What I was really wanting to do what get the heater going in the basement for a while, and heaters aren’t supposed to be left unattended. I’m not one to just hand around watching videos on my phone, my hands are too messed up to do my usual things, like crochet, and my eyes are too messed up to read, so…
Tomatoes it is!
Towards the end of the video, I included pictures I took of the thermometer in the portable greenhouse today. I was really impressed!
While I was starting my morning rounds, it was about -6C/21F shortly after 8:30am outside. At that time of day, it is just starting to get out of the morning shade. The thermometer inside was about -2C/28F or so.
When I checked again before going inside, shortly before 9am, the outside temperature was much the same, but the thermometer had already warmed up 4 degrees to 2C/39F.
I came out in in the afternoon and, at roughly 1:15pm, it was about 27C/81F in there. By about 4:10pm, it had warmed up to about 38C/100F in there! At least, that’s what the thermometer read. It didn’t feel anywhere near that hot to me.
This would be a good place for a high/low thermometer!
On a completely different topic, I have potential good news.
I was able to get some photos and short video of Brussel and her babies that I sent to the cat lady, joking that if she sent them to her circle, maybe someone might be interested in adopting a kitten in 6 or 7 weeks.
Much to my shock, she responded almost right away, saying someone was interested in the little calico!
I won’t be holding my breath on that, considering how many times people have backed out at the last minute, but gosh, it would be awesome if the babies could be adopted out right away! There is some progress in socializing Brussel, too – I was actually able to sneak a pet as she was walking past me and she actually stopped and let me pet her more!
In other cat news, there’s potential good news about Button. The Cat Lady and her family have adopted him permanently and, while he started growing again and is at normal size now, after being treated for worms three times (!!!), he also became both blind and deaf. His eyes were permanently dilated. Well, they’ve taken him to a cat eye specialist, and they think it might be a hereditary type of glaucoma. He’s now getting treatment for it. She sent me a photo, and his pupils are almost normal again – you can see his electric blue irises again. It would be nice if he could regain at least some of his vision!
For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.
As with so many other things in our garden this year, things did not go as planned or expected!
Tomatoes – how it started
This year, we were planning to cut down on how many tomatoes we were going to plant. I wanted a paste tomato for making sauces and, by request, we were going to have a few cherry type tomatoes for fresh eating. Two, maybe three, varieties.
For the cherry tomatoes, we had Chocolate Cherry and Black Cherry. For the paste tomato, I tried San Marzano this year, so see what the hype was all about.
Then we got free seeds with one of our orders, for Forme de Ceour tomatoes, a slicing tomato, so we had to try those!
Then there were the mystery compost ring tomatoes!
Oh, and a couple of mystery self seeded tomatoes. 😄
When starting them from seed indoors, I planted just a few seeds of of the cherry and slicing tomatoes, but a lot more of the paste tomatoes, with the expectation of processing and canning them.
The problem was, we had a very high germination rate, and I just can’t bear to toss away strong, healthy seedlings. Which means we ended up with considerably more transplants than intended.
And almost all of them survived transplanting!
How it went
Let’s start with
The Black Cherry tomatoes.
Those got transplanted into the wattle weave bed, along the back of the long side if the L shape. Each transplant had a protective collar round them, held in place with a pair of bamboo stakes that would later be used to support them as they grew.
The collars are something I will continue to do in the future. My husband goes through a lot of gallon jugs of distilled water for his CPAP humidifier, so we’ve got lots of them available. The tops and bottoms are removed, and they get placed over the transplant. This protects them from wind and, in the early parts of the season, from cold spring nights.
It also protected the transplants from rolling cats.
Bonus, the collars came it handy for spot watering. Fill the collars with water, and it slowly absorbed right at the base of the plants, rather than spreading across the garden bed.
The Black Cherry tomatoes – there were 7 of them – THRIVED!!! They got incredibly tall, growing up the stakes, then into the lilac branches above. They produced so many clusters of tomatoes, the branches couldn’t really hold the weight. We ended up having to find ways to add more support as they got bigger. It did take a long time for them to start ripening, though – again, due to our unfortunate spring weather.
We ended up with 9 or 10 transplants. They went into the larger rectangular bed in the old kitchen garden, near the wattle weave bed, with the garlic down the middle, and Red Wethersfield onions interplanted with them.
They, too, absolutely thrived! I’m sure it helped that the sump pump hose was set to drain against the base of the bed, at the high end of the garden. With so much rain this spring, the pump was going off many times a day until well into late summer. Which means this bed got watered from below, frequently, and with our soil drainage, they would never had gotten over watered.
They were also quite prolific, and were among the first to start giving us ripe tomatoes, which my family assures me were quite delicious. They got so heavy with tomatoes that the weight actually broke some of the stakes supporting them!
The Chocolate Cherry tomatoes
There were 7 of these that got transplanted into the chimney block planters at the chain link fence, leaving one empty block for the Goldy zucchini to be planted in.
They grew pretty well, but did not thrive, like the others did. They produces lots of tomatoes, but they were slow to ripen, and few ripened at a time. I now think the chimney block planters themselves may be part of the problem.
The San Marzano tomatoes.
While we started the most of these from seed, an unfortunate falling tray accident did quite a bit of damage.
With the spring weather and inability to work on the main garden beds, I ended up planting the largest and strongest plants into the retaining wall chimney blocks. These blocks have mint in alternative blocks, with chives at one end, so they went into the open alternating blocks.
These did not do well. The plants never got particularly strong or healthy, and they produced few tomatoes.
When a bed was finally ready in the main garden area, the last transplants – the weakest ones – finally got into the ground.
They did fantastic. Even the one that was so spindly, I debated just tossing it rather than transplanting it, recovered and thrive!
I was never able to keep up with pruning these ones, so the side branches soon splayed out in all directions, so the point I was sure they had crushed most of the onions growing in between them. We ended up winding jute twine around the stems until we could lift them up and tie them off to their bamboo supports.
They did not, however start to ripen until very late, and when they did, we never got a lot of them. As a determinate variety, they should have all ripened pretty much at the same time, but they did not.
The Mystery Tomatoes
When harvesting potatoes from the bed along the other section of chain link fence, I uncovered a volunteer tomato. I ended up transplanting it to one end of the bed, so I could harvest the potatoes. It grew quite well, considering how late in the season it showed up. It produce large amounts of small tomatoes. Small enough that I don’t think they were survivors from when we planted a Mosaic Mix of cherry and grape tomatoes, but too big to be the Spoon tomatoes we’ve grown there in another year.
None of them ripened before frost.
Then there were the compost ring tomatoes!
