spinach

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

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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 2025 Garden and food forest firsts

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I just got in from doing my evening rounds.

The weather apps say we’re anywhere from 24-26C/75-79F out there this evening but, strangely, it felt much cooler! Very enjoyable, in fact. Well. Except for the blood red sun from all the wildfire smoke.

I decided to head into the outer yard and check on the walnuts this evening; something I usually do in the mornings, but my daughter did the watering out there today. I was very thrilled to see this.

It was very hard to get the camera to focus on such a small spot! Surprisingly, it did better when I accidentally took some video. Of course, it didn’t help that I had cats pushing their way into things!

What we have here is our very first walnut tree leaf bud! It was taking so long, I was starting to think it might not have survived being transplanted. I’m so happy! No signs of anything from the walnut seeds, yet, but hopefully they will start emerging soon.

This evening I decided to take the cover off the winter sown bed in the east yard. It has the same mix of seeds as the high raised bed, plus lettuce from our own saved seed. The two beds could not be more different!

For starters, the one thing that is thriving in this bed is the Jebousek lettuce, which is the only variety of lettuce we planted this year. The rest is onions and root vegetables. There’s so much lettuce, though, it’s choking things out!

So I thinned some by picking a bunch out by the roots. I grabbed a couple of radishes, too.

We’ll need to thin the lettuce out more, as I could see scrawny beet greens being crowded out by them. There are some larger leaved plants in there I wasn’t sure of, so I carefully took a closer look at their bases. It looks like we have a few Zlata radishes growing! These seeds were gifted to me, and I’ve never seen them before. They are very round and have a yellowish colour to them. I’ve left them for now. The radishes I did pick are the longer French Breakfast variety. The first lettuce and radish harvest for this year! I ended up picking another French Breakfast radish from the high raised bed, the picked some spinach from the old kitchen garden. We’ve been using the spinach mostly in sandwiches, but we’ve got the makings of an actual salad from our garden right now!

And it’s not even June, yet.

Yeah, I’d say winter sowing like this is something we’ll be doing again!

The Re-Farmer

Wind damage, and Our 2024 Garden: growth

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The outside cats are most confused!

There are no food bowls in the sun room right now. I checked the critter cam a few times during the night, and would sometimes see a cat wandering around where their platform and cat beds used to be, seeming lost! This morning, there was a whole crowd of them, milling about, waiting for their breakfast. They were all over the baby jail, inside and out, but there are no beds or blankets inside it right now, either.

As I fed them, I counted only 17, though.

With yesterday’s high winds, while checking around the yard, I was surprised to find just a couple of fallen branches, and just one broken tree.

The trunk of a poplar snapped off and will need to be cleared out. There’s also a live spruce tree nearby that has been slowly falling over, but it’s been doing that for years now. I’ve been keeping an eye on it. The only reason it’s not on the ground already it because it’s leaning against another tree. The dead trees around it, however, are all still standing straight!

It looks like we won’t be getting any haskaps again this year. The one “Mr.” haskap is leafing wonderfully, and even showing flower buds. The “Mrs.” haskap that was purchased and planted the same year is barely showing leaf buds. The smaller “Mrs.” haskap that was planted the following year is actually further ahead, but is really small compared to the other two. There’s just 1 year’s difference between them, so it should be much closer in size.

We’ll see how they do this year. I keep saying we need to transplant them to a better location, but every time I talk about it with the girls, they are concerned that moving them would damage them too much. Considering how poorly they are doing now, I don’t see what difference that makes. For the length of time we’ve had them, we should be getting plenty of berries every year by now, but there’s just no possibility of proper cross pollination to happen.

Of course, I checked the bed with the peas, carrots and spinach planted. I think I might, maybe, possibly be seeing a carrot sprout or two, and there are no peas coming up yet, but we’re finally seeing spinach!

The garlic, meanwhile, is seeing an absolute growth spurt, in all the beds they are planted in!

