seeds

Thinking of 2022; first seed order placed

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While we have already been picking up some seeds here and there for next year’s garden, still have some from this past year, and even have some seeds we have saved, last night I placed our first online seed order. We will have a “seed” budget over the next few months that will also include, hopefully, fruit trees and berry bushes as well.

A lot of stuff is still listed as out of stock. This is most likely because the sites are at the end of the 2021 catalogue year, and their 2022 products are not ready yet. Still, it meant a few things on my wish list did not get ordered, and I found alternatives, instead.

This order was with Veseys. I have been very happy with what I’ve had from them – even the stuff that ended up failing, like the mulberry tree, since they had no control over it getting hit with that one bitterly cold night that killed it off! :-D There are several other places we will be ordering from, month by month, but this is what I ordered last night, with why they were chosen.

All photos belong to Veseys, and I will link to their individual listings. (For future readers, if the links are dead, it’s likely because they no longer carry the item anymore.) All links will open in a new tab, so you don’t lose your place.

This past summer was a hard one for the winter squash. We did not get enough winter squash for storage, and that’s the main reason we were growing them at all. While we still have Red Kuri and Teddy squash seeds we can grow next year, I like variety. Hopefully, between them all, we’ll have at least something for the root cellar!

Georgia Candy Roaster Winter Squash

This is the long squash in the photo. I have heard from quite a few different places about how delicious these squash are, so I want to give them a try.

Winter Sweet Organic Squash

Another good storage squash that I chose specifically because the listing says they are best for eating several months after being picked. So this one is for the long haul!

Bresko Beet

We’ve tried different varieties of beets, and grew lots of them this year, but with the growing conditions, we got remarkably few beet roots out of it. I don’t know that we will order other varieties as well, but I don’t expect we will plant as many as we did, this past summer. The listing specifies that this variety is a good storage beet, so that’s a big selling feature for me. Pickled beets are fine and dandy, but having some for fresh eating will also be good.

Aunt Molly’s Organic Ground Cherries

I’ve been wanting to grow these for a while! Before our move, we did grow these in our balcony garden with success, and I just love them. Which is odd, as they are in the tomato family, and I can’t eat tomatoes unless they’re processed. One of the cold climate gardening sites I follow listed these as something they regret planting, as they became invasive, and they didn’t like how they tasted. It seems these can self sow and are hard to get rid of, once established. With I see as a bonus! These will be planted in a location that can be permanent, so they can self-sow as much as they want.

Conservor Organic Shallot

We will be trying these again! I really enjoyed the shallots we bought as sets, to replace what we tried to grow from seed, but they were used up very quickly. We need more for our household, and the sets only had 25 per bag! I want to try and grow from seed again. This time, we have what we need to ensure the cats’ won’t be able to get at them and destroy them again!

Red Baron Onion

Another one we will be trying again. When we started these seeds for our 2021 garden, I had used an cardboard egg tray for the “pot”. The cardboard just sucked the moisture right out of the growing medium.

We did plant the last of our seeds in Solo cups, though it was incredibly late in the season. What we did get got transplanted near our tomatoes. It didn’t really work, but while I was working on that bed yesterday, I found a single Red Baron onion in the ground, with just a hint of green on it. So I planted it back into the ground! Onions go to seed in their second year, so it should overwinter just fine under the mulch. We shall see! Even if it doesn’t, though, I look forward to trying to grow these bunching onions from see again.

Oneida Onion

Of course, we must have regular cooking onions, too! This is a variety I chose for its storage potential. I was happy with the yellow onions we grew from seed compared to the ones we grew from sets. We go through a lot of onions in this household, so I will probably be ordering other varieties as well – as long as we can find the room for all the growing trays when we start them indoors! At the very least, I want to get a variety of red onions I have my eye on, in another site.

We got a bush bean collection last year that did surprisingly well under difficult growing conditions. This year, I wanted to try a pole bean collection, but it was out of stock, so I found individual ones to try. We may still get bush beans as well. I am also interested in getting beans for drying. We shall see.

