tomatoes

Our 2021 garden seedling shuffle, monthly shop, and man that’s bright!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Wow. It’s coming up on 10pm as I start this, and this is the first time I’ve had to sit down for most of the day!

Today was our monthly shop, so after doing my rounds, my younger daughter and I headed out to the city. We were going to do our usual shop when I remembered I wanted to pick up some wood pellets to try as a litter replacement, so we added a stop at Canadian Tire, first.

Canadian Tire is a dangerous place for me to be, on payday! ;-)

While we were there, I got my daughter to choose a paint colour so we can finally paint the kibble house. We’ll be able to paint the cat house, too. This is the colour she chose.

She actually chose two colours, then asked me which one I preferred, and I chose the darker one. “Citrusy”, I think it’s called. The girls have declared we don’t have enough colour around the farm, and they would like to change that.

It’s going to be colourful, all right! :-D The kibble house is going to be really bright!

One of the other things we picked up was a new axe. We’ve found a whole collection of them, mostly in the old basement, but the girls have examined every one, and they’re all in terrible shape. I suppose we could fix them, but we’d much rather have something new and higher quality. After we paid for our stuff and were heading for the van, my daughter suddenly asked, “where’s the axe?”

Yup. We’d forgotten it at the cash desk!

So off my daughter went with the receipt to get it. It was so hilarious to see her coming out again, long flowing hair, skirt swirling in the wind, and an axe over her shoulder. A woman happened to be getting out of her vehicle beside us and called out, “walk proud, and carry a big axe!” Too funny!

With our rather meager success with onion seeds, when I saw some onion sets at Canadian Tire, I did pick some up.

When we got home and I quickly checked my email, I found a shipping notification from Vesey’s. The onion sets we ordered from them have shipped, with an expected arrival of May 7. Those are a red variety, so between the two, we’ll have a couple hundred onion sets to plant, on top of the surviving seedlings. We shall see how they compare! I’d rather grow onions from seeds, if only because there are so many more choices in varieties, but I’m not too fussy about it! We use a lot of onions, so I’ll take whatever will grow.

After all the shopping was put way and we had supper, the girls and I then worked on planting the squash seeds. That required taking everything out of the big tank to make room for the new starts, so the tomatoes, luffa and the last onion seeds I started have all been moved to the sun room.

All of the onions have been moved to the new shelf we got for our transplants.

This photo was taken somewhere around 9pm. I love how bright it still is outside! It was an overcast and rainy day today, so not a lot of light, but the sun room was still quite warm.

Not warm enough for the new seedlings, though. I had to get creative.

I rigged up the light we’ve been using to keep the small tank warm, so it hangs from the support bar holding the top points of the mini greenhouse in place. It has a full spectrum bulb in it, so they’ll get both good light and warmth from above, as well has warmth from below, where the ceramic heater bulb is set up. We still need to use that at night.

The small tank now has all the remaining gourds that have not sprouted yet. Without the light fixture that was helping to keep the tank warm, I added a couple of bottles filled with hot water help maintain the temperature.

We changed the level of the base in the big tank, so the cups would be closer to the lights. One of the fixtures does give off warmth, but the other does not, so I added bottles of hot water to this tank, too.

This tank now has the one cup with the Tennessee Dancing Gourds, and one cup with a single tomato seedling in it that isn’t doing well, but we just can’t bring ourselves to get rid of. Everything else is summer and winter squash. We planted fewer of the winter squash, pumpkin and zucchini, and lots of the melons and pattypan squash.

We are really looking forward to lots of summer squash in particular! The pattypans are our favourite vegetable, and we really miss being able to pick a bunch of summer squash every morning, for that day’s meals. :-)

We now have a couple of weeks or so before we start the last of our seeds; the Montana Morado corn, cucamelons, and half of our sunflowers. The corn will be in toilet paper tubes, so they’ll be in their own bin to keep the tubes supported. By then, we should be able to use the sun room exclusively, instead of the aquarium greenhouses. The gourds might even have germinated by then! ;-)

The next few days are going to be odd ones. Our days are going to warm up again, but check out those expected lows…

Tomorrow, we’re supposed to have a fairly decent 7C/45F, but then drop to -4C/25F with flurries overnight! Then, two days later, we’re supposed to reach a high of 19C/66F, only to drop to 4C/39F overnight. Then Sunday’s overnight low is back below freezing again! At least the long range forecast shows no lows below freezing after that, but… well, we do have a frost date of June 2, so there’s a good chance will dip below freezing a few times more. I just wish it wouldn’t lurch back and forth like that! Still, those daytime temperatures will give us plenty of opportunity to get garden beds prepped, and the early planting started. We have lots of work to do outside, and will need to take advantage of every good day we get!

