planning ahead

More garden surprises

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

If you’re on Facebook, you know how they pop things into your news feed that you posted, X number of years ago today?

Yesterday, I saw one of those, with a photo I posted, three years ago.

After a snowfall.

Not only have we blown past our average first frost date of Sept. 10, but we are at a point where it is not at all unusual to have snow on the ground. Nothing that lasts, really, but usually at least one storm.

I am so loving our extended summer. Especially with how it’s giving our garden so much more time to recover from the extreme heat and drought conditions of the summer.

This morning, I found new Ozark Nest Egg flowers, both male and female! I hand pollinated some other ones, but it’s too early to tell if it works. I went ahead and hand pollinated the female flower here, too.

While looking through the Ozark Nest Egg plants, I found a single flower from the Thai Bottle Gourd that has made its way up the fence, mixed in with the Nest Egg gourds! I’ve only seen male flowers on this one, though.

Remember that carrot bed the groundhogs kept decimating, over and over? The one we finally gave up on, other than watering it now and again? Half of it, where the Kyoto Reds are planted, has carrots gone to see, pushing their way up through the weeds. The other variety, Napoli, have fronds visible among the weeds, but none are going to seed.

I watered the gardens this morning and, out of curiosity, pulled up some Napoli carrots. I was really surprised by how big they were! After having their greens eaten away several times, It’s amazing that there are any at all, never mind anything of a decent size! That had me looking around among the Kyoto Reds for carrots that had not gone to seed, and I found a surprisingly large one there, too!

The squash tunnel thermometer is definitely whack. We might be at 30C/86F as I write this, but it was only about 22C/72F at the time I took this photo.

While watering the peas among the corn, I couldn’t help but notice the corn block that is the furthest south.

We actually have corn. This block as lots of cobs developing!

They are very small – the husks make them look like there is more than there really is – and poorly pollinated, but we actually have corn. I went ahead and ate the one I picked, right after taking this photo, and it was tender, sweet and delicious. I will have to go back later today, with a container of some kind, and pick more!

I didn’t get a photo, but I picked 4 more of the largest Tennessee Dancing Gourds, too.

Once back inside, I started up a big chili in the crock pot. It’s got our own onions, garlic, carrots and bush beans in it, as well as both ground beef and the ground pork we got from our neighbour. Oh, and I also tossed in some Spoon tomatoes we’d tucked into the freezer. In the future, I plan to grow beans for drying, so some day we will be making chili with our own dry beans, too, along with the paste tomatoes we plant to grow and can. :-)

With a goal of being as self sufficient as possible when it comes to growing our own food, this year has shown just how touch and go that can be. We had a very warm May that had all sorts of things starting to bloom, only to get a single cold night that killed all the flowers off. Because of that one night, we have no crab apples, no saskatoons, no chokecherries, and it killed off the (expensive!) mulberry bush we’d transplanted. Even the lilacs and roses got damaged by that one night. Then we had the drought conditions that had us watering every day, twice a day, for so long. And now we’ve got an extended summer, and instead of frost and snow, parts of our garden are able to recover and start or continue producing! It’s been a crazy gardening year, but as much as I shake my head over how extreme conditions have been, the reality is, this isn’t actually all that unusual. As every farmer, gardener or homesteader knows, you could have the best year of all, only to have all your hard work wiped out by a single storm, or one unusually cold night. Or you could get a terrible spring and summer, but then get a great fall and winter. Some years, you might not get any real summer at all, and in others, the winter will be as mild as any fall or spring. As fantastic as it can be, to be able to grow your own food and preserve it for use in the off season, I’m just as thankful that we have grocery stores and imported food. I think both are good! As my brother and his wife have both said, if they had to rely on their garden, they’d starve!

The Re-Farmer

At the gate, and after the rain

/ Re-Farmer / 7 Comments

While doing my rounds this morning, I found a strange thing at the gate.

The twine was caught around the lock and the caribiner, which usually hangs over one side of the gate, was hooked onto the chain link.

Right off the bat, I knew this was NOT our vandal. If it were, there would have been actual damage, like the locks being glued again, or something like that.

Needless to say, I was quite curious when I sat down to look at the trail cam files. I had a pretty good idea who did it.

I was right.

