With the pre-germinated seeds potted up and the tray on top of a heat mat, I have been eager to see how long it would take for the seed leaves to break through.
Not long at all! It’s been only a week since the seeds were set up to pre-germinate, and here we are…
The Baked Potato squash have the most leaves emerged. There are some Mashed Potato squash pushing their way, or just visible, though the vermiculite. Even the Arikara squash is just visible through the vermiculate. Nothing visible on the Sunshine squash, yet. Nothing visible in the luffa, eggplant or peppers in the other tray, either.
Oh, and I checked the last luffa seed still in the pre-germination container. I gave it a squeeze, and it was hollow; just the shell left. So it’s 3 out of 4 seeds that successfully pre-germinated.
After taking the above picture, I pulled the winter squash tray out and rotated it on the heat mat, in case there were some warm and cold spots. The silver insulating material I put under it seems to be working; I could feel more warmth than when it was just the cardboard.
I have more of this insulating stuff left and was thinking of putting it around the drain pipe I was trying to clean out yesterday, in the general area where I think the gunk might be freezing. I know the bottleneck starts at about 6′ from the access point.
The problem is, for most of that area, access to the drain pipe is blocked by a heat duct and the frame built around the window on the inside, with a platform to hold a fan. It could be done, but I would definitely need someone else to give me a hand.
I’d also want to clean away the many years of dust, dirt and cobwebs first, too!
Though, now that I’ve looked at it, I am now doubting that ice could be the issue. There is that heat duct in the way. I would think any heat lost through the metal of the duct would be enough to keep things from freezing.
It wouldn’t hurt to have the pipe insulated in that section, though. I haven’t unrolled it, but there’s at least 6 feet of the insulating material left.
This stuff is turning out to be handy for all sorts of things, but insulating pipes is what the dimensions of this particular size of roll was designed for.
It seems to be doing well for keeping seed trays warm in a cold basement, too!
Well, it has stopped snowing – for now. We’re supposed to get a brief snowfall again later this evening.
I am so glad we got our first stock up shopping trip done yesterday. I got a call from home care saying there wasn’t anyone to do my mother’s med assist in the evening, due to unsafe road conditions. !!! The problem is, if the road conditions are too unsafe for the home care worker to drive to my mother’s town, it would be equally unsafe for me or my siblings to do it. After explaining the situation to the shift supervisor that called me, she said she would look into things can call me back. Thankfully, they were able to find a home care worker that didn’t have to drive into my mother’s town, and could juggle schedules so she could do my mother’s two evening med assists.
While waiting for her to call me back, I checked the road conditions, just to be sure. Our provincial government website for road conditions is notorious for not being up to date, so when I saw it listing our highway was “partially snow packed”, I checked a local highways group on FB. Some people had made the drive on the highway I’d be taking and things were certainly not very safe. Our gravel roads, of course, have not been plowed yet, but I did see cars driving past our place. The danger isn’t so much the snow, but that it’s snow on top of ice from our recent warm weather melting things all over.
So I was very, very happy and thankful when I got the call back saying they’d found a way to get my mother’s med assist done!
What better way to spend my time when it’s too snowy to do anything outside, besides shovel?
Work on garden stuff, of course.
With the basement being as cold as it is, I headed down to get the heater going and seeing what I could do to prepare for potting up the pre-germinated seeds. Premoistening the seed starter mix works great, but it has resulted in the mix being far colder than if it were dry. I set things up so that the heater was blowing right over my giant metal mixing bowl to help warm it up, along with the rest of the room. Then I checked on the seeds.
They are looking great! We have a near 100% germination rate!
In the first photo, we have the Sunshine squash. It’s hard to see on a couple of them, but yes, all four of them have radicals emerging. The other, with six seeds, are the Mashed Potato squash. It’s hard to see with some of them, but they have all germinated.
In the second photo, you can see that all three Arikara squash have germinated. The five seeds are the Baked Potato squash, also all germinated.
Next are the luffa, and so far, two of four have germinated. I would not be surprised if the last two also germinated by tomorrow.
In the last photo, I have a large-celled tray prepared and set up in front of the heater to pot all but the luffa into. That will leave three empty cells.
I might have to invest in another heat mat, though. That little heater can only do so much in such a big room! We don’t have any bigger heaters. The basements are not heated. The old basement is where the furnace is and it actually does get warmer. I considered setting up in there, but it doesn’t have enough outlets available to plug in a heat mat or grow lights.
For now, in the tray I’m using to hold the seed starts now, I made sure to add warm water to the base for the eggplants and peppers in peat cells. With the heat mat, the peat was drying out, which would draw moisture out of the seed starter mix, so I have to made sure those stay damp. The heat mat would also keep the water in the tray warm, which helps. The luffa will be potted up into individual peat pots, since they will be transplanted into large pots in the little portable greenhouse we got, while the winter squash will go into various garden beds. The luffa pots can go back to the tray the eggplant and peppers are in and will stay warm, but the second tray with the winter squash is going to need to be warmed up as well.
I should be able to get a second heat mat in town, but there’s no going anywhere today. Possibly tomorrow, if road conditions are improved. Otherwise, Sunday would be the earliest.
The seeds should be okay in their damp paper towels for now. Even if the first leaves start to emerge, they can be potted up. I just don’t want them to pot them up, only to get killed off by cold!
Well, we’ll see how it works out over the next couple of days.
I was happy to see an envelop from Vesey’s today. These were the part of a larger order I made that could be sent right away. It was just two packets of seeds, and one of them was flowers, but I did want to get the peppers started right away.
With a days-to-maturity of only 70-75 days from transplant, starting the Sweeties Snack Mix this late should be okay. This mix of small sized bell peppers are something I actually see regularly in the grocery store, sold in packages with red, orange and yellow peppers, just like what is supposed to be in this seed mix. I’ve even bought them a time or two, so I know the family enjoys eating them. Which is good, since these are the only peppers we’re growing this year. We still have both dried and frozen peppers from last year!
