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!
After all the rain we had, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to work in the garden today, though today’s weather was supposed to be better. I had to head to the pharmacy, so I figured I would know when I came back.
I ended up in town a lot longer than expected!
My daughter’s prescription, that they did not have in stock yesterday, the main reason to go back to the pharmacy. My husband had ordered refills for delivery, so I figured I would get his bubble packs while I was at it. My daughter wasn’t feeling well enough to come along, unfortunately. I headed out and got to the pharmacy shortly after 11am.
That turned out to be an oops. They don’t get their inventory orders in until the afternoon. Typically around 1pm.
Also, since my husband’s refills were ordered for delivery on Thursday, and today is Tuesday, they weren’t ready yet, either. Those were left for delivery. I asked about my daughter’s meds, as I thought she got a partial refill, but no, she hadn’t gotten any of this one at all, and she needed them.
At first, I was going to head home then come back tomorrow until I remembered I was going into the city tomorrow. So I gave them my cell phone number and told them I would stay in town, and they could call me when the meds were ready.
That left me with quite a bit of time to find something to do, so I ended up doing a lot of walking!
Most places were closed for the season, but I did remember there’s a second hand store, so I went to check that out. I ended up spending a whole dollar when I left…
I already a similar drinking jar at home, but it’s colorless. They had a couple like that, but only one in this green tinted glass, so I got it.
I did enough wandering around that my left hip was starting to talk to me. Not pain – it hasn’t hurt like it used to since I got that injection at the sports injury clinic – but it started feeling like it was about to give out. By then, it was past 1:30, so I went to the pharmacy. I was just going to sit and wait, since they hadn’t called me yet, but they are so on top of their customer service, I had someone asking if I needed help before I had a chance to! It turned out they were working on my daughter’s prescription right then, so I didn’t have long to wait.
From there, I headed home, where my daughters had a late lunch waiting for me. The weather was good and things were relatively warms, so as soon as I finished eating, I decided to go for it, and headed to the garden.
My focus for today was to get winter sowing done, and I decided to do the sowing planned in the main garden area, first. The first thing I needed to do was a lot of raking of leaves! Once I had both the wagon and the wheelbarrow filled, I started at the trellis bed.
This bed already has seed onions planted along the non-trellis side. I chose the Spring Blush peas for the trellis side, and the rainbow mix of carrots in the middle.
The rows I planted in remain marked with stakes and twine. There is room between the carrots and the onions to plant something else. Fresh bulb onion transplants, perhaps, or more carrots.
In the second photo above, you can see the row of peas is shorter! There were only 25 peas in a packet. I should have bought two! I planted a pea every 6 inches or so, but it would have been good to plant the full row and have them more densely planted, in case some don’t germinate. As it is now, in the spring, I can plant something else in the remaining space that can use the trellis.
Once that was done, I covered the whole thing with a deep mulch of leaves. I actually ran out and had to get more.
Then I decided to finally use that pile of cardboard that I’ve had set aside for the entire season! I used it to cover where the next trellis bed will be built, as well as the path, to kill off the grass below. If I’d had enough, I would have put cardboard on the other paths, before I put wood chips on them as a mulch. The dandelions in particular had no problem growing through the mulch, and you can barely even tell the wood chips are there anymore. *sigh*
There was still enough time and light to work on the next bed.
The only problem was, that bed had turned into a pool!
I removed everything that was holding the plastic down and just started rolling it up. The piece of wood I used to roll up the excess is long enough to rest on both sides of the bed, so there was space below. Rolling it up meant pushing the water further and further to the end before it could finally overflow the plastic. Which meant that only the very end of the bed got an extra watering.
I left that to drain while I went to rake up more leaves.
In the next photo, you can see where I planted the Daikon radish and White Egg turnip. Those went on the outsides of the bed, leaving the middle for a spring sowing of probably pole beans. I’m planning to plant bush beans in the high raised bed.
In the last photo, the bed is mulched with leaves. Once again, the stakes and twine were left to mark where things were planted.
By this time, it was getting quite dark and it was time to stop for the day. The beds that I have winter sowing planned for in the main garden area are now done. In this area, there are still two beds that need to be cleaned up but, if necessary, that can wait until spring.
I did move my supplies over to the east garden beds. Two of those beds will get winter sowing, hopefully tomorrow afternoon, after I get back from the city. That will be the warmest part of the day. Those beds will get kohlrabi and cabbage sown into them, as those beds will be easier to cover with insect netting to protect from flea beetles and cabbage moths.
After that, I have one bed in the old kitchen garden that still needs to be harvested of alliums and Swiss Chard, and then I will be doing winter sowing in there and the wattle weave bed. The only other area that needs to be cleaned for winter sowing is the square bed off to the side of the main garden area that I’d grown the Albion Everbearing strawberries in, last year. The survivors got transplanted along the new asparagus bed, and I’ve decided the space may as well be used as a permanent poppy bed, since I expect those to self seed readily, and it can be treated as a perennial bed. However, if I run out of time to winter sow those, they can still be done very early in the spring.
So there we have it! Four more things winter sown for next year.
From the predictions I’m seeing, it’s supposed to be a mild winter, but other sources say a harsh winter. We shall see! Hopefully, the winter sowing will survive and we’ll have a head start to next year’s garden!
With how short our growing season is (I’m not counting on the newly revised averages yet), every little bit will help.
One of these years, I hope to get enough to actually can or freeze again! The last two years have been pretty brutal. If we depended on the garden for food at this point, we’d starve! :-D
Little by little, it’s getting done, and I’m feeling pretty good about it so far!
I’m happy to day I did actually get some progress done outside.
Last night, however, I was up late doing some research on well pumps and pressure tanks.
