When it comes to deciding what seeds to start indoors, and when, your frost dates are more important than your zone. Gardening in Canada talks about what to start now, whatever zone you are in.
We’ve got our onions,shallots, eggplants and hot peppers started (even though the hot peppers are supposed to be a short season variety). Next up, I have herbs to start.
We don’t have luffa seeds to try this year; I will buy more to try again next year. I’m debating whether I want to try any gourds this year. I’m not sure how many beds we will have access to this year. I think I should skip them this year and focus more of the edibles than things I am growing for crafting purposes.
What about you? If you have a garden, what are you trying – or skipping – this year?
Here’s another great video from Gardening in Canada. With so many people looking to garden to feed themselves, because grocery prices are getting so high, it helps to know what’s actually cheaper to grow!
There are, of course, always outliers. With the dry beans, for example. It may be cheaper to buy them at the store, but you can grow varieties that you won’t find in stores at all. Similar for things like potatoes, which don’t even make her list. For example, there’s not much point growing your basic white, red, or yellow potatoes that are common in stores. For the space they need, you could grow other more cost-effective vegetables instead. But there are many varieties of potatoes you’ll never see in a grocery store, or if you do, they are much more expensive “gourmet” items.
But then, a novice gardener looking to save on the grocery budget probably wouldn’t be after special varieties. That’s the time to focus on tried and true varieties that will grow in their area, not experiment. We are fortunate to have lots of space to convert into garden beds. Most people don’t have that.
I still say it’s good to grow at least one thing, just for fun!
We still have not been able to start seeds indoors. I need access to the aquarium greenhouse, but we’ve got too much shoved in front of it that we don’t know where else to put. Like an armchair that needs repair. It will probably have to get moved to the storage house, but there’s too much snow in the way to carry something like that.
We really need to get those onions started soon, though!
Today’s is the Epiphany, also called Three Kings Day, recognizing when the magi visited Jesus, bearing gifts. It is also the closing of the Christmas season.
I found this rendition of We Three Kings I’d never heard before.
This was one of those songs I really enjoyed singing in my younger days. There’s something about the melody that just pulls you in and lifts you up! Alas, I don’t really sing anymore, as it triggers coughing fits, so I just get to enjoy the singing of others.
With the previous garden analysis posts, I wasn’t able to include a lot of photos that I would like to have. Due to media storage running out in my WordPress account (I’m at 98% now, so I have to go find some more photo/critter of the day posts to delete!), I did a lot more videos, instead.
Turns out, I did quite a lot of them.
So this post is going to have all those videos, starting with the longer garden tour videos.
But first, I want to mull over my final thoughts on this past year’s garden, before I do a final review and reset post for next year’s garden.
Honestly, I’m not sure what to think about how the garden went this year.
I’m unhappy with the fact that the garden was so much smaller, and that we didn’t get the trellis beds built, that we wanted to. Even if we didn’t get the trellises added until later, we should have at least been able to build the raised beds. It seems that every time we had a day where we should have been able to get in to fell the dead spruces to use for it, something would come up that needed to be done right away, like helping my mother with errands, or doing our own errands in the city, etc. Then there were all the days when it simply wasn’t safe to try and fell trees due to weather. Mostly high winds. Felling 60′ + tall trees against the wind is just not a thing to to! It got me very frustrated. Still, I’m glad we managed to fell the trees we did, and the more that are taken down, the more space there will be to fell the bigger ones that we need to make sure fall away from the house.
The price of lumber is still quite high, which is why we’re scavenging our dead trees. Though prices have been slowly dropping again, they’re still high enough that I’ve even had people offer to cut down the dead trees for me, in exchange for the lumber. In another world, I would have happily taken them up on this exchange, but we need the lumber for ourselves!
The other frustration is not knowing why some things, like the beets, did not do well at all.
Oh! I completely forgot to include the radishes in the root vegetables post! They were planted as a fall crop, and while a couple grew fast enough to start blooming, and they certainly did better than the beets did, by a long shot, their roots still did not do well. Plus, my one daughter that actually likes radishes happened to be away and house sitting at the time when they would have been best for harvesting, so even what little we had never really got used.