Carminat Bean

Since everything purple seemed to do much better than other stuff in our garden this year, I figured a purple pole bean would be worth a try! They are supposed to be a high yield bean that stays tender even as they get larger.

Seychelles Bean

This pole been variety was new for Veseys for 2021. They are supposed to produce for a very long time. As they are also expected to grow up to nine feet tall, these, and the Carminat bean, should be great to grow on the squash tunnel.

Latte Corn

This past summer, we had a sweet corn collection with three different varieties. This year, I decided to get just the one – and we will be planting them closer to the house in next year’s garden! These are an early variety that can handle colder soil, which will be important for spring sowing. Also, they were on sale. ;-)

I plan to get a couple other varieties of corn from elsewhere as well, so we should still have three or four different kinds of corn next year. We shall see.

I decided to try turnips this upcoming year. A couple of varieties caught my eye.

Tokyo Silky Sweet Turnip

I chose this variety because they get harvested at such a small size, and are supposed to be mild and sweet. The leaves can be used like spinach, too.

Purple Prince Turnip

These are a fast maturing summer turnip that are also supposed to be harvested at a smaller size. The greens are also good for eating, so they are another dual purpose crop.

Eureka Cucumber

And finally, we have these cucumbers! I chose this variety for its dual purpose as well. Harvested at smaller sizes, they are a good pickling cucumber. Leave them to grow larger, and they are good for fresh eating, too.

So this is our start! Along with the garden beds we used this past summer, we will need to expand our garden even more for next year. We will likely need to build more trellises as well.

One thing we learned from this past year’s garden is, if we want to meet our goal of growing enough food to preserve through the winter for the four of us, we need a much bigger garden! Partly, we need to plant more of some things, because who knows how much will actually survive? Plus, a few packets I’d ordered turned out to have fewer seeds in them than I expected. As I place our orders, I’ll need to keep an eye on the quantities and decide; do I order more packets, or order more varieties?

Hopefully, we will not get another year of severe heat and drought conditions. Nor another year with a plague of grasshoppers. And be able to keep the critters out… There are so many things that can affect yield. Someone on one of the gardening groups I’m on, posted this little rhyme.

One for the rook
One for the crow
One to rot and
One to grow

Planting four times more than we think we will need seems a bit much, but after how things went this past year, there are some things it really does seem appropriate for! And that’s just food for us. When we get chickens and possibly goats, we will want to grow as much feed as we can. Plus, I want to eventually grow flour corn and things like wheat, chickpeas and flax. I’m even looking at getting sugar beets, and my daughters are interesting in growing hops for beer making. By the time we’re doing that, however, we’ll be growing in the outer yard!

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: chocolate

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

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

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

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

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

The Re-Farmer

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

Our 2021 – and 2022 – garden: seed assessment

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Before heading out to do the watering, I went through our remaining seed packets to do a bit of planning.

First, there’s what’s left of things we planted in the spring.

To the right, we have the two types of carrots in pelleted seeds. I keep reading that we can still plant carrots this late in the season, and I had debated with myself about replanting the carrots decimated by the woodchuck, but really… what’s the point? It seems to have a special love for carrot greens, and until we get rid of the woodchuck, there will be no new plantings of carrots!

To figure out what we can plant for a fall harvest, I looked up our first frost date, which is Sept. 10, and worked out how much of a growing season we have left. Then I checked out the germination and days to maturity to see what we can plant now, and what will wait until later. We could plant the remaining Merlin beets, but we have so many beets planted, there is no need. The two types of beans could also be planted, but again, there is no need. Not in the photo are the remaining green peas, which apparently can also be planted this late in the season, but we won’t. If we wanted to, we could plant any of the summer squash, too, if we wanted to. All the seeds we will not be using this year got set aside for next year.

We had received the purple kale and purple kohlrabi as free seeds with each of our orders from Baker Creek. We ended up with two packs of kohlrabi seeds, but still have seeds in the one we did open. There are still kale seeds, too. These are both cool weather crops, and the kale can hand frost. While I plan to try kohlrabi again next year by starting them indoors, I’d forgotten we still had seeds. I’ve decided I will go ahead and plant the rest of the open packets of seeds, in hopefully better conditions, and actually get some growing!

