strawberries

Plans changed… and I’m not surprised

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First, the more pleasant stuff!

It’s a wonderfully cool morning today. The entire time I was doing my morning rounds, it was gently misting instead of raining. And would you look at this!

We still have strawberries, blooming and ripening! Recovering from being eaten by deer has resulted in very late production. I’ll take it! 😄

I wasn’t able to get pictures, but I did have a small harvest today. I wasn’t expecting to, so I didn’t bring my colander and ended up using my shirt. I really ought to keep at least one of our harvesting colanders by the sun room! I was actually able to harvest some ripe looking Black Beauties today, as well as a few Indigo Blues. I left the Romas for later. There were some more summer squash to hand pollinate, as well as a couple large enough to harvest.

In looking over the winter squash and the melons, I just have to shake my head. The melons have been blooming like crazy, with both male and female flowers, but there are only 3 melons forming that I can find. This morning, however, there are suddenly a plethora of female flowers! Too many to even try to hand pollinate. With the size of the flowers, I’d have to use something like a cotton swab, anyhow. Hopefully, the insects will take care of it, though to be honest, it’s coming up on the end of August, so not much time for any fruit to reach maturity. Our first average frost date is Sept. 10, but with the strong El Nino this year, we might actually have a chance.

As for the winter squash, there had been two new Honeyboat Delicata forming, then one shrivelled up. The remaining one is getting noticeably bigger, every day. This morning, however, one of the other plants suddenly has a whole bunch of female flowers! Until now, it’s been all male flowers. One was open enough that I could hand pollinate it. The others should open over the next few days. Will they have a chance to mature? During a typical year, no. It would be way too late in the season. But if the frost holds off… we might just have some.

On a slightly more frustrating note, I saw Junk Pile again this morning. This photo is from last night.

That is one round belly.

I saw Caramel walking by this morning, too, and she’s looking pretty round.

More kittens at the end of August/beginning of September?

Crap.

Junk Pile has had a strange year. She had a litter of kittens extremely early and lost them. For a short while, she would follow me as I trudged through the snow to do my rounds and allow me to pick her up and carry her. She was clearly upset about losing her babies. After a few days of that, though, she went back to making strange. She will sometimes allow me to pet her when she’s on the cat house roof, eating, but that’s about it.

I’m sure she had another litter, but not being able to tell her and not-Junk Pile (now Two Toes Tony) apart, it was hard to tell. Once we saw not-Junk Pile/TTT with scratching wounds behind her ears, we could tell them apart, so I could see that it was TTT had a litter of six, though by the time we found her with the broken leg, it seems she was down to three. I would sometimes see that Junk Pile had active nips, but I never saw her with kittens. If her kittens are here at the house now, I don’t know which are hers, and the creche mothers – mostly Adam and Beep Bop – will nurse any and all kittens by the house that want to. Beep Bop is often seen nursing Caramel’s three – so I guess it’s no surprise that Caramel is pregnant again, too, even though her kittens are not old enough to be weaned.

*sigh*

Now, on to the main change of the day.

I’m not going to my mother’s.

I was indisposed when the phone started ringing, and it wasn’t even 7:30 in the morning yet. We get only two types of calls before 8am. Scammers, or my mother! 😄 I found a message from my mother, sounding very conciliatory, saying I didn’t need to come over. I could go to my appointment. She would be all right. (As if I needed her permission to go to my appointment??)

So I called her back. She told me she would take the shuttle bus for her errands. I could go to my appointment. She’d be fine. It’s only $6. She absolutely insisted I did not need to come over.

Which is fine, but between yesterday’s call and her attitude this morning, my suspicions are almost confirmed. She didn’t want me to come at all, because she had plans for my sister. She can talk my sister into taking her places that I can’t – or won’t! – take her. Considering the things she’s been saying about my brother lately, I have a very good idea of what that would have been, and there is no way I would have had the time to drive her around for that. Also, even if I did, there are things she can talk my sister into doing that she can’t talk me into. I sometimes worry about my sister’s cognitive abilities, to be honest, because she got talked into helping my mother stab my brother in the back, and she still seems to have no understanding of the harm she’s done, among other odd things.

Well, whatever. My day just went back to my original plans.

Sort of.

A nap is now part of those plans.

I didn’t get much sleep last night. With TTT not using the litter, and peeing on my pillows, I think I found something suitable to block her preferred area. My husband got a wedge for his knees, years ago, but with his hospital bed, he no longer needs it. I brought it down from it’s storage spot and have it on my bed. I considered she might just decide to pee next to it or something, but she really seemed to be wanting to use my pillows, so I hoped it would work.

