I apologize for the image quality. I had to reduce it to get a reasonable file size. Even so, it took way too long to upload. When I first started, it said it would take 35 minutes, so I lay down and closed my eyes.
Two hours later, I checked on it, and it said 88% and 5 minutes left. Half a minute later, it said 89% and 19 minutes left… wtf??
But, here it is! A tour of our garden, such as it is so far.
The Re-Farmer
A lot of what I write about in this blog, besides cats, has been about gardening. We’ve had a lot of unexpected challenges, so I’ve been spending a lot of time doing research and watching gardening videos.
Videos like this.
A very useful video about harvesting onions.
So why is this a weird time of year?
Because this video was just published a few hours ago. It’s May 30.
It’s May 30, and he is HARVESTING his onions.
He also has garlic scapes to harvest.
Onions can take anywhere from 90 to 120 days to maturity. Which is why we start our onion seeds indoors earlier than anything else.
We haven’t even transplanted our onions yet. They can handle the cooler nights, but they will be transplanted around and in between other things, not in a bed by themselves.
While our garlic was planted in the fall and is growing quite nicely right now, we probably won’t see scapes for another month.
It’s one thing to reading blogs or watching videos of harvests from people that are living in the southern hemisphere. It’s quite another to see this happening here in the norther hemisphere, and there are SO many channels I follow that are harvesting from huge, lush gardens right now. Even in places with climates that are actually cooler than ours, or at least don’t have our extremes of bitter winters and scorching summers, but have a longer growing season.
It’s downright surreal at times!
The Re-Farmer
Yes!!! I am so thrilled. Ashley, from Gardening in Canada, got her hacked channel back! I’m amazed it happened to so quickly, to be honest, and I think it had a lot to do with the GiC crew making a big stink about it with reporting the channel as hacked.
To mark the event, a very exhausted Ashley made an unedited May garden tour video to mark the occasion.
I am so happy for her! Finally, something went right. 😁😁
For us, I’m skipping a May garden tour video, mostly because there isn’t much of anything to show that isn’t being more effectively shared in the blog posts I’ve been doing. Hopefully, I’ll have a garden tour video with plenty to show, in the middle or June or so.
The Re-Farmer
Why do people do stuff like this?
The good thing is, so many people are making a stink about it, she’s actually getting some help. Hopefully, she will be able to recover her account intact. She put so much into it!
Just before I found this update on her other channel, I had tried to see if anything changed on the Gardening in Canada channel, and it was gone. Nothing showed up in searches. I’m hoping that just means YouTube has made it private until the mess can be cleared up!
The Re-Farmer
This is from her other channel.
This is one of the best gardening channels out there, too. I’ve shared quite a few of her videos here on the blog. I hope YouTube gets their s*** in gear and gets it back to her before too much damage is done!
The Re-Farmer
Who knew a video about how to reuse potting soil could be so funny?
I just had to share it! However, when I try to embed it, I get a message saying playback has been disabled, so you’ll just have to click this link and watch it on YouTube.
Enjoy!
The Re-Farmer
As I write this, the video I made is still uploading, so I’ve scheduled this to be published tomorrow morning.
One bed is prepped and ready for logs to be placed around it. My younger daughter is working in the spruce grove to get them for me, but has to clear away pieces of trees and branches that have fallen in high winds, and other debris, just to reach them. She handles heat even worse than I do, and the humidity sure didn’t help. She ended up needing to use a cane to get around the house until the painkillers kicked in.
She’ll have tomorrow to recover, though. The rain started up again this evening, with thunderstorm warnings. It’s supposed to keep raining all through tomorrow (meaning today, by the time this is published). A good day for me to be helping my mother out with her errands.
Sunday is supposed to be sunnier, though rain is expected to start again in the evening, so we might get a few hours of work in during the day. Then the rain is supposed to be back on Monday.
This weekend is a long weekend, when many people will be putting in their gardens. While we could probably direct sow some things, our area still has a while to go. Looking at the 14 day forecast is frustrating, since it seems to change every time I look at it, but at one point I was seeing predictions of overnight temperatures dropping below freezing in the last few days of May. When I look at it now, though, it shows a few chilly nights, just above freezing, and then overnight temperatures are predicted to be considerably warmer. Once I look into June, the daytime highs are all supposed to be 20C/68F or higher, for the entire month!
