transplanting

Our 2025 Garden analysis: final thoughts and plans for next year

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All righty. Time to get my thoughts organized about how things went this year, and what I want to do next year.

When this post gets published, I’ll actually be at my mother’s place, doing some housekeeping for her and getting her apartment the way she wants it for Christmas. We’re already getting weather warnings for this weekend. Today’s high (Thursday) was -11C/12F. Wind chills at around -22C/-8F. Tomorrow (Friday, when this will be published) and Saturday, our highs are supposed to be -21C/-6F, but we are getting warning of wind chills dropping things to -40C/-40F. !!!!!

Then it’s supposed to start warming up again, up to a high of -5C/23F on Tuesday, before dropping again. There are no longer any predicted highs above freezing around Christmas, but we’re still expecting major swings in temperature.

I’m so glad the winter sown beds got that extra layer or straw.

Speaking of which, here are my final thoughts on how our 2025 garden did.

Winter Sowing

This was the big experiment this year. If it didn’t work, we would have had a very different gardening year, that’s for sure! The other part of the experiment was broadcasting mixes of seeds, some of them years old, which gave me the chance to restock with fresh seed, later on.

Two of the mixes were complete failures, but for very different reasons. The summer squash just never came up. If anything did sprout, they got rolled over by cats. Which is what killed off the “tall and climbing things” bed, and the winter sown flowers. I did see things start to sprout, but they didn’t survive long.

The root vegetables mix in two beds did really well, though one almost got chocked out by the insanely productive Jabousek lettuce seeds that were added. I’m even happier with the greens mix, having finally been able to grow kohlrabi, and those Swiss Chard were an excellent cut and come again crop.

In the end, if it weren’t for the winter sown beds that survived, we would have had a much less productive year! This is a major game changer for me, and I expect to keep doing this from now on. Not only did we get much earlier growth, but it saved me a lot of work in the spring.

The biggest problems

Cats.

I thought it would be the elm seeds, and they were definitely a problem in the expected places, too, but the yard cats were particularly destructive this year.

What I won’t do again, and what I’m doing instead

Definitely not broadcasting mixes. That did give me a good idea of what could be successfully winter sown in our climate zone, though. Particularly with the drought, heat and smoke we got this year. This time, the winter sowing was much more planned out. The beds also got more thoroughly mulched before the hard frosts hit.

With that in mind, we’ve planted carrots, peas, spinach, chard, kohl rabi, cabbage, beets, and Hedou Tiny bok choi. Plus, of course, garlic. There were also lots of little onions found while cleaning up the old kitchen garden that got transplanted. Those might bulb, or go to seed. Either one works for me.

I will also have to make sure to put cat proof protective covers on pretty much everything.

I was also happy with having radish pods instead of radish bulbs. There is a variety grown specifically for their pods that I might pick up at some point but, for now, we quite enjoyed the proliferation of pods to snack on and do quick pickles with. You get a LOT more food from a single radish by eating the pods, too. Definitely for winter sowing, though, as I’ve read they taste a lot stronger when they are direct sown in the spring.

Transplants

This was a really hard year for all our transplants. The heat, drought and smoke likely played a big part in that, but in some beds, it looks like tree roots invading the beds also played a part. We got very little out of our transplants. The ones we started indoors that did best were the Chocolate Cherry and Spoon tomatoes, even as stunted as they were. The worst were probably the melons. The pepper and eggplant plants did rather well, but to so much for blooming and productivity. The purchased herb transplants, on the other hand, did great in their tiny raised bed!

The biggest problems

The transplants were something we could protect from cats rather well. In the end, it was probably a combination of drought conditions and those tree roots. Not a lot that was in our zone of control that we could have done anything about.

What I won’t do again, and what I’m doing instead.

I won’t winter sow onions again. Instead, I will be starting them indoors for transplanting. I had hoped they would at least grow enough to use the greens and deter deer, but most of them simply got choked out.

We will, of course, still be starting seeds indoors to transplant in the spring, but we need to set up a seed starting area and the aquarium greenhouses in the basement. If for no other reason than we need to clear space in the cat free zone, AKA the living room. Now that cats aren’t allowed in the new basement anymore, I can open up the “window” between the basements, near the furnaces. That should help more warm air from the old basement to flow into the new basement and equalize things. There is the “doorway” (a vaguely door shaped hole cut into the wall when the new basement was built) but no real air flow between the two basements.

As for what we can do instead, for better success with our transplants… I honestly don’t know. There isn’t much I can do about heat waves. There are limits to watering during a drought, and not just due to the lower water table. Our well pump still needs to be replaced, if we dare risk the foot valve, so the more the hose is used, the more wear and tear on the pump. In the end, it comes down to the weather, really.

As for the tree roots, we need to cut that row of self-seeded trees down completely, and ensure no suckers start coming up at the stumps. My mother was adamant about not cutting those trees down, even though I see signs that someone tried to at some point. Probably my late brother tried to get rid of them. I recall my mother laughing about how angry he would get because she would stick trees all over the place, making it hard for him to take care of things.

Now my oldest brother owns the property, though, and he is very much in agreement with getting rid of them. He had issues with where and how my parents chose to plant trees, too, and we’re both now dealing with the consequences.

Other than clearing those trees out, the only other thing we can really do is more raised beds. The higher, the better but, for now, even low raised beds help. Once the trees are cut down, I’m even thinking of putting a long, higher raised bed over where they are, to make sure they get good and dead. That would also reclaim the garden space lost to my mother allowing those trees to grow after she transplanted out the raspberries that were there.

As for the purchased herb transplants, those did quite well. I certainly won’t turn my nose up at buying transplants to supplement anything we start indoors.

Yes, I will still be trying luffa again! 😄

Spring Direct Sowing

These where the most affected by this year’s climate conditions of all. It was pretty brutal.

We direct sowed pole beans, bush beans, corn, carrots, peas and more summer squash. I’ll add potatoes to this list as well. I think the potatoes did the best, even though they never reached the blooming stage. The summer squash and two types of beans were the worst.

The biggest problems.

There’s only so much I can blame on the drought. We haven’t had much luck direct sowing summer squash in the past, either. Granted, last year it was slugs that were the big problem, and this year, we had lots of frogs taking care of those for us!

In the end, though, I think most of our issues were the same as with the transplants. Too much heat, drought conditions (even with watering twice a day) and so much smoke. Plus, tree roots.

What I won’t do again, and what I’m doing instead

I will have to find space for them, but summer squash will be started indoors again, for transplanting instead of direct sowing.

Beans and corn; there really isn’t anything I can do differently with those.

The peas did surprisingly well, but we need to ramp up our deer protection.

The carrots need less tree roots competing for space. Those have been winter sown in the trellis bed. If I plant more in the spring, I need to be strategic on where, to avoid those roots.

The chard I direct sowed were a complete fail. I have more varieties to direct sow in the spring, and those will go in earlier. I suspect it was partly too hot when they were planted, and the soil too compacted by watering.

Soil compaction is an issue. We need to add more organic matter to our soil. Preferably something like peat moss (Canadian peat moss is ethically harvested) that will also increase the acidity.

That might be another issue for everything. Our soil is so alkaline, and most things do better in slightly acidic soil. I’ve been amending with Sulphur, but it’s really hard to increase soil acidity. Especially with dark grey zone soil like ours, that leaches everything so quickly.

More high raised beds will allow us to control for that more, but this is the sort of thing that takes years to amend, even the slightest.

Food forest and perennials

Happily, we got quite a boost with our food forest this spring, adding a plum, another variety of eating apple more suited to our climate zone, new cross pollinating varieties of haskap and gooseberry. I remember we had gooseberry here when I was a kid and so loved eating them when they were really really sour! I look forward to eating them again.

