Purple Savoy cabbage

Our 2026 Garden: direct sowing four beds

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So May has been just all over the place, this year. This morning, it was snowing. We have frost advisories for tonight. It’ll be almost a week before things really start to warm up again.

This has had an unfortunate affect on our winter sown beds. Most of what germinated did not survive the temperature fluctuations, after the mulch was removed.

What was sown in them, however, was all cool weather crops that can be direct sown before our last frost date, as soon as the soil can be worked. Which means, we still have time.

I started off in the old kitchen garden, with the bed that has clear vinyl over the wire raised bed cover that my daughter helped me move aside.

The first picture in the slide show above was before I stared doing anything. You can see a row of onions along the south wall that are doing well – but the ones along the north wall are pretty much gone! I think the one on the south were partially shaded by the wall, keeping them slightly cooler, while the ones inside the north wall had no respite. I should have propped up the cover to allow air circulation on the hotter days, but there was no real way to do that.

Which is why the first thing I worked on was the walls of this bed.

There were a number of stakes that were high enough that the cover got hung up on them, and I spent some time hammering them deeper. The top logs aren’t particularly straight, and one of them is quite a bit narrower at one end than the other. I secured them better, while also using straw to fill the gaps under them, as well as to make everything more level. I ended up using leftover pieces from the stakes I’d cut for the in-progress garden bed at the chain link fence and most more stakes to further secure the walls.

You can see the end result of that in the second picture.

Once that was done, I spent some time removing more of the leaf mulch remaining. Even with the vinyl over the cover, wind got in and blew things around.

After clearing the rows, I re-sowed the Hedou Tiny bok choy and the variety mix of beets. I had considered getting one of the snail rolls of onions from inside to add along the north edge, but changed my mind. I had picked up a packet of parsnips at our local general store – because I just could not resist buying more seeds! – and sowed some of those, instead. I think I’m the only one in the household that likes parsnips, so we don’t need a lot.

That done, I watered everything from the rain barrel right away. Then I grabbed the soaker hose I’d brought over and hooked it up to the garden hose to test it out. It was working fine, so I laid it out between the rows, making sure the right end was set up at one corner, where the hose could be screwed on without having to take off the cover.

This soaker hose is quite long, though, so after pegging it down between the rows. there was enough length left over to go along the walls around the entire bed.

Once it was set up and pegged down, I hooked up the hose and left it going while I worked on the next area.

In the wattle weave bed, I’d planted some Tom Thumb dwarf peas along the back, and transplanted garlic and a few onions along the front. After removing most of the mulch when things started to warm up enough, I made sure to set netting over it, to keep the cats out.

I don’t know if any of the peas germinated or not, but when I moved the netting aside and cleared away excess leaf mulch, I saw no sign of pea sprouts at all. The package has only 25 pea seeds, so I planted the entire package. I do still have an extra of this variety, though, that could be succession sowed somewhere else, if I want. We have other varieties of peas, though, so I would probably go with something different.

The garlic was doing fine, and most of the transplanted onions are showing growth. In the green plastic collar, the mystery flowers I found and transplanted into this bed are coming up nicely, too. Once the peas were planted and watered, I just needed to slide the netting down the hoops and peg them down again. Those fiberglass hoops I used in place of the wire the kit came with are working out really well.

After that was all done, I messaged my daughter to help me put the raised bed cover back on. I turned off the water and moved the garden hose first, to remove the tripping hazard! The last image shows both beds, all covered up again.

The cover fits a LOT better now. No hanging up on stakes, and no weird gaps under the frame that I had to fill with boards or rocks or pieces of brick, to make sure no cats got in, and to keep the wind from flipping the whole thing over. I was better able to tuck the excess vinyl under the edges, so nothing should catch on the wind. The boards I’d used along the edges before were no longer needed, so they went on top, to weigh down the vinyl and keep it from billowing in the wind. The pieces of wood I used before kept getting blown off!

I will keep that vinyl cover on for a few more nights. Then I will replace it with mosquito netting, so it doesn’t get too hot under there, while still protecting the bed from cats.

That done, I moved to the garden beds in the East yard. I worked on the cabbage bed and the kohlrabi beds at the same time.

