Well, I went and did it. I potted up the very enthusiastically growing winter squash. I even did the luffa. Of all the seeds I started only 1 luffa hasn’t germinated yet, and it still might.
I’ve decided I will go the Costco shopping tomorrow and, while in the city, try and find a second heat mat to put under the winter squash tray. If they’re out of stock… well… we’ll see how it goes!
The Re-Farmer
I was happy to see an envelop from Vesey’s today. These were the part of a larger order I made that could be sent right away. It was just two packets of seeds, and one of them was flowers, but I did want to get the peppers started right away.
With a days-to-maturity of only 70-75 days from transplant, starting the Sweeties Snack Mix this late should be okay. This mix of small sized bell peppers are something I actually see regularly in the grocery store, sold in packages with red, orange and yellow peppers, just like what is supposed to be in this seed mix. I’ve even bought them a time or two, so I know the family enjoys eating them. Which is good, since these are the only peppers we’re growing this year. We still have both dried and frozen peppers from last year!
While I was handling the moistened seed starter mix, I could tell it was way too cold for the seeds. The thermometer I have set up on the work table reads a consistent 10C/50F – which may have felt warm while I was outside, felt cold while in the basement! The container I use to hold the pre-moistened seed starter mix, however, is enameled steel, and it was sitting on the concrete floor.
Oops.
I now have a different set up and it no longer rests on the concrete floor. Hopefully, that will make a difference for the next time I have to start seeds!
I brought down a little heater and set it up to warm things on my work table. Since I had to wait a while, I did some clean up in the root cellar. We didn’t get to the last of the winter squash in time, and a bunch had to be cleared away. I decided not to put them in the compost ring, though. Instead, I spread them out in different areas to see if they would seed themselves. It’s more likely that they will be eaten by critters, but if a few seeds survive, we might have “wild” squash plants growing.
Once those were out, I took the time to clean and sanitize the shelves before getting back to the seeds. The only things we have left in the root cellar right now are onions and garlic. We keep forgetting that they are there!
As for the peppers, because these are a mix, there’s no way to know how many of each colour of pepper we’ll get. Depending on the germination rate, I might thin by transplanting. They should be fine on the heat mat for now, but once things start germinating, I’ll have to find some way to keep things warmer in there, since I’m not about to leave a heater running unattended in the basement.
Ah, well. We’ll figure it out!
Meanwhile, we’ve started our earliest seeds for now. The net ones I start should be the tomatoes, and those won’t need to be started for at least a week. The seeds set to pre-germinate should be potted up, by then. Hopefully, the bulbs for the other light fixture will have arrived. Not only does that fixture have a built in timer, but it also puts off a bit of warmth. The one that’s down there now doesn’t seem to get very warm at all.
It should be interesting to see how things work out, in this year’s seed starting dungeon!
The Re-Farmer
As I write this, the video I made is still uploading, so I’ve scheduled this to be published tomorrow morning.
One bed is prepped and ready for logs to be placed around it. My younger daughter is working in the spruce grove to get them for me, but has to clear away pieces of trees and branches that have fallen in high winds, and other debris, just to reach them. She handles heat even worse than I do, and the humidity sure didn’t help. She ended up needing to use a cane to get around the house until the painkillers kicked in.
She’ll have tomorrow to recover, though. The rain started up again this evening, with thunderstorm warnings. It’s supposed to keep raining all through tomorrow (meaning today, by the time this is published). A good day for me to be helping my mother out with her errands.
Sunday is supposed to be sunnier, though rain is expected to start again in the evening, so we might get a few hours of work in during the day. Then the rain is supposed to be back on Monday.
This weekend is a long weekend, when many people will be putting in their gardens. While we could probably direct sow some things, our area still has a while to go. Looking at the 14 day forecast is frustrating, since it seems to change every time I look at it, but at one point I was seeing predictions of overnight temperatures dropping below freezing in the last few days of May. When I look at it now, though, it shows a few chilly nights, just above freezing, and then overnight temperatures are predicted to be considerably warmer. Once I look into June, the daytime highs are all supposed to be 20C/68F or higher, for the entire month!