The biggest problems

Deer. Drought. The insane number of rocks I find when digging holes to plant in.

What I won’t do again, and what I’ll do instead.

I won’t underestimate how determined deer can be, nor assume they won’t like something! I got spoiled by them ignoring the silver buffalo berry and sea buckthorn, though they did go after that one highbush cranberry, over and over again, last year.

In the spring, I’ll be making more wire mesh cages for the fruit and nut trees. The berry bushes seem to be okay.

I really need to find a place to transplant those grapes to.

Now that I’ve got the new strawberry and asparagus bed, I’m thinking of slowly turning that section over to perennials. Not next year, though. I have other plans for there, first.

Final thoughts

There were a lot of things out of our control this year, and some things I am just not sure what went wrong. Like with the red noodle beans.

With so many changes to our garden this past year, and not being able to reclaim spaces we’d planted in, in previous years, it really isn’t a typical year at all. We did have some surprise successes (peas, crocus) and big disappointments (no melons and almost no squash at all!).

At least I can call it a learning experience.

Here is the last garden tour video I did, where you can see the beds that are already winter sown.

Planning ahead to our 2026 Garden

Obviously, some of that is already in and done, with the winter sowing. We’ve got quite a head start to next year’s garden already.

Doing that meant I got a lot of seeds in advance. I took advantage of some big sales and replenished my stock from MI Gardener.

Here is what I got.

No, we aren’t planting all of that!

But we will be planting both old and new seeds.

My daughters and I went though my seed inventory to make some decisions on what we’ll be planting next year, outside of what I’ve already winter sown.

I just went into the basement, where my seed bins are stored, to get my lists and diagrams. Since I was there anyhow, I went ahead and uncovered the window between the two basements. I’d covered it with a piece of rigid insulation and had poked holes in it to allow for some air flow, but it clearly wasn’t enough. Once that was down, there was a literal wind of warmer air coming in from the old basement! Wow!

So that will make a difference. I’ll have to keep an eye on the thermometer I’ve got over my seed bin. The new basement tends to stay between 10-13C/50-55F, all year. I don’t have a thermometer in the old basement, but it’s often warmer than the main floor!

I didn’t write a list the varieties we intend to plant yet, but have the seed packets set aside. We intend to grow fewer plants of more varieties in some things. The varieties will be listed in future posts, but this is what we’ve decided to grow this year.

To start indoors

Winter squash and gourds. The gourds are my “fun” thing to grow.
Summer Squash.
Melons.
Cucumbers
Onions – bulb and bunching
Eggplant – hopefully, a variety my daughter is not allergic to!
Tomatoes
Peppers
Celery
Herbs
Flowers

So… yeah, I’m going to need to make space!

That doesn’t leave much for us to direct sow in the spring!

Spring Direct Sowing

Corn – short season and not to short season
Beans – pole and bush. If I have room, beans for drying
Potatoes
Flowers

Succession sowing

Peas
Chard
Spinach
Carrots

One thing I will have for 2026 is more room to plant in. There is one bed in the old kitchen garden that took forever to re-work, but it is now ready for planting, and included supports to hold hoops or whatever I end up using to hold covers and protect the bed from critters.

The bed that was winter sown with tall and climbing things was a major issue and a complete fail. I did have mesh netting to protect from the seeds, but it couldn’t protect from playful kittens. I’ve been gathering the materials and will rework that bed, yet again. It will be taller, narrower by a few inches, and like the reworked bed in the old kitchen garden, it will have supports I can attached hoops or wire or whatever I need to cover and protect the bed from elm seeds and critters.

The plan so far.

Which, I’m sure, will change a few times before the garden is completely in!

Let’s start with the old kitchen garden, which is mostly winter sown. There is the short side of the L shaped wattle weave bed that is open. I intend to plant herbs there, including fennel, though we want that more as a vegetable than an herb.

The newly finished rectangular bed could have root vegetables planted in it, so I was thinking of more carrots. However, it might be a better place to plant summer squash in.

The open retaining wall blocks are now all filled with transplanted alpine or whatever they are strawberries. Those will be for perennials, since nothing else seems to want to grow in them.

I did the same with the retaining wall blocks by the chain link fence. Hopefully, they will survive the winter. It’s hard to say, being planted in concrete blocks, but all the chimney block planters did get mulched for winter insulation.

Once the longer bed at the other section of chain link fence is redone, I am thinking winter squash and/or gourds would be good to put there. They can be covered until they’re too big for cats to get into, can climb the fence, and are too spikey for deer to eat.

In the East yard, two out of three rectangular beds are winter sown. In the third one, I’m thinking a couple of varieties of tomatoes can go in there.

There is a 4′ square bed in this section, which will get white eggplants transplanted into it.

In the main garden area, one of the beds is sown with Daikon radish on one side, turnips on the other. Down the middle, I plan to direct sow pole beans.

The high raised bed will get bush beans.

In the trellis bed, the winter sown peas didn’t fill the entire row, so we will transplant cucumbers in the last couple of feet.

Of the three remaining 18′ beds in the main garden area, one will have peppers, celery and tomatoes. The other will get squash and/or melons. The third bed will get potatoes.

The area near where the new asparagus and strawberry bed is, is still covered with black plastic, which has mostly killed off the grass and weeds that took over what used to be a squash patch before. I plan to pull that back and use that area to plant two varieties of corn that mature at very different rates, so there should be no issue with cross pollination.

Further out is the area where the Albion Everbearing strawberries were. I plan to sow bread seed poppies in that location, as part of the plan to slowly convert that whole section to perennials, or self seeding annuals that can be treated as perennials.

What you’re not seeing in there is flowers or onions.

The onions will get interplanted all over the place. The bulb onions are saved seed, but the bunching onions are new, so those I’ll try to keep in one spot. Perhaps interplanted with the herbs in the old kitchen garden or something.

The space at the end of the high raised bed will have flowers again – hopefully including those self seeded asters – but I also intend to have both transplanted and direct sown flowers scattered all over, interplanted wherever I find the space.

Somewhere in there, I want to direct sow some of the saved Hopi Black Dye seeds.

If all goes well, I’ll have at least one additional trellis bed done, and we can finish our first trellis tunnel, though maybe not in time for spring planting. If my brother is able to get one of his tractors going and we start dragging dead spruces out of the spruce grove – maybe even cut more of the dead ones down – I will have the logs needed to continue building pairs of trellis beds and, if all works out, pairs of beds that will become polytunnels. Once the second bed for the first trellis tunnel is done, though, framing the existing low raised beds are priority. Those will be only one log high for now, while the trellis beds will be started at two logs high. I’ve got only so many dead spruces to work with, so building the beds up higher will be left after we’ve got all the beds framed out that need it. Over time, I’d like for at least half of the raised beds to be increased to match the high raised bed – 4 logs high. I’m finding that the perfect height for reach, and for my back. I do want to leave some beds lower for things that grow tall, like corn or pole beans. The trellis tunnel beds may eventually be increased to 3 logs high, but we’ll see.

Then there are the perennials and trees.

I’ve placed an order for some Manchurian Walnut, which is one of the few nut trees out there that are hardy enough to grow here – it’s actually hardy to zone 2b, which is what we are in Canadian. I could only afford to get one, rather than any of their bundles. It will be planted in the outer year. In the same order, I was able to get a bundle of five Bleu Basket Willow. Those will be planted beyond the outer yard, where they will eventually be coppiced and used to grow stems for everything from, yes, weaving baskets, to wattle weaving and even willow furniture, if we want. Over time, I plan to get two other varieties of basket willows that are different colours.

We might have to buy replacement Korean Pine, too. We shall see.

