This is so much later than in past years, so we’ll see how it works out. We’re doing things a lot different this year!
While we are going to deliberately aim to have fewer transplants there year, I did plant extra seeds, just in case some don’t germinate. Of course, pre-germinating the larger seeds will make it easier to know if there are any problems with germination. With the eggplant, I used a 10 cell seed starting tray from last year and just filled it. Each cell has two seeds in it, though I think the very last seed I planted was actually two stuck together. Way more than we need, but we’ll see what the germination rate turns out to be.
I don’t plan to start any other seeds until the first week of April. Hopefully, some of the winter squash will have started to sprout before then, and can be planted. I am a bit concerned about the heat mat, though. It didn’t feel any warmer, by the time I left. I need to check it again later. It might not be working!
Okay, I just dashed down to the basement (… well… “dash” may be a strong word to use for me. 🤣) and checked, and yes, the heat mat IS working! I hope it’s got enough heat. The basement seems to stay at about 10C consistently right now.
This is way different than using the big aquarium as a greenhouse!
Well, we shall see how it works out. Worse comes to worse, I will sacrifice the heater in my bedroom!
While I was out and about today, I found myself standing in line at the grocery store, right near a seed display. So, of course, I went looking.
Yeah. I bought more seeds.
In going through my seeds, I was thinking of what slicing tomato to grow this year. I had decided on doing the Spoon tomatoes, and will make a point of saving seeds from those, but for the family, I wanted a slicing tomato and a snacking tomato. I saw the two varieties of black tomato seeds we grew a couple of years back, and somehow completely missed the packet of Forme de Couer tomatoes (I think it was stuck to the back of another seed packet) that we grew last year. The black tomatoes took such a long time to mature, I figured it was worth getting these to try.
Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes, which need only 40-59 days to harvest, after transplanting outdoors. In the next photo, you can read that this variety was developed in Alberta specifically for our prairie climate, is a determinate tomato and does not need staking.
The “It grows here” guarantee is a nice touch.
Well worth the try. Hopefully, it will even taste good.
After I finished doing my evening rounds early and tending to the new mama in the sun room, I got my daughter to help me take some things to the basement, then we went through the packets of tomato seeds together, so she could help choose one more variety.
We ended up with two.
For a snacking tomato, I’ll start some Chocolate Cherry tomatoes. My daughter, however, spotted the packet of Black Beauty tomato seeds. While these took forever to ripen, and had a tendency to split like no other tomato we’ve grown, she says they were the most delicious tomatoes we’ve grown to date.
So we will have two types of slicing tomatoes. One short season variety and one long season. Depending on how things work out, the Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes should be done and harvested just in time for the Black Beauties to start ripening.
That makes four varieties of tomatoes we will be growing this year, and I will make sure to NOT start too many seeds! With the different places we’ve tried tomatoes before, I have a better idea of where I will transplant these. Most definitely not in the blocks along the chain link fence, for starters! I figure I will shoot for four transplants of each variety. That should be enough for out needs, since we will not be freezing or canning any tomatoes we grow this year.
Either tonight or tomorrow, I will head back into the dungeon and set some seeds up to pre-germinate. The tomatoes will wait until the first week of April, but there are other things I can start now.
I have decided to go ahead and try the luffa again, after all. They will get transplanted into large pots and be kept in the new portable greenhouse we got for the entire growing season.
I will also start pre-germinating seeds for winter squash, but I think I’ll sow the Turkish eggplant right away into seed starting mix, rather than pre-germinate them. I don’t feel like pre-germinating smaller seeds. I will pre-germinate the melon seeds, but not until April.
I didn’t expect to be recording another seed haul video quite so soon! Our MI Gardener order came in today, though, so here we are.
I actually ordered these a full 10 days before the seed order that came in yesterday. It does take a while when things have to cross the border!