When my daughter’s package was delivered, the driver tried to shove it into the gate, then used the chain to try and hold it in place. The problem is, the gate moves in the wind. When the cameras were triggered again, less than 15 minutes later, I could see the package was already half-falling. My the time my daughter came over to get the package, about half an hour after it was dropped off, it was on the ground.

It’s a good thing it wasn’t fragile!!

Going through the trail cam files was interesting for another reason: several files caught huge flashes of lighting from last night’s storm! I even saw a deer and her little one, hurrying up the driveway, while the sky light them up repeatedly.

Yesterday blew past our expected high of the day, reaching at least 30C/86F, possibly 32C/90F. That was followed by a wicked thunderstorm that passed over us around 11pm. It was awesome! Of course, we lost internet well before that. It rained enough that I found our rain barrel by the sun room, which had only a few inches of water on the bottom, full to overflowing.

We *really* need an overflow hose on that thing.

The garden loved the rain, too!

I was seeing huge new blossoms on the summer squash. Even the Ozark Nest Egg and the luffa gourds had new flowers opening. So did the Tennessee Dancing gourds, but they never really stopped blooming, so that wasn’t a lot of change.

The Crespo squash is seeing more flowers opening, too, and some of the developing fruit is noticeably bigger! These two are the ones closest to the barriers than I can get clear photos of, but there are quite a few more getting bigger like this.

The sunflowers are loving the deep watering, too. And just look at this Hopi Black Dye seed head! It is getting so very dark!

I even had a baby harvest this morning.

The larger melon is a Pixie melon. There are still lots of those. The little one is a Halona melon. The remaining melons on those vines are not getting any bigger, as the vines are pretty much completely died back now. Most of the melons are all very securely attached to their vines, though. This little one was feeling a bit softer, so I had it with breakfast. :-)

I even was able to pick some peas! With our first green peas, I did find a pod or two, but between the drought and the critters, that was about it. This is the most I’ve picked at once, this year.

That longest pod is the size they would all be reaching, if growing conditions were better.

I suppose I really should have left them for another day, as these were a bit on the small size, but I couldn’t resist.

I had them with my breakfast, too. :-)

The melon wasn’t as sweet as larger ones we’d picked, but it was definitely ripe. The peas were also probably not as sweet as they would have been under better growing conditions. They were both still quite tasty, though!

Last night’s storm had blown the door to the outhouse closed. I opened it again and things were still a bit damp. It’s been a few hours now, so I am going to head out and see if I can start painting!

The Re-Farmer

Morning harvest, and getting named

/ Re-Farmer / 4 Comments

Check out what I was able to gather this morning!

There are quite a few more of the purple beans buried underneath. They have been, hands down, the most prolific bean producers, and if the weather keeps up the way it has been, we will be picking beans for at least another week or two! Even the yellow beans are putting out a second crop. With the drought conditions, none of the bean plants are as large and bushy as they should be, with the green and yellow beans particularly stunted, even as they continue to produce. With the green beans, that resulted in my finding bean pods that were almost as long as the plants were tall!

I had to get a bigger container to collect tomatoes with, instead of the red Solo cups we’ve been using until now. The vines are dying back, yet they still have so many ripening tomatoes!

Earlier today, I made a quick trip to the post office, before I gathered our morning harvest. The general store it is in always closes at noon on Wednesdays, so I had to do it early, but not too early; I knew the postmaster would need at least an hour from opening, to sort through the morning mail. We had some packages to pick up, but one of my daughters also had a package that was supposed to be delivered by courier, directly to our address, as it was from a place that does not deliver to box numbers.

Which has always been a problem, since our physical address doesn’t come up in searches. Like pretty much all of the roads around here, our road has two names; one is a numerical designation (part of the provincial system), and the other is our family name (a municipal thing). Many of the local roads are named after local families. It was only recently that I discovered that the road past our place has no name on the maps at all! Not even the road number. Which certainly explained why delivery companies had such a problem finding us!

My daughter was keeping an eye on the tracking number, however, and got a notification that her package was delivered to our door at about quarter to one. Of course, there was no such delivery, since the gate is locked. I could see nothing on the live feed of the security cameras, but my daughter went to see if it might have been left at the gate. Sure enough, I watched her on the camera as she got to the gate and picked up a white package. Which was on the gravel of the driveway, which also looks pretty white on the camera! No wonder I couldn’t see it!