It’s going to be fun! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: Soil test on purchased soil and tending tomatoes

/ Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

I finished testing samples of the new garden soil this afternoon.

I was interrupted by scrabbling sounds behind me.

Saffron looks so adorable!

She is also a vicious beast. ;-) Her favourite thing it to suddenly launch herself across the room, onto whichever human is passing by. She typically lands about half way up, and then starts sliding down.

Which can be very painful! She is very sharp, and rather clumsy. :-D

Anyhow.

Here are the test results from the purchased garden soil.

The nutrients are nice and high, all round – and so is the pH! Most of what we are growing recommends a pH of 6 – 6.5, so we’ll want to look into increasing the acidity a little, if we can.

Today, I decided to “pot up” the tomatoes. It feels strange to do that, since they are so tiny, but they are also tiny varieties of tomatoes! ;-)

We planted 4 double cups of each variety, but I worked with only three each. Of the Spoon tomatoes, there’s one cup where nothing at all has germinated. Of the Mosaic Medley, one cup as a single seedling in it, and it’s quite small, so I left it.

I’ve never grown tomatoes before, so I looked at a lot of gardening resources before deciding to plant them in a small amount of growing medium in the larger cups, rather than Jiffy Pellets or tiny pots, so as to add more soil as they grew bigger, rather than transplanting them from small to larger pots.

After the soil was added, they got a careful, but large watering. I left them to drain for a while, emptied the lower cups and left them to drain some more. I wanted to ensure the added soil was completely dampened, through and through. I’m hoping this will give them a nice growth spurt. :-)

The overnight temperatures in the sun room are getting much nicer, so we will be able to move things out of the aquarium soon. Over the next while, we will be starting all the summer and winter squash. We’re going to need the space! :-D

Something else on the to-do list:

Having worked out where we will be planting things (which is always subject to change until the seeds are in the ground!) and, more or less, what dimensions we’ll need, my daughters and I need to start measuring out, marking out and preparing garden beds. Some things, like our two varieties of peas, need to be direct sown well before the last frost date. They are going to be near the corn, which isn’t supposed to be planted until well after the last frost date. So we’ll need to mark out the plots and start prepping them. We’ve decided to make most beds at 3′ x 8′ (roughly 1m x 2 1/2m) for ease of access and denser planting. Ultimately, we have no idea how many of these we will need, until we actually start planting. Some varieties had packets with a LOT more seeds than others of the same vegetable type, and some were packed by weight, so we won’t know how many seeds there are until we open them.

We’re finally getting close to when we can plant things outside! Yay!!!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 Garden; cutting our losses, and planning plots

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Well, it was time to throw in the towel on some of our seed starts.

The bunching onions in the small fish tank never recovered from the cats being able to get at them, there were mold issues, and watering problems. At least with those, we still had seeds left and could start more.

The shallots (in the background, out of focus) are another loss.

This is one of the potential problems of using whatever was on hand. We started them in the cardboard egg cartons, but had no way to put a tray of any kind under them, where we could water them from below. Even though we did take them out and give them a thorough watering from below, it wasn’t enough. I regularly sprayed them with water, trying to get the cartons themselves wetter, but again, it wasn’t enough. The shallots are a complete loss, and I have no more seeds to try again. So we’ll be down from four types of onions to three. :-( Unless I find and buy sets later on.

In the future, I would not use the cardboard egg cartons to start seeds in again, unless I were able to keep them in a tray of some kind, and keep the cardboard wet all the time. In spite or watering them every evening, when I pulled them out of their makeshift greenhouses this morning, they were pretty much bone dry. So, they went into the compost heap this morning. :-(

The little tank is now empty, and the tomatoes and bunching onions have been shifted around in the big tank. We are seeing more and more seedlings pop up, though there are still a couple of cups that have no seedlings at all. We’re not after a lot of tomato plants, but I am hoping for more of the Red Baron onion seeds to germinate. At least the bulb onions seem to be doing all right. From what I’ve read, I should be trimming them a few inches, about now.

