I fit in the 10 large bags I loaded last time, when the truck’s onboard computer started blaring at me, plus three more smaller recycling bags of cans from the house. I still have three large bags that I need to sort through with a magnet.
In the second photo of the slideshow above, you can see the return I got for the cans.
Last time, the weight was also just over 200 pounds, but had mixed metal in with the aluminum.
We got about $17 and change last time.
Basically, having a few non-aluminum cans mixed in last time cost us about $100.
Lesson learned!
We still have all the old batteries that can be brought in, but my brother has had to shove so many things into the barn, they’re inaccessible right now. My brother will be coming out as he is able, to organize things. So those will wait until spring. I’d hoped to get the scrap guys in this year, but until my brother can move things around, they can’t even get at some of the old vehicles anymore.
Ah, well.
After dropping off the aluminum, I headed out to the nearer Walmart to pick up a few things my husband requested. I hoped to meet up with the Cat Lady, as she has cat food, a scratch tower and cat bed donations for us. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to meet me this time. Hopefully, we’ll be able to connect next week. Her husband would like to have the stuff out of their car! 😄
She also hopes to be able to get some spays booked for us, soon. She will let us know the dates as soon as she has them.
Now that we have the truck back, we’ve got another outing tomorrow that’s been put off – a trip to the dump! After that, we need to winterize things around the house. The insulation that gets set around the base of most of the house has been brought from the barn, but we need to clear out leaves and other debris, first. That will require the catio being moved away from where it is now.
The catio sides will get wrapped in plastic for the winter. I am thinking a good place to set it up for the winter is near the shrine, for the cats that are shier.
I put the latch on the isolation shelter ramp/door. It will just need a carabiner to keep it closed – something racoons shouldn’t be able to open. I also prepped some plastic to go around the mesh enclosed lower level for the winter.
We will need to attach something sturdy across the middle, under the roof, to hang the clamp lamp heater from. After much consideration on how to get power to the isolation shelter, I’ve decided we won’t be able to set it up near the other shelters by the house. There’s just no practical space for it. So I am thinking of setting it up under the kitchen window, where the catio is now. There is an outlet around the corner of the house that it can be plugged into. We could plug in a heated water bowl, too.
There are other winterizing things that will need to be done. The forecast has us being fairly warm over the next while, even reaching highs of 10C/50F over the weekend. After that, we’re getting to where the daytime highs will be closer to freezing, and even dipping below.
It’s still relatively mild for this time of year, though. We haven’t had any blizzards – it’s not unusual to have a blizzard in October, so this is good. Especially if we’re going to be keeping cats closed up in the isolation shelter to recover from spays. Yes, it has insulation in the upper level, and passive solar with the window. Yes, the bottom level will be covered in plastic. Yes, we will even have a heat source in there. It’s still not the same as being inside the sun room, or the cat house!
Once the winterizing is done, it’s back to cleaning up the garden beds and, if all goes well, finish assembling the new log framed raised bed, now that I no longer have to worry about harming squash vines.
That should go relatively quickly, since the bed walls are just one log high. I’m still holding out hope that I’ll be able to start on the permanent trellis supports, but those will be more complex to assemble. They have to support themselves until the matching raised bed is built, and they eventually become part of a trellis tunnel.
The squash was roasted plain, so we could try them in different ways. I first had a chunk as a savoury side dish, just adding some butter and salt and mashing it up on my plate. I quite liked it. Then, I had another piece, mashing in a bit of butter again, along with brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. That was also very good, though I think I liked it as a savoury dish better.
The description for the seeds described Crespo squash as a particularly delicious variety of pumpkin. I’ll be honest, here. While I quite enjoyed it, it doesn’t compare to, say, the Red Kuri, Candyroaster or Pink Banana squash we’ve grown before. However, I’m not entirely sure the Crespo squash reached full maturity, given how much green there was under the flesh when we cut it open. Plus, some types of winter squash taste better after being in storage for a while. I would definitely want to grow it again, but if we could only choose one or two winter squash varieties, I would choose something else.
I had started a tomato sauce in the crockpot and decided, since it was handy, to include some of the roasted squash. This sauce included San Marzano tomatoes ( I had enough that there was no room to add more tomatoes from the freezer), with maybe two Forme de Couer in the mix, plus a yellow bell pepper from the ones ripening in the living room, a few shallots, and the pieces of roasted squash. It was seasoned with salt and pepper, plus dried sage, thyme and basil. Last of all, I added a splash of Krupnik (not an affiliate link) – simply because we happen to have some right now.
When the tomatoes got to the stage where I could blitz the whole thing with the immersion blender, it was left to cook down overnight to thicken it, though we would dip into it to use with our meals every now and then. Before I started writing this post, I decided it was thick enough to jar up. By then, we had enough to fill two 750ml jars, plus one 500ml jar. Once they are cool, they will go into the fridge to use right away.
My taste buds are far from refined, so I honestly couldn’t tell you if adding the squash or the booze made any difference! 😄
As for the rest of the roasted squash, I can hear my daughter in the kitchen right now. She’s making pie out of it!
I’m really looking forward to seeing how it turns out!
I headed out early this morning, while it was still relatively cool, to do the watering and make use of the grass clippings that had been collected and spread out on the black tarp.
I was getting near the end of watering in the main garden area, about to move on to the strawberry bed, when I realized…
I have to admit, I was complacent. I’d seen a deer around the garden area a few times, but it never went to any of the beds and stayed in the tall grass. We’ve got spinners and flashy things and other distractions all over. It seemed they were making a difference…
Now, this.
Obviously, it’s late in the game, but I put a net around the bed so it won’t happen again. The plants will recover, and the runners are still there and rooting themselves. The main thing with the netting is to be able to lift it, as needed, to tend the bed. It’s held down with ground staples in the corners
*sigh*
The next time I can get to a Dollarama, I will see if I can pick up more of those green, plastic coated support posts. They are very handy!
The netting was put up last of all, though. Before that, as soon as the watering was done, I started filling the wheelbarrow with grass clippings and mulching things.
First I laid a pretty thick layer around the edges of the tomato and onion bed. Then I did the onion, shallot and summer squash bed. Setting handfuls of grass clippings between every onion took a while!