Of course, that might change completely, the next time I look.
Well, whatever ends up happening, we’ve got a lot of hard work to do before we can plant in the main garden area.
The low raised beds have been wildly overrun by crab grass in particular, with some beds heavily invaded by dandelions, and at least one has a pretty bad infestation of Creeping Charlie. Since they all need to be heavily reworked anyhow, we’re going to go ahead and redo them. Or, more specifically, I’ll be doing the weeding and shifting. My daughter will be harvesting and processing the dead spruces to build walls around them. This late in the game, I’ll be happy if we build them just one log high. They just need to be done! We can add more height to them, as time goes buy. Once these low raised beds are reworked, we can switch our focus back to building the trellis beds. Those will require even more work, since we’ll be bringing soil in from what’s left of the purchased garden soil pile, as well as layers of organic material at their bottoms.
For transplants, we’ve got the winter squash and melons, which will take up the most space, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, onions, gourds, some thyme and Orange Butterfly Flower (a milkweed) plus the mulberry saplings to transplant. Depending on the space available, I want to direct sow summer squash, shelling peas, bush beans, pole beans and more carrots, plus the dwarf nasturtiums. If we really do well for space, I’d like to plant at least one variety of corn, but I don’t expect that to happen. There will be a fair bit of intercropping, plus we plan to have things growing vertically as much as possible, so that should help with space. Still, there are quite a few things I expect to skip entirely this year, like cucumbers, beets, radishes, chard and lettuces, simply because I don’t expect to have the prepared space for them. Mind you, things like radishes and chard can be planted later, after the garlic is harvested and those beds are freed up.
Weather willing, I hope to be able to get at least one of the low raised beds weeded and shifted over in a day. With one done today, there’s four left to do. If the weather forecasts are at all accurate, that means they should be done by the end of next week. Then the log walls need to be placed and secured, and the soil amended with sulfur granules. Hopefully, that will also get done by the end of next week, because the week after has me doing a lot of driving around, from getting my mother to a medical appointment, to our monthly stock up shopping, to hopefully being able to connect with a friend that is back in Canada for a while.
It’s a very busy time of year!
The Re-Farmer
Okay, so I’ve scattered seeds and such, but today is the first day for direct sowing. It was such a gorgeous day for it, too!
I planted all the edible pod peas from the package, minus the ones that split apart as they soaked between damp paper towels overnight. Not a lot of carrots were planted; I’ll include them between other things, over the next while. I’ll probably do the same with more spinach. Basically, they’ll be space fillers and ground covers until it’s too warm to plant them anymore.
The box frame cover got worked on first, then set aside, since I put in the old salvaged T posts to hold netting for the peas to climb. I couldn’t drive them in very far, so they will need to have support added to them before any trellis netting is added, so they don’t get pulled into the bed by the weigh of the peas – or the net, for that matter! I intended to add a third post in the middle, but hit something hard. Possibly one of the branches set at the base of the bed, when it was first built and filled. Or a rock that got missed.
I found my pH meter and did a reading. No surprise the pH is still at 8. I even stuck it into the compost heap nearby, and the needle barely moved. I had a bit of an ah-ha moment earlier today. Well, more like a “duh, of course” moment. Maritime Gardening did an April garden tour video and was taking about how acidic his soil is, and mentioned that liming the soil can make the soil more alkaline.
Liming.
Lime.
Garden lime.
Which is made out of limestone.
Which is what we are sitting on top of.
Our area has limestone quarries and commercial gravel pits – we even have our own little gravel pit – with limestone based sand and gravel below a very narrow band of topsoil.
Of course our soil alkalinity is maxing out the pH meter. How could it be any different? *smacks forehead over what should have been obvious*
Increasing the acidity is going to be a challenge, that’s for sure. The use of raised beds will make it easier, at least.