I’ve been angsting about our well pump since we moved out here. I’ve never been able to ascertain what “normal” sounds like. Thanks go my brother, we do have a new pump ready and waiting to be installed, but no plumber has dared do it. I explain about it in this post from 2020. Basically, there was a possibility the foot valve was leaking, because the pump would start running, even when no one was using water, and they were concerned that if they switched out the pump, the foot valve could break apart. If that happened, we would have no water at all and could potentially need a new well dug.
Eventually, though, we figured out that we have phantom flush. I just happened to be on the toilet in the wee hours of the morning when I heard the water start going in the tank, to refill it. We replaced all the parts in pieces in the tank, but it was still happening. Finally, I just took the refill out of the overflow, so it filled directly into the tank instead, and the phantom flush stopped. Why it worked, I have no idea, but it did.
So with that problem “solved” (we actually want to replace the toilet, for a number of reasons), we figured it should be safe to replace the tank. We just don’t have a budget for it.
Well, in the last while, the pump sounding more and more grindy,. It runs for a normal length of time and the pressure is good. Most likely, it’s the bearings.
Which is bad enough on its own, but lately it’s been going off way too often. Every time the toilet is flushed, even if it’s been on person right after the other, using it. When someone is in the shower or the washing machine is going, it starts running so often, it may as well not have stopped in between (as I hear the pump starting up again, while my daughter is in the shower). We’re also losing pressure faster, which is always most noticeable in the kitchen, which is the farthest sink from the pump and tanks.
After looking things up, it looks like the pressure tank is starting to lose pressure. There can be a number of reasons for this, but the end result is the same. The tank can’t keep up the pressure, so the pump keeps having to turn on to refill it. Depending on the size, a new pressure tank can cost anywhere from about $200 to over $500. For the amount of water we use, we would need a somewhat larger tank (I think this one is a 7 gallon tank), I’d love to get a 20 gallon tank. That way, if we ever get those water fountains by the barn serviced, we could turn the tap on in the basement, and there would be continuous water available for any animals we might get, or even for the renter’s cows. These fountains are insulated and keep the water warm enough to never freeze, too.
But that’s not an option now, and to meet our needs, we’d want at least the same size as what we have no, no smaller.
This morning, I messaged my brother about it. The tanks I looked at all say “compatible with most deep well pumps”, but he’s the one that knows the system better than anyone living.
He doesn’t think it’s the pressure tank.
He thinks it’s the foot valve. He says it was last replaced 20 years ago.
Well, I don’t know how it can get replaced. The bottom of the well access is a concrete floor, with pipes running to the house through the side near the bottom. I don’t know how the well pipe itself can be accessed. The plumber seemed to think that the concrete on the bottom would have to be broken up. Which doesn’t make sense, if the foot valve was replaced 20 years ago. We should be able to pull it up somehow.
I’ll have to consult my brother about that.
Whether it’s the pressure tank or the foot valve that needs replacing, either way it would be a good time to install the new pump!
All these pumps and tanks are the greatest source of stress for me. Water related or septic related!
So that’s something I really would rather not have to worry about. There’s absolutely nothing we can do about it right now, either.
What I did instead was my morning rounds, after feeding the outside cats. While coming back from checking the gate, I realized I was seeing an amazing full moon, and just had to try for some pictures. I even found someplace to steady my phone against, so I could zoom in.
Now that I see the picture on my desktop, it looks so detailed, I’m wondering if the camera automatically “fixed” the photo. That was a bit of a “scandal” some years ago, and that “feature” was supposed to have been dropped.
As I was going through the garden, I checked out the sunflowers. This past frost has killed them off, so any remaining seed heads will never reach maturity. I did, however, find this one…
It is possible that this one has viable seeds in it! I’ve tucked it into the portable greenhouse for now, to dry out some more. It would be nice to try again from our own seeds. Every generation of seeds collected will be better adapted to our local climate.
While the frost killed up most of the things that were exposed (I still haven’t tried peaking under the cover for the winter squash), one thing is doing just fine.
Once the morning rounds were done, I waited until things warmed up a bit in the afternoon before continuing with the stuff from the sun room that I had soaking over night. Most of it could be spread out, hung up or set up to dry. Except for the garden mesh. Today turned out to be ridiculously windy, so unraveling those will have to wait. For now, they’re set aside with their bin upside down over them, so they hopefully will not blow away.
That old sheet I found that was repurposed to cover garden beds sure had it’s moments when I tried to hang it on the line. Lots of clothes pins needed! Sure dried fast, though. 😄
I’m so glad I though to put that old roof panel onto the shelf shelter! This little feral kitten could enjoy a warm sun spot while completely protected from the wind.
Eventually, I got things done as much as I could until things dried. After my daughter and I get back from her appointment in the city, I’m hoping to finally put everything in bins with lids, and get them out of the yard again! I need that space to paint the isolation shelter.
The next thing to work on was that garden bed I’d started on a couple days ago.
*sigh*
With all the years of amending the soil, prepping these beds for the winter should only have taken about 15 minutes each. Half an hour, if the rocks and weeds were really bad.
Where I’d stopped, last time, had a bit root sticking up and I had to use the loppers to cut that. Then I just kept working my way down that side of the bed. In the first picture, you can see some of the roots I was exposing as I worked my way down. By this point, the soil was so dense with roots, I actually had a hard time pushing the garden fork through it!
The second picture was taken when I finally got that side done. I’d emptied the rocks bucket before I started, so these just rocks I’d picked today. When I stopped last time, I had worked past the half way point, so this was from about a third of one side of the bed. That pile I raked up at the end, near the bucket, is almost all tree roots. Very few normal weeds.
That last photo was taken from the unworked side of the bed. There were a could of bigger roots that I pulled up, but I won’t be able to get the rest out until I’ve worked the other side of the bed.