The 3 types of spinach adn 4 types of lettuces will be planted, but not until the end of July.

Then there are these.

I’d picked up the radish seeds when I was last helping my mother with her grocery shopping. I intend to plant those as soon as possible; just a few of each. From what I’ve read, I should not expect to get bulbs developing in the heat of summer, and will be growing them for their pods.

The chard was something I picked up a few days ago. While waiting in line at the grocery store, I found myself next to a couple of boxes of seed packets, all jumbled together, instead of in their display cases. I rifled through them and found the two types of chard, which will be planted right away, too. I’ve read that they are tolerant of summer heat.

While going through the seed packets, I also picked these up.

Little by little, we intend to have an herb garden, likely in the old kitchen garden, so these are seeds for next year. Unless we want to try growing them in pots indoors, but I don’t imagine they’d survive the cats.

So we now have our first herb seeds, and more seeds to join the Yellow Pear tomatoes I picked up earlier.

The 5 day forecast has us back to around average temperatures for July, which means we should be able to catch up on things we’ve set aside because of the heat. But then, the forecasts have been so off for the past couple of weeks, I wouldn’t be surprised if the forecasts were completely off! Still, those empty beds need to have something planted in them, and it needs to be done soon!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: first seeds

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No, that is not a typo!

While we have extra seeds that we got for this year’s garden that we will use next year, yesterday I bought the first seeds specifically for next year’s garden.

While going through seed sites with my daughters, we spotted these Yellow Pear heritage tomatoes and we all agreed that they were a variety we wanted to try next year. When I was helping my mother with her shopping yesterday, I spotted them in the seed displays and grabbed them. It’s too late to start tomatoes for this year, particularly in our zone, but I didn’t want to pass them up when I had the chance.

They look absolutely adorable! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: planting day!

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We had another change in plans, today.

I was supposed to take my mother to a doctor’s appointment, but the clinic called and it got rescheduled to tomorrow.

Which meant I could change into my grubbies and go play in the dirt! :-D

Today, we finally got most of our cold hardy seeds in the ground. :-) The first to go in were the lettuces.

We’ve got 4 types of lettuce; three are dark reds/purples that we ordered, plus a packet of buttercrunch that we got as free seeds. :-) These were alternately planted in the chimney block retaining wall.

Also, the plastic containers from things like sour cream and cottage cheese make excellent label markers! :-)

We’ll sow more in a couple of weeks somewhere else. We haven’t decided where, yet.

Then it was off to the newly finished garden beds.

The bed on the far left of the first picture has a single row of purple kale down the middle. These were other free seeds from Baker Creek that we got. :-) Later, that bed will have onions planted on either side.

The three middle beds each have a double row of spinach in the middle. In a couple of weeks, we’ll sow more along the sides.

The last bed, that is half watered, has carrots in it. We got one kind as pelleted seeds, which made it very easy to plant and space them properly. They’re supposed to be 1 1/2 – 3 inches apart, and they’re planted in roughly a 3 inch grid. Sort of like square foot gardening, but without bothering to mark out square foot plots. We’ll plant the other three varieties in similar density.

I have to say, by the time my daughter and I finished planting these, I was really, really looking forward to when we have the accessible raised beds! My knees are shot, so I can’t squat like my daughter could, so I was bending from the waist. Not only did that get painful after a while, but I was getting head rushes every time I straightened!! Meanwhile, my daughter has a bum knee, and a messed up shoulder, so she kept having to alternate positions to be able to reach, too. We really need to find materials to build the raised beds. We’re hoping to make a trip to a salvage yard this summer, so hopefully we’ll be able to find some good materials there.

Meanwhile, I’ve now got shipping confirmations for several other items from Veseys, including the mulberry tree! Which means we need to find some way to take down several dead trees in the area it will be planted in. We might have to just do it manually. :-/

The only thing we don’t have shipping confirmation for yet are the potatoes. It might be another couple of weeks before those get shipped.