While I was handling the moistened seed starter mix, I could tell it was way too cold for the seeds. The thermometer I have set up on the work table reads a consistent 10C/50F – which may have felt warm while I was outside, felt cold while in the basement! The container I use to hold the pre-moistened seed starter mix, however, is enameled steel, and it was sitting on the concrete floor.
Oops.
I now have a different set up and it no longer rests on the concrete floor. Hopefully, that will make a difference for the next time I have to start seeds!
I brought down a little heater and set it up to warm things on my work table. Since I had to wait a while, I did some clean up in the root cellar. We didn’t get to the last of the winter squash in time, and a bunch had to be cleared away. I decided not to put them in the compost ring, though. Instead, I spread them out in different areas to see if they would seed themselves. It’s more likely that they will be eaten by critters, but if a few seeds survive, we might have “wild” squash plants growing.
Once those were out, I took the time to clean and sanitize the shelves before getting back to the seeds. The only things we have left in the root cellar right now are onions and garlic. We keep forgetting that they are there!
As for the peppers, because these are a mix, there’s no way to know how many of each colour of pepper we’ll get. Depending on the germination rate, I might thin by transplanting. They should be fine on the heat mat for now, but once things start germinating, I’ll have to find some way to keep things warmer in there, since I’m not about to leave a heater running unattended in the basement.
Ah, well. We’ll figure it out!
Meanwhile, we’ve started our earliest seeds for now. The net ones I start should be the tomatoes, and those won’t need to be started for at least a week. The seeds set to pre-germinate should be potted up, by then. Hopefully, the bulbs for the other light fixture will have arrived. Not only does that fixture have a built in timer, but it also puts off a bit of warmth. The one that’s down there now doesn’t seem to get very warm at all.
It should be interesting to see how things work out, in this year’s seed starting dungeon!
Today, started bringing seed starting supplies to the basement, and went through some of my seed inventory for potential seed starts.
In past years, I would have had all sorts of seeds already started. Things have changed a lot with our winter sowing experiment. We have quite a variety of seeds already planted, taking up quite a few beds, which I need to plan around. I’m not going to assume we will have any new beds ready to plant in for this year, and will just focus on what we have ready right now.
With that in mind, here is a video I took while going through my bin of seeds that would be started indoors.
I won’t actually start seeds indoors until at least a week from right now, with some things to be started in April. That should give enough time for my seed orders to come in. Aside from a few varieties of winter squash, herbs and tomatoes I want to start, we will have the new varieties of eggplant, mini bell peppers and a honeydew melon I want to try this year. This time, I will not start as many seeds of each for transplanting this year! Last year, I had not expected to have 100% or near 100% germination rates on so many seeds. We had so many things to transplant, there wasn’t much space left for direct sowing.
I have decided I will go to a Walmart tomorrow to pick up a few things, and will pick up some seed starting mix while I am at it.
I forgot that the aquarium light with the timer on it has a bulb that needs to be replaced; this fixture holds two bulbs. For now, I have brought down the fixture with one larger bulb that came with our big tank. Meanwhile, I’ve placed an order from Veseys for a pair of 4 foot T5 bulbs. I’d had a hard time finding the right bulbs elsewhere and, when I did find them, they were shockingly expensive. Veseys had the best price I’d found, even taking into account the extra shipping cost for bulbs, but by the time I was ready to order them, the size I needed was sold out, and then I simply forgot about it. So those are now ordered and should be on their way soon.
The first day of spring is coming soon. I was planning to do our first “garden tour” video on that day, but I will be going to my mother’s. I might just do it tomorrow, before I head out, instead. We are supposed to have a steep temperature drop, from an expected high of 6C/43F on the first day of spring, to -10C/14F the day after. Things are going to be really slippery around the yard after all the melt! It’s already pretty treacherous in places, while I do my morning rounds.
Anyhow. I hope you enjoy the video. I used a new chest harness my husband got for me to hold the phone I was using to record video. While editing, I did find my voice was a LOT louder than typical when I record video, and had to adjust the audio volume down. When I had to sit down to continue recording, I was concerned things were too close to the camera, but I think it worked out okay, in the end. Please feel free to let me know what you think.
Okay, I did say, months ago, that we did not need to order seeds this year.
I also said that I knew I probably would order more, anyhow! 😄
I’ve placed two orders so far. One was with MI Gardener, and I just got the email notification that they have been shipped. I explain what I chose, and why, in this post. Most are “back up” seeds, in case our winter sowing experiment fails.
I also placed an order with Veseys, but this was more for the food forest. The seeds ordered were so that I could take advantage of a promo code to get free shipping. I explain what I ordered there, and why, in this post.
So, why am I ordering even more seeds?
I mean, besides the fact that I just want to… 😄
Well, this order is with Heritage Harvest Seeds. It’s actually been a couple of years since I’ve ordered from them. They are a small heirloom seed company that is even further north than we are, so as far as climate and growing season goes, I know anything I order from there should grow here.
Another reason is, more back up seeds!
This is what I ordered today. (all links should open in new tabs)
At the top of the list is Cream of Saskatchewan Watermelon. We tried growing these last year, and one one tiny little watermelon out of the only surviving transplant. I want to try them again, but this time give them more dedicated space, rather than having it share a bed with a whole bunch of melons. I do still have seeds left, but they are a couple of years old, so I want to have some fresh seed.
Next is the Arikara squash. This is a variety of winter squash I have been eye balling for years. I chose is specifically due to its rarity, with the goal of saving seeds. From the website description:
Originally grown by the Arikara Indians of North Dakota, This squash is oblong with pinkish orange skin and a green star on the blossom end. The Arikara Indians picked the blossoms and dried them for winter use. A very good storage squash that can be used for soup. (90 days to maturity) Extremely rare.
