Sweet Chocolate peppers

Our 2026 Garden: onion, eggplant and pepper seedlings, plus an update

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

I got a little bit of garden therapy in, while checking on my seed starts.

I also remembered to get a picture of how the onions are doing in the seed snail experiment.

I’m actually debating whether it’s time to “pot up” the onions. That would involve unrolling the snails, adding more soil (at this stage, I would be using potting soil rather than seed starting mix), then rolling them back up into thicker snails. I made sure to have plenty of excess foam packing material being used here to accommodate extra thickness. I think I might wait a bit longer, though.

You might have noticed the tips of the onions look dry and shriveled. I think that’s from getting too close to the shop light before I raised it higher. Currently, they have the shop light on for part of the day, but for 12 hours on a timer, they are getting full spectrum light from the larger new lamp I picked up.

In the next couple of pictures, you can see new seedlings from the pre-germinated seed starts. Well… almost see! The row at the bottom of the picture is the Caspar Eggplant, and three seedlings have broken ground. In the middle is the Sweet Chocolate Pepper, and five seedlings have appeared, a couple just barely visible through the vermiculate. The top row is the California Wonder pepper. It took some searching, but I did see the curved stems of seedlings just barely visible through the vermiculite.

In the last picture, you can see the largest of the Sweet Chocolate peppers.

I turn the shop light on for part of the day for these, too, but they also have full spectrum lights on for 12 hours. I’ve got two lights fixtures with four light strips each, and I’ve got them set up so that five light strips are over the full tray, then three strips are over the celery and luffa in the other tray. The strips with the herbs I recently sowed are off to one end of the tray, closer to the heater that I have set up to blow warm air over both trays.

I have the full spectrum light strips quite close to the surfaces of the trays. As the seedlings get larger, I can raise each strip individually, as needed. Right now, for example, the container with the celery is lower than the Red Solo Cups the luffa are in (still just the one seedling in those), so it has its own light strip that’s lower than the two that are over the taller Red Solo Cups.

I’ve made a point of spending time in the basement to have the heater on. Usually, that’s my time to do my steps (I have a step counter on my phone), but I also go over my notes. I have lists of things based on how many weeks before last frost they should be started. What I have so far has been started early, based on a June 2 last frost date, though the newly revised average has our last frost date in a range of dates at the end of May, potentially adding as much as a week to our growing season.

Looking at the calendar, I made sure to write down when the next batches of seeds should be started, though I can get away with some, like the herbs and the marigolds, to be started early. Some of them are things that could be grown in pots indoors, and are more flexible. I am mightily resisting starting tomatoes! Those are next on the list but, if I were to go by calendar dates, they shouldn’t be started until the middle of March. Being short season varieties, I could theoretically wait even longer.

I don’ wanna wait that loooonnnggg!!! <insert childish whining> 😂🤣😂

Still, spending some time with the plants and thinking these things through, even for as little time as it was, was enough to make me feel better than I have been for much of today.

In other things, I phoned my mother today. In the TCU, she can’t have a phone in her room. I call the nursing station and they transfer me to a cordless phone that they take to the person being called. They tried transferring me four times before it finally worked!

My mother was very, very happy for the call, and said she had been thinking of calling me. I reminded her that, where she is now, it’s a long distance call.

She really wants a phone and was asking if we could get her a phone, like other people have. Meaning, a cell phone.

Now, there’s no way my mother can handle a Smartphone. She could barely handle the new phone my brother got for her at her apartment, to replace her old set, and it was actually simpler than the one she had before. Still more bells and whistles than desired, and things were in slightly different locations, and that was enough to give her a hard time. My brother tried so hard to find the simplest phone set – a corded phone with an answering machine, plus two cordless phones for her dining table and bedroom – that he could, but everything has bells and whistles these days.

I do know there are cell phones made for seniors out there, so I plan to do some research later today and see what’s available here in Canada.

I explained to her that she would have to buy a phone and have a monthly phone bill. Her response was, she has money that’s just sitting in the bank, not doing anything, so she doesn’t mind using it. She currently has no idea what’s going on with her banking right now, as my brother is taking care of it for her. None of us have tried to explain to her that the hospital back dated their billing for her stay there, which was charged daily. Plus, her rent for February was taken out, but as my brother explained my mother’s situation and why he wasn’t able to give them a month’s notice, it will be refunded. Until then, she’s being double billed for the month, which she would not be able to understand and would freak out over if we tried to explain it to her. My brother is the best person to be taking care of all this for her, and I assured he, even though he’s still out of the country, he’s on top of all this and taking care of things for her.