These were from the seeds we dumped into the compost after processing last year’s harvest. The plants got massive. Eventually, I could see some that I could recognize as most likely from the Indigo Blue we grew last year. Others were clearly Roma VF.
But then there were the round ones. We never grew red tomatoes like that. I have no idea where they came from!
How it Ended
So.
Many.
Tomatoes.
With first frost approaching, my daughter and I harvested all the green tomatoes in one evening, along with the last of the winter squash.
Two of those bins are almost all San Marzano. One has Forme de Ceour on the bottom. Two are all the cherry tomatoes, plus a few Forme de Ceour as well – and the last of the patty pans, which you can see beside the cat.
The real surprise was the compost ring.
The plants were so strong and dense, I had to cut them away to reach the tomatoes – and there were so many tomatoes hidden under the foliage! The foliage was so dense, the tomatoes were actually looking blanched.
This bin is just from the compost ring. In one corner, you can see the dark Indigo Blues (most likely). The rest would be the Roma VV.
Those round tomatoes, though, with one looking quite red. I have no idea what they are. We never grew tomatoes like this. We haven’t even bought tomatoes like this in the store!
It’s been months since they were harvested, and we still have a box with ripening tomatoes in it, in the kitchen.
My tomato Conclusion
This was a successful year for most of the tomatoes. As with everything else, they were about a month behind, but most were very prolific.
I don’t know that we’ll be growing tomatoes next year, though.
I don’t eat fresh tomatoes. They make me gag. I can eat them after they’ve been processes, as long as they are a sauce or a paste. My family likes fresh tomatoes.
They are getting sick of tomatoes! 😄
When we weren’t able to process them fast enough, we put whole tomatoes into the freezer to be processed later.
We still have some from last year.
The problem is, they end up buried in the freezer and we don’t get to them.
Hopefully, this winter, we can make a project of processing them, if only to free up space in the freezer!
If we do grow any tomatoes next year, they will likely be another cherry type tomato, and not many of them. Or, we will get more volunteers!
The Potatoes
We bought two new varieties of tomatoes for this year. We got a couple of 3 pound bags of German Butterball, a later season variety, and Purple Caribe, and earlier season variety.
We ended up planting a third variety.
But first, we had to amend soil, to try and increase the acidity.
Once the soil was amended, there were only enough Purple Caribe to plant in 2/3rds of the bed. We still had some Red Thumb fingerlings from last year left – they were looking pretty wizened and sprouty by then! I planted the largest, healthiest looking ones, and the rest went into the compost ring.
It was a while before we were able to plant the German Butterball variety, in one of the low raised beds in the East yard.
How it went
With the Purple Caribe not well at all. About half of them never grew. We had a few plants that we could harvest, leaving two late bloomers to grow as long as possible. There were very few potatoes to harvest.
They were good potatoes, though.
The Red Thumb did much better, which was a real surprise. We got a decent harvest out of them, considering how few were planted.
The German Butterballs were left in the ground for as long as I felt we could get away with. I’m quite happy with the harvest I got out of them, too. We didn’t plant enough to keep for the winter, but we do still have some left now. We’re saving the last of them to have with our Christmas dinner.
Potato Conclusion and thoughts for next year
We are still in the “finding what kind we like” phase with potatoes. I would definitely be okay recommending the German Butterball potatoes. I wish I knew what happened with the Purple Caribe potatoes. This is the second time we’ve tried to grow a caribe type. The first time, the area we planted in got flooded. We had flooding this spring, but where the Purple Caribe failed would not have been affected by it. The Red Thumb fingerlings were a pleasant surprise. These are good potatoes and, clearly, do well when kept and used as a see potato. The only problem is, as a fingerling potato, they are harder to clean and peel for cooking, and just take so much longer to prepare because of that. So while they are good, I think we will move away from fingerling types completely.
Next year, I do want to grow potatoes again. I have just not decided on a variety yet, and am not even sure where I would grow them at this point.
All in all, though, I would consider the potatoes as successful this year, and am happy with what we got.
There were four harvestable squash out of the three vines, though the first one to develop sort of stagnated early on, stayed dark green and never got very big. In the photo above, you can see it in the front row, third from the left.
The largest squash with the damage visible is the big Crespo squash we wanted to make sure to cook first. However, with losing our hot water and having to constantly heat water for washing anything, we didn’t get to it until now.
It was remarkably easy to cut into! I expected to have a harder time of it.
The colour is not only quite a deep orangey-yellow, it actually stained my hands a bit, by the time I finished scooping out the insides and removing the seeds. Which suggests to me that this squash has quite a bit of beta carotene in it.
I cut it into quarters, then cut out the stem, which you can see in the next image, before putting it in the oven. Aside from adding a bit of water to the bottom of the pan, nothing else was done to it. I want to be able to give it a taste without any seasonings, first.
In the last image, you can see the seeds, washed and draining. There were very few seeds that got rejected. I supposed we could roast some for eating, but I don’t actually have any interest in doing that. Later, these seeds will be laid out on a parchment paper lined tray to dry out.
I set the oven for 350F for about an hour before stabbing the pieces with a fork, then adding another 45 minutes. As I write this, they are soft and appear to be cooked through. I’ve shut off the oven and left them in there, just in case there were some undercooked parts I couldn’t reach.
Today, I was actually planning to get some stuff done outside but, while it is warmer than yesterday, it has turned out to be a rainy day.
Sort of.
It’s been raining off and on since last night. It’s supposed to start raining for real at about 7pm and continue raining through to about 10am tomorrow morning. Since some of what I hoped to get done today involved power tools, I decided to postpone it!
There is a bit of concern about the winter sown garden beds. When the seeds were sown, the beds were completely dry and did not get any watering. It’s cool enough that it’s unlikely they will germinate, but if they get wet and don’t germinate, the seeds may rot. If they get wet and do germinate, they may freeze. The heavy leaf mulch, however, should protect them from both possibilities.
I hope.
So today I’m focusing on indoor stuff, but still garden related. We had a box of San Marzano tomatoes in the living room that were fully ripe. Those are now soaking in vinegar water. Later on, I’ll remove the tops and tails, and get them in the crock pot for the night to make tomato sauce. There might be room enough to use some of the whole tomatoes we have in the freezer right now.
Once the oven is free, we have lots of peppers that have ripened and are starting to dehydrate in the living room. Those will get set onto trays to dehydrate fully and faster in the oven. Except, maybe, the hot peppers. There are so many of them. We might instead string them up and hang them above a heat vent, instead.