Syndol was following me around this morning, and he is frustrating me to no end! He kept going into the garden beds as I was checking them. I’ll have to put something around the bed with the spinach to keep him out! We can’t put a cover back on it, because of the T posts set up inside, which will have netting set up for the peas to climb, later on. The tiny raised bed that has its own cover is closed at the ends, so cats can’t get inside. Instead, Syndol climbs on top and uses it like a hammock! He’s the only cat I’ve seen that does that, but I’m sure there are others. I have to put another support hoop in the middle, plus a cross piece at the top, because there’s no way we’ll be able to keep the cats from climbing it.

But not today.

Today, the focus is back on the sun room. First, the windows in the plant corner need to be cleaned, then the second light hung back up over where the makeshift table will be set up. After that, we can set up the plant table over the baby jail, and bring the cat beds and blankets back.

Washing those was quite the thing! We split them all into two loads, and both loads had to be washed twice. Actually, I think my daughter washed the second load a third time, during the night. The amount of debris that had to be cleaned out of the washing machine’s tub was rather shocking, too. Some of the bedding needed a lot of mashing and bashing, as the layers inside got all messed up and bunched up. There’s one large cat bed that was donated to use that I’ve just not been able to get flat and even again. I’m serious considering opening up a seam so I can reach inside and break up the filling. The cats hardly even use it, because gets so lumpy after being washed.

So that’s my main goal today. Getting the plant side of the sun room done. Then the tools and storage side can be worked on.

That side, I’m afraid, it probably going to have a lot more messes hidden among the stuff they’ve knocked about. Now that everything’s thawed out, there’s an unfortunate smell, and it has to be coming from somewhere on that side.

At least it’s got a concrete floor that makes it much easier to clean!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: first direct sowing! (video)

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Okay, so I’ve scattered seeds and such, but today is the first day for direct sowing. It was such a gorgeous day for it, too!

I planted all the edible pod peas from the package, minus the ones that split apart as they soaked between damp paper towels overnight. Not a lot of carrots were planted; I’ll include them between other things, over the next while. I’ll probably do the same with more spinach. Basically, they’ll be space fillers and ground covers until it’s too warm to plant them anymore.

The box frame cover got worked on first, then set aside, since I put in the old salvaged T posts to hold netting for the peas to climb. I couldn’t drive them in very far, so they will need to have support added to them before any trellis netting is added, so they don’t get pulled into the bed by the weigh of the peas – or the net, for that matter! I intended to add a third post in the middle, but hit something hard. Possibly one of the branches set at the base of the bed, when it was first built and filled. Or a rock that got missed.

I found my pH meter and did a reading. No surprise the pH is still at 8. I even stuck it into the compost heap nearby, and the needle barely moved. I had a bit of an ah-ha moment earlier today. Well, more like a “duh, of course” moment. Maritime Gardening did an April garden tour video and was taking about how acidic his soil is, and mentioned that liming the soil can make the soil more alkaline.

Liming.

Lime.

Garden lime.

Which is made out of limestone.

Which is what we are sitting on top of.

Our area has limestone quarries and commercial gravel pits – we even have our own little gravel pit – with limestone based sand and gravel below a very narrow band of topsoil.

Of course our soil alkalinity is maxing out the pH meter. How could it be any different? *smacks forehead over what should have been obvious*

Increasing the acidity is going to be a challenge, that’s for sure. The use of raised beds will make it easier, at least.

Our order of sulfur is supposed to arrive by Thursday. Once we’ve got that in, we’ll be able to start amending the various beds with it, to increase the acidity. My husband actually ordered 2 different bags. One bag is 90% sulfur, 10% betonite clay. The other is guaranteed 99.5% elemental sulfur, but both are supposed to be broadcast evenly, then worked into the top 6 inches of soil, at a rate of 250g/10m² (0.5lb/100ft²). These low raised beds are 27ft², so they shouldn’t need much but, from what I’m reading, the more alkaline the soil, the more sulfur is needed (which makes sense), plus our soil type would also need more, for it to make a difference. Even so, it won’t actually do much for us this year; if we were treating a field, we’d be adding it to the soil a year before planting a crop. Any amending we do this year will mostly benefit what we grow, next year. Once we’ve started incorporating it into our soil, though, we should test the soil every few months to see how much difference it has made. Still, every little bit will help.

While it will be slow going to increase our soil acidity, using sulfur is supposed to be one of the quickest ways to do it!