Discovering that the roots from those trees my mother allowed to grow where she’d had a row of raspberry bushes, many years ago, were actually getting into the grow bags and crowding out the things I actually wanted to grow was another frustration. When she asked us to move here, and I mentioned wanting to clear those trees away, she demanded they stay. They’re a wind break, she says. Well, sort of, but even as a wind break, they’re not located in a good place. When I was starting to clean up around them, I discovered a number of stumps that showed these trees had been cut down in the past, most likely by my late brother. Much of what we’ve got now are actually suckers that grew out of the stumps.
Those trees have got to go, and go permanently, if we want to be able to use that space to grow food.
Still, they do provide a small amount of shelter, so that will likely wait until we’ve been able to plant more shelter belt tress in better locations. We just have to be very careful about where, since we need to avoid a buried telephone line.
We might just cut down the Chinese elms, though, as their seeds were also a contributing problem. The maples that are in there are not so bad. They have different root systems, too.
All in good time, but where they are used to be part of the main garden, and that’s space I’d like to reclaim at some point. I just didn’t realize, until this year, the extent of the problems those trees are causing.
Then there was the stuff planted in the new chimney block beds against the chain link fence. The bed we had there previously didn’t have anything to hold the soil in place, and we were losing it under the fence, so we had to do something. These are the last of the chimney blocks that were intended to replace the chimney for the old wood furnace – back when my parents bought the property in 1964! A chimney that was taken down when we got the new roof last fall, as only the electric furnace is being used.
We’ve used those chimney blocks as planters in the old kitchen garden retaining wall, so I expected them to work find. Yet nothing planted in them thrived at all. I can make some guesses, but I can’t say for sure why they failed.
There was some frustration with deer damage to the peas, bush beans, strawberries and asparagus, but nowhere near as bad as the year we had so many groundhogs move into the yard, so that’s a relative thing.
We did have some good harvests, especially with the pink banana and candy roast squash, the carrots and – eventually – the tomatoes. Even the tomatoes that had to be harvested early because they got blight, which is a first. We’ve never had tomato blight before and, as far as I can remember, my mother never did, either.
Though I have to say, it’s been great to grow potatoes and not have any Colorado Potato Beetles! We had massive problems with those in my mother’s garden when I was a kid! We also grew massive amounts of potatoes to last 7 people all winter, but there until we started growing them again, I don’t think anyone has grown potatoes here for many years.
So I am happy with quite a few things, but disappointed or frustrated with quite a few other things. A real mixed bag!
You will be able to see how that progressed over our year in these garden tour videos. This first one is the spring tour I included in another post.
I was able to do monthly garden tour videos, starting in June.
In this July tour, you can see the self seeded red poppies that showed up in the shallot bed, that turned out to be this variety – and I have no idea where they came from originally!
In this August tour, you can see just how poorly the plants did in the chimney block planters – and how well the compost pile squash did!
This September tour was done on what was our average first frost date.
We even got one last tour in October! We’d had our first frosts by then.
Also, I completely forgot that the cat we now call Syndol had been named Rudy!
Amazingly, we still had crops in the ground to harvest in October. The frosts we got came quite a bit later than usual, and the temperatures remained mild, so we could get away with quite a bit being left out longer!
These next videos are more topical, starting with one I included in an earlier post, about preparing beds and making carrot seed tape.
This next one was done in early April, when we got a snow storm. I was able to pot up tomatoes that day!
You can also see some of the early sprouts, many of which did not survive to be transplanted.
This next one is a time lapse video of planting the carrots, and preparing the spinach bed.
Gooby, the yard cat you see often in the video, has since disappeared. 😥
In this next video, we planted the Alternative Lawn Mix, spinach in the bed prepared above, and the bed preparation and planting of the Hungarian Blue poppies.
Sadly, Marlee, the cat in the thumbnail, did get outside and disappeared. She was unhappy that we’d brought the tiny kittens and their mother in, and when a window screen got knocked open, out she went and we never saw her again.
I miss her!
This next video took 5 years to make, and shows the progression of the old kitchen garden from completely overgrown in 2018, to our 2023 garden.
This progress video includes time lapse video of building the last two raised beds.
