Sweet Chocolate peppers

Our 2024 Garden: a morning of peppers

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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!

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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

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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!

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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

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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

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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

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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

Tiny harvest, kitten update, and a mystery

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I will start with the kitten update!

The kitten seems to be completely normal right now! No favouring the leg that was dislocated. No limp that I can see. The kitten stays away on its own, for the most part, but doesn’t run away when the other kittens come over to say hi. I’ve even seen TTT grooming in on the way by.

I’m also not finding any messes. Not even on the puppy pads under my desk. It looks like TTT has finally starting using a litter box. Not while I’m in the room, though, so I’m hoping she’s using the covered box in my closet – the only one I can’t see into – and not in some secret corner somewhere. I’m not seeing any tiny messes, either, so it looks like the kitten figured out litter boxes right away.

The main thing is, the kitten appears completely uninjured! I was able to sneak a pet this morning, but otherwise it stays away. Now that it’s indoors, socializing it will be much easier, so I am not concerned.

Today is supposed to be “cooler”, with a high of 27C/81F. We currently have weather advisories for smoke. I can see it on the security camera live fee, hanging in the old hay yard like a fog. It is worse now, than when I was doing my morning rounds.

Our squash flowers are very popular.

They are pretty much the only things blooming right now, other than some wild yarrow, so the bees are happy!

I wasn’t expecting to harvest anything this morning, but I found these!

I was surprised to find such large patty pans. They got missed yesterday, hidden under leaves, but this morning I could actually see them. I normally like to pick them a bit smaller, but these will still be tender, without a seed cavity yet.

I was not intending to pick the pepper, though. I had moved it to look at the back and see how much green there still was, and the stem broke off!

Some of the beans growing in the compost ring are completely dried on the vines, so I picked one of the pods. Once inside, I opened it up and found…

A mystery.

When I first opened the pod, I thought they were black, but once I uploaded the photos to the computer, I could see they are actually a deep, dark blue.

I have no idea where they came from.

I have never bought seed beans like this, nor do I remember buying dry beans like this. If we did buy some that I can’t remember, they would have been cooked; no viable, uncooked seeds would have ended up in the compost heap.

I’ve tried looking them up, but have had no luck. These had pale purple flowers, green pods, and now deep blue, almost black, seeds. I’ve found seeds similar to this, but they all come from yellow or purple pods, none green.

Well, whatever they are, we’ve got more of them with pods drying out on the vines. I’ll keep the seeds and maybe try growing them in the garden next year, and seeing if they are actually a tasty bean.

I’m considering a couple of things in the garden beds right now.

One is going to have to be done; it’s just a matter of doing it when it’s cooler in the day. The Roma VF look like they’ve picked up a fungus. I don’t know if it’s tomato blight or something else. Either way, all the remaining tomatoes need to be picked and the plants pulled. They will be burned, not composted.

I’m debating the bed along the chain link fence. The peas are pulled, but there are still some of those Czech lettuces in there that I’m allowing to go to seed. Plus the volunteer tomatoes.

The tomato plants are really small, but if the long range weather forecast is at all accurate, they still have more than a month of growing season. So I am thinking of transplanting them into the empty bed in the old kitchen garden, where the Irish Cobbler potatoes had been. I would need to protect them from the kittens that like to play or nap in there.

Once that bed by the chain link fence is clear and ready to be prepped for the winter, I’m going to make it a bit narrower. It’s too painful to reach near the chain link fence to weed. Plus, some of those pieces of concrete patio blocks I found run under one corner of the bed, and I want to dig those out.

I have those tillage radish seeds still. I am thinking, once some beds are emptied and cleaned up, I can plant some of those as a cover crop. They won’t reach full size before winter, but they should drill far enough to make a difference. These are meant to be left in the ground, where they will freeze in the winter, decompose, and add organic matter to the soil in the spring.

Amending this soil into something healthy again is definitely a years-long process.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: a harvest gift, and taste test

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I’m heading to my mother’s this afternoon, then taking her to a medical appointment, so I thought I would bring some things from our garden to her.

I picked the potatoes from under just one Irish Cobbler plant, which had a pretty decent amount of larger potatoes. There were also small ones, so I just buried them and the plant roots again. There’s a few orange carrots, a zucchini we harvested earlier, some Roma and Indigo Blue tomatoes and a Sweet Chocolate bell pepper. While cutting some thyme, I noticed a shallot that got missed, so I grabbed that, then added a couple more we’d harvested earlier. I also cut some spearmint for her. I decided to add one of the Black Beauty tomatoes we harvested earlier, too. The softest one I could find among the lot. After bagging it up, I remembered to grab a head of garlic for her, too.

My mother being my mother, I expect to get a lot of snarky comments and backhanded insults. 😄 She’ll have issues with the brown pepper and different coloured tomatoes. She did ask me to give her some of the tomatoes to try, but then launched into a long speech about how bad it is to have not-red coloured tomatoes. And, of course, she’ll tell me how my sister brought her soooooo much from her garden, and it’s so much better, and she’s just one person, so it’s all too much, and how bad it was for me to bring more.

My mother is very predictable. 😁

But I’m giving them to her anyways. Who knows. She might actually show appreciation for a change. 😄

We did have one really nice, ripe Indigo Blue Chocolate tomato for my daughter to taste test. I’d picked three and put them in my pocket so I could use both hands. One was so ripe, it split when I bent over, so it needed to be eaten right away.

My daughter found them absolutely delicious. Nice and sweet. Juicy, but not too juicy, with a rich tomato flavour. We have others harvested that will need to be eaten quickly, and I don’t think that’s going to be a problem at all! 😄

The Indigo Blues are an indeterminate tomato, so I can expect to be able to harvest small amounts of them more often, from now one. The Romas are starting to ripen in mass quantities, so I might just wait on processing the ones we’ve picked, so we can do larger quantities all at once.

On another note completely, we did try to use the new bread machine yesterday.

Something went wrong, but I don’t know what.

I came into the kitchen to check on it, and it was off. There was still power to it – the display was showing the exact settings I started with for a basic 1.5lb loaf. It should have been showing a count down on the time. It just wasn’t running. The bread dough had been completely kneaded and was just sitting and rising the pan, so I left it. Later on, my older daughter took the dough out and baked it in the oven, so we now have one, perfect little loaf in bread jail to try.

Hmmm… I wonder. We keep our bread in a bin – bread jail – to protect it from the cats. I wonder if maybe a cat stepped on the controls while we were not around, and shut it off? We’ve set the bread machine up on the counter near the microwave, where it could be plugged into an outlet on a different breaker, and plenty of space around it for when it’s hot and baking. It’s the one counter the cats are allowed on, as they like to sit and look out the window.

That’s about the only thing I can think of, other than mechanical failure.

My daughter plans to try again, later, so we’ll see!

Who knows. I might come home to some fresh bread to try. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: morning harvest and how things are looking

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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