Our order of sulfur is supposed to arrive by Thursday. Once we’ve got that in, we’ll be able to start amending the various beds with it, to increase the acidity. My husband actually ordered 2 different bags. One bag is 90% sulfur, 10% betonite clay. The other is guaranteed 99.5% elemental sulfur, but both are supposed to be broadcast evenly, then worked into the top 6 inches of soil, at a rate of 250g/10m² (0.5lb/100ft²). These low raised beds are 27ft², so they shouldn’t need much but, from what I’m reading, the more alkaline the soil, the more sulfur is needed (which makes sense), plus our soil type would also need more, for it to make a difference. Even so, it won’t actually do much for us this year; if we were treating a field, we’d be adding it to the soil a year before planting a crop. Any amending we do this year will mostly benefit what we grow, next year. Once we’ve started incorporating it into our soil, though, we should test the soil every few months to see how much difference it has made. Still, every little bit will help.
While it will be slow going to increase our soil acidity, using sulfur is supposed to be one of the quickest ways to do it!
Anyhow…
In the early evening, the girls and I went around the yard, checking things out and enjoying the longer daylight hours and warmth. We blew past our predicted high and reached 16C/61F! Plenty of trees and bushes have leaf buds showing. It took some searching, but we were thrilled to find a few shoots of snow crocuses and grape hyacinth emerging through the leaf litter. We even spotted the leaves of two tulips that had emerged near the saffron crocuses! These were not there, this morning!
We are getting into that period when everything starts to just explode into new growth.
Before long, we’re probably going to be complaining over how hot it is! 😂😂
For now, I’m just really happy to get some progress done outside. We’re supposed to get some rain next week, but we should have plenty of lovely days like today, to get things done outside!
The Re-Farmer
Well, it finally got done! At about 1am, the video I meant to post yesterday was finally uploaded to YouTube, which then was going to take another hour to process it, in three different quality options. I waited until the lowest quality one was done, so I could select a thumbnail, then went to bed!
The question is, was it worth it?
I’ve watched the video myself, selecting the highest quality option, but I really can’t see much of a different.
Here is the video in question.
Could I ask a huge favour?
Could you please watch this video on YouTube, selecting the highest quality option, then compare it to this one…
… also on highest quality option?
Then let me know in the comments how you watched it, and if you could see any difference in quality or play.
I’m using my new desktop to watch these, and the YouTube settings for both allow me to watch them at 2160p/4K.
When exporting the older video in my software, I used the default “good” quality setting. There is little difference in file size with either “good” or “high” options, so it should not have taken so very long to upload. I don’t know if it was an issue with our internet, or with YouTube itself. Or both. I’ve had this happen before where the upload took so long. it was basically stopped. I gave up and started over again. The problem with doing that is, no matter how far along the upload was, trying again starts at the beginning, not from where you left off. In that case, when I tried it again, it uploaded much faster and without any problems the second time around. I seriously considered doing that again with this one, and probably should have.
Please feel free to let me know what you think!
The Re-Farmer
With the previous garden analysis posts, I wasn’t able to include a lot of photos that I would like to have. Due to media storage running out in my WordPress account (I’m at 98% now, so I have to go find some more photo/critter of the day posts to delete!), I did a lot more videos, instead.
Turns out, I did quite a lot of them.
So this post is going to have all those videos, starting with the longer garden tour videos.
But first, I want to mull over my final thoughts on this past year’s garden, before I do a final review and reset post for next year’s garden.
Honestly, I’m not sure what to think about how the garden went this year.
I’m unhappy with the fact that the garden was so much smaller, and that we didn’t get the trellis beds built, that we wanted to. Even if we didn’t get the trellises added until later, we should have at least been able to build the raised beds. It seems that every time we had a day where we should have been able to get in to fell the dead spruces to use for it, something would come up that needed to be done right away, like helping my mother with errands, or doing our own errands in the city, etc. Then there were all the days when it simply wasn’t safe to try and fell trees due to weather. Mostly high winds. Felling 60′ + tall trees against the wind is just not a thing to to! It got me very frustrated. Still, I’m glad we managed to fell the trees we did, and the more that are taken down, the more space there will be to fell the bigger ones that we need to make sure fall away from the house.
