Red Noodle Beans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then it was time to weed.

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

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

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

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

And another.

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

Then I found another.

And another.

And several others!

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

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

Or 15.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: sprouts!!

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I just got back from giving the garden beds a watering for the evening. Tomorrow is not supposed to be as hot as today, but we haven’t gotten any of the rain that hit other parts of the province, some of which got serious thunderstorm warnings!

When I got to the trellis bed, I was rather blown away by how much bigger the noodle bean sprouts were, even compared to this morning.

They were not the only ones.

In the first image, you can see four of the five collars around pumpkin seeds – and they are all sprouting! Nothing in the fifth one, yet, but these were the very last seeds I planted, and they’re already up! I remember last year, being amazed by how fast these free pumpkin seeds grew, too.

I have also confirmed, and you can see in the next photo: we have sunflowers! Not a lot, but the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers are starting to sprout. I wasn’t sure if these seeds were still viable or not, so anything we get of those is bonus!

While watering the new asparagus and strawberry bed, I got another pleasant surprise. I am pretty sure I planted the bare roots and crowns too late; I had not expected it to take so long, or I would have stored them properly. And yet, I found a single Jersey Giant asparagus, sprouting along the stake I place to mark where the crowns were planted. It’s so adorable!

I spent a fair bit of time working on the snap pea bed, carefully using the hose to pull weeds without also pulling the peas and tiny carrots out. As I worked my way from one end to the other, I was startled to find a bean sprout. Several of them. I had completely forgotten that I’d planted the last few bean seeds in the gaps between pea plants in one row! Gosh, the red noodle beans germinated fast!

Meanwhile, the Royal Burgundy bush beans I’d plant much earlier, beside the spoon tomatoes, have finally shown signs of life. All of two beans have sprouted. Hopefully, this means more will show up.

I didn’t bother trying to get a photo, but I also saw more corn seedlings showing up in the corn and yellow bush bean bed. Still very few, while the leftover seeds that got planted with the Arikara squash have more sprouting, and the earlier ones are getting quite big!

The Black zucchini has been doing really well. I planted three seeds in three spots, and 8 out of 9 seeds are now sprouted! With so many sprouting, I will probably have several to thin by transplanting, later. Even where the White Scallop square are planted, one seedling has appeared. Last year, those ones took three tries and a much longer time before any germinated, so that makes me very happy.

So far so good! I have to keep reminding myself that I finished planting everything such a short time ago. It just feels so late in the season. Probably because we had that heat wave in May.

On a completely unrelated note…

We seem to be missing three kittens.

Caramel’s tabby, Li’l Rig, and her tortie, Wormy, are nowhere to be seen. Yesterday, I spotted Caramel “luring” Li’l Rig into the maple grove on the north side of the inner yard. I strongly suspect she has taken them across the road. I was really hoping that, after I brought Li’l Rig back to the sun room yesterday evening, she wouldn’t try again. Caramel has been hanging around the house, which seems very strange for her to do, if she took her babies onto the property across the road.

Their brother, Havarti, is the biggest of the litter, is still very much around. He is so active and independent, I doubt he’d follow his mother anywhere right now. The other two are much smaller and were both recovering from oogey eyes. I can’t find them to check if their eyes still need washing.

The third missing kitten is Zipper. He was the sickest and the last on the road to recovery. He did seem much improved but, to be honest, in looking for him, I was looking for a body. No sign of him, anywhere. I do hope he’s okay. I can’t imagine he would have followed Caramel across the road.

I’m probably going to go outside one more time and do a walkabout. Maybe I’ll find him then.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden, corn, beans and strawberries

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As I write this, at almost 6:30pm, we are at 25C/77F with the humidex putting us at 28C/82F

I’d watered the garden beds last night, and they were still fine this morning, but by the evening they were definitely in need of more water. I knew we were expecting rain tomorrow, but too many things were getting baked!

It was only on checking the weather app as I wrote the above that I found the rain expected tomorrow, is now expected tonight. Only a 32% chance of rain, though, and for a shorter time. *sigh* A good overnight rainfall would be a wonderful thing right now, but it doesn’t look like it’ll happen!