Yesterday, I picked up some Jiffy pots. I’ve been looking things up about growing luffas, which have a very long growing season to reach that sponge stage I’m after. I’ve decided I will start a few seeds of those in the next few days, and set them up in the little tank. With the screen I found in one of the sheds as a “lid”, we’ve solved the cat problem, so I can raise the level closer to the light, too. From what I’ve been reading/watching, luffa doesn’t like to be transplanted (more so than other gourd types), so using pots which can be buried should help reduce transplant stress. With the size the pots are, I should be able to still double cup them with the red solo cups, which would allow me to water them from below.

So that’s a goal for the next few days, and I will also be preparing to start the other seeds that need to be starting in April.

Meanwhile, as I do my morning rounds, I’ve been studying the different areas we intend to garden in this year.

This strip has never had a garden in it. You can see where the ground starts to get rough on the left, where the old garden started. That rough part is from the crappy plow job that was done before we moved here.

This stretch will have alternating blocks of three varieties of Peaches ‘n Cream corn and two varieties of sunflowers.

In years where we had more snow, where I’m standing to take this picture had a large puddle of water from melted snow. This year, there is only that whitish patch you can see on the left foreground. That’s ice from the small amount of water accumulated this spring. This is something to keep in mind when we are planting food trees here, as we don’t want saplings being drowned out in the spring. So part of our goal when growing here is leveling things out a bit more.

The further out we go, however, the drier it gets. By the time we reach the corner, past the low hanging spruce branches I will have to prune away, it’s very dry. Weeds and grass barely grow there. Which means that, when we have corn growing there, we are going to have to find ways to keep them well watered. This entire area is going to be a challenge to water, simply because it’s so far from the house.

This time of the morning is the only time this area is in shade. It gets full sun for most of the day, and also gets incredibly hot. To the left of where the corn and sunflowers will be planted is where we will be having beds of melons and gourds. They’ll get the heat they need (especially if we have summer like last year!). We just have to make sure they get the water they’ll need. The winter squash will also be more on this side, while the summer squash will be planted closer to the house, where they will be closer for continual harvesting over the summer.

We’re also going to have to work on keeping the deer out. There are a number of options we can try. If we make use of several of them together, it should work out.

The fence line the trees on the right are hiding is pretty much toast. New posts had been put in along the spruce grove, which I’m guessing my late brother did, but he never got to finish the job. The remaining stretch of fence has rotting fence posts, some of which are held up by nothing but the barbed wire. My late brother had a soil auger attachment for the Bobcat, and we still have the post pounder he built, but the Bobcat and its accessories are with our vandal now, and the post pounder had been sitting, exposed to the elements and covered in junk, for so many years, there’s lichen growing on the belts. So if we’re going to be putting in new fence posts, we’re going to have to do it the old fashioned way. I’ve found a couple of post hole diggers that we can try out. One of them is a very different design, and I’m curious as to how it would be used.

Meanwhile, that entire strip along the West fence line needs to be cleaned up. I might have to take the remains of the fence out entirely. The North fence line, which runs behind the lilac hedge, is in even worse shape, but at least the lilacs are there to provide some privacy and a bit of security. Once the strip along the West fence line is cleared out, it’ll be pretty open.

It would be nice to not need a fence there at all.

Since these fences mark the property lines at the roads, these are areas where we can consider putting in something very permanent for fencing. Something along the lines of a hedgerow, perhaps, or a “palisade” type of wall that would give both privacy, and keep the deer out! The corner at the far end is one of the places they regularly jump the fence (well… what’s left of the fence…). The road on the North side is very busy (as such things are in this area), and in the summer, a LOT of dust gets kicked up. On a windless day, it just hangs in the air like a fog, slowly drifting across the property, for a surprisingly long time. The lilac hedge helps keep that out of the garden area quite a bit, so that’s another thing to keep in mind as we work on the area. Dust control!