These two beds took up most of the grass clippings, but there was maybe half a wheelbarrow left, so I mulched around the onions going to seed, and around some melons at the end of the bed where the bush beans are trying to recover.
After that, I just had to get some photos of the huge vines we’ve got now!
The pumpkins are blooming enthusiastically, and I even hand pollinated a couple more. There’s one pretty large pumpkin developing, plus a few smaller ones. I got a picture of just the largest one.
There are lots of drum gourd flowers, but no female flowers, yet.
The winter squash that are developing right now are getting so big, so fast! So far, the only one I can identify – I think – is what is likely a Turk’s Turban squash. It will probably be a while before we can identify the others – two of which I think are the same variety. I was able to hand pollinate a couple of winter squash, too.
I also got some photos of the Forme de Coure tomatoes.
I think having the sump pump hose draining at one end of the bed is making a difference. A lot of the water does end up flowing down one of the paths, but the bed itself is benefiting from being watered indirectly like this. The tomato plants are lush and bushy, and the tomatoes seem to be growing much faster than other varieties.
It was about 17C/63F when I headed out to water the garden beds, at about 6:30-7am. It’s now coming up on 11, and we are at 24C/75F with the humidex putting us at 27C/81F. We are expected to reach a high of 29C/84F, with highs of around 30C/86F starting tomorrow and staying at or near that range into August.
Which means I’ll be out watering the garden in the cool of the morning pretty regularly.
Most of the prairies are under heat warnings and/or air quality warnings. We’ve got an increase in wildfires up north, but really, we’re doing all right, all things considered. Alberta is being hit hard, and Jasper had to be evacuated and seems to have mostly burned down! Thank God, there don’t appear to be any injuries or loss of life. The most recent article I can find, as of this writing, is here. (link will open in a new tab)
And that is why having a “bug out bag” is a good idea! As well as having emergency supplies in your vehicle, if you have one.
So we will do what we can with our own heat, and be thankful that it’s all we have to deal with!
We’ve got a hot day coming, so I wanted to give the garden beds a solid watering, to help them cope with the coming heat. It was already 22C/72F at the time. I can’t remember what the humidex was.
While doing my morning rounds, though, I got a bit of a harvest.
There were quite a lot of scapes to harvest! There’s a few left to harvest over the next few days, but at this point, the bulk of them are harvested. We just need to figure out what we want to do with them all!
There were a few sugar snap peas large enough to pick. The little strawberries are the ones grown from seed last year, and the larger ones from the bare root plants we planted this spring. There is one plant among the asparagus that has berries, but the other three have been eaten, in spite of the barriers I put up to discourage the deer. *sigh*
I have spotted our first female pumpkin flower. The camera on my phone just did NOT want to focus on it, though. After I got the picture, I found a male flower and hand pollinated it. I later found a new female flower among the winter squash and was able to hand pollinate that one, too.
After a quick breakfast, my older daughter and I headed outside – my younger daughter is out of commission and walking with a cane again. 😢 We finally got around to removing the insulation around the base of the newer part of the house. This uncovered two windows – a third was already uncovered. These two windows don’t have screens on them, so I’m hoping to build some new screens for them. This way, we can have the windows open and allow more air circulation in the basement and hopefully help it dry out.
The insulation was taken to the barn for storage. My daughter took the smaller pieces in the wagon, fighting her way through the tall grass. With both of us, though, it took only two trips to get it all stored away.
Since I was going to be watering the garden anyway, I had decided to use the hose attachment and water soluble fertilizer. We have the 30-10-10 Acidifying fertilizer we’d found when cleaning out the old kitchen. Everything in the box was well sealed in plastic bags, so even though the box got wet at some point, the fertilizer is fine. With our alkaline soil, I decided it was worth trying. The peas and beans, of course, won’t get any benefit from the high nitrogen content, but anything that makes our soil at least closer to neutral will be a help.
I had a bit of trouble getting back into the sun room to get what I needed, though.
I was NOT about to interrupt Button getting some nip. Especially when he wasn’t having to fight the bigger kittens for it.
So I took advantage of the time to clear things on the patio blocks in front of the south facing basement window. The swing bench is there. The seat cushions have needed replacing for years, but I keep forgetting to get the measurements for cushions. Being out in the elements, moisture and debris gets caught in the fold between the back and the seat portions, so I undid the Velcro holding them in place and flipped the folds backwards for them to dry.
We stuck an old wooden bench against the wall that my daughter helped me move away after the insulation pieces were taken out. I ended up taking it off the patio blocks completely. All sorts of buckets and other things were stored under the bench, some of which got garbaged, some hosed off and set to dry in the sun. After that, it was old leaves, twigs, and other nature debris that needed to be scraped off the patio blocks and swept away. The window and the basement wall, of course, had to be swept clear of debris that got between the wall and the insulation pieces.
By the time I finished clearing that, Adam and Button were done, and I could fill the hose attachment and get to watering. The box of fertilizer has one large bag in it, with four smaller bags. One had been opened, but hardly anything had been used. Each one of the smaller bags was premeasured to put into the hose attachment. Handy! Of course, I used the one that was open already, even though it was missing a small amount, and set it up on the hose at the main garden area.
All the beds got a watering then, after the first watering had time to be absorbed by the soil, a second watering. Hopefully, it will be sufficient to protect the plants from the heat, even though a lot of these are heat loving plants.
I don’t know if the last Zucca melon will survive. When I did my evening rounds and checked on it, it was just covered in slugs, eaten to the point the stem with the newest growth on it broke off while I was removing the slugs! It still got a fertilizer watering, though.
That done, I switched to the front yard hose and did the East yard garden beds, and the beds along the chain link fence. There’s a section where we planted the Purple Caribe potatoes that never came up. I’m thinking of direct sowing something for a fall crop. I’m told we can actually still plant kohlrabi now, so I might do that. There is a single self seeded Jebousek lettuce that showed up in the gap, and I’m leaving it to go to seed, as it would be acclimating to our local conditions quite nicely by now. That, and the seed it came from survived the entire bed being reworked!
By the time the south and east beds were watered, the water in the attachment was looking pretty clear, so for the old kitchen garden, I switched gears. I used watering cans and water from the rain barrel, opening another bag of fertilizer and adding measured amounts into the cans after filling them. As I was watering, I spotted some Forme de Couer tomatoes developing!