I’m impressed that they found us, but it reminded me of something I wanted to try. Using the maps app on my phone, I found our road and took a closer look. It turned out that there is a 4 mile stretch of our road that is not labeled at all, however to the south of us, the road ends at another road, then restarts a short distance away. From where it restarts and continues south, it is labeled with the same numerical designation as the signs we have on our stop sign.

The four mile section that had no label is the only section that has our family name assigned to it. The offset part of the road with the numerical label probably has another family’s name assigned to it.

The app now has a function that allows the map to be edited. When I used that and started to select sections of the road, it simply said “unknown road”. I was able to select all 4 miles that had no label on it, then put in the name. It gave the option to add more information, so I added that it was also known by the numerical designation. I then sent the edit to Google Maps. I’ve already got a confirmation email saying “Thank you for your contribution. Your suggestion is being reviewed. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. We’ll let you know once the changes are published.”

Hopefully, that means or road will finally have a name attached to it on Google Maps, and people will be able to find us more easily! Plus, with the name rather than the number on the map, it will also match what is on not only my driver’s license, but on the licenses of several of my neighbours, too!

Speaking of which, I am hoping to get a chance to visit the one that sells pork products at the farmer’s market today. With our province’s latest draconian restrictions, organic humans are no longer allowed in “non-essential” places, even though such mandates are expressly forbidden in our laws, at both the federal and provincial levels. Vendors at markets aren’t required to be GMO though; just the customers. So I will just have to skip the market, and go right to the source! :-D

I’m quite okay with that. They are a homesteading family that are a few years ahead of where we want to be, as far as self-sufficiency goes, and I would love to see how they’ve been doing things! I may have grown up here on the farm, two sticks ahead of the stone ages, but I am more than happy to learn new, better and more efficient ways to go things! Especially since we’re only about one stick ahead of the stones ages now. ;-)

The Re-Farmer

Cat heaven, basement flood update, and our monthly shop

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Gosh, it feels like such a long day today. It always does when we do our city shopping!

I am so glad we only do this once or twice a month!

But first… Kitties!

I just have to share some adorable photos with you. :-) <3

I got my morning Ginger cuddles!

He does not want me to pet him. If I try, he violently kicks my hand away with his back legs, rolls half onto his back and sticks the back of his head onto my hand for ear skritches. Not from above his head, but from below! Of course, once the skritches starts, a back leg starts to kick uncontrollably. :-D

Gosh, he’s adorable.

Before my daughter and I headed out to the city, I of course had to check the basement.

That is SUCH an improvement! By the time I checked it again after we got back from the city, this side was mostly dry. I think, by tomorrow, I’ll be able to move the blower fan to face the other side of the basement, as it had flooded enough to reach the other side of the furnaces. A couple more days, and we should be able to start the final clean up.

I even remembered to pick up more heavier duty latex gloves for the job, as the pair I was using while working on the drain pipe sprang leaks! :-D

Of the four places we typically try to hit during our monthly city shop, my younger daughter and I managed three. :-D Our first stop was at Canadian Tire, were we picked up more wood pellets. We still have some unopened bags to use as litter, but now that I’ve found how well they work to amend the soil in our garden beds, I have no problem stocking up even more! While there, we also found a heavy duty, high traffic, scrubbable paint for the inside of the outhouse. My older daughter was thinking a pale robin’s egg blue, but once we started looking at the colour samples, there were not a lot of options, so my younger daughter chose a light mint. Not a colour I would have chosen, but they have better taste than I do, so I trust them. ;-) As long as it’s a like colour and not white, I don’t really care all that much. :-D So now we just need to get all those tacks out of the walls, give it one last cleaning to get rid of any new dust or spider webs, and then we can paint! At some point, we’ll pick up more exterior paint to do the outside, but that can wait until next spring, really. Getting the roof fixed is more of a priority when it comes to the outside.

After Canadian Tire, we went to the international grocery store for those little things we can’t find at Costco, with Costco being our final stop. We didn’t get everything in the quantities we will need for our goal of stocking up extra for the winter, in case the weather has us stuck at home for a couple of months, again. Partly because, even using a flat cart, it would be just too much. The largest and heaviest items being the bags of dry cat food. Even so, it’s been a long time since we packed the van this full!