We’re also looking at other types of hardy fruit trees to get as the budget allows, such as pears, or varieties of cherry that actually grow and produce in our climate zone.

All in good time.

All done!

Well, there we have it.

In the end, 2025 was a really rough year for gardening. Yes, we were able to harvest and the winter sown beds made a huge difference, but nothing really reached its full potential, including the winter sown beds, as well as the surviving ones did. So many people in our region struggled with their gardens.

I know a lot of people have been going on about “survival gardens” or sharing those idiotic memes about how, if we all grew gardens instead of lawns, no one would starve. Hogwash. Obviously, I’m all for growing as much of your own food as possible, however you can manage is, and to be as self sufficient as possible. I absolutely encourage people to do that, every chance I get. Especially in these unstable times. But the hype and expectations I’m seeing out there are not helping. Years like this show exactly how little control we actually have when it comes to growing our own food. There are bad growing seasons like this, but even if you have an excellent growing season and your garden is doing great, one storm could wipe it all out. Or it could be destroyed by animals, insects or disease.

As the old saying goes, hope for the best, plan for the worst. There will always be things happening we have no control over, other than how we respond to it.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: beets, bok choi, dwarf peas – and Judgement!

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I definitely want to start with the good news, before getting into the gardening stuff.

As I was putting things away in the sun room, I saw a cat in the cat cage jump out and meow a greeting. Nothing unusual about that, except that this cat had something around its neck that was flapping.

Which is when I realized, it was Judgement!

I haven’t seen Judgement in months!

We had put collars on the cats that got fixed, to make them faster to identify, but I also made sure they were reflective collars, so they would be less likely to get hit by a car or something. Most of the cats lost their collars long ago. Judgement had lost one or two already, but he still had a ratty yellow collar still on him.

I took it off and threw it away!

Now I’m hoping to see Syndol back, too! It’s not unusual for cats to disappear for the summer, then come back for the winters, but sometimes they don’t come back at all. So this was a nice surprise for the day.

My priority for today was to finish what I started in the old kitchen garden. The rectangular bed in particular needed a bit more work. I was able to pull more weeds and roots I could no longer see when I stopped last night. I also found the gap under one log was quite a bit larger than the hole the cats had made, so I found more sticks to push in front of it. The gap extended all the way to the corner, though, so I used the scrap board I’d been using when hammering stakes into the ground to lay across the opening on the inside, then added a few more sticks to hold it in place.

Then I could use the rake to level all the soil again.

The section of the wattle weave bed I’d prepped yesterday needed some clean up again. I kept having to chase cats out of the garden beds because they kept wanting to use the nice, soft, fluffy soil as a litter box!

After levelling the soil in the rectangular bed, I marked out four rows with stakes and twine. This required repeated removal of kittens. In the second picture, you can see what I planted and transplanted. In the row north of centre, I planted the mixed beets, so they wouldn’t overshadow the Hedou Tiny bok choi I sowed on in the row south of centre. The bok choi can get quite tall, after it has bolted and gone to seed, but for harvesting, they should only be about 2 or 3 inches tall. I do plan to leave one or two to go to seed to collect at the end of the season.

In the outside rows, I transplanted a whole bunch of the onions I’d been finding. On one side, I transplanted the ones that were clearly bulb onions. On the other, I transplanted the ones that look like they might be white bunching onions, except I’ve never tried to grow white bunching onions before.

In the next picture, you can see where I planted one packet of dwarf peas. I got two packets, but this is a very short row, so I only needed the one. The peas went in the back of the bed (north side). I’d already transplanted some onions at the end and at the front near the corner before. Today, I took the two garlic bulbs I’d found, broke up the cloves, and planted them in line with the onions. They filled the entire remaining front space.

Once everything was in, it all got mulched with leaves. Then I mulched around the herbs in the tiny bed as well. I didn’t cover them, as we’re still using them as needed. Before the hard freeze hits, I’ll cover them completely with a leaf mulch, and we’ll see how they survive the winter!

I also moved the raised bed cover over the rectangular bed for the winter.

I didn’t take final pictures, though, as I decided to take garden tour video, instead. I’ll be going through them and putting together a garden tour video. If I’m satisfied with what I took. Otherwise, I might take new recordings tomorrow, before I head into the city for the Costco shop. We’ll see.

At this point, the only bed I was considering winter sowing into is the small bed off to the side where the Albion Everbearing strawberries had been last year. It still needs to be cleaned up, and I plan to sow bread seed poppies there. That can wait until spring, though, if necessary.

As it stands now, other than mulching the transplanted strawberries and little things like that, the garden can be done for the year. The winter sowing is in, and anything left can wait until spring if I can’t get to it in the next while. We’re getting a bit of rain right now, and the next couple of days are supposed to be dry and cooler, but Sunday and Monday are supposed to get warm again, with plenty of sun, so there’s still the possibility of getting ahead of things for next year.

So, to recap, we have winter sown for next year:

Purple savoy cabbage
White and Purple Vienna Kohlrabi
Daikon Radish
White Egg turnip
Rainbow Mix carrots
Spring Blush peas
American spinach
Yellow Swiss Chard
Garlic
Hedou Tiny bok choi
Assorted Mix beets
Tom Thumb Dwarf peas

Then transplanted miscellaneous onions and garlic that were found during bed prep. Plus seed onions.

Last year, I scattered seed mixes and they did surprisingly well. This year, I’m hoping the more orderly plantings will survive the winter and give us a nice head start in the garden next year!

Not too shabby, I think!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: updates, radish pods, temporary trellis, and volunteers!

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I figured I should get some pictures of the East yard garden beds, now that they’ve got some fresh stove pellet sawdust mulch on them.

The beans with the tomatoes are doing really well. At first, it seems that one of the seeds had not germinated, but it did eventually show up. That makes for a 100% germination rate of these old seeds.

Too bad a cat dug one of them up. *sigh*

In the foreground of the first photo, you can even see some of the self-seeded carrots coming up!

In the next image, you can see the second planting of beans coming up in between the corn. Of the first planting, there ended up being a total of three, maybe four, that came up, and only one of them came up strong and healthy. Considering these are the same seeds in the same bed, it’s hard to know why the first sowing failed so badly.

The last image is of the Arikara squash bed – and the corn in there is so much bigger than the ones in the other bed!

I really like using the stove pellets to mulch around seedlings. The pellets land around the small plants, rather than on top of them. Then, after being watered, the pellets expand and fall apart, with the sawdust creating a nice, fairly thing, but really light, mulch. So far, it seems to be working out with anything I’ve used them around. It helps that the 40 pound bags are so cheap, and a little goes a surprisingly long way!

Once my rounds were done, my older daughter came out to help me remove the netting around the trellis bed. We had an unfortunate surprise while pulling it out, though. I’ve seen frogs – even large ones – squeeze through the rather fine mesh but, unfortunately, a garter snake didn’t make it. My daughter found it stuck around and under the corner of the bed. It hadn’t been dead for long, but long enough that a big beetle was chewing on its head. We had to cut a section of the netting off, because we couldn’t get it loose from the netting.

As my daughter said, it’ll be good when we no longer need to use netting! At least not this netting. It’s always a concern that a kitten or a bird will get caught in it. I never thought a garter snake would get caught!

We were being eaten alive by mosquitoes while we got the net down, stretched it out, folded it in half length wise, then started rolling it up on a bamboo stake for storage. They were after my daughter a lot more than me for some reason, so once the netting was rolled up enough, I sent her inside while I finished. It’s now tied off and in the garden shed. I made sure it was resting higher up in the shed so, hopefully, no critters will get into it.

That done, I brought out some of the trellis netting we’ve used in previous years. This netting has 4′ square spaces, making it easy to reach through to weed or harvest.