I just realized; I forgot to water the green zucchini in the pot. The Magda and White Scallop pots still have nothing in then, and I’ve figured out part of the problem. I’ve got stakes to keep the cats out, but the kittens still fit! I’ve been finding kittens curled up in between the stakes, right over where the seeds were planted.
*sigh*
Oh, that reminds me. We now have all four G-Star seeds I planted, in the bed with the onions and shallots, germinated and starting to show their true leaves. Still nothing with the Magda and White Scallop I planted at the same time. I was really hoping to get those. We quite enjoyed the few Madga squash we’ve been able to grow over the years, and the White Scallop patty pans are a new variety we were really looking forward to trying. The G-Star, however, seem to thrive here, so we should at least get some of those!
After everything was watered, I took the time to put away some plastic for the garden. I’d laid the pieces out on the grass, weighted down to keep them from blowing away, to dry. Instead, it rained, and ended up with puddled. After a while, they were starting to kill the grass, so I finally gave up on that idea. Yesterday evening, I hung them up on the clothes line, instead. They’re pretty long, even with the biggest piece folded in half, so there was a risk the cats would start playing with the ends and tearing them up.
The wind was starting to pick up, and the plastic was starting to get twisted on the line, so I took them down. The biggest piece got folded smaller, before being rolled up into a bundle. The other pieces were long and thin – mostly clear garbage bags with the sides cut, and used to solarize a garden bed. Those got rolled up around a stick.
By the time I got inside and checked the temperature, we were – and still are – at 28C/82F, with the humidex at 31C/88F. The high for today is expected to reach 30C/86F.
I can’t complain. In the city we lived in before moving here, they hit 36C/97F with the humidex at 40C/104F, yesterday. Mind you, we’re expected to reach a humidex of 40C/104F today ourselves, even with a lower expected high. Most of the prairies, now extending into southwestern Ontario, are under extreme heat warnings. Tomorrow is supposed to be much of the same.
Looking at the extended forecast, we’re not supposed to get any more rain until the beginning of August, and temperatures are expected to remain high. Given the heat and humidity levels, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get sudden thunderstorms in there.
Well, all those squash and melons, peppers and eggplants, are going to love the heat! They might get a chance to really get growing.
Hmm. This is interesting. I just checked a completely different weather app, and it says we have a 100% chance of rain on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
Every app seems to have a different forecast!
We shall see.
Until then, we’re going to hunker down inside the house. It’s not supposed to cool off out there until 7pm, and even our overnight temperature is supposed to be a low of 21C/70F!
Gotta love the prairies. We get as hot in the summer as we do cold in the winter!
Okay, I’m going to start with the eggplants, because I keep forgetting about them!
Last year, we grew the Little Finger variety of eggplants. Last year being our Terrible, No Good Growing Year, they never got to the size they would normally have been harvested at, but we did have little baby eggplants to try, and really enjoyed them. So they were worth growing again. I also picked up some Classic eggplant seeds to try.
This was not a good year for our eggplants.
I started the Little Finger seeds in the middle of March. The Classic eggplant seed packet, however, was mistakenly sorted in with the direct sowing seeds, and I didn’t find it and start them until the end of March.
We had trouble with both types, right from the start. With all the Little Finger seeds that were planted, only 3 germinated, so more were planted. It was even worse with the Classic eggplant, which also got replanted.
They were transplanted in between the gourds by the chain link fence, with the tiniest two, which were really too small to be transplanted, but I did, anyhow, going into one planter block.
With the Classic eggplant, we had only one transplant, and it went into the wattle weave bed.
In the above photo, it’s just to the right of the luffa that doesn’t have a plastic ring around it anymore.
I really thought the Little Fingers would do well, where they were. They had plenty of space and lots of sunlight. Instead, they didn’t thrive at all. The one at the very end of the row, next to the people gate, did sort of grow, but mostly they just stagnated. They never even got large enough to start producing flower buds. In fact, nothing did well in those blocks at all.
The Classic eggplant, however, did surprisingly well. The plant grew quite large and robust and started to bloom and produce!
Everything this year seemed to be behind, though, so while these were a variety that should have been able to mature within our growing season, they never quite got there. We did have a long, mild fall, which helped, and when we did get an unexpected frost, that one plant handled it quite well, though we did cover it, along with the peppers, during other nights we thought might get frost.
This is how big they got before we finally harvested them, knowing they wouldn’t get a chance to grow any bigger before a killing frost was expected. Which means we did get a chance to taste test them, and were quite happy with them.
Final thoughts on eggplant
While the Little Finger were a completely failure this year, and we got only one Classic eggplant, we like them enough to grow both again.
Just not in the planter blocks by the chain link fence!
Eggplant is not something we buy often, mostly for budget or space reasons, but we do like them. Growing them ourselves will allow us to do more with them, too. In the future, we will probably try other varieties, but for next year, I think we’ll just stick to the two we still have seeds for.
Next up – the gourds.
We had a real problem starting gourd seeds this year. Many didn’t germinate at all, and I don’t know why. These included varieties we grew last year that had no problems germinating.
Then they started dying off, and I replanted, but the new seeds didn’t germinate. In the end, I had just one survive. The growing medium in the other pots got reused when potting up other things, but I could find no sign of seeds in them.
So that one surviving luffa got planted in the corner of wattle weave bed, where it could get good sunlight, and have the taller portion of wall, then the lilac bush, to climb.
Later on, however, some seedlings sprouted that looked an awful lot like luffa! So I planted them in the same bed.
How they did
This was the best year for growing luffa, yet!
Ideally, we’d be growing them in a polytunnel or greenhouse, because they need twice the growing season we’ve got, to reach full maturity. If we were just growing them as a summer squash for fresh eating, that would be fine, but I’m after the luffa sponges.
The two mystery plants did turn out to be luffa, but they were planted way too late to do well. That first transplant, though, grew so very well and was soon climbing high into the lilac bush where, hidden from view, we actually had several gourds start to develop!