While checking on the in-progress trellis bed, I was expecting to see more of the barely visible sprouts that were starting to come up yesterday. I was NOT expecting to see the entire row and basically exploded!

So… finishing that trellis is going to be a priority! These are the red noodle beans, and they’re going to need something to climb.

What is odd is that these beans are coming up, but none of the others beans I’ve planted have. I planted a row of them in the same bed as the Spoon tomatoes, and there’s nothing. Right now, only the Chinese elm is sprouting. Those were the Royal Burgundy bush beans, and they really should be up by now. The tomatoes and melons in the same bed area also struggling, so I wonder of there’s a correlation, there?

Oh, and I think, maybe, possibly, there are some sunflowers starting to come up. I’ll need to wait until the seedlings get bigger before I can be sure that’s what I’m seeing, and not some weed.

While watering in the old kitchen garden, I saw flashes of colour hidden by the leaves, and discovered the strawberries we grew from seed a couple of years ago now have berries ripening! These are the small wild? Alpine? strawberries we got in a kit meant for children, and there was nothing on the package to say what kind of strawberries they were. They are absolutely thriving. Too bad the berries aren’t particularly good.

I had a bit of a surprise with our corn, too. In the last image in the slide show above, you can see a row of corn sprouts.

These are the ones I planted with the Arikara squash. There are sprouts coming up all over in that bed!

Those were left over seeds from running out of room while planting in the nearby low raised bed. In that bed, there’s only one corn sprout visible. !! What is it about this little squash bed that has almost all the seeds I planted sprouting already, while the bigger bed has only one, so far?

No sign of any of the yellow bush beans, yet. With those being older seeds, I would not be surprised if none of those came up.

I don’t expect to get much, if anything, done in the garden tomorrow. In the morning, I’ll be heading to my mother’s to get her to a lab for her monthly blood work, then do her grocery shopping. We’re running low on wet cat food, plus we are now down to just one hose nozzle that doesn’t leak, so a trip to Walmart is in order for the afternoon. After that, my week is clear of appointments, so I should be able to get some work in the garden done. I want to get those vertical supports for the trellis bed secured, and whatever horizontal supports we decide on. For this year, we might just use temporary plastic trellis netting we already have, then put something more permanent on, next year.

Our plans are very loosey-goosey, and prone to change! As long as the final goal is achieved – in this case, permanent trellis tunnels joining pairs of low raised bed – I’m rather indifferent as to how it gets done! 😁

Well, I’ve got an early start and a long day ahead of me. Time to start winding down and get to bed early.

Ha!

I told myself that last night, expecting to be in bed shortly after 8pm. By the time I finally got to bed, it was past midnight.

😂🤣

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: beans, sunflowers and unexpected transplants

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I managed to get it done, just as the rain started to hit!

I think I can now officially say, our garden is in! Sure there are some things, such as fall spinach, that can be planted, but for all our expected spring planting, it is done.

Yay!

I waffled between planting along the chain link fence in the south hard, or in the trellis bed in the main garden area. In the end, I decided to go for where I knew there would be the most sunlight.

The first image above is how the bed looked, after the mulch was pulled off. Last year, we grew melons along one side, onions for seed on the other. The onions were replanted in the fall, with just one half of the bed being prepped, then covered with leaves for mulch. The other half had melons mulched with cardboard, bark and grass clippings and, in the fall, I just pulled the melon plants and left the rest in place to protect the soil.

That made cleaning the bed up much easier!

This bed does have an issue, though. You can see that – sort of – in the next two images.

To make these beds, we’re using logs as straight and even as we can find. Which is surprising difficult. Especially when looking to use 18′ logs. With this bed, on the trellis side, one of the logs was quite bent. We put that one on the bottom, with the bend going into the bed, while the top log is straight. That’s what the remaining three vertical trellis support posts are going to be secured to.

What that means, though, is that there is an entire log, just inside the top frame of the bed, in the middle. The bend is extreme enough that there’s an actual gap formed between the two logs. Over time, it won’t matter as much, as we are aiming to eventually make the beds all 4 logs high. Until then, though, the gap is getting stuffed with skinny pieces of wood, bits of bark and even grass clippings and dried leaves.