After being awakened many times by either the kittens running wild, or Snarly Marlee growling and snarling at them – even when they were nowhere near her! – I am pretty sleepy right now! I was, however, awakened yet again, shortly before my alarm was supposed to go off . A distinctive rustling sound.

Sure enough, TTT was under my desk. She’d dug around the puppy pads and took a dump, right next to the litter box.

At least it was on a puppy pad.

There was no puddle, however. I couldn’t find a puddle anywhere, which had me concered that she’d found some hidden corner to use that we can’t get at.

Then I sat in it.

I keep a towel on the seat of my desk chair. It’s fake leather and the surface has been peeling off, with more than a little assistance from cats. I have the towel so that I don’t have little pieces of fake leather stuck to my butt when I get up.

TTT had jumped onto my chair and peed on the towel.

With a litter box RIGHT THERE and easier to get to.

*sigh*

I’ll be sure to talk to someone at the clinic today about it, but to be honest, I suspect we won’t solve that problem until the kittens get adopted out. Too many kittens using all of the litter boxes.

I’d really like to adopt out TTT, too. She’s new to this indoor life thing, but I’m sure she would be better in a household with far fewer cats in it!

We’ll figure it out.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: progress, damage and… damage control?

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While doing my morning rounds today, I was thrilled to see SO many pea pods!

It’s like they all exploded into existence, overnight. I’ve read that peas don’t like to be over watered, but they sure seemed to like the downpour we had!

Then, I found this.

The remaining three strawberry plants in the asparagus bed were eaten. One not as bad as the others, but a lot of leaf loss, for sure. I have to find some way to protect this bed, so the plants can recover.

What I really wanted to check – with some dread, I admit! – was the squash patch. Did the cornmeal work, or did my squash plants get decimated by the hundreds of slugs I saw last night?

Well… the good news is, there was no new damage to any of the plants, though a couple of seedlings will certainly not recover from the state I found them in last night.

There wasn’t a single slug, in any of the traps.

I could still see corn meal dusted on the mulch around each mound.

I didn’t see a single slug, live or dead.

Now, a live slug, I would not have expected to see. Not in the sun and heat we already had by then. But I did think I might see less cornmeal around the plants, and dead slugs.

It could be, they ate their fill, then crawled away before they died, but if that were so, I would not have expected to see so much cornmeal still visible.

So I’m not sure what to make of this. I mean, I’m glad there is no new damage to the plants, but for all I know, they’ll be back tonight.

Which means, when I head out to do my evening rounds, I’ll be looking closely at the squash patch!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: transplanting done!

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Now that the tomatoes and pepper transplants have been set up in town for give-aways, the remaining transplants have been done!

These are the pictures I uploaded on Instagram.

First image is the Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes that have started to develop.

In the matching pots are the herbs. The single oregano transplant is in the middle of a pot, surrounded by the second variety of thyme we have. The second pot has all the spearmint. For the pot themselves, I put a few inches of grass clippings on the bottom to keep the soil from falling through the drainage holes. Most of the soil is actually recycled out of other plant pots, with only a bit of a top up of garden soil, then the transplants were carefully mulched with more clippings. Doing the transplants freed up a couple of metal trays, so they’re now being used as drain trays.

We had already transplanted a couple of rows of onions in between the spinach earlier. The remaining spinach that bolted was pulled up, and my daughters took care of harvesting the remaining leaves. They discovered the Susan really, really likes spinach! We had to check to make sure spinach is okay for cats, and once that was confirmed, my daughter would hand her a leaf every now and then, as she stripped them off the stalks. It was amazing to watch her gobble them down! Even Fenrir came over and tried stealing some leaves, and got a few given to her, too.

We definitely need to stick to this variety of spinach. As bolted as they were when the plants were pulled, the leaves are still not at all bitter!

Now, the bed that had the spinach is completely filled with Red of Florence onions. There were still onion transplants left, so I cleaned up a bit more of the spaces the lettuce and bok choy were planted, in the bed along the chain link fence. Much to my surprise, there are quite a few lettuces that survived the smothering drifts of elm seeds. As for the bok choy, we’ll be lucky if the three or four I found survive at all. The empty spaces in the rows got planted with the remaining onion transplants, including a few yellow onions, and the other variety of red onions we’ve got. There were enough Red of Florence onions left that, after transplanting from end to end between the remaining lettuce and bok choy, I made holes in the mulch along the outer edge of the bed and kept on transplanting, filling about half the length of the bed. By the time I was putting those in, only really tiny ones were left. If they survive and develop fully, great. If not, we’ll still have lots.