Anyhow…

In the early evening, the girls and I went around the yard, checking things out and enjoying the longer daylight hours and warmth. We blew past our predicted high and reached 16C/61F! Plenty of trees and bushes have leaf buds showing. It took some searching, but we were thrilled to find a few shoots of snow crocuses and grape hyacinth emerging through the leaf litter. We even spotted the leaves of two tulips that had emerged near the saffron crocuses! These were not there, this morning!

We are getting into that period when everything starts to just explode into new growth.

Before long, we’re probably going to be complaining over how hot it is! 😂😂

For now, I’m just really happy to get some progress done outside. We’re supposed to get some rain next week, but we should have plenty of lovely days like today, to get things done outside!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: spinach, beets and radishes

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I finished preparing the bed we harvested the garlic from, and sowed for a fall harvest.

I chose Cherry Belle radishes and Bresko beets. I wasn’t sure how many seeds I had left, so I brought two different varieties of spinach. I was able to sow the Lakeside variety, which is what we planted in the spring. I was so impressed with how they didn’t go bitter, even when they started to bolt, I definitely wanted to sow those again.

I used the boards I’d brought out to shelter the tomatoes from the wind in the spring and laid them out around the edges, where weeds are such a problem, as well as across the middle to divide the bed into three sections. I ended up adding a couple more boards at the ends, too. Aside from hopefully keeping the crab grass at bay and dividing the bed, they also give me something to step on while tending the middle rows.

The first thing I did was give the entire bed a watering, using the cone setting on my sprayer for more even coverage. Then I used a hoe to trench out three rows in each section. Those got a watering on the jet setting, because I wanted to drive the water deep. Even though I’d already watered the bed, the moisture didn’t get very far, and the trenches were quite dry. The water also leveled out the soil in the trenches, so they weren’t so deep.

Next, I used grass clippings to mulch along the boards and in between the rows. Once the mulch was down, I used a broken piece of bamboo stake to make the rows the seeds would be planted in.

I picked up a seeder at Dollar Tree, and this is the first time I used it. It worked rather well. In the photo are the beet seeds, which were easiest. The rounder radish and spinach seeds did sometimes get a bit out of control, though! 😄

The beets went into the middle sections, the spinach at the end closer to the house, and the radishes at the far end.

Once the seeds were in and lightly covered, I used the flat setting on the hose to water each row and settle the soil further around the seeds. The grass clippings were toasted dry in the sun, so I used the cone and shower settings to soak the mulch. Last of all, I used the jet setting to clean the loose grass clippings off the boards.

What I will probably do later is put some kind of cover over the whole thing. I think we have some mosquito netting long enough for it. I mostly want to keep the insects from eating the greens. Last year, the radishes seemed particularly vulnerable. As they get bigger, they will definitely be tempted for the deer, too!

We were at 26C/79F while I was out there. Another reason to make sure the bed got extra watering! The two northernmost rows of squash were wilting in the heat again, so I’ve got the sprinkler going on those. Squash need a lot of water, anyhow! I had been concerned that the two southern rows would have trouble because they get so much more shade, while the two northern rows basically get zero shade from sunrise to sunset. With this year’s heat, that shade it turning out to be helpful! Last year, with the flooding, it was the other way around. The squash that were in full sun strove mightily to recover from the flooding, while those in shade basically had no chance at all.

For the next week to ten days, we’re going to see increased heat. Depending on which app I look at, we’ll either have no rain at all, have several days or rain, or several days of thunderstorms! It’s awfully hard to plan things with such conflicting information!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: a morning harvest!

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I’m really impressed with this variety of spinach we tried this year. The plants are finally starting to bolt, but the leaves have not become bitter at all!

I picked some spinach to use for today, but the whole bed will need to be harvested. We can dry the excess leaves, and plant something else in the bed.

I thought I would be picking the last of the garlic scapes, but a couple more showed up overnight that should be ready to pick tomorrow. I don’t know if two scapes could be considered a harvest, though. 😄

Several of the strawberries I was expecting to pick this morning were gone. I found their remains on the mulch nearby. There were a few others that I could pick. They clearly did not get fully pollinated and are misshapen, but my goodness, they are tasty little morsels!