There was also a large colander in the old kitchen, full of tomatoes that were further along in ripening. Every now and then, I go through the bins and pull out the ones that are blushing and set them in the colander until it’s full. I went through those, setting more San Marzano, and a few mystery compost tomatoes, into a bin for the living room to continue ripening. The cherry tomatoes went into a small colander for general use and snacking in the kitchen. These are the Chocolate and Black Cherry tomatoes in there, a lot of which still need more time to ripen, plus a couple of little red tomatoes from the mystery plant that self seeded among the Red Thumb potatoes. When we harvested the tomatoes before our first frost, that plant had many small tomatoes on it, all still very green. I’m glad to see that they are actually ripening now. Judging from the colour and the size, I am guessing it is from the Mosaic Medley mix we grew in that bed a few years ago. That was a mix of cherry and grape tomatoes. These are so small, though, and with how the clusters were formed, I’m tempted to think they might be Spoon tomatoes. They’re big for Spoon tomatoes, but as something that has self seeded, it’s possible they reached a size they might not reach when grown as transplants.
Well, whatever they are, they are a tomato, and my family likes tomatoes, whatever the variety!
Aside from all of this, I hope to take advantage of today being an indoor day and start editing a couple of videos, including the October garden tour video using footage I recorded on Nov. 1. 😄
But first, lunch – and maybe a taste of that Crespo squash!
Well, we may not have had many yellow peppers in the garden, but now that they are ripening in the living room, we have a LOT of yellow peppers!
I neglected to take any photos, though, so here is a WordPress AI generated version…
I specifically told the AI generator “long slices”, but it gave me rounds, instead. 😄
There are two types of yellow peppers in the short season collection we got. Yellow and orangey-yellow. Once I had them under the kitchen like while washing them, I could finally tell the difference!
I prepped and sliced enough yellow peppers, plus I think one or two orangey-yellow ones, to fill a gallon size freezer bag.
The remaining orangey-yellow ones were starting to dehydrate all on their own, so I sliced those ones super thin and set them to dehydrate in the oven. That got me three 9×13 baking pans, which required a bit of creativity to fit on the two oven racks. I’ve got a tray meant to cook vegetables on the BBQ, so the bottom is perforated, to use as a spacer between two pans on top of each other.
There were other purple and Sweet Chocolate peppers that could have been processed, but I left those for later and got almost all the tomatoes that are in the living room. A few ended up in the compost, as they were over ripe. The rest got washed, then topped and tailed. I was able to fill one gallon size freezer bag with San Marzano, plus some Roma VF (I assume) compost pile tomatoes. Another gallon bag got a mix of the Forme de Coure and what are probably all Black Cherry tomatoes. There might be some Chocolate Cherry tomatoes mixed in there. Once off the vines, I can’t tell them apart.
The bags all went into the small freezer for now. The chest freezer has bins and boxes of ripening tomatoes covering it right now. I go through them regularly and pull out the ones that are ripening the fastest, and move them into my harvesting colander. Once that’s full, they get transferred to the living room to continue ripening.
Eventually, we will be able to combine the contents of bins so that there’s fewer of them, and have easier access to the chest freezer. Moving a bin or two is not an issue. Moving five bins, a box and a colander to get into the freezer it something else entirely!
All in all, that’s a pretty good haul to quickly process, considering these are all things that were harvested early, before they got hit with frost. There are many more tomatoes ripening, including the ones from the compost pile that look like Indigo Blue Chocolate, though I suppose some might be Black Beauties, from last year’s garden. The basin of unripe hot peppers in the living room is looking more and more red. There are still a lot of green sweet peppers, some of which I can tell are the purple Dragonfly peppers, with a very few Purple Beauty left, and others are the brown Sweet Chocolate peppers. The remaining ones, I expect to turn yellow or orangey-yellow.
So we will have plenty more vegetables to process for the winter over the next while.
Tomorrow we are supposed to reach a high of 19C/66F and, more importantly, we are NOT expected to have high winds again. Since there is nothing more we can do in the bathroom until the sealant has finished curing, that means I should be able to finally get outside and clean up in the garden, and prepare beds for fall planting. It’s time to get garlic planted – we will be using our own garlic from this year’s harvest – and I want to try fall sowing seeds that will hopefully survive our winter and give us an early start in next year’s garden. At this point, looking at the monthly forecast, it seems we will be in for a relatively mild winter. I certainly hope so. We’re supposed to have a La Nińa winter this year which, for our region, usually results in bitterly cold temperatures.
I could really do without that.
While I can no longer tolerate heat like I used to, I find I am absolutely dreading the cold of winter more and more, every year. Especially this year, as we have not been able to slowly stock up quite as much as we have in the past, on the assumption that we will get snowed in or whatever, for weeks or even months again. Everything is so much more expensive now, it’s getting harder and harder to get any extras at all.
So the more we can process from our garden and put up for the winter, the better!
The red onions have been left, since they can handle the cold nights, and still aren’t quite ready for picking. With various distractions related to our plumbing issues, the potatoes still need to be harvested. The sunchokes are still green and growing, so they won’t be harvested for a while. Mostly, the beds are ready for winter clean up – once we can get to them!
When my daughter harvested this bed, she left behind the really tiny tomatoes, or the damaged ones. However, as more of the foliage died back, I could see some green tomatoes that looked fine, and seemed to have gotten missed. The foliage in this bed was so dense, that’s no surprise. I basically ignored them, though, figuring they were frost damaged by then.
This morning I could see they had continued to ripen! Hidden in the middle like that, it seems they got protected from our first frost and following cold nights, too.
So I picked them and added them to the bins and boxes of green tomatoes in the old kitchen to ripen.
We have quite a few things slowly ripening. Yesterday, my older daughter grabbed all the ripe hot peppers, cleaned and prepped them, then set them in the oven to dehydrate. Eventually, they will be made into a powder.
Now… my older daughter is pretty much the only one that can eat these. My husband used to love spicy food, but the medications he’s on have really messed with his ability to taste or tolerate foods. My younger daughter can handle a bit of heat, but not as much. My, I can’t tolerate spicy food at all.
So she has taken over preparing the hot peppers as they ripen and, once dehydrated and powdered, she will have enough to last a very long time! We won’t need to grow hot peppers for some years. 😁
Now, these are hot peppers, but not exceptionally hot peppers. They’re not the kind where you need to wear gloves or anything.
Normally.
It turns out that, after processing about a dozen remarkably large hot peppers, that becomes a problem.
Not right away, though. My daughter had no issues at all while working on them. She was careful about washing her hands before touching things, too.
Then she made herself a sandwich.
The pepper oils from her hands – even after being washed – got onto her sandwich, and it was so spicy, it started to burn her mouth. She ended up having to drink straight cream to reduce the pain!
Then her fingers started to burn.
