When I saw all those long range forecasts saying we’d be getting consistent highs above freezing, I knew things would likely be different, but… really?
This is what it was like when I did my morning rounds; -18C/~0F, with a wind chill of -26C/-15F! That’s January temperatures!
This time of year, we all tend to be tired of the cold and snow – even after as mild a winter as we had this year – but to have such warm weather melting everything all through February, and a forecast saying it would continue, to the complete opposite is downright depressing!
The yard cats don’t seem to mind it, though!
I actually got to pet Broccoli this morning! I snuck a pet as she walked in front of me, after taking this picture, and she actually stopped eating to enjoy shoulder scritches for a little while. So far, that’s still as much as she will allow. Junk Pile, who’s licking her chops enthusiastically here, had been eating with her back to me, and I was able to rest my hand on her back. Just for about half a second, before she realized what was happening and got all startled, then moved to where she is in the photo. Altogether, I think I counted maybe 23 cats, but they were running around so much, I’m just not sure!
Yesterday, I made a quick garden tour video for the first day of spring. While I was recording inside the big aquarium greenhouse, I didn’t see that we had new tomato sprouts until I uploaded the video to my desktop. This morning there are more, and the ones that the video picked up are already much larger. So far, it’s just the middle row, plus one in another row, that are germinating.
The other seed trays, however, show no activity. These are the ones in the new seed starting trays with their grow lights, and are set above the heat vent. I think it might still be too cold for them, though. I think what I’ll do, is shift the San Marzano tomatoes off the heat mat, to the other side of the tank. The new trays, with the peppers and other tomatoes, can go on the heat mat, along with the Butterfly Flower tray. I’ll remove the domes on the new trays, since they won’t be needed in the aquarium greenhouse. That will free up the LED grow lights to put over the bin with bell peppers and thyme, to give them a bit of a boost.
I took this picture after turning on the LED grow lights, but before turning on the bright shop lights. The LED lights are only along one edge of the shelf above, and I had them over the peppers for a while, but I’ve since rotated the tray, so the eggplants can be under the grow lights for a while.
It’s getting to be time to thin out those eggplants, and a couple more peppers. Thinning out is always so hard for me. I keep wanting to thin by transplanting, since I don’t want to “waste” any seedlings. The thing is, we don’t need that many! We could probably do fine with maybe 3 or 4 of each plant, including the peppers. We certainly don’t have enough space for all of them!
In the big aquarium greenhouse, all three cups with the Sweet Chocolate peppers now have seedlings in them, though it’ll be a while before they’re at the stage that they need to be thinned. With the Purple Beauty peppers, the one cup now has 4 seeds germinating; one cup had 4 seeds planted in it, the other had 3 seeds – the last of our Purple Beauty seeds. The second cup has nothing germinating it, so for that variety, when it comes time to thin them, I will thin by transplanting. I’d like to have at least two surviving plants and, right now, there are four seedlings, so we’ll see how that works out. For now, I’m leaving them in the aquarium, but I’ve moved the red onions out and under the lights at the window. We’re not going to have many of those to transplant, compared to the yellow onions and the shallots.
I spent some time looking for replacement bulbs for one of our tank light fixtures. The one with a burnt out bulb holds 2 bulbs that are T5HO. Looking at the various hardware store website, I can find the bulbs, but at sizes ranging form 12 to 18 inches. We need 48 inch bulbs. The one place that had them, they were sold out.
I did, however, find replacement bulbs on the Veseys website. These are the bulbs they use in their grow light set ups. The price for a pair of fluorescent bulbs is quite affordable. They also have LED alternative bulbs that fit the same fixtures, which last much longer and use less power, but are more than triple the price. I’ll be sticking with the fluorescents!
I checked the other light fixture we have over the tank, and it uses a single T8 bulb. That bulb is still fine, but it’ll be a good idea to get some spares of that one, too.
In the next couple of weeks, we’ll need to start our next batches of seeds. Time to go over them and make some decisions.