Once the mulch was removed, I went over the bed with the garden fork first, to loosen the soil and make it easier to pull the weeds. As I went along, I started to find other things besides weeds, though – and I was not at all surprised. The onions that had gone to see had dropped some of their seed before they could be harvested.

Once I got to where the onions had seeded themselves, I worked a lot more carefully, and gathered every one that I could find.

Along the way, I also found a couple of plants I recognized as the flower I allowed to grow at one end of the bed, last year. I removed those as well.

It wasn’t part of the plan, but since I had them, every since baby onion I found got transplanted. The flowers got transplanted at the opposite end of where we grew them last year.

While preparing to transplant the onions, I also carefully pulled some of the onions that were growing against each other, broke them apart, then replanted them separately.

One half of the bed had fewer onions survive than the other, so that was the first area I started transplanting onions the tiny onions. I still had enough left over that I made a second row for the rest. They filled a little over half the bed’s length before I ran out, so there’s still room to plant something else, if I wanted to.

After that, I planted the two flowers (possibly a wild salsify) I’d found, then marked off two more rows in the soil in the other side of the bed. Those were for the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers and the Red Noodle beans.

There were not enough sunflower seeds to fill the row. I spaced them about 6 inches apart, which is close for sunflowers. I don’t expect a 100% germination rate, though. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if none germinated. These are older seeds.

The red noodle beans, on the other hand, are fresh seed. These got planted nearer the edge of the bed, where they will be able to climb the trellis that will be built on that side of the bed. After filling the row from end to end, I had only 6 bean seeds left. So I stuck them into some of the gaps among the sugar snap peas, since they have a trellis already prepared. The planted rows then got marked off at the ends with plant stakes, so that if I decide to plant something else there, I know where the open spaces are.

Oh! I completely forgot! I was going to plant the pumpkins in this bed!

I can still do that. For those, I plan to set up plastic collars to mark where the seeds are.

In fact, I see the rain has passed and the sun is out. I’ll go do that right now!

The Re-Farmer

Analysing our 2022 garden: peas and beans

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Okay, it’s that time! I’ll be working on a serious of posts, going over how our 2022 garden went, what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t even happen at all. This is help give us an idea of what we want to do in the future, what we don’t want to do in the future, and what changes need to be made.

It was a mixed bag when it came to growing legumes in 2022!

As with so many other areas in the gardens, we did have flooding around the pea and bean trellises, but that area is a bit more elevated, so it wasn’t much of an issue, compared to other garden areas.

The previous year, we’d grown three types of bush beans, and they did very well, in spite of drought conditions and heat waves. We were very happy with them.

For 2022, though, we decided to try growing pole beans, and shelling beans.

The previous year, we had little success with peas. For 2022, we decided to try an edible pod pea, as well as shelling beans. Plus, we had a whole four saved seeds from the King Tut Purple Peas we tried growing the year before.

Let’s start with the peas.

We used the same trellis we’d grown peas at, the year before, amending the soil a bit more. The trellises were all meant to be temporary, but we did get one more year out of them.

Don’t those peas look nice and healthy?

That was about the best they got.

The Results:

The sugar snap peas germinated, then almost disappeared. I think we got a whole two pea pods out of them. There weren’t a lot of those, however, and were planted in half of one side of the trellis. The shelling peas too up the rest of the trellis, which means some were planted across from the snap peas. Those pea plants also did not do well, which tells me that the soil on that end of the trellis was most likely the problem.

A couple of weeks later, we planted more of the shelling peas at an A frame trellis, shared with gourds and cucumbers. Those plants actually seemed to do better.

In general, though, the peas did not thrive. Even the healthiest, strongest plants only got to about half the size they should have. I did have shelling peas to harvest, but never more than a handful. Usually, it was just a few that I could eat right away.

Then there were the purple peas.

The Results:

As with the other peas the year before, the King Tut Purple Peas did not do well, but they kept trying to grow and bloom for a surprisingly long time. I decided to try starting the four seeds we’d managed to keep indoors. All four germinated and were looking quite healthy. They were transplanted in a south bed with the chain link fence to climb. Shortly after transplanting, I cut the top and bottom off some gallon water jugs and put them around the peas for extra protection from the wind until they could grow big enough to start vining into the fence.