The price of lumber is still quite high, which is why we’re scavenging our dead trees. Though prices have been slowly dropping again, they’re still high enough that I’ve even had people offer to cut down the dead trees for me, in exchange for the lumber. In another world, I would have happily taken them up on this exchange, but we need the lumber for ourselves!
The other frustration is not knowing why some things, like the beets, did not do well at all.
Oh! I completely forgot to include the radishes in the root vegetables post! They were planted as a fall crop, and while a couple grew fast enough to start blooming, and they certainly did better than the beets did, by a long shot, their roots still did not do well. Plus, my one daughter that actually likes radishes happened to be away and house sitting at the time when they would have been best for harvesting, so even what little we had never really got used.
Discovering that the roots from those trees my mother allowed to grow where she’d had a row of raspberry bushes, many years ago, were actually getting into the grow bags and crowding out the things I actually wanted to grow was another frustration. When she asked us to move here, and I mentioned wanting to clear those trees away, she demanded they stay. They’re a wind break, she says. Well, sort of, but even as a wind break, they’re not located in a good place. When I was starting to clean up around them, I discovered a number of stumps that showed these trees had been cut down in the past, most likely by my late brother. Much of what we’ve got now are actually suckers that grew out of the stumps.
Those trees have got to go, and go permanently, if we want to be able to use that space to grow food.
Still, they do provide a small amount of shelter, so that will likely wait until we’ve been able to plant more shelter belt tress in better locations. We just have to be very careful about where, since we need to avoid a buried telephone line.
We might just cut down the Chinese elms, though, as their seeds were also a contributing problem. The maples that are in there are not so bad. They have different root systems, too.
All in good time, but where they are used to be part of the main garden, and that’s space I’d like to reclaim at some point. I just didn’t realize, until this year, the extent of the problems those trees are causing.
Then there was the stuff planted in the new chimney block beds against the chain link fence. The bed we had there previously didn’t have anything to hold the soil in place, and we were losing it under the fence, so we had to do something. These are the last of the chimney blocks that were intended to replace the chimney for the old wood furnace – back when my parents bought the property in 1964! A chimney that was taken down when we got the new roof last fall, as only the electric furnace is being used.
We’ve used those chimney blocks as planters in the old kitchen garden retaining wall, so I expected them to work find. Yet nothing planted in them thrived at all. I can make some guesses, but I can’t say for sure why they failed.
There was some frustration with deer damage to the peas, bush beans, strawberries and asparagus, but nowhere near as bad as the year we had so many groundhogs move into the yard, so that’s a relative thing.
We did have some good harvests, especially with the pink banana and candy roast squash, the carrots and – eventually – the tomatoes. Even the tomatoes that had to be harvested early because they got blight, which is a first. We’ve never had tomato blight before and, as far as I can remember, my mother never did, either.
Though I have to say, it’s been great to grow potatoes and not have any Colorado Potato Beetles! We had massive problems with those in my mother’s garden when I was a kid! We also grew massive amounts of potatoes to last 7 people all winter, but there until we started growing them again, I don’t think anyone has grown potatoes here for many years.
So I am happy with quite a few things, but disappointed or frustrated with quite a few other things. A real mixed bag!
You will be able to see how that progressed over our year in these garden tour videos. This first one is the spring tour I included in another post.
I was able to do monthly garden tour videos, starting in June.
In this July tour, you can see the self seeded red poppies that showed up in the shallot bed, that turned out to be this variety – and I have no idea where they came from originally!
In this August tour, you can see just how poorly the plants did in the chimney block planters – and how well the compost pile squash did!
This September tour was done on what was our average first frost date.
We even got one last tour in October! We’d had our first frosts by then.
Also, I completely forgot that the cat we now call Syndol had been named Rudy!
Amazingly, we still had crops in the ground to harvest in October. The frosts we got came quite a bit later than usual, and the temperatures remained mild, so we could get away with quite a bit being left out longer!
These next videos are more topical, starting with one I included in an earlier post, about preparing beds and making carrot seed tape.
This next one was done in early April, when we got a snow storm. I was able to pot up tomatoes that day!
You can also see some of the early sprouts, many of which did not survive to be transplanted.
This next one is a time lapse video of planting the carrots, and preparing the spinach bed.