After this, I have just one more seed order to come in, with just two seed packets (the rest of the order are trees and bushes that will be shipped later; probably in May). One of those seed packets are a mix of mini bell peppers that I want to try, and I plan to start those indoors, even though they are short season peppers.
So, from among the seeds that came in today, I plan to start the eggplant, honeydew melon and possibly the luffa. If I’m going to do the luffa, I need to start those right away. For direct sowing, I will have the red noodle beans and sugar snap peas, with the carrots and spinach as back up seeds if our winter sowing experiment fails, while the sugar beets will be for next year.
From the seeds that came in yesterday, the Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon will be started indoors. I’m still debating whether to try the Arikara squash this year or next year. I’m leaning towards next year, since we will have three varieties of winter squash to try this year. For direct sowing, we have the super sugar snap peas, plus the white scallop squash as back up seeds, if the winter sowing fails, and the Yukon Chief corn is for next year.
When the Veseys seed order comes in, we will have the mini bell peppers to start indoors.
Aside from that, I will be starting my last Spoon tomato seeds indoors, a cherry or grape tomato, plus a slicing tomato. I will let the family choose which they would like. No paste tomatoes this year, since we still have so many buried in the freezer. I will also make some decisions on what herbs will be started indoors. There’s the other variety of watermelon I plan to start, and possibly one cantaloupe type melon.
I’ll have to be careful of how many things I start indoors, since we will have limited space – if the winter sowing experiment works – and I have other direct sowing things I want to grow. Last year, we had such high germination rates on the winter squash, melons and tomatoes that, by the time they were all transplanted, there wasn’t much room left to direct sow anything! So I will need to keep that in mind when I decide how many seeds to start from each. Plus, we need to keep space open for potatoes, and I’d like to plant more this year than we did last year. Seed potatoes are starting to show up in the stores, so I will likely pick them up sooner rather than later, and store them in the root cellar until it’s time to plant.
A lot of the direct sowing decisions will depend on just how well the winter sowing experiment did, and we won’t know that until probably mid May, or even early June!
Today, started bringing seed starting supplies to the basement, and went through some of my seed inventory for potential seed starts.
In past years, I would have had all sorts of seeds already started. Things have changed a lot with our winter sowing experiment. We have quite a variety of seeds already planted, taking up quite a few beds, which I need to plan around. I’m not going to assume we will have any new beds ready to plant in for this year, and will just focus on what we have ready right now.
With that in mind, here is a video I took while going through my bin of seeds that would be started indoors.
I won’t actually start seeds indoors until at least a week from right now, with some things to be started in April. That should give enough time for my seed orders to come in. Aside from a few varieties of winter squash, herbs and tomatoes I want to start, we will have the new varieties of eggplant, mini bell peppers and a honeydew melon I want to try this year. This time, I will not start as many seeds of each for transplanting this year! Last year, I had not expected to have 100% or near 100% germination rates on so many seeds. We had so many things to transplant, there wasn’t much space left for direct sowing.
I have decided I will go to a Walmart tomorrow to pick up a few things, and will pick up some seed starting mix while I am at it.
I forgot that the aquarium light with the timer on it has a bulb that needs to be replaced; this fixture holds two bulbs. For now, I have brought down the fixture with one larger bulb that came with our big tank. Meanwhile, I’ve placed an order from Veseys for a pair of 4 foot T5 bulbs. I’d had a hard time finding the right bulbs elsewhere and, when I did find them, they were shockingly expensive. Veseys had the best price I’d found, even taking into account the extra shipping cost for bulbs, but by the time I was ready to order them, the size I needed was sold out, and then I simply forgot about it. So those are now ordered and should be on their way soon.
The first day of spring is coming soon. I was planning to do our first “garden tour” video on that day, but I will be going to my mother’s. I might just do it tomorrow, before I head out, instead. We are supposed to have a steep temperature drop, from an expected high of 6C/43F on the first day of spring, to -10C/14F the day after. Things are going to be really slippery around the yard after all the melt! It’s already pretty treacherous in places, while I do my morning rounds.