They… grew. Like the other peas, they did not reach their potential at all. They grew tall and thin, without a lot of foliage. There were a few purple blooms and pea pods developed, but they were green instead of purple, except for one. I never tried harvesting them at all, but just left them to go to seed. There wasn’t a lot to collect at the end of the season, and I’m not even sure I want to try growing them again. They weren’t the tastiest of peas, but that could be because they just didn’t grow well.

The Conclusion:

While the peas did not do well, we will still be growing them again. For 2023, I’ve already ordered the variety of shelling peas we’d tried in 2020. The pea and bean trellises have been dismantled, and they will be grown in a completely different area, as we build up our permanent garden beds. Hopefully, that will make the difference. I really love fresh peas, and would love to have enough to freeze. I would love to have edible pod peas, too, but I’m not sure if we will try them again in 2023. I think it will depend on how far we get with the permanent gardening locations.

Then there were the beans.

While we bought pole beans, we also had green and yellow bush beans left over from the year before.

We planted a green and a purple variety at an A frame trellis. The shelling beans and the red noodle beans were planted at what had been a squash tunnel, the year before. The yellow beans were planted with the kulli corn to act as a nitrogen fixer, as well as to help shade out weeds.

The green beans from the year before were planted with our sweet corn as well, but that bed got flooded out. While most of the corn survived, not a single green bean germinated. We bought another variety of green bush bean and planted those, and they did grow.

The Results:

The purple Carminat and the green Seychelles pole beans did great, considering what a horrible growing year it was.! Both varieties were quite productive. I wasn’t picking beans every day, as I was with the bush beans the previous year, but I was at least picking some every couple of days. The purple beans seemed to do the best – even when a deer went by and nibbled on them all along the row!

The yellow bush beans planted with the kulli corn did quite well, too. The only downside was that we had a net around the bed to protect the corn from deer and racoons, which made harvesting the beans very inconvenient.

The green bush beans we planted with the sweet corn didn’t grow as large as they should have; it was a new bed and it had lots of issues, so I’m not surprised by that. Everything did a lot better when we were finally able to finish mulching it all. The bean plants were so small, however, that it was hard to harvest them with the mulch. They were there more for the corn than for us, so I decided to just leave them and hopefully have seeds, but I think they were planted just too late for the season, and none of the pods dried out.

Then there were the shelling beans and Red Noodle beans at the tunnel trellis.

The shelling beans (Blue Grey Speckled Tepary) were very small plants, just barely getting tall enough to start climbing the trellis, yet they produces so many pods! Still, there wasn’t much of a harvest of these very small beans. That photo is the entire harvest! I saved 100 seeds (we’d planted 50) to grow in 2023, and we ate the rest. It was the first time we’d tasted these beans, and they were barely enough for one meal! Still, we found them tasty, and I look forward to trying them again. I hope a better growing year will improve things.

As for the Red Noodle beans…

These are supposed to be a vining type bean, but it wasn’t until near the end of the season that they actually got large enough to start climbing the trellis. It took even longer before I finally saw blooms. We were starting to harvest and pull up the garden for the end of the year, when I found a single, solitary, baby red noodle bean pod, which you can see in the above photo.

I had been looking forward to trying these beans, and would like to try growing them again, just to find out if we like them! Not in 2023, though.

Conclusion:

Beans are such a staple crop, and we enjoy having a variety of types, we are definitely growing beans again in 2023. Along with the seeds we saved for shelling beans, my mother gave me a jar of white beans that are descendants of beans she used to grow here. She gave seeds to my sister to grow in her own garden, which she did for quite a few years. She’s not growing shelling beans anymore, though, so she gave her saved seeds to my mother, who passed them on to me. What a circle!

On top of that, we have ordered seeds for green, yellow, purple and red varieties of beans, including one that is supposed to be good as both a fresh bean and a shelling beans.

While we’ve had our failures this year, beans are one of the few crops that have produced really well for us, even in adverse growing conditions, making them a reliable food to grow.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: gourds, ground cherries, and one. Just one!

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While doing my rounds this morning, checking the remaining garden beds, I found myself giving the ground cherries a closer look.

