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.
I was able to pick up more potting soil after helping my mother with errands yesterday, which means that today I got to finish potting up our tomato seedlings.
I actually was able to “pot up” the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes by topping the cups up with soil, first. Then I potted up the last 18 Roma VF tomatoes, which used up my last two plastic bins. I had to move things around, and move the onions right out, to fit everything. The taller seedlings hat to go either to the top of the mini greenhouse frame, or to the shelf, where the onions were. The rest are still short enough to fit in the mini greenhouse frame, though I’ve run out of space in there.
Next was the Spoon tomatoes.
I planted two seeds per pellet, and I made sure to do the ones that had pairs of seedlings first – though one of them had three! For each one, I removed the outer covering on the Jiffy pellets, then separated the seedlings. They’re still quite small, so the cups got filled only about half way.
I noticed the outer covering on the Jiffy Pellets is different this year. It’s more paper like. I remember it being more net-like, before. Those didn’t really break down, and I would find them in the garden while cleaning up at the end of the year. I’m guessing that has sometime to do with the change. With one pair of seedlings, a tomato had actually grown through the outer covering. As I was trying to gently remove it, I ended up breaking the tomato stem clean through! It’s a tomato, though, so I went ahead and planted the tomato top, anyhow. Changes are pretty good it’ll send out new roots and survive.
These are all 35 Spoon tomatoes (I’d mistakenly counted 36, before). I was able to fit 19 onto an oven liner tray, which will allow for bottom watering. The tray the Roma tomatoes had been in, which now had only the spearmint and oregano in it, could fit another dozen. That left only 4 that needed to be double cupped. I’ve run out of both trays and bins.
Those done, I did some more rearranging and removed off the watering can and extra cups, which allowed me to bring the onions back closer to the light. With all those, plus the bin with the Zucca melon and African Drum gourds in it, this surface is now completely full. I don’t even have my work space anymore! The light isn’t as good during the day on here but, early in the morning, it does actually get direct sunlight for a few hours.
The peppers in the large aquarium greenhouse still have new seeds germinating, so I won’t be potting those up for a while. Not that I have the space for it anymore!
I will need to monitor the overnight temperatures in the sun room over the next while. We’re supposed to warm up, but the overnight temperatures are still dipping below freezing. If the sun room can manage to stay at 6C/43F or warmer during the night, I should be able to at least move the onions over. They are about the only thing we’ve started indoors that can handle cooler temperatures. I’d love to be able to move the biggest plants out, which is mostly the gourds and Zucca melon, but they are the most cold sensitive plants we’ve got right now. Daytime temperatures in the sun room have been reaching as high as 20C/68F, which would be great as long as it didn’t drop too far. The times I’ve checked it through the bathroom window at night, I’ve seen the thermometer at around 10C/50F, which would be acceptable, I think. Plus, we’d be closing the doors overnight to keep the yard cats out of the plants, which means it would stay warmer overnight, too.
The cats are not going to be happy, losing their favourite bed on the swing bench, and private dining areas! I’ll be happy to not have skunks and racoons going in there anymore!
All in good time, though. It’s still only April, and a lot of these can’t get transplanted until the middle of June!
I planted chamomile and the second variety of thyme just a few days ago.
Two mornings later, when turning the aquarium lights, I spotted sprouting chamomile! By the afternoon, some thyme was coming up, too!
They were so tiny, though, I didn’t even try to get a picture until this morning.
They are still quite miniscule, but I can see more thyme coming up, while every single peat pellet has chamomile coming up.
I’ve never seen anything germinate this quickly! Meanwhile, I still have just a single oregano (I’m thinking of reseeding those) and just a few spearmint, that were started near the beginning of the month, and they are still barely any bigger than the chamomile sprouts are now! It seems the peat pellet trays are doing much better than using seed starter mix in toilet paper tube pots.
This afternoon, I will be heading out to help my mother with grocery shopping. Depending on the timing of things, I hope to pick up some more potting soil before coming home, so I can finish potting up the tomatoes.
I’m still just blown away by how quickly these germinated!
It’s a chilly, damp and dreary day today. You know what that means?
Gotta do something gardening related!
Today, I potted up the Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes.
I’d started them in a peat tray with two rows of four square cells. One row for the tomatoes, one for the Little Finger Eggplant. I planted 4 seeds per cell, which got me 11 plants, which is quite a good germination rate.
I wish I could say the same for the eggplant! Only three germinated, so I replanted. As of today, I have finally seen one tiny, barely visible seedling, germinating. Hopefully, that means we’ll see more, soon.
In other things, yesterday I finally saw the tiniest, microscopic oregano seedling, and this afternoon, there was an equally tiny spearmint. The Roma tomatoes sharing the tray, however, are doing great. I’ll have to get more soil for potting up. Quite a bit more. The Roma and Spoon tomatoes will need to be potted up, and eventually the peppers sharing the tray with the Spoon tomatoes will need potting up, too – there are finally more and more of the peppers germinating!
I’m going to start running out of shelf space for the plant trays! It will be good when things warm up enough to start moving trays into the sun room – and start keeping the yard cats out! Last year, we set up a surface using a couple of saw horses and an old closet door I found when cleaning the outhouse over the swing bench, which worked out really well. We’ll have to work out something better to support the lights, though. We’ve got a few weeks to figure things out.
We’ll also have to figure out what to use to protect the plants when it’s time to harden them off. Last year, we used the frame of my daughter’s market tent, with an unused, home made bed frame made out of plywood on it. This kept the plants high enough that none of the cats went after them. The market tent is being use now, though, and the bed frame got painted and is now in the basement, keeping litter boxes raised off the concrete floor – just in case things get wet again. I think I saw a folding table in one of the sheds – it’ll take some doing to access it to confirm, and see if it’s big enough. The problem will be how to keep the cats off, since it would be about half the height of the frame we used before.
We’ll come up with something!
It just felt good to do at least a little big garden related, today!
The Re-Farmer 