None of this was there when I planted the peas and carrots in it in the spring. All those roots are just one summer’s growth.
My mother keeps giving me a hard time for being such a bad gardener. Meanwhile, it’s the self seeded trees she deliberately left, after transplanting the raspberries they’d been growing through, that is causing me more problems that all the rocks! The roots are growing into where the soil is easiest to grow in – the soil I’ve been amending to grow vegetables in. So they’re filling the beds and taking up all the water and nutrients, and I’m not even finding it until the end of the season, after the damage is done. This, on top of dealing with drought conditions and smoke this year.
Trees are not always good thing.
One of these days, I’ve got to snag a daughter and our cutting equipment, and take down the entire row of elms and maples. Then we’ll have to find a way to make sure they don’t grow back! Otherwise, even as we build these up into high raised beds, the roots will still find their way up and into the growing zone.
It’s taking a lot longer than it should, but at least I did get some progress in today. Whether I manage to get any done tomorrow, after we get back from the city, will depend on how much daylight we have left.
While going through what’s left of the garden as I do my evening rounds, I’m constantly surprised by what’s still surviving. The still blooming summer squash and eggplant. The pumpkin vines growing new leaves and blooming. The bush beans still blooming and producing.
This evening, however, I had some more unexpected surprise finds.
Yes. Actual tomatoes are ripening. The tiny self seeded tomatoes in the trellis bed got hit hard by the frosts we got at the beginning of the month, but mostly survived. To find a spray of ripening tomatoes, however, was the last thing I expected to find! It also confirms that they are Spoon tomatoes.
The next two pictures are of pea plants I found near the end of the bed with the newly completed log frame around it. The last picture was of a group of three pea plants I had unknowingly stepped on! We didn’t grow peas in that bed. They were in the bed next to it, roughly 7 feet away.
My guess is a deer eating the pea plants might have dragged a section of vine away, dropping a pod in the process. Which still seems unlikely, but it’s the most logical explanation I can think of.
I’ve since stuck some short pieces of bamboo stakes into the ground beside them, so I won’t accidentally step on any again. I don’t expect them to get very big before the season ends, but I don’t want to walk all over them, either.
For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.
Okay, time to take a look at things that did not turn out anywhere near how we originally intended!
The Original Plan
Beans
In the past, we’ve grown lots of different beans at once, mostly with great success. We enjoyed having almost daily harvests, for both fresh eating and for the freezer, and even tried a rarer variety of shelling beans that was suitable for our short season. I’m glad I saved those rarer seeds, because they no longer seem to be available from the company I got them from.
This year, I had many different types of bean seeds. Aside from the seeds I’d saved from the shelling beans we tried, my mother gave me a jar of seeds for shelling beans that trace back to what she grew here every year, decades ago. Along with the shelling beans, I still had seeds for pole beans that we really liked, a variety of bush beans that were good for both fresh eating and shelling, and more bush beans. My plan was to grow each type; pole and bush beans for fresh eating, plus shelling beans. It was just a matter of figuring out where, as I intended to do a fair bit of interplanting.
Peas
We haven’t had much luck growing peas. Between growing conditions and deer eating them, we just never got many! At best, I’d find a few pods to eat while I was doing my morning rounds.
We still have quite a lot of seeds for shelling peas, but we also wanted to get edible pod peas. I hoped to grow enough that we could put some in the freezer, but to at least have enough for fresh eating.
Carrots
Carrots were going to be the only root vegetable for this year. I had lots of seeds for the delicious Uzbek Golden carrot, and made seed tape with a decent amount of them. We also still had pelleted seeds for an orange variety called Napoli. I wanted to grow plenty of both, so that we could freeze or can or store for the winter. Carrot seeds don’t age well, so the seeds would need to be used up. Especially the older pelleted seeds.
Greens
We actually intended to cut back on these. We’ve tried growing a variety of lettuces but, for some reason, they seem to get bitter, even if they aren’t bolting. We also found that, for the amount we actually use them, we may as well just buy them from the grocery store when we feel like it. The only exception to this was spinach. We all like spinach, but have not had much success with them over the past few years. The first year we grew them was amazing, but that was pretty much it for them doing really well. Still, we wanted to at least grow spinach this year, and that was about it for greens.
What we actually did
Beans
We tried two types of pole beans this year. Carminat, a purple podded bean, and Seychelle, a green podded bean. Both did very well the first year we grew them. They were prolific, and we quite enjoyed eating them. The Seychelle beans were interplanted with the Crespo squash. The Carminat got planted along one side of a winter squash bed.
For bush beans, we ended up with only a small space left, where we planted Royal Burgundy beans; a variety we’ve grown before and enjoyed eating.
That was it. Just three varieties ended up being planted.
Peas
For peas, I planted Dalvay shelling peas – something we still had a lot of seeds left for – on the other side of the winter squash bed the Carminat beans were planted in. We also got some edible pod peas that went into one of the low raised beds in the East yard, where a few onions we’d found were transplanted at one end. Nowhere near as much as I’d hoped to plant, but all we had room for.
Carrots and Spinach
These went into the same bed as the edible pod peas. The peas got a trellis net down the middle, carrots were planted on either side, then the spinach along the outside. The idea was, with each thing maturing at different rates, the spinach would be done first, then the peas, until the bed was left with lots of room for the carrots to grow, along with the few onions left to go to seed.
How it actually turned out
Not good.
Beans
The seeds for the pole beans must have been too old. With the Seychelle beans, I planted them by the Crespo squash twice, but we only got three survivors.
The Carminat beans had more survive, but there are a lot of gaps in between plants. I was out of seeds, though, so I tried filling the gaps with Seychelle beans. Only one, maybe two, survived.
