 3′ x 9′ covers like this over time, but we need to buy more lumber for it, first.
That done, it was time to shift over to the old kitchen garden.
The cats have been having a field day in the cleaned up wattle weave bed, so that got a clean up, first. My plan is to winter sow dwarf peas in the back of the south facing section of the wattle weave bed, and transplant any onions, etc that I found in the rectangular bed in the front.
That… might not quite work out! At least, not so much for the onions part.
The first thing was to harvest the remaining Swiss Chard. It wasn’t until I uploaded the pictures onto Instagram that I realized I forgot them outside! They should be okay overnight.
In the second picture, you can see an area on the south side of the bed, where the cats dug into the dirt. I suspect there was a mouse or something that got their attention for them to dig it out that much. There had been grass clippings chinked in the gap between the logs, but that disappeared. It’s been filled repeatedly, and the cats keep pulling it out. So one of the things I needed to do was find a way to block that gap in a cat proof way.
Once the chard and remaining kohlrabi roots were cleared out, it was time to loosen the soil, pull the weeds and set aside any little onions I found.
I found so many, I started just tossing them with the weeds after a while!
What I really wanted to find out is what was going on with what looked like a cluster of garlic coming up, and another cluster of what I thought were onions but, as they got larger, the leaves started to look like some sort of ornamental allium, instead.
In the next picture, you can see that there were two entire bulbs of garlic that somehow got missed! I planted garlic in here a couple of years ago. This year, two garlic bulbs grew among the seed mix in this bed. They grew into nice sized bulbs that got harvested.
Now I find two full bulbs of garlic that somehow got missed over two growing seasons! I will probably separate the cloves and transplant them.
Next to the garlic is the cluster of alliums growing near by that did turn out to be onions. Several of them were growing together like bunching onions, rather than bulb onions, but I’ve never grown bunching onions. They are large enough that I will probably transplant them, too.
In the next photo, you can see most of the other onions I found while cleaning the bed. There were so many tiny ones! One red onion was quite large. I will transplant the larger ones, but I don’t know if I’ll bother with the teeny ones.
While working across the bed, I was finding a surprising number of roots. Some were definitely from the rose bush at the end of the bed, but it’s possible others were from the ornamental crap apples and the double lilac. It definitely made the job take longer. As I worked my way up the bed, I took advantage of having lots of old stakes handy from the bed along the retaining wall, before the wattle weaving was added on top of the retaining wall blocks. Some of the largest, strongest ones were used to stabilize the top side logs, as their supports were getting old and starting to break.
To block the gap, I used some flat pieces of scrap wood that were in the corner, then a whole bunch of old stakes, on the inside of the wall. Once the bed is done and ready for planting, these will be mostly buried and hidden from view.
As you can tell by the last picture, and the flash needed for the pictures of the onion and garlic, I had to stop before it was all finished. It was simply getting too dark. I was working by the light of the shop lights at the sun room window by then, and those were on only because their motion sensors were being triggered.
I don’t have anywhere to be at tomorrow, so I’ll be able to finish the job then, and do more winter sowing. I should also be able to clean out that little bed off by itself in the main garden area, where I’ve decided to plant bread seed poppies. Since I didn’t winter sow a variety of peas I’d meant to plant between the cabbage, I’m considering finding somewhere else to winter sow them. Once the dwarf peas are planted, that’s two varieties of peas that are winter sown, so leaving the third variety I was planning to winter sow for the spring would be fine, too. I also have our own saved sugar snap pea seeds that can be sown in the spring.
The rectangular bed that’s being cleared now will have beets and tiny bok choi winter sown in it, probably interplanted with some of those onions and/or garlic I’ve been finding! I was thinking of planting something down the middle, but I can’t for the life of me remember what that was right now. I’ve got diagrams drawn out, but those are in the basement, along with my seed inventory.
So that’s the garden and winter sowing status, for now. We should have a nice head start into next year’s garden, if this works out.
I will also be making what will probably be my last garden tour video of the year. Last year, I ended up doing my October video using video recorded on November 1, because the video I’d taken on October 31 was done too late in the day, and everything was too dark. So I want to make sure to get it done earlier, and earlier in the day.
Thankfully, it looks like the weather will hold for a while yet, and I should be able to get other things done before the snow flies. We’ll see how that works out!