When it comes to gardening in this area, it’s all temporary. If things go well, it’ll just be for one year, and then next year, we’ll be able to start planting food trees here, while permanent garden beds get placed to the south of the house. The area we intend for permanent beds is very rough, though. It might be easiest to clear it as much as we can, then get someone in to plow and smooth it out as much as possible. We’ll be building accessible raised beds there, so it’s the leveling that’s more important to our needs. It would be good if we could get the old farm equipment moved, and the collapsing building dismantled and cleared away, but that might be just too much for this year!

We’ve got a lot of work to get done! Last year, with first the heavy rains, then the excessive heat, we didn’t get anywhere near as much done as I wanted. Hopefully, this summer will be not be as extreme.

So much of what we want to do depends on the weather!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 Garden: we have tomato babies!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Little bitty sprooooots actually showed up a couple of days ago, but they were so tiny, I didn’t bother trying to take a picture through the glass of the tank.

So far, only the Spoon tomatoes have started to show, not the Mosaic mix, though some of the bunching onions emerged even earlier.

I unpacked the second light for the tank – this was the one that originally came with the tank kit – and set it over the red solo cups. It’s sitting partly on the wood of the mesh frames, to better light up the inside of the cups. That wood is way too wide, really, but it’s what I had available.

Sometimes, I will also put another light fixture on the tank covers, too. While it does have a full spectrum bulb in it, it’s more because it’s an incandescent bulb, which provides a bit of heat. The onions don’t need it as much, but from everything I’ve been reading, tomato seedlings need more warmth.

I look forward to when things warm up and we can start moving seedlings to the sun room (after Ginger has completed his convalescence in there!). By then, the tomatoes and, later, squash seedlings will get all the heat they need in there!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: starting tomatoes, and onion follow up

/ Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

Yes! We managed to resist temptation, and not start the tomatoes too early. :-D

After a fair bit of research, plus an evaluation of our cat-safe spaces, I chose to start our tomatoes using the “double cup” method.

I’d already picked up a large package of the red beer cups, and those were the types recommended. The first thing to do was to make drainage holes in half the cups we’d be using.

These will later be used to start our squash and gourds, so I didn’t mind putting drainage holes in extra cups. I’ve got a bag of 250, so we’ll be putting holes in at least 125! :-D

These are the seeds from one packet of Spoon tomatoes from Baker Creek. They are so tiny!!! And we didn’t even end up using them all!

Now, we’ve considered quite a few options for starting our seeds, including peat or similar pots, Jiffy pellets, starting trays of various types, and even looking at the pots of various sizes we found while cleaning out the basements. I settled on these cups for a few reasons. They are the size I want, you can get a LOT of them for a very low price, and I expect to be able to reuse them for many years. In some of the gardening videos I’ve watched, there are people who have been reusing these cups for as long as 10 years.

If I had the budget, I would prefer to use coir pots. I like the idea of those, or peat pots, as they can be put right into the soil with the transplants to break down, resulting in far less root disruption. The problem is, for the sheer volume of these that we would need, they’re just completely out of budget. Peat pots are fairly easy to find, but coir or any other biodegradable pots are things we’d have to seek out, and are far more expensive. :-/

The double cup method has added benefits. I can water them from below, using the outer cup, and not have to have them sitting in trays. That makes them more flexible for our spaces. Particularly since we’re using fish tanks as makeshift greenhouses. Using double cups means we can fit them inside the big tank, along with the trays of bulb unions and shallots.

Another benefit to using these cups for starting tomatoes is that we won’t need to “pot up” the tomatoes.

We filled the cups only half way with peat. The loose peat we’re using takes a long time to moisten, so I made sure to set some up in a container with water to saturate overnight, first.

As a bonus, the double cups hold the labels in place very well!

Once the seedlings reach a size large enough that we would be potting them up, we can just add more of the peat around the stems. No disruption of the main root, and the “hairs” on the stems will become new roots, making them hardier for when they finally get transplanted outside.

We planted 4 seeds in each cup. We shall see how many germinate, and how many make it to the transplant stage! The goal is for a total of 8 plants, but if we have extra… well, we’ll figure it out when the time comes. With the Mosaic Medley, it is a mix of cherry and grape tomatoes, so we will hopefully have several different varieties from the seeds that were planted, but I really don’t know how we’ll be able to tell until they start fruiting, really. There are plenty of seeds left in that packet, too.