Then I told her that I had going to mass yesterday, where prayers were said for her health, which she was very happy to hear about. I then told her I had been on the way to visit her when something went wrong with the truck, and I had to get a tow truck. She immediately said, I need a new vehicle. *sigh* As if we don’t know that! So I told her about my BIL driving me home in his truck, and that he was planning on selling it in the summer. If we can come up with $5000 by then, we will buy it from him. It took a while before I realized she didn’t know who I was talking about at first, so I said my BIL’s name again. Oh! You mean… and then she said his Polish name (his family are also from Poland). 😄 So she was pretty keen on the idea of our getting a truck from him.

We talked about a bunch of other stuff for a while. She’s not liking where she is right now, and I can’t blame her one bit. Not only is she now in a smaller room that’s being shared with someone else, it’s very close to the nursing station, which is right next to the entry doors. Lots of traffic, lots of noise. I explained to her that everyone else there is waiting to go somewhere else, like she is. Her response was, I don’t care about anyone else. I just care about me. *sigh* I said it meant that she would be seeing a lot of changes in who is there with her. She is doing a lot better, as far as care needed, than many others and that’s part of the problem; people with higher needs are going to get beds in nursing homes faster than her, typically. I reminded her that, when it came to nursing home spaces, we’re basically waiting for people to die, as that’s pretty much the only way beds get freed up. She thought that we could talk to people about getting her into a nursing home faster, because where she is is not good for her health. I told her, where she is now is the first step, but in the end, it’s the ultimately the provincial government that decides. So she said we should tell them to build an addition to the nursing home she wants to live in.

…

*sigh*

I didn’t even try to explain. Our province certainly needs more beds for long term care and assisted living, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before that happens.

Our conversation went all over, and she gave me messages to pass on to my siblings. I mentioned again that it’s long distance for me to call her now, but not for my sister. She was all surprised by that (not sure why; my sister lives only 15 minutes away, at most) and started saying my sister should phone her more often! She’s not understanding that it’s harder to do that through the nursing station where she is than how it was before. Then she wanted to know when I would be visiting her next. I reminded her, the truck was at the garage and we have no idea how long it will be, before we have transportation again.

Oh, so you want me to give you money for the truck now?

?????

I said no, I was just letting you know that it might be a while before I can visit and why. That’s all!

I can give you a check…

????!!!

I told her again, I wasn’t wanting anything like that. I was just letting her know why I might not be able to visit anytime soon, but we just don’t know right now.

But the money is just sitting there, not doing anything… I can write a check.

???!!!

Finally I deflected and said, we can talk about it the next time I visit. She happily agreed with that and we dropped it.

I wasn’t going to ask, but I’m not sure if she was offering to pay for the repairs, or to give us funds to buy the truck from my BIL! I fully expect her to forget about it long before I’m able to visit her again, and I will certainly not bring it up again! The offer was totally out of the blue and not at all what I meant by telling her about the truck. That’s the sort of thing our vandal was constantly doing to her and my late father for many years, which might be why she thought that, by telling her about the truck, I was actually asking her for money. I do appreciate the offer, but I will not ask or bring it up again.

Over all, for all that my mother is not liking where she is, she did sound happy. Even when, at one point, she started rather playfully referring to herself as an “orphan” for being there. She told me to make sure to pass that on to my sister, so she will call and visit more often. 😁

I really hope my mother isn’t there for very long. Still, it’s the first step to getting her where she wants to be, at least.

Meanwhile, I’ve got my homework assignment, and will start seeing if there is some sort of phone out there that will work for her and where she is. That won’t be easy!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: eggplant and peppers

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

A couple of days ago, on checking the seeds I’ve set to pre-germinate, it looked like some were just starting to show radicals. Nothing ready, but it seemed they soon would be.

So I grabbed one of my deep celled trays and prepared it in advance. These trays have 21 cells, and I’m looking to have 1 row of each of the seeds I have pre-germinating right now. The seed starting mix in the cells are all pre-moistened, ready and waiting.

When I tried pre-germinating seeds last year, I let them sit for probably too long. Their roots started to go into the damp paper towels and had to be very carefully pulled free. From what I’ve been seeing online, they really should be potted as soon as the radicals appear.

So that’s what I’ve already done with the luffa.

Yesterday, that first seed I saw that looked like it was starting to show its radical – a Caspar Eggplant – had started to germinate. Just the one. So I planted it into a prepared cell, then topped it with vermiculite, partly so I could easily tell which cell has a seed planted in it.

Today, I found another eggplant, plus some Sweet Chocolate peppers.

I would prefer to have these on another heat mat, but I only have one. The light fixture above them, however, does put off some heat. With smaller seeds closer to the surface like these, it will actually be enough to affect them.

I did have to raise the light fixture another inch to fit the large celled tray under it, but that should be okay. I’ll keep transferring seeds over as they germinate. With these larger cells, I should be able to avoid potting them up for some time, if at all.