Not all of them made it. In fact, only one did, really. We left it on the vine as long as we possibly could before harvesting it. As I write this, it’s currently curing over a heat vent in the living room. I keep forgetting it exists, so I haven’t tried to peel it and see if we got an actual mature luffa with usable sponge – and possibly seeds – inside.
Final thoughts on luffa
Luffa is one of my “just for fun” experimental plants, so I keep trying! We will eventually get some sort of polytunnel or greenhouse set up, which should make them easier to grow in our short season. I will keep trying to grow them for the challenge of it, but I think I will try seeds from other sources in the future.
Drum gourds, Caveman’s Club gourds, Zucca melon and Crespo Squash
We tried growing Zucca melon last year, but that bed was one of the ones that got flooded, so I wanted to try again. The African Drum gourds and Caveman’s club gourds were new ones to try. I want to grow gourds to use them for crafting. The first time we tried to grow Crespo squash, they did really well, even when recovering from being eaten repeatedly by groundhogs and deer. Both the Zucca melon and Crespo squash are experiments we are growing so we can at least try them and see if we enjoy eating them.
The Crespo squash and Caveman’s club were started in the middle of March.
Though I made sure to scarify the seeds, when they germinated, there were problems with the seed leaves not being able to free themselves from the shells. We also had losses and germination issues, and had to replant the pretty much all of them.
The ones that did take, did well, though, and soon got quite huge!
Here you can see where I used a straw as a splint to protect a breaking stem. It started to break, just from moving the pots around to get good light, when they were still smaller and in the living room. Once we were taking them outside to harden them off, there was a much greater risk of damage. So some of them got transplanted earlier than I normally would have, given our last frost date.
One Zucca melon and one African Drum gourd went into the block planters, along with the two surviving Caveman’s Club. The Crespo squash got their own bed, well away from the other squash, in case we were able to save seeds, as they don’t seem to be available anymore.
The last of the Zucca melon and African Drum gourds went into a reworked bed near the squash patch.
At least, that’s what I thought.
As things started blooming and developing, it because clear that there were only Zucca melon. With restarting seeds and putting up, I must have mislabeled things, because the pots that were labelled African Drum gourd began producing fruit that could only be Zucca melon.
Which means the only African Drum gourd transplant we had, was the one planted along the chain link fence.
How they did
As you can see from the photos above, the drum gourd, Crespo squash and Zucca melon did start blooming.
What was grown in the blocks by the chain link fence did not do well at all.
The Crespo squash also did not like their location. I was expecting the huge, lush plants we got the first year we tried them. Instead, they were spindly vines, with many male flowers but almost no female flowers. What few did appear, I hand pollinated. We did get a few that started to grow, but by fall, there was just one to harvest, and it was much, much smaller than these are supposed to get.
With the Zucca melon, they also produced mostly male flowers, but they did start to eventually produce a good amount of female flowers. I hand pollinated those, too! While the plants themselves didn’t thrive, either, they did do better than the Crespo squash, or the ones at the chain link fence. They started to produce fuzzy fruit, which is how we could finally say that what we thought were Drum gourds were actually Zucca. Some of them even started to get pretty big, but in the end, they all ended up with blossom end rot and dying off!
Update:
I knew I was forgetting something!
The Caveman’s Club gourds did slightly better, though far from healthy plants. They bloomed and pollinated, and at the end of the season, we had two – sort of – little gourds. After picking them, one got all wizened and was tossed. The larger one is currently curing in our sun room. The cats keep trying to play with it!
Final thoughts
These were all really disappointing. Those transplants were looking so good when they went in, but none of them thrived!
With the Crespo squash, a bit of research leaves me to conclude that they actually got too much sunlight. Where they were planted gets full sun, all day – no shade at all in the summer. This will be the last year we use that patch for vegetables, though, and next year we will be planting something for the food forest there.
I still have seeds and do what to try them again, but in a different location, where they will be less likely to get sun burnt.
As for what was planted in the blocks, this was the first year those blocks were used as planted, and something is definitely going wrong. It shouldn’t be the soil. One possibility is that the regrown branches above are cutting out too much sunlight. Another is that the blocks themselves are creating a hydration problem. We will grow completely different plants in there, next year.
The Zucca melons near the squash patch, though… that’s where we grew Crespo for the first time, two years ago, and giant pumpkins last year. The soil had been reworked and had manure added to it. They should have done well, and yet they didn’t. I’m not sure why. Next year, we will use that spot to grow something different.
I do still want to try growing all of these again, plus other gourds that we have seeds for. We are working on building trellis beds, but these are all supposed to produce really massive fruit, so I will likely try them in low raised beds, instead. Whether or not we try them again next year, or pause them for a year, will depend on just how many of the various raised beds we need to build, progress.
Summer and Winter Squash
I’m putting these together, but there isn’t much to say about the summer squash!
We had seeds for the same varieties we grew last year; green zucchini, yellow zucchini, yellow patty pans and Magda squash are all seeds we got from a variety pack we accidentally bought 3 of, so we’ll have seeds for these for a long time! We like all of them, too. Then there was the G-star patty pan that we grew last year, and was one of the few things that produced, in spite of the flooding. We got those seeds sent to us by mistake. A happy mistake, as we quite like them, too.
As these are shorter season varieties that we only plan to eat when they are smaller, I was going to experiment with starting a few seeds indoors, and direct sowing others. In the end, we didn’t have the space to start more seeds indoors, so they got direct sown.
Every red dot you see in the above photo marks a slug.
I’ve never seen so many slugs in my life – and we’ve lived in Victoria, BC, where the Banana slugs come out in herds, after a rainfall!
They absolutely devastated our sprouting summer squash. They did damage to the winter squash as well, but they seemed to leave the larger transplants alone more.
Ultimately, we did have a green zucchini, yellow zucchini and a yellow pattypan squash survive and actually produce some fruit. No Magda squash survived. The G-star, however, did surprisingly well; they didn’t seem to get hit by the slugs as badly, recovered very well, and had decent production.
There was the problem of only male flowers being produced, and when a female flower did finally show up, there were often no male flowers to pollinate them. So I ended up hand pollinating them with any male flowers I found on other summer squash plants.
We didn’t have a lot of summer squash to harvest, but there was at least some!
I think the biggest surprise was when they got hit by frost, but when we got more mild temperatures again, they started to recover and continue to produce!