The onion sets we ordered from Veseys should arrive in the mail tomorrow. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to pick that up, depending on how things go with driving my mother around. Which means we should be able to start planting onions the day after, including our surviving transplants. It should be interesting to see the difference between onions from sets, and from seed.

We’re going to need to pick up netting to protect the beds from birds and deer. Even for the garlic beds. The birds are digging around in the dirt, like they dig around in the leaf litter in the trees. I don’t know what’s in there that they’re after. They’re not going for the garlic, but they’re messing up the soil enough that some get partially uncovered, and kicking it up far enough that it’s covering up the paths!

We also need to get more seeds started indoors over the next few days. These will be the last ones to start indoors.

We saved up just enough toilet paper tubes to fill the under-bed storage bin. Once they’re filled, we’ll start the Montana Morado corn. Then, with whatever’s left, we’ll start sunflower seeds until they’re all filled, then move on to the Jiffy pellets. Then there are the cucamelons. If there is enough room left in the Jiffy pellet tray, they’ll go in there. Otherwise, we’ll do the double cup method for them.

Once the onions are planted out, we should be able to move all our starts to the sun room. It’s much warmer in there than the aquarium green houses right now. In fact, I’m considering moving some of them over, now. We can move the lights over, later, though I’m not sure how we would set them up. The ones for the big tank are quite long. I might set them up vertically. We’ll see. The other gourds in particular have not sprouted yet, and neither have any more Crespo squash (the one that did is already in the sun room, along with the dancing gourds). I think they really need that warmth.

It feels so good to be planting outside!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: seed planning, a furry mushroom, and oops!

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After hauling to many loads of soil over the rough, rough ground, none of us were up to doing it again today.

So our Sunday remained a day of rest!

We did still go out to soak down the beds we are working on, though, along with other watering and checking of things. There is fresh new growth on the grapes, which was good to see. I wasn’t sure they’d survived February’s deep freeze. We’ve got rhubarb coming up, and the one haskap is leafing out nicely. The other is still struggling. :-( The garlic is looking awesome. Unfortunately, the birds are digging into the soil, as they have been digging into all the leaves on the ground all over the place. They’re not after the garlic, but they’re scatting soil all over, and some are getting partially uncovered in the process. We’re going to have to come up with a way to cover those!

While checking out the snow crocuses and grape hyacinths (so many are coming up now!), we found a strange, furry, orange mushroom in a tree.

Rolando Moon found a perfect spot to settle down and groom herself! :-)

The girls and I talked about where we are going to plant things; the space we have to work with is turning out very different than we expected while working with the satellite image, and we’re going to have open spaces where we had expected to have garden beds.

Which is okay. Nothing is written in stone, and most of the beds are going to be temporary.

We then went through our seed packets, sorting out the ones that need to be planted before the last frost date.

There are a lot of things that should have been planted “as soon as the ground can be worked”, but we aren’t ready for all of them.

These are the ones that should be in the ground right now.

Two of the three beds for the spinach collection are not ready yet. The kale will be interplanted with onions, and one of those beds is ready. The bed for the strawberry spinach is ready. The beets will be going into the new bed beside the garlic, and that one’s not quite ready. It’s a small bed, so we will probably be planting one type there, and another somewhere else. The poppies will be going in the old kitchen garden, which also is not ready yet.

We still aren’t sure where the carrots will go. They need deep soft soil, so I think they will be going where the potato beds were last year. We are making those longer, so only the part that was used last year will have the soft soil needed. Some might end up in the old kitchen garden, too.

Then there is the next batch.

We can start planting lettuces now, with successive sowing every couple of weeks until about the middle of June, before it gets too hot. These will go in the old kitchen garden, with some of them going into the retaining wall blocks, which are ready now, and others further into the garden, once we’ve worked out where the paths will go and add more soil.

These can be planted in the middle of May. It’s a bit surprising for a corn to be planted before first frost. Once we’re done with the beds that need to be direct sown right away, I’ll be marking off the block the corn will be planted in. At the same time these are being direct sown, I will be starting the Montana Morado corn indoors, along with half of the sunflowers.