I may not grow these this year, as I have other winter squash we want to grow, and if I’m looking to save seeds, I don’t want to risk cross pollination. We shall see how things work out.
I also ordered more White Scallop Squash. We had issues growing them in containers last year – they simply did not germinate – but did finally get some in one of the garden beds. By then, it was so late in the season, I’m amazed we had any to harvest at all. The last of the seed went into the winter sown bed with all summer squash. These are back up seeds, in case none survived the winter.
In my MI Gardener order, I did order sugar snap peas. This time, however, I ordered Super sugar snap peas! 😄 From the website:
One of the sweetest and crunchiest snap peas available! The 3 inch pods are delicious eaten raw or cooked and are very productive. A favorite of all who try them! Tall vines to 6’ in height.
If we have the space, I’d like to try both varieties of sugar snap peas we’ll have this year. If we end up with space for only one variety, I’d like to try this one, first.
Last of all, I ordered two packets of Yukon Chief corn. Last year, we had two short season varieties to choose from. Yukon Chief and Orchard Baby. We did Yukon Chief first, due to it’s super short growing season. This year, we will be trying the Orchard Baby. Hopefully, if we can keep the racoons from eating them first, we’ll be able to save seed. We did really like the Yukon Chief, though, so I ordered two packets this time, for next year, and plan to save seed again.
One of the changes at Heritage Harvest is that they now have a $20 minimum order. We’ve never had problems with having our seeds shipped with regular mail, but apparently, others have. Solving the problem meant to have expedited mail with a tracking number, but the extra cost of that only makes sense with orders of at least $20. That brought our final cost to Cdn$36.50
Except it didn’t cost us anything. At least, not anything out of budget.
One of the payment methods is PayPal. This year, we actually got payment for ads on this blog (it took 3 years!), which was sent by PayPal in US dollars. It went into my personal PayPal account, and I left it there, so I used that to pay for this order. Which got converted to US$26.45 at the current exchange rate.
Which worked out quite well, I think.
So that’s what I got today; a combination of things to plant this year, and next year, and back up seeds, if the winter sowing didn’t work.
I have to admit, I had to mightily resist ordering more. They have the Tropeana Lunga onions that grew so well for us when we tried them a few years ago. I was also tempted by the Amish Bottle Onion, simply because of its rarity (and the shape, which I find easier to cut when cooking). I even seriously considered the Yellow of Parma onion, for its excellent storage and up to 1 pound size. We have so many of our own onions seeds, though – as well as seed producing onions – that we may never need to buy onion seeds again. I also want to try the Red Mangel, though that would for a time when we have animals, to grow as feed. There are just so many things I want to try!
This will do for now, though. We have more than enough seeds for this year, and years to come!
We just need to keep expanding the garden beds for now, and grow what we can in the beds we have available now.
Okay, after going through their website more, I made some decisions and placed an order at Vesey’s. It was mostly for our future food forest, but I did order a couple of seed packets so I could take advantage of a promo code for free shipping.
As I was preparing to write this post, however, I got a phone call.
From home care.
Guess who has to go to my mother’s again this evening, to do her med assist?
Two nights in a row. Apparently, someone just called in sick.
My mom is going to be furious.
*sigh*
I will just have to deal with that, later.
Meanwhile, here is what I ordered today. (Links will open in new tabs)
These were the one thing we absolutely wanted to get this year. The Opal Plum tree. The description from the website:
Prunus spp. Opal stands alone as the hardiest European type Plum available on the market. It is vigorous, productive and self-fertile. Even in short summer seasons, the fruit will reliably ripen. The plums are round, red-purple with a golden flesh and have a complex and sweet flavour, fresh or dried. Hardy to zone 3. We ship 18″ trees
The key points were that it is self fertile, so we don’t have to plant it next to our dying wild-type plums, but can plant it in the section we’ve designated for a food forest. It’s hardy to our zone, so we don’t have to do like we did with our zone 4 Liberty apple, and tuck it into a sheltered area. (Hopefully, it survived the polar vortexes we got this winter!)
I decided to also order some more haskaps. We already have three, but they have not been doing well at all. While I should probably transplant them, I’ve decided to get a couple more that will be planted in the food forest area, this time.
The second is Boreal Blizzard, an early producing and largest fruit variety.
We currently have “Mr” and “Mrs” haskap varieties, where are sold as cross-pollinating varieties. The “Mr” is an Aurora, and seems to bloom too early to pollinate the “Mrs.” variety, so I am hoping that the early Boreal Blizzard variety will work out better.
If these haskap do well, that will confirm that the ones we have now are not producing because they are in a bad location. Which I am 99% sure of, but it really is a good location – for us!
To use the free shipping promo code, I needed to have at least one packet of seeds.
I had been looking at these last night, while planning my order, but they were listed as sold out. This morning, they were back in stock! So I snagged them.
This is the Sweetie Snack Mix of small sized peppers. They have a short growing season, too, so they should work out. I think my family might like them better than the larger bell peppers we’ve been trying so far.
Last of all, I got some flowers for the girls. 😄 The Jet Black Hollyhock. These are pollinator attracting biannuals and should be self seeding, so we will plan out where to sow them with that in mind!
There we have it. Another order in for our 2025 garden, and our food forest.
The grand total for this, after tax, came to $137.08, however we will only be billed for the seeds when they get shipped in the next day or two. The sapling and haskap plugs will be shipped closer to our last frost date of June 2, and we will be billed for those, then.
The flower seeds were not that expensive, but that packet of mini peppers cost $8.75, with only about 20 seeds in the pack. That’s almost 44¢ per seed!