I started off by weaving a bamboo stake through one edge of the netting, where there is a pair of lines about a half inch apart, instead of 4 inches. I tied one end to the vertical post at the corner, then stretched out the netting flat before tying it to the next post. Then I added the next bamboo stake, weaving it into the netting and joining it to the first stake, before tying it off to the next couple of vertical supports, then did it again.

The netting ended on the third stake, so I added another piece of it to a fourth stake before joining the stakes and matching the netting up. That left a lot of excess netting at the end, but I just bunched that up and secured it while trying off the stake to the vertical.

I had woven in a plastic coated metal stake at each end of the bed to keep the netting straight. After the horizontal stakes were in place, I pushed the netting down so any excess was at ground level. I then took the garden stakes there were already in place to hold the protective netting that was there before, and used them in the trellis netting. Each one got woven vertically through the netting, then I used them to tighten things up a bit before pushing them into the ground. Where the two nets overlapped happened to be where there was already a longer bamboo stake, so I used that to join the sections together at the same time. Once all the stakes were woven through and pushed in the ground, I used ground staples to secure the netting to the soil, catching in the excess, to make it all fairly stretched out and tight.

I recall from using the netting before that the weight of plants climbing it can cause issues, so I added another level of horizontal bamboo stakes along the middle. These got tied to the vertical garden stakes, rather than the posts for the permanent trellis. This way, the netting is at a slight angle for the beans to climb.

Then it was time to weed.

This bed hasn’t been weeding since the protective netting was placed all around it. A lot of the self seeded onions I transplanted into rows were no longer visible.

I started weeding along the trellis side. I probably should have done it before the trellis net was added, but the mesh is open enough to reach through easily. The problem was more my hat constantly getting tangled in it!

As I was working my way along the beans, I spotted a little volunteer tomato plant! I remember finding volunteer tomatoes in this bed last year, too. I’m not sure where the seeds came from!

When I found one, I left it, thinking it would be fine were it was. Then I found another.

And another.

So I thought I would come back later and transplant them once I weeded and could see a space for them.

Then I found another.

And another.

And several others!

As I was working my way down the onion side of the bed and kept finding more even tiny tomato plants, I started pulling them up with the weeds, then transplanting them wherever I had enough space between the onions or the pumpkins. Then, when I finished weeding the bed, I went around the beans side to dig up the ones I’d left there and transplanted them.

By the time I was done, I counted 14 volunteer tomatoes.

Or 15.

I actually counted 13, first, after all the weeding and transplanting was done. Then noticed one I’d missed, so I counted again and got 15. Then I counted again, as I was scattering stove pellets around the bed and counted 14. I counted again and kept getting 14, so I either keep missing one, or I double counted one before.

Of course, it’s also possible I missed some volunteers when I went back to find and transplant them. If so, they’ll be easier to see, soon enough!

The last photo was taken after I’d scattered the stove pellets, but I forgot to take one after it was watered and the pellets were all expanded and breaking up.

This bed now has Red Noodle beans and Hopi Black Dye sunflowers along one side. On the other is onions from last year, going to seed, plus a whole bunch of tiny self seeded onions that I transplanted after clearing and preparing this bed for the beans and sunflowers. Then there is the pumpkins, and now the volunteer tomatoes.

This bed is going to look really interesting, once everything has reached maturity!

Today, I remembered to take some pictures of the radish seed pods that I’ve been snacking on.

The first three pictures are all from the same plant. What a difference! Some pods have just one pea-sized seed “bubble”. Others are longer, looking like they have a couple of seeds developing in them. Then there was a branch that has seed pods of all shapes and sizes!

The last pictures is of a different variety of radish in the winter sown East yard garden bed, with distinctive red lines on them. The seed mix had four different varieties of radishes in it, and I don’t know which is which, though I’m guessing the yellow variety is the one plant I’m seeing with yellow flowers.

I’m really happy with how the winter sowing experiment worked. The last time I tried it, I did the mild jug version, and it failed completely. Now I know that sowing directly into the beds, then heavily mulching, is the way to go for a lot of things. There are a few things I will now plan ahead to winter sow, but not as a mix. Beets, carrots, turnips, kohlrabi, spinach, and radishes for their pods. Also, that one variety of lettuce I planted was insanely prolific, and good at self seeding! I’ll have to be careful when collecting seeds this fall! Oh, the tiny bok choy worked, as did the chard – when they’re not being overwhelmed by other plants! There are also tiny onions all over, but they’re so far behind, I don’t expect we’ll be getting any bulb unions this year. Which is okay. We have the ones that are going to seed, so we can start onions indoors, using our own seeds, in January or February. The turnips also worked out much better than any other time we’ve tried them, so I think we will run through the varieties again to see which ones we like best.

I get the feeling we’ll be doing a lot of direct sowing in the fall from now on! Just in a more organized way. Peas are something else that are supposed to be good for winter sowing – we just have to make sure the bed they’re planted in doesn’t get destroyed by cats, to find out!

Obviously, tomato seeds survive the winter just fine. What variety they are, I have no idea, but if we’re going to winter sow tomatoes deliberately, they’ll have to be a very short season variety, if we’re going to get anything from them. If the Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes turn out to be a variety the family likes, they would be an ideal candidate. Their growing season is so short, we could actually direst sow in the fall, then again in the late spring, to extend the harvest, if we wanted to.

We just need to be sure we actually enjoy eating them, first.

It’s taking us years to get things worked out, with a couple of major set backs along the way, but those set backs have actually helped us in our decision making for the future. Like now knowing that parts of our garden area are prone to flooding during wet years! Having beds raised even just a few inches has saved come of our plantings already.

I do look forward to when we can make the low raised bed higher, though. Working on the bed this morning, while much improved from working at ground level, was still pretty painful! Plus, the lower the bed, the shorter the reach. Even though these beds are 4′ wide on the outside, it was still hard for me to reach the middle of the bed. With the high raised bed, I can reach clear across, if I wanted to, without difficulty.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the morning’s work.

My next garden project will be finally working on the old kitchen garden bed that will get wattle woven walls, but I’m going to have to put another job higher on the priority list. When going through the trail cam files this morning, the gate cam had over 100 files – and this camera is set to just take single still shots. Most of those were from the poplars coming up on the other side of the fence, blowing in the wind. Which is not really a step back, since some of them, at least, are of a size that could probably be used in the wattle weaving!

Lots to do, and the weather is finally cool enough to get to it. I’m loving every minute of it!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: rescuing neglected strawberries, mulching potatoes and more

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Last year, we planted a little plot of Albion everbearing strawberries. They did fantastic!

Until they got eaten by deer.

Repeatedly.

They even tore through the net barrier I’d put around them, and I ended up having to use some leftover pieces of chicken wire. By then, there wasn’t much of the season left, but the bed did get heavily mulched for the winter, with some chicken wire draped over the whole bed for protection.

I did remove some of the mulch in the spring, but in the end, the bed got severely neglected this year.

Amazingly, some strawberries survived.

The strawberries I’d planted in front of the new asparagus bed, however, did not. Not a single one made it. I had simply taken too long before planting them, I think.

We do, however, now have a third Jersey Giant asparagus fern growing! So I still have some home for the rest of those, and the purple asparagus.

The first thing to do was to find and dig up the Albion strawberries and see how many there were.

I’m afraid I had to be pretty rough with them. The crab grass rhizomes were bad enough, but I was also finding new elm roots invading from below. When I planted this bed, I’d dug up as many roots as I could, then covered the bottom with several layers of carboard before adding fresh soil on top, in which the strawberries were planted.

You’d never know I’d done all that, from the roots I was finding!