One thing we didn’t get a lot of was meat. Partly because we still had some in the freezer, but partly because we are planning on getting a quarter beef from the local supplier we found. They are taking orders now, then start butchering in November, and the meat will be ready in December. They are charging $6 per pound this year, and a quarter beef averages about 150-200 pounds in finished weight. So, at most, we can expect to be paying $1200. That’s the equivalent of our entire grocery budget, including cat supplies, toiletries, household cleaners and the like, for the entire month! Which means we have to make sure to set some of our grocery budget aside, along with the unallocated funds in our budget. Most of the unallocated funds for this month just went to pay for the plumber, though. We’ll have to juggle the budget a bit, so we can still set aside for the beef, while also not touching our contingency fund that is slated for something else.

After we got home and everything got put away, it was time for supper, and then I headed outside to water the garden beds. We hit 25C/77F today. Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter, and things have been pretty dry for the past little while. We still have the soaker hose set up under the squash trellis, and the sprinkler hose set up with the summer squash, so we got those going first. While I was at it, I topped up the empty kibble trays outside.

We may have got all of the outside cats when I did!

I counted 11 kittens in total, including Nosencrantz and Toesencrantz in their usual private dining area under the shrine. Nutmeg, Rosencrantz and Ghost Baby joined them, too! I also saw Potato Beetle, Rolando Moon and Butterscotch at the kibble house. They were all moving around so much that, if the 12th kitten was there, too, I could easily have missed it. Especially since they sometimes hide under the cat house.

There are nine kittens and three adults visible in the above photo. What a crowd! Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more of the kittens outside the sunroom door, waiting for me to come out with the kibble, and fewer of them run away completely when I come outside. Some of them are almost underfoot when I put the food out, even though they back right off if it seems like I’m about to stop near them. They are such an adorable bunch. I just love those stripes on the ‘icouses!

When I came back out later to switch the hose from the soaker hose to the sprinkler hose, I was very entertained by the sight of a Rolando Moon roast! She loves to climb right into the old roaster (which became a kibble tray after one of the handles broke off). I missed getting a photo of her looking all trussed up, before she gave me her famous death glare. :-D

Later on, I even saw Junk Pile cat! She has been coming out to eat after all the other cats and kittens are gone.

I’m just looking at the long range forecast right now, and it’s looking like we are going to have some absolutely glorious weather, well into October! That should go a long way to giving us a chance to get some outside projects worked on, and for our garden to continue producing. While watering today, I was noticing quite a lot of pea pods developing, and yes, I have even found some mature enough to taste! Just a couple of pods so far, but my goodness, fresh peas are the best! One of the sweet corn blocks is even looking like it might have cobs worth harvesting soon, too! I honestly thought that one was a lost cause, too. We shall see! Meanwhile, tomorrow I will be picking tomatoes, and probably more beans, too.

It’s working out to be a really awesome fall! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Giant puffballs done, and an unexpected autumn

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

This morning was the day!

After sitting in water, with some molasses and a touch of salt, for a couple of days, our Giant Puffball spores were ready to be used to inoculate an area.

The instructions just said to pour over grass, but I did do two things to prepare the area we decided on. First, I pulled up the tall grass. There was barely any, and I didn’t try to pull them up by the roots or anything. Mostly, I figured I wanted the spores to be on the ground, not on tall blades of grass! :-D Then, I wet the area down with a hose. I wet down the morel bed, too, since the hose was handy.

When pouring the slurry out, I just swung the jug back and forth while walking backwards, paying more attention to spreading it evenly than to how large of an area I covered. It ended up being just enough to cover from end to end between the trees, from the morel box, down.

The temperatures have been just lovely, and we’re even getting passing showers, fairly regularly.

It’s been mild enough that, even with the first Ozark Nest Egg gourds withering away from last of pollination, new gourds are forming!

Looking at the long range forecast, I am just amazed.

We’re supposed to hit 28C/82F in a few days! With a humidex of 32C/90F! I thought we already seen our last days of temperatures this high. It’s the warm overnight temperatures that make the big difference, though. The app on my phone has long range forecasts to 24 days. Of course, the farther out they predict, the less accurate they can be, but even so, there are no frost nights predicted! It’s like we’re getting the weather we normally would have got, earlier in the year, instead of the drought. In fact, even with the few showers we’ve had, it looks like we still need to water the garden! We will still be getting beans and summer squash, more and more of the late sown peas are growing pods, more sunflowers are opening their seed heads, and even the Tennessee Dancing Gourd is producing more flowers and gourds. Of course, the beets and carrots are still growing. I was planning to leave those until around first frost, and it’s looking like they’ll have plenty of time to keep developing. The tomatoes are dying back, but still prolific, and the lettuce and surviving chard are thriving. I’m almost tempted to plant some more lettuces!