Next, I worked in the wattle weave bed, and noticed one of the Sweet Chocolate bell peppers is getting quite big! The plant is still blooming, as are the other plants, so I expect we may get a decent harvest over the summer.

The tiny strawberry plants grown from seed got transplanted out. One of the three bunches of winter thyme did not survive being transplanted, so that left a gap I could fit several strawberries in. I did take out the self-sown walking onion as I kept transplanting strawberries wherever there was space between the herbs and bell pepper. It was neat having that onion show up on its own, but I don’t want walking onions settling into this bed. The strawberries are planted pretty close together, but it’ll give them a chance to get bigger, before they get transplanted to somewhere else next year.

There was still one surviving squash that I’m about 95% sure is more luffa, so I transplanted that next to the other two, and transferred the protective plastic ring to the new one. Hopefully, it won’t get shaded out by the potatoes too much.

I didn’t get a picture, but there was one last tiny Spoon tomato that emerged from the only Jiffy pellet that hadn’t had anything germinate when I potted them up. One of the Spoon tomatoes that got transplanted into the retaining wall blocks got broken, and is just a stem with a single branch, now, so I planted the baby tomato plant in the same block with it. Hopefully, at least one will survive.

And that’s it. These are the last of the surviving transplants – though when I went to get the trays, I spotted a hulless pumpkin seedling show up in one of the trays! All the other trays left behind are with things that did not germinate at all, for some reason. The Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon. Both varieties of cucumbers. The Birds Egg and Apple gourds, and a few other things. I’m not sure what to make of a zero percent germination rate. Since so many things have this habit of suddenly germinating, later on, I am not quite ready to count them as a loss, but even if they did germinate, for most of them, it’s too late in the season for them to be able to reach full maturity by the end of the growing season.

While I was walking around, setting up to transplant the onions, I kept hearing a cracking sound from the spruce grove. The cracking really started to increase, so I stopped to watch as the one tree my brother cut down for me that got stuck on other trees, started to fall. It got hung up again, but there was enough wind that it fell further still. It’s still stuck on other trees, but is now at about a 40° angle, instead of an 80° or so angle! It should make it easier to finally get it down the rest of the way, I hope. That one tree is almost enough to build a complete bed in the size I’m after!

After so many delays and distractions, it felt so good to finally get progress done outside! The one thing I want to do before working on those trellis beds is re-sow some of the summer squash. Then, it’ll be time for some manual labour!

I’m quite looking forward to it.

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: so many things!

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Yesterday was hot, and today is supposed to be a hotter, so I made sure to give the garden a thorough watering last night. I think it really appreciated it!

The mock orange next to the laundry platform is just exploding with flowers. Even the smaller one against the east side of the house that I keep forgetting to water is starting to bloom (we really need to move both of them!).

I found a few surprises this morning.

We have ripening strawberries. The ones in the photo look like they had some pollination issues, but it looks like all the plants are producing.

The big surprise was finding Roma tomatoes! They’re not the first to start blooming, and where the third variety to be transplanted, so for them to be the first to have developing tomatoes was very unexpected.

Some, but not all, of the resown green beans have germinated. Even some of the summer squash have started to germinate. With the winter squash, while transplanting Jiffy pellets with sprouts in them, I also transplanted the pellets that didn’t germinate. At least one of those has sprouted with big, strong seed leaves emerging. All of the squash seem to be recovering from transplant shock, little by little.

There was one transplant I did not expect to survive. There was a squash of some sort that sprouted in the wattle weave garden bed, between a bell pepper and some shallots. I did not plant it there, and it would have to go, since a squash plant there would completely envelop the shallots and peppers. So I transplanted it to an open space next to the pink rose bush, where we grew leftover lettuce seeds last year. As I tried to gently dig up the squash plant, I discovered that it was far, far deeper than I expected. I’m guessing the seed came with the garden soil, which has compost in the mix. When I pulled it up, it was basically all long, buried stem, but I did see a hint of a root just under what had been the soil level, so I transplanted it anyway. When I saw it the next day, drooping on the ground, I figured it didn’t survive, but included it when watering, anyway. This morning, it was looking perked up and much stronger! So it might actually survive, and we’ll find out what kind of squash it is.