I am very happy to say, I got another bed in the main garden area done today!
I decided to work on the trellis bed, as I figured it would take the least time. I was going to loose light fast, and it was getting cold and damp!
This bed had the sunflowers, pumpkins, red noodle beans, onions – mostly self seeded – and self seeded Spoon tomatoes in it.
My first order of business was to loosen the soil enough to pull up the remains of the sunflowers and set them aside in the wheelbarrow, for later use.
You can see how the bed looked, once the sunflowers were out.
From there, I wanted to work the opposite side, where there are still onions. Some grew well and went to seed. Others just sort of disappeared. Still others were tiny self seeded onions that I transplanted along the one side, in hopes they would have enough season to grow.
Most of those disappeared, too.
Some, however, had started to show new growth!
I wanted to dig up what onions survived and replant them as seed onions again.
For the first pass, I just loosened the soil with the garden fork enough to find and remove what onions I could see. A couple of the ones that went to seed were completely spent and went into the wheelbarrow, but all the onions I found were set aside for later.
In the second picture of the above slide show, you can see what I pulled up, plus four tiny onions I’d found while cleaning up elsewhere and set aside for today.
I knew I would find more, once I started doing a thorough weeding, which I certainly did. Quite a few were hiding in the soil. There were a surprising number of larger ones that should have grown and gone to seed this year. Some of them were showing growth only now! In the third picture, you can see the final number of onions I’d found. Most were red onions, but a few little ones were yellow onions. There’s one big yellow onion that had gone to seed.
Cleaning up the bed did go a lot faster than the other beds. What a difference one more log in height makes! I did find tree roots, but nowhere near as many, and not as close to the surface. There were also almost no rocks at all. I was hitting rocks with the garden fork as I loosened soil, but they were further down than what I was clearing of weeds. What few rocks I uncovered could be tossed into the trees. No bucket needed!
Towards the end of the clean up, I was really pushing to get done. I could hear thunder in the distance, and the wind was picking up. I thought I might have to stop before finishing when it started to rain, but then the rain moved on, and I got it done!
Once the weeding was done, I used the landscape rack to pull the soil to the sides to make a trench in the middle. That’s where the sunflower stalks and pumpkin vines got trench composted. I even included the frost killed sunflower heads. They were killed off before any seeds could reach viability, so they should be okay to bury.
Once the stalks and vines were laid out in the trench, I stomped on them a few times. Then I paused to take the next picture in the slide show above, before burying it.
When everything was buried, I raked up the weeds and roots I’d pulled out. In the next picture of the slide show, you can see what was the smallest pile of weeds I’d pulled up yet!
Then, I started planting onions. In the next picture of the slide show, there’s the finished bed and the onions visible. They were planted all along one side, plus the ends.
The last picture is of the row along the side of the bed.
For this bed, I am considering winter sowing one of our shelling pea varieties along the trellis side of the bed, then something planted in the spring, in between.
While these onions are meant to be left to grow seeds, I do intend to start onions indoors for spring transplanting. They would need to be started in January or February.
I’m so glad I got that bed done, and got rained on only a little bit!
There are a couple more beds there to work on that I expect will have a lot more elm roots in them. I am hoping to be able to get at least one bed done tomorrow. Two, if the weather holds!
I’m actually kind of dreading it, though, as I expect the roots to be bad in them.
Meanwhile, as I was putting things away and tidying up, I noticed a lot of dead walking onion stalks and a WHOLE lot more new growth. I cleaned up the dead bits, being careful not to damage any of the new growth. Any bulbils on the stalks I cut away got broken off and returned to the soil for more growth.
There are so many weeds in there, but that doesn’t seem to bother the onions any!
You can also see almost all the herbs in the tiny raised bed are doing well. Just the basil got killed by the cold. The chives are also doing well, and some are even blooming!
By the time all that was done, I was more than happy to get inside to warm up with a hot cup of tea and supper…
… plus my daughters’ fresh baked cookies, for dessert.
All in all, it was a productive day, even in the garden, after being gone for so long!
I have to admit, I’m feeling disoriented right now, looking at the time. It’s still morning??
It was another mostly sleepless night, so I did my morning rounds, then went back to bed. I did get some sleep, but my brain just wouldn’t shut off. I’m starting to feel rather ill at this point.