The kohlrabi will be interplanted with onions. Onions are supposed to repel those beetles we had issue with last year.

While going through the seed packets, we discovered an oops.

The pink celery should have been started 8-12 weeks before last frost!!

So we quickly planted them now.

The seeds are absolutely minuscule! They are surface sown, so they just needed to be scattered on the soil and pressed down, so we used a take-out container as a mini-greenhouse. The sun room is warmer than the house, and there’s no room in the aquarium greenhouses, so we set it up with the tomatoes and luffa. We still use the ceramic heater bulb at night, but according to the thermometer in the sun room, it reached almost 30C/86F in there today!

They’re getting less than half the time to start than they should, but we’ll see how it goes. Who knows? We might have a long summer this year.

Everything else that needs to be direct sown has to wait until after our lost frost date. Especially the Peaches ‘n Cream corn collection. The radishes (two varieties) will be interplanted with some of them, to help break up the soil. They mature very quickly, so being overshadowed by the corn will not be an issue. The sunflowers will be a mix of transplants and direct sowing, to see which works better. And finally, there are the three varieties of bush beans.

If all goes well, we’ll be transplanting all the squash, gourds, cucamelons and tomatoes at about the same time. The potatoes and asparagus should be in and ready to plant by then, too.

The first few weeks of June are going to be very busy, and we’ve got a lot of manual labour to get done ahead of that!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden seedling shuffle, monthly shop, and man that’s bright!

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Wow. It’s coming up on 10pm as I start this, and this is the first time I’ve had to sit down for most of the day!

Today was our monthly shop, so after doing my rounds, my younger daughter and I headed out to the city. We were going to do our usual shop when I remembered I wanted to pick up some wood pellets to try as a litter replacement, so we added a stop at Canadian Tire, first.

Canadian Tire is a dangerous place for me to be, on payday! ;-)

While we were there, I got my daughter to choose a paint colour so we can finally paint the kibble house. We’ll be able to paint the cat house, too. This is the colour she chose.

She actually chose two colours, then asked me which one I preferred, and I chose the darker one. “Citrusy”, I think it’s called. The girls have declared we don’t have enough colour around the farm, and they would like to change that.

It’s going to be colourful, all right! :-D The kibble house is going to be really bright!

One of the other things we picked up was a new axe. We’ve found a whole collection of them, mostly in the old basement, but the girls have examined every one, and they’re all in terrible shape. I suppose we could fix them, but we’d much rather have something new and higher quality. After we paid for our stuff and were heading for the van, my daughter suddenly asked, “where’s the axe?”

Yup. We’d forgotten it at the cash desk!

So off my daughter went with the receipt to get it. It was so hilarious to see her coming out again, long flowing hair, skirt swirling in the wind, and an axe over her shoulder. A woman happened to be getting out of her vehicle beside us and called out, “walk proud, and carry a big axe!” Too funny!

With our rather meager success with onion seeds, when I saw some onion sets at Canadian Tire, I did pick some up.

When we got home and I quickly checked my email, I found a shipping notification from Vesey’s. The onion sets we ordered from them have shipped, with an expected arrival of May 7. Those are a red variety, so between the two, we’ll have a couple hundred onion sets to plant, on top of the surviving seedlings. We shall see how they compare! I’d rather grow onions from seeds, if only because there are so many more choices in varieties, but I’m not too fussy about it! We use a lot of onions, so I’ll take whatever will grow.

After all the shopping was put way and we had supper, the girls and I then worked on planting the squash seeds. That required taking everything out of the big tank to make room for the new starts, so the tomatoes, luffa and the last onion seeds I started have all been moved to the sun room.

All of the onions have been moved to the new shelf we got for our transplants.

This photo was taken somewhere around 9pm. I love how bright it still is outside! It was an overcast and rainy day today, so not a lot of light, but the sun room was still quite warm.

Not warm enough for the new seedlings, though. I had to get creative.

I rigged up the light we’ve been using to keep the small tank warm, so it hangs from the support bar holding the top points of the mini greenhouse in place. It has a full spectrum bulb in it, so they’ll get both good light and warmth from above, as well has warmth from below, where the ceramic heater bulb is set up. We still need to use that at night.

The small tank now has all the remaining gourds that have not sprouted yet. Without the light fixture that was helping to keep the tank warm, I added a couple of bottles filled with hot water help maintain the temperature.

We changed the level of the base in the big tank, so the cups would be closer to the lights. One of the fixtures does give off warmth, but the other does not, so I added bottles of hot water to this tank, too.

This tank now has the one cup with the Tennessee Dancing Gourds, and one cup with a single tomato seedling in it that isn’t doing well, but we just can’t bring ourselves to get rid of. Everything else is summer and winter squash. We planted fewer of the winter squash, pumpkin and zucchini, and lots of the melons and pattypan squash.

We are really looking forward to lots of summer squash in particular! The pattypans are our favourite vegetable, and we really miss being able to pick a bunch of summer squash every morning, for that day’s meals. :-)

We now have a couple of weeks or so before we start the last of our seeds; the Montana Morado corn, cucamelons, and half of our sunflowers. The corn will be in toilet paper tubes, so they’ll be in their own bin to keep the tubes supported. By then, we should be able to use the sun room exclusively, instead of the aquarium greenhouses. The gourds might even have germinated by then! ;-)

The next few days are going to be odd ones. Our days are going to warm up again, but check out those expected lows…

Tomorrow, we’re supposed to have a fairly decent 7C/45F, but then drop to -4C/25F with flurries overnight! Then, two days later, we’re supposed to reach a high of 19C/66F, only to drop to 4C/39F overnight. Then Sunday’s overnight low is back below freezing again! At least the long range forecast shows no lows below freezing after that, but… well, we do have a frost date of June 2, so there’s a good chance will dip below freezing a few times more. I just wish it wouldn’t lurch back and forth like that! Still, those daytime temperatures will give us plenty of opportunity to get garden beds prepped, and the early planting started. We have lots of work to do outside, and will need to take advantage of every good day we get!

It’s going to be fun! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 Garden: our Morado mystery

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In choosing garden seeds this year, we kept a lot of things in mind. Choosing food that we’ll actually eat, choosing foods for long term storage, choosing foods we would eat more of, if they were more affordable at the grocery store, and choosing foods just for the fun or challenge of it.

One of the things I picked for the fun and challenge of it is corn that is such a deep, dark purple, it looks black.

This image is from the Baker Creek website, where I got our seeds from. I chose it not only for it’s unique colour, but because it is a corn that can be used to make flour; something we have plans to do in the future.

Maize morado is a Peruvian corn, and I found the story behind how Baker Creek got their seeds to be really interesting.

The question is, how do I grow a Peruvian corn, in a Zone 3 prairie environment? So I started looking for people who had already tried to grow maiz morado.

I didn’t have much luck.

I did find things like this video from 2015.

Yeah. They didn’t do too well. I found an earlier video, and saw that these were the Kulli variety, also from Baker Creek.

I found a few other videos, and noticed one thing in particular. They started out with very few seeds. One guy had only five seeds, and of those five seeds, he got one corn plant that he had to hand pollinate, and only one ear of corn, which he intended to save the seed from to plant the next year. I found no follow up on that. Another person had planted 8 seeds, starting them indoors, but he deliberately intended to cross pollinate them with local varieties, to develop a hardier strain. He stopped posting videos soon after, so there was no conclusion to his experiment. All of these were older videos. Of the ones that showed the end product, they got very tall corn plants – 8 feet tall or more – very few cobs, and very few developed kernels on those cobs.

We have one advantage, in that our packet says it has a minimum of 75 seeds in it. At the very least, we should have plenty of corn plants and the wind can do the pollinating!

There is something else, though.

In spite of what the Seed Stories video from Baker Creek says, these are not Maize Morado.

They are Montana Morado.

From their website:

This variety is a northern adapted homage to the legendary Maiz Morado/Kulli corn from Peru. Ed Shultz, the accomplished and passionate open pollinated corn breeder who spent 30 years selecting this dark purple variety, explains that Montana morado is was actually selected from the Painted Mountain corn.

https://www.rareseeds.com/store/vegetables/new-items-2021/montana-morado-corn

These are apparently not from Peru at all.

These are shorter and stockier than the Peruvian Morado strains, and are bred for Northern gardens.

Except this is Montana, which means for us in Canada, it’s bred for Southern gardens.

Will this strain work here? Aside from a few articles about the development of the strain, I am finding nothing about people actually growing it, and how. It may simply be too new a strain. It’s all pretty much a mystery.

So we’re going to be flying by the seats of our pants on this one.

The plan right now is, we will start them indoors in the second half of May. As corn is not something that is normally started indoors, and their roots do not like to be disturbed at all, we will be using toilet paper tubes to start the seeds in. The tubes will be left open ended in a container, so that when it’s time to transplant them, they can be put into the soil, tube and all, with zero disruption to the roots. Hopefully. As their roots tend to grow more downwards than outwards, the open bottoms should mean no root constriction, while the cardboard tubes break down in the soil.

Unlike the one gardener whose video I found, we do not intend to deliberately cross pollinate, so these will be planted at the opposite end of the garden from the other varieties. With wind pollination, the only way to be absolutely sure no cross pollination happens anyway would be to put bags over the developing corn, and then hand pollinating.

I’m not that dedicated to preventing cross pollination.

I am hoping that this one packet of seeds will give us enough corn to be able to have some for fresh eating, maybe even freeze some, and hopefully even try making some chicha morada to drink, but mainly to keep some for seed to plant more next year. Then we will repeat the process until we eventually get a mill and can try grinding some for flour.

Along with the Montana Morado corn, I’d ordered a variety called Dorinny Sweet – a Canadian hybrid – from Baker Creek. We will be direct sowing the Dorinny Sweet, and plan to save seeds from those, too. The Veseys three pack of Peaches ‘n Cream varieties I also ordered was more because I wasn’t sure the Baker Creek order would make it past the border, and while we will have plenty of corn for fresh eating and preserving, Peaches ‘n Cream are just about sustenance, not any particular interest in the variety. They’re the Russet potato of the corn world, in my view. :-D

Well, that’s the plan.

Who knows. Things may even work out to the plan! Either way, I’m looking forward to trying out this variety of corn, and seeing how it handles our climate.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 Garden: getting organized

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I needed to divert myself with positive thinking, and what better way to do that than to think of gardening!

Also, I am striving mightily to NOT start those tomatoes yet, so sitting here and writing about starting them is keeping me from starting them. :-D

I will explain shortly.

First, I went through the seed packs and took out the ones that need to be started indoors. Here they are.

Then I worked out which ones need to be planted when. Here they are, in order of when they should be started indoors.

You can probably see where I might be having some problems.

Right around May.

It’s the tomatoes that are teasing me. I’ve never grown tomatoes before, and the Spoon tomatoes in particular are a new variety. Even in the reviews, I saw no one in Zone 3 that grew them. In my research, I have found articles from people in our zone who experimented with different tomato starting times, and they generally found that starting them earlier did not benefit them in any way. And yet… there are Zone 3 gardeners who have already potted their seedlings up. The down side of giving up social media for Lent is, I’m no longer seeing the gardening groups about it! But there are other resources and, at the very least, waiting another week will not cause problems. However, if you are a Zone 3 gardener who has experience growing tomatoes from seed, please do feel free to leave a comment! I am eager for the voice and advice of experience!

Next on the calendar are the gourds, in late April. Ozark Nest Egg, Birdhouse, Dishcloth/Luffa, Tennessee Dancing and Thai Bottle gourds. How many we plant of each will depend on how prolific the variety is expected to be. I’ve read that the Tennessee Dancing gourds, which are quite tiny, are extremely prolific. We’ll probably plant just a couple of seeds of those, and shoot to have one plant, while we’ll probably look to have 3 or 4 Birdhouse gourd plants. I learned from last year, not to jump the gun on our frost date of June 2, but we also need to keep in mind that we could still get a frost after that date, so I’d rather have more plants than less.

All of these will be trellised in some way.

Then there is early May.

Oh, my.

All the winter and summer squash, pumpkins and melons need to be started at the same time! Our winter squashes are Teddy and Little Gem. They’re small and I expect them to be fairly prolific, so we probably won’t be starting the entire packets of seeds, but we will likely plant at least half, depending on how many seeds are in the packages. We also have the tiny Baby Pam pumpkins, and I expect them to be fairly prolific, so we’ll likely plant half a package. The Crespo squash, however (listed as a type of pumpkin on the website) get huge, and will likely have fewer fruit per vine, so we will likely plant the entire packet of seeds.

The summer squash include Magda (light green), Goldy (yellow) and Endeavor (dark green) zucchini. Last year, few of them survived the late frost, so we didn’t have many of them. Even the surviving plants were not as prolific as the varieties normally are. We definitely want to have at least 3 or 4 of each. As for the Sunbrust squash, I got an extra packet of those, and we intend to plant two packets of seeds. They were a favorite last year, and we look forward to having lots!

The melons, Pixie and Halona, are small fruiting varieties. There don’t seem to be a lot of seeds in the packets, so we will likely plant all of them. Hopefully, they will be prolific.

A lot of these will be staked or trellised.

Next are the cucamelons and Montana Morado corn in late May. By which I mean, mid-May, so they’ll be ready to transplant after June 2.

We will be trying the cucamelons two ways; I potted up tubers from last year, which should mean getting an early start on them when they are transplanted in the spring, but we will also start a few indoors. It should be interesting to see what differences there are between them. Assuming the tubers survived their winter in the un-insulated old kitchen.

As for the corn… I have been researching that and I’m going to save my thoughts on those for their own post!

Then there are the sunflowers; Hopi Black Dye and Mongolian Giant. This will be another experiment. I got two packets of each. Last year, we direct sowed our giant sunflowers, then sowed another giant variety to make up for the losses from the first batch. They never really had the chance to fully mature. This year, we will start one packet of each, indoors, then will direct sow the other packets when we transplant the first ones outdoors. It should be interesting to see the difference.

Finding the space for all these starts is going to be a challenge. I’m hoping that, by the time we need to start so many seeds in early May, we will be able to use the sun room instead of fighting for space in the aquarium greenhouses. Last year, it was a somewhat chilly spring, and that wasn’t an option. However, if we can provide some sort of heat overnight, it might work this year, even if we get another chilly season.

While all of these need to be started indoors, there are also some things we will be able to direct seed “as soon as the ground can be worked”, which means in mid to late May. The bread seed poppies, kale and kohlrabi, peas, etc. will all be direct sown before any of these are ready to be transplanted. A lot of local people start putting their gardens in on the May long weekend, including transplants. If we had the things necessary to properly protect transplants from frost, I probably would do the same, but we don’t. Our attempts to protect them last year were not particularly successful. :-/ So we will wait for June on the transplants.

Now I just have to hold off another week, before starting those tomatoes!! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 Garden: back ordered Veseys seeds are in!

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My daughter’s birthday gift is not the only thing that came in the mail today!

The very last of our outstanding seed orders are in.

Yay!!!

The yellow beans are the last of a three colour collection we ordered, so we will have yellow, green and purple bush beans to grow.

I’m really happy to have the tomatoes in now. They need to be started much earlier than most things. Based on our frost date, we would be starting them after the first week of April, but other zone 3 gardeners I know have not only started their tomatoes, but have already repotted them!

We won’t be planting all the seeds; just a few for our first year growing tomatoes. The space we intend to plant them will fit about 8 or 10 plants. More than enough to meet our needs, since they’re basically for just one person! While other things we need to start can wait until the onions we’ve got in the tanks now are moved to the sun room, there is space enough in the big tank to fit some tomato starts. A project for this weekend, perhaps.

We’ve got a lot planned for our second year of gardening since moving here, but I think the best part is overhearing a daughter saying, “I’m so excited about gardening!”. We’ve never been in a position to garden on this scale in their lifetimes, and I’m thrilled that they are so looking forward to it, too!

The Re-Farmer