Almost.

This does mean we won’t be broadcasting the wildflower seed mixes we have for quite some time; they aren’t going to go out until there is no chance of germination.

What a strange year it has been!

The Re-Farmer

Mmm… puffball slurry!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Okay, I should have done this yesterday, or at least earlier today, but too many other things kept distracting me away. So now I finally have it started.

Puffball slurry.

The spores in the packet are done the same way as the morels were; as little grains.

The package instructions said to put water in a gallon glass jar. I don’t have a gallon sized glass jar available, so I ended up using one of the gallon sized jugs from the distilled water we get for my husband’s CPAP humidifier. It’s food grade plastic, so that should be fine.

The instructions called for distilled or any other non-chlorinated water, so well water it was. Then they called for a pinch of salt (?!?!) and a small spoonful of molasses, which was then to be mixed with a clean wooden spoon until the salt was dissolved.

Such a strange mix of precise and imprecise instructions! :-D

Well, there was no way to use a spoon in the jug I was using, so after adding a bit of salt and a pouring in a blob of molasses, I put the cap back on and shook it until the molasses was dissolved. The salt dissolved pretty much right away, so that wasn’t an issue.

The instructions then said to “brush” the spores in, but since the spores were in those handy pellets, I just dumped them in. Now it is supposed to sit, undisturbed, for two days.

Actually, the instructions said to place the slurry “… where it will be disturbed…” :-D I suspect translation issues!

Anyhow.

Two days would actually be Saturday night, but since I’m not going to go pouring puffball slurry around in the dark, Sunday morning it is!

Like the morels, it could be a couple of years before these fruit, and it’s entirely possible they won’t take at all. No loss in trying, though, and if it works, we could find ourselves with puffballs big enough to cut into steaks! :-D Much easier than the little ones we normally get around here. :-)

Meanwhile, I have taken today as a break from heavier manual labour to give my body a chance to recover a bit. My husband, darling that he is, has been treating my hands with his zapper (needle-less acupuncture). One hand is pretty much back to normal now, but the ring finger on my right hand is still a problem. I may have actually injured it, somehow, aside from the usual arthritis. Whatever I did to it, I can at least say with confidence that nothing is broken, and I can at least still type. It’s a good thing I’m left handed in most things, too.

Aside from running some errands, we’ve been working on processing that big bag of dill my brother and his wife gave us. Our entire dining table is covered with towels, and my younger daughter and I have been working it in batches, as we’ve had the chance. There are a lot of mature seeds in there, and we’ve been talking about what to do with them. We want to basically set aside an area for the dill where they can self-seed to their heart’s content, and we don’t have to worry about them popping up when we’re trying to grow something else. We seem to have settled on the area next to the low raised beds that are being set up. It has been partially cleaned up, and because of various old tree stumps and roots, as well as spreading roots from those cherry trees that are not right for our climate, it’s not like we’re ever going to expand garden beds further in. If, for some reason, that spot doesn’t work out, I can think of another area where it might work to have a dill jungle. :-)

I am hoping to get back to taking down more dead trees and breaking them down for the high raised beds we will be building over the next while. I also want to do a thorough weeding of the empty beds, and letting them sit to allow any missed weeds to start growing, so I can pull them when it’s time to actually move the top soil and build the beds. We don’t have a lot of material left to use when refilling the bottom layers of the beds, but we will soon be able to start raking leaves, which will be good to use. Plus, we should be able to get another lawn mowing in before the end of the season, and have fresh grass clippings as well. So for now, the more dead trees we can cut and process, the better.

Little by little, it’ll get done!

The Re-Farmer

Morning harvest, and another one down

/ Re-Farmer / 9 Comments

Well, so much for trying to support the sunflower in the old kitchen garden.

We had high winds again this morning, and the last of the three flower stalks on the remaining sunflower in the old kitchen garden finally broke. It was actually still upright when I came out this morning, but by the time I came back to the house, it was lying on the ground.

Sadness.

While checking the garden beds, I did get a little bit of a harvest this morning.