Thankfully, we did cool down during the night, and today is not as hot. We’re supposed to have some rain in about an hour, and it should keep raining for a couple of hours. Which is good, because I wasn’t able to water the garden this morning.
I started off feeding the yard cats, as usual. This morning, little Colby – the fluffy orange and white feral – was actually in the space between the cat shelters, meowing for food! What a brave little one. Even the other three were in the grass, heading towards the cat shelters near the house. As I came closer, the tortie ran into the isolation shelter and watched me go by with the kibble from the bottom level, rather than running away. Alas, my hands were full, and I wasn’t able to get any pictures!
After the dry kibble is set out, the bowls of kitten soup get set out. Some of the cats have started to actually wait for the kitten soup before they start eating! I have to set a couple of bowls up higher for the four socialized kittens, then quickly set out more bowls in various spots outside, so they have a chance to eat before the grownups push them away. One of the larger two-sided bowls goes to the shrine feeding station for the Colby and his sibling. I also have the mixing bowl and add some kitten soup to some of the dry kibble bowls before taking the rest of it to the garage for the kittens and their mom living in there. These days, they are almost always outside and seem to have moved out of the garage and into the area directly behind it. This morning, I spotted the two kittens were making their way through the sun choke and asparagus beds. They seemed to be aiming for the shrine feeding station! It would be great if they did that.
After the cats were fed, I did my usual rounds, which includes switching out trail cam memory cards. For one of them, I get to check on the crab apple trees along the way.
There are lots of apples forming, and some of them are starting to blush. The apples on this tree still have a long way to go. They get larger and tend to be ripe in September, or even October. The big tree with smaller edible apples tends to ripen a month earlier.
Checking on the garden beds, there was this blooming pumpkin. Of the five plants, this one is the largest. It has one primary vine that is long enough that I’m starting to train it up the bean trellis – since the beans clearly will not grow large enough to start climbing it. You can see how yellow they are, in the background.
In the top right corner, you can see the sunflower that got its top eaten by a deer. It is sending up a pair of new tops that grew out from the bases of the remaining leaf pair.
The onions from last year are blooming nicely, and one of them was serving as a bed.
I could not resist getting a bunch of pictures of the sleepy bee!
While doing my rounds, it’s not unusual for me to be followed by one or more cats. Usually, Stinky comes along and wants all sorts of attention. Lately, though, I’ve had a tabby hanging out and calling to me. He has a high pitched, peeping sort of meow, and he meows at me like he wants attention. He’s feral, though, and will not let me near him. Instead, he circles around, lays on the ground when I stop, but if I move towards him, it’s a big NOPE!
This morning, he was rolling around adorably in the grass. He stopped when I tried to get video of his cuteness, though. 😄
It’s hard to be sure, but I do think I actually have been able to pet this cat – when it was a teenager! I think he’s the one that would hang out in the upper level of the isolation shelter, when it was set up against the house for the winters, waiting for me to fill the food bowl. That was the only time he allowed me to pet him, and he stopped doing that after the isolation shelter was moved to its summer spot. He’s much bigger now, but he’s got a mark on the side of his nose that makes me think it’s the same cat. That might explain the almost-socialized behaviour.
Today being Sunday, I do normally try to make it a day of rest, and it seems like today, I won’t have much choice. Lack of good sleep is doing me in. I do hope things improve, since I need to go to my mother’s for her evening med assist.
Ugh. I just checked the weather. According to two of my weather apps, it’s raining right now (it’s not). We’re at 26C/79F right now, and the humidex is 29C/84F. We’re supposed to cool down a bit, then reach our predicted high of 27C/81F at about 6 or 7 pm. Checking the weather radar, more thunderstorms are happening to the south of us. There’s still that huge, out of control fire across the lake. It has crossed provincial borders. Then there are more fires to the north, including an ever bigger one, also still out of control. There are so many fires, in a big swoop along the Boreal forest, starting from Alaska, all the way down into Northern Ontario.
We could really use a whole lot of rain right now!
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.
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!
Today’s weather was pleasant enough that I was able to work on the low raised bed that will, eventually, be a trellis bed.
This is the bed that had the Summer of Melons mix along one side, onions that we found in other beds and transplanted for their seeds, and a few bush beans, on the other side.