Anyhow. I hope you enjoy the video. I used a new chest harness my husband got for me to hold the phone I was using to record video. While editing, I did find my voice was a LOT louder than typical when I record video, and had to adjust the audio volume down. When I had to sit down to continue recording, I was concerned things were too close to the camera, but I think it worked out okay, in the end. Please feel free to let me know what you think.
For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.
Some things managed to work out pretty well, even with our rough start in the garden!
The Original Plan
Corn
Corn is something we’ve tried to grow a few times. The first year, we grew several varieties with some being grown more as part of our long term plan to break up soil that had never been gardened before, and prepare the area for a future food forest. I’ve also been trying to grow kulli corn – a deep purple Peruvian variety – for a number of reasons, though we’ve found ourselves growing Montana Morado, instead. Some worked well, some didn’t.
With our garden size actually being reduced after a flood year, instead of expanding, this year we weren’t necessarily going to grow corn at all. We just didn’t have the space prepared for such a nitrogen hungry plant.
However, I had a couple of short season sweet corn varieties I wanted to try somewhere, so when I found myself with larger spaces between winter squash transplants in the second bed, I chose Yukon Chief, which had the shorter growing season: a mere 55 days!
Peppers
We have been trying different varieties of peppers to find the ones the family likes most. Personally, I can’t eat peppers, so I have to rely on their feedback for this. Last year, we had a mix of success and fail with peppers. This year, my older daughter requested one type of hot pepper, and we figured we should probably cut back on the number of varieties to try out this year. So far, no one has really found enough difference between the varieties of sweet peppers to really choose any one type over the other.
Eggplant
We’ve tried two varieties of eggplant before. The first we tried was Little Finger, which was grown in grow bags. They didn’t thrive, but we did have a few little ones we could harvest that we did enjoy. We later learned that nearby elm trees had roots invading the grow bags – a whole row of them all along the north end of the garden, near the self seeded elm and maple trees my mother allowed to grow after she transplanted the raspberries they’d started growing through.
We tried them again another year, but they fared even worse, growing in one of the concrete chimney block planters by the chain link fence. It wasn’t until this spring that I found the blocks were completely choked out by elm tree roots.
So this year, I wanted to try them again, in a completely different area!
The Classic eggplant was new to use last year. Only one seedling started indoors survived. It went into the wattle weave bed and the plant grew strong and healthy, though it was late in producing. In the end, we had one roughly palm sized eggplant to try, plus a couple smaller ones.
I wanted to try both again, this year. I was rather liking the idea of being able to grow enough eggplant to make baba ganoush, or cook nice big slices of them over an open fire.
How it went
Corn
I was really, really happy with this variety! Having something that matured so quickly was amazing!
Sure, I probably planted them too close together, but that didn’t seem to bother them too much.
They do not grow very large cobs, but the corn was so tasty, I could eat them raw!
There were two problems, though.
One was, high winds. After they got mostly flattened after a day of high winds, I did what I could to straighten them and support them, only for them to get flattened again from another direction.
The other was, racoons. I’d actually harvested all the corn – or thought I did – when I found I’d missed a few cobs. I decided to leave them to dry on the cob, so harvest seed at the end of the year. That never happened, because the racoons tore them apart and ate them.
*sigh*
Peppers
Wow, did we get peppers!
The hot peppers – Cheyenne – were started much earlier indoors. For the sweet peppers, I still had seeds for a collection of early varieties, plus a variety that did very well last year, and even a few seeds left from one I’d tried to grow a previous year.
I ended up planting a few of each, thinking the older seeds would have a lower germination rate.
Which was sort of true.
We ended up with quite a lot of the hot peppers. They went into a raised bed in the East yard, in between the two varieties of eggplant.
The sweet peppers all went into the high raised bed, later to be interplanted with shallots.
They all did really well! Especially the ones in the high raised bed. They got so full of peppers that got so big and heavy, I found myself having to add supports to some of them – and others actually broke their stems from the weight!