Speaking of seeds, I’m considering making another seed order. I’d had an order with my T&T Seeds shopping cart when my computer died. By the time I logged back on to place an order it was, of course, no longer there. My daughter had requested a couple of squash to try and I remembered one of them. Talking to my daughter later, she asked about the second one I’d completely forgotten about. When looking for replacement bulbs on the Veseys site, I couldn’t resist looking at seeds, and realized they also have the type of squash my daughter was interested in. In fact, there are two similar ones. So now I’m thinking of getting those, too.
We already have SO many squash seeds right now, though, including a winter squash surprise mix. We don’t need more seeds!
Today is turning out to be an unpleasant day, so here is a picture of green growing things, instead!
The eggplants and hot peppers are just starting to show their true leaves. With just their seed leaves, they all look pretty identical. The only real difference is the stem colour on the peppers.
They are so pretty! A real boost to the mood. Especially on days like today.
For me, I think the shoveling I did finally caught up to me. Not in muscle pain or stiffness – I’m pretty used to that every morning. No, it hit me in the innards.
Upon my third run to the bathroom, I was definitely reconsidering going to the city today for our first stock up shop. That would mean about an hour plus of driving, with only one place en route with access to public washrooms, before reaching the city. As it was, I had to get the girls to take care of feeding the outside cats.
Then I checked the weather.
Wind chills of -31C?? Blowing snow advisory?
Then I checked my highway conditions groups. Some people even posted video they took, as passengers, while on the highway.
Nope. Not going to the city today!
I even got a message from my SIL saying she hoped I was staying home. I’d told her I was going to Costco today, which is relatively short drive from their place, asking if she were up to meeting for lunch. She already had plans to do ice fishing on one of the lakes, so that was a no go.
She canceled her fishing trip. Yes, it would have been in a fishing shack, but – aside from the drive itself – the exposure to winds on the lake ice was just not worth the risk for maybe a fish or two.
So today is a day to hunker down, stay warm, and out of that wind!
I have just enough time for a quick post, before heading to my mother’s.
Check it out…
I had actually forgotten that I had a whole 9 seeds left from last year’s package of Cheyenne peppers until I saw this, this morning. The last two cells in the tray have two seeds each, and all four are now germinating. What makes for a 100% germination rate on seeds from last year. Which is awesome!
Unfortunately, the Red Wethersfield onions are not doing as well. Since putting them in the big aquarium greenhouse, there have been more sprouts and they are definitely getting bigger and greener, but there aren’t all that many of them. The conditions in that little aquarium greenhouse may have killed off some of the seeds. That tank isn’t as warm as the big one – even without using the heat mat, one of the light fixtures adds a bit of warmth – but onions like cooler temperatures, so that’s not likely the problem. I’d say it’s the light on that tank. It’s definitely dimmer, even from when we used it last year, and the light is more blue than red.
So for now, at least, we’ve got just one usable aquarium greenhouse for seed starting.
I’m really thrilled at how well everything else is doing, though!
While checking on the seedling this morning, have to say, I am very impressed with our germination rates!
It’s hard to judge the percentage with the onion seeds, since I don’t know exactly how many were sown in each section of their growing trays, but I know exactly how many seeds were planted in the big tray.
With the Classic Eggplant in the middle, there were just enough seeds left from last year to plant two to a cell. We have a 100% germination rate!
The Cheyenne peppers, in the row closest to the window, had just enough seeds left from last year for one per cell. Five are up, and one is just breaking ground, so we’ve got 6 out of 7 germinating.
The Little Finger Eggplant are a mix of old and new seeds. The cell on the bottom left has 3 new seeds planted in it. The other six cells have 2 seeds from last year, plus one from this year, in them. All but one seed has germinated – and that one might still emerge soon.
I’m rather impressed by this!
Of course, we don’t need anywhere near that many eggplants. We’ll thin them to one per cell. I’ll have to resist thinning by transplanting. I hate “wasting” a seedling! Still, even if we’re just down to 7 of each type of eggplant, that’s more than enough, even if they don’t all survive transplanting in the spring. With eggplant, we’re still working out if these are something we will want to plant regularly or not. The first time we grew the Little Finger eggplant, one plant barely managed to fruit, but even those little eggplants were enjoyed. Last year, none of them grew much after transplanting. Last year, we had only one Classic Eggplant seedling survive and it did remarkably well, though we ran out of growing season and had only a couple small eggplants to try out.