Where the melons were did not need much done. The melon transplants were mulched with layers of cardboard, tree bark and grass clippings. Not much got through there, so all I did was pull the vines loose and spread them out on top of the mulch.
Where the onions were planted, however, was a different issue. There was quite a bit of grass growing among them – both crab grass and lawn grass! – along with the usual dandelions and other weeds.
I decided I would pull up the onions so I could weed more thoroughly, then transplant them back again.
In the first photo, I’d already started pulling up/digging out the first onions I’d found. Along the way, I found some of the seed stalks, and those got set on top of the melon vines. I even found a couple of seed heads that got missed.
Interestingly, there were even fresh, new onions starting to grow! Onions sure are hardy!
Once I pulled all the onions I could find (of course, I found others I’d missed, later on), I sorted them between red and yellow bulbs. The red would have been the Red Wethersfield onions that seemed to die off entirely last year, only for us to find them starting to grow again, when we prepared the bed this spring! The yellow are probably Oneida onions, and I think there may even have been a couple of shallots in there, too.
The seeds we collected are all mixed together, which means we’ll be getting both red and yellow onions growing in the winter sown beds.
The south end of the bed was the worst for grass and weeds. That was also where I transplanted a flower that might be a salsify. I was very curious to see what the root was like, as salsify is supposed to have a long tap root that tastes a bit like seafood. We got seeds specifically for that, which we never got to planting, but the seed company images only showed the roots, not the flowers.
Well, whatever this flower was – and it may well be a different variety of salsify – it didn’t have the long tap root at all. In fact, it had very shallow roots.
Curious.
I used a hand cultivator to weed most of the bed, stopping before I got to the end where I’d piled up the onion bulbs. Then I got out the garden fork and worked over things again, finding plenty more roots to pull out, while loosening the soil. All the grass clipping mulch was added to the melon vines on the other side.
When I got close to the other end, I paused to plant all the red bulbs, starting at the south end, in a double row. Some of the bulbs had divided into twos or threes, and those got split up for planting. These reached to about the middle of the bed.
Next, I moved the yellow bulbs aside, cleared the grass clipping mulch off the corner, and finished weeding and loosening the soil.
I uncovered a frog!
The poor thing was trying to hibernate in the soil. It barely moved when I so rudely uncovered it, and then just stayed there. I worked the soil at the end of the bed some more, dug a shallow hole for the frog where I knew I would not be planting the onions, then very gently set the frog in place and covered it with loosely with soil again.
Once the north end of the bed was ready, the yellow bulbs got planted in another double row, working my way to the middle – and there was just enough to reach the other onions! I marked the divide with a piece of broken bamboo stake.
This is way more seed onions than we will ever need, but that’s okay. These are being planted as protectors. Next spring, we might interplant around them; maybe with some greens or bush beans, or something like that. Whatever we plant, the onions should help protect them from the deer.
Once the onions were all transplanted, I raked up some leaves to mulch them for the winter, then raked the path around the bed clear. It’s not a priority for this fall, but eventually the path will be covered with cardboard, then a layer of wood chips.
Once that was done, I went into the overgrown area nearby to find the poplars I’d debarked to be used as vertical supports for the trellis and set them across the bed. They’re not the straightest, and need to have their branch nubs cut away, but … it’ll be rustic. Yeah. That’s it! Rustic. 😄
I’ve got eight of them that are debarked. They were to be lined up in pairs along two raised beds for the future trellis tunnel, but the other bed has yet to be constructed. If I use four on this bed, that means one at each end, two along the side, and they’ll all be six feet apart.
I think that might be too far apart.
If I add one more, that would have the posts at about four and a half feet apart. I think that will work out better. It’ll be easier to find straight (ish) horizontal cross pieces for that length, and the whole thing should be stronger This is expected to someday hold the weight of things like winter squash, so I don’t want to skimp on sturdiness.
Getting those up is not the priority right now, though. Before I work on that, I want to finish assembling the log frame around the low raised bed we put together this spring, and get that weeded. With the peas and beans on trellised on each side of that bed, I wasn’t able to weed around the winter squash, so it got very overgrown!
The next priority is clearing away the fallen spruce tree and the crab apple tree it fell on. That will require the chainsaw, though, which means waiting for a dry day. From the current forecast, that looks like the next two days, and then we get rain again for another two days. After that, I think it’ll just be too cold.