Once these are done, there won’t be anything that can be harvested for some weeks, or even months, and there are still things that need to go in the ground. The squash – including the mystery squash I transplanted near the rose bush – are finally looking like they’re getting stronger. I keep having to remind myself, we’re still in the middle of June. We’re actually ahead of the game a bit. It’s the heat that’s messing with my perception. Well, that and on some of my local and Zone 3 gardening groups, there are people sharing pictures of their huge gardens and the things they are already harvesting. !!!

It’s the delay in building things that’s really eating at me, though. It’s driving me absolutely bonkers So very frustrating!

Ah, well.

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: spinach and alternative lawn mix

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My daughters were out early, taking care of some planting for me, so here are some “after” pictures. 😊

The first area they worked on were the bald patches in the maple grove.

These are where the branch pile we got chipped last summer had been sitting for about four years. The first thing they did was use the thatching rake to break up and loosen the soil, then raked it smooth. For the patch in the foreground, they made sure not to get too close to where we’ll be digging a trench to replace the water line from the house to the garden tap. I ordered two packets of alternative lawn mix, which they sowed and watered and tamped down. From the website:

This mix contains annuals and perennials of daisies, poppies, sweet alyssum, soapwort, nemophila, viola, thyme, chamomile, clover and fine fescue. 

Hopefully, they will not only fill in the bald patches, but will also naturally spread themselves in the maple grove, and maybe choke out the bell flowers that have been so invasive here!

In the time it took me to finish feeding the outside cats and switching out the trail cam memory cards, not only had they finished this area, but they finished planting the spinach, too!

The only thing left to do by the time I came out was to add the floating row cover. I bought a couple of these from a dollar store to try out. I’m not sure we’ll get more. It seems very fragile. At some point, I should buy a whole lot of tulle fabric. For the spinach, however, it’s more about keeping the critters from eating them than for insects. I just hope the cats will stay off of it. Otherwise, we’ll have to add hoops. I’m still shooting to build proper covers for these beds soon, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to pick up the lumber I need, so this will do until then!

The next cool weather crop I need to get in is at least one variety of bread seed poppies. I keep forgetting about them! I’ve decided to clean the vine off the chain link fence and put them in the bed we unsuccessfully tried to grow white strawberries in, last year. That can be the permanent spot for one variety. The other cool weather crop we can get in this early are peas, which will be planted along the chain link fence where we had tomatoes last year.

After that, things will need to wait until closer to our last frost date, so we’ll have time to prepare and finish more beds.

It feels so good to be able to get stuff into the ground!

Oh, and I got my first shipping confirmation from Veseys, for the smaller order that got processed a couple of days ago. It is our 3 pack of raspberries!

Royalty raspberries; image belongs to Veseys.

The expected delivery date is May 8, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they arrived earlier. I look forward to getting shipping notices for the apple, mulberry and potatoes!

The Re-Farmer

Analysing our 2022 garden: lettuce, spinach and chard

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Okay, it’s that time! I’ll be working on a serious of posts, going over how our 2022 garden went, what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t even happen at all. This is help give us an idea of what we want to do in the future, what we don’t want to do in the future, and what changes need to be made.

Growing greens this year was pretty touch and go.

We had three varieties of spinach seeds left over from the year before. Only one variety was a success.

The Results:

These were planted with the Tropeana Lunga onions in the high raised bed, and they did quite well. They were not as lush as the year before, but still quite good.

The other two varieties were planted in nearby low raised beds, together with other onions, and with peppers in one bed, and eggplants in another. The few that managed to germinate disappeared very quickly, with none growing beyond their seed leaves! I don’t know what went wrong with them this year. Last year, they were grown in the low raised beds and thrived.

After the high raised bed spinach was harvested, the space was replanted with chard.

We also had three varieties of lettuce seeds left over form the year before, and those were planted in the L shaped bed in the old kitchen garden, with netting to protect them from critters – whether those critters be groundhogs or playful kittens! The last of the seeds were scattered, all mixed together, over an open space by a nearby rose bush, since there weren’t many seeds left.