It happened slowly, over several hours, but eventually she could barely even use one hand.
She sprung for take out for supper, so I went into town to pick up the food. By the time I got back and she regaled me on what had happened, I could see the tips of all her fingers were bright red!
Lesson learned. Even mildly hot peppers can become a problem, if you’re processing enough of them at once!
Gloves needed!
Meanwhile, even her lungs were starting to burn!
These were being dehydrated in the oven. We had the kitchen window open and the fan running. The house smelled amazing, but we still had to stay out of the kitchen as much as possible, so as not to breathe too many of the hot pepper fumes. Even the cats were staying out of the kitchen!
Speaking of cats, they added another distraction. My younger daughter tried to go to bed early, only to discover a cat with a messy butt made a mess on her bed. She had to wash all her bedding.
We had been working to clear my husband’s bedroom, and started doing his laundry, too, so that was already set up (yes, we are still running the hose out the window for the washing machine to drain into the yard). The girls were going to start the laundry and my younger daughter was going to use her sister’s bed for the night.
Which is when they discovered more mess in the middled of her sheets, from a cat or cats that squirmed its way under her covers.
So they were both up all night, doing load after load of laundry. Some things needed to be washed twice, just because of their size. They didn’t get to bed until past 6am.
We’ll be more laundry today, too. My husband has set up his CPAP in my bedroom so he could sleep with me.
Sleeping in the same bed as my husband! Imagine that. 😄
That will give us a chance to strip his hospital bed and wash things like his pillows and body pillows, along with the extra blankets he puts under his sheets. The mattress for the hospital bed has a sort of thick vinyl instead of fabric, so it’s easier to clean. Unfortunately, it doesn’t breath, and causes my husband to sweat. The extra layers under the sheets help prevent that.
I did finally find an XL twin fitted sheet on Amazon for his mattress, which is several inches longer than a standard twin mattress. We’ve confirmed the new sheet fits properly, so we’ll need to get a few more. For now, though, he has only one fitted sheet that actually fits the mattress on his hospital bed.
We’ve been working most of yesterday on clearing his room so we can access the corner behind the plumbing for the tub. This is where we will be cutting an access panel, but it’s still covered by the wardrobe. My husband doesn’t really use the wardrobe, and the girls have said they’ll take it upstairs – but they will need to move out their little bar fridge for the space. They don’t use that much anymore, so we were already talking about moving it to my room. I’ll have to find space for that, though.
Once we get that figured out, we can start moving things around but, for now, we still have one more corner of husband’s room to clear and clean, where has his own tiny fridge to store his injections. This will give us the opportunity to defrost and clean it, too, then move it to where it will be more easily accessible.
The bonus of moving the girls’ fridge out from upstairs, to make room for the wardrobe, is that it frees up a grounded outlet.
That means they can get an air conditioner and actually be able to plug it in! The upstairs gets so insanely hot in the summer, they really need one up there.
That will not happen for a while, though, since my daughter will be paying for what we end up needing to get the bathroom walls repaired.
So all of this rearranging and cleaning and figuring things out is happening at the same time – all because the hot water tap in the tub broke.
There is nothing we can do in the bathroom itself right now. The fan it still running to dry the rotted aspenite. My brother will be looking at it when he comes out on Friday evening (today is Wednesday).
We will have to pull out the tub to be able to find and cut away all the rot, and I’m not even sure how that will be done. It does seem like the tub is in two parts; the tub itself, resting on top of a flat panel that hides the underside of the tub.
Well, we’ll find out when the time comes.
Until then, we’ll just take advantage of the disaster and do the clearing, cleaning and rearranging we need to do, anyways.
On the one hand, I’m glad this has happened now, and not in the middle of winter.
On the other, this keeps me from getting outside stuff done, and from finishing the cat isolation shelter!
Hopefully, I’ll be able to get some of that done today, since there’s only so much I can do in my husband’s bedroom before I need my daughters to help out. It’s so close to being finished, too!
My younger daughter and I were able to get so much done today, all before our expected first frost.
Depending on which weather app I look at, we’re supposed to drop to either -2C/28F, or 1C/34F tonight.
Either way, we’re looking at frost tonight.
Strangely, there are absolutely no frost warnings. Perhaps the humidity is too low. The temperature alone is enough to cause damage, though.
Last night, my older daughter helped me cover the two beds that actually can be covered, and I’m glad we did. We dropped to 3C/37F last night, and that was enough to kill off the last of the squash and melon leaves. Even the Crespo squash was droopy, and they were the only ones that were still lush, green and growing.
My daughter started off by checking on the biggest Crespo squash. As she rolled it aside, the stem broke right off its vine.
The two that were growing in the bean trellis didn’t get to full maturity, so they’ll need to be eaten sooner, too. Or we could cut make a puree to freeze or something like that.
My daughter started off harvesting the tomatoes in the old kitchen garden ahead of me. She’d collected all the Forme de Couer and had moved on to the Black Cherry tomatoes by the time I was able to start helping her. The Black Cherries were so tangled up in the lilac branches, we had to cut our way through to be able see, never mind reach, the tomatoes. After a while, I grabbed a pile of cut up tomato plants to take it to the compost pile when I realized, there were plenty of tomatoes in the compost pile to gather.
So I grabbed another bin and worked on those.
I found a surprise!
I knew there were two types of volunteer tomatoes in there. A few Indigo Blues, and a whole lot of Roma VF from last year’s harvests.
I found a third type, completely buried by the others!
They look like a slicing tomato of some kind, but I don’t remember growing a red variety of slicing tomato last year. It was also the only one that had an almost ripe tomato.
You’ll notice a lot of the Romas are very pale – almost white – in colour. These were essentially blanched from being under so many stems and leaves. I’m really surprised by how many we got in there!
It’s a shame they never got to ripen. A few of the Romas had started to show a blush. Who knows how many of these will actually ripen once indoors.
By the time I got the compost tomatoes done, my daughter was almost finished the old kitchen garden, so I moved on to the main garden area, bringing the wagon with the Crespo squash, to start harvesting the squash and melons. Then my daughter joined me and started harvesting the rest of the San Marzano tomatoes.
I found several melons were already “harvested”! One had a hole in it and was essentially hollowed out, so I’m guessing a mouse got that one. The others looked more like racoon damage.
Once the squash and melons were picked, plus a few patty pan squash, I cut down and went through all the corn stalks to find the cobs I’d left to go to seed.
This was all the racoons left me, and it’s not even dried out enough to have viable seeds.
Ah, well. Live and learn!
That done, I got another bin and helped my daughter with the last of the tomatoes. There were so many San Marzanos in the main garden area! Then we did the tomatoes that were at the chain link fence.