Which means the next two days is probably the last chance we’ll get to do some of the outside stuff. That will include moving the giant hose my brother lent us to use to divert the septic away from the house, if we had needed to, into the barn and covering the septic tank for the winter. I was still hoping to hose off the insulated tarp again, but it’s still damp. It would have been good if we could hang it on the clothes line, but it’s just too big and too heavy for that. Ah, well. It’ll still do the job. Technically, the tank doesn’t actually need to be covered, given how deep it’s buried, but I’d rather be safe than sorry! We’ve had another septic problems without potentially adding more.
At least now we don’t have to worry about the leak at the expeller anymore! My brother has also expressed great relief that it is finally done.
We’re managing to get quite a few things done this year, that will make next year easier!
Including planting one more garden bed with seed onions. 😊😊
After the last couple of days, I plan to take it relatively easy today.
Part of “taking it easy” for me includes finally doing my morning rounds as usual!
Since I’d gathered a larger harvest yesterday, I didn’t expect to gather anything today. I did find a couple of things to pick though. A handful of Carminat purple beans, a single green Seychelle bean, a hot pepper and…
The clusters still look quite green, but I noticed some of them had already started to drop seeds among the melons in the trellis bed. So I grabbed a clean bucket and tried just shaking the seeds into it. Things were still too damp with dew, though, so I broke off the seed heads that were starting to drop seeds and dumped them into the bucket whole.
Quite a few seeds were dropped into the bed, so I think we can expect a fair number of self sown onions in there in the spring!
There are still some seed clusters that are very green that got left on the plants to be gathered later. For now, the bucket of seed heads is in the house, sitting in a sunny spot in the cat free zone. We’ll collect more seeds after the seed heads have dried off.
I made no effort to separate types of onions in here. There was really no practical way to do so. There would be only two types of onions – a red and a yellow – that we had tried growing last year. At this point, if we are going to start growing onions from our own seeds, there isn’t as much need to keep track of varieties, or even keep the seeds separate. It’s not like we’re going to be packaging them up for sale or anything like that.
Which means that when we start seeds for next year’s garden, we’ll be having Onion Surprise. 😁
I was very happy for a pleasant breeze to cool me down while I was working. I got the last of the bed turned and weeded, the boards laid out to mark where the log frame will go, and the soil evened out and leveled off as best I could.
Since I was wanting to finish off the onions and shallots, I decided to work in a grid instead of rows. I marked off 5 rows lengthwise first,, about 3 or 4 inches apart, then made cross rows, also every 3 or 4 inches apart.
Once the lines were marked out, I used the jet setting on the hose to drive water into all the marked lines. It makes it messier to transplant into, but it evens out the soil and gives deeper moisture for the roots to reach for.
After that, I just laid out the transplants where the lines crossed, starting with the yellow bulb onions at one end. I got to about half way down the bed, maybe a little more, before I finished them. Then I planted the shallots at the opposite end. Last of all, I used the grass clipping mulch I’d removed earlier today, to scatter a light mulch around the transplants.
I was very happy to see that this left me an open space where something can be direct sown. I’ll go through my seeds to see what I’ve got that will mature in less than 2 months, since we basically just have July and August left for a growing season.
This is really late for onion transplants. My intention had been to interplant them with other things, but that doesn’t really work out with the winter squash and melons, since those will get bigger and overshadow the onions. At least I got some in with the tomatoes.
We shall see if the weather holds long enough for all these onions to fully mature!
I’m now going to let my self breathe for a bit. I have some direct sowing to do, including where the spinach was planted, and that’s about it. After a break, I’ll get back to working on the trellis beds. Hopefully, we’ll dry out a bit and the winds will die down, and we’ll be able to harvest more logs for the raised bed frames. The forecast of rain to start this evening and continue for about 4 hours has changed. Now it’s saying we’ll get some rain for about an hour, around 10pm. On Friday, though (today is Tuesday), they’re still saying rain all day, starting about 5am Friday morning, through to 1am on Saturday morning. Aside from the brief rain we’re supposed to get tonight, though, we’re not supposed to get any rain at all until Friday.
I might actually be able to do some mowing! How exciting!
The Re-Farmer 