The next video is another time lapse video, and one I posted previously, showing where we reworked the tulip bed and planted our new apple tree – and protected the area from deer!
That was another area that had been very overgrown when we first moved here.
This next short video is of planting our Purple Peruvian potatoes in grow bags, with comparisons to the first year we’d grown them.
This next one was done in late May, when we transplanted our gourds and some squash, before our average last frost date.
It’s a shame that such healthy looking transplants did so poorly!
Here is another time lapse video, also done in late May, planting the Tom Thumb popcorn, plus the free Hedou Tiny Bok Choy and Jabousek lettuce seeds we tried.
This next one is very different. It shows what was discovered as I tried to repair a hose from the house to a tap in the garden, including more time lapse video.
The damage turned out to be far more extensive – no surprise, given the pipes were likely older than me!
Since this video was taken, I’ve dug up half the pipe, from where I’d first tried to repair it, to the tap. I asked my brother about the mystery sections of pipe the narrower pipe was running through. He said those were put there to help protect the narrower pipe. Which seems and odd way to do it, to me!
Now that we know the whole thing needs to be replaced, the plan is to dig a trench and remove the remains of the old pipe, then lay down some PVC pipe, with drainage holes, to protect a contractor’s grade garden hose that has been gifted to us already. At the garden end, we’ll have the tap and a sink set up – I’ve found what I want to use in one of the sheds – as a vegetable washing station. We will also be building a garden shed nearby, to replace the current one that’s rotting and starting to fall apart.
Lots of work to be done!
Finally, one last short video, showing our first major harvest!
For all the struggles we had this year, I think I can say we had a pretty decent gardening year overall. Especially compared to our Terrible Now Good Growing Year, last year. 😂
We have quite a lot of fresh onions, on top of the ones we dehydrated (half of which I powdered) and froze. Mostly the Red of Florence onions.
Which have started to grow! Not all of them, but enough that we had to do something about it.
So I made a version of this historical onion soup using all red onions, to use up the ones that were sprouting.
I made a few other changes, too, of course.
This is how it turned out.
I sliced all the onions that were starting to sprout, saving the greens to use fresh, some of which I used to garnish my bowl. We’d done a pork roast yesterday, and there was just a bit left, along with the pot juices and rendered fat from the roast. I used the fat from the roast, as well as bacon drippings, to caramelize the onions, instead of butter. Part way through the caramelization process, I added the leftover bits of pork, finely chopped – there is no meat in the version in the video.
For the liquid, I use the juices from the pork roast, which had jelled quite nicely overnight, plus water. They used just water in the video. A vinegar I had on hand I chose to add to the beaten egg yolks was a fancy, barrel aged apple cider vinegar.
My daughters had made a loaf in the bread machine yesterday, and that was used for the bread portion. The video specifically stated to use the outside of a crusty loaf, not the soft insides (which would just turn to mush in the soup!), so I sliced off the crust on the bread machine bread. The bread machine makes a relatively dense bread, particularly around the edges, so I was able to cut quite thick slices off all sides for this, and cut them into fairly even cubes. They stood up well to being cooked in all that liquid!
The only other thing I did a differently was to add a splash of vinegar to the soup stock, even though there was vinegar in the beaten egg yolks. After tasting it, I just felt it needed that extra bit of bite.
The only down side to making this soup was the length of time it took to slice the onions, then caramelize them. By the time the soup was simmering and the cubed bread added, my back was giving out and I had to sit down in between doing the other stuff. Not an issue for people who aren’t broken, like me! 😁
As for the soup, it was quite tasty. Even my husband went for seconds, and he’s not a soup person! I think it would have tasted even better with yellow onions, but that’s just me. If all goes well, we’ll have a lot more of those in our garden next year!
This is definitely a soup I’d make again, with any type of onion.
I might be getting my daughters to do the chopping or caramelizing next time, though! 😄
Gosh, this guy reminds me of Decimus so much! That permanently stunned expression is what does it. The white arrow on his head reminds me of Pointy Baby.