Of course, that might change completely, the next time I look.
Well, whatever ends up happening, we’ve got a lot of hard work to do before we can plant in the main garden area.
The low raised beds have been wildly overrun by crab grass in particular, with some beds heavily invaded by dandelions, and at least one has a pretty bad infestation of Creeping Charlie. Since they all need to be heavily reworked anyhow, we’re going to go ahead and redo them. Or, more specifically, I’ll be doing the weeding and shifting. My daughter will be harvesting and processing the dead spruces to build walls around them. This late in the game, I’ll be happy if we build them just one log high. They just need to be done! We can add more height to them, as time goes buy. Once these low raised beds are reworked, we can switch our focus back to building the trellis beds. Those will require even more work, since we’ll be bringing soil in from what’s left of the purchased garden soil pile, as well as layers of organic material at their bottoms.
For transplants, we’ve got the winter squash and melons, which will take up the most space, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, onions, gourds, some thyme and Orange Butterfly Flower (a milkweed) plus the mulberry saplings to transplant. Depending on the space available, I want to direct sow summer squash, shelling peas, bush beans, pole beans and more carrots, plus the dwarf nasturtiums. If we really do well for space, I’d like to plant at least one variety of corn, but I don’t expect that to happen. There will be a fair bit of intercropping, plus we plan to have things growing vertically as much as possible, so that should help with space. Still, there are quite a few things I expect to skip entirely this year, like cucumbers, beets, radishes, chard and lettuces, simply because I don’t expect to have the prepared space for them. Mind you, things like radishes and chard can be planted later, after the garlic is harvested and those beds are freed up.
Weather willing, I hope to be able to get at least one of the low raised beds weeded and shifted over in a day. With one done today, there’s four left to do. If the weather forecasts are at all accurate, that means they should be done by the end of next week. Then the log walls need to be placed and secured, and the soil amended with sulfur granules. Hopefully, that will also get done by the end of next week, because the week after has me doing a lot of driving around, from getting my mother to a medical appointment, to our monthly stock up shopping, to hopefully being able to connect with a friend that is back in Canada for a while.
It’s a very busy time of year!
The Re-Farmer
Yesterday’s progress turned out to be a lot more work than it should have been, but the job got done. Rather than try and post pictures through Instagram, I decided to take them and make a vlog, instead.
It’s coming up on 1am as I post this. Time to go to bed and, hopefully, the old bod won’t stiffen up and break down too badly overnight!
The Re-Farmer
Today, I was able to finally get to that bed along the chain link fence, and get some potatoes planted!
I must say, though; it really was hitting home for me, how much I need higher raised beds. The narrower bed did mean I could reach across it just fine, but my goodness, the whole process was painful. It didn’t help that I was working during the hottest part of the day! We reached our expected high of 16C/61F, while the “feels like” was 21C/70F, at the time I finally got inside. I think I spent about 3 hours on the job, including hydration breaks. I was definitely not going to push myself in this heat.
Yeah, I can hear you folks from the south, giggling at me. 😉😉
Once I was done, I even remembered to take more painkillers before settling down at my computer to upload the video files I took. It doesn’t take long for the whole body to stiffen up, and I end up hobbling around looking in worse shape than my husband, even on his worst pain days!! 😄😄
I still prefer it over housework. I must say, it was great to come in when I saw done, to a house that smelled like cleaners instead of cats! 😁😁 My daughter is awesome.
I had fun putting this video together, including picking music that much better fits me and what I like.
There’s even bonus Syndol, being incredibly snuggly, while I sat in the shade to get some rest and hydration.
The 10 day forecast has changed, yet again. We went from expecting more rain and cooler temperatures to heat and mostly sunny. Tomorrow, we’re now supposed to reach 20C/68F! Which means I need to make sure to get to work on the other beds earlier in the day, before it starts getting too hot.
Which means I should probably get to bed before midnight, for a change!
I hope you enjoy the video!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 