With the bush beans, the first sowing didn’t succeed at all – and these were new seeds! I was able to buy more and tried again. This time, we had a nice, short row of bush beans emerge. They did quite well…
We did get beans to harvest from all three types. Some days, I was quite surprised by how many I was able to gather!
Peas
The edible pod peas were another one that needed to be sown twice. With the first sowing, I think 3 in total finally germinated. I bought more seeds and replanted, but the new packet had about half as many seeds, so all we got was one row in the 9′ bed.
The shelling peas did better, in that maybe half of what I planted germinated. These, I could at least “blame” it on them being older seeds.
All the peas and beans got trellis netting to climb. The shelling peas needed to be trained up theirs. The edible pod beans were better climbers. Neither variety of peas thrived, but the edible pod peas did better, and got quite tall. I ended up having to put netting around the entire bed they were in, though, after discovering some eaten by deer. Even with the netting in place, deer were able to reach higher parts of the plants and eat them!
Carrots and Spinach – plus chard, kohlrabit and Jebousek lettuce!
We were only able to plant the Uzbek Golden carrot seed tape; one row on either side of the peas. I hoped to plant more elsewhere, but there just wasn’t the space for it. They did okay, even as we lost control of the weeds in this bed. The real surprise was when several of them went to seed! Carrots are biannual, so they should not have gone to seed in their first year.
The spinach did very poorly. They sprouted, but only a few got leaves large enough to be harvested, and even then, not enough to be worth harvesting at all.
Once it became clear the spinach was done for, I pulled them out and tried planting chard. I had some seeds for two varieties that got mixed up (a cat got at the baggie the seed packets were in and chewed them up!), so those got planted in the same space the spinach did.
They didn’t do well, either, and I only partly blame that on losing control of the weeds in that bed.
Meanwhile, with the Purple Caribe potatoes that failed, I found myself with a gab in the bed that needed filling. I’ve been wanting to grow kohlrabi for some time, with zero success. The first time was almost a success until they got decimated by flea beetles. I think slugs got the other attempts.
I had seeds, though, so I tried them as a fall planting, and amazingly, they started out doing really well!
Until the cats started rolling on them.
They survived the cats, though, and I had some hope to actually have kohlrabi to harvest.
Meanwhile, next to where I planted the kohlrabi, a self seeded Jebousek lettuce appeared. We got these as free seeds a couple of years ago. The first year, the seedlings got almost completely choked out by elm tree seeds. The few that survived, we allowed to go to seed and just left them. The deer ate them, but some did survive to go to seed, so we had a couple show up the next year. They got left alone, too, and went to seed, though I believe they got deer eaten, too. So when a couple of plants showed up again this year, with the kohlrabi nearby, I set up netting over the bed. It didn’t keep the cats out, but it mostly kept the deer out. The wind kept blowing the bottom of the netting loose, no matter how many ground staples, bricks or rocks we used. Which is how deer managed to get at them, anyhow. But they recovered! In face, on of them ended up growing two new stems around the eaten part, and we allowed them to go to seed.
How it ended
Beans
Considering how few bean plants actually survived, pretty darn good. We barely had enough beans to harvest fresh for a few meals, but we enjoyed having them at all. I would still recommend the Carminat and Seychelle varieties of pole beans, and the Royal Burgundy bush bean is such a survivor!!!
When I found some Carminat pods that got missed and were getting too big for fresh eating, I left them, and now we even have seeds saved!
Peas
The peas did poorly over all. We never really had more than a few pods to harvest. Mostly, there would be two or three that I would harvest to eat while I was doing my morning rounds.
Carrots
While we never had a lot of them, I was really happy with the Uzbek golden carrots. They are really tasty, and I would definitely recommend the variety. As for the ones that went to see, the flower clusters never actually produced developed seeds, so I don’t know what to make of that.
The Greens
I wish I knew what was going on with spinach in our garden. We had that one amazing year, plus one decent year in the high raised bed, and that’s it.
The first year we grew chard, they did well, but they didn’t do well this year. Again, I’m not sure why.
I really wasn’t expecting that to happen so late in the season, but they just showed up one day, and the poor plants were black with them.
As for the Jebousek lettuce, they went to seed which I happily collected at the end of the season.
Plans for 2025
Things are going to be very different next year!
With our winter sowing, I ended up making three mixes of seeds. One of them is all root vegetables, including the last of the pelleted carrot seeds and some of Uzbek golden carrots. I also added four different beet varieties, one variety of turnips, four varieties of radishes, plus saved onion seeds. Basically, I just emptied out my old seed packets. How many will actually germinate, I have no idea. We shall see in the spring!
Another mix I made is all greens. The last of our Swiss Chard (two varieties), four varieties of spinach, two of kohlrabi, and the Hinou Tiny Bok Choi seeds I’d saved from the few plants that survived being smothered by elm tree seeds, last year. This mix also has both onions and shallots from saved seed added in.
I ended up making a third mix of seeds. These include two types of sunflowers, Dalvay shelling peas, plus a few King Tut pea seeds I’d saved from previous years, the last of my Royal Burgundy bush beans, a tiny amount of Montana Morado corn seeds that I managed to save after the cats knocked the entire bowl of seeds over and, of course, onion seeds.
Basically, I used this as an opportunity to finish off packets of older seeds, of seeds that I had only a few of.
We do still have other bean seeds that I want to grow. I don’t think I need to buy more seed, but can use what I have. I also want to try edible pod peas again. It will all depend on how many garden beds are available, really. All our plans to expand the garden again seem to get kiboshed, so we’ll see how that actually turns out.
I still have plenty of Uzbek Golden carrot seed tape and loose seeds, and they need to be planted, as the germination rates drop quickly with carrots. I can see sticking those in any place we have room for them.
With greens, if the winter sowing fails, we likely won’t try to plant more (though I do still have several varieties of lettuce seed we could sow) and the bed would probably be given over to something else.