Still cheaper than buying them at the grocery store, but what a huge leap in prices for vegetable seeds! During the illegal lockdowns, with people panic buying and prices going up and up and up, so many people decided to try growing their own food, a lot of seed suppliers were completely sold out. They are still recovering from that. I know some smaller Canadian seed growers had to back out of the consumer market completely and only sell commercially in bulk. Add to this, in the years since, more people are trying to grow their own food because the grocery prices have gotten so high. That increased demand puts a major stress on supplies, too. Which is why I’m seeing the cost of vegetable seeds skyrocketing, while the number of seeds in the packets are going down, but not with flower seeds. I haven’t been looking at herb seeds lately, so I don’t know how they are doing for pricing.
With this order in, the next thing we’ll need to decide on is what variety of potatoes we want to grow and where. Anything beyond that is just gravy.
Okay, I wasn’t really planning to buy more seeds this year. Not exactly.
With our winter sown beds, which are detailed in the video below, we actually have a lot already planted for this year’s garden…
… that’s IF they survived the winter.
If they didn’t, then we’re not going to have a whole heckuva lot at all, because I finished off seed packets in doing this method.
There are a few things that I am thinking to start indoors – especially now that we have the portable greenhouse – but other things I will likely buy as transplants in the spring. Decisions will be made in the spring for that.
In the end, though, I broke down and made an order with MI Gardener. I’ve been looking at Canadian seed sources but, in the end, it came down to price. I’ve been really shocked by how expensive some seeds have gotten, even with very low seed counts in the packages, at a number of the sites I’ve bought from in the past. Plus, some of the things that interested me were either sold out or no longer available.
I didn’t even make a large order. Just a few things, some of which I probably won’t even plant this year.
The first item in the list is red noodle beans. We tried growing these a few years back and ended up having a drought and heat waves that year. They grew, but I only found a single pod when I was cleaning up for the end of the season, and it was the saddest, skinniest little thing! Along with the bush beans I have winter sown, I want a pole bean and a shelling bean. We have plenty of bean seeds, but no red noodle beans, and I’d really like to try those out.
Next is Winter Giant Spinach. I winter sowed all our spinach seeds so, if they don’t take, this will be our fallback planting.
Next is Turkish Orange Eggplant. We grew Classic and Little Finger eggplant last year. This year, I want to try a different variety. I’m not sure we’ll grow them this year – we’ll see if the order comes in early enough to start them indoors – but it will be an option. If nothing else, we can try the portable greenhouse to extend the season.
I got a package of sugar beet, but don’t expect to plant them this year. I want to actually try and make sugar with them, so this is going to be one of those “fun” things I like to include in my garden every year.
We have more than one variety of carrots winter sown. We still have more Uzbek Golden carrot seeds, if the winter sown ones don’t take, but it would be nice to have another variety as a back up seed.
We did the Summer of Melons mix last year. This year, we still want to grow at least one variety of melon. My younger daughter prefers honeydew types over cantaloupe types, and this Green Flesh Honeydew variety seems to have a short enough growing season to make it worth trying. We have other melon and watermelon seeds already on hand we can try this year, but we will definitely be scaling back from the number we grew last year!
Next are some basic sugar snap peas. I have shelling peas already, and want to have both types.
Last of all…
Yup.
I’m going to keep trying!
I ordered some luffa seeds.
If they come in early enough, I might try them this year. I’m not completely decided on where we will set up the portable greenhouse but, once we do, I will try growing the luffa there in pots, rather than transplanting them into a garden bed.
That’s it, that’s all. A whole 8 items.
All of these together came to a grand total of US$23.50, including shipping. Granted, with our Canadian dollar tanking so much right now, it will probably be closer to Cdn$50, but that would still be less than if I’d try to order these, or similar varieties, anywhere else.
[update: the order was processed, and it came out to Cdn$34.82]
The other things we will need to order or buy for this year’s garden will be things like potatoes and fruit trees. They wouldn’t be shipped until closer to our local last frost date of June 2, so we have time. We just have to settle on what we will be getting this year, first.
I have never ordered from MI Gardener before, but have heard nothing but excellent things about them, so I look forward to getting and trying out these seeds this year!
For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.
Some things managed to work out pretty well, even with our rough start in the garden!
The Original Plan
Corn
Corn is something we’ve tried to grow a few times. The first year, we grew several varieties with some being grown more as part of our long term plan to break up soil that had never been gardened before, and prepare the area for a future food forest. I’ve also been trying to grow kulli corn – a deep purple Peruvian variety – for a number of reasons, though we’ve found ourselves growing Montana Morado, instead. Some worked well, some didn’t.
With our garden size actually being reduced after a flood year, instead of expanding, this year we weren’t necessarily going to grow corn at all. We just didn’t have the space prepared for such a nitrogen hungry plant.
However, I had a couple of short season sweet corn varieties I wanted to try somewhere, so when I found myself with larger spaces between winter squash transplants in the second bed, I chose Yukon Chief, which had the shorter growing season: a mere 55 days!
Peppers
We have been trying different varieties of peppers to find the ones the family likes most. Personally, I can’t eat peppers, so I have to rely on their feedback for this. Last year, we had a mix of success and fail with peppers. This year, my older daughter requested one type of hot pepper, and we figured we should probably cut back on the number of varieties to try out this year. So far, no one has really found enough difference between the varieties of sweet peppers to really choose any one type over the other.
Eggplant
We’ve tried two varieties of eggplant before. The first we tried was Little Finger, which was grown in grow bags. They didn’t thrive, but we did have a few little ones we could harvest that we did enjoy. We later learned that nearby elm trees had roots invading the grow bags – a whole row of them all along the north end of the garden, near the self seeded elm and maple trees my mother allowed to grow after she transplanted the raspberries they’d started growing through.