The bin with the cat next to it has the Chocolate Cherry tomatoes from the chain link fence in it, plus the tiny tomatoes from the volunteer tomato plant that I found among the potatoes. There were so many perfect little tomatoes! Not a single one had a chance to ripen. We have no idea what kind of tomatoes they were, either.
My daughter had already moved the previously harvested winter squash from the garage to the house, so now these squash are set up in the garage. It looks like some of the blue squash did get to fully mature, but most of them seem shy of full maturity, so they won’t be able to properly cure. They are still quite edible, though. They just won’t last as long in the root cellar than if they had fully matured and cured. Still, some time set up like this in the garage will help them last a bit longer.
Once we were done with the harvesting, my daughter uncovered the box of the truck, and we loaded up with as many bags of cans as we felt we could properly secure.
Which turned out to be maybe a third of the pile!
The whole thing got covered with a tarp and strapped down with ratchet straps. We set two up in an X across the pile, plus two more across the front and back. It was pretty windy, though, and once we got to highway speeds, the tarp was billowing under the straps more than I liked.
We stopped at a gas station to tuck the tarp back in place, then secured it more using Bungee cords. It still billowed, but nothing that was a potential problem.
This is the first time we’ve gone to this salvage place, but they were easy to find. I’d called for instructions yesterday, so we knew where to go to start. After talking to someone in the office, she directed me to where we should pull up, and staff could unload the truck.
My daughter and I started taking the straps and tarp off while they brought over a couple of bins with a forklift to bring them to the scale. All the cans are in transparent bags, so they could see that there were some tin cans in there, too.
That was okay for them, but good for us.
The tin cans go for 10 cents per weight.
The aluminum goes for 50 cents.
When they’re mixed up like this, they basically figure out something in between.
After everything was unloaded, we moved the truck again, and I went back to the office to wait. I had thought I stopped out of the way, but I turned out to be wrong, when a very large truck pulling a very long trailer came in! One of the office staff asked if we could park on the street. When I moved the truck, though, there wasn’t enough room to get by the trailer. I went back inside while my daughter waited until the truck could pull ahead, then she found a place to park.
As I was waiting in the office, I heard some staff going back and forth and saying something about “getting her a magnet”.
Then a guy came up to me and handed me a red keychain with their company name and number on it. It turns out, I was the “her”, and the keychain has a strong magnet on its end. This is for the next time we bring in a load; when we back stuff up, we can use the magnet to make sure there’s no cans with steel in them mixed in.
It means we’ll have to re-bag all the cans again, but the difference in price makes it worth is. With sooooo many cat food cans, plus the pop and energy drink cans, it is quite a loss to not get full price on the aluminum because there’s half a dozen tin cans scattered among them.
In the end, we brought 208 pounds, which got us just over $17. While they did give us an in between price, we still could have gotten quite a bit more, if we didn’t have those tin cans in there.
Live and learn!
It was very nice of them to give us the magnet, too. We have magnets, of course, but this one will be much more convenient!
That done, my daughter and I made a quick stop at a gas station, then headed home. We made a point of not covering the box again so that, once at home, we could give it a cleaning. The truck has screw holes in the bed from when it was a commercial vehicle hauling trailers. A remarkable amount of dust from the gravel roads gets in there!
I know it’s just going to get full of dust again, but it sure did feel better to finally wash that out with the hose!
Then we filled the truck again, this time with our garbage. We were overdue for a trip to the dump!
I had planned to go to a different landfill in our municipality, but I don’t know the area it’s in, so we went to our usual one.
I was really glad to have my daughter with me! The pit area is a real disaster. My daughter got out before we went into the pit area to make sure there wasn’t anything that might puncture a tire. While she kicked things out of the way, I slowly crawled along behind her with the truck until she could guide me in backing up to the pit. Not as close as we normally would have gone; too much broken glass!
And nails.
She was finding and kicking away nails, the whole distance!
This place has really gone downhill. The previous municipal council had fired the guy that used to take care of the landfill. I don’t know what the new council is doing, but the attendant that’s here now is not someone physically able to maintain the pit. Which is fine, if being an attendant is the only part of her job description, but whoever it is that’s been hired to use the heavy equipment to clean where we’re supposed to drive up to the pit is not doing a good job at all. Even the equipment being used is different, and the tracks on that front end loader is just destroying the gravel driveways.
But, we got the job done, and so far, it doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any flat tires, thanks to my daughter!
As we were leaving, my daughter wondered about being able to go to town and pick up something. It had been a long time since either of us had eaten, and she was thinking of perhaps treating us.
After talking about it, we decided that, between the two of us, we could pick up some fish and chips for all of us for supper.
Which was about when we got a message from my husband. The pharmacy called. When he had his prescription refills delivered, they didn’t have enough to fill one completely. They now had the amount they owed him.
Well, that was handy! We would have time to do that, before the pharmacy closed at 6pm.
A trip to town, it was!
As we were going along, we ended up stuck behind some slower moving traffic, so it took a bit longer to get to the pharmacy. I was going to just dash in, anyhow.
As I was walking in the door, behind two other people, a staff member let us know…
…they were closing in one minute – and she locked the entry doors behind us!
It turns out, they close at 5:30.
Thankfully, my husband’s prescription was quick to find, and it was already covered, so it just needed to be handed to me, and I could go!
From there, we went and got the fish and chips to bring home, plus a quick stop at the grocery store for something else my husband needed. We could finally go home!
We weren’t quite done yet, though!
One home, my daughter took care of bringing in the hot food, while I started bringing the bins of tomatoes into the old kitchen.
I have no idea what we’re going to do with them all.
In previous years, we kept a bin of green tomatoes out and my family just snacked on them as they ripened. They were all small grape, cherry or pear type tomatoes.
I know there are lots of things that can be done with green tomatoes; we’ve just never done them. I wouldn’t be able to eat them, so it’s a matter of finding things the family would like.
What we don’t have is the space to lay out so many green tomatoes in what should be a single layer, to ripen indoors. It would have to be in the living room – the cat free zone – but it’s a disaster right now.
Until we figure that out, all five bins are now laid out on the chest freezer in the old kitchen. That room is too dark and gets too cold to be able to leave them there to ripen.
Once we were finally able to have our supper, things still weren’t done!
It was back outside to recover the two beds for the night, so the peppers and eggplant will survive. The hoses had to be prepped so they wouldn’t have any water in them to freeze, and I even remembered to close the doors in the side of the garage the squash and melons were in, so they won’t get as cold.
And now I am FINALLY done for today.