Here they are, all in a row along the front of the big tank. Once they start sprouting, if it seems they aren’t getting enough light, we can place the extra aquarium light over the tank above them.

At which point, I call your attention to the onions, behind them.

The bulb onions (Norstar) in the self-watering tray are doing all right. The K-cups are actually doing better than the ones in the Jiffy pellets, which was a surprise for me. In fact, so many seeded pellets didn’t germinate, I reseeded many of them (plus a few K-cups), and they seem to be doing better now. The K-cups dry out much faster, and don’t water from below as well as the pellets. Unfortunately, watering the taller K-cups without also over watering the pellets has been a challenge. In the future, I would not want to mix the two again.

As for the shallots in the egg trays… Hmm.

I had thought that the wet cardboard of the egg trays might help the plugs stay moister, longer, but they seem to have done the opposite. They seem to be drying them out faster, and with this set up, I don’t have the space to put trays under them, to be able to water them from below. I’ve been using a spray bottle to water them from above, but … well, they really seem to be struggling. And I can’t even plant more, because all of the shallot seeds were used up in these trays.

Then there are the bunching onions, in the small tank.

*sigh*

The cat damage didn’t just wreck a lot of plugs, but it looks like the peat was contaminated, too. On one tray, a white mold has started to grow, while on the other tray, there is what looks like a more yellowish mold. Lack of air circulation in the tank certainly wasn’t helping matters.

That will not be as much of a problem now, at least. The window screen I found in the shed to replace the lid seems to be working, even though it is bigger than the tank. The frame along one side juuuuussssttt fits in the narrow gap between the tank and the wall, which means the tank itself helps hold the screen in place. A couple of 5 pound hand weights on the back, and it seems to actually be working. Yes, we did have a cat knock it off by going on the overhang, but since the weights have been added, that seems to have solved it.

On removing the light fixture from the lid, I had a slightly different issue. There is no “back” to the light bars, and while the waterproof tubes the lights are in have a dark strip along where it would have been against the lid, there was still a lot of light in every other direction. For now, I’ve simply placed the fixture on top of the metal mesh of the screen, then placed a somewhat-cut-to-size piece of rigid insulation, wrapped in aluminum foil, on top. All that “wasted” light is now being reflected downwards. It seemed darker in the tank, possibly because of the mesh itself, so I put aluminum foil around the sides of the tank, too. The foil wrapped “backing” for the light seems to be working well, so I plan to attach the light fixture to it, rather than just have it sitting loosely on top. I had intended to mount the light to the underside of the screen, but it actually seems to be working okay, sitting on top. As long as the cats leave it alone. They don’t seem to like the overhang of the screen, though, and only a couple of the kittens have been willing to make the effort to get past it.

We have a very small, light fan that can sit right on the screen and provide air circulation in the tank. For now, we’ve been switching the little fan back and forth between the tanks, until we feel it’s time to start using the oscillating room fan that’s on a stand.

I’m pretty sure those bunching onions are a lost cause, though.

So we had two things to deal with; the too dry shallots, and the dying bunching onions.

The girls took care of the shallots for me, while I made a run to the post office. They had to get creative, because… cats.

They put the seedlings into baking pans with water in them, to water the seedlings from below. That needed time, but they found that the under-bed storage container that we’ve been using to contain our potting mess was large enough to cover and protect both trays.

They successfully foiled the cats!

There was room for three more cups in the big tank, though, and we still had seeds for the bunching onions. So when I got back from my errands, I decided to plant more of them.

The shallots were well dampened by then, so I slid them back onto the pieces of insulation we’re using tho carry them, and put them back in the tank. Then I filled three double cups with peat and put about a dozen seeds, at least, in each cup. The seeds are all about half an inch apart, so I’ll be able to easily thin them, if necessary, or separate them for transplanting, later on.

And I still have seeds for the bunching onions left over!

So that is done. Tomato seeds have been planted, shallots have been, hopefully, rescued, and new bunching onion seeds have been planted.

The next batch of seeds that we will need to start are the gourds.

But not for another month or so.

Hopefully, by then, it will be warm enough even overnight, that the onions and tomatoes can be safely transferred to the sun room, so we can use the fish tank aquariums for the next batch of seed starts.

A little more garden progress, done! :-)

The Re-Farmer