They do have frost damage, but a lot of the leaves are still looking just fine. The entire patch is all leaning over, making it hard to reach to pick anything. I’ve found that the plants, as strong as they appear to be, are actually quite fragile, and branches break off easily. There are still so many green berries on there! I’m not too worried about missing any ripe ones that have fallen off, though. Part of the reason we chose this location, was so they could self seed and hopefully come back every year on their own.

With how big they got, and how easily they fall over, though, I’m thinking we will want to add a support structure of horizontal wire mesh. Maybe two horizontal layers of them, with a mesh of about 4 inches square. That way, the plants can grow through the wire mesh, and still be supported during high winds, or when the weight of their own branches start pulling them down.

Oh! I just remembered. I’d dug out a roll of fence wire from a shed last year. It has 4 inch square mesh. It would be perfect for the job! I’ll just have to figure out what to use for vertical supports.

But that can wait until spring.

I finally remembered to get a picture of this crab apple tree this morning.

It has SO many apples on it, and they’ve turned such an incredible red colour. They are like beautiful ruby ornaments! The apples on this tree are not really edible – at least not for humans. The birds and the deer like them, though. The apples will be left on the tree to freeze. Every now and then, in the winter, I hope to be able to get to the tree to knock some of the apples down for the deer. Otherwise, they stand up on their hind legs to reach, and end up breaking branches.

This tree still looks pretty healthy, so we will be able to keep it while we cut away the dead and diseased trees. It may not produce apples we can eat, but it will serve as a cross pollinator. We plan to eventually plant apple trees that are not crab apples, and they often need a tree like this nearby, to help with pollination. Of course, there is the one big crab apple tree that produces some tasty apples, still. We will be down to only two apple trees in this area, from the dozen or so that used to be here. They were planted way too close together, which certainly didn’t help. We just need to get rid of the diseased tree in particular, and hopefully will be able to keep the remaining trees nice and healthy.

After covering the eggplants and apple gourds last night, I went over to the trellis to check on the Ozark nest egg gourds. Having confirmed the vines were completely killed off by the frost, I decided to go ahead and pick them, this morning.

I am just so happy with how these gourds turned out! Like everything else, they had a rough start, and yet they still produces so many little gourds! A few are still more on the green side. Imagine how many we could have had if it had been a good growing year? We will definitely be growing these again, and I hope to have some seeds I can save from these.

I’d brought pruning shears to harvest them. Those vines are pretty spiny! I also harvested the Tennessee Dancing gourds. They snapped off their stems quite easily; no sheers needed. As I went around to the inside of the tunnel trellis to pick more, I spotted what at first looked like a little snake, hanging in the air!

There we have it. Our one and only Red Noodle bean. Just one! It’s about half the size it could have been.

I now have to decide if these are something I want to get seeds for and try growing again. Under better growing conditions, they should have done just fine in our area. I’d like to at least know if they are something we enjoy eating.

Here are all the gourds I gathered – and my little buddy, who kept me company the entire time! She is such a little sweetie.

I rearranged the chocolate cherry tomatoes to make room for the gourds to cure for a while. Eventually, they will be brought indoors, given a wipe down with a bleach solution, then set up somewhere to continue curing all winter. Probably in the old basement, where the cats aren’t allowed. It may get damp in there during the summer, but in the winter, it is incredibly dry, so that should work out.

The onions my daughter braided yesterday are so heavy, with such thick necks, they started falling out of their braid. I remembered the hooks I put up that held our lights for the seedlings we had set up over the swing bench, so after the gourds were laid out, I strung the onions on some sisal cord to hang them. Once they were hung up, I ended up adding two more cords to help hold the weight! These are definitely the heaviest of all the onions we grew this year!

I absolutely love those nest egg gourds. They are beautiful, and even a pleasure to hold. I have some ideas of what I can do with them. What I do end up doing will depend on how many fully cure properly. The greenest ones probably won’t, but I think most of them did get a chance to become fully ripe. This is from two or three plants. We planted four, one died, and one never fully recovered. They’re so intertwined, it’s hard to tell them apart, but I don’t think that one smaller plant ever produced any gourds. Eighteen gourds from two (possibly three) plants during a bad growing year is pretty awesome! I want to plant more next year. The Tennessee dancing gourds also did really well under the circumstances, and I hope to plant more of them next year, too!