I’m hoping to actually get to bed before midnight and get some real sleep for a change. My attempt to do so last night was a total failure! 😄
There is, of course, lots to do outside. This is one of the busiest times of the year, as we get ready for winter, while the weather holds!
I had a long day taking my mother to her specialist appointment in the city yesterday, and now another long day with her today. I did have time to do some of my morning rounds, though, and was able to gather a good sized harvest!
In the giant colander, there are a good number of Chocolate Cherry tomatoes from by the chain link fence. I also picked a few green Seychelle beans from the bed shared with the Crespo squash, and I even found a few on the one plant next to the purple Carminat pole beans. There are even some Royal Burgundy bush beans in there.
I found a melon lying on the ground in the raised bed – it harvested itself! 😄 There are a couple of yellow peppers, plus a Sweet Chocolate. Some of the peppers that are supposed to be more orange are finally starting to turn colour. There’s a single G Star pattypan squash, plus a few San Marzano tomatoes.
When it came time to go into the old kitchen garden, I knew there would be quite a bit, so I grabbed the bin. Those are all Forme de Couer and Black Cherry tomatoes in there.
Including a rude looking tomato! Click over to the next photo to see what I mean. 😄
After that, I left things to my daughters and headed out to my mother’s.
Long story short: her apartment finally got sprayed for bed bugs. There were no sign of any, so they will have to come back only one more time. Her neighbour got sprayed, too. I get the impression that apartment has been the main source of the problem in the building.
My mother then had to stay out of her apartment for 6 hours. Technically, she should stay out for 12 hours, as she has respiratory issues, but she refuses.
The neighbor says they only need to stay out for 4 hours, but I have no idea where she got that from. The notification letter they all get says the same thing. At least 6 hours.
We made sure to take along my mother’s supper time medications, as well as the information sheets the eye clinic gave her, yesterday, to go over. While we were waiting for the exterminator to arrive, I did go through some with her. I took the grid eye test, which is a flat magnetic sheet, and put it on her fridge. The grid has a black dot in the middle that is supposed to be focused on. I spent some time explaining the test to her, how to do it, and that she should be checking her left eye with it, every day. I even held it for her while she did the test, as instructed.
While explaining the grid test to her, how to take the test, what she’s looking for, I was saying, your left eye this, your left eye that, with your left eye…
Yet she still stopped at one point and said, “with my right eye, then…”
…
No. Your right eye can’t even see the dot in the grid. It’s for your left eye.
It’s going to take a while for it to stick, I think!
We had a nice chat with the manager while her apartment was being sprayed – she parker her walker across from her door and would not move until the exterminator left.
Then we had to find something to do or somewhere to go for six hours.
I was going to move the truck into the loading zone in front of the doors, to make it safer for my mother to get in, but the exterminator’s truck was in there, and he was chatting with the manager. When I got there, I did apologize for my mother’s behaviour over all this.
She is still utterly convinced the exterminator rifled through her closet to find and steal 70+ year old passports. In fact, at one point when it came up in conversation, she started saying, “maybe I should call the police?” When I said no, she said I was accusing her of lying. I told her, I didn’t think she was lying, but that she probably just put them somewhere and forgot where. When she moves, she’ll probably find them again. Her response was that I was “against” her.
*sigh*
Anyhow…
It was a good thing I caught up with them, because the manager remembered to ask if my mother’s bed had mattress covers. She doesn’t, and the exterminator said she needs two – one for the mattress, one for the box spring. Then he remembered he might have one and checked in his truck. He did have one and gave it to me for my mother’s mattress. We’ll still need one for the box spring.
Then I mentioned I needed to move my truck so my mother could get in, and we said our goodbyes.
By this time, though, my mother had come out and was sitting in her walker, watching us suspiciously. She called me over before I moved the truck and started asking me questions… why was the exterminator still there? Why was the manager sitting in his truck? etc.
Oh, gosh. I just realized what she was getting at.
She thought they were waiting for her to leave, so the manager could use his master key to get into her apartment, so they could steal things.
*sigh*
Anyhow.
We got her into the truck and then headed out for lunch. There was one place she wanted to go to, because someone new bought it and she wanted to see how it was, now that it wasn’t “browny” people that owned it (it had been owned by a Korean family). *sigh* The place was still being worked on, on the inside, but when she saw the worker’s vehicles in the parking lot, she thought it was open and wanted me to go inside and check. I had to tell her, no, you can’t just walk into a construction zone!
So we went to a chicken and pizza restaurant.
She ended up ordering a vegetable pizza this time, which I normally would not have thought much of, except that my mother is once again deciding that the reason she’s having trouble with her eyes is because of food, and so she needs to eat more vegetables and green things.
There is no known cause for macular degeneration, and there is no food she can eat or not eat that will make any difference. But she heard something somewhere – maybe last week, maybe last month, maybe 30 years ago – and just latches on to things.
We’re going to have to watch her on that, because she’s going to start causing malnutrition in herself if we don’t.
I had something else, so she had a small pizza to herself, with some left over that was packed up for later. We took our time eating, though – we did have 6 hours to kill! – then went across the street to a little department store she wanted to check out, while she was out and about. I helped her get across the street, then moved the truck to park by the store, so she wouldn’t have to cross the street again. The nice thing about that was that I was able to pull up really close to the curb – and that extra height made it downright easy for her to get into the truck when she was done!
We then both went in and did a bit of shopping.
There’s only so long we could drag that out, though.
There was nowhere else she wanted to go, and there is nowhere in this town where one can just hang out. We even tried driving around parts of town we’ve never gone into before, but there wasn’t a whole lot of that, either. 😄
We managed to use up about 2-3 hours before finally just going back to her building and sitting in the common room. No one else was around, so we brought out the information the eye clinic gave her and I went over it with her. Most of it, the doctor had already explained to her really well.
It didn’t take long to go through it all.
I was completely prepared to stay with my mother until 7pm, but she told me that I could go home. She was really tired and was going to just sit and close her eyes for a while. She had her leftovers for supper, and I’d added a bottle of orange juice I’d gotten with her meal on the way home from the city yesterday, that got forgotten in the truck, so she was prepared for taking her medication with her supper while in the common room.
So I headed home.
When I got home, my younger daughter was adding more supports to the tomatoes at the chain link fence that yesterday’s winds had managed to blow partly over. I ended up helping her with that, then she moved on to start breaking down the tree that the winds blow over and onto a crabapple tree.
I had gone to talk to her when our phones both dinged. My husband had sent a message.
My mother had called and left a message on the answering machine. Something about her keys?
I had completely forgotten.
While digging in her purse at one point, my mother gave me her keys to put in my pocket, so they wouldn’t get lost.