We’ve passed on photos in hopes someone will adopt him, but he does have lung issues. We can hear his lungs rattling as he breaths. Unfortunately, we’re out of Lysine, and our Amazon subscription supplier seems to be either out of stock, or no longer carries it? I’m not quite sure which it is, based on the very brief notification. I’ve looked at alternatives, but those in the bulk size I’m after that’s meant for humans seem to all have other vitamins mixed in, while the ones marketed for cats cost almost twice as much, for 1/3rd the quantity! I hope our usual supplier starts shipping again. Winter is always the hardest when it comes to respiratory issues in the cats.
Yesterday, my daughter and I finally lifted the roof on the cat house to give it a cleaning. I’d hoped to be able to brace it somehow, but there’s a large ridge beam down the centre; it’s the beam that extends out the back that the counter weight is attached to, so it’s very substantial. Unfortunately, the roof has such a low slope, it means I can’t attach cross pieces (collar beams, I believe they’re called) to the rafters. The ridge beam it in the way.
Once open, we took out all the bedding and threw away the sheet-wrapped pillow that had been in a box, because it got damp on the bottom and started to mold. The litter box was simply switched out for another with clean litter pellets in it. The smoke detector battery was tested, the heat shield put back around the light fixture, then we plugged in the electrical and tested the terrarium heat bulb. My daughter also found a way to secure the timer so that the light sensor should stay upright and facing the window. It will turn the bulb on when it gets dark, then off when it gets light.
We also cleaned the windows, inside and out! Gosh, they get greasy on the inside. All those cat faces rubbing on them. 😄
We had cats in and out the whole time we worked on it! Once the bedding was returned and it was time to drop the roof, we had to be extra careful to make sure no cats decided to jump in from the top! That roof is really heavy, and even with the counter weight, it drops hard if we’re not careful. With how much the roof has been wiggling around, we’re being extra careful, anyhow. We’ll have to plan ahead for building a new cat house, because this one is just getting too old and the wood too rotten. That and the cats are using the inside walls as scratching posts, and WOW are they tearing it apart!!
That done, we’re also starting to do things like put away the hoses for the winter. We haven’t shut the taps off in the basement, yet, so we do still have access to water for a while longer, but mostly we’ll be bringing warm water out from inside, instead.
We ran out of kibble for the outside cats already! When I got another bag, I didn’t realize we were so low for the inside cats, too. By the time the bin for the inside cats was refilled, plus the one I keep in my room for the kittens, there wasn’t much left. Rather than take from the inside bin, I took advantage of delivering Nosencrantz to her new home by arranging to meet near a Walmart, then picked up another 10kg bag. I’ll be doing our first stock up shopping trip to Costco in a couple of days. Now that we have the truck, I should be able to get the entire month’s worth of kibble in one trip!
While I was driving, I started to get some messages that turned out to be from the Cat Lady. I’d brought up about bringing the 5 kittens to get fixed during the clinic’s cheap day. She came back to tell me she has us booked for 6 slots – all females! We don’t even have 6 females to bring in. There are the 3 older kittens (Tiny is just too tiny), Toni and Tissue. We have had no progress in getting at any of the outside females. It would probably be easier if the males weren’t so aggressively friendly and pushing their way past the ladies and spooking them. But this clinic wants to do only females for their cheap day. The rescue would pay for 4, and she was asking if we could pay for the other two. We were already expecting to pay for one (Toni).
Bringing Tissue, though… Tissue: Destroyer of Cars. That’s a risk!
I’ve messaged the Cat Lady about how many we can do, but haven’t heard back. She’s in the middle of getting her house ready for sale, and to start moving next month, if things go to plan. Thankfully, the new house is very close, but moving is always very stressful. The hardest move we ever had was only half a block. It took us a week and we all were sick with colds. At one point, I just collapsed and was bed ridden for a couple of days. And we had only 4 kids and two cats at the time, too! So she has a lot to focus on that are a higher priority. All that, and she’s still hoping to come out here this weekend to drop off a donated cat carrier for us to keep! With the move, she’s not positive she’ll be able to take Ghosty after the spay. It might be better for her to come back with us for a bit longer, instead.
With us now having car payments, starting next month, finding the money to do spays – even super cheap ones (only $75, instead of $350!!) – is going to take a bit more juggling of the budget than usual. We’ll manage. Especially if we are able to adopt out more cats, and not be spending so much on cat food every month!
The Re-Farmer 