I also got a harvest this morning! We don’t have a lot of garlic this year, and one variety is a soft neck garlic, so even fewer will develop scapes. I’d noticed scapes starting to show up recently, so it was a surprise to see they were ready to harvest, this morning! I picked almost all of them. There are a few remaining that should be ready tomorrow or the day after. Then they will be done.

Next year, we have to make sure to plant a lot more hard neck garlic, and protect the bed over the winter more thoroughly.

In other things, when I came out with the cat food this morning, I saw Caramel out and about, looking very hungry. She even let me pet her, though I think that was more because she wanted food. I dropped a handful of kibble at the opening where she had her kittens. It wasn’t long before she eating it, and was back under the cat house. I could hear the squeaking of kittens. She may have let me pet her while she was on the cat house roof, but when I tried to use my phone again to look under the cat house, she was back to growling!

There was one unpleasant surprise this morning, though. When I got to the kibble house with food, I found blood all over the place! On the floor, in the empty trays, and even against the walls in a couple of places! I’ve seen blood around before. The cats do fight pretty violently at times. Never this much, though. While doing my rounds, I kept an eye out for an injured cat, but saw nothing. Not even blood on the grass to show me where an injured cat might have gone. I’m assuming it was from a cat, though it’s possible it came from a racoon. Definitely not a skunk, since there was no smell.

The weird part is, no one heard any fighting last night. My daughters have a window facing that way that is kept open all night. My older daughter was working all night, as usual, and she didn’t hear a thing. My husband’s window is closer, but between the fans and his CPAP, he would only hear something if he’s up and about already. It would take a lot of noise outside to wake him from all the white noise he’s got going around him, inside.

It is a mystery.

The kittens inside are getting more active. In fact, I found one crawling around on the floor! I don’t want to risk stepping on one during the night while going to the bathroom or something, so with the help of a daughter, we move the cat cave, with the whole family inside, into baby jail. One of my daughter has put strips of carboard around the bottom few inches, so if any of the kittens get out of the cat cave, they won’t be able to get through the cage openings. They’re still small enough to squeeze through!

So far, they seem to be okay with the new arrangement.

Our 2023 garden: winter survivors!

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But first, the cuteness!

I was able to zoom in to get a shot of Brussel and Sprout, sharing the tray under the water shelter. When I first came out this morning, I saw only about a 14 cats, but more kept showing up, including these two. I think I counted 22 in total, with some of them skulking around in the distance, waiting for me to leave the food area.

While doing my evening rounds, I took the winter mulch, which was corn stalks, off the asparagus and sunchoke beds. There is still no sign of the sunchokes or the asparagus, but…

… the four strawberry plants that share the asparagus bed were looking great! I wasn’t sure if they’d survive the winter. Not only did they survive, but they are looking better now than they did at the end of the season, last year! I’m hoping they’ll put out more runners this year, that we’ll transplant elsewhere. Strawberries are among the plants we want to have a lot of. They’re so incredibly expensive in the grocery stores!

Of course, I had to check on the crocuses and found this little guy.

The very first yellow crocus! There are a lot of purple ones blooming this morning, and a lot of white buds showing up, but still just the one yellow buds visible.

I should make a point of checking the bed I inoculated with morel spawn more often. May is the time of year they usually fruit. It would be cool if the giant puff balls emerged, too, but if they do, it’ll be later in the season.

It’s a good thing today is Sunday, which I try to keep as a day of rest. I didn’t do a lot when reclaiming the bed to plant poppies yesterday, but it was enough to increase the pain levels. It’s turning out to be a really windy day, too. So, tomorrow will be my day to really get into the manual labour needed in the old kitchen garden. Hopefully, at the very least, the winds will die down!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: new sproots!

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Our newest seedlings are starting to show!

I few days ago, I spotted our first Spoon tomatoes, but they are so fine and spindly, I waited until today to try and get a photo.

Still no sign of peppers, but there’s about 8 or so tomatoes sprouting, and signs of more seedling elbowing their way to the surface. They are so bitty!

Speaking of bitty, we also have our first strawberries sprouting!

Growing strawberries from seed is totally new to me, so I’m pretty happy to see these. Over time, I want to have lots of strawberries, so if growing them from seeds works, that would make it much more affordable compared to buying transplants or bare roots. We’ll probably still do both. I want to use them as a living ground cover around the silver buffalo berry bushes. Those are nitrogen fixers, so it would be a good combination, and when the bushes start getting too big and start shading out the strawberries, we can just transplant them somewhere else.