They were still in my pocket!!!
I had dashed into the house to get my purse when the phone range again. It was my mother, trying again – from the number on call display, a neighbour had let her use their phone. I told her, I was leaving right then and there!
When I got there, so was so apologetic about having me drive all the way back again. Meanwhile, I was apologizing for forgetting I had her keys! It was pretty funny!
Enough time had passed that she had eaten her supper and taken her medications. It was still early to get into her apartment, but by less than an hour, so we went in anyway.
I had offered to come back to help her put things back and she had said no, so this actually worked out.
I was able to put the mattress cover on her bed – and found out that they’d given her, and others, mattress covers long ago. She didn’t want me to put it on her bed, and basically scoffed at the fact that they had been given them in the first place.
*sigh*
So, somewhere in her closet, she had 2 more of these. Maybe when my sister next visits my mother, she’ll be ablet to find one and get it onto the box spring.
I made up her bed and put a few things away.
If she didn’t have to wait until the health care aid came to help with her nightly medications, she would have gone to bed right then and there!
I did make sure to set out the little miniature tagine bowl and lid I’d brought for her. She thought it was adorable! This will be a handy container for the health care aide to put her pills into, after removing them from the bubble pack, so they can both easily see that the right number are in there. Plus, my mother can more easily pick up the little bowl to take them, rather than trying to use her hands. Some of her fingers are deformed with arthritis.
The extra trip was good for another reason. I had forgotten to hit a bank machine earlier, to take cash out for the septic guy. We’re almost into October. Time to get the tank emptied for the winter.
We’ll need to contact the septic repair company again, too, and hopefully get a date on when they can come and repair the leaking pipes at the expeller!
I really hope we’re not getting ghosted by this company. We’ve had this happen before with other companies, in the first couple of years after we moved here. I have reason to believe it has something to do with our vandal defaming us, though I have no actual proof. Our vandal has a past history of trying to prevent companies from doing things here at the farm, and even on property in the heart of our little hamlet that my parents used to own. Then, when they tried to sell it, he drove off two potential buyers!
Yes, he felt he was entitled to that property, just like he feels he’s entitled to this property, too.
Of course, it could be this company is just really busy, trying to get jobs done before winter. Unfortunately, with past experience, I can’t help but wonder.
Well, if we don’t hear from them after trying to call them back several times, there is another company we can contact again. They are in a completely different town that our vandal doesn’t really go to, that I know of, so the chances of them having any contact with our vandal is very low.
The main thing is that this gets repaired before the ground freezes.
Thankfully, our system has still been working so far, even if the greywater is all just soaking into the ground, as if we had a septic field instead of an expeller. The leak must be pretty close to the surface for the ground to become saturated like that, so if it doesn’t get repaired, the whole thing will freeze, the greywater will have nowhere to go, and the ice will break the pipes even more.
*sigh*
Tomorrow, I will hopefully not have to go anywhere, except maybe the dump. I don’t know if I dare to to the nearest landfill again, with how bad it has gotten lately (I don’t want another flat tire!), but the next nearest one is also open on Saturdays. I just need to find it.
If all goes well, though, I’ll finally be able to catch up with stuff here at home!
Like prep and freeze a whole lot of bell peppers and melons, and either freeze whole tomatoes, or start another sauce in the Crockpot.
I had another sleepless night last night (courtesy of the cats!), so my daughters took care of most of the morning stuff. That let me get at least a couple of hours of sleep before I headed out to the garden, just before noon.
We got a smattering of rain yesterday evening, so I used one of the side walls from the broken market tent to cover the onions that were curing outside. Once things were warmer, I uncovered them again, so they could get some sun and air flow.
We’ve got some warm, sunny days coming up, and mild overnight temperatures, so I lifted the bottom half of the vinyl sheets wrapped around the box frame over the eggplant and hot pepper bed.
As you can see in the foreground of the photo above, Syndol is checking out the eggplant and hot peppers I harvested out of there this morning!
This is the rest of today’s harvest. We have a first today!
Yes, a couple still have some green on them, but I wanted to get some of the weight off the plants. It was much the same with the few tomatoes I collected today.
Also, yes, that is a mutant Little Finger eggplant on the left! I actually remembered to bring pruning shears to cut the stems – they are surprisingly spiky! – and it was rather a surprised to cut one stem and get two eggplants! There are two Classic eggplant in there, too. I’m harvesting a bit smaller, as the large ones we’ve harvested before were getting pretty seedy inside. Mind you, we could leave some longer just to collect the seeds, but it’s probably too late in the season for any of the ones still on the plants to have viable seeds to collect.
The long, straight hot peppers were easy to harvest, but the curled one was so twisted around the stalk and another pepper, I ended up breaking off the top of the pepper itself, rather than the stem.
We also have one melon today, and one purple Dragonfly pepper. The colour is very much the same as the eggplants!
Pretty darn good for near the end of September in our area!
The German Butterball potato plants have all died off, so we should be harvesting those, soon. A few of the winter squash are starting to look ready to harvest and get set aside to cure, too. The one Jebousek lettuce that seeded itself should have seeds ready to collect, too. The kohlrabi look like a total loss, though. The flea beetles just decimated them. 😢 We finally got some to actually grow, and this happens. *sigh*
As we build up our raised beds, making it so they can be covered with insect netting is going to be important! I would really like to grow kohlrabi and cabbage and brassicas in general, but it looks like that’s just not going to happen until we have a way to protect them from those flippin’ flea beetles!!
It was a lovely, cool and foggy morning today. Apparently, we did have some rain last night, but barely enough to wet the grass. Other areas of the province got flooding!
Though we had thunderstorms on the forecast, the amount of predicted rain was pretty low, and these systems often blow right past us. With that in mind, I decided to water the garden, though not as deeply as I would have if there was no rain at all in the forecast.
I also wanted to stay out longer, as I’d opened the gate for the scrap guy – more on that in another post. Before the watering, though, I managed to get a picture of one of our first yellow peppers turning colour. I can’t remember if this is an Early Sunsation or Early summer
If you click through to the next image, you’ll see this morning’s harvest – including some accidental harvests. I found a bell pepper branch that had broken off under the weight of its peppers. As I was tending to the Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, I tried to lift a heavily laden branch to some support, only to have it fall off in my hands. The same thing happened later, when moving some of the Black Cherry tomatoes for better support. I’ve made fresh cuts on the broken ends, which were partially dried from having broken much earlier, then wrapped them in damp paper towel. They’re now hanging in the living room/cat free zone to continue ripening.
Also, it’s time to make another batch of tomato sauce!
I was going to say “a morning in the garden” in the title, but no. It’s almost 4pm, and I just got inside!