As for the Cheyenne peppers, if we have only one surviving transplant, that would probably be enough for our needs; the one that was able to produce peppers last year had lots on it, though we had to harvest them while still green. Hopefully, by starting them early like this, they’ll have time to mature on the plant.
We shall see how they do over the weeks again, but I do like what I’m seeing so far!
Things got moved around so I could set the mini greenhouse frame at the window, and the new seedlings have been shifted out of the aquarium greenhouses.
Also, we’ve got a massive jade tree in a large, square, self watering pot that is very awkward to move! And it has to be moved in order for the shelf it’s on to be moved, because the shelf cannot be moved with the weight of the jade tree on it. Aside from the weight of shelf and plant together, it sinks deep into the 1970’s shag carpet! 😂
It’s not even our biggest jade tree.
Anyhow.
Here is the new set up.
On the top shelf, we’ve got the mulberries next to the coffee tree. The yellow onions are in the round tray beside them. The shallots are underneath, and the eggplants and hot peppers on the bottom. The red onions got shifted into the large aquarium greenhouse for a little while, and I swear, in the space of an hour or two, I could already see more onions sprouting, and more green, rather than almost white.
The thermometer in the living room is pretty consistently at 17C/63F. I think, in the evening, I’ll run the little space heater for a while. That big picture window may be triple pane, but it still gets pretty cold beside it at night!
After getting that done, I made a run into town where I picked up my new card reader. I can now finally upload trail cam files again.
I really don’t like Windows 11.
Unfortunately, as I tried navigating through Windows Explorer, it kept “not responding” on me. Just as frustrating was navigating to where the pictures fold should have been, but it’s not there.
Turns out it’s now in OneDrive. Windows 11 wants images to be uploaded to the cloud. Which I absolutely do not want to do.
I ended up managing to upload them to the new external hard drive, until I can figure out where I can set up a folder for my image and video files.
I haven’t been doing much in trying to set the new computer up with what I had in my old system. Partly because it feels rather overwhelming – and I’ll probably have to link up with my old computer to get some of the most recent data. The other part is learning the differences in Windows 11. Even cut and paste is suddenly a pain.
My husband, sweetheart that he is, fussed with it for a while, and it seems my suspicions are correct. There just isn’t enough RAM. Not that there was much choice in the matter. When researching a new computer, I noticed they all seemed to have much less RAM and must less memory on the hard drive. Granted, I got my other computer more than 10 years ago, so it’s been that long since I’ve even looked as this stuff, but it seems most computer are 8G of RAM with 500G hard drives. If you want a terabyte, the price jumps dramatically.
It’s that lack of RAM that is making it a pain to navigate in Explorer. Yeah. The RAM is already almost completely used up.
The good news is, this system has extra slots, we have room to add more RAM.
Not that we can do that anytime soon, as far as the budget goes, but at least it’s an option.
Meanwhile, my husband went looking through task manager to see what was running that could be making the machine more inefficient. Windows 11 has a lot of stuff running in the background, that’s for sure!
Ah, well. I’ll get used to the new user interface.
For now, I will enjoy thinking garden thoughts, while the snow starts to fall more heavily outside.
I went to bottom water the seed trays and turn the lights over them for the night, when I made a happy discovery. Our first Cheyenne hot peppers have sprouted!
The peppers are in the row of cells on the left. It’s hard to see, but there is a second one barely visible in the cell at the top of the photo, just breaking ground!
Now that those are starting to sprout, I’ve unplugged the heat mat. Tomorrow, I want to set up the mini-greenhouse frame near the window and above the heat vent – we’ve got some shelves to move out of the way, but we now have a portable AC unit stored in the living room that we might have to move, too. Once these trays are out, the next batch of seeds will be started and set up in the aquarium greenhouses.
One nice thing about using those fruit and vegetable trays for starting seeds. They have a smaller, round space in the middle that had either a container of dip in it, or some strawberries, that’s not deep enough to plant anything in. I’ve got their lids under the trays, which is handy, as they have recesses that fit each section of the trays, but there’s not a lot of space to reach for bottom watering. Instead, I’ve made drainage holes in the empty spaces in the middle, and pour the water in there. They then drain slowly into the lids below. Bottom watering from above! 😁
The red onions are still very sparsely emerging, and not very many of them, so I want to put them into the big aquarium for at least a few days.