It should be interesting, once everything is in and we can do an assessment of what we got, and use that to help decide what to do next year.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: some progress, and a little harvest

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It’s just past 10pm as I start this, and we’re still at 21C/70F, and the higher winds of earlier today have died down to a lovely calm. I found myself looking for reasons to get the fire going, but I really need to get some sleep tonight! Sleep has been frequently interrupted for the past while. 😕

Lack of sleep wiped me out enough that I was feeling quite ill this morning, to the girls took care of feeding the critters so I could try and get at least a couple of hours in. With Leyendecker still in recovery in my room (no, he wasn’t the one keeping me up at night!), and my daughters still having their days and nights reversed, my younger daughter has been taking her “night shift” and sleeping in my room, to keep and ear out on Leyendecker while I’m out. (He seems to be doing all right, though still having difficulties voiding, so we are monitoring him very closely) In the end, it was almost noon before I finally was able to head outside and do my rounds – minus the critter feeding.

Of course, a fair amount of that is spent checking things in the garden. Things like this.

Here we are, into September, and the Red Noodle beans are just starting to show flower buds!

This Kakai hulless squash was the first to develop and is looking like it’s ripe – but it’s about a quarter the size it should be. If the weather holds, there’s a chance we’ll have a couple more, larger ones. In fact, all the hulless pumpkins are going rather well, compared to the other winter squash. Only the Baby Pam pumpkins are managing as well. The Lady Godiva should give us at least 2 fully developed squash by the end of the growing season, with a few more little ones developing. Likewise, the Styrian variety has a couple large pumpkins that should be harvestable by the time growing season is done, with a couple more developing.

As for the Baby Pam, we have a little few bright orange pumpkins that could probably be harvested, that are smaller than they should be, but there are others that are still growing and turning colour that look like they will reach their full size – which isn’t very large to begin with.

This Georgia Candy Roaster is one of two stunted plants that were just covered in slug trails this morning!

While watering this evening, I was amazed to find female flowers among the Georgia Candy Roaster, and even one Winter Sweet. I hand pollinated them, just in case, but I think it was too late for one of the Georgia Candy Roasters.

While harvesting, I was surprised by how many Yellow Pear and Chocolate Cheery tomatoes were ready. I took the few G-Star patty pans that were on the plant killed off by a cut worm.

A few more of the Cup of Moldova tomatoes were ripe enough to pick, and into the freezer the went, with the others needing to be processed.

I keep saying I need to get those done, but the fact that they are in the freezer actually frees me up to work on other things. But that will be in my next post!

As for the garden, it’s a waiting game. So far, we’re not looking to have cold temperatures or frost for the rest of the month. With our first average frost date on Sept. 10, that is very encouraging. I plan to do recordings for another garden tour video on that date. Hopefully, thing weather will hold and things will have time to catch up.

I’d really like a chance to try those red noodle beans!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: progress, and one last cardboard mulch

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There wasn’t much of anything to harvest this morning. I picked a few shelling peas and just ate them right away. There was no point in bringing so few inside! At least with the first planting of peas. The second planting is looking like it will have a decent amount to pick fairly soon.

I really don’t know what to make of the beans at the tunnel. These are the Blue Grey Speckled Tepary shelling beans. They are so small and delicate looking. They are just barely tall enough to reach, but are managing to climb the mesh. I have no idea how big these would normally get, but for a shelling bean, I would have expected them to be at least as big as…

… the red noodle beans on the other side of the tunnel. These are much bigger plants, but there is still no sign of any vining happening. I’m not seeing any flowers, either. Given that it’s the start of August and our average first frost date is Sept. 10, I’m starting to wonder if we’ll get any of these at all. Even if we do get a super long, mild spring, like we did last year, I wonder if we’ll have any of these at all. At least the purple beans on the A frame trellis are blooming and producing tiny little pods, with vines extending well past the top of the trellis frame, while the green beans on the other side are climbing and blooming.