As long as the pre-germinated seeds survive the transfer, I should have 7 plants each by using this tray. If I’d been using the Red Solo cups, I can fit 9 cups in each of the bins I have to hold them, so that’s what I would have been shooting for as a total. Seven should be enough, and I am not expecting 100% germination rates, nor 100% transfer survival rates.

We shall see!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: starting peppers, celery and luffa

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Normally, today would be my day to go into the city for our first stock up trip for February. With the truck having issues and an appointment to get it checked tomorrow morning, today was a home day, instead.

Which turned out to be a good thing.

I didn’t think I’d pushed myself yesterday, but the pain started hitting last night, and this morning I could barely walk. I managed to feed and water the outside cats, grab a quick breakfast, pain killered up and went back to bed for a couple of hours.

Thankfully, that seemed to help a lot.

Which meant I was up to setting things up in the basement to start more seeds.

That included testing out the heat mats. I’d bought a new one last year, because the old one stopped working, but I tested it again anyhow. For a while, I thought I’d need to buy another heat mat, but the new one did eventually warm up quite nicely. The basement is always between 13-16C/55-61F, though it does feel warmer after we removed the cat barrier in the “window” between the two basements, now that we don’t allow the cats down there anymore. I set up just one of the lights, choosing the one that actually warms up a bit when it’s on.

Then it was time to get the set of seeds to start this early. I decided against starting thyme. I’ll see if the varieties we planted last year survived the winter under their thick mulch and blanket of insulating snow. If they didn’t, I will buy transplants, instead.

I also decided against trying the Sweetie Snack Mix peppers again, and will start more of the other two varieties, instead.

This is what I started today.

There’s the luffa, of course. I probably could have started those at the same time as the onions. There are sprouts in all four onion seed rolls now.

Then there’s the Caspar eggplant, a new variety I’m trying this year. The Golden Boy celery is the first time I’ll be trying to grow celery. The Sweet Chocolate peppers are a variety the girls suggested. They grew well when we had them before. When it comes to flavour, they really don’t find much difference between any of the varieties we’ve tried. The California Wonder Bell pepper is a new variety for us that I chose specifically because they are described as being thick walled.

I decided to pre-germinate the peppers, eggplant and luffa, as the seeds are larger and will be easier to move and plant, once the radicals appear. I could also use a damp wooden chopstick to pick up the pepper and eggplant seeds.

With the peppers, I was thinking a total of 9 plants. When it came to pre-germinating the seeds, though, I ended up going for 9 seeds each – though the California Wonder got an extra when one of the seeds I grabbed looked like it was damaged. We’ll see how many actually germinate.

I also started just 9 seeds of the eggplant. I’m hoping to get 4-6 transplants out of those.

I was seriously tempted to pre-germinate more than 4 luffa. Even with pre-germinating, they do struggle to survive. We’ll see how many germinate – and how many survive until transplant time. Last year, I started with four, three pregerminated, one didn’t survive being planted, and of the remaining two, only one really grew much at all.

When it came to dampening the paper towels for this, I made sure to use warm water, too.

As for the celery, the seeds are so tiny, I decided not to pre-germinate them. Instead, I repurposed a clamshell from strawberries. The holes on the bottom are fairly large, so I set a paper towel on the bottom to keep the medium from washing out the bottom. Normally, I pre-moisten the starting mix in a large bowl I have for that purpose, but for such a small amount, I filled the container with dry mix, then used the warm water to thoroughly soak it, first, making sure there were no dry spots. Then I pressed it down to get rid of any excess water, and ensure there were not air gaps.

I have a little seed dispenser that I used to scatter the seed lightly over the surface. With seeds that small, the hard part is keeping them from being too densely sown. Also because they are so small, I didn’t top them with more seed starting mix. Instead, I added a layer of vermiculite. That got a thorough spray with warm water.

All of these fit into a seed starting drain tray and are now set on the heat mat, under the light. The light has “legs” that fit on the ends of the aquarium we originally got it for, so it only needed a couple of the fire bricks I’ve been using as supports. The other light we have rested directly on the aquarium frame, so if we need to bring that one out, it’ll need twice as many bricks to get the same height. The handy thing is, as things grow taller, we can just add more bricks to raise the lights by an inch per brick.

For the peppers and eggplant, I’ve got some deep cell trays I can plant them into. The less potting up, the better.

In the beginning of February, I will be starting tomatoes. I will probably pre-germinate, then use the Red Solo cups for those. I’m still torn between starting three, or all four, of the new varieties I got.

Oh, who am I kidding. I’ll be starting all four.

It would also be the time to start herbs, such as tarragon and savory.