We tried them again another year, but they fared even worse, growing in one of the concrete chimney block planters by the chain link fence. It wasn’t until this spring that I found the blocks were completely choked out by elm tree roots.
So this year, I wanted to try them again, in a completely different area!
The Classic eggplant was new to use last year. Only one seedling started indoors survived. It went into the wattle weave bed and the plant grew strong and healthy, though it was late in producing. In the end, we had one roughly palm sized eggplant to try, plus a couple smaller ones.
I wanted to try both again, this year. I was rather liking the idea of being able to grow enough eggplant to make baba ganoush, or cook nice big slices of them over an open fire.
How it went
Corn
I was really, really happy with this variety! Having something that matured so quickly was amazing!
Sure, I probably planted them too close together, but that didn’t seem to bother them too much.
They do not grow very large cobs, but the corn was so tasty, I could eat them raw!
There were two problems, though.
One was, high winds. After they got mostly flattened after a day of high winds, I did what I could to straighten them and support them, only for them to get flattened again from another direction.
The other was, racoons. I’d actually harvested all the corn – or thought I did – when I found I’d missed a few cobs. I decided to leave them to dry on the cob, so harvest seed at the end of the year. That never happened, because the racoons tore them apart and ate them.
*sigh*
Peppers
Wow, did we get peppers!
The hot peppers – Cheyenne – were started much earlier indoors. For the sweet peppers, I still had seeds for a collection of early varieties, plus a variety that did very well last year, and even a few seeds left from one I’d tried to grow a previous year.
I ended up planting a few of each, thinking the older seeds would have a lower germination rate.
Which was sort of true.
We ended up with quite a lot of the hot peppers. They went into a raised bed in the East yard, in between the two varieties of eggplant.
The sweet peppers all went into the high raised bed, later to be interplanted with shallots.
They all did really well! Especially the ones in the high raised bed. They got so full of peppers that got so big and heavy, I found myself having to add supports to some of them – and others actually broke their stems from the weight!
What they didn’t do was ripen much.
As with everything else this year, they were well behind. I did have some I could harvest, with the purple Dragonfly and Purple Beauty peppers ripening fastest, then some Sweet Chocolate but I ended up harvesting a whole lot of unripe peppers before they could be killed off by frost.
The good thing about peppers is, they keep ripening after they’ve been harvested.
I did end up with enough peppers ripening indoors that some could be cut up and frozen, while others got dehydrated. The family actually got tired of eating peppers, like they did with tomatoes!
The exception being the hot peppers.
My oldest daughter is the only one that can eat them, and even then, just small amounts. These aren’t even an exceptionally hot variety of pepper, either!
We did try dehydrating a bunch. We don’t have a dehydrator, and use the oven for that. Unfortunately, the peppers made it so that we could barely stay in the kitchen while they were dehydrating, because breathing the fumes caused our lungs to start burning!
Once they were dry, though, they went into a jar. They should be processed into a powder, but no one wants to do it and accidentally end up breaking powdered hot pepper.
There was a LOT of green hot peppers, though, and they ripened very well indoors.
What I ended up doing was stringing them, and they are now hanging in the cat free zone (the living room) above where the heat vent is, to dry. It’s a lot slower, but it doesn’t create fumes.
Eggplant
We ended up with quite a few surviving transplants this year, which was really nice. They went into a low raised bed with the hot peppers. For this bed, I covered it with cardboard and thick paper as a mulch, then cut openings to transplant through. I moved the box frame cover onto it, and set up sheets of plastic around it to create a sort of open greenhouse situation, since the eggplants and peppers are all heat loving plants.
The plastic ended up being torn off by high winds.
Later in the season, I was able to try again, using stronger plastic and running paracord both inside and outside the plastic to keep it in place, which you can see in the last photo in the slideshow below.
The plants themselves stagnated in growth for a while, until things dried up enough that I could mow some lawn. Once they got a nice grass clipping mulch on top of the cardboard and paper, they really started to grow and bloom.
Eggplants have such lovely flowers.
We were able to harvest some small eggplant towards the end of the season, before they all got harvested ahead of a killing frost.
The setbacks means they never got particularly big, but they were big enough to get a taste of them!
My conclusion, and thoughts for next year.
For the corn, I most definitely want to grow them again. While I am happy with the Yukon Chief, I want to try the other variety, next year. I can’t remember the name of it right now, but it matures in 65 days, I believe. Wherever we end up planting them, I want to make sure to have something set up to support the plants so they don’t get knocked over by high winds as they get bigger. I have a few ideas that would involve fence wire or something like that, set up horizontally, for the stalks to grow through.
I also want to find more kulli corn seeds to try again, but maybe not next year. We shall see. I might buy some seeds (if they’re not sold out again), just in case we end up with enough garden real estate available. If it doesn’t happen, though, I’m hoping the few Montana Morado seeds that got included in the mix along the chain link fence will survive the winter and grow. For the number of seeds in there, if they do survive, I expect to have to hand pollinate them. Then I will leave them on their stalks to dry, and save more seed for next year.
We’re still trying out different varieties of sweet corn. Once we figure out what we like that grows well here, we will want to dedicate a larger area of garden space to be able to grow enough that we can can or freeze some. For now, my single packet of I think only 50 seeds will be enough.
As long as we can keep the racoons out of them!
For the peppers, we won’t need to grow hot peppers again for a very long time! I don’t think we want to grow so many sweet peppers again, either. I’m debating, for next year, picking up a variety that grows smaller “snack size” peppers, instead, but I haven’t decided yet.
As for the eggplant, I’m happy with how they did, under the circumstances. I do want to grow them again. I probably won’t grow them next year, though. I want to save the garden real estate for staples, instead.
Given what a rough start we had this spring, all of these did way better than expected, so I am very happy.
For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.