I have never grown pole beans before, but I really expected them to do better than this. This area did not get flooded out the way the bed with the green bush beans did.

Well, next year we’ll be moving the trellises closer to the house, and this area will be getting perennials planted in it. Parts of the area will need to be kept clear because of the phone line running under it, but not all of it. Hopefully, a new location for our legumes next year will be better.

The dancing gourds are doing rather well, at least! The plants are much stronger and more vigorous this year than they were during last year’s drought. So far, there is just this one early gourd growing, though I am seeing quite a few female flowers developing. This one gourd is already bigger than the biggest we had last year. For perspective, the squares in the wire mesh are 2 inches.

In between the tunnel and the A frame trellises are some hulless pumpkins. They are the last patch without the cardboard mulch. I still had the cardboard sides from the wood chipper in the garage, so I decided to use it.

This is how it was looking. There’s an awful lot of creeping charlie making it’s way through the straw mulch around the pumpkins in the foreground. There are actually less weeds than it appears, though, just because of how they spread out.

The cardboard from the wood chipper box was very heavy duty, and had even more staples holding it together than the lawn mower box I used on the Boston Marrow. Cutting it so I could put it around the plants took some doing! Sliding the cardboard in place required quite a bit of care, too. The vines were gripping the straw and weeds quite strongly.

I placed some of the protective poles back, around the patch, and will be adding scythed hay mulch on top as I am able, but I find myself wondering if I should make a support frame for the vines to climb. I don’t know if that would actually help these or not. At the very least, I’ll be adding cord around it, to discourage deer from walking through.

There were quite a few female flowers on the vines, but I found only one male flower, so I used it to hand pollinate as many of the female flowers as were ready. While moving the vines onto the cardboard, one of them had already fallen off, because it had not been pollinated. Hopefully, the hand pollinating will help.

All three varieties of hulless pumpkin have at least some developing pumpkins. Some of summer squash is also finally picking up; the sunburst patty pans are starting to show female flowers again. The Madga squash seems to be doing the best, and we finally have yellow zucchini starting to develop. Not so much of the green zucchini, though.

At least we will have lots of the determinate tomatoes. Even the Cup of Moldova tomatoes are starting to show more of a blush in them.

If the weather holds and the frost stays away, we might still have something to harvest this fall.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: things are trying to grow

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My daughters were sweethearts and took care of feeding the cats outside for me, as I’m still feeling pretty unstable, so the cats weren’t out and about by the time I headed outside. I did get to briefly pet a kitten, though! :-D

While checking out the garden, there was some new progress – and a bit of deer damage – to find.

The Carminat beans are reaching the top of the trellis, and you can see their flower buds. At my fingers, however, you can see the stem of a missing leaf! There was a vertical row of missing leaves, a few feet along the trellis. Right about deer height! Time to find more noise makers and flashy things to set up.

On this side of the trellis are the Seychelles beans, which are starting to get pretty tall, too. None of them show deer damage, which is good, since less of them germinated. In the foreground are the self seeded (or should I say, bird-seeded) sunflowers that I left to grow. The beans can climb them, too! With the flooding this spring, we did not plant any of the Hopi black dye or Mongolian Giant sunflower seeds we’d collected from last year, so I don’t mind letting these one grow. These would be the black oil seed that we put out for the birds in the summer. We’re finding them all over the place, thanks to being spread by birds!

The first sowing of shelling peas may be about half the size they should be, but they are loaded with pods. At least on the north end of the pea trellis. Towards the south end, the sugar snap peas are barely surviving, and the shelling peas on the other side of the trellis are much weaker, too. The entire trellis gets an equal amount of sunlight, so this would be a reflection of soil conditions.

This should be the last year we use this spot for growing vegetables. Next year, they’ll be moved closer to the house, and this area will be made available for planting fruit or nut trees. We haven’t decided what to get next, yet.

The cucumber row is a mixed bag of plants that are growing nice and big, and filled with little cucumbers, and others that are barely bigger than when they were first transplanted!

I had an adorable find at the big trellis.

We have a first Tennessee Dancing gourd developing! It is so cute!

The beans on the same side as the dancing gourds are the red noodle beans. The plants are pretty large, but they are still not at the point of climbing. The shelling beans on the other side, however…

The are much smaller, but have tendrils climbing the trellis, and have even started to bloom!