Then there was the winter squash.
As with so many other things we started indoors, we had a really hard time with germination. Some squash and melons simply did not germinate at all, or when they finally did, the seedlings quickly died. In the above photo, you can see what was left to transplant. Just two Lady Godiva hulless seed pumpkins (we started 3 varieties of hulless seed pumpkins), two Winter Sweet (they were among those we tried last year that got flooded out), and two Boston Marrow (another from last year that got flooded). The Little Gem/Red Kuri are something we’ve grown for a couple of years now, and quite like, but this is the first time we’ve tried growing them without a trellis of some time.
More of the Honeyboat Delicata survived. This is a new variety for us, and is a variety of Delicata that is supposed to be good for storage. We’d tried Candy Roaster last year, too, but they, too, got flooded. The Pink Banana was a new one for this year.
The empty mounds got summer squash planted in them, plus another row was prepared for the rest of the summer squash, on the left of the photo.
The thing with winter squash, of course, is that there’s nothing to harvest until the end of the season!
What a difference between the plants, though.
How they did
The Pink Banana and the North Georgia Candy Roasters did excellent! I didn’t think they would, because their two rows were planted in an area that gets a lot more shade. The other winter squash were planted in rows that got much more sun, yet they were the ones that failed to thrive! Going back to what I learned in trying to figure out what happened to the Crespo squash, it looks like they actually got too much sun, while the rows that got shade for much of the day got just enough! Lesson learned!
We still managed to get small harvests out of some of the sun burnt squash. We did get to try both the Banana and Candy Roaster squash and found them delicious.
Final thoughts on summer and winter squash
When it comes to summer squash, these will remain a staple in our garden. We just have to find a way to deal with all the slugs!! We will try other varieties as we’re able – there are a few patty pan varieties I want to try, but what we have now are basic and we will keep growing them. Especially the G-Star. They seem to really thrive here, even under really horrible conditions!
With winter squash, we are still very much in the experimental stage in learning what what grows well here, and what we like. The Red Kuri/Little Gem squash are a winner – though they definitely need better growing conditions than what they got this year! The Pink Banana and Candy Roasters are both ones well worth growing again. I don’t know that we’ll bother with the hulless seed pumpkins again, though. I seem to be the only one that likes pumpkin seeds in the family! As for the other varieties of winter squash, we will try them again in different growing conditions. With the tiny fruit we got this year, we can’t really say if we like them or not, as they would not have developed their full flavour.
Next year, we will not be growing squash again in this location. They need to be rotated out. The trellis tunnel that will be built into the new mid-height raised beds we are working on will be strong enough to hold the weight of these climbing varieties, so hopefully, that’s where we’ll be planting them next year.
The Surprise Squash
We got some unexpected squash, too!
In our compost ring!
They were the biggest, healthiest squash of all! 😄 Unfortunately, we don’t really know what they are. Some looked like hulless seed pumpkins. Some looked like they might have been from some hybrid zucchini we were gifted with. We harvested them, but have yet to actually try any of them. If you look at the photo of squash in our root cellar, the two big green ones at the top are from the compost heap! Whatever they are, they are likely hybrids, or even hybrids of hybrids! 😄
We also got surprise beans in here. I left them to go to seed, and have no idea where they came from. We’ve never grown beans like those before!
It should be interesting to see what volunteers we get in our compost, next year. 😁
Melons
We were so eager to do melons again!
Two years ago, in spite of a drought, we successfully grew two types of melons, Halona and Pixie, and were looking forward to growing even more, last year.
Yeah. They were in beds that got flooded.
Total and complete loss.
This year, we hoped to be able to grow quite a bit more. We started the seeds indoors in early May.
This year, we tried the Halona and Pixie melons again, plus Sarah’s Choice, a new variety. We also tried Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon. The watermelon we tried the previous year – a short season variety, too – was among the losses.
The water melon was a loss this year, too! Zero germination. Bizarre!
The others struggled to start, too. In the end, we had only two Sarah’s Choice, and a couple of Pixia and Halona, each, none of which looked particularly strong.
These were intended to go into the new trellis bed, but that didn’t get built, so we got creative.
We have a kiddie pool we’ve been using for all sorts of things, from washing cat blankets outdoors, to harvesting potatoes out of bags into, to sifting soil into, to use elsewhere.
I made holes in the bottom and turned it into a raised bed, because the few melons we had really needed to get transplanted!
How they did
They did remarkably well! So well, we had to add more supports to the top of the makeshift trellis.
As with the winter squash, these just needed tending until the end of the season. They developed many flowers and we saw lots of little melons forming.
Unfortunately, like so many other things, they started blooming late. We did get a couple of larger melons that were fully mature, but most of them never had a chance to get to that point, even with our exceptionally long and mild fall.
This was our final harvest of all the melons, and you can see we did get some decently large ones!
The smaller ones, however, very quickly started to rot, so we didn’t get very many to eat.
Final thoughts on melons
We will continue to try and grow melons, because we really like them, but they tend to be too expensive to buy regularly. As we build more raised beds, and the trellis tunnels we are planning, we should have better growing environments for them over time.
The Halona and Pixie melons are varieties we know can grow here, so we will probably stick to those two.
We will try the watermelon again. I don’t know why they didn’t germinate; I don’t think the problem was with the seeds. It’s a short season variety developed in Saskatchewan, so it should grow here fine. I might even try direct sowing them instead of starting them indoors, to see if that makes a difference.
We will also try other varieties over time until we eventually settle on something we all really like, and can save seeds from. There are many short season varieties we can choose from!
Poppies
I almost completely forgot about these!
I really want to grow non-ornamental poppies. My mother used to grow them on the old kitchen garden, when I was a kid, and we had enough that my late brother and I would eat the seeds straight out of the dry pods, and my mother could still make filling for makowiec.
We had two varieties of bread seed poppies; one we’ve grown before, and one that is new to us. Previously, we’d grown Giant Rattle poppies, but where we grew them ended up getting highly compacted, was full of weeds, and they did not thrive, though we did get fully mature pods out of them. The other variety we got was Hungarian Blue.