I am so looking forward to having our own berries. We all love them, but they are so expensive to buy! My younger daughter was asking about growing blueberries, but they need acidic soil. Ours is very alkaline. We will need to find a spot and focus on lowering the pH so we can plant some. Once we clear more of the dead trees out of the spruce grove, we might be able to get some good spaces in there. I’ve read the spruces increase soil acidity, so I will want to do some soil tests and see how it is now.

So many things we’d like to grow!

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer

Analysing our 2022 garden: strawberries and asparagus

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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.

This is our second year for the purple asparagus. We should have one more year of letting them establish themselves before can we start harvesting anything.

I’d read that strawberries are a good companion plant for asparagus, so we bought some transplants this spring. Eventually, we plan to have a lot more strawberries as part of our self-sufficiency goals, but this was just a start. I hoped that we would be able to use runners to expand our strawberries next year.

I also snagged a package of 10 bare root, white strawberries as a spur of the moment purchase. We planted those in a new bed along the chain link fence, where the potato grow bags had been the year before.

The Results:

The asparagus and red strawberries may have been in a low raised bed, but the asparagus crowns get buried quite deep, and that bed ended up affected by the “moat” that formed around the garage with this spring’s flooding. (click on the images to see them full size)

The asparagus bed had been well mulched for the winter. When we transplanted the strawberries, the straw mulch was moved to around the bed, and wood shavings were added for a lighter mulch on top of the bed. That was done in early June and when the straw was moved, we could see that some asparagus spears were starting to make their way through the straw.

Then the flooding happened. I don’t think I’ve ever seen standing water that close to the house before! It’s hard to tell in the picture of the flooded yard, but the path around the beds at the chain link fence were filled with water, too.

Where the white strawberries were planted, however, was high enough that it wasn’t affected by the flooding in any significant way.

We did get a few red strawberries, but most of the berries ended up pretty misshapen and didn’t fully ripen. They just did not do very well at all. Lack of pollinators may have played a part in that.

As for the white strawberries, I thought we might have had some start to grow, but what I thought was a strawberry turned out to be a local weed that has leaves similar to strawberries. Not a single white strawberry grew, and I don’t really know why.

Conclusion:

With the asparagus, we are looking at 20 years of production in one place, so it’s not like anything is going to change, there – as long as they survive! There were fewer spears this year, than in their first year. I suspect that they have been set back at least a year, by the flooding.

Part of the plan had been to get more asparagus crowns every year, with both green and purple varieties, but that just didn’t happen for 2022. Finding a spot that can be given over to something for at least two decades is always a challenge, however with this spring’s flooding, that just wasn’t going to happen. We will have to keep in mind what areas so the most water collecting, and make sure to avoid them.

As for the red strawberries, the bed has been mulched, so hopefully they will survive the winter, and we’ll see better production next year.

The white strawberries were a complete fail. I would still like to try them again, but will likely order a different variety from somewhere else.

Strawberries can be planted under other things as a productive ground cover, so we have more flexibility when it comes to deciding where to plant them. We could order the roots in packages of 25, to be shipped in the spring. I’m thinking of getting at least one 25 pack, and planting them around the Silver Buffaloberry. Something we still have to decide on.

The Re-Farmer

Morning in the garden

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I just spent a bit of time going back over garden photos from last year. For all the drought and heat waves we had, the garden was well ahead of most of this year’s garden. It’s amazing how much the extended cold and excessive moisture has set things back. At this time last year, I was picking at least a few summer squash, and even beans in the morning. As much as they struggled in the heat, the peas were starting to produce pods. The melons were setting fruit and looking really prolific, and even the Mountain Morado corn was starting to develop cobs. The cherry tomato mix and spoon tomatoes had sprays of green tomatoes, with some ripening and ready to eat, soon after.

This morning, I was able to give more onions a hair cut.

These are onions from seed, taken from the high raised bed, which had the most, plus a few from one of the low raised beds. We picked so many from the onion sets last time, most of these went straight to getting dehydrated.

Kitchen shears makes the job to much faster. After a more thorough washing, then trimming off the browned tips, it was quick work to snip them into small pieces. As I write this, they are in the oven under the warm setting, at 145F (the lowest temperature our new oven can go).

Even with the onions, there’s a difference. They they are looking pretty good, last year they were developing bulbs by now.