The Result:

The lettuces did pretty well, in general. Even in the area you see in the photo above, which kept getting overtaken by the nearby invasive flowers, managed to do well. I think the Buttercrunch lettuce did the best of the three varieties.

We eventually removed the netting, when it seemed the groundhogs had moved on, because the netting made it very hard to keep up on the weeding. Ultimately, though, we found we just didn’t eat a lot of lettuce, and they started to bolt. I left some plants to go to seed while harvesting the rest, and then the bed was reseeded with the last of our spinach seeds.

The Result:

The second sowing of spinach was a complete fail! The first section that got planted had started to germinate, but the kittens flattened the protective cover and rolled all over them. They never recovered.

We planted more in two other sections, and made the netting supports stronger – strong enough for the kittens to use it as hammocks, and not touch the ground!

It made no difference. The second sowing barely germinated at all, and never got past their seed leaves. They were a total fail, which really surprised us.

Then there was the chard.

*sigh*

The Result:

What you see in the above photo is all the chard we got. As soon as they started to germinate, their leaves became riddled with holes. Some insect was eating them, but we never saw the insects themselves! In the end, we simply left the chard alone. Most died off, but I figured whatever was left could act as a bait crop for whatever insect was eating them.

Conclusion:

There are expectations, and then there is reality!

With growing greens, we were picturing having plenty of salads, or having lettuce in our sandwiches, and basically just enjoying having access to leafy greens, any time we wanted. We figured they would be among those things we would eat more of, simply because they were there.

Well, that was more or less true of the spinach – what we got of it. But not so much with the lettuce. We found we just don’t eat lettuce all that much. Having them barricaded under netting didn’t help. None of us wanted lettuce enough to go through the bother of taking out pegs holding the netting to the ground (so nothing could crawl under it) to harvest leaves.

As for the plants we left to go to seeds, only one variety seemed to reach full maturity. The others were still blooming when I finally cleared the bed out.

With how well the lettuce did, I expected the second sowing of spinach to do well, so it was a real surprise for them to fail completely. Now that the L shaped bed has been built up to a low raised bed with wattle woven walls, anything we plant there should do better. There is new garden soil, as well as layers of organic matter trench compositing below.

As for the chard, we really didn’t know what to do with it, that we actually enjoyed eating.

For 2023, we will have just one variety of spinach. That, at least, is something we enjoy eating, sometimes even just picking leaves to snack on while doing other things.

We will probably not grow lettuce again next year. If we do grow chard again, it’ll be because we still have seeds left, and have space for it.

It turns out we just don’t like leafy greens all that much. It actually makes more sense for us to buy greens at the store every once in a while, rather than grow them ourselves.

I do still want to get chickens next year, if we can build a brooder and coop for them early enough. One of the things we plan to do is grow as much of their feed as possible, and I can see us growing greens more as chicken feed than for ourselves!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: fall planting, garden progress, and exciting news!

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I’m just going to start with the exciting news.

The tree guys came today! They’ve been here all morning, and have just headed into town for a lunch break. They have finished the big pile in the outer yard. When they come back, they’ll do the small pile by the garage, then work on the piles in the maple grove.

Now, when the owner of the company came here for an estimate, we talked about getting as much done as possible for 3 hours, because that’s what my budget is.

When the guys came this morning and I was walking around with one of them, showing him where the piles were, and where they could dump the chips, he told me I’ve got them all day. He knew I had cash for them, and whatever else it cost, we can pay them as we are able.

!!!!

Which is good, because that big pile took about 4 hours to do.

Meanwhile…

Check out the sunflowers we have opening now! We did not plant any sunflowers this year, though it had been in the plans. There are a few things we didn’t plant, with how crazy this spring was. And yet, we have several sunflowers growing, all planted by the birds. And it looks like the extra bit of fertilizer they were in helped, too! 😉

The Little Finger eggplant in the black grow bag are blooming! It would be awesome if we actually got some eggplant before the first frost hits.

I finally got to working on the cleaning up the lettuce bed.

I kept at least two of each variety of lettuce to go to seed.

After working on pulling out as many weed roots as I could, I decided it was not worth trying to plant anything at the end closest to the house. There’s just too many things spreading into there.