Once everything is ready, I’ll have to make some decisions on what long season seeds to start next. Some herbs, for sure, but they don’t need to be in the remaining new tray with the larger cells. I want to save that for larger seeds. I should have room enough to start some tomatoes, I think. I don’t think they all need to be started this early, though. I’ll probably start more peppers, too. Yes, they are supposed to be short season varieties, but the only ones we had a really good harvest with last year were the ones we started much earlier. I don’t want to start as many pepper or fresh eating tomato seeds this time; we had such a high germination rate last year, we ended up giving away lots. Space for the trays will be an issue this year, as we were gifted a nice big armchair that is now the most comfortable chair in the house – but now we don’t have room for how I set up an extra “table” for seed trays like we did last year!
Setting up the living room as the cat free zone has become way too handy. The room is getting way too full of things we need to protect from the cats, because our house plants and seed trays!
The first was the ear mite medication I bought. When I finally opened the bag to get it out, I realized that there was a sealed box inside.
I bought one dose.
A box has 6 doses!
After going over the receipt and making sure I was seeing what I wasn’t supposed to be seeing, I called up the vet clinic and told them what I found, and that I’d like to return the extras. The receptionist went to talk to a tech and confirmed that, as long as the individual dose packages were still sealed, they could take them back.
I plan to go to the city for our second stock up trip, so I’ll make sure to go to town first and drop the extras off and go to the city by a different route. Somebody made what could have been an expensive mistake!
I also found a surprise in the sun room.
Usually, when doing the evening feeding, I go through the old kitchen, where the kibble is stored. This time, I happened to go out the main entry to take something to the compost bin, then went back in through the sun room to put away the rinsed out bin I’d used. We have had rain on and off all day today, and there were a number of startled cats sheltering in the sun room when I came in. As I saw them dashing around, I noticed a tiny tail disappearing between two bins.
A grey tail.
I was actually able to reach in and give it head scritches, though it did not like that. When I got the kibble ready, I left a handful in front of where it was hiding – it could only back up so far. We still coat the kibble with lysine and, from the looks of it, this kitten could use some!
I thought, at first, that this was the tuxedo’s sibling, but now that I look at the pictures, I can see its eyes are still blue, so it is younger. For now, we are leaving it in the sun room, though I did set out a container of water for it to find, too. I have no clue which cat this one belongs to.
In between the rain, I checked out a few things. The last of the Jiffy pellets that have seeds that didn’t germinate are still on the picnic table under the old market tent. The picnic table is not completely under the tent, so some of the trays are being rained on. I checked them and drained the excess water, and found a single lemon cucumber has germinated! Which makes me wonder how many other things will decide to germinate, too. Hopefully, I’ll be able to transplant anything that does. If we get both types of cucumbers, there’s enough time to have harvests before fall, at least.
I grabbed some broken plant pots we’d been hanging on to and set a bunch of them up in the squash patch, buried in the mulch, for the frogs to hide in. Yesterday evening, I used grass clippings to mulch the spaces between squash mounds in rows; the paths in between will be mulched with wood chips. I am still finding some slugs, so I think I will shake out more corn meal, after I get back from the city tomorrow. We’re still expecting rain off and on all night.
When there were just the too-small pieces left, I went to put them in the old garden shed. When I opened the door, I startled Caramel. There’s a rotted out hole in the back of the shed that cats can get in and out of. She seemed strangely hesitant about running away from me, so I took a closer look at where she had been. Sure enough, there was a wriggly little worm! Looks like she’s moving her kittens again! I quickly put the broken pieces of pots away near the door and closed the shed up again, so she could tend to her baby.
As for the one in the sun room, I suspect this baby is not quite weaned yet, so we will have to leave it alone for now. I’ll still make sure to check on it and, if it hasn’t been moved, leave food for it and perhaps its mother.
Oh! Good grief.
One of the things I picked up in town today was a couple of cat collars with bells. Leyendecker and Finnegan (one of our original tuxedos that moved out with us) have been spraying, so we’re hoping the bells will alert us to them being where they shouldn’t be.