I got to taste our first strawberry from the transplants! It was so very sweet! Not the one in the photo; that one’s not ready yet. Nor the first one that developed. That one rotted before it ripened for some reason. There are plenty more developing, and lots more flowers, though, so I hope we will have a decent amount from our 4 little plants. Hopefully, they will also develop runners that we can propagate, to have more plants next year. :-)

Still nothing from the bare root white strawberries we got, though. Looks like a total loss, there.

Some of the Carminat pole beans are getting very enthusiastic about climbing! The pole beans on the other side of the trellis aren’t quite there yet. There are a couple of self seeds (or should I say, bird-poop seeded) sunflowers that I am allowing to grow. There are some in other beds that I’m letting grow, too.

I was sure the beans I planted at the tunnel were also vining types, but I’m starting to think they are actually a bush bean. They are getting bigger, but so far, I see nothing to show that they are climbers!

While the Chocolate Cherry and Yellow Pear tomatoes are not showing fruit yet, the tomatoes that were started so much earlier indoors are really starting to fill out! Almost all the plants are starting to show fruit now. The photo above is one of the first Sophie’s Choice tomatoes to develop, and it’s getting surprisingly large, from what I can tell for the variety.

There is a distinct shape difference between the Sophie’s Choice and the Cup of Moldova tomatoes. In fact, it looks like the row that I thought was all Sophie’s Choice actually has a few Cup of Moldova in it. There are a LOT more of the CoM than the SC tomatoes.

The big surprise are the giant pumpkins. Do you see that flower above? And all the buds around it, both male and female?

That’s on the pumpkin I found with a broken stem. The one I didn’t think would survive. Turns out that pushing the broken surfaces together and burying them was enough to save it.

The rest of the squash nearby are not really doing well. Most are still very small, and even the ones that are growing more are nowhere near as big as they should be for this time of the growing season. I am starting to think we might not get any of the winter squash in this patch (the Red Kuri at the chain link fence is doing really well, at least), and we’ll be lucky to get any summer squash, too. The melons are all so small, I just don’t see them making it. Squash and melon all need lots of water, but it looks like they still got too much, this wet-wet spring, and just aren’t recovering. Unless we have a ridiculously long and mild fall. Some of the hulless pumpkins seem to be doing better, but I still don’t think they’re recovered enough to get a crop this year.

We planted SO much this year, and it seems much of it is going to be wasted effort. Hard to believe that it’s pretty much all having a much harder time this year, with so much moisture and more average temperatures, than last year with the heat waves and drought. I would have expected it to be the other way around. Looking at what is working and what isn’t, it definitely confirms that we need to go with the high raised beds. Even the low raised beds, while better than what’s at grade, are not all doing as well as one would expect. The tomato bed is the only thing I would say is doing really well. Most of the onions are doing all right, though even the shallots from sets planted near the Chocolate Cherry tomatoes are struggling at one end of the bed. Though the bet was raised about 4 inches when we framed it with bricks, the end near the vehicle gate had a lot of water around it. So much, it even looks like the shallots at the end were largely drowned out. At least there are more, further down the bed, that escaped nature’s wrath!

I’m struggling with disappointment right now. We planted more then we “needed”, with the expectation that we’d lose some, so that we could at least still be able to preserve food for the winter. Now it’s looking like we’ll barely have fresh produce for the summer.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: First!

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Look what I found this morning!

Our very first strawberries are forming! Yes, we’ve had wild strawberries before, but these are our first strawberries that we’ve planted ourselves.

We had more rain last night, so it was very wet while doing my morning rounds. We’ve had more rain throughout the day, and high winds – even tornado warnings earlier on. Not getting much done outside right now.

Not getting much done inside right now, either. I had a sleepless night, and while I should have been doing other things (including catching up on the blogs I follow; I’m so behind on that!), I ended up throwing a hunk of pork in the slow cooker, then taking a much needed nap. The girls and I need to be working on the basement, but there is a lot of stuff that needs to go to the burn barrel, but it’ll just get wet, so there’s no point right now. Hopefully, they’ll be able to work on it tonight.

I did make it out to my mother’s to drop off plastic bags and storage bins for her to use to prepare her apartment for getting sprayed for bed bugs. My sister had called her yesterday about coming today, and my mother told her not to – it was too early. !!! *sigh* Hopefully, at least one of my siblings will be able to come out to help her tomorrow, then I’ll be back the day after to help with the last, big stuff.

Meanwhile, we could really use a few dry, sunny days!

The Re-Farmer