As poppies reseed themselves easily, I wanted to make sure they were planted somewhere where they could be treated as a perennial, plus I also wanted to make sure the two varieties were planted well away from each other, so as not to cross pollinate.
We only got one in.
We had an area by the chain link fence where we’d first grown potatoes in bags. After the potatoes were harvested, the soil was returned to where the bags had been sitting to create a new bed. Last year, we unsuccessfully tried to grow white strawberries there. For this year, it got a thorough weeding, and then Hungarian Blue poppies were planted in it.
How they did.
At first, I thought for sure we wouldn’t get any at all. For all my efforts to remove weed roots, that’s what we got the most of. Eventually, however, poppies started to show up! Yes, some even got to fully mature, with dried pods developing.
We also had some self seeded poppies show up with the shallots. These were transplanted in a new raised bed built over where we’d grown Giant Rattle poppies before, so I thought they’d reseeded themselves and let them be. They turned out to be a variety that predates our living here! Still a bread seed poppy, so I collected seeds from those in the fall.
Final thoughts on poppies
With edible poppies available as seeds again (for a while, they were not available, because they are the source of opium), I want these to be a staple again. I don’t know what happened to the variety my mother used to grow – the ones that have come up on their own are different from the ones I remember. I’ve even found poppy seeds while cleaning up the place, but it seems my mother switched to ornamental poppies at some point. There’s no what to know what kind the seeds I’ve found are without planting them, and with how old they probably are, it’s unlikely they will germinate.
The bed where the Hungarian Blue were planted will need to be completely reworked, with the soil sifted to get out more weed roots. Then, they will be replanted there. Once the poppies themselves are established, they will choke out any weeds, themselves. Until then, we’ll have to battle the weeds for them. The soil also got quite compacted, which affected their growth as well., so we will have to amends it more.
As for the other varieties, we still need to find locations where we can plant them, and then just leave them to self seed. There are a few areas I can think of, but it will take time to take out grass and weeds and amend the soil before we can plant them.
Well, this one turned out much longer than intended! This is the last of what we grew, though.
Next time, I’ll be looking at what we intended to grow, but it just didn’t happen!
I am so glad we don’t need to go anywhere for the next while!
When I headed out yesterday evening to feed the outside cats, we had freezing rain on top of the snow.
We also had company.
Looks like the big, fluffy beast hunkered down as soon as I came out. I stayed where I was long enough to take the picture. As soon as I moved closer, he ran off.
I love how casual Driver is, sitting next to the racoon!
When I saw him this morning, he was still favouring that front paw. I still can’t see any obvious signs of injury, but I’m not able to get a closer look, either.
We got snow again, after the rain, so things were pretty crunchy, crispy out there! We’re supposed to both get more snow, and warm up, over the next few days. I’m sure the cats will enjoy the warmer temperatures, and the snow melting away. Of course, the long range forecast of up to 8C/46F have changed, but it’s still saying we’ll have several days of 6C/43F next week. My main concern right now is for the 11th. I’ll be bringing the cats in to the clinic quite early in the morning, and the forecast currently calls for sleet. More on that later!
This morning, my older daughter was planning on making a soup today. Using these…
That’s one of the big Pink Banana squash, a Red of Florence onion and garlic. The Sweet Chocolate and Cheyenne peppers were all green when we harvested them, but have been ripening up quite nicely! They’re also dehydrating a bit, too.
I don’t know what else went into the soup, besides shrimp, but my goodness, the house smells amazing. I’m told it’s not very spicy hot, which means I should even be able to do more than have a taste! 😁 I don’t handle spices very well, unfortunately.
I popped outside again not long ago, to get a meter reading, when this strange noise started coming out of my pocket. It always startles me when my cell phone rings! 😄 It was the Cat Lady. She’d been hearing from the clinic about our bookings. They are quite concerned that we might not show up. With all their no-shows last time, and with us having 6 slots, I can’t blame them! She said she assured them that we will be there. I told her to go ahead and tell them we went out and bought 2 more carriers, just to make sure we could bring them all in! If we don’t make it, it’ll be because we’ve gotten into an accident along the way, or the house has caught fire or some sort of emergency like that.
The Cat Lady is going to be in town that day anyhow, and will be meeting me. She’ll be going in for another MRI at the hospital just across the road from the vet clinic. All the kittens will be coming home with us. Currently, all her own cats, except 2, are being boarded as they prepare to move. Unfortunately, every offer made for their house fell through because the potential buyers couldn’t get financing. It’s adding an insane amount of stress to their lives! Meanwhile, the two cats that are not being boarded are also the two calicos from us, that both hate her for some reason! Cabbages came back because she refused to eat. I don’t think Muffin (who now has a different name) ever left. She is wildly attached to the Cat Lady’s husband, and goes off to job sites and coffee runs all the time. She’s good with the kids, too, but the Cat Lady has never even been able to pet her. She walks by and gets swiped and growled at! She’s never had a cat act like this before! Still, with only the two cats in the house, and one of them gone out for coffee with her husband, the house is amazingly quiet! At this point, I would not be surprised if Muffin has become a de facto sales cat! I can easily imagine potential clients and contractors being happy to see the guy with the cat come around. It is strange that she is so nice to everyone else, but not to the Cat Lady!!
Anyhow. I hope the next offer they get actually finally pans out, and they can finish moving to the new house they bought – a house with a whole other heated building that will be dedicated to cats! It would be awesome for them to be able to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s in their new home, without the added burden of two mortgages!
Oh! There was something else she told me that just blew me away. The last time we got a female done at the nearest vet clinic, it was $350. That included getting a tattoo and… something else I can’t remember right now. Things like vaccinations, etc, are extra. Males were half that. The Cat Lady was talking to the clinic with the cheap spay day about the possibility of bringing in a stray cat in their area and get her spayed. The vet told her that they’d be able to do it at the discounted price, since she is a rescue.
$408
!!!
She asked what the regular price was.
$497
That includes a wellness check, vaccinations, etc, right?
Nope. Just the spay. The other stuff she mentioned would be extra.
Good grief!!!
She did find a place that would give her a much better discounted price, but it involves a much longer drive. At under $200, though, that’s what she’ll be going!