It all could fit in my pocket! :-D

This is the largest I’ve ever let a pattypan squash get. Any bigger, and they start developing their seeds. One of these days, I should try letting some fully mature. At that point, when the seeds are removed, they leave a cavity that can be stuffed for roasting, which I do want to try. We just really like them at this stage, though. :-) For next year, I plan to try other varieties of pattypan squash, and hope to grow some to save seeds, too. Since I accidentally bought three summer squash collections for this year, instead of one, we don’t actually need to buy more squash seeds, but I like to try new varieties.

That is definitely one of the biggest benefits of having a garden. There are so many varieties that are just never in the stores!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: morning in the garden, and first lettuce!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I was rather pleased with this morning’s harvest!

I am just amazed that we still have beans to pick, this late in the season! Even a single yellow bean. :-D

If the mild temperatures continue, we will be getting more yellow beans, too. There are new beans growing, all over the row! From what I could see while picking the green and purple beans, we will have more to pick for at least a couple of weeks, unless a frost hits, first.

After seeing that insanely high reading on this thermometer a few days ago, I’ve been making a point of checking it more often. This time, it seems to be reading low. It was chilly this morning, but not that chilly!

Ah, well. It’s a Dollar Store thermometer. As long as it’s close, it’ll be useful.

This morning was the first time I uncovered the lettuce to weed and thin them. The cover may keep the critters out, but it’s so long, it’s awkward to move on and off, unless there are two people.

These seeds had been from the bottom of a baggie they had spilled into, so I was expecting a mix. It looks like they are almost all the same type, with the exception of two Buttercrunch. Today is the first time we have been able to harvest lettuce this year! The first time we planted them in the spring, the groundhog got to them before we could. The lettuce is just loving these cooler temperatures.

What I am most curious about is this…

There is a tomato plant growing here! It’s looking very strong and healthy, too. I think that’s a dill growing beside it. Dill self seeds easily, but a tomato? Where did that come from? And why did it sprout so late in the season? This bed had spinach in it, first, and this tomato is growing past the sticks marking the ends of the rows I sowed the lettuce in. No additional soil had been added. Very strange!

While weeding this bed, I was on the lookout for the radishes we’d planted in the other half. I found a couple, but they were really tiny. I have no idea what happened to them.

The Bright Lights chard is doing well. We’ve harvested leaves a couple of times from these. They are liking these cooler temperatures.

We have completely abandoned the carrot bed the woodchucks had decimated repeatedly. I’d tried to at least keep weeding it a bit, but it was just too much. And yet, you can see carrot fronds among the weeds! It should be interesting to see what we have, when this bed gets cleaned up for next year.

The Hopi Black Dye sunflower in the old kitchen garden had three stalks with flowers on it. In our recent winds, one of them broke, so I added the supports for the plant to try and save the rest. This morning, I found a second stalk, broken on the ground.

We didn’t really have a lot of wind last night.

I suspect kittens.

I’ve been catching them playing in this garden, right on top of the netting over the carrot bed and the beets by the retaining wall. The carrots are on the edges of the bed, and the kittens have been playing in the middle, so those aren’t as affected, but the beets are being flattened. That bed was already struggling to recover from being et by grogs, and not doing well, so I guess it’s not really a loss, but I find it interesting that the kittens seem to really like playing on top of the netting, instead of on the ground or paths beside it!

Thinking ahead to next year, I believe we have enough salvaged boards in the barn that can be used to make low raised beds here. It would be a good place to make contained areas, such as with square foot gardening, as we turn this into a kitchen garden, and we start to plant more herbs that may have a spreading tendancy. If we have actual frames on the beds, that will make it easier to set up sturdy covers to protect from voracious critters and insects – and playful kittens!

I think we should dig up the rhubarb and transplant them somewhere else. They are not doing well here, likely because they are right under the ornamental crab apple trees.

As difficult and sometimes disappointing as things have been with gardening this year, particularly with the drought, it has showed us a lot about what works, and we can do to improve things for the future.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: chocolate

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

When I placed our order for fall garlic, I also ordered a pack of seeds for next year’s garden.

It felt kind of weird to order just one pack of seeds. Especially since the garlic will be shipper later, when it’s time to plant them in our zone.