Gooby, the yard cat you see often in the video, has since disappeared. 😥
In this next video, we planted the Alternative Lawn Mix, spinach in the bed prepared above, and the bed preparation and planting of the Hungarian Blue poppies.
Sadly, Marlee, the cat in the thumbnail, did get outside and disappeared. She was unhappy that we’d brought the tiny kittens and their mother in, and when a window screen got knocked open, out she went and we never saw her again.
I miss her!
This next video took 5 years to make, and shows the progression of the old kitchen garden from completely overgrown in 2018, to our 2023 garden.
This progress video includes time lapse video of building the last two raised beds.
The next video is another time lapse video, and one I posted previously, showing where we reworked the tulip bed and planted our new apple tree – and protected the area from deer!
That was another area that had been very overgrown when we first moved here.
This next short video is of planting our Purple Peruvian potatoes in grow bags, with comparisons to the first year we’d grown them.
This next one was done in late May, when we transplanted our gourds and some squash, before our average last frost date.
It’s a shame that such healthy looking transplants did so poorly!
Here is another time lapse video, also done in late May, planting the Tom Thumb popcorn, plus the free Hedou Tiny Bok Choy and Jabousek lettuce seeds we tried.
This next one is very different. It shows what was discovered as I tried to repair a hose from the house to a tap in the garden, including more time lapse video.
The damage turned out to be far more extensive – no surprise, given the pipes were likely older than me!
Since this video was taken, I’ve dug up half the pipe, from where I’d first tried to repair it, to the tap. I asked my brother about the mystery sections of pipe the narrower pipe was running through. He said those were put there to help protect the narrower pipe. Which seems and odd way to do it, to me!
Now that we know the whole thing needs to be replaced, the plan is to dig a trench and remove the remains of the old pipe, then lay down some PVC pipe, with drainage holes, to protect a contractor’s grade garden hose that has been gifted to us already. At the garden end, we’ll have the tap and a sink set up – I’ve found what I want to use in one of the sheds – as a vegetable washing station. We will also be building a garden shed nearby, to replace the current one that’s rotting and starting to fall apart.
Lots of work to be done!
Finally, one last short video, showing our first major harvest!
For all the struggles we had this year, I think I can say we had a pretty decent gardening year overall. Especially compared to our Terrible Now Good Growing Year, last year. 😂
I hope you enjoy these!
The Re-Farmer
I meant to have this video done and posted a while ago, but had some technical difficulties with my computer.
I don’t think my computer is much longer for this world!
Anyhow…
I did some time lapse video while direct sowing some greens and popcorn. I hope you like it. 😊
The Re-Farmer
I put together a video of the work I did yesterday. No audio, so I wanted to add music to it today.
I spent so much time trying to find public domain music that fit the mood I wanted. Then my daughter came in and helped me pick music that was already in the software I’m using, in a matter of minutes.
She’s now interested in making videos. I have no doubt she would do a better job than me! So at some point, you might start seeing better quality videos getting posted.
For now, this is what I got done yesterday.
We settled on this location for the new Liberty apple tree for several reasons. The main one is, it is a zone 4 tree, which means it will need more protection in the winter. Where I was thinking of planting it originally is far more exposed, and will remain so until the silver buffalo berry reaches maturity.
Here, it will get full sun, but also be sheltered from the north by the lilacs. It also needs another variety of apple tree for pollination. While I took down the one crab apple tree, there are the ornamental crab apples in the old kitchen garden, plus another crab apple tree, though we’ll see how well that one does. It will likely be taken down, eventually.
The little plum trees were also removed; we’ll see how the larger ones do this year. These are not edible plums, though my father did use them for wine making sometimes. They have almost no flesh around their pits.
If all goes well, we’ll start having apples to harvest in a few years. The new apple tree can reach a mature height of 18-20, so if we do plant any other fruit trees here, we will need to keep that in mind. If we do end up taking out the one crab apple, and possibly the remaining inedible plums, I figure we have room for one more fruit tree here.