Those elm trees have got to go.

I actually found quite a few more strawberry plants than I expected! In the end, I found 10 plants, plus a runner with fresh roots in it, though no leaves yet.

All of these went into a bucket with some water while I worked on where to plant them.

At first, when I thought there were just a few, I had expected to plant them at one end of the bed with the Spoon tomatoes, but there were enough that I decided to reclaim the space I’d planted bare root strawberries in that failed. The shallow trench they were planted in were, of course, filled with elm tree seedlings, along with plenty of other weeds.

There was still some soil left in the old kiddie pool we used as a planter last year, so once the weeds were cleared out, I used that to fill in the shallow trench the strawberries had been planted in. This was more for the asparagus, since I didn’t feel I’d been able to cover the crowns properly on that side.

While clearing the weeds out, I did not find a single sign of the bare root strawberries that had been planted there.

Totally my own fault. They should have gone in the ground as soon as I got them. Instead, they sat for about a month.

Then I decided to take some short logs from the old kitchen garden retaining wall and set them along the little wire fence, to prevent erosion and water run off.

That done, I thoroughly watered the newly added soil. It was bone dry in that little pool. Once everything was well hydrated, I spaced out the strawberry plants in between where the asparagus crowns were planted.

Once those were in and watered again, I went and got more grass clippings to mulch both the strawberries and the asparagus.

Then, because I had enough for it, I got more loads of grass clippings and mulched the potatoes.

By this time, it was getting pretty late, and I was being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

I did continue watering the rest of the garden beds for the night, though. As long as I was moving the mosquitoes weren’t as bad.

While I was watering the grapes, I spotted some friends.

We haven’t seen these in a couple of years! They are Abbott’s sphinx Sphecodina abbottii  and look VERY different, at different stages of development.

Around the edge of the spruce grove, I paused to check on the wild saskatoons growing there.

We actually have ripe berries developing!

I got a picture, then I ate them!

They’re not as big and juicy as they could be; we haven’t had a lot of rain, and the undergrowth is starting to crowd them again. We need to get under them with the loppers and clear it all out again.

All in all, things are going pretty good in the garden. At least, for our region. I have to keep reminding myself of that when I watch gardening videos, and I see all these people posting about their huge plants and amazing harvests. They all tend to be at least a month ahead of us!

I’m happy I got as much done this evening as I did. I’m not sure how much I’ll get to go tomorrow. Not only will it be hotter, but I’ll be driving my husband to his appointment. Thankfully, the AC in the truck works fine, because that heat is going to be brutal on him.

After tomorrow, the highs are supposed to drop a bit for the next while, then get right back up to the “heat warnings in effect” level again.

On the plus side, the peppers and eggplant will be just loving these temperatures!

😄😄

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: summer squash, thinning by transplanting

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This evening, I finally had a chance to do some transplanting! I’d really wanted to do them earlier, but things just didn’t pan out.

My first priority was to get the summer squash bed cleaned up, and to transplant our “extras”.

I’d planted three groups of three seeds of Black Zucchini and White Scallop squash. The zucchini almost all came up – one spot had only two come up – but the white scallop squash saw only two germinate, in one spot.

That left me with two empty spots – and those were being filled with tiny elm seedlings taking over!

So the first thing I had to do, after taking the protecting netting off, was move the mulch aside and get in with the hand cultivator to weed as much as possible.

That took a while.

I really, really hate those elm seeds.

With the white scallop squash, I simply moved the smaller plant into the empty spot beside it. I did the same with the zucchini that had only two plants growing. Then I very carefully removed the extras from the other two spots that had all three zucchini seeds germinate.

I turned out to be wrong. I must have dropped a seed or something, because one of them had four!

I found spaces for them in other beds. Two went into gaps between the three types of winter squash, which are still recovering from getting hit with that one cold night. One went into the end of the bed with the Spoon tomatoes in it. Those all got protective plastic collars. The last one went into an open space in the high raised bed, left from harvesting some radishes and turnips.

Thanks to my SIL using their big zero turn mower on the outer yard, I had a whole lot of grass clippings available. I needed more mulch around the original summer squash bed, plus the one in the high raised bed got a grass clipping mulch, with a final watering to soak the mulch.

Hopefully, the transplants will survive alright. Squash don’t like their roots disturbed, but there was no way I could take them out without using a lot of water and washing the roots off completely. Those ridiculous elm seedlings were wrapping their tap roots around everything!

That done, I had time to work on the next job.

Rescuing strawberries.

Coming up next!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: beans, sunflowers and unexpected transplants

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I managed to get it done, just as the rain started to hit!

I think I can now officially say, our garden is in! Sure there are some things, such as fall spinach, that can be planted, but for all our expected spring planting, it is done.

Yay!

I waffled between planting along the chain link fence in the south hard, or in the trellis bed in the main garden area. In the end, I decided to go for where I knew there would be the most sunlight.

The first image above is how the bed looked, after the mulch was pulled off. Last year, we grew melons along one side, onions for seed on the other. The onions were replanted in the fall, with just one half of the bed being prepped, then covered with leaves for mulch. The other half had melons mulched with cardboard, bark and grass clippings and, in the fall, I just pulled the melon plants and left the rest in place to protect the soil.

That made cleaning the bed up much easier!

This bed does have an issue, though. You can see that – sort of – in the next two images.

To make these beds, we’re using logs as straight and even as we can find. Which is surprising difficult. Especially when looking to use 18′ logs. With this bed, on the trellis side, one of the logs was quite bent. We put that one on the bottom, with the bend going into the bed, while the top log is straight. That’s what the remaining three vertical trellis support posts are going to be secured to.

What that means, though, is that there is an entire log, just inside the top frame of the bed, in the middle. The bend is extreme enough that there’s an actual gap formed between the two logs. Over time, it won’t matter as much, as we are aiming to eventually make the beds all 4 logs high. Until then, though, the gap is getting stuffed with skinny pieces of wood, bits of bark and even grass clippings and dried leaves.

Once the mulch was removed, I went over the bed with the garden fork first, to loosen the soil and make it easier to pull the weeds. As I went along, I started to find other things besides weeds, though – and I was not at all surprised. The onions that had gone to see had dropped some of their seed before they could be harvested.

Once I got to where the onions had seeded themselves, I worked a lot more carefully, and gathered every one that I could find.

Along the way, I also found a couple of plants I recognized as the flower I allowed to grow at one end of the bed, last year. I removed those as well.

It wasn’t part of the plan, but since I had them, every since baby onion I found got transplanted. The flowers got transplanted at the opposite end of where we grew them last year.

While preparing to transplant the onions, I also carefully pulled some of the onions that were growing against each other, broke them apart, then replanted them separately.

One half of the bed had fewer onions survive than the other, so that was the first area I started transplanting onions the tiny onions. I still had enough left over that I made a second row for the rest. They filled a little over half the bed’s length before I ran out, so there’s still room to plant something else, if I wanted to.

After that, I planted the two flowers (possibly a wild salsify) I’d found, then marked off two more rows in the soil in the other side of the bed. Those were for the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers and the Red Noodle beans.

There were not enough sunflower seeds to fill the row. I spaced them about 6 inches apart, which is close for sunflowers. I don’t expect a 100% germination rate, though. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if none germinated. These are older seeds.

The red noodle beans, on the other hand, are fresh seed. These got planted nearer the edge of the bed, where they will be able to climb the trellis that will be built on that side of the bed. After filling the row from end to end, I had only 6 bean seeds left. So I stuck them into some of the gaps among the sugar snap peas, since they have a trellis already prepared. The planted rows then got marked off at the ends with plant stakes, so that if I decide to plant something else there, I know where the open spaces are.