On the left is the Bloomsdale spinach I already planted.

Between the kittens and the grasshoppers, I decided these needed to be covered. I had some longer plastic coated metal stakes I got last year. The metal was hollow tubes, and they bent and broke easily in our soil. I ended up breaking some of them in half, to have me a bunch of shorter rods. I finally got to use the PEX tubing I picked up for this purpose. They fit over the metal stakes perfectly.

The small space near the Bloomsdale spinach got more Bloomsdale in it, while the longer space got Hybrid Olympia spinach planted in it.

After lashing the last of my 6′ bamboo stakes to the middle of the hoops, I grabbed the shorter pieces of mosquito netting from the main garden and set them up here. They are not pegged to the ground. I’m hoping to not need to do that. As they are now, it would be a simple matter to slide the slips up the hoops to be able to reach under. The excess on the ends are rolled around boards, which can also be easily moved, if needed.

The netting does have holes in it, so insects could still get in, but not as much.

When cleaning up this bed in the fall, I’m hoping to start adding walls to build it up higher. I’m just not sure what I’ll have available to use for that. I don’t expect to make high raised beds here, but I do want to have something in between a high and a low raised bed. Partly to make it easier on the back, but also partly to get it up and away from all those invasive plants! That and working around the lilac is a pain. This bed will be a maximum of 2′ wide, so we’ll be able to each all of it from just one side.

Oh! I see the tree guys coming back on the garage cam. Yay!

I am just so excited by the fabulous job they are doing!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: new growth, surprise growth, fall planting and our biggest harvest yet.

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There is some lovely growth happening in the garden right now.

While we have lots of Cup of Moldova and Sophie’s Choice tomatoes ripening on their vines, these Yellow Pear tomatoes are looking to have a good crop, too. They are actually turning out larger than I expected for this variety. It should be interesting when they finally start turning colour!

These Carminat bean pods are getting so very long! I love their gorgeous dark purple.

With the purple pole beans, we can see quite a few pods developing, though the vines are still trying to extend their reach, and blooming all the way. The green pole beans (sheychelles) have wispy little pods forming, too.

Then I started weeding and discovered a hidden surprise.

There are ripe pods hidden among the greens! It turns out these beans start developing right near the ground, unlike the Carminat, which have no flowers or pods at all near the ground.

Awesome!

After finding these, I made a point of looking more closely at the Blue Grey Speckled Tepary beans – the shelling beans – too. They’ve been blooming for a while, but are still such tiny and delicate plants.

Sure enough, I found time tiny pods starting to form. Since these beans are for shelling only, they’ll just get weeding and watering until the pods are all dried.

We actually have yellow zucchini this year! Last year, I was sure we had at least one germinated, but after transplanting, all we got were green zucchini. So I am happy to get some this year. Especially since we still don’t have any green zucchini developing! We did have female flowers, but there were no male flowers blooming at the same time to pollinate them.

We are finally getting more Sunburst patty pan squash, too. There was also one Magda squash ready to harvest.

All the squash are SO far behind. The squash patch, which is mostly winter squash, and the summer squash bed should be enveloped in plants. It’s unlikely we have enough growing season left for most of them, but we should still get something from the smaller varieties.

Here is this morning’s harvest!

Yes, the peas are still producing! There was only a handful to harvest from the second planting, but it’s the most I’ve been able to pick in one day, this year. We have both the yellow bush beans, and the green pole beans.

With the lettuce, we normally just go in and grab however many leaves we want. This time, I harvested the plants in one area of the L shaped bed in the old kitchen garden, so that the space can be used again.

I was planning to plant fall spinach elsewhere in the main garden area, but changed my mind.

It’s just a small area for now. As more of the bed gets cleared, I’ll plant more.

We got another harvest in this morning, too.

This is the garlic from the bed in the main garden. There isn’t a lot, but they are much larger than last year’s drought garlic!

The other garlic is quite behind, so it might be a while before we can harvest those.

The freshly picked garlic is now strung up under my daughter’s old market tent, where it can get plenty of air circulation as it cures, and we won’t have to worry about it being rained on.

I am quite thrilled by how well these garlic did!

The Re-Farmer