The first thing was to remove their covers. As you can see in the first photo, the leaf mulch got blown all over the rows I’d planted into. I cleared away excess leaf mulch and, in the process, did find a few tiny seedlings.

In the second image, you can see I also found a friend!

When it was clear enough to start sowing (which you can see in the third image), I used a bamboo trellis stake to create a furrow, and did my best not to kill off the few seedlings I found in the process. Hopefully, they will survive.

Once the kohlrabi and cabbage were all re-sown, they got a thorough watering from the rain barrel, and the covers were set back on.

I debated whether I should find some plastic to cover them for the night, since we are expecting frost, but these are meant to be sown before last frost, so they should be fine.

At this point, I was done for the day. The next things I need to re-sow are the spinach, chard and carrots. I’m pretty sure the daikon radish and white turnips don’t need to be re-sown, but I’d have to lift the poly to be able to see just how many have made it. The greenhouse poly is semi-transparent, with condensation on the inside, so it’s really hard to tell.

This will wait for another day. Hopefully not tomorrow, as I would love to be making the trip into the city to bring my daughter home from the hospital!

This weekend is the May long weekend – Monday is Victoria Day – which is when a lot of people traditionally finish getting their gardens in. Not where we are, though, and certainly not this year!

I’m happy with what I was able to get done today, though. It feels so good to be working in the garden again!!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 garden: winter sowing kohlrabi and cabbage, and prepping the next bed

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I got back from the city early enough, and it was still warm enough, to get some progress done in the garden.

My first priority was to winter sow in the east yard low raised beds. Two of these beds were already prepped, but not covered in any way, so they did require some clean up. The cats have been using them as litter boxes!

Some of their “presents” were astonishingly huge.

Ew.

My original plan had been to do the kohlrabi and cabbage on the outside of the beds, then have peas down the middle of one, while leaving a gap in the middle of the other to plant pole beans in the spring.

I forgot. The kohlrabi and cabbage will need to be covered in netting to keep them from being decimated by flea beetles and cabbage moths. Having something growing on a trellis in the middle is probably not a good idea!

In the first picture below, the beds are cleaned up, leveled and rows marked out.

In the second picture, you can see the planted rows of purple and white kohlrabi. If I had gone ahead with the plan to grow pole beans down the middle, these rows would have been further apart. I decided to stick with just the two rows and moved them closer to the middle. These raised beds are more prone to freezing than the beds in the main garden area, simply because the boards are so much thinner than the logs used in the longer beds. We’ve lost almost entire beds of garlic over the winter due to excessive cold, even with a mulch. I’m hoping that, with sowing them closer to the middle, deep mulching them with leaves, plus the predicted milder winter we’re expected to have, they will survive. The plant spacing for these, according to the package, is 4-6 inches, so I tried to scatter the seeds with my little hand seeder fairly lightly. If they survive and germinate, they will still need to be thinned later on, but not by too much. Hopefully, if I have the space, the will be thinned by transplanting.

In the next picture, I have the Purple Savoy cabbage. This is the first time we’ve tried to grow cabbage. I originally planned to have two rows on the outside, then peas in the middle, but decided to do three rows of cabbage. As they need about a foot per cabbage for spacing, I tried to scatter two or three seeds every foot or so, though a few spots accidentally got quite a bit more! You can sort of see a grid in the soil, from where the seeds were covered and the soil gently pressed down, while the rest of the rows I made with a hoe remain untouched.

Grommet REALLY wanted to “help” me with the sowing!

I had made sure to rake up plenty of leaves into the wagon and the wheelbarrow before I started, and was able to give the beds a good mulching for the winter. Then I transferred one of the raised bed covers for the winter. There is another one on the third bed I could move over, but I decided against it. That cover’s wire mesh does not have hoops to support it. Cats would knock that flat and out of shape in a heartbeat. So it’s up on top of the box frame one the other bed, which I’ve found surprisingly useful. I plan to make more 3′ x 9′ covers like this over time, but we need to buy more lumber for it, first.

That done, it was time to shift over to the old kitchen garden.