Okay, time to take a look at things that did not turn out anywhere near how we originally intended!
The Original Plan
Beans
In the past, we’ve grown lots of different beans at once, mostly with great success. We enjoyed having almost daily harvests, for both fresh eating and for the freezer, and even tried a rarer variety of shelling beans that was suitable for our short season. I’m glad I saved those rarer seeds, because they no longer seem to be available from the company I got them from.
This year, I had many different types of bean seeds. Aside from the seeds I’d saved from the shelling beans we tried, my mother gave me a jar of seeds for shelling beans that trace back to what she grew here every year, decades ago. Along with the shelling beans, I still had seeds for pole beans that we really liked, a variety of bush beans that were good for both fresh eating and shelling, and more bush beans. My plan was to grow each type; pole and bush beans for fresh eating, plus shelling beans. It was just a matter of figuring out where, as I intended to do a fair bit of interplanting.
Peas
We haven’t had much luck growing peas. Between growing conditions and deer eating them, we just never got many! At best, I’d find a few pods to eat while I was doing my morning rounds.
We still have quite a lot of seeds for shelling peas, but we also wanted to get edible pod peas. I hoped to grow enough that we could put some in the freezer, but to at least have enough for fresh eating.
Carrots
Carrots were going to be the only root vegetable for this year. I had lots of seeds for the delicious Uzbek Golden carrot, and made seed tape with a decent amount of them. We also still had pelleted seeds for an orange variety called Napoli. I wanted to grow plenty of both, so that we could freeze or can or store for the winter. Carrot seeds don’t age well, so the seeds would need to be used up. Especially the older pelleted seeds.
Greens
We actually intended to cut back on these. We’ve tried growing a variety of lettuces but, for some reason, they seem to get bitter, even if they aren’t bolting. We also found that, for the amount we actually use them, we may as well just buy them from the grocery store when we feel like it. The only exception to this was spinach. We all like spinach, but have not had much success with them over the past few years. The first year we grew them was amazing, but that was pretty much it for them doing really well. Still, we wanted to at least grow spinach this year, and that was about it for greens.
What we actually did
Beans
We tried two types of pole beans this year. Carminat, a purple podded bean, and Seychelle, a green podded bean. Both did very well the first year we grew them. They were prolific, and we quite enjoyed eating them. The Seychelle beans were interplanted with the Crespo squash. The Carminat got planted along one side of a winter squash bed.
For bush beans, we ended up with only a small space left, where we planted Royal Burgundy beans; a variety we’ve grown before and enjoyed eating.
That was it. Just three varieties ended up being planted.
Peas
For peas, I planted Dalvay shelling peas – something we still had a lot of seeds left for – on the other side of the winter squash bed the Carminat beans were planted in. We also got some edible pod peas that went into one of the low raised beds in the East yard, where a few onions we’d found were transplanted at one end. Nowhere near as much as I’d hoped to plant, but all we had room for.
Carrots and Spinach
These went into the same bed as the edible pod peas. The peas got a trellis net down the middle, carrots were planted on either side, then the spinach along the outside. The idea was, with each thing maturing at different rates, the spinach would be done first, then the peas, until the bed was left with lots of room for the carrots to grow, along with the few onions left to go to seed.
How it actually turned out
Not good.
Beans
The seeds for the pole beans must have been too old. With the Seychelle beans, I planted them by the Crespo squash twice, but we only got three survivors.
The Carminat beans had more survive, but there are a lot of gaps in between plants. I was out of seeds, though, so I tried filling the gaps with Seychelle beans. Only one, maybe two, survived.
With the bush beans, the first sowing didn’t succeed at all – and these were new seeds! I was able to buy more and tried again. This time, we had a nice, short row of bush beans emerge. They did quite well…
We did get beans to harvest from all three types. Some days, I was quite surprised by how many I was able to gather!
Peas
The edible pod peas were another one that needed to be sown twice. With the first sowing, I think 3 in total finally germinated. I bought more seeds and replanted, but the new packet had about half as many seeds, so all we got was one row in the 9′ bed.
The shelling peas did better, in that maybe half of what I planted germinated. These, I could at least “blame” it on them being older seeds.
All the peas and beans got trellis netting to climb. The shelling peas needed to be trained up theirs. The edible pod beans were better climbers. Neither variety of peas thrived, but the edible pod peas did better, and got quite tall. I ended up having to put netting around the entire bed they were in, though, after discovering some eaten by deer. Even with the netting in place, deer were able to reach higher parts of the plants and eat them!
Carrots and Spinach – plus chard, kohlrabit and Jebousek lettuce!
We were only able to plant the Uzbek Golden carrot seed tape; one row on either side of the peas. I hoped to plant more elsewhere, but there just wasn’t the space for it. They did okay, even as we lost control of the weeds in this bed. The real surprise was when several of them went to seed! Carrots are biannual, so they should not have gone to seed in their first year.
The spinach did very poorly. They sprouted, but only a few got leaves large enough to be harvested, and even then, not enough to be worth harvesting at all.
Once it became clear the spinach was done for, I pulled them out and tried planting chard. I had some seeds for two varieties that got mixed up (a cat got at the baggie the seed packets were in and chewed them up!), so those got planted in the same space the spinach did.
They didn’t do well, either, and I only partly blame that on losing control of the weeds in that bed.
Meanwhile, with the Purple Caribe potatoes that failed, I found myself with a gab in the bed that needed filling. I’ve been wanting to grow kohlrabi for some time, with zero success. The first time was almost a success until they got decimated by flea beetles. I think slugs got the other attempts.
I had seeds, though, so I tried them as a fall planting, and amazingly, they started out doing really well!
Until the cats started rolling on them.
They survived the cats, though, and I had some hope to actually have kohlrabi to harvest.