The most adorable little pollinator showed up just as I was taking the picture.

I startled a bee when checking out this HUGE pumpkin flower.

Yes, it’s on a giant pumpkin plant. 😁

I’d seen some female flowers previously, but now I can’t find them, so there are no pumpkins starting to form, yet. While we are not shooting for super big pumpkins, and won’t be pruning them down to just one pumpkin per plant, it feels like it’s too late in the season for any giant pumpkins to mature. We’re near the end of July already, and none have formed, yet!

In the south yard, we finally have Chocolate cherry tomatoes! Just this one plant, yet. Of the 4 varieties we planted this year, the Chocolate cherry have been the most behind – and they are planted where tomatoes had done so well, last year. The plants themselves are getting nice and tall, and we’ve been adding supports and pruning them as needed, but there are much fewer flowers blooming, and only today do we finally have tomatoes forming. Thankfully, the other varieties are much further along.

I also spotted some ground cherry fruit forming! These plants are doing remarkably well, given how much water they had to deal with this spring. It took a while, but not they are quite robust plants, and I’m happy to see them setting fruit!

Hopefully, it won’t be too much longer before we start getting actual food from the garden. Everything is so, so behind, I am extra happy to see progress like this.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2020 garden: the bean tunnel

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This year, we decided to use the squash tunnel for vining beans.

But first, it needed some work.

We were able to weed and prep this side of the tunnel in the fall. Can you tell?

What a huge difference in the soil. When we first set up the squash tunnel, using a post hole digger to make holes for the support posts, it was incredibly hard. For the rows to plant in, we layered straw, then fresh garden soil – we’d long run out of carboard, and even shredded paper, if I remember correctly. Then the top was mulched with straw after the squash, gourds and melons were transplanted.

As you can see in the photo, the garden fork can now did deep into the soil, and I could push my hands into it to pull out the weed roots.

And tree roots. A remarkable amount of fine, thin tree roots.

The only things causing problems while using the garden fork was hitting rocks or larger tree roots!

So. Many. Rocks! Deep enough that I didn’t try to dig them out, though. I just pulled out the small rocks nearer the surface.

In the picture, you can see some orange twine. I found 3 places where the screws had snapped, and the cross pieces were basically being held in place by the wire mesh. I just lashed them back to the support poles. We might get one more year out of this tunnel before we build a permanent one, closer to the house, so I’m not too worried about it.

It was very hot work. Though my weather app said it was 19C/66F, with a RealFeel of 21C/70F, this is what the tunnel thermometer read.

Yeah, that’s reading about 33C/91F out there.

I’m sure the heat loving melons, eggplants and peppers were just loving it.

Me? Not so much!

Along with beans, the two Canteen gourds were transplanted. These were growing so fast, they had been potted up three times, and we needed to add support poles because they were trying to climb anything they could reach, including the tomato plants they were sharing a bin with! They were outgrowing their pots again, and really needed something sturdy to climb!

In the row on the left of the photo, I planted Blue Grey Speckled Tepary beans. These are a vining bean for drying, not fresh eating. They are also drought and heat tolerant, so perfect for this spot! The space was just enough for the amount of beans in the package, too. I supposed it’s possible there were more, but the cats tried to eat the package, scattering beans all over the floor. I think we found all of them, but some may have been missed.

On the right in the photo, I planted Red Noodle beans. These beans can grow up to 20 inches long! The packet was supposed to have 25 seeds, but I counted 33, which didn’t fill the row. We still have 2 other varieties of pole beans, but there are too many in the bags to fit in the remaining space, and I didn’t want to plant just a few. One of them has something like 200 seeds in it, so we aren’t going to be planting all of them!

I think, instead, we’ll plant some climbing gourds in the remaining space. We have some Tennessee Dancing gourds that would fit. Or some luffa. I think we have some that survived. We’ll decide after we get the remaining two trellises ready.

I’m glad we got at least two types of vining/pole beans in. It’s quite late in the season to be direct sowing beans here, but they are short season varieties, so it should be fine.

Little by little, it’ll get done!

The Re-Farmer