I just heard a bell tinkling behind me, so I looked over to see Leyendecker walk over, then jump onto my bed.
For all that I see him every day, it blows me away, just how BIG he is! I don’t mean how chonky he is, either. He is just a massive cat. He’s taller and longer than just about every other cat, and very, very burly. Hard to believe he was the smallest kitten of the litter!
Well, I am just a sucker for punishment or something.
I headed out this afternoon and ended up checking the push mowers. We still have my mother’s old mower. We bought the other one when I simply couldn’t start it anymore. The prime pump needs to be replaced. Though that’s not the only thing wrong with it, it’s the one thing that keeps it from running.
After checking over the newer mower, I gassed it up and got it started. It took a while, but once it got going, it started on the first pull again, as usual. It needs a new air filter, and I was sure I had a spare, but can’t find it.
Then, since it was running and had gas, I decided to do a bit of mowing.
In the super tall and thick grass that never got mowed at all last year.
In what was probably the hottest part of the day. It’s past 6pm as I write this, and we’re at 29C/85F right now, so it was at least that, at the time.
My goal was to mow a lane to the barn, making sure to pass close to the pile of garden soil.
This is after I mowed over it twice, at two different heights, sending the clipped grass towards the middle for easier gathering. You can see in the foreground, where the grass is greener. That’s as far as we’d been able to mow, last year. The dried grass is all the thatch from last year. The green grass on the left is misleading; it’s just like the part that I mowed, with the new grass is tall enough to somewhat hide the thatch. In reality, it’s almost all dead, dry grass and hardly any fresh new grass.
I raked the clippings into piles; this is after my daughter had already hauled away several loads with the wagon. Once I finished raking, I grabbed the wheelbarrow to help with the rest. The clippings are now in the main garden area, ready to be used as a mulch.
We’re going to have to take the mower in for servicing. I can’t see the problem, but the self propeller won’t self propel anymore, and when I tried to use it, it made an awful racket. I remember now that it broke last year, but we hardly use the self propeller, so I forgot about it. Of course, getting an oil change, the blade sharpened, and a basic maintenance check would certainly be in order. At least it’s still useable. And if we can get my mother’s old mower fixed, we could have two people mowing at once. The refurbished riding mower my brother bought us when we first moved here, sadly, is toast. Not only does a chain keep falling off (when we had it looked at, we were told that, for the cost of fixing it up, it wasn’t worth it!), rendering it immobile, but the tires need replacing, too. They’ve become cracked, and now one of them is completely flat. If we can figure out where to put it, we should get it out of the garage workshop our mowers and blowers, etc. are stored in, because it takes up a lot of space!
Anyhow.
We got the small area we needed mowed clear; next priority is a path to the shed near the barn. Little by little, we’ll get the rest done, but the main thing is access to the garden soil pile and the barn. Raking up the clippings for use in the garden will help with the health of the grass, too, though it will likely take at least a couple more mows before we’ve dealt with all the old thatch.
That done, I did a bit of watering from the rain barrel. Hopefully, we’ll get that promised rain, because it’s going to need a refill!
The transplant trays in the sun room got watered, too. They didn’t dry up as much as if they had been outside today, but it still gets hot enough in there that, together with the fan and the cross breeze between the sun room and old kitchen doors, things dry out pretty quickly.
With the transplants, we have had a few losses. One of them was an African Drum gourd seedling that started dying when they were still set up in the living room. It never recovered, so I took the pot it was in and set it aside to make space in the tray. The pot, of course, dried out completely, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw green poking out! One of the drum gourd seeds that hadn’t germinated was breaking soil. So I found room for it in the tray with the one remaining luffa and watered it, and now there is a second seed germinating!
That was just one surprise, though. While tending the tomatoes, I found these.
A squash or gourd suddenly appeared in the pot on the right a couple of days ago, and now two more have shown up in the pot on the left!
I have no idea how these seeds got in there. I did reuse the seed starting mix from the few pots where seeds never germinated, mixing it in with the potting soil used to pot up the tomatoes, but I was pretty careful to remove anything larger from the potting soil. We’ve had issues with finding sticks and rocks in both the seed starting mix and the potting soil mix. Even when breaking up the soil from the used pots, I remember looking for the failed seeds and never found any, so I figured they’d rotted away. I have no idea what kind of squash these might even be, anymore. There are several possibilities.