Meanwhile, next to where I planted the kohlrabi, a self seeded Jebousek lettuce appeared. We got these as free seeds a couple of years ago. The first year, the seedlings got almost completely choked out by elm tree seeds. The few that survived, we allowed to go to seed and just left them. The deer ate them, but some did survive to go to seed, so we had a couple show up the next year. They got left alone, too, and went to seed, though I believe they got deer eaten, too. So when a couple of plants showed up again this year, with the kohlrabi nearby, I set up netting over the bed. It didn’t keep the cats out, but it mostly kept the deer out. The wind kept blowing the bottom of the netting loose, no matter how many ground staples, bricks or rocks we used. Which is how deer managed to get at them, anyhow. But they recovered! In face, on of them ended up growing two new stems around the eaten part, and we allowed them to go to seed.
How it ended
Beans
Considering how few bean plants actually survived, pretty darn good. We barely had enough beans to harvest fresh for a few meals, but we enjoyed having them at all. I would still recommend the Carminat and Seychelle varieties of pole beans, and the Royal Burgundy bush bean is such a survivor!!!
When I found some Carminat pods that got missed and were getting too big for fresh eating, I left them, and now we even have seeds saved!
Peas
The peas did poorly over all. We never really had more than a few pods to harvest. Mostly, there would be two or three that I would harvest to eat while I was doing my morning rounds.
Carrots
While we never had a lot of them, I was really happy with the Uzbek golden carrots. They are really tasty, and I would definitely recommend the variety. As for the ones that went to see, the flower clusters never actually produced developed seeds, so I don’t know what to make of that.
The Greens
I wish I knew what was going on with spinach in our garden. We had that one amazing year, plus one decent year in the high raised bed, and that’s it.
The first year we grew chard, they did well, but they didn’t do well this year. Again, I’m not sure why.
I really wasn’t expecting that to happen so late in the season, but they just showed up one day, and the poor plants were black with them.
As for the Jebousek lettuce, they went to seed which I happily collected at the end of the season.
Plans for 2025
Things are going to be very different next year!
With our winter sowing, I ended up making three mixes of seeds. One of them is all root vegetables, including the last of the pelleted carrot seeds and some of Uzbek golden carrots. I also added four different beet varieties, one variety of turnips, four varieties of radishes, plus saved onion seeds. Basically, I just emptied out my old seed packets. How many will actually germinate, I have no idea. We shall see in the spring!
Another mix I made is all greens. The last of our Swiss Chard (two varieties), four varieties of spinach, two of kohlrabi, and the Hinou Tiny Bok Choi seeds I’d saved from the few plants that survived being smothered by elm tree seeds, last year. This mix also has both onions and shallots from saved seed added in.
I ended up making a third mix of seeds. These include two types of sunflowers, Dalvay shelling peas, plus a few King Tut pea seeds I’d saved from previous years, the last of my Royal Burgundy bush beans, a tiny amount of Montana Morado corn seeds that I managed to save after the cats knocked the entire bowl of seeds over and, of course, onion seeds.
Basically, I used this as an opportunity to finish off packets of older seeds, of seeds that I had only a few of.
We do still have other bean seeds that I want to grow. I don’t think I need to buy more seed, but can use what I have. I also want to try edible pod peas again. It will all depend on how many garden beds are available, really. All our plans to expand the garden again seem to get kiboshed, so we’ll see how that actually turns out.
I still have plenty of Uzbek Golden carrot seed tape and loose seeds, and they need to be planted, as the germination rates drop quickly with carrots. I can see sticking those in any place we have room for them.
With greens, if the winter sowing fails, we likely won’t try to plant more (though I do still have several varieties of lettuce seed we could sow) and the bed would probably be given over to something else.
In the end, I think the priority for next year will be with beans, as they seem to do the best here, even with the odds stacked against them. If we have the space to give over to them, I’d really like to plant those rarer shelling beans, and collect more fresh saved seed. We had only a small amount to cook and taste when we grew them, and they are well worth it.
Peas, beans and carrots are things that are staple crops for us, with some types of greens being bonus. We will probably still be trying new varieties, especially with peas, as we try to find something that will successfully grow here, but if things go as they should, they will be part of our garden, ever year.
For the next while, I’ll be going through my old posts and videos about our 2024 garden, looking at how things worked out, and use that information to decide what we will do in our 2025 garden.
Our plans for herbs and strawberries have had some rough times!
The Original Plans
Strawberries and herbs are among those things we intend to have as our more perennial food garden items. Most herbs can’t survive as perennials where we lived, but some might, and others will reseed themselves, if left to their own devices. Over time, we plan to use the old kitchen garden as… well… a kitchen garden, since it’s right against the house, so it will eventually have a lot of herbs in it. As for strawberries, these are something we expected to interplant in various areas, as well has having dedicated beds of them.
How it started
Herbs
Last year, we started tried a few herbs, in pots and in the wattle weave bed. We had a single oregano seedling survive, some spearmint, a non-specific thyme variety and lemongrass in pots. In the wattle weave bed, we had chamomile and German Winter thyme.
This year, we started only oregano and German Winter thyme indoors.
None of the oregano germinated.
On removing the mulch in the spring, I had some hope that the thyme in the wattle weave bed had survived, but they did not. So that’s where the new thyme got transplanted.
The chamomile, however, had reseeded itself!
We also have mint in the chimney block retaining wall, which trace back to my late grandmother’s garden, plus chives in one corner of the retaining wall, that come back every year.
Strawberries
We had four strawberry plants in the asparagus bed. They should have spread their runners and expanded by now, but the deer kept eating them. They did, however, survive the winter, and started growing again as soon as the soil warmed up.
The real surprise were the tiny strawberries we grew from seed last and transplanted into the wattle weave bed. As they were planted near the outside edge of the bed, I had some doubt that they would survive the winter, even under the mulch. They not only survived, but they thrived!