In the end, I think the priority for next year will be with beans, as they seem to do the best here, even with the odds stacked against them. If we have the space to give over to them, I’d really like to plant those rarer shelling beans, and collect more fresh saved seed. We had only a small amount to cook and taste when we grew them, and they are well worth it.
Peas, beans and carrots are things that are staple crops for us, with some types of greens being bonus. We will probably still be trying new varieties, especially with peas, as we try to find something that will successfully grow here, but if things go as they should, they will be part of our garden, ever year.
Today was our second stock up shop in the city, but I had a couple of things to do in town, before then. The first was to get to the garage when it opened at 8, to get our repaired tire, have it put back on the truck, and the spare returned to its spot under the box.
Which meant being out rather earlier than usual for my morning rounds, starting with feeding the outside cats, including heading around to check on the babies in the old garden shed.
I’m happy to say that Broccoli has accepted our cat bed gift, and the babies seem quite cozy in it. I always knock on the door, so they can know the door is about to be opened. There are no windows in the shed, and the morning sun streams right in once the door is open, so the babies get a bit blinded. It was also windy again, this morning, which is probably why the calico is shivering so much.
I was quick about petting them, leaving food for their mama and closing the door again.
The girls were going to take the transplants out after I left, but the winds were still so high, I messaged them to tell them not to, while I continued my rounds.
Some of the Purple Caribe potatoes are getting much bigger – but most of the bed still has nothing showing yet. There are more Red Thumb potatoes showing than the the Purple Caribe, and those ones were mostly wizened when I planted them! I honestly would have expected those ones to not grow at all.
The second planting of peas is coming up nicely, while there are still only 3 from the first planting. The carrots are still barely visible, and I think a lot of them have failed, and the spinach seems to have stalled. Very strange.
The strawberries grown from seed last year, in the wattle weave bed, are getting really big! We did get berries last year, and they were tiny, like wild strawberries, so it’s a bit of a shame that these are the ones that are doing best. We hadn’t put anything around the asparagus and strawberry bed. I thought we were still okay, but two of the 4 strawberry plants in there have already been munched on! I do sometimes see a deer on the trail cam, so I guess it’s coming into the yard as well. So that bed will need some protection.
The new strawberries are doing quite nicely, which means we’ll have to put something around that bed rather quickly, to keep the deer from munching on them, too.
There is still a lot of squelching as I walk around the yard. The unfortunate thing is that one of the softest parts of the yard is where I drive in to turn and back up to the house. So far, it just seems to be a bit muddy, and not forming ruts, but this is not a good thing. There’s another, less ideal, area I can use to turn in, but it’s almost as wet, so there’s really not much advantage to that.
By the time I finished my shortened rounds, it was time to head out. I got to the garage just as it opened I had to wait while the guy got their computer system going, which was fine. I had to go to the pharmacy next, and they didn’t open until later. Once he got everything up and running, he got the truck backed into the garage and switched the tires for me. He was a new guy, and a fairly new mechanic, who had never worked with a spare tire system like we’ve got before. I got to show him all the stuff I just learned about the truck myself, while waiting for CAA to come and change my flat for me. 😄
In the end, it didn’t take long, and the final bill for the repair and installation was less than $60. Less than I had budgeted, which is always nice. It was still early, and I hadn’t had breakfast yet, so I popped across the street and got a hot breakfast sandwich before going to the pharmacy. They turned out to be already open, so I was able to get my refills right away. We actually had a prescription delivery for my husband on Wednesday, but they had to fax my doctor to update my prescription, so mine wasn’t included. I’m glad I remembered it was called in, because I was planning to head straight to the city after the tire was done.
I’ll cover the shopping in another post. I only went to two places; Walmart and Superstore. On the way home, my husband sprung for burgers, so I stopped in town again to get those, then hit the mail on the way home. I left at 7:30am, and got home some time after 2pm. Almost 7 hours of mostly driving around! There was no Costco in the area to get gas, and the gas station at the Superstore was at $1.469/L, while town was at $1.449, so I was going to get gas while in town. On the way out of the city, though, I passed a gas station and saw the price was at $1.399/L, so I filled up. Then I got to town and discovered the prices had gone down while I was in the city, and they were at $1.399/L, too!
So we have a full tank of gas for tomorrow. We’ve been in touch with our friend and worked out a time and place to meet him in the early afternoon. My husband and I will be leaving shortly before noon to get there. It’s been a very long time since my husband has done a city trip. It’s going to be painful, but it’ll be worth it to meet with our friend. With my husband’s mobility issues and living here in the boonies, it’s been harder for him to keep in contact with his friends. Rather ironic that the one he did keep in contact with wasn’t even on the same continent! I really wish he were able to get together with friends more often. He’s just around us ladies all the time. Not a lot we can do about that, but when the chance is there, I’m going to make sure we can take it!
While I was gone today, the girls took are of a few things for me, including getting some of the weed trimming done around the house. It’s still too wet to mow, but at least that can be done. Hopefully, tomorrow, they’ll be able to do the paths between the garden beds I’m trying to work on, too. Some spots would have water in them still, but not where I’m working on, next.
Today, we reached a high of 21C/70F, and they’re now saying we’ll have light showers this evening, but just for about an hour. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to hit 21C/70F again, and have sun and some cloud all day, but no rain. Then on Sunday, we’re supposed to hit 23C/73F and get rain in the evening. I’m hoping that, I’ll be able to get more progress in those last 4 garden beds! It’s getting to the point that they need to be worked on, rain or no rain. My daughter is feeling bad because she hasn’t been getting more dead trees processed, to frame the beds, but she’s not been feeling well. With the high winds and rain we’ve been having, though, she wouldn’t have been able to work on them, anyhow.