Oh! I completely forgot! I was going to plant the pumpkins in this bed!

I can still do that. For those, I plan to set up plastic collars to mark where the seeds are.

In fact, I see the rain has passed and the sun is out. I’ll go do that right now!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: transplanting tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, and creating supports

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I am very happy to say that, as of today, ALL the transplants are in! There is just the final direct sowing to do, now.

The first transplants to get in where the tomatoes, and they all fit into one garden bed.

This bed had already been prepped, then covered with plastic, except for one end, where there had been onions gone to seed. They did not survive another winter, though.

The plastic didn’t solarize the weeds to death, but at least it kept most of the elm seeds off! The challenge was to get the plastic off again, without dumping them all onto the soil.

For a bed that had already been weeded before the plastic was laid down, there were a LOT of weeds to clear out. As I worked around the bed, I suddenly realized that I was pulling out baby carrots! Last year, we had a couple of Uzbek Golden Carrots bolt and go to seed, so I left them to it, so I could collect the seeds in the fall. When I went to gather them, though, the seed heads were shriveled and messed up looking, and there were no seeds to collect.

Looks like one of them did have seeds, after all!

There was no way they could be transplanted or anything like that, so away they went.

Once the bed was clear of weeds and roots, I finished off our last bag of manure into it, and worked that into the soil.

Then it was time to figure out where the tomatoes would go.

I used the collars (I found an extra “stash” of the water bottles I make the collars from in the basement, so I had plenty for the tomatoes) to figure out the spacing. There were four Black Beauty, four Chocolate Cherry and nine Sub Arctic Plenty.

We’ve grown the Black Beauty and Chocolate Cherry before, so I know what to expect with those. They both get quite tall, while the Black Beauty became really heavy. They had trellis supports, and I ended up having to add supports to the supports, to keep the whole thing from tipping over in the wind!

With that in mind, I made sure that these were on the north side of the bed, so they wouldn’t shade out other plants. So I set out eight collars on that side, with a space in the middle.

If I remember correctly, the Sub Arctic Plenty are a bush type tomato, so I don’t expect them to get tall. I’m thinking they will be more like the Forme de Couer tomatoes we grew last year. Each tomato plant had a pair of bamboo stakes to support it, and I’d used twine around the plants to secure them. The plants got so heavy with tomatoes, the supports started falling over, and some of the bamboo stakes even broke from the weight.

With that in mind, I planted the Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes along the south side of the bed, where they would get the most sunlight.

As with everything else, this bed was dry, dry, dry, so it got repeated waterings at every stage. I’d taken the cover off the other bed and every time I watered the tomato bed, I gave the other bed a gentle watering, too.

Once the tomatoes were in, it was time to give them support. For the verticals, I used 6′ plastic coated metal stakes. I’m glad I got more of these! Every collar got one of these tucked against one side. I used up all the stakes from last year, and used a couple of the new ones, to make one for every tomato plant.

Once those were in place, I used bamboo stakes to weave through the verticals. I did three horizontal rows on each side, and more can be added later, if need be. I then added some sticks to connect the two sides. There’s just a couple at the ends of one level, and a couple more further in, at another level. We may not need any more than that. We’ll see how things progress over time.

I did not have any clean grass clippings left for mulch, so I made use of the stove pellets we use for cat litter. I scattered them around, and even inside, the collars before giving the whole thing one final watering, to get the pellets to break up into sawdust.

I think it worked out rather well, and should be able to hold the weight of the tomatoes we can expect from these varieties,

Once this was done and cleaned up, and I took a break for lunch, it was time to work in the old kitchen garden. I decided it was time to remove the cover and netting from the greens bed, so the first thing to do was roll up the two sheets of netting, then take the cover off.

The kittens are going to miss their little mosquito netting hammocks!

The greens bed was really dry, so I spent time time watering it from the rain barrel – the rain we had was almost enough to refill it – and weeding. The spinach is bolting and we’ve decided to let them go to seed. I also found a second tiny bok choi that is staring to bloom.

That done, the herb bed got a watering, too, and then I did the pruning and clearing I mentioned in my earlier post, before I could even start on the wattle weave bed.

I decided that the Sweetie Snack Mix mini bell peppers would go in the short part of the L shaped bed, and the eggplant in the long section, among the strawberries.

The short side of the bed didn’t need a lot of weeding, and I was careful to work around the garlic that got missed and started growing this year. The old mulch got pushed up against the wattle weave sides, and the hard packed soil was broken up and fluffified. It was surprisingly hard packed. So I added some of the remaining rehydrated coconut coir over the area and worked that into the soil.

I laid the transplants out, in their cups, to figure out the bed way to space them. After that, it was the usual routine of wetting everything down, then again and again, in between every stage of transplanting. When the peppers were finally planted, I made sure to press down around each one, to create a shallow “bowl” to collect water and drain it towards the plant. Then each pepper plant got its own wire tomato cage to grow up into.

That done, it was time to work on the other side. It was a bit more challenging, working around the strawberries and onion survivors that are there. There was no sign of any of the chamomile self seeding, and the thyme that almost survived the winter was long dead, so that gave a bit of extra space. The mulch was moved aside, the compacted soil broken up, and the last of the coconut coir worked into the soil.

The transplants in their cups were laid out to figure out the spacing, along with the mystery flower. I decided to plant that at the very end of the bed, where it could stay permanently. If it survives! The flower did get a plastic collar, more to keep the cats from rolling on it.

Once the eggplant were in, each with their shallow “bowl” around them, they got their wire tomato cages set in place, and they were done!

Almost.

The mulch I’d moved aside was mostly old wood chips. I didn’t want to push that back. I did, however, have some leaf mulch that had been pulled off and set along the inside of the L shape, by the double lilac. It was old and dry, so I was able to crush handfuls of it, and shake it out over the transplants, to give the soil a light protection. More mulch can be added as the plants get bigger.

I forgot to take an “after” picture when I was done, so I went back out later, and got a picture of the entire finished bed, which is the last image in the above slide show.

That done, I went on to water the new trees in the fruit forest area, and the walnuts in the outer year. Still no sign of anything emerging where the seeds are planted, but the year old sapling is starting to get some bigger leaves on it.

I headed outside shortly after 7am to go my morning rounds and start on the garden. By the time I was done and heading back inside, it was past 8am. Taking into account stopping for breakfast and lunch, I got about 10 hours in the garden today!

Which is great, because all the transplants are IN!!!

Tomorrow, my main goal of the day is to get the third low raised bed near the compost rind cleaned up and planted with short season corn and yellow beans. After that, I want to work on the permanent trellis bed where I want to plant red noodle beans. That will make sure the trellis gets finished off, because they’re going to need something to climb!

Last of all, I will be clearing the bed at the chain like fence, salvage what I can find, replant with what I can manage, then cover it up again. Somehow. I like the netting that’s over it, but it really need something better than the wire to support it. I’m not even sure I can salvage the ones that cats have bent up!

I’ll figure it out.

Just another day or two, and the garden will be officially in!

Almost there!

On a completely different note, while I was working outside, my daughter let me know that the shop I took our push mower to had called and left a message. As expected they can’t find the part that’s needed. It’s simply not available, anywhere.

I was expecting this and had been thinking about it. I’d told them not to worry if they couldn’t find it; I’d just come pick it up. However, it would just end up as more junk here. So when I called them back and talked about it, I suggested they could keep the mower and use it for parts. If I ever buy a push mower again, it won’t be that brand, so it would be of no use to me. They, however, might be able to scavenge it if some other poor soul has the same brand of mower and needs a part that’s hard to find. They happily accepted the offer. Win, win!