Hopefully, this will work out. Aside from the luffa, these varieties have a relatively short days to maturity on them. It’s not just frost free days we need to think about though, but soil temperature. Last year, we had such warm days in May, but the overnight temperatures were so low, we still couldn’t transplant our seedlings until well into June.

Hopefully, this year will be a much better growing year, without the drought, heat waves and smoke!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: a morning of peppers

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Things definitely not chilly last night, though not – thankfully – frost chilly. We dropped to 6C/43F. Our expected high today is only 17C/63F, with tomorrow about the same. Then we’re supposed to warm up again over the next week, and even reach temperatures as high as 25C/77F before they start to drop again. Even the long range forecast into October has changed to warmer predictions, though we are still looking at potential frost. What gets me are the days we’re supposed to hit 25C/77F again, but have overnight lows of 3C/37F! Talk about temperature whiplash!

The garden seems to be okay with this, for the most part. The tomatoes, of course, aren’t ripening very quickly. The beans seem to be loving it, though. The Crespo squash is a surprise. While all the other squash and pumpkins are dying off, the Crespo squash is just thriving, growing and blooming. I’m not seeing any end of season die off at all!

This is what I was able to harvest this morning.

There are a few San Marzano tomatoes, all from the main garden area, none from the retaining wall blocks in the old kitchen garden. Hidden on the bottom of the colander is a single green zucchini. It’s small, but I picked it anyway, as it’s not going to get any bigger. There’s a whole three Chocolate Cherry tomatoes under there, too.

There’s all three types of beans in there. With the Crespo squash growing so enthusiastically, it’s hard to see the green Seychelle beans that are sharing the bed. Like the squash, the bean plants are thriving and blooming, as if it were the start of the season for them, instead of well past. There were more of the Royal Burgundy and Carminat beans than I expected, and they are still blooming, too. Even the one surviving Seychelle plant with the Carminat has a few beans on it, and is blooming.

I had a bit of a surprise while digging around to find the beans. I spotted a Carminat vine that didn’t make it onto the trellis netting, and was instead going under some winter squash vines. I gently pulled it out to see if I could get it on the trellis – and found a several huge pods! So we have more pods that might give us seeds, if the weather holds long enough for them to dry out.

With the peppers, I decided to go ahead and pick most of the Dragonfly peppers, as well as quite a few Purple Beauties. There’s a couple of Sweet Chocolates in there, too, though one of them turned out to be mostly green on the side I couldn’t see very well.

There were several peppers that are getting very yellow, but still not quite ready to pick. As for the variety that is supposed to be more or an orangey-yellow, they are all completely green, still.

Later today, when things are warmer and drier, I will head back to the garden and harvest yellow onions. Almost all of them had their necks bent down quite a while ago – most by cats, but some by the weight of the tomato vines they were planted around. No sense in leaving them to get mushy in the ground. I’m not entirely sure where I will lay them out to cure in the sun, though, since our picnic table is no longer useable, and the old market tent’s frame is broken.

I think I’m going to have to pick up another Walmart cheapie canopy tent. We’ll just have to make sure not to set it up where any trees can fall on it!

With the chill of the night, there were no Forme de Couer or Black Cherry tomatoes to pick today. I’m really hoping the upcoming warm weather stays for a while. We don’t have a lot of cat free space we can use to lay out green tomatoes to ripen! Another reason why getting another canopy tent would be useful.

And another picnic table. Probably a basic kit we can assemble ourselves, then paint.

When we get to building the outdoor kitchen we’re planning, that would be a good place to include areas where we can set out or hang produce to cure before they go to the root cellar. With the cooking surfaces we have in mind, we could even do large batch canning if we wanted.

All in good time!

For now, I’m just happy with a colander full of peppers and a handful of beans!

The Re-Farmer

[addendum: you know, if I followed the feedback suggestions on WP’s AI Assistant, my blog posts would be insanely long and even more verbose than I normally am! 😂😂]

Our 2024 Garden: triple harvest!

/ Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

Harvest was split between morning and evening today!

I did a double harvest as part of my morning rounds today. Here is what was ready to be picked.

Three Summer of Melons blend melons were ready to pick this morning, as were some Dragonfly and Sweet Chocolate peppers, a handful of beans, a few Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, a G Star patty pan squash and a Goldy zucchini.

After brining those in, I grabbed another bin before checking on the tomatoes in the Old Kitchen Garden. If you click to the second photo in the slideshow, you’ll see a few San Marzano tomatoes, some Black Cherry tomatoes, and mostly Forme de Couer tomatoes – including a branch I found that had broken off.

I’ll admit, part of the reason I wanted to pick eggplant this morning was to see how the new set up worked, with the vinyl wrapped around the box frame. You can see that in the last photo of the slide show. It seems to be holding up, though we haven’t had a severe wind to test it out yet. More importantly, having the overlap in the middle of the long sides made reaching into the bed to harvest easier than having the overlap on the short ends. So far, I’m happy with how it’s working.