One more reason to really appreciate the cheap day we’re booked for. It just blows me away that anyone would simply not show up when it’s only $75. I found out that the large animal rescue that moved in just a mile away from us had similar issues. They arranged for a mobile spay and neuter unit to come in. They would have been $175, male or female. We never booked, as we didn’t have it in the budget, but it turns out they had a lot of no-shows, too. Which really chokes me, because I saw all the excited responses and people asking to be booked for that day, when they announced it on Facebook. I figured they would have run out of slots and had to turn people away. Instead, they had people book and not show up!
Well, that won’t be us.
Less than a week, and we’ll have 5 kittens and 1 cat recovering from spays and neuters, all at the same time!
The Tom Thumb popcorn could probably be harvested now, but I’m going to leave the stalks for as long as I can before we do that. Just to make sure the kernels get all the time possible to fully mature and dry out on the stalks. So far, the critters seem completely uninterested in both corn beds!
Today was not as hot as yesterday, but still quite warm, hitting 21C/68F while I was working outside. Which is good for the remaining beds that will not be harvested for some time, like the Red of Florence onions next to the popcorn, which still have a lot of growing to do.
A real surprise this morning was seeing a bright yellow flower in the squash patch! The yellow patty pan squash plant is still alive, in spite of all the frost damage, and one of the female flowers actually bloomed this morning. There are several more female flower buds, too, but there are no male flowers to pollinate, so nothing will come of it. The green patty pans have squash that were big enough to survive the frost, and they are getting bigger, too. Even on the green zucchini, we found one little zucchini that had gotten bigger and could be harvested!
Later in the day, I finally cleared the tiny raised bed in the old kitchen garden, which required snipping off the dried poppy pods that had grown through the wire cover. These self seeded poppies have openings in their tops, so when I put them upside down in the container, the seeds just poured out. It really shows how these self seed so readily. The Hungarian Blue poppy pods do not have these openings, so are less likely to self seed.
Another surprise is seeing flowers on one of the volunteer tomatoes that got transplanted! They’re still so tiny, but they seem to really like where they were transplanted to.
I was going to plant garlic in the bed by the chain link fence, after it was reworked, but the garlic came in yesterday. The Jebousek lettuce is blooming now and I want to save the seeds, so the garlic had to go somewhere else.
Which is what my next post will be about!
I’m just loving that we’re past the middle of September, and there’s still gardening happening!
I’m just going to post this photo for now; I took some video and will upload that later.
Until then, this is what I was able to harvest today.
We did get another frost last night. I was out doing my rounds early enough to see some frost still on the ground. Once again, there was no frost warning and, according to the official past 24 hours record, we never dipped below 6C/43F, while I know I saw 4C/39F on my app when I checked before heading out this morning.
I should get one of those high/low thermometers that have needles to mark the highest and lowest temperatures on the dial.
So for now, all the stuff affected by the frost has been harvested that could be harvested. I left the melons, because they look like enough of the vines survived for ripening to continue. We’re supposed to warm up over the next while, so that will give more time for things like the melons, peppers, Spoon tomatoes and the one eggplant to ripen. The other things, like the carrots and onions, can handle frost so they’ll be fine for quite a while longer.
First, I have heard about how the adopted ladies are doing. They are recovering well at the Cat Lady’s home for now. The Phantom is being an absolute, loving joy. The kitten is also being really sweet.
Decimus is hissing and spitting and not a happy camper, but doing well, health wise! They have several catios, though, so they were able to let her go “outside” to get some fresh air.
My daughter and I went outside with the flashlight last night. Still no sign of Marlee or Butterscotch. We did spot a cat in the driveway that turned out to be Nosencrantz. Once my daughter started walking towards her, though, she ran off into the old hay yard.
If we’ve seen her, chances are pretty good the other two are okay, too.
Right?
As for the remaining cats in the isolation ward, the kittens are doing just fine, though getting very active and destructive! TTT spends most of her time in her napping cave in my closet, but she sure knows when the food is coming out!
She has also continued to make a mess on the puppy pads next to the litter box under my desk.
*sigh*
At least it’s on a puppy pad, and not my bed or the carpet.
She is also remarkably regular. She always goes in the same place, and even goes at almost the same time! I was awakened by the rustling of the puppy pad being dug into this morning. I found it was very wet and changed it, then went back to bed. Maybe an hour later, I was again awakened by that familiar rustling sound, and she’d dropped a load this time. Again, thankfully, on the puppy pad and an easy clean up, but I find it interesting that she has such a consistent habit of time and location!
Now, if she would just use that litter box, instead. The kittens are sure liking it. 😕
This morning, as I started getting the kibble ready for the outside cats, I spotted the stranger cat, inside the sun room!
For a stranger cat, it’s acting right at home.
S/He was even sharing a food bowl with Beep Boop and the friendly black and white kitten.
I feel I should know this cat. The face looks familiar. In fact, the face makes me think of Potato Beetle. The markings on the sides, though, are not at all familiar.
Could this be a yard kitten from last year that took off before we became familiar with it, only to come back now? It’s possible, but I don’t remember seeing a kitten with markings like that last year. Mind you, it might also be a slightly older cat, too. I still can’t come close to it, though.
After finishing my rounds, I noticed the bitty kitties around with Octomom (whose name is actually Slick, but I kept forgetting that). They were watching me, so I got out the lure – just some jute twine tied to a stake.
This adorable ball of fluff took the bait and started trying to catch the end of the twine. I was actually able to get hold of it and pick it up. It did not like that, though! I pet it for a bit, but as I was trying to put it back down again, it chomped on my fingers and left me bleeding.
It was worth it.
I didn’t intend to harvest anything this morning, though I did end up picking some Red Swan beans and a couple of yellow patty pans. Mostly, I was making sure everything was doing well.
I picked a different one to hand pollinate the single female flower. One of the bees flew off, but the other stayed, even as I moved around the male flower stamen, then broke it off and left it in the flower, so the bee could do the rest.
This next slide show is the first time I’ve been able to upload a slide show and have every single photo work! After this, I had to do one photo at a time, because every group upload was thoroughly corrupted.
I really, really hope we have a long mild fall, because we suddenly have SO many new melons forming, along with the two big ones. The vines are so mixed up, there’s no way to tell which variety is which right now. There are many more female flowers and tiny melons that forming. If the weather holds, we might have a bumper crop!