This year, I did buy some bare root strawberries, and they got their own bed. You can see how that worked out in this video I made.
Thanks to those elm trees, what started out as a very productive squash hill (the first place we tried growing Crespo squash) was barely recoverable. I could only hope that those layers of cardboard would keep the capillary roots from spreading upwards.
The main thing, though, is that we had some new, everbearing strawberries planted that I hoped would do better here, than the ones by the asparagus did!
How it went
Not too bad, for the most part.
Herbs
The German Winter Thyme did well again, in the same spot we grew them last year. We had the Black Cherry tomatoes growing behind them, and filled in empty spots with Red Wethersfield onion around them. The cats rolled all over the onions, but didn’t roll on the bushier thyme.
The chamomile grew and bloomed, but there wasn’t as many as last year. The Red Wethersfield onion was also planted around them and got rolled on, but the chamomile survived the cats.
The mint did okay but actually had to fight off an invasive flower (possibly creeping bellflower, but we never let them grow big enough to confirm) that keeps trying to choke them out, even in the chimney blocks! Which is saying a lot, since mint us usually the invader. I was able to do limited weeding, but these are growing in from below and it’s pretty much impossible to get them out completely. Basically, I just had to weed them enough for the mint to be able to get bigger, then they could crowd out the weed.
The chives, on the other hand, were their usual enthusiastically growing selves.
Strawberries
I was surprised at how well the ones by the asparagus did. They’re a few years old and normally past their prime, but we did get a few ripe berries out of them.
Then the deer ate them.
Deer really seem to love strawberry leaves!
Even putting a makeshift fence around them was not enough to deter the deer.
*sigh*
The new Albion Everbearing strawberries did really well. They grew and spread runners, which I spread around and set the leaf clusters against the soil to root, so we could expand them to other areas in the future. I had thoughts to use them as a ground cover in our budding food forest, for example. They bloomed and developed berries, and we even had a few ripe ones to taste.
Then the deer got them.
I didn’t have a fence around the bed, but I did have poles with flashy pinwheels to startle them away, but it wasn’t enough. I put a net around the bed and they started to recover, only for a deer to actually tear through the netting and get at about half of them. I had a short length of chicken wire I could put around the side with the hole, but by that time, there just wasn’t much season left for them to recover in. There was new growth, though, so I’m hoping they survived.
*sigh*
The runaway success story, though, is the tiny variety of strawberries we grew from seed. Being in the old kitchen garden, the deer don’t get to them, I guess. Too close to the house? I don’t know. They got big and bushy, strong and healthy, and were very prolific! I was really impressed with how they did.
Conclusion and plans for next year
Herbs
I had visions of having fresh culinary herbs to use with our cooking as needed throughout the summer, and gathering blossoms and leaves for herbal teas.
The problem is, we keep forgetting we have herbs in the garden.
With the chamomile, I didn’t want to harvest any blossoms as there weren’t that many this year, and I wanted them to go to seed, instead.
I did remember to use the thyme a couple of times, but that was it. I didn’t even harvest any to dehydrate.
In past years, we gathered fresh mint leaves to make fresh mint tea, but just never got around to it this year. In past years, we used chive blossoms to make infused oils and vinegars, but that didn’t happen this year, and I ended up deadheading them so they wouldn’t spread seeds all over the grass outside the chimney blocks.
Basically, we had so many things happening this year, including lots of things breaking down, that we just didn’t have the spoons left to do this stuff this year. We also went from a very wet late spring to a very hot summer that made doing anything outdoors more difficult.
As for the strawberries, those wonderfully prolific little strawberries – I don’t know if they are a while strawberry, or an alpine variety – the seed kit didn’t name them – that did so well…
The berries themselves just aren’t that big a deal. We have native wild strawberries in the maple grove that manage to produce berries even while choked out by creeping bellflower, and those have an intense strawberry taste. They’re just really tiny. These ones are larger, but they don’t have that intense wild strawberry taste. If they’re not perfectly ripe, they’re actually rather bitter. For that brief time of perfect ripeness, they’re good, but not as good as, say, the Albion Everbearing strawberries.
So while they are a success, they are essentially taking up space that we can grow something more suitable for a kitchen garden.
Which means that, in the spring, I will try and find a good place to transplant them, where they can grow wild.
I might actually transplant the Albion Everbearing strawberries into the old kitchen garden, where they will have better protection from the deer! I really want to expand our strawberries, because we love them so much. The ones with the asparagus, I’m considering a lost cause at this point, but if we can keep the Albion everbearing ones going and spreading, that would be fantastic.
We currently have the larger rectangular bed in the old kitchen garden winter sown with the “greens” mix – spinach, chard, kohlrabi and tiny bok choi, and if the strawberries get transplanted, they will likely go into the long, narrow bed along the retaining wall. So that leaves most of the wattle weave bed (assuming the chamomile reseeds itself successfully again) and the tiny raised bed potentially for herbs.
I’ve picked up seeds for basil and fern leaf dill, though I have seeds for other dill and herbs as well. I don’t know that I will try growing thyme again this year, and oregano just doesn’t seem to want to germinate for us, so I think I will try different varieties this year. If the winter sown greens actually survive and grow, and we have things to harvest, I think we will be more likely to remember to harvest herbs, too.
We will definitely have to find ways to keep the cats off the garden beds, though. I’ll need to build a cover to fit over the larger rectangular bed. The wattle weave will probably get hoops and netting.
The problem with all these barriers to protect our garden from cats and wildlife is, it makes it hard to weed and water them, too!
Next year, however, the old kitchen garden will be a lot further along in being a kitchen garden, too, so that would be another step towards long term goals. It’s slow going, but we are managing to eek our way towards them!
The Re-Farmer 