Thankfully, my brother has provided us with mowers we can use! I was going to take my mother’s old mower in, but my brother thinks he can fix it himself, so we don’t even need to bring that in.

Oh, my goodness. It’s past midnight as I finish this! I need to get my butt into bed!

Have a good night!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: Spoon tomatoes, bush beans and summer squash

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I’m rather happy with how things went this morning!

The first order of business was to get the Spoon tomatoes, which are starting to bloom, into the ground, and plant some bush beans in the same bed.

I had nine transplants, so that worked out with using the trellis posts as spacing guides.

Since I was going to plant bush beans along the edge of the bed, I did things a bit differently from the other half. With the melons, I set out the collars, added a handful of manure into each one and worked that in, in situ, then made narrow trenches around each collar. For this half, I started out by making a shallow, flat trench along the length of the bed I’d be planting into, pushing soil up against the log wall, and towards the trellis line. I added manure into the trench and worked that into the soil before giving it a thorough watering. Then I added the collars, closer to the centre/trellis line, than the melons are. Then I watered it again, filling each collar with water, as well as the trench.

To transplant the tomatoes, I scooped out a hole in each collar, deep enough for the entire root balls, then added it back in after the tomatoes we in place. Even with filling each collar and letting it absorb water before hand, I was still pulling up dry soil! Once the tomatoes were in, I filled the collars with water again.

Each tomato got a pair of bamboo stakes set on either side, placed right against their collars. Later one, once I have the time and the ties, I will be adding cross pieces to make them sturdier, and also secure them to the wire trellis. Growing these before, I’ve been able to just wind their stems around a single bamboo stake but, after a while, it starts to get tippy, so I’ll better secure them this time.

Once done with the tomatoes, I made another long, narrow trench to plant the beans into. That got watered using the jet setting to drill the water deeper into the trench, which also helped level it out and even break up some of the clumps I missed. I didn’t have a full packet of the Royal Burgundy purple beans, but I had just enough to evenly space the seeds from end to end. I don’t expect a 100% germination rate, so we might end up with a few gaps, but these are new seeds, so it shouldn’t be too bad.

Once I spaced the beans out evenly, I pushed them into the soil in their little trench and covered them, then went over the trench with a more gentle flat spray of water to fill it and level out the soil again.

That done, I used the last of the grass clippings left in the wagon to mulch around the tomato collars, and the edge of the bed along the bean’s little trench. I ran out of grass clippings with just one corner left to cover, but I still had some leaves and grass clippings mulch set aside from the winter sown beds I could use.

Then it all got watered again, making sure to soak through the mulch.

With how dry that bed was, it’s really not possible to over water it.

Since this bed had been covered in plastic while we had our recent rainfall, I fully expected it to be so very dry. After working on the next bed, however, it turns out that it really didn’t make much of a difference. It still would have been that dry!

The next bed I worked on was the end of the garlic bed, where I’d winter sown some of the same seed mix of root vegetables that is in the high raised bed. Nothing survived in this bed, though.

I didn’t have time to break out the weed trimmer to clear around the bed, so I used a rake to knock the weeds and dandelion seed heads down and way from the bed. This little section still has netting over it, though the cats have still been lying on top of it! So before I started, I had to pull the netting away, starting at the garlic end, leaving it still tacked down at the other end. The bed then got a weeding, and finally some manure was worked into the soil.

Next, I used some of the small plant support stakes I was no longer needing at another bed, to add more supports for the very loose twine, including adding one in the very middle of the bed, where the twin crossed.

Once the soil was ready and watered, I made three round, shallow “bowls”, which got watered again. Each “bowl” got three squash seeds planted in them. On one side, I planted the White Scallop squash. On the other, Black Zucchini.

Then the “bowls” got watered again.

This garden bed was fully exposed to the rain we got, and yet it was every bit as dry as the bed I’d just worked on, that had been covered in plastic while it was raining! You’d never know we had any rain at all.

This bed had been mulched for the winter with a mixture of leaves and grass clippings, that had been pulled to one side of the bed in the spring. I was able to use that to mulch around the “bowls” the seeds were planted in, with a light scattering of mulch in the bowls, too. Once that was in place, the netting was put back in place. Then it got watered again.

Hopefully, the new supports will help keep the cats off!

By the time the squash is large enough that the netting will need to be removed, they won’t need the extra protection anymore. We shall see how many of the seeds actually germinate. If I end up with extras, I will thin by transplanting. Hopefully, this year, we will actually have a decent amount of summer squash!

So that is now done. In the main garden area, the only bed left is the trellis bed. I won’t work on that again until everything is planted, though.

From the looks of the weather forecast, I should be able to get lots done tomorrow.

Gosh, I’m so enjoying all the progress in the garden! I might be in a lot of pain when I’m done, but it feels so good otherwise, it’s totally worth it.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: setting up a trellis, and transplanting melons

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Once the frame for the low raised bed was finally assembled, it was time to set up a trellis, then do some transplanting.

This time, I got to use actual new, never before used by anyone else, metal posts to hold the wire! I had picked up four of these posts at Dollarama, and they seem like a really good product.

Rather than set the posts right at the freshly attached end logs, I set the end posts about a foot in from the ends, which turned out to be roughly 15′ apart in the 18′ bed, so the other two were set about 5′ apart. And by “feet”, I mean literally my booted feet. 😁

At the end closer to those trees we need to get rid of, I had to actually dig around with the garden fork to pull up the rocks I kept hitting, trying to push the post in!

Then I went to the old squash tunnel and snagged the last 2″ square wire mesh. There’s still one section with chicken wire on it. I find the 6 sided shapes bend and stretch out of shape too much for my liking, so I’m not sure what I’ll use that for.

The square wire mesh was about 18′ ong, so there was excess to work with.

One of the things about these posts is that they have hooks on them to hold stuff like this, which you can see in the second image of the slideshow above. There’s four hooks like that, with the opening facing up, along the top 2/3 or so, then two in the bottom third, facing the other way.

Very convenient, except it was remarkably difficult to get all of them hooked up at the same time!

It was still much easier to get the wire mesh up evenly than on the salvaged T posts I used for the pea trellis.

Once the trellis was done, it was time to finally do some transplanting!

Once again, the trellis posts dividing the bed into 3 sections came in handy, as I had three types of melon to transplant. There were four each of the honeydew and Sarah’s Choice (cantaloupe type) melons. Then there were the Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon. There are two larger plants, plus one really tiny one I probably shouldn’t have bothered with, but I can’t just toss the poor thing!

I decided to transplant all of them melons on the East side of the trellis, so they will get the morning sun, and the three watermelons would be on the south end of the bed.

As with the winter squash, I set up collars made from 4L water bottles that my husband uses for his CPAP humidifier. Those are turning out to be very handy!

Once I spaced out each collar and set them into the soil, just enough to keep them from blowing away, I added a handful of manure into each. That got well mixed into the very, very dry soil, the collars reset in place, and then I made low trenches in the soil around them, to drain water down towards the roots.

Then everything got a thorough soaking. Which got sucked up like a sponge, so I did it again.

Even with filling the collars with water, as well as the trenches around them, when I dug down to plant the melons, I was still reaching super dry soil!

Everything got another thorough watering, once the transplants were in.

Then I grabbed the wagon and headed to the outer yard to rake up grass clippings to use as mulch. Thankfully, that area is far enough away that it’s not filled with Chinese elm seeds! The inner yard is practically drifted with them.

Once the melons were surrounded by mulch, it got yet another thorough watering. I wanted to make sure the mulch was wet all the way through, not just on top.