Soon after I finished my morning rounds, I grabbed a melon and a couple of bell peppers for my mother, then headed out to her place for lunch, then helping her with her errands. That took a while, so it was very late in the afternoon by the time I got home.

I’ve been eyeballing the winter squash and pumpkins for a while now, and decided it was time to harvest the ones I was sure were fully mature. After picking, they will need time to cure. Normally, I would have set them up on the picnic table under a canopy tent, but the picnic table is finally giving out and can no longer hold much weight, and the frame on the canopy tent was finally broken beyond our ability to jerry rig it. In the end, I decided to set them in the garage, in front of my mother’s car. The back door and one of the front doors are kept open to allow for a cross breeze, which I hope will be enough for them. We moved the swing bench into the space in front of my mother’s car, now that all the bags of cans are outside, so I put a couple of boards across the arm rests to set the squash on.

After brushing off a whole lot of dust and old spider webs!

Then I grabbed the wagon and a utility knife and headed for the garden!

These are the ones that I felt were ready for harvest.

It’s a good thing this wagon is rated to 300 pounds, because all those squash together were pretty heavy!

In the next photo, you can see them laid out on the boards. I tried to put the smaller ones in the middle, and the heaviest over the arm rests.

In the middle front is a small, dark green squash. That is the first Crespo squash that formed. It got to this size and just didn’t get any bigger over the weeks, so I figured I may as well pick it.

There are four pumpkins from the free seeds I got from my mother’s town. Their pumpkin festival is this weekend. While with my mother, she told me one of her neighbours had some beautiful pumpkins in her section of the garden area. My mother offered to buy one, but she said not; they are for her grandchildren. So I offered my mother one of ours. She said yes – but just the smallest one.

She doesn’t want to actually do anything with it. She just wants to have a pumpkin for a few days. Just to make her happy! Then we can take it back and do whatever we planned to do with it. 😄😄

The rest are from the Wild Bunch mix of seeds we go, so we don’t know the names of them. I thought the two green, flattish ones were a Turban squash, but those get very bright and colourful. They might be a Buttercup squash, but from the images I can find, those are smoother. Still, that’s the closest I can find to what these might be.

There are two of those green ones that might be Buttercup squash. Then there are two of the slightly elongated orange ones with a point at the blossom end that looks a bit like a second them. Finally, there are two large orange ones that are round and slightly flattened.

Some of these have some damage to the skin. I tried to put them on boards or bricks to protect them from damp soil, but these still got too wet on the bottoms.

We’ll just have to eat those ones, first.

These will stay in the garage for a week or two before being moved into the root cellar, or eaten.

Except the pumpkin that will be going to my mother, of course!

I’m pretty happy with this haul. There are still more winter squash in the garden, and I hope the frost holds off long enough for at least some of them to finish ripening. The long range forecast has changed again, of course, and right now it looks like we won’t get cold enough for frost until we get into the second week of October. If this is at all accurate, we’ve got at least 2 – 2 1/2 frost free weeks ahead of us.

A lot can happen in two weeks!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: harvest firsts

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

After doing my rounds this morning, I had a bit of a harvest – some planned, some unexpected!

There is what I gathered this morning.

The melon on the right is the first honeydew type we’ve harvested, having already fallen off its vine when I checked it.

I decided to harvest a few young eggplant today, even though they can still get larger. I really look forward to trying them. The last time we were able to grow either of these, we only managed to have very little ones to harvest before the frost. We enjoyed them, so I expect we will enjoy them at their bigger size, too.

The two together are the Little Finger eggplant, while the one on the other side of the green Seychelle beans is a classic eggplant. The Seychelle beans growing with the Crespo squash, have had a growth spurt and suddenly have loads of flowers. There are even a few green beans from the single plant growing with the Carminat beans.

The purple beans are almost all Royal Burgundy bush beans. There’s just a few Carminat pole beans in with them. They seem to be picking up on the blooms, too. I guess they liked the rain we finally got last night? We didn’t get a significant amount, though. I probably should have watered the garden this morning, anyway, as we got pretty hot today.

The peppers are the Dragonfly variety. Some of the pepper plants were falling over under the weight of their fruit. As I was straightening one to add more support to it, a branch broke off! Those are the Sweet Chocolate peppers, with only one starting to show a blush of colour. They should still ripen, so I left them on the branch and brought them inside, too.

