solarization

Our 2025 Garden: temperatures, removing mulch and solarization

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Today was my day of rest, but I did get a few things done in the garden, since I won’t be home for most of the next two days.

The first thing I made sure to do was find a plastic to cover the end of the one bed where I’d run out.

I ended up using a dollar store shower curtain I’d got to potentially use around the eggplant and pepper bed last year, but ended up using the dining table protectors instead. That should help out with warming up the soil and, hopefully, kill off any Creeping Charlie and crab grass in there. I will probably use one of these two solarized beds to plant our potatoes.

I also removed most of the mulch from the wattle weave bed and had a pleasant surprise.

In the first image, you can see the wild strawberries (or whatever they are), which I was expecting. What I was NOT expecting, but hopeful for, you can see in the next image. That is thyme! It survived the winter!

In the next photo, you can see an overview of the long part of the bed. There’s a sort of lighter colour mass about half way down; those are the self seeded Chamomile. Hopefully, it dropped seeds and will come back again this year.

The very last photo is the thermometer in the covered bed. It looks cloudy because I took the photo through the plastic cover. It looks like it was about 18C/64F in there.

Looking around, I couldn’t see much of the green seedlings I uncovered while removing most of the mulch. I likely damaged them too much. There were a lot of seeds scattered in there, though, so I expect more to be coming up soon.

The temperature inside the portable greenhouse was a fair bit higher!

40C/104F! That would definitely start warming up the water in the heat sink I set up, though when I popped the cover off to check, it still seemed cold. That would be in comparison to the very warm temperatures I was standing in!

The next image, meanwhile, is a screen cap taken right after I got a photo of the thermometer, showing what the outside temperature was at. 5C/42F A 35 degree difference (Celsius)!

It should be interesting to see what the thermometer says in the morning, after the 0C/32F we’re supposed to drop to, tonight.

Oh, I also remembered to remove most of the mulch from the strawberry bed in the main garden area – and return the chicken wire over the top. It was quite frozen under there, and there’s no sign of the Albion Everbearing strawberries we have planted there.

The next time I should have time to do anything of note in the garden will be on Wednesday, and right now, the forecast for Wednesday is for a high of 14C/57F with a mix of sun and clouds. It should be a very good day to be working outside!

Meanwhile, I moved things around with the seed trays in the basement. I had the containers with pre-germinating seeds on top of the light fixture over the heat mat, but that light turns itself off, so what little heat it produces doesn’t last long. I thought I figured out how to reprogram the timer, but it seems to have not made any difference. It’s been a while, and there has been no sign of germination. They’re just too cold. So I ended up moving the trays with the chitting potatoes to the top shelf with the winter squash, under the shop light, then set up the second heat mat under aquarium light. So now the tray with the eggplants, peppers, tomatoes and luffa seeds is on one mat, and the three containers of melon seeds are on the other.

When I checked on them before shutting things down for the night, I was already seeing hints of radicals! They will be ready to be potted up by tomorrow or the day after!

Amazing how just a little bit of warmth makes such a huge difference!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: harvesting onions, and prepping half a bed

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Well, I harvested the onions this evening, and there turned out to be more than I expected! At least, more than I expected to have survived! 😄

The variety of yellow onion we tried this year is called Frontier, from Veseys. I’m actually impressed with how big they got, even though they were flattened and had their necks broken so early on!

The first photo in the above slideshow is all the onions from the bed shared with the summer squash, and all the onions I could find under and around the San Marzano tomatoes. I know for sure I’ve missed some in that bed! The tomatoes are quite dense, making it hard to see, but I still found quite a few.

I also harvested a few shallots. There are others I left, as they had not been flattened and are still growing.

In the second photo, you can see what I used to lay them out to cure this year. That’s a home made bed frame, and they’re laid out on metal mesh window screens we salvaged from the barn, years ago.

Some of them have enough stems on them that they can be braided, so those ones will get braided and hung up in the garage to finish curing. The ones that can’t be braided will be brought into the house to be used first.

That done, I had a mess to clean up.

In the first photo of the slideshow above, you can see that, even with a mulch, the weeds are taking over. The main concern being the Creeping Charlie at one end.

The first thing to do was remove the mulch. We won’t be able to use the grass clippings as mulch again, since so many roots and rhizomes are mixed in with it now.

In the next photo, the soil had been broken up – our soil tends to get very compacted – to be able to remover as many weeds, roots and rhizomes as I could.

Including elm tree roots. Yes, even after clearing those out in the spring, they are once again reaching that far away from the trees!

I had considered skipping the weeding, but I’m glad I didn’t. I shooed away a remarkable number of frogs that were hiding in there!

In the next photo, you can see the pile of stuff I cleared out. That will be for burning, not composting. The bed itself was tidied up and levelled.

Of course, while working on this, I found onions that got missed! You can see those in the next photo. They are now on the screens to cure.

The last photo shows the finished bed. Boards that had been used to frame the bed space while it was being shifted over in the spring are now holding down plastic for solarization. We’ve got some hot days coming up, and that should be enough to start cooking the soil and killing off any weeds, seeds and roots.

But no frogs. I made sure they all got a chance to hop away!

Unless the wind manages to blow the plastic away, boards and all, this will stay until spring. When the summer squash and shallots in the rest of the bed are cleaned up for the winter, I should be able to cover the rest of the bed, too.