So many setbacks, but at least we do have several beds we can put transplants in, once we cross that last frost date threshold! Looking at the overnight lows we could, theoretically, put stuff out now, but why take the risk when we don’t have to? With not being able to take the transplants outside to harden off consistently, though, we will have to make sure to protect them once they’re in the ground. All those distilled water bottles for my husband’s CPAP humidifier that we’ve been saving will come in handy for that!
Okay, so I’ve scattered seeds and such, but today is the first day for direct sowing. It was such a gorgeous day for it, too!
I planted all the edible pod peas from the package, minus the ones that split apart as they soaked between damp paper towels overnight. Not a lot of carrots were planted; I’ll include them between other things, over the next while. I’ll probably do the same with more spinach. Basically, they’ll be space fillers and ground covers until it’s too warm to plant them anymore.
The box frame cover got worked on first, then set aside, since I put in the old salvaged T posts to hold netting for the peas to climb. I couldn’t drive them in very far, so they will need to have support added to them before any trellis netting is added, so they don’t get pulled into the bed by the weigh of the peas – or the net, for that matter! I intended to add a third post in the middle, but hit something hard. Possibly one of the branches set at the base of the bed, when it was first built and filled. Or a rock that got missed.
I found my pH meter and did a reading. No surprise the pH is still at 8. I even stuck it into the compost heap nearby, and the needle barely moved. I had a bit of an ah-ha moment earlier today. Well, more like a “duh, of course” moment. Maritime Gardening did an April garden tour video and was taking about how acidic his soil is, and mentioned that liming the soil can make the soil more alkaline.
Liming.
Lime.
Garden lime.
Which is made out of limestone.
Which is what we are sitting on top of.
Our area has limestone quarries and commercial gravel pits – we even have our own little gravel pit – with limestone based sand and gravel below a very narrow band of topsoil.
Of course our soil alkalinity is maxing out the pH meter. How could it be any different? *smacks forehead over what should have been obvious*
Increasing the acidity is going to be a challenge, that’s for sure. The use of raised beds will make it easier, at least.
Our order of sulfur is supposed to arrive by Thursday. Once we’ve got that in, we’ll be able to start amending the various beds with it, to increase the acidity. My husband actually ordered 2 different bags. One bag is 90% sulfur, 10% betonite clay. The other is guaranteed 99.5% elemental sulfur, but both are supposed to be broadcast evenly, then worked into the top 6 inches of soil, at a rate of 250g/10m² (0.5lb/100ft²). These low raised beds are 27ft², so they shouldn’t need much but, from what I’m reading, the more alkaline the soil, the more sulfur is needed (which makes sense), plus our soil type would also need more, for it to make a difference. Even so, it won’t actually do much for us this year; if we were treating a field, we’d be adding it to the soil a year before planting a crop. Any amending we do this year will mostly benefit what we grow, next year. Once we’ve started incorporating it into our soil, though, we should test the soil every few months to see how much difference it has made. Still, every little bit will help.
While it will be slow going to increase our soil acidity, using sulfur is supposed to be one of the quickest ways to do it!
Anyhow…
In the early evening, the girls and I went around the yard, checking things out and enjoying the longer daylight hours and warmth. We blew past our predicted high and reached 16C/61F! Plenty of trees and bushes have leaf buds showing. It took some searching, but we were thrilled to find a few shoots of snow crocuses and grape hyacinth emerging through the leaf litter. We even spotted the leaves of two tulips that had emerged near the saffron crocuses! These were not there, this morning!
We are getting into that period when everything starts to just explode into new growth.
Before long, we’re probably going to be complaining over how hot it is! 😂😂
For now, I’m just really happy to get some progress done outside. We’re supposed to get some rain next week, but we should have plenty of lovely days like today, to get things done outside!
This time of year, the McKenzie Seed displays are everywhere, including the grocery store I do my mother’s shopping at. Today, she just gave me her list and stayed home, so I took the time to take a quick look at the display.
I should have known better! 😄😂
I ended up getting these.
What caught my eye were the Royal Burgundy bush beans. I grabbed their last package. We grew these back in 2021, and of the three types of bush beans we grew that year, they did the best. In fact, everything we grew that was purple seems to do really well. We’d ordered them from Veseys, but they don’t carry them anymore. Last year, I ordered a different purple variety, but those were sold out and not replaced, so we got the Red Swan beans as a substitute. We still have lots of those. What we really wanted, though, was more of those Red Burgundies! So I snagged them.
I didn’t want to be buying just one packet of seeds and nothing else, though, so I looked for some edible pod peas. We have plenty of the Dalvay peas, but no edible pod varieties. We had tried growing edible pod peas before, but they didn’t do well. We aren’t growing vegetables in that area anymore, so I expect them to do better planted somewhere else.
Just not at the chain link fence again. The deer ate everything that grew through to the outside of the fence! The next time we plant climbers at the fence, we’ll have to make sure there is protection on the outside of the fence, as well as the inside!
Corn and beans, in particular, were things we had so many seeds for, in so many varieties. Especially the Red Swan beans, though that was a mistake. I’d ordered a different, purple variety, because purple everything seemed to do quite well here. When I got Red Swan, instead, I contacted Veseys and they sent me another package.
Of Red Swan.
That happened a couple of times before I finally read on the website somewhere that they were out of the purple variety, and Red Swan as what they were sending out instead!
Oops.
When it came to beans, I’d hope to plant both bush and pole beans, in a variety of colours. I also wanted to try the beans my mother gave me, that trace back to what she used to grow here, when I was a child.
That didn’t happen. We simply didn’t have the space to plant many beans at all this year.
It was much the same with corn. We had many varieties to choose from. Mostly, I just wanted to have three types. The purple Montana Morado, the Tom Thumb popcorn, and one of the short season sweet varieties for fresh eating.