The cats have been having a field day in the cleaned up wattle weave bed, so that got a clean up, first. My plan is to winter sow dwarf peas in the back of the south facing section of the wattle weave bed, and transplant any onions, etc that I found in the rectangular bed in the front.

That… might not quite work out! At least, not so much for the onions part.

The first thing was to harvest the remaining Swiss Chard. It wasn’t until I uploaded the pictures onto Instagram that I realized I forgot them outside! They should be okay overnight.

In the second picture, you can see an area on the south side of the bed, where the cats dug into the dirt. I suspect there was a mouse or something that got their attention for them to dig it out that much. There had been grass clippings chinked in the gap between the logs, but that disappeared. It’s been filled repeatedly, and the cats keep pulling it out. So one of the things I needed to do was find a way to block that gap in a cat proof way.

Once the chard and remaining kohlrabi roots were cleared out, it was time to loosen the soil, pull the weeds and set aside any little onions I found.

I found so many, I started just tossing them with the weeds after a while!

What I really wanted to find out is what was going on with what looked like a cluster of garlic coming up, and another cluster of what I thought were onions but, as they got larger, the leaves started to look like some sort of ornamental allium, instead.

In the next picture, you can see that there were two entire bulbs of garlic that somehow got missed! I planted garlic in here a couple of years ago. This year, two garlic bulbs grew among the seed mix in this bed. They grew into nice sized bulbs that got harvested.

Now I find two full bulbs of garlic that somehow got missed over two growing seasons! I will probably separate the cloves and transplant them.

Next to the garlic is the cluster of alliums growing near by that did turn out to be onions. Several of them were growing together like bunching onions, rather than bulb onions, but I’ve never grown bunching onions. They are large enough that I will probably transplant them, too.

In the next photo, you can see most of the other onions I found while cleaning the bed. There were so many tiny ones! One red onion was quite large. I will transplant the larger ones, but I don’t know if I’ll bother with the teeny ones.

While working across the bed, I was finding a surprising number of roots. Some were definitely from the rose bush at the end of the bed, but it’s possible others were from the ornamental crap apples and the double lilac. It definitely made the job take longer. As I worked my way up the bed, I took advantage of having lots of old stakes handy from the bed along the retaining wall, before the wattle weaving was added on top of the retaining wall blocks. Some of the largest, strongest ones were used to stabilize the top side logs, as their supports were getting old and starting to break.

To block the gap, I used some flat pieces of scrap wood that were in the corner, then a whole bunch of old stakes, on the inside of the wall. Once the bed is done and ready for planting, these will be mostly buried and hidden from view.

As you can tell by the last picture, and the flash needed for the pictures of the onion and garlic, I had to stop before it was all finished. It was simply getting too dark. I was working by the light of the shop lights at the sun room window by then, and those were on only because their motion sensors were being triggered.

I don’t have anywhere to be at tomorrow, so I’ll be able to finish the job then, and do more winter sowing. I should also be able to clean out that little bed off by itself in the main garden area, where I’ve decided to plant bread seed poppies. Since I didn’t winter sow a variety of peas I’d meant to plant between the cabbage, I’m considering finding somewhere else to winter sow them. Once the dwarf peas are planted, that’s two varieties of peas that are winter sown, so leaving the third variety I was planning to winter sow for the spring would be fine, too. I also have our own saved sugar snap pea seeds that can be sown in the spring.

The rectangular bed that’s being cleared now will have beets and tiny bok choi winter sown in it, probably interplanted with some of those onions and/or garlic I’ve been finding! I was thinking of planting something down the middle, but I can’t for the life of me remember what that was right now. I’ve got diagrams drawn out, but those are in the basement, along with my seed inventory.

So that’s the garden and winter sowing status, for now. We should have a nice head start into next year’s garden, if this works out.

I will also be making what will probably be my last garden tour video of the year. Last year, I ended up doing my October video using video recorded on November 1, because the video I’d taken on October 31 was done too late in the day, and everything was too dark. So I want to make sure to get it done earlier, and earlier in the day.

Thankfully, it looks like the weather will hold for a while yet, and I should be able to get other things done before the snow flies. We’ll see how that works out!

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer