short season gardening

Our 2026 Garden: winter sowing spinach and Swiss Chard, and a small harvest

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I had a wonderfully productive day in the garden today, so I am splitting things up into a couple of posts.

I decided to shift gears today. After looking at what I was wanting to winter sow and where, I decided to leave cleaning up the last two beds in the main garden area for later. Possibly until spring, depending on how things go over the next while. I needed to move on to other areas. Areas I knew would be faster to work on, since I wouldn’t be dealing with the roots and rocks situation!

The priority was going to be the old kitchen garden, but first I decided to do the winter sowing in the garlic bed. I didn’t want to have the plastic cover over the garlic for too long, as I was concerned the mini greenhouse it created might mess with the garlic.

Here is how it looked, after the plastic was removed.

I’d already raked up as many leaves as I could stuff into the wagon and the wheelbarrow for mulching.

As for the plastic, I was going to roll it up for storage, but remembered the low raised bed I had recently cleaned up. The cats have been digging in it, so I tided that up, then just shifted the sheet over.

The boards and bricks that had weighted down the sides against the hoops before are now being used to keep the plastic snug against the soil, and from blowing away. I found a short log that I could roll the excess up into. Later on, I did take all those rocks you can see at the end, and set them on the plastic, under the roll. It is slightly elevated, and the wind was moving it around quite a bit, considering how litter wind we had today. The rocks weighing down the other end weren’t enough, so I found a short board I could wrap the plastic around and weighted that down with the rocks. If it were spring, this would be a good solarization set up. For now, it’ll just keep the soil a bit warmer, and keep the cats from leaving me more “presents”. 😄

Then it was time to get back to the garlic bed, and clear away the hoops. With the twine marking the three rows of garlic, I used those as a guide while using stick to create furrows in between. I went back over them with my hands to lightly compact the bottoms for better soil contact – and remove as many little rocks as I was able to!

For the varieties, I chose American Spinach and Yellow Swiss Chard.

I didn’t mark the rows, so this picture is to help me remember what I planted and where!

I chose this variety of spinach because, after reading the back, it seemed the most appropriate for the location, as well as winter sowing. The Yellow Swiss Chard is a new variety, with an unusual colour for Chard, so I wanted to give it a go. Both packets still have seeds left, so we could potentially do another sowing in the spring, after these have germinated.

The seeds got lightly covered, and gently tamped down, again for better soil contact. I had made the furrows deep enough to form shallow trenches. The soil was damp and didn’t need watering – I don’t want them to germinate too early! – but next year, the trenches will help hold water, in case we end up with another drought year. Plus, it makes it easier to see where the seeds were sown.

You can see that in the next picture, along with the “first” mulching of grass clippings taken from other beds. Because the garlic is so close to the outside of the bed, and the bed has no log frame, I wanted to give the sides extra insulation. When the leaf mulch is removed in the spring, the grass clippings will be left as erosion and weed control.

I was originally going to remove the twine and stakes marking the garlic rows, but decided to leave them, and put the leaf mulch right on top, which you can see in the last photo. I finished off both the wheel barrow and the wagon of leaves before it was done. I got another wagon load to finish mulching the garlic bed, and had just enough left over to mulch the Albion Everbearing strawberries I’d transplanted from their original choked out bed to beside the new asparagus bed. The strawberry plants were still very green! Hopefully, they will survive the winter and we’ll have nice, big strawberries next year.

So the garlic bed is now DONE!!!

With the stakes left behind, the bed will be visible after the snow falls. This area gets very flat with snow in the winter. If we can get at the beds this winter, I would want to dig snow out from the paths and onto the winter sown beds for even more insulation – and moisture – in spring.

That done, I started moving my tools and supplies over to the old kitchen garden, where I wanted to work next, but first, I decided to gather a small harvest.

I dug up just a few Jerusalem Artichoke plants around the edges of the bed, and this is what I was able to gather from under them. I will leave the rest of the bed to overwinter. Later on, I’ll use loppers or something to cut the plants, which are still very green, and drop them on the bed as a sort of mulch.

The Jerusalem Artichokes (aka: sunchokes) did not grow very tall this year, compared to others. I did water it at times but, I’ll admit, it was largely ignored this year. As with everything else, I think the heat, the drought and the wildfire smoke set them back. I think they also got less light this year. The Chinese Elm trees beside them had been pruned, but the branches have grown back. I want to get rid of them entirely, because of the billions of seeds they drop in the spring, but for now we’ll just try to prune them again, when we can.

As for the sunchokes, I noticed a difference this year. For starters, I didn’t find any of those grubs I found so many of, when I harvested this bed completely, last time. Sometimes, I’d find them half burrowed into a tuber – both living and dead! Other times, I’d see the holes, then find a dead grub inside when cutting open the tuber. I was not impressed! This time, I saw zero grub damage. Sweet!

The tubers themselves are actually less nubby, too. A lot of the ones we harvested at the end of the season last year had so many nubs on them, they were hard to clean. This time, there are a couple of nubby ones, but most are smoother. Which I much prefer!

With leaving the rest of the bed to overwinter, I hope that we will have a much better growing season overall, and a lot more plants to harvest from. That seemed to work out when we did it before, as last year’s harvest was quite decent.

This done, I could finally move on to the old kitchen garden and start on the beds there.

Which did take longer than expected, but for a very different reason this time!

I’ll share about that in my next post.

See you there!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 garden: bed ready, and seed onions planted

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I am very happy to say, I got another bed in the main garden area done today!

I decided to work on the trellis bed, as I figured it would take the least time. I was going to loose light fast, and it was getting cold and damp!

This bed had the sunflowers, pumpkins, red noodle beans, onions – mostly self seeded – and self seeded Spoon tomatoes in it.

My first order of business was to loosen the soil enough to pull up the remains of the sunflowers and set them aside in the wheelbarrow, for later use.

You can see how the bed looked, once the sunflowers were out.

From there, I wanted to work the opposite side, where there are still onions. Some grew well and went to seed. Others just sort of disappeared. Still others were tiny self seeded onions that I transplanted along the one side, in hopes they would have enough season to grow.

Most of those disappeared, too.

Some, however, had started to show new growth!

I wanted to dig up what onions survived and replant them as seed onions again.

For the first pass, I just loosened the soil with the garden fork enough to find and remove what onions I could see. A couple of the ones that went to seed were completely spent and went into the wheelbarrow, but all the onions I found were set aside for later.

In the second picture of the above slide show, you can see what I pulled up, plus four tiny onions I’d found while cleaning up elsewhere and set aside for today.

I knew I would find more, once I started doing a thorough weeding, which I certainly did. Quite a few were hiding in the soil. There were a surprising number of larger ones that should have grown and gone to seed this year. Some of them were showing growth only now! In the third picture, you can see the final number of onions I’d found. Most were red onions, but a few little ones were yellow onions. There’s one big yellow onion that had gone to seed.

Cleaning up the bed did go a lot faster than the other beds. What a difference one more log in height makes! I did find tree roots, but nowhere near as many, and not as close to the surface. There were also almost no rocks at all. I was hitting rocks with the garden fork as I loosened soil, but they were further down than what I was clearing of weeds. What few rocks I uncovered could be tossed into the trees. No bucket needed!

Towards the end of the clean up, I was really pushing to get done. I could hear thunder in the distance, and the wind was picking up. I thought I might have to stop before finishing when it started to rain, but then the rain moved on, and I got it done!

Once the weeding was done, I used the landscape rack to pull the soil to the sides to make a trench in the middle. That’s where the sunflower stalks and pumpkin vines got trench composted. I even included the frost killed sunflower heads. They were killed off before any seeds could reach viability, so they should be okay to bury.

Once the stalks and vines were laid out in the trench, I stomped on them a few times. Then I paused to take the next picture in the slide show above, before burying it.

When everything was buried, I raked up the weeds and roots I’d pulled out. In the next picture of the slide show, you can see what was the smallest pile of weeds I’d pulled up yet!

Then, I started planting onions. In the next picture of the slide show, there’s the finished bed and the onions visible. They were planted all along one side, plus the ends.

The last picture is of the row along the side of the bed.

For this bed, I am considering winter sowing one of our shelling pea varieties along the trellis side of the bed, then something planted in the spring, in between.

While these onions are meant to be left to grow seeds, I do intend to start onions indoors for spring transplanting. They would need to be started in January or February.

I’m so glad I got that bed done, and got rained on only a little bit!

There are a couple more beds there to work on that I expect will have a lot more elm roots in them. I am hoping to be able to get at least one bed done tomorrow. Two, if the weather holds!

I’m actually kind of dreading it, though, as I expect the roots to be bad in them.

Meanwhile, as I was putting things away and tidying up, I noticed a lot of dead walking onion stalks and a WHOLE lot more new growth. I cleaned up the dead bits, being careful not to damage any of the new growth. Any bulbils on the stalks I cut away got broken off and returned to the soil for more growth.

There are so many weeds in there, but that doesn’t seem to bother the onions any!

You can also see almost all the herbs in the tiny raised bed are doing well. Just the basil got killed by the cold. The chives are also doing well, and some are even blooming!

By the time all that was done, I was more than happy to get inside to warm up with a hot cup of tea and supper…

… plus my daughters’ fresh baked cookies, for dessert.

All in all, it was a productive day, even in the garden, after being gone for so long!

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: yes, there’s still things growing, and seed sorting

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Today turned out to be too damp to work on more garden beds outside. Another day lost when there are very few days left to get the beds ready for winter sowing. Hopefully, I’ll get more progress done over the next couple of days. After that, we’re supposed to have another day of rain, and then it’s actually supposed to slowly warm up a fair bit, so I should still have time to get beds ready and winter sowing done.

While I’m focusing on the main garden beds right now – they are the largest and most difficult, thanks to the tree roots I’m battling – we do actually still have things growing! The greens mix I sowed in the old kitchen garden still has a few things that have done quite well with the frosts we’ve had.

The most visible are the Swiss Chard. We’ve just been harvesting leaves from the larger plants as we want some, and they soon fill out with more.

The first photo in the slide show above show the two largest of them – the ones we’ve harvested from the most! There are other, smaller ones in the bed. These had germinated in areas where the kohlrabi was growing, so they got shaded out. Interestingly, I harvested a few kohl rabi but cutting the stems at the bases, rather than pulling the whole plant, and the stumps are growing new leaves!

All of the winter sown seed mixes had onions seeds, which didn’t make it, for the most part. This bed has a few poking up, including a few clusters of greens. As those greens have gotten bigger, however, their leaves turned out to be flat! They look like garlic! Now, we did have a couple of garlic show up in this bed. In a previous year, we planted garlic in it, and it seems a couple of cloves that hadn’t germinated then, survived to germinate this year. The thing is, this bed was completely reworked to make the soil as fluffy as possible before the winter sown seed mix was added. I never saw garlic cloves. Looking at the clusters, if those are garlic, they look like they are growing out of a whole bulb of cloves, not individual ones!

I’ll be digging them up as I clean the bed and, if they are indeed garlic, they will be replanted and mulched for the winter.

One of the garden related things I did today was start going through the seeds I’d collected and set out to dry in the cat free zone, aka: the living room. Today, I started jarring some of them up.

In the first photo, I’ve got some of them in spice jars that were gifted to us. There are the mixed Jewel nasturtiums, radish seeds from whatever plants had pods ready (we had 4 or 5 different types of radish in the root vegetable seed mix), Super sugar snap peas, and the Hedou Tiny bok choy. I had to look up the name for those. I keep wanting to call them Hinou instead of Hedou, and I don’t know why!

In the next picture, I’ve separated carrot seeds out from their clusters. Same with the onion seeds, after that. The last picture is the Jebousek lettuce seeds I’d collected by trimming off the stalks. They are now separated out from their stalks and will be left to dry out some more. Some of them are still surprisingly green.

I’ve also started planning on where I want to do the winter sowing, and choosing what will go where. There are a number of things I need to consider. Some faster growing/maturing things will be planted closer to the house, while stuff that will take much longer before they can be harvested will be further from the house. Some will need extra protection from deer and/or insect damage. Others will be interplanted with things that will be sown or transplanted in the spring. I’m even considering things like which things will get harvested the most often, for the high raised bed.

Which means none of what I’ll be winter sowing. That bed is going to get bush beans again. Must easier on the back to harvest from there! I had bush beans in there a few years ago, and it was SO much easier to find and pick the beans.

I picked up so many seeds, taking advantage of MI Gardener’s sales on their already low priced (even taking into account the dollar difference) seeds, that we have lots of extras, and that doesn’t even take into account the seeds I already have in stock. We can pick and choose what we want to try growing this year. I’ll be going through them with my daughter’s, too, to see what interests them.

In other things…

We’ve heard from the company that’s replacing our door and frame. Today was out, because of rain, and the installers don’t do Saturdays, so Monday is the earliest it will be installed. Monday, however, has a 70% chance of rain, so it will likely be done on Tuesday. I have my eye appointment on Tuesday, and my daughter will have to drive me home, but it’s not until the afternoon, so that’s not an issue.

I’ve also been in touch with the woman who is taking 6 yard cats tomorrow, with a time and place to meet arranged. She says she has a kibble donation for us, too, which is greatly appreciated! The three littles are so small, they can go into the same carrier together. Being together will probably help keep them calmer, too. Four carriers in the truck will be much easier to arrange than six! Especially since I want to refill a couple of water jugs while I’m in town.

This evening, before the light was gone, I got my mother’s angel statue set up by the trail cam, facing the gate. I hope I’ve secured it to the block it’s on well enough. It’s rather top heavy. Ideally, it would be secured to a post hidden behind it. Maybe with something pretty, or at least a neutral colour to match the neutral colour of the statue, around her waist so it looks like it’s supposed to be there. When I’m able to, I’ll drag out some larger rocks to set around the bottom to hide the block it’s on for now. Eventually, the rocks will form the walls of a slightly raised flower bed around the base of the angel.

I’m even thinking of moving my mother’s Mary statue to be part of the display. It’s currently mostly hidden by the mock orange beside the laundry platform. Unlike the angel, though, this statue is concrete. It weighs anywhere from 80-100 pounds. No chance of that one blowing away in the wind!

This will be a longer term work in progress. It’s going to involve a lot of digging and the hauling of a lot of heavy rocks! For now, the main priority is to make sure the angel doesn’t get blown over. Especially now that we know how easily it breaks!

I haven’t told my brother that I’ve set it up, yet. I am pretty sure he’ll be coming out this weekend again. He still has plenty to do with his own stuff, but our motion sensor light over the door has stopped working. We thought it just needed a new bulb and tested it by turning it on manually, but it still didn’t work. I think he intends to replace it completely, since he asked me to send him pictures of it in daylight, after I sent him a video of the light occasionally flashing like a strobe light.

In the end, even though I didn’t get stuff done outside because it was so wet, I did manage to have a productive garden related day!

I’m really chafing about not getting those beds ready faster, though! 😄😄

The Re-Farmer

Victory, fixing an angel, wind damage, and finally done!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I’d say I did have a productive day today, though not quite how I originally planned.

Being a warmer day, I was going to head outside to work in the garden earlier, but with my telephone appointment from the sports injury clinic in the afternoon, I decided I didn’t want to be working in the dirt before handling the phone.

So I worked with epoxy, instead.

My mother had an angel statue in her apartment for many years. It’s meant to be outdoors in a yard or garden, but she kept it in her living room. It’s about three and a half feet tall and, I’ve determined today, made of fiberglass.

My mother has been trying to get us to take things or claim things of hers for when she “goes up up”, and she decided the angel should go here to the farm. My brother and I decided that it will be set up by the gate, for our vandal to see the next time he gets all creepy for the cameras again. My mother loved that idea!

As we were taking it from her place, though, my brother discovered one of the wings was cracked. We didn’t want water to get in, so we wanted to use some epoxy on it to seal it up, first.

I decided I would do this today, so that we could get it outside by the weekend. We already have a spot for it, with a chunk of old side walk block for it to stand on. I just have to figure out how to secure it, or the angel will go flying in the wind!

I had picked up some clear epoxy for it. When my brother came out this past weekend, he brought me some clear epoxy for it, too – the exact same stuff that I’d picked up! So we have extra now. 😁

The type I got has a plunger that squeezes out both the resin and hardener in equal amounts at the same time, which made things easy. I mixed a bit up and applied it to the crack. There’s no way to clamp such an odd shape, though, so I had to try and press the edges of the crack together with my hands while the epoxy set.

Which is when the entire wing broke off.

!!!

So now I had to figure out how to set the angel so I could use gravity to help me hold the wing in place, so I could epoxy the whole thing together. At least we could see that no water would get into the body of the angel.

As I tried setting the angel flat on the floor, I heard another cracking noise.

The angel is holding a bird in its hands. I just broke a wing tip off.

*sigh*

I was able to lean the angel against a shelf, applied the epoxy to the wing and had to stand there and hold it in place for at least 5 minutes, which is what the packaging says is the set time. It was probably closer to 10 minutes before I felt I could let it be and could go do something else for awhile.

While I was standing there, holding the wing in place, I could see on the other wing why it broke off so easily. The wings were added onto the angel separately, and I could see a seam where the wing joined the body.

You can see on the second picture, how it looked before I finally dared straighten the angel back up again. Then I mixed up a bit more epoxy, and attached the broken wing tip onto the bird. I had to sit there and hold it in place, too. This time, I remembered to use the timer on my phone. After 5 minutes, I moved away to start putting away the epoxy syringe into its packaging when I heard a clunk. The wing tip fell off! So I held it for another 10 minutes. It seems to be holding fine, now.

When it gets set out, I’ll probably just find a way to tie it down to the concrete base to keep it from blowing away, for now. Eventually, I will make a little flower garden around it. Since that area is lower and tends to flood in the spring, I am thinking to dig out some of the sod in the lower area, where I can see someone started to make a ditch at some point, and use that as the base to build up soil around the agnel. I am thinking of bringing rocks to frame the flower bed. Digging up sod from nearby will create a deeper, mini-pond like area for the spring run off to collect in, and maybe I won’t be slogging through water when switching out the trail came for a change!

That is for the future, though. The important thing is so make sure the wind won’t carry the angel away!

Like it tried to do with this tree I noticed while doing my evening rounds today.

We never heard it go down, but it clearly came down during the recent high winds. You can see the difference in the wood from the freshly fallen tree and one that fell many years ago.

This tree is one of the ones I wanted to harvest for raised bed walls. It’s hung up on other trees, but pretty low to the ground, so I should be able to harvest it to use in the garden, still.

Anyhow…

After I got the angel done, I basically just stayed indoors until I got my call. The doctor was right on time, too! It was a very quick call. When the doctor asked how I was doing, I was able to give him a glowing report on what a huge difference the injection made for my hip. From the sound of his voice, I don’t think he gets such an enthusiastic response very often! 😄 In the end, all he had to do was tell me to get back to them should I have issues again in the future, and we were done.

When it was time to head outside, my daughter came out with me to help put away the things I organized last night. I fed the cats first, and she took advantage of that to try and pet as many kittens as possible. There are a few that are starting to allow touches, if not outright pets.

There was, however, a major victory.

She was able to pick up and cuddle Smokey!

Smokey was purring and snuggling and enjoying every minute of it!

Oh, she is going to make someone very happy when she gets adopted out!

Just a few more days, and she’ll be off to the rescue with her brother, along with four others, for fostering as they get prepped for adoption. She and her brother, plus one other cat, are large enough for spays and neuters. The three littles we’ll be snagging will need to grow bigger before they are ready.

Once my daughter sadly put Smokey down, she went ahead of me to the old garden shed to make some space in it, and get the rolling seat in, first. From there, I started bring stuff over for her to put away in an organized fashion. She’s very good and Tetrising things!

Once everything was put away, I wanted to finally finish off the garden bed I’ve been working on for way too long now! Between being pulled away to other things, and the weather, it’s been very slow going even without the issues with roots.

It is, however, now finished!

I had so little left to do, but there were so many tree roots in there! I can’t believe how bad it was! No wonder the peas and carrots didn’t do as well as they could have. It wasn’t just drought conditions! I’m amazed they survived at all, with so many roots choking them out.

Once the bed was leveled out some more – the back of a fan rack is great for that – I brought out the plastic that was used to cover the winter squash, folded in half, so the big hole was not an issue, and set that over the bed, to protect it from cats until I can winter sow into it. Even while I was working on it, not only was I finding “presents” the cats had left, but when I stepped away to do things, like get the loppers to cut the larger roots, I came back to find fresh presents in the soil! Grommet (you can see him in the second photo) was particularly interested in what I was doing and, at one point, was about to use the spot I was working on, like I’d dug it out just for him to use as a litter box, while I was right there, picking out roots, weeds and rocks!

What a cheeky bugger!

That done, it was time to head inside for sustenance and hydration that my daughter prepared for me. I didn’t head out again as, by the time I was done, it was getting too dark.

Meanwhile, I’ve heard back from the company about our main entry door replacement. The door was delayed during the pre-painting process, but it will arrive tomorrow afternoon (Thursday). The guy was working on booking the installers, but it’s expected to rain on Friday, so he’s hoping they can come in on Saturday.

*sigh*

I’m looking at the forecast now. It has changed, of course. We are now expecting to get rain starting tomorrow afternoon, continuing off and on through Friday.

Which means that if I’m going to get more beds cleaned up and ready for winter sowing, I’d better be getting out there much earlier tomorrow!

Hopefully, the remaining beds won’t be as ridiculously full of roots like this one was, and they will go faster! There are four beds left to do in the main garden area – these are the 18′ long ones, so I want to get them done, first. There is a 9’x3′ bed, plus a 4′ square bed to do in the east garden area, and then the old kitchen garden needs to be done. Once the main garden beds are done, the others should go a lot faster. Aside from being smaller beds, they shouldn’t have as many tree roots growing up into them!

Looking at the long range forecast, it does look like we’ll have the weather to get this done. Amazingly, it has changed from the possibility of snow in the last week of October (I can’t believe the month is half gone already!), to warmer temperatures, and even a day that’s forecast to hit a high of 20C/68F! Then it’s supposed to rain during the last 5 days of October. That’s when we’ll be doing our city stock up trips, so that actually works out for me.

Of course, the forecast will change when I look at it again, tomorrow. I’ll take what I can get for pleasant weather, though. It’s not as pleasant as the one fall where we got our first frost in November, but still better than getting snow storms, like some have gotten up north already, but I’ll take what I can get!

Little by little, it’s getting done.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: winter squash and garden clean up

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

When I was doing my morning rounds, everything was still covered in frost, as we dropped below freezing last night.

I noticed the cover on the winter squash, which I haven’t lifted for awhile now, looked rather different.

Yes, there was frost on the cover but, if you look at the next photo in the slide show above, much of that frost was coating the inside of the cover!

I waited until things warmed up after I’d run my errands today before taking the cover off to see. In the third photo, you can see that all the plants were killed by frost. The next few photos are of the winter squash that seemed to have survived the cold. Two Baked Potato and three Mashed Potato squash made up the littler harvest you can see in the last photo of the slideshow above. The little ones should still be okay to eat. I am curious if the largest one has mature seeds inside. These are not varieties that produce large squash, so that one might actually be the full mature size.

That done, I then started working on gathering up all the hoops and stakes and netting and protective collars. The plastic cover that was over the winter squash got folded up length wise – it has a hole in it but, folded in half lengthwise, it should still be useable – a couple of times before getting rolled up.

Folding a very long, damp sheet of plastic took quite a while! Thankfully, there wasn’t much wind, but what little breeze there was sure didn’t help!

The trellis netting and the stakes holding them got taken down. Finding a way to store the netting, which has 4″ squares, without getting it all tangled took some doing.

For the past while, I’ve been putting the material together by the tree stump bench near the old garden shed. Aside from what is still covering the garlic, I think I’ve been able to gather everything from all the garden beds. I’d already partially sorted and bundled some of it. Today, I worked on finishing off the organizing, bundling and collecting it all.

The first photo above is how the garden looked, after I took all the stuff down. The garlic bed will be done after I’ve winter sown something with it, then give it a thick mulch of leaves. Until then, the cover is needed to protect the bed from cats wanting to use is as a litter box!

The next photo is all my bundles of stakes, hoops, the hoop nets I can still use, and even the twisted up wire hoops. I’ve got my soaker hoses all rolled up. The garden hoses will be done soon, too, but they are still being used. Ties, clips, short stakes to hold the Pexx hoops in place, and even the pieces of pool noodle used to go over the support posts that had twine threated through them, when used to hold netting over a bed to keep the cats out. I’m even hanging onto the water bottles that were set on the tops of stakes to rattle in the wind and hopefully startle deer away. I’ve got a bundle of 8 metal posts I found at the dollar store in there, too. Four of them had been used to support a trellis for the melons that they never grew big enough to grow up on. The other four were ones I found more recently and have not been used yet.

In the future, I intend to get more of the tallest, plain metal stakes, but I also really liked the taller tomato cage sets. The sets are three posts with connectors. The shorter ones came with two connectors per post, the taller ones with three connectors per post. The same connectors can fit both lengths of posts. I have two sets of the larger ones currently around the plum tree, supporting chicken wire, to keep the deer from eating it. I have shorter sets around the gooseberry bush and apple tree. I used several sets of the taller ones to make a deer barrier in front of the pea trellis. I can see being able to use them in a lot of other ways, too. They are surprisingly sturdy for a dollar store purchase, and I plan on getting more in the future.

The last picture has the collection of protective collars on t-posts, to keep them from blowing away. The round wire tomato cages that were used for the pepper and eggplant are all stacked up, with a large plastic bottle covering the sharp points. The water bottles used to help keep the frost at bay under covers are hanging off a smaller stake set into the wire cages to hold it up. The water bottles with their bottoms cut off that were used to deep water the summer squash are stored on there, too. There’s a couple or rolls of the black netting, plus a couple of roles of wire mesh, as well, plus the rest of the T-posts.

Now that I have all these sorted out, I need to figure out how to store them. Some can fit in the old garden shed, but the rolling garden seat needs to fit in there, too. I’ve got more stuff to store than last winter, plus there are the hoses and the garlic bed’s hoops and cover to add to the pile, and it won’t all fit in there. That shed is in serious need of replacing, too. Lots of rotten spots in the walls and roof that are slowly getting worse. In the last photo, you can see part of it. The door is a simple piece of plywood, and it’s comping apart in layers from weathering!

I’ll figure it out.

The next couple of days are supposed to be warmer. Friday is supposed to be the warmest day, but it’s also supposed to be raining off and on all day. If the long range forecast is at all accurate, aside from the one rainy day, we should have about a week and a half of decent, if chilly, weather to finish preparing garden beds and getting the winter sowing done. That’s the priority. After that, I can work on finishing the wall on that garden bed in the old kitchen garden that I’ve decided to do slightly differently. It would be nice to finally get that bed finished!! I can’t believe how long it’s been taking to get it done. That’s what happens when a job gets worked on piecemeal. 🫤

So while I didn’t get any progress on preparing beds for winter, I did actually get a lot done. By the time I was done with all the sorting and bundling for storage, it was getting pretty darn cold out there (we’d already passed our high of 8C/46F by the time I started). I’m hoping to get an earlier start tomorrow, partly because I have an afternoon telephone appointment with the sports injury clinic about my hip. Not only is it expected to be warmer tomorrow, but we’re supposed to stay at our high of 11C/51F for about 6 hours, rather than the eye blink of time we were at our high today! We’ll be dropping down to 8C/46F again by Saturday, then warming up a bit again. I will be delivering cats on Saturday, anyhow, so that works out!

All in all, I’d call it a productive day.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: garlic is in!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Finally!

Last night, we apparently dropped to 2C/36F. There were no frost warnings. Yet, when I headed out to do the morning cat feeding and rounds, there was frost everywhere, not just in the shady areas.

Which meant we had to wait until it warmed up a bit before we could start on the garlic. I had limited time, as I needed to go to my mother’s today and would be there for a while, so my younger daughter came out to give me a hand.

The bed that was ready for the garlic has been covered in plastic for some time, so the first thing we had to do was unroll it. Then, while my daughter broke up garlic bulbs, selecting the biggest cloves and setting the smaller ones aside for the kitchen, I marked off three rows for the garlic.

The twine and stakes will stay in place until after I winter sow something in between the rows.

In the second photo, we laid out the cloves where they would be planted, more or less. We ran out before filling the bed, so I went in to get more of the biggest bulbs from our stock.

Sir Robin was helping.

Breaking the bulbs apart was surprising difficult. Hard neck garlic and be that way sometimes. We also found that there were very few small cloves! We were more selective than usual – in the past, I would plant every single clove unless they were super tiny. We are now at a point where we can be fussy about it, so the kitchen got quite a few decent sized cloves!

I forgot to take a photo of the all the cloves in place, so the next photo is after we started burying them.

Grommet and Havarti “helped”.

We were pushing off the cats so constantly, it was clear we would need to give the bed extra protection. Normally, I would mulch it heavily with leaves right away, but I will do that after the winter sowing is done, some time in the next week or so. Until then, that’s a lot of soft, fluffy soil that cats would just love to dig in!

Well, we did just take off that plastic cover, so we decided to use it again.

I got some hoops from the pile of stuff being set aside and organizes for winter storage while my daughter gave the bed a heavy watering. The soil was still damp, but more water is good at this point. We do want the garlic to actually start growing a bit, before the ground freezes.

Once the watering was done and the hoops were in place, pushed down far enough that the 5′ width of the plastic could cover it with enough slack on the sides to be secured, a length of twine was run across the tops and pinned snug at each end. The hoops and the pinned end of the twine was kept on the inside of the stakes marking the rows, so the plastic could be pulled down in front of them. Then we unrolled the plastic in the path next to the bed and simply lifted it over.

So glad my daughter was able to help with that!

The excess plastic at each end was twisted to close up the opening under the hoop at one end, then weighted down with bricks. Once one end was secured, I pulled the sheet as snug as I could, then did the same thing at the opposite end. Once that was done, I could send my daughter in. She was caning it again today, and her back was really killing her by the end of it. I used the boards that had kept the plastic from blowing way earlier to secure the sides and added bricks and rocks as weights to hold them in place, which you can see in the last photo of the above slide show.

There was quite a bit of soil and debris stuck to the damp plastic, so I hosed it off before calling it done. I got inside with a whole half hour left to clean up, change and head to my mother’s!

I hope the garlic will be protected enough, but also that it won’t get too warm under there. We’re dropping to 5C/41F tonight, but tomorrow is supposed to have a high of 17C/63F, with a low of 11C/52F, then Sunday is supposed to have a high of 19C/66F. It can get pretty hot in those plastic covered rows even at those temperatures! The temperatures are supposed to drop right down again after that, including overnight lows below freezing.

When the time comes to mulch the bed for the winter, I will be focusing on a thick mulch along the sides of the bed as well as the top. Even though the bed is raised only a few inches, the outer rows could potentially get hit with winter freezing quite a bit more than the middle. In one of our first few years growing garlic, I planted in the low raised beds in the east year. One bed didn’t survive the winter, except for a handful of cloves, because it froze through the side walls. The other had mostly bulbs in the inner rows, while the other garlic planted closest to the walls didn’t make it.

Live and learn!

I’m quite happy that we finally got the garlic for next year planted. There has been so many last minute delays!

I won’t be able to get much, if anything, done in the garden tomorrow, though. I’ll be doing a dump run, then I need to go to town to pick up some prescription refills and do a bit of shopping before Thanksgiving. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to cleaning up that bed so full of tree roots, then get started on the other beds that need to be prepped for winter sowing.

I wonder how full of tree roots the other beds will turn out to be!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: in before the cold

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

It was still raining, off and on, while I was doing my evening rounds. Today, that included getting a meter reading.

I had help.

Gouda in particular was following me the whole time, mostly trying to rub against my feed while I walked and trying to trip me up!

Even from a distance, I could see those mushrooms in the wood chip pile are getting much bigger.

Well… two of them are.

The third one in the group looks like something stepped on it, and the fourth I found off to the side doesn’t seem to be getting any bigger. I wonder what kind they are?

We are expected to drop to 3C/37F tonight. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to hit 0C/32F, then 2C/36F the night after, before things are supposed to warm up a little bit overnight. The winter squash are covered and should be okay, but I decided not to bother trying to cover the rest. Instead, I did a harvest.

There is our single White Scallop squash that I’ve been allowing to get bigger. No chance it would get big enough and mature enough for viable seeds, but it is at an edible stage right now.

The peppers and Turkish Orange eggplant, on the other hand, are now set up in the living room to ripen. We’ve had a red pepper and an orange one so far. There are also supposed to be yellow ones in there. The one that’s darkening if from a plant we got a red pepper from. I’m curious to see if the lighter green ones will turn yellow, or if they’re just really immature.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a mix of sun and cloud, with a high of 11C/51F. The day after is supposed to reach a high of 8C/46F. After that, we’re supposed to have highs above 15C/59F. The lows are supposed to be all over the place, but still below 10C/50F. It’s also supposed to be sunny until Sunday, when we’re currently expecting to get rain. Of course, the forecast will be changing from day to day, but it does look like we’ll be able to get more progress in the garden, getting the garlic in, and preparing beds for winter sowing. Normally, I’d say we have a good window of pleasant weather to get that done but, considering how many huge roots I’m finding in the main garden beds I’m prepping, it’s likely to take quite a bit longer than it should!