As these get bigger, I plan to train them up the trellis as best I can. Last year, we had a 4″ plastic trellis net, and it really sagged under the weight of the vines, so I’m hoping this set up will work better. I will probably still have to add cross pieces at the tops. The wire extends about 4″ above the top hook on the posts, so I should be able to weave supports through the mesh fairly easily. The posts also have holes in them so, if necessary, I can use twine or something to stake them out at the ends, so the weight of melons doesn’t pull them towards the middle.

That took care of one half of the bed.

I have decided that I will plant our Spoon tomatoes in the other half.

Several of them are staring to bloom now! These are indeterminants that can grow quite tall, so they will have their own individual supports, plus the trellis, to hold them up. I’ve got nine Spoon tomato transplants, so there will be room to plant something else with them, if I wanted to. Some bush beans, perhaps.

I’m hoping to be able to get them in tomorrow morning, since the bed is pretty much ready, and there’s even extra mulch waiting in the wagon for them. My daughter has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, and we’re planning on leaving early. Chances are, we’ll need to go to the pharmacy after her appointment, and I will likely take advantage of the driving around to do some of the shopping we weren’t able to do during our stock up shops, so it might be a long day of driving around! Which means the morning will be pretty much the only time I’ll have available to get any more transplants in.

After the Spoon tomatoes are in, that leaves the peppers and eggplant to be planted in the old kitchen garden, and the rest of the tomatoes should fit in one of the low raised beds in the East yard. The other low raised bed will have our short season corn planted in it, with more bush beans planted in between.

By the time those are in, the elm seeds should be done dropping, and I can finally do something about that bed along the chain link fence. The mesh tunnel may be all bent up, but it’s still doing its job of keeping the bed from being suffocated by seeds. I’ll be replanting the bed with my remaining packet of Hopi Black Dye sunflower seeds, and pole beans.

I might skip planting into the chimney block planters at the other section of chain link fence entirely, this year. I’ll have to see how badly the elm roots have invaded. There’s still the trellis bed that still needs work, but can be planted in before that’s done. Plus, the bed in the old kitchen garden that will be getting wattle weave walls added. It could probably be planted in before that’s done, too.

It feels like I’m way behind on getting the direct sowing done, but it’s only June 2 today – our previous average last frost date. Which means most things couldn’t actually be safely direct sown until after today, anyhow! We had so many insanely hot days, lately, everything feels off.

Having said that, it’s June, now.

Half the year is pretty much gone already.

Good grief.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: transplanting winter squash

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One thing about not being able to mow/clear around the main garden area is…

We’ve got a massive crop of dandelions – and they’re going to seed right now!

I decided to plant the all the remaining winter squash into one bed. With these ones, I’m not looking to save seed, so it doesn’t matter if they cross pollinate. The bed I decided to put them in has been solarizing for quite a long time now.

The first thing to do, though, was get in with the weed trimmer and clear around the bed.

There were clouds and clouds of dandelion seeds!

The plastic did a great job of protecting the soil from that, though.

Once the weed trimming was done, I removed the boards and bricks holding the plastic down. One of the boards had been used to roll the plastic up for storage, and I used that again.

It’s amazing what can survive under the heat of that plastic – and the lack of any moisture!

So my first job was to break up the compacted soil and so what weeding needed to be done.

I was finding elm tree roots at the end furthers from the elms.

It was while I was working on this that we got company. My brother came over today. He had some stuff he needed to get done, so I just went over to say hello before getting back to my own work.

The first thing he did was comment on how I needed to not die on him! Apparently, I was extremely red and flushed from the heat! I did make sure to sit in the shade and hydrate, often, but after his comment, I made a point of going inside and sitting in the air conditioned living room for a while before getting back at it.

As I was working, I thought about how to bed protect the bed. Seeing how, even with logs added to the sides, the peas and carrots bed was eroding on one side, I wanted to prevent that right from the start.

So, once the soil was weeded and fluffified, I decided to make use of the boards that had weighed down the plastic, and make temporary walls.

I first raked the soil in from the edges. In going through my supplies in the garden shed, I brought out a bundle of metal stakes that were salvaged from the Walmart market tent we had a tree fall on, several years ago. I’d used these to mark out where to shift the garden beds last year, and this particular bundle all had pinwheels – or the remains of pinwheels – taped to them. A pair of them still had twine wrapped around them, so I put those two at opposite ends of one side. I then used the last of some small bamboo stakes I had to fill in the gaps a bit, to support the boards, as they are all different lengths and some are pretty rotted out and broken on their ends. Once the boards were in place, I raked some of the soil against them to hold them in place and create a shallow trench in the middle.

The soil was insanely dry. Once the boards were in place, I gave the trench a thorough watering. The water just disappeared! Eventually, I got it to the point that the water would actually sit for a little while before getting sucked away.

I used the plastic collars to work out the spacing, setting them into the soil just deep enough to not blow away, but not so deep that they would restrict root growth. Then, each collar got a handful of manure mixed into it. The soil around each collar got shallow trenches made around them, too. Then everything got another thorough watering.

The metal stakes handily divided the bed into three sections, and there were three varieties of squash to transplant. There were six Mashed Potato squash, and I decided those would go on the end closest to the elm trees. I figured, if the elm roots started crowding into the bed, it would be better to have the variety with the most plants at that end, in case we lost one or two. There were five Baked potato squash, which went in the other end, and four Sunshine squash were planted in the middle section.

After being planted into the collars, everything got another watering. Then I grabbed the wagon and went into the outer yard, where sections have been mowed, and raked up dried grass clippings to use as mulch.

While working on this, I could hear various noises and saw my brother driving around in the zero-turn lawn mower, using it as transportation. One of the things he did today was add a ball hitch, so he could use it to tow a small trailer.

Then he came to get me. He even set up a stump of a log I had in the shade of the trees, on the trailer as a seat for me! A seat is why that log was set up in the shade in the first place, so that was rather funny.

I did need his help to steady myself to get onto the trailer, though. 😄

One of the many things he got done today was replace the long screw eye we’ve been using as a pin on the slide bar for the gate. He got two different possible replacements for it and wanted me to choose one of them. After we got that figured out, he gave me a ride back to the garden.

That was really fun!

Meanwhile, the wind has been picking up through the day – and the elm trees are dropping their dried out seeds.

There were times when it was like a snow storm of seeds. Our lawn is thick with them and, in mere minutes, the soil in the garden bed I’d spent so much time clearing out was getting filled with seeds!

Mulching around the squash was as needed to keep those frickin’ seeds off as much as anything else! I even tucked a light mulch of grass clippings inside the collars, carefully setting it around the stems.

Once the bed was mulched, I brought over the rolling seat and settled down for one last watering. The grass clippings are bone dry, and it needed to be soaked all the way through. This way, the damp grass clippings will keep the soil both damp and cool, and is more likely to allow water through. When it’s completely dry, the grass can act as a thatch, and prevent moisture from reaching the soil, instead. So I took my time and made sure the mulch was completely soaked.

By that point, it was time for supper, and I was done for the day! It was 34C/93F and holding. I didn’t catch what the humidex was, but it sure felt hotter.

At the moment, the high forecast for tomorrow is “only” 20C/68F, which is going to feel blessedly cool after the past couple of days! We might even get a bit of rain at around 7am.

Hopefully, I’ll get there rest of the transplants in tomorrow. I have both tomatoes and melons blooming right now! So those have priority.

I’m going to be pretty much living on painkillers for the next few days, but it needs to be done!

Once the garden is in, I want to just sleep for a week.

Which won’t happen, but I can still fantasize about it! 😄

I’ll be paying for it tonight and tomorrow, but I’m very happy with how much I was able to get done in the garden today. Those winter squash could have been planted a couple of weeks ago, at the size they’re at! I noticed some even had flower buds already on them.

I’m so happy to be back in the garden!

The Re-Farmer