Well, when the time comes, they’ll be transplanted and, if they survive, we’ll find out what they are!
With the heat we’ve been having, it is so tempting to start direct sowing – and we actually can direct sow the Montana Morado corn at the end of this week. My sister and her husband, who live south of us, but not as far south as my brother, put their garden in this past weekend. It’s traditional for a lot of people to put their gardens in on Mother’s Day weekend. For others, it’s the May long weekend – Victoria Day in most provinces – which is next weekend, but that’s still almost 2 weeks before our last frost date. As hot as it is today, we’ve now got a forecast a few days from now with a high of only 8C/46F and an overnight low of 3C/37F. Long range forecasts show days with highs of 23C/73F and overnight lows of 5C/41F, or 20C/68F highs followed by 4C/39F. That sort of temperature whiplash would be hard on our heat loving transplants, and we don’t have enough materials to protect them from the overnight chills.
Which is okay. We still have lots of work to do to prepare the existing beds, never mind build the new trellis tunnels we need for our climbers. One of the low raised beds is so full of weeds right now, you can hardly see where it is among the crab grass and weeds in the paths!
One of the things that keeps getting delayed is cutting the trees I need to make the trellis tunnel(s). Which is okay, because it gives me time to rework the design and construction in my mind. We talked about making low raised beds at the base of the tunnels 2 ft wide on the outside, with the tunnel’s vertical supports being part of the inside walls and a 4 ft wide path inside the tunnel. However, we’ve been working with beds at about 3 ft wide for growing space. I’m now thinking of going with beds 3 feet wide, with the tunnel’s vertical supports one foot in from the inside. This way, we can plant our climbers inside the tunnel, and still have 2 ft wide growing space on the outsides. That would add 2 feet to the horizontal distance between the vertical supports.
I think it’s doable, and the dimensions will better match the high raised beds we will be building.
In the end, the final decision will be based on what materials we can scrounge together.
It took quite a few trips and a fair bit of rearranging, but all the transplants that were in the living room are now in the sun room!
There is a down side to not being able to close the outer door for the sun room. To keep the cats out, that means closing the inner door. The outer door has a screen window.
We reached a high of 21C/70F today, but the sun room reached 27C/81F! And the only air circulation is the ceiling fan. We are keeping the inner door into the old kitchen open. The outer door has a screen window, and with the old kitchen staying so much cooler, it should help at least a little bit. While it will help keep the sun room temperature down a bit, it will also warm up the old kitchen, so it’s a trade off.
Hmmm. I just remembered. I think we have a spare hook and eye closure somewhere. If I can find that, we can latch the outer sun room door from the inside. That would help. We’d still have to close the inner door for the night, so we don’t lose too much heat, but that’s okay.
Meanwhile…
I got the second light hung up and plugged into the first one. We are pretty much out of trays and bins to hold all the transplants, and I’m not finding more like the ones we have. We do still have a couple more of the black plastic trays, but they’re not very strong, and some of them have started to crack. I’ve been doubling them up, anyhow, just for the extra strength, and that way I can also use the cracked ones without leaking water everywhere.
There’s still a bit of room on the shelf! Those peppers had been in the big aquarium greenhouse and will need potting up, but I think they’ll enjoy being here for a while, first. They, at least, will really like the heat in here! I’m hoping the oregano and spearmint will do better here, too. They are not doing as well as the oregano and second variety of thyme we planted more recently are. I think the sad little luffa will like it better in this heat, too. In fact, depending on how things go, we might even try growing it in a pot in the sun room, instead of outside, this year.
We are expected to cool down a bit over the next few days, with Sunday being the coolest at 10C/50F. Tomorrow is supposed to reach 15C/59F, so it should be a good day to continue working in the old kitchen garden and finish that last bed. I’ll start hydrating my trays with the Jiffy pellets, so they’ll be ready for starting seeds the next day.
The priority for tomorrow, though, will be to go to the post office and pick up those raspberries that are in! We’ll want to plant those as soon as possible.
The Re-Farmer 