My parents planted so many things in this little area over the years; I remember there being mountain ash (there are none left at all now), a pear tree, other crab apple trees, plus I thinned out caragana and lilac. Oh, and there’s the big linden tree at one end, now. It’s one of the few things that is doing well! I’m sure there were other things that came and went in the 30 or so years I’ve been away.
Now that I’ve cleared as much as I have, the lilacs will hopefully grow better. When I first cleared the area of dead stuff back in 2018, I found most of the lilacs had stretched to very unusual heights. They had leaves pretty much only at the top, as they struggled to get sunlight. They are recovering, but still a lot lankier than lilacs normally would be.
The main thing, though, is that the new apple tree and the tulips have that barrier around them. It’s small enough that I hope no deer will consider it worth trying to jump it. Over time, we will add things to the wire to blow, flash and make noise in the wind.
One thing I noticed only after watching the time lapse video I took.
I had a LOT of cats running around while I worked!
The Re-Farmer
Okay, it took WAY longer than it should have, but I finally finished a video I was working on. I ended up leaving my computer on all night to upload it. I don’t know that I’m happy with it, but it shows what I want it to show, and that’s the main thing.
First, though…
I took the potatoes that came in yesterday and laid them out on egg trays to chit for a bit longer. They all already have shoots, so we’ll need to get them into the feed bag-grow bags we’ll be using this year, soon.
These are the Purple Peruvian fingerling potatoes.
They don’t look very purple!
None look like they need to be cut into smaller pieces, so I won’t see how purple they are on the inside, but when these come fresh out of the ground, they are so dark a purple, they’re almost black. Right now, there’s just purple in the new growth.
It’s the same thing with the Red Thumb fingerlings. If it weren’t for the red cast to the shoots, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart from these ones. At least the Irish Cobbler ones look more distinctive, just because they’re not a fingerling variety!
For now, they’re all laid out in the trays and set up in the sun room.
While going my rounds this morning, I checked the planted beds. I can’t see that any poppies are coming up, but there may be seedling coming up in the areas planted with the alternative lawn mix. There are most definitely spinach seedlings coming up, though! As for the carrots… I may have goofed. There are lots of things coming up in there. Mostly dandelions. So much for weeding out as many roots as we could! But I can’t see anything that looks like carrots coming up. The problem may be their cover. Once planted, it’s really important that carrot seeds never dry out. That’s why I put the hoops and covered them with plastic. The thing is, it likely got too hot for them under there. Perfect conditions for any weeds, but not for carrot seeds.
I uncovered the bed yesterday, to allow the bed to be rained on. We’ll watch closely over the next while and if they don’t germinate, I’ll replant the bed. We used the entire packet of a new variety of seeds in there, but I have two other varieties waiting to be planted.
Speaking of which, we have pretty much decided not to transplant those teeny little mulberry saplings. At least not outside, this year. What we’ll most likely do is put them up into larger pots and wait until they are larger and more likely to survive being outside.
We’ve also decided to plant that apple tree in the more sheltered spot in the West yard. We’ll have to clear away some dead and dying trees, first, so it might still be a day or two.
The bed along the chain link fence is also ready for a proper weeding now, and we can finally plant our peas.
Lots of work to be done!
But first, here is the video showing the transformation of the Old Kitchen garden, and then I have to go pick up some parcels in the mail!
Please feel free to watch the video on YouTube, like, subscribe, leave a comment, etc.. Any feedback, here or on YouTube (I’ll later upload it to Rumble, too) would be greatly appreciated.
Enjoy!
(Also, I need to learn how to make a thumbnail image to properly fit! 😂😂)
The Re-Farmer
Well, I wasn’t able to get progress images of what my daughters did, but I did get to set up another time lapse video later on. I was able to reclaim the bed by the chain link fence and sow one variety of bread seed poppies.
Having the rake handle break on me while I was clearing outside of the chain link fence was a bit of a downer! We had others I could have used, but I just kept using it, anyhow. It got the job done!
Also, I had a lot of cats visiting me while I worked!
I hope you enjoy the video. 😊 If you select to watch it on YouTube, you can hit the like and subscribe buttons, if you wish.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 