What they didn’t do was ripen much.
As with everything else this year, they were well behind. I did have some I could harvest, with the purple Dragonfly and Purple Beauty peppers ripening fastest, then some Sweet Chocolate but I ended up harvesting a whole lot of unripe peppers before they could be killed off by frost.
The good thing about peppers is, they keep ripening after they’ve been harvested.
I did end up with enough peppers ripening indoors that some could be cut up and frozen, while others got dehydrated. The family actually got tired of eating peppers, like they did with tomatoes!
The exception being the hot peppers.
My oldest daughter is the only one that can eat them, and even then, just small amounts. These aren’t even an exceptionally hot variety of pepper, either!
We did try dehydrating a bunch. We don’t have a dehydrator, and use the oven for that. Unfortunately, the peppers made it so that we could barely stay in the kitchen while they were dehydrating, because breathing the fumes caused our lungs to start burning!
Once they were dry, though, they went into a jar. They should be processed into a powder, but no one wants to do it and accidentally end up breaking powdered hot pepper.
There was a LOT of green hot peppers, though, and they ripened very well indoors.
What I ended up doing was stringing them, and they are now hanging in the cat free zone (the living room) above where the heat vent is, to dry. It’s a lot slower, but it doesn’t create fumes.
Eggplant
We ended up with quite a few surviving transplants this year, which was really nice. They went into a low raised bed with the hot peppers. For this bed, I covered it with cardboard and thick paper as a mulch, then cut openings to transplant through. I moved the box frame cover onto it, and set up sheets of plastic around it to create a sort of open greenhouse situation, since the eggplants and peppers are all heat loving plants.
The plastic ended up being torn off by high winds.
Later in the season, I was able to try again, using stronger plastic and running paracord both inside and outside the plastic to keep it in place, which you can see in the last photo in the slideshow below.
The plants themselves stagnated in growth for a while, until things dried up enough that I could mow some lawn. Once they got a nice grass clipping mulch on top of the cardboard and paper, they really started to grow and bloom.
Eggplants have such lovely flowers.
We were able to harvest some small eggplant towards the end of the season, before they all got harvested ahead of a killing frost.
The setbacks means they never got particularly big, but they were big enough to get a taste of them!
My conclusion, and thoughts for next year.
For the corn, I most definitely want to grow them again. While I am happy with the Yukon Chief, I want to try the other variety, next year. I can’t remember the name of it right now, but it matures in 65 days, I believe. Wherever we end up planting them, I want to make sure to have something set up to support the plants so they don’t get knocked over by high winds as they get bigger. I have a few ideas that would involve fence wire or something like that, set up horizontally, for the stalks to grow through.
I also want to find more kulli corn seeds to try again, but maybe not next year. We shall see. I might buy some seeds (if they’re not sold out again), just in case we end up with enough garden real estate available. If it doesn’t happen, though, I’m hoping the few Montana Morado seeds that got included in the mix along the chain link fence will survive the winter and grow. For the number of seeds in there, if they do survive, I expect to have to hand pollinate them. Then I will leave them on their stalks to dry, and save more seed for next year.
We’re still trying out different varieties of sweet corn. Once we figure out what we like that grows well here, we will want to dedicate a larger area of garden space to be able to grow enough that we can can or freeze some. For now, my single packet of I think only 50 seeds will be enough.
As long as we can keep the racoons out of them!
For the peppers, we won’t need to grow hot peppers again for a very long time! I don’t think we want to grow so many sweet peppers again, either. I’m debating, for next year, picking up a variety that grows smaller “snack size” peppers, instead, but I haven’t decided yet.
As for the eggplant, I’m happy with how they did, under the circumstances. I do want to grow them again. I probably won’t grow them next year, though. I want to save the garden real estate for staples, instead.
Given what a rough start we had this spring, all of these did way better than expected, so I am very happy.
The Re-Farmer 