This is a variety of tomatoes my daughter really wanted to try. We now have seeds for two colourful varieties of little tomatoes for next year. We will also be getting two other, larger sized varieties. For me, I will be getting paste tomatoes, while my daughter wants to get some sort of big, lumpy heirloom variety. :-D I think this time, we will start them indoors a bit earlier, so I don’t mind getting seeds will in advance. Last year, we ordered the majority of our seeds in early December, because so many were already selling out. I don’t expect there will be quite the same level of shortages as last year, but I still want to place our orders as soon as our budget allows.

Alas, one thing we won’t be ordering this year are the bushes we were talking about planting where the corn and sunflower blocks are now. We missed the deadline; they have already stopped taking orders for the year! We will need to make sure we can place an order as soon as they open up for orders again, next year. The saplings wouldn’t be shipped until spring, anyhow.

I think half the fun of gardening is planning for the next year’s garden! :-D

The Re-Farmer

ps: the package under the packet of seeds is a set of 12 inch drill bits my darling husband got for me. He’s the best!!

Our 2021 garden: still growing!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Today is likely to be the last hot day of the year. As I write this, we are currently at 26C/79F, with the humidex at 30C/86F. We are expected to reach 28C/83F with the humidex making it feel like 31C/88F. We are supposed to get a couple more days in the mid to low 20’s before the highs start dropping to the mid to high teens. So far, overnight temperatures are also still supposed to remain high enough that there are no frost warnings.

I headed out to do my rounds later than usual this morning, and we had already reached 22C/73F.

There has to be something wrong with the squash tunnel thermometer. It may have felt warmer than the 22C it was when I took this photo, but there is no way it was feeling like 42C/108F! Not even being in full sun, like it is, should result in that extreme of a difference. I suspect the dial is stuck. I haven’t been looking at it since the temperatures finally cooled down, so it may well have been sitting at this reading since our last heat wave.

In checking the sunflowers, there was only one little pollinator that I saw! I think the heat waves we had over the summer killed off a lot of our pollinators. There just wasn’t enough food to sustain them. The mild temperatures we are having means more of our sunflowers are actually budding and opening their seed heads, but I don’t know that they’ll have a chance to be well pollinated.

Some of the Mongolian Giants are finally taller than me. Hopefully, the opening sunflowers will lure any remaining pollinators to them. They may not have time to fully mature, even with our predicted mild temperatures, but they will at least provide some food for our surviving pollinators.

These are the Hopi Black Dye transplants that got chomped by a deer. They have all recovered surprisingly well, and are budding and blooming. They don’t need as long of a growing season as the Mongolian Giants, so it should be interesting to see if any of these get a chance to mature.

The green peas are enjoying the cooler temperatures we’ve been having, and I’m seeing more pods developing. This photo is of one of the pea plants growing among the Dorinny corn, the remains of which are being left to go to seed. The three blocks of sweet corn are still green, but they aren’t really growing. At this point, I don’t expect anything from them, really. They’re just there for the peas to have something to climb. Any pea pods we get is just gravy, as their main purpose is to fix nitrogen into the depleted soil in this area.

The winter squash and melons are the ones I am monitoring the most right now.

Remarkably, even as the plants are dying back, we are still getting fresh blooms, and the newer Red Kuri squash are getting noticeably bigger.

The mutant seems to have stopped getting bigger, and is now deepening in colour and developing a harder skin.

As this other, larger Red Kuri is still doing.

I did a nail test on the oldest of the developing Red Kuri, and you can see the mark left behind. Still not ready.

The Teddy squash are also still managing as well.

If we do end up getting frost before any of these larger squash can fully mature, we will still be able to harvest them and eat them. We just won’t be able to store them for long.

The melon vines are dying back faster than the winter squash vines, but their fruit are still hanging in there! I was able to pick this Pixie melon, only because the vine it was attached to had died back completely. I suspect it isn’t quite ripe.

My daughters discovered something about these little melons. After they are cut in half and the seeds scooped out, they make perfect ice cream bowls! I’m not big on ice cream, but I finally had some last night, in half of a Halona melon. It was quite excellent! :-D

I am glad we found these little, short season melons. They have been among the most enjoyed producers this year. I think we will try different short season varieties next year, but the Pixie and Halona are definitely varieties we would grow again. I’ve also saved seeds from some grocery store melons that I plan to try. They are larger varieties, but if we start them indoors early enough, and we don’t have another drought, we should be able to grow them. :-)

The Re-Farmer