Ah, well.

Little by little, it’ll get done!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: winter squash and finally some buds! Also, a general update

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

It was still comfortably cooler when I did my rounds this morning, but we were set to have a hotter day again. And by “hotter” I mean a high of 23C/73F (we actually hit 24C/75F) and sunny. It was strange to be walking around the yard and hearing what sounded like the patter of rain, only to realize it was the sound of leaves falling!

I was very happy to finally see our very first Cosmos flower buds!

In the next picture, you can see the one group of asters is opening up nicely. I’m glad they survived the frosts we got at the start of the month, because – as with pretty much everything else but the winter sown beds – they are about a month or more behind.

In the last picture, you can see the remains of one of the peas I found a couple of days ago. *sigh* Of course the deer would eat the biggest one, too. There’s just the tiniest remains of a stem poking through the mulch, and a tiny branch that got left behind.

With today being so much warmer, I made sure to move the plastic off the winter squash. While condensation under the plastic showed that there was still moisture under there, they did need a very thorough watering. In the process, I found a few new female flowers and hand pollinated them.

I uncovered them in the morning, but these pictures were taking in the early evening.

This first group of photos is of the Baked Potato squash.

There were the two already developing ones, plus a couple to hand pollinate.

Then there was the Mashed Potato squash.

That group had a couple of small, older squash, plus some smaller ones that I’m not sure will make it, and finally one that I could hand pollinate.

There is nothing with the Sunshine squash. Those seem to be mostly dead. The transplanted zucchini seem to be making it, but are still very small.

I don’t know what the chances are of these surviving long enough to develop before the hard frosts come, but as long as they are covered when it gets cooler, they at least have a chance!

Then, finally, there is a pepper I found to pick.

Not quite ripe, but as soon as I lifted it to see, the stem broke off, so inside it went! It will continue to ripen indoors.

In other things, I headed out this afternoon to meet someone for a kibble donation. She’d suggested meeting at an intersection on the highway. I got there a little bit last. First, because I had to pull over while going through my mother’s town to check my phone. I kept getting notifications. One of them was to let me know that home care called and wanted to talk about my mother. Not the scheduler, but a coordinator covering for our usual coordinator. I asked my daughter to send me the number, then continued on my way. I caught up to a car that was driving a bit slower. Then it slowed down more, started signaling a left turn, started breaking…

Then kept on going.

They did this every mile for the next five or so miles. It wasn’t until we were in the last mile before the highway that the vehicle started signaling a right turn. I thought at the stop side ahead, but nope. They pulled over completely!

I’d say someone was very lost!

Meanwhile, I pulled over just short of the stop sign myself, where the woman I was to meet was already waiting with a large bag of kibble for us. It’ll be enough to last us until CPP Disability comes in, and I’ll be able to go to the city for a stock up shop. That will be after dropping the truck off for the insurance claim repairs, so I will be doing the shopping in a courtesy vehicle.

I’ll have to make sure to transfer over some of our hard sided insulated and non insulated grocery bags when I switch vehicles.

After picking up the kibble, I called the home care coordinator. It went straight to voice mail, so I left a message, giving my cell phone number, but adding that I would be driving and it would be a while before I could answer.

My next stop was at the pharmacy. Since I was heading out anyhow, I was able to pick up some prescription refills for my daughter. It was getting close to 4pm when I got there, and the home care office closes at 4, so I tried the number again as soon as I parked.

The woman had a bit of a laugh when she answered and it was me. She had just finished listening to my message!

It turned out to be about my mother’s inhaler. It’s out. There’s still two in the lock box, but they are a different type, so home care isn’t allowed to use them. We had a fairly long talk about that. I explained that I didn’t know why my mother was still on an inhaler, as it was a test to see if they helped with her breathing, and they’ve made no difference, confirming my mother does not have asthma. Plus, my mother went ballistic when I picked up her last refill and she saw how much it cost. She can afford it, but she expected it to be “free”. She still doesn’t understand that she has the provincial insurance or what a deductible is. I don’t know of this type of inhaler is even covered, though.

What I’ll be doing is calling my mother’s doctor’s office tomorrow, and trying to get a telephone appointment with her to talk about it. Then the doctor can send instructions to home care, either saying they can use the other type, or that my mother doesn’t need to use an inhaler anymore. Which is what I am hoping for.

We spoke about other things involving my mother as well. I told her about the person that’s coming to see my mother tomorrow for a mental health assessment. We talked about my mother’s declining mobility and increased pain. I mentioned that my mother should not be living independently anymore. She was really surprised when I mentioned my mother actually wants to go to a nursing him. Not being familiar with my mother’s file, she didn’t know that it’s been over a year since the paneling process has been started.

The main thing is that I wanted to stress how much more difficult my mother has been finding it to just get in and out of a chair, never mind walking around her apartment, or standing to cook for herself. Meals on Wheels is just three days a week.

We’ll see how that goes. At this point, my mother isn’t even on any waiting lists, which frustrates me to no end.

After that, didn’t take long to get the prescriptions and then head for home.