I think I might pick up more of those dollar store dining table protectors. They’re not a particularly heavy duty vinyl, but they are stronger than the clear plastic garbage bags I’d used in the spring. They are also completely clear and transparent, rather than slightly opaque, like the plastic I used today, or the bags I used in the spring. I think the vinyl might help the soil become hotter and do a better job of cooking the weeds. If nothing else, we can see through it and can tell if actually doing the job, or if it’s acting like a greenhouse for the weeds, instead! 😁

Tonight, we’re expected to have an overnight low of 11C/52F. Tomorrow is supposed to be warmer than today, but the overnight low is supposed to drop to 9C/48F. After that, we’re supposed to get hot again. We’re now looking at a couple of days at 25C/77F, and lows of 15C/59F.

As for those temperatures cold enough for frost that the long range forecast was saying might happen within the first two weeks of October, that has changed again. The possible frost has been pushed back another week or so, though we are still expecting to get chilly nights.

I’m actually seeing possible snow on the last day of October – just in time for Halloween!

Who knows, though. The forecast will change again, soon enough! I just would like it to keep changing towards warmer nights for awhile. Since moving out here, we’ve had years when the first frost didn’t hit until November. I could do with a repeat of that!

It’s going to be interesting when I do my end of year analysis of how things went this year, as part of our planning out next year’s garden. This year has turned out completely different than how we originally planned! Having so many winter squash and melons to transplant made one huge difference. Shifting the beds to their permanent positions rather than building new ones was another big change. Then there was having to work around all that rain we had!

All things considered, I’m just happy to have as much as we do, this year!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: I got work done!

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I was able to get a few things done outside today, and I am so happy!

While waiting for the septic guy to arrive and replace the pill switch in our tank (yay! That’s done!), I took the time to remove the mulch in the old kitchen garden beds. At this point, the mulch is insulating the soil from the warmth instead of the cold, so it needs to come off.

I hope you can see the Instagram slideshow okay.

There is garlic planted in the tiny raised bed with its own cover, the long and narrow bed against the retaining wall, the short part of the L shaped wattle weave bed, and down the centre of the rectangular bed in the middle.

In front of the tiny raised bed is some walking onions. I’d planted bulbils for last year, but basically just left them be. They produced new bulbils and now both the onions from last year, and their bulbils, are starting to send out new shoots! I could plant the new bulbils somewhere, but the whole point of walking onions is that they plant themselves.

While uncovering the long section of the wattle weave bed, I found what looks like surviving thyme and strawberries! I wasn’t sure if they’d make it through the winter. It should be interesting to see if the chamomile self seeded or not.

These had a grass clipping mulch, which has just been set aside for now. We’ll use it again, after the ground is thawed an as we are able to plant things.

By the time this was done, it was coming up on 2pm, which is when the post office opens for the afternoon, so I headed out. Not only did I get the packages I was expecting, but the missing pieces from the shelf I got to make into a multilevel cat bed came in. A job for tonight will be to take care of that.

When I got home, the septic guy was here, so I stayed around the area as he went in and out from the tank to the basement, so make sure no cats got too curious about the open tank! That gave me the opportunity to move the mulch over the saffron crocuses we planted in the fall, and I got a real surprise, there!

They had already sprouted – and look how long those leaves are! This mulch should have been removed awhile ago. Hopefully, the shock of being exposed to sunlight won’t set them back too much. I’m really surprised they were already growing, considering the soil under the mulch is still quite frozen! These are supposed to be hardy only to zone 4, but our mild winter seems to have been excellent for them. So far, it looks like one corm didn’t make it, but now that it’s uncovered it might still show up.

After the septic guy was done and headed out, I was able to keep working on the bed by the chain link fence. I ended up finding another buried piece of sidewalk block! I was able to get the entire bed reworked and somewhat weeded, then replaced the brick border to make the narrower bed. I was able to pull out quite a few weed roots, but not everything, so when it was done, I covered the entire surface of the bed with clear plastic from bags we normally use for our recycling. Because the bed is now so narrow, I cut the bags along the sides to make long pieces. It took 4 of them to cover the bed, to solarize them. Something else I learned from Gardening in Canada that I want to try.

The idea is the direct contact plastic will basically cook those roots. Hopefully, this won’t take too long. Once I can remove the plastic, I want to plant some of these…

I’ve decided I will plant the Purple Caribe potatoes in this bed. I won’t be able to hill them, but if I plant them deep enough – something that can actually be done in this bed – I won’t need to.

Oh! I’m just watching that video again and she says the soil should be deep watered first. I haven’t got any hoses set up, since we still dip below freezing some nights. It’s too late in the day to do that now, so I’ll get the water turned on from the basement and set up a hose in the morning.

We’ve got a few more warm days, then in the middle of next week we are supposed to get a bit chilly with some rain and possibly some snow. By next Sunday, we should start getting highs in the double digits (Celsius) again, and stay there.

I wasn’t planning on chitting the potatoes but, after looking at the forecast, I think we can go ahead and do that, while waiting for better conditions to plant them in. That will give us time to prepare the area we want to plant the German Butterball potatoes, and even do some solarizing there, too.

Things are going to get busy!

The Re-Farmer