I did not harvest any tomatoes, today. We harvested so many yesterday, I decided to wait. Last night, I decided to start a slow cooker tomato sauce, to use up as many tomatoes, and some other vegetables we had on hand, as I could. That included a couple of Uzbek Golden carrots, a couple of small onion bulbs, that one shallot I found pulled up, several cloves of garlic, the remaining beans we had, and even one Purple Beauty pepper that hadn’t been used yet, all chopped very fine. I added the usual salt and pepper, plus what herbs I had in my cupboard, some olive oil and apple cider vinegar.

Then I started adding the tomatoes.

I used all the San Marzano tomatoes I could find. Those didn’t yield much per tomato. They were a lot like peppers, with a hollow space in most, and the seeds clustered around the core. That did make them easy to deseed and core, but there wasn’t much tomato left after that.

All the Black Cherry tomatoes we had went in, and then I started on the Forme de Couer. Those, I just kept chopping up until I couldn’t fit any more in the slow cooker. No de-seeding or coring needed with those!

That still left us with quite a few tomatoes – and I didn’t even start on the basin of tomatoes we picked yesterday!

We kept the slow cooker going through the night, with occasional stirring. The warm setting on the slow cooker seems pretty high, so even after the time was done and it switched from Low to Warm, it continued cooking.

In the morning, one of my daughters took the immersion blender to it, and we turned it back to low. I propped the lid slightly with a wooden spoon to let the steam out, though we eventually put it on high, so we can cook it down to a thicker consistency.

My brother and his wife came out this morning. My brother was towing a piece of farm equipment that was very wide, and my SIL followed in her car with her hazard lights going. He was able to only go about 50-60 kph and sometimes, he later told me, that was too fast!

When they got here, my SIL gave me some vinyl table protectors she had been about to put into recycling until she heard I’d picked some up to put around the eggplant and pepper bed as a sort of greenhouse. I was quite happy to take them! I had a large melon for them and it reminded her to ask if I had any more tomatoes I was willing to part with.

Oh, was I happy to hear that!

I bagged up the last of the Forme De Couer I didn’t have room for last night, then brought another bag and the basin for her to take as much more as she wanted! (She can’t come into the house, as she is allergic to cats.) They’ve had so much going on this year, they didn’t really do much in the garden, and the few tomatoes they planted this year aren’t ripening yet, so I was more than happy to share the bounty! We still have tomatoes in the freezer from last year! 😄

My SIL headed home soon after, and I helped my brother secure a new tarp over the box on the dump truck. He’d already parked and unhooked the machine he’d hauled, and was planning to come back with another load on the trailer.

After he left, I was able to work on a few things I haven’t been able to get to, with all the running around I did last week, but that will be for my next post!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: new sprouts, no sprouts, plus possible cat adoptions!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

While shutting down the lights in the big aquarium greenhouse, I spotted a bit of green. By this morning, there was more!

In one of the two cups they were sown in, all three Purple Beauty bell peppers have started to sprout.

In one of the three cups the Sweet Chocolate bell peppers were sown in, there’s one sprout emerged, and another pushing its way through. There may even be a third, under a piece of perlite, on the right. If it is, we’ll know by the end of the day.

With the thyme sprouted for so long, but nothing else, I had unplugged the heat mat some time ago and just hoped the tank would still be warm enough for the other seeds. There is NO sign of the oregano. We had issues with oregano last year, too. I’ll give it a bit longer, then decide if I want to try sowing them again, or just give up on the oregano from seed this year. It might be better to buy a transplant when the garden centres open in the spring.

In other news…

I was contacted by the Cat Lady a couple of days ago. She has been able to find open adoption spaces at a couple of shelters in the city for us. After much discussion, we’ve decided that both Ginger and Toni will go to one shelter. They have a set up just for special needs cats, and apparently three legged cats are extremely popular. In the city, at least! The other shelter specialized in Siamese or Siamese looking cats. I sent a picture of Ghosty’s face, and she was identified as a Lynx Point Siamese. My daughters figured she was a tabby with albinism! Either way, this shelter tends to have rather high end clientele, so Ghosty will likely find herself in the lap of luxury before long!

As I write this, I can see the live feed from the garage cam. There are 6 cats milling about. It’s that time of year again. There’s been a lot of baby making going on, and the males are starting to fight over the females. I’m so frustrated that we haven’t been able to snag any of the females to get fixed! They simply will NOT let us near them! I think the super fluffy little tabby that is sibling to Patience outside, and Peanut Butter Cup, the Beast, and Soot Sprite, inside, is female. It’s hard to tell with all the fur, and I can’t get close enough to check, anyhow, but the way I see her behaving around the males right now…. *sigh* Why are all the females so skittish, but the males so friendly?

Anyhow.

If all goes to plan, we might be down three indoor cats on Friday! I’ll be driving them out half way to meet the Cat Lady, and she’ll take them the rest of the way.