Even the winter squash is seeing an increase. For example…
This is one of two Boston Marrow vines. Both had a single squash starting to form, but the one on this plant suddenly started to rot away. You can even see it in the photo. I broke it off but left it to break down where it was.
Now there are three female flowers blooming – and not a single male flower to be seen! At least not another Boston Marrow male flower. I ended up hand pollinating them with a nearby North Georgia Candy Roaster. With that combination, if we actually get something to harvest, I’d want to save the seeds. That sounds like it would make an interesting hybrid!
The pink bananas are also doing very well. Not only are there a lot of huge squash like this, but lots of smaller ones, plus they are still blooming and producing both male and female flowers!
I noticed that one of the Honeyboat Delicata squash that hadn’t even bloomed all year, suddenly has both male and female flowers budding. Even the Winter Sweet plant that had nothing going on – the other one has a single developing squash – suddenly had a female flower blooming! I had to use another type of winter squash to hand pollinate it, though.
We’re at the end of August, though. Average first frost date is September 10. Long range forecast says we should have a high of 23C/73F that day, with a low of 13C/55F. In fact, if the monthly long range forecast is right, we won’t see frost until near the end of October. If that holds true (thanks to El Nino!), that will another 50 days or so to our growing season! That would make a huge, positive difference for the garden.
As for today, there’s a limited amount of work I can do outside right now. We’ve got high winds today. We’ve had predictions for everything from a thunderstorm this afternoon, to rain this morning (we didn’t get any), so rain overnight, to no rain at all.
This morning, when I saw the predictions for a storm, I checked the radar. I would see the system coming our way but, sure enough, by the time it reached our area it dissipated and split up around our weird “climate bubble”.
Which works out. We’ve decided to do my husband’s birthday dinner today, and he asked for take out pizza from a specific restaurant in town. He didn’t get his prescriptions delivered yesterday, as they were missing something, but it’ll be ready today, so I’ll be picking those up first, plus hitting the grocery store for a few things, before picking up the pizzas – which my daughter is kindly paying for as her birthday gift! My husband’s main disability payment came in today and normally I’d be going into the city for another stock up shopping trip, but I’ll do that tomorrow, I think.
Meanwhile, I’m going to be watching the trees outside our windows closely, in case another one comes down in the wind!
I didn’t pick any bush beans for a couple of days, so there was plenty to pick this morning!
I also grabbed a few Gold Ball turnips, Uzbek Golden carrots – a first harvest of those – and snagged a yellow zucchini. There’s some green ones starting to grow, and one that is almost ready to harvest, but not quite!
I uploaded other photos onto Instagram. As you go through these, can you please let me know if any of them look like the files got corrupted somehow? I am having problems with viewing batches of photos like this. They look fine as I go through the process, but after they’ve been published and I view them, there are usually visual changes to some of them. Some are so bad, I can barely see the image, so I delete the whole thing and start over. I had to do that with this batch, and I still see problems. The images are at least identifiable, though!
Please let me know if you see it to, or if it’s just my computer messing up!
The first image is of the North Georgia Candy Roaster squash that is getting SO big, so fast! It seems to be getting noticeably bigger, every day! There were also a lot of new female flowers among the candy roasters and the Pink Bananas.
There is a little patch of allium flowers that come up every year through a crack between sidewalk blocks and the laundry platform steps. They are in full bloom right now, and the bees loves them. I tried taking photos and just happened to catch the bee as it flew off to another flower head!
The earliest Sweet Chocolate bell peppers are turning colour quite nicely right now.
The next photo, of the chamomile flowers, looks like it has a block of purple over all but the top of the photo. Do you see that too?
The chamomile are blooming quite enthusiastically right now.
The very first luffa flower has opened – and is being pollinated!
Last of all is the first flower on the Classic Eggplant. Check out those spikes on it!
On another topic entirely, I brought one of the yard kittens in, so my daughter and I could wash its eyes out. They were completely stuck shut. As soon as the dried gunk was softened enough that the lids started to open, they started oozing more gunk! It’s nose was all gummed up, too, and somehow a tiny piece of flexible plastic was stuck to it! My guess is it was from the strips of plastic that covered the adhesive on the new roof tiles. We’re still finding them blowing around.
We got the kitten cleaned up as best we could, then set it outside again, but not before my daughter got a picture of it. The Cat Lady is going to be coming for Ghosty soon. I hated to asked, but I sent her the picture and asked if they would be able to take a second sick kitten.
She had to check with her husband, who was monitoring their cat that just came out of surgery not long ago. Their cat seems to be doing all right, so she will take the sick kitten. With its eyes gumming up so much, it tends to stay by the house a lot, so we should be able to find it and catch it, once we know she’s on the way.
The down side is, the rescue’s budget for August already done, having gone towards spays. Which means they’ll be taking on these two, out of pocket! They’ve already spent thousands on just two cats in the past, but they’re still willing to take on these two. The other downside is, once they’re all healthy, it’s been difficult to adopt cats out. Partly because she wants to keep them! 😄 I do expect Ghosty will get adopted out easily. She is a rather unique looking kitten. A bit freaky at times, too! She’s got blue eyes, and when the light hits them just right, her pupils glow red. We think she might have partial albinism. Her eyes are still sticky, too, but she has gotten much better since coming inside.
The Cat Lady commented that the strain causing these problems is particularly bad this year. Not just with so many sick cats, but so many kittens dying this year, too. So it’s not just at our place! We’ve found so many dead kittens this year, plus losing Question, even after bringing her inside. We’re still tossing the outside cats’ kibble with lysine to help their immune systems, but it’s the little ones that are suffering. The adults seem just fine, but with the littles, it seems that as soon as they start getting weaned, it’s just not enough.
Well, we do what we can! I feel bad asking the Cat Lady for help, though, but after Leyendecker, we just don’t have the budget to take another cat to the vet. The Cat Lady’s rescue runs on donations, but they do a lot out of pocket, too. Her husband, thankfully, makes good money, but it’s still a lot to cover out of pocket!
Ah, well. I’m just glad she’ll be able to take Ghosty and this other kitten. She is so awesome!
The Re-Farmer 