Well… two out of three is pretty good.
The purple corn.
As much as I’d like to grow the kulli corn, the seed source I’d found was out of stock. We’d grown the Montana Morado before a couple of years back (though we though we were getting an acclimated variety of kulli at the time), and they did well until something destroyed them.
This was all that survived from our 2021 garden.
The kulli corn we’d grown last year did absolutely amazing, growing into massive tall stalked that looked so strong an healthy – though high winds did try to take them down!
We had to add a lot of supports to the kulli corn and yellow pear tomatoes, after strong winds.
What they didn’t develop, however, was corn! Not a single tassel or cob!
So we went with the Montana Morado instead.
The Montana Morado got their own bed in the main garden area. I ordered a couple of packets of seeds, because there weren’t many per packet. It still wasn’t a lot, as far as corn goes, but this is an experiment for us. While the plants certainly didn’t thrive like the kulli stalks did last year, they at least produced cobs that we could harvest!
I waffled back and forth about interplanting beans with the corn as a nitrogen fixer, and did end up planting some Red Swan with them, late in the season, but more on that later.
Bonus for wanting the corn to use for flour is, no harvesting until the very end of the season.
There are a couple of things I wanted to do with purple corn. One was to make and try chicha morado, as the very concept of a drink made out of corn fascinated me. The other is to try making corn flour. For this year, the goal was just to have corn to try making flower, though we did try a few cobs for fresh eating.
We got almost exactly 1 cup of kernels. Just enough to try to make into flour, though we don’t have a mill. We were debating where to try the spice grinder in small batches, or the Bullet processor we’d been given, but were concerned the hard kernels would break them.
Then, one night, I heard a terrible crashing noise and went to investigate.
I found the container of kernels on the floor. A cat had somehow knocked it down.
We lost them all.
Every. Single. One.
*sigh*
Final thoughts on Montana Morado/purple corn:
Yes, we plan to try again but, gosh, that was disappointing to lose them all like that! We might wait another year or two before trying again. My source for the kulli seeds has them again, but they are insanely expensive – and in US prices, so quite a bit more, plus shipping, in Canadian dollars.
So that will wait.
The popcorn.
We got the Tom Thumb variety, which only gets a couple of feet tall. This is actually the second year we tried to grow them, but the location we grew them in last year, flooded. This year we planted them in a completely different area, both from the flooding and the purple corn. The two types of corn pollinate at different times, but the extra space reduced the chances of cross pollination, should we want to keep seeds.
When it came time to build frames to cover the raised beds, a priority was put on one that could go over the Tom Thumb corn, to protect it from deer or racoons. I’m rather happy with how it turned out, though I do want to stabilize the corners better.
As with the Montana Morado, these were grown to be harvested after they’d dried on the cob. These didn’t even get taste tested for fresh eating, so it was a very low maintenance crop! One we got a surprising number of cobs out of.
After they had their chance to dry on the cob indoors some more, we got a surprising amount of kernels.
We got almost exactly 6 cups out of them!
Final thoughts on Tom Thumb popcorn
We did a test pop, of course.
They didn’t pop. They just burned.
So we left them to dry longer, and stored them with a desiccant, before doing another test pop.
They still wouldn’t pop.
They’ve had more time to dry out and I’ll try again, but they should be dry enough. I’ve looked up about how to harvest and process kernels for popcorn, and we’ve done all that. The only thing I can see that might be the problem is that they still have too much moisture in them. Yet, they do need to have a bit of moisture in them, as that’s basically what makes popcorn pop.
I don’t know what to make of it!
I think we still have seeds left, but I don’t think we’ll try them again. In a way, it was a waste of space to grow these two varieties of corn, instead of a sweet corn that we could eat, freeze or can. We just didn’t have the space available to grow a third variety.
In the future, I think we’ll try a flour corn again when we have more prepared spaces. If we do find that we like having flour corn and actually use it, we would need to have a much larger space available to grow in, to make enough flour to be useful. That is still years in the future. Until then, we will continue to try small amounts as testers.
Next year, I want to focus more on growing a good, short season variety of corn, and we have seeds for at least two different varieties that fit that bill, ready and waiting to be planted.
Bush beans
In previous years, we have had great success with beans. The first year, we grew three types – yellow, green and purple – in rows about 25 feet long. The purple beans did especially well!
This year, I wanted to grow some bush beans, for their earlier harvest, pole beans for their later harvest, and shelling beans for dry storage.
Once again, we just didn’t have the prepared space for them.
In the end, we planted yellow and green beans in the high raised bed, which is only 9 feet long.
The yellow beans did okay, though a lot of the green beans in particular did not germinate. Most seeds were planted to fill the gabs, they they grew all right this time.
Then… this happened.
Turns out this bed is the perfect height for a hungry deer’s buffet!
We rigged a cover for the bed with poles and netting. Amazingly, the beans recovered, and we actually got some harvests!
Not a lot, but enough to include in our meals. Nowhere near enough for freezing.
Eventually, we were able to cover the bed with one of the garden bed covers we build this summer.
This worked out really well, as the netting could be lifted, and the openings of the fence wire used in the cover were wide enough to fit our arms through, so we didn’t have to remove the cover to harvest the beans. The only down side is that this netting is insane for catching on things!
One thing I found was that the slugs managed to get up into that bed!
This was a very bag year for slugs, but that will be covered more when we talk about the squash.
Still the beans did remarkably well under the circumstances!
Final thoughts on bush beans
While we will probably continue to experiment with varieties until we find ones we really like and can save seeds for, bush beans will probably be a staple crop for us. Especially purple ones, which seem to do best for some reason. Bush beans don’t need much done for them, and they are ready to harvest earlier than pole beans. Since we planted so few of them this year, we may not buy more for next year at all, and just go with what we already have.