This morning, after giving the outside cats their food and warm water, I did a bit of shoveling. I’m much less stiff and sore than I expected to be, after yesterday! I made sure to have some Golden Milk before bed, which I think helped a lot. Lord knows, the painkillers aren’t doing much. We now have paths to the compost pile, the back of the garage, the outhouse, and the litter pellet compost behind the outhouse.

What I am NOT going to bother doing is clear a path to drive into the inner yard. I don’t see the point.

We are getting snowfall warnings for this evening, though – another 10-15cm/4-6 inches – so we might need to clear the driveway again tomorrow, so we can meet with the Cat Lady on Friday. Hopefully, the gravel roads will be plowed, too. I thought it was done already, but when I cleared our driveway, I found that what I though was a plow ridge visible on the garage cam was just tire tracks from the one vehicle that managed to make its way down our road. !! I don’t expect to have troubles with the truck on the road, but our driveway tends to drift a fair bit. Mostly right in front of the garage.

We have several packages to pick up at the post office, which closes at noon today, so I will be heading out soon to get those, then keep going into town with a couple of water jugs to refill, and pick up a few groceries. I’ll have to snag a daughter to help me bring things to the house from the garage, since I won’t be able to pull up to the house. Either that, or reclaim the wagon from the storage side of the garage. It’s got our chainsaw and other tools I was using to clear trees and work on the first trellis bed stored in it. With the paths in the snow, though, it might be easier to just carry things in. We’ll see.

As I write this, we’ve already warmed up to -13C/8F, and we are expected to reach a high of -5/23F after the snow starts to fall. We’re expected to stay below freezing for a few more days, but the forecast is now saying we should reach of high of 2C/36F on Sunday, and be staying with highs at or above freezing from then on.

We’ll see what actually happens! I just want that snow to melt away slowly, so we don’t get any flooding aside from our usual moat around the garage. 😁

Well, time to get ready to head out, and see what the roads are like!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 garden: herbs and peppers

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Today, I did some seed organizing.

After marking out the weeks backwards from our June 2nd last frost date on our calendar, I then went through my bin of seeds and organized them by when they need to be started indoors. Then I picked out the ones I could get started now.

We won’t be starting everything that we have seeds for.

Starting from the 3-4 weeks list:

I still haven’t decided if we’re going to plant any gourds at all this year. There are several I really want to grow, but we just don’t have the space. With the winter squash, we have the new packet of mixed winter squash seeds to try, plus one type for pies my daughter asked for. With the mixed seeds pack, we will of course want to plant the entire package, and see what we’ve got! I would still like to try the Honeyboat Delicata squash again; the few we got didn’t get a chance to fully mature, but they were great in the pie my daughter made! We also really liked the Pink Banana and Georgia Candy Roaster. There are other varieties that didn’t do well that I want to try again, just so we can decide if we like them or not, but that will depend on how much space we have. The problem is, there are a LOT of things that need to be started in that 3-4 week time span. I’m still not sure if we’ll do cucumbers this year. I’d rather use the space for the melons and winter squash. We’ll be skipping the hulless seed pumpkins this year, but I really want to try the Crespo squash again. Last I saw, Baker Creek didn’t carry the seeds anymore, so I want to successfully grow at least one to collect seeds from!

As for the tomatoes in the 6-8 week list, we’ll not be planting all that we have seeds for. We’ll do the San Marzano paste tomatoes for preserving and the Black Cherry for fresh eating. The free seeds we got are tempting me greatly, and I always want to grow more Spoon tomatoes! They’re just fun. I want to start quite a lot of the San Marzano, but not as many of the cherry tomatoes. I don’t want a situation like last year, where we ran out of space and had to give away so many transplants!

From the 8-10 week list: the Butterfly Flower is a type of milkweed, so I definitely want to get those going. We have three varieties of “early” peppers that I waited to start last year. They have such a short growing season, technically we could direct sow them. It didn’t work out. They didn’t get to produce, though with most of them I now know that the grow bags they were planted in were invaded from below by roots from the nearby Chinese elm. So we’ll definitely need to keep that in mind, when deciding where to transplant them this year. I will be starting fewer seeds, shooting for at least 2 plants per variety in the garden, but between the 6 varieties I’ll be starting this year, we’ll still have plenty for our needs. Hopefully, my family will have peppers of each kind to try, so we can decide which varieties we like enough to keep growing, year after year.

You’ll notice there are no summer squash on my list. Those got moved to the direct sowing bin. I’m not going to have the space to start them indoors. As long as I can keep the slugs away from them, they should be okay to start outdoors.

There were four things I could start today. Since I was after fewer plants per variety, I decided to go with the Red Solo cups to start them in, rather than the larger trays with smaller grow cells.