As I write this, we are at our predicted high of 27C/81F, with the humidex putting us at 29C/84F, and I must say, I’m really feeling that 29C/84F!
We’ve had rain and even thunderstorms. It took a while, but the rain barrel by the old kitchen garden finally got refilled. We’re supposed to get more thunderstorms passing through over the next week, but the amount of rain predicted is under 5mm. That’s only 0.19inches. Barely enough to get things wet.
With the next week or so expected to reach temperatures like today, I wanted to make sure to give the garden a deep watering. In fact, I’ll probably be doing that every morning, if I am able to. The things that need the time to finish ripening also are things that need a lot of water to do so.
Before the watering, though, I wanted to see what needed to be harvested. I even remembered to bring something to carry it, instead of using the bottom of my shirt. 😄
I even spread it out on the bench, so it could all be seen. Much to the entertainment of Syndol, whose paw you can see on the left of the photo. Gouda was following me around and really wanting attention, and kept trying to bite my hands while I was laying things out, because I wasn’t petting him!
So… what we have this morning.
On the left are both Dragonfly and Purple Beauty peppers. There are a few Seychelle beans. Nothing much, but they can be added to the beans that got picked yesterday. The tomatoes are the chocolate cherry tomatoes growing against the chain link fence, and the Magda squash is from the pot in front of the house.
I was able to pick some green G Star patty pans, and they have more developing. We have a first in here, too! I picked one of the two white scallop patty pans we have growing, leaving the second one to get bigger. There are lots of flower buds, but I can’t see any other patty pans developing on those plants.
With the melons, I found the first one on the ground, its stem wound looking at me. 😄 That one had actually been growing fairly high up on the trellis, so it had fallen maybe 3 feet to get where I found it. No damage, though. Then I found two more that were ready to pick! We might almost have enough melon to start freezing some!
After gathering these, I found a small bin to use for the tomatoes in the old kitchen garden.
We have a few San Marzano tomatoes, a pretty good haul of the Black Cherry tomatoes, which look almost identical to the Chocolate Cherry tomatoes. I don’t know why, but they just aren’t getting dark like the variety is supposed to. The rest are the Forme de Couer tomatoes – including a branch that broke while I was tending another vine!
Those done, I set up the soaker hose in the bed the Forme de Couer tomatoes are in, then used the rain barrel to water the old kitchen garden, the potted summer squash, and the other beds on the south side of the house.
While watering the Cholate Cherries at the chain link fence, I found a few I missed, earlier!
The mystery tomato plants I found among the potatoes by the chain link fence, plus the one in the wattle weave bed that showed up among the garlic, are both developing tomatoes now.
The lettuce with the name I never remember to spell will be going to seed soon, and I want to make sure to collect some of those.
The kohl rabi have been attached by flea beetles. This is a surprise, as I didn’t think this was the season for flea beetles! I guess the canola fields are being harvested, and the beetles are finding other things to chomp on. I still see no sign of bulbs forming on the kohl rabi stems.
I had to resist collecting more eggplants. They look so good! I want to get them more time to grow bigger, though.
The Crespo squash got extra water, and I even did the compost ring tomatoes. 😄
We will need to do something about the Crespo squash!
In the first photo above, you can see that the squash that started developing inside the A frame bean trellis is getting pretty big….
… and heavy!
If you look at the second picture in the slideshow, you can see how the bamboo stake across the top is bending quite a lot! It is there to hole the metal posts in position, and keep the netting from sagging. It’s not there to hold weight! We will need to made a large enough squash hammock to put under the squash and attach it to the metal stakes in the A frame. If we can fix the hammock to four points, that will hopefully distribute the weight enough.
By the time the south yard beds were done, a couple of hours had passed, so I headed inside for breakfast, leaving the soaker hose running in the Forme de Couer tomato bed.
When I got back outside and checked the soaker hose, it really didn’t seem to be letting out much water. In fact, I saw more condensation on the garden hose than seepage from the soaker hose! I dug down into the soil under the hose, and it was still pretty dry. So I switched the garden hose back to its regular nozzle and just watered the bed with the hose.
The inside of the catio needed to be painted so, before I went to water the main garden area, I got a bucket and a brush and scrubbed the floating catio shelves as best I could, first, so it would have time to dry.
Then it was off to the main garden.
By this time, it was 26C/79F, according to my phone, and the garden was definitely feeling the stress from both the heat and the lack of rain. According to the current forecast, we are no longer expecting thunderstorms, and the chances of getting any rain at all are below 10%, so I made sure to give them plenty of water. Basically, I have a pattern of watering slowing along one side of the bed, going around to the other side and watering it again, then repeating the process in the next bed. That way, each bed gets done twice, and any spots that get missed due to foliage or whatever gets done on the second pass.
I found a surprise in the Summer of Melons mix bed!
I have no idea where it came from. The soil used to top this bed was from the pile of garden soil we bought a few years back. I don’t remember repurposing soil from a bed we’d grown tomatoes in.
Well, we’ll see how it does.
I also found new onions growing among the ones from previous years we found and transplanted, to go to seed. The seed pods on those are still quite green, so they didn’t come from there – at least not that I can tell!
As for the onions in the actual union bed, I think I’m just going to have to harvest those. The shallots, too. All but one are completely flattened, so they’re not going to get any bigger. If they stay in the ground too long, they’ll start getting mushy.
Note for future reference: must find some way to keep the cats out of the garden beds!
Which reminds me…
The last thing that got watered was the strawberry bed. It is surrounded by a net, which allowed the strawberries to recover quite nicely from being deer eaten.
Well, a deer managed to get at one corner again! It actually made a hole in the net!
They must really like the taste of strawberry plants!
I think we might have to isolate strawberries in the old kitchen garden. The deer have not gone in to eat the tiny variety of strawberries in there, and that garden would be easier to fence off from deer completely, if that were needed.
Oh, speaking of critters eating things…
While watering the winter squash interplanted with corn, I found this.
It looks like the raccoons got at the Yukon Chief corn cobs I was leaving for seed!
They didn’t get all of them, though. I won’t be pulling the corn stalks under after the squash is done for the season. Hopefully, the raccoons have decided they don’t like dry corn and will leave the rest alone! I’m actually seeing a few tiny cobs with fresh silks on them, but the tassels are all dried, so there’s no pollen for kernels to form.
So the watering is finally done for the day, and I’m taking a break. I’d like to get a bit more work done on the cat isolation shelter today, but it’s starting to get late. It might have to wait until tomorrow.
Today is Sunday, though. It’s supposed to be a day of rest from unnecessary work, anyhow!
The Re-Farmer 