Our overnight low is supposed to be 13C/55F, so I will be leaving the winter squash uncovered for the night. Tomorrow is supposed to be ever so slightly cooler. If the forecast over the next few days is accurate, I should be able to leave them uncovered for three more days, and two more nights. We’re still supposed to be warm during the days, but overnight temps are looking to drop below 10C/50F more most nights after that. Around the middle of October, we’re supposed to get our first days with a mix or rain and snow, while overnight temperatures are supposed to drop below freezing before then. Of course, long range forecasts can change quite dramatically, so who knows.

It’s time to get the mostly done beds cleaned up and ready for winter sowing. We’ve got lots of leaves available to use for mulch right now, and I’d better start collecting them before they are blown away entirely.

I’m really looking forward to a more planned out winter sowing! We’ll need to prepare a bed to plant garlic in, too. None of those will go into the ground for at least a couple of weeks for the garlic, and probably longer for the direct sowing. I don’t want any of the seeds to germinate before the ground freezes.

It’s been slow going, but it’s getting done.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: eggplant and seed harvest

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Well, I went and did it. I harvested some of the Turkish Orange Eggplant, even though I really have no idea if they’re ripe or not.

I harvested the ones with the most orange colour, and there are still quite a few green and mostly green ones on the plants. From what I found, looking it up last night, these should be ripe. They are still firm, but not hard. One still has green on it I couldn’t see while I was pushing through the leaves with my pruner to cut the stem but, according to what I found last night, it should continue to ripen if kept at room temperature.

With the eggplant, and in the next picture, is a cluster of carrot seeds. I’m pretty sure these are Uzbek Golden carrot seeds, as the only other carrots winter sown in this bed were some old, pelleted Napoli seeds I had. Very few of those germinated. When I grew them before, none bolted to seed. Carrots normally go to seed in their second year, not their first, but every year we’ve grown Uzbek Golden carrots, there’s been at least one that went to seed early. At this point, there is just the one seed cluster that has fully dried off, and I didn’t want to be losing seeds into the garden bed. We have self sown carrots where we grew them last year. I’d wanted to collect seeds from them but, when I thought they were ready to collect, none of the seeds seemed to have developed. That would most likely be a sign of poor pollination. Clearly, some viable seeds did develop and fall to the ground, at least at one plant. The self seeded carrots are growing only in one area, not all the areas where there had been bolted carrots.

Amazingly, the “dead” pumpkin vines are still blooming.

That dead leaf is from the same vine as the flower. This heat we’ve been having has given a surprising boost to things I thought for sure were killed off!

The asters are soooo close to blooming!

I honestly thought the Cosmos would bloom first, as they grew so big so much faster. I don’t see any potential flower buds on them at all! Including the ones that do not have frost damage on them. They should have finished blooming by now, but there’s nothing. Very strange.

Today is turning out to be another hot one. We exceeded the forecast and hit 27C/81F, with the humidex at 28C/82F. As I write this, we’re at 26C/79F, with the humidex at 29C/84F. Currently, we have gusts of high winds and are under a severe thunderstorm watch. Parts of the province are under tornado warnings. Looking at the weather radar, it seems the system won’t hit our area for another three hours.

The high winds limit what I can do outside. From where I’m sitting as I write this, I can see a big maple and a corner of the spruce grove. It’s bright and sunny, with some clouds right now, but the wind comes and goes. Sometimes I’ll look up and there doesn’t seem to be any wind at all. Moments later I’ll look up because suddenly, the maple is being whipped around like crazy. This maple is HUGE and needs to have large branches that are bigger than some trees removed, before they break. Where they join at the main trunk is showing rot and, to be honest, I’m amazed one branch in particular hasn’t come down yet. I’ve removed parts of it that I could access, which may have taken off enough weight to help. Since then, things have grown back to the point that we have to duck under the branches when mowing the lawn under part of it. I might be able to get some of it down with the extended pole pruning saw, but most of it is simply too thick. Ideally, we’d have a lift or scaffolding (the scaffolding we have is meant for indoors, so it’s pretty short) and take it down in sections with a chain saw. My brother has all sorts of ladders that would allow us to reach, but the only thing there would be to secure a ladder to is other sections of the branch that needs to come down. Sections that would lift as weight was removed, potentially enough to lift a ladder secured to it right off the ground. Even branches this thick have remarkable bounce to them.

Ah, well. We’ll figure it out.

Unless it finally comes down in these high winds. At which point, it would be a pretty huge clean up job!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: first pepper, sunflowers and almost asters

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

While doing my morning rounds, I just had to try for a picture of one of the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers.

This one is the tallest of the sunflowers, looking close to 7′ tall, taking into account that it’s in a low raised bed. It’s also one of several with seed heads that are working on opening up, late in the season as it is.

I have been checking on the asters. It’s so late in the year, but a few of them are so close to blooming!

Now, as long as I can keep critters like Sir Robin (visible in the second picture) from rolling over them or something, I still have a chance to collect seeds.

Remarkably, I actually had a harvest this morning!

Yes, the yellow bush beans are still producing. This is also the most zucchini I’ve picked at once, all year. I also finally picked our single ripe Sweetie Snack Mix pepper – which had a surprise little green pepper growing out of its top!

I am thinking it’s time to pick the Turkish Orange eggplant. I have confirmed that they do continue to ripen after being picked. In fact, I found out a whole bunch of information on harvesting them.

Today, we hit 26C/79F, which was warmer than forecast. It’s past 6:30pm as I write this, and it’s finally starting to cool down. I’m planning to head out to the garden to water what’s left, before things get too dark. Looking at the 10 day forecast, while we’re expected to cool down soon, it won’t be anything severe, so I should still not need to cover the garden beds. We’ll see as the forecast changes whether we’ll need to cover the winter squash beds, at least for the night.

I’m rather surprised by how the garden – parts of it, at least – is still chugging along.

The Re-Farmer