With the herbs, I’m just doing the oregano and German Winter Thyme again. The chamomile we planted last year should have self seeded, and we’ll see if the spearmint survived the winter in their pot. We ended up not using the lemongrass at all, so I’m not trying them again this year. We’ll plan out our herbs more, as time goes by. The herb seeds are so incredibly fine – especially the oregano! They got surface seeded over the pre-moistened seed starter mix, then covered with a light dusting of dry starter mix to just barely cover them, followed by a spritz to moisten the tops. Vermiculite would have been better, but I don’t have any. The herbs went into two cups each. With such tiny seeds, there’s no way to know how many I managed to sprinkle onto them. I still had seed left over, too, so if they don’t take, I can try again. The oregano really struggled last year, and I ended up with only one surviving seedling to transplant. That one plant did well, at least! They were started in the little Jiffy pellets last year, so I hope they do better in the larger cups and a different growing medium.

I decided to go ahead and plant the last of our Purple Beauty seeds, which are two year old seeds. The first time we planted them was a year of drought and heat waves, and they did very poorly. Last year, what was planted in that bed also struggled, so I think it’s more a problem with the soil in that bed. I split the last 7 seeds of Purple Beauty between two cups.

The Sweet Chocolate peppers were the one pepper that we were actually able to harvest mature peppers from last year, and they were also the only ones I started quite early. We saved seed from them, too, but there was still plenty in the packet, so I used those. There was enough to plant three seeds into each of three cups, with plenty of seed left over. I had intended to do just two cups, like the others, but the bin they’re in for bottom watering holds 9, and I just had to fill in that last space! Yeah, it’s a bit OCD, but I have an excuse. If there are gaps in the bins, the cups tend to fall over more easily when the bins get moved around.

So these are now in the big aquarium, on the warming mat.

The next seeds don’t need to be started until the second half of March, at the earliest.

Must… resist… starting too early!!!

😂

The Re-Farmer

Fuzzy friend, future soup, and cat status

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

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!

It should definitely be… interesting! 😄

The Re-Farmer

Evening harvest and a change in plans

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Well, I’m going to be running around tomorrow, after all.

But first, while doing my evening rounds, I found myself bringing in a small harvest.

At first, I thought I’d just grab the few ripe Indigo Blues I spotted, but then I noticed the Red Swan beans, among the purple corn. The plants are small and sparse, but once I started looking around the leaves, I kept finding more and more larger bean pods! The yellow zucchini was one I looked at this morning and thought would wait until tomorrow or the day after, but it was noticeably bigger by the evening.

I really should know better than to move the peppers to see how ripe they are. Where the sun hits turns brown rather quickly, while the parts in shade stay green longer. They are completely ripe when they are all brown. The problem is, their stems are fragile, so when I move a pepper to see the other side of it, it just snaps right off!

Which is fine. My daughter is using it for her meal right now.

Meanwhile…

While still at my mother’s, I got a message from my husband letting me know there was something to pick up at the post office. One of the packages was RAM for his computer. He was very excited about it.

Some time later, I came out and noticed he wasn’t in his room. Eventually, I found him in the living room, reading on his tablet.

Not a good sign.

He had installed the RAM, which was absolutely the right hardware for his computer, but when he turned it on, it wouldn’t work. He just had a black screen with a spinning circle on it.

Turns out, this is a known problem with his brand of computer. It doesn’t like being upgraded.

After fighting with it for a while, he reinstalled the original RAM.

And it still didn’t work.

His computer was dead.

At which point, he pain killered up and lay down for a while, because installing the hardware really did a number on his back. When he couldn’t handle being prone anymore, he moved to the living room.

At least he was still able to research his issue, then try something else.

Ultimately, he was able to get the original RAM working again, and he has a working computer again.

He’s also going to return the RAM.

That requires printing out a return label.

The printer is in my room. We don’t need to print a lot of stuff, but the self cleaning uses a lot of ink, anyhow. I’m out of cyan and magenta. You’d think we’d still be able to print out a black and white label, but nope. Even when it’s set to black and white, if more than one colour of ink is out, the printer simply won’t print.

Which means that tomorrow, I have to go to the nearest place that sells this brand of ink.

Which is a Staples, in the smaller city.

Then, after the ink is installed the the labels printed, I’m going to have to go to a Purolator to send the return out.

Which is driving to either the town we usually go to, or the town my mother lives in. Considering were the Purolator depot moved to in town, there isn’t really any difference in time or distance between them.

So I’ll have a couple of hours, more or less, of driving to get the ink and bring it home, then another 45 minutes to an hour of driving to get to a Purolator.

A significant portion of the refund is going to have to go back to paying for the gas and ink!

Well, so much for starting on that tomato sauce tomorrow.

The Re-Farmer