The Red Swan beans.
There was some confusion when we got these, as I’d forgotten what I’d ordered, then realized what I ordered didn’t come in, and then… well…
I think we ended up with three bags of them, in total, by the time it was figured out!
These are a variety of bean that can be used for both fresh eating, and as a dried bean. They are also climbers. Since we had so many, when I decided to go ahead and interplant beans with the purple corn as nitrogen fixers, this was the variety I planted. I honestly did not expect them to have enough season left to produce edible beans, so it was a real surprise when they did!
They even got big enough to harvest!
They do turn green when cooked, rather than keep their red colour.
While they managed to grow pods, there was no chance they’d reach full maturity for harvesting dried seed pods. Which is okay. Having any pods at all from these was unexpected! They never even got big enough to climb the corn stalks.
Final thoughts on Red Swan beans, pole beans and dry beans
We will definitely be planting these again, with some left to mature for dry bean collection, and some for fresh eating, so we can figure out if we like them enough to keep growing. After all, there’s no point in letting all those extra seeds go to waste!
As for pole beans in general, we still want to try other varieties to see what we like, though for next year, we’ll probably go with the ones we got for this year, that never made it into the ground! Pole beans start to reach fresh eating maturity about the time bush beans are done, so having both will keep the harvests coming.
I also want to plant dry bean seeds we saved from last year that we didn’t have the space to plant this year, as well as experimenting with other varieties. We won’t go in that direction too far, though, as none of us enjoy dry beans quite enough to warrant having a lot of them. Mostly, having them will be part of our food storage and self sufficiency goals.
Peas.
Finally, we get to the peas!
This year, we planted a variety of pod peas we’ve grown somewhat successfully before, Dalvay. Previously, we’d grown them on trellises near the pole beans, way off in what will be our food forest area, as part of our efforts to amend the soil. Peas have yet to do very well for us, though they were growing in far from ideal conditions in that location. We didn’t plant in that area this year. Unfortunately, we didn’t have an alternate location ready for this year, either.
For the peas, though, I decided to plant them along the chain link fence this year, so they already had something to climb.
This area had had tomatoes growing in it for two years previously, and I felt it was time to switch up to a nitrogen fixer.
They did… okay. They certainly didn’t thrive in this location, which I found a bit strange. In fact, nothing did really well in this bed this year.
The peas did start climbing the fence, and we even got a few pods to harvest. Mostly, though, there were just a few pods I could snack on while outside.
Then one morning, I came out to do my rounds and discovered all parts of the pea plants that grew through to the other side of the fence, were gone. They all got eaten down to the same height, for the entire length of the fence!
Yup. It was the deer, again.
They did somewhat recover, only to get nibbled on again later on. We aren’t feeding the deer anymore – it’s just too expensive – so we don’t get the number we used to, but there are still a few that regularly come by. Usually, they just raid the compost pile, but every now and then, they help themselves to our garden.
*sigh*
So not only did they struggle in the new location, but with being eaten by wildlife, too!
Final thoughts on peas.
I like this variety of peas – the few times we were able to harvest them. At some point, I’d like to have enough pod peas to be able to can or freeze them!
As for why they didn’t do well in this location, when things had done well there before, I think the answer is above them.
We’ve been trying to cut back the branches on the Chinese Elm inside the fence, but in some places, that just resulted in new branches growing back even bushier. They are also too high to reach with our extended pole pruning saw.
Basically, that bed no longer gets as much light as it did over the past couple of years and, for the peas, that was a problem.
Since these trees also drop damaging amounts of seeds every spring, they are on the hit list. At some point, they are going to be taken down completely. They do, however, shade the yard and are among the few trees that are a partial wind break for winds from the south. I would rather not take them down until we have something to compensate for what we would lose when they’re gone.
However, given how much damage they are doing, we might just get rid of them and deal with the other issues later.
As for peas, I hope to plant them in different beds next year, and I’d like to try edible pod peas again. Eventually, I’d like to have both as staples in the garden.
In the end, when it comes to peas, beans and corn, the main hurdle we have is prepared beds to plant them in. We need to build a lot more raised beds of varying heights. We do have plans to build pairs of raised beds joined by trellis tunnels that has been started, and will continue to add more as we are able.
It’s the “as we are able” part that’s the problem.
Well, we do what we can with what we have available.
I found a little round cucumber lying on the ground and picked it, leaving the others to get a bit bigger. There were a few peas to pick, as well as some carrot thinnings. I would have thinned more of the purple carrots, but they are a very long variety, and our soil just doesn’t want to give them up!
I grabbed some of the smallest Red of Florence onions for today’s cooking, and decided to grab a few little turnips, too. There was one Magda squash I went ahead and grabbed. There was also a single green zucchini, and one large-ish sunburst squash, that I left to get a bit bigger.
The yellow bush beans are almost done. I couldn’t see very many developing pods left as I picked these. The purple Carminat beans are very prolific! There are so many more of them, compared to what’s on the green pole beans.
In that pile of green pole beans, however, there were two extras.
They are from this one little bush bean plant, grown from a leftover seed of our first planting of green bush beans under the sweet corn. The second planting of green bush beans are starting to develop pods, while this lonely original had a couple ready to pick.
I’m happy that this year, we at least have plenty of these two varieties of beans. The Red Noodle beans still show no signs of blooming, though they are at least starting to climb the trellis more. I’m curious about how the shelling beans will turn out, given how incredibly small and fragile the plants turned out to be. There are a lot of pods developing, too.
We planted so much this year, with hopes of having lots of food, in many varieties, to have over the winter. I always expect to have at least some losses. I didn’t expect to have so many total, or near total losses! Which makes me extra thankful to have what we do have.
The Re-Farmer 