yellow zucchini

Our 2024 Garden: triple harvest!

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Harvest was split between morning and evening today!

I did a double harvest as part of my morning rounds today. Here is what was ready to be picked.

Three Summer of Melons blend melons were ready to pick this morning, as were some Dragonfly and Sweet Chocolate peppers, a handful of beans, a few Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, a G Star patty pan squash and a Goldy zucchini.

After brining those in, I grabbed another bin before checking on the tomatoes in the Old Kitchen Garden. If you click to the second photo in the slideshow, you’ll see a few San Marzano tomatoes, some Black Cherry tomatoes, and mostly Forme de Couer tomatoes – including a branch I found that had broken off.

I’ll admit, part of the reason I wanted to pick eggplant this morning was to see how the new set up worked, with the vinyl wrapped around the box frame. You can see that in the last photo of the slide show. It seems to be holding up, though we haven’t had a severe wind to test it out yet. More importantly, having the overlap in the middle of the long sides made reaching into the bed to harvest easier than having the overlap on the short ends. So far, I’m happy with how it’s working.

Soon after I finished my morning rounds, I grabbed a melon and a couple of bell peppers for my mother, then headed out to her place for lunch, then helping her with her errands. That took a while, so it was very late in the afternoon by the time I got home.

I’ve been eyeballing the winter squash and pumpkins for a while now, and decided it was time to harvest the ones I was sure were fully mature. After picking, they will need time to cure. Normally, I would have set them up on the picnic table under a canopy tent, but the picnic table is finally giving out and can no longer hold much weight, and the frame on the canopy tent was finally broken beyond our ability to jerry rig it. In the end, I decided to set them in the garage, in front of my mother’s car. The back door and one of the front doors are kept open to allow for a cross breeze, which I hope will be enough for them. We moved the swing bench into the space in front of my mother’s car, now that all the bags of cans are outside, so I put a couple of boards across the arm rests to set the squash on.

After brushing off a whole lot of dust and old spider webs!

Then I grabbed the wagon and a utility knife and headed for the garden!

These are the ones that I felt were ready for harvest.

It’s a good thing this wagon is rated to 300 pounds, because all those squash together were pretty heavy!

In the next photo, you can see them laid out on the boards. I tried to put the smaller ones in the middle, and the heaviest over the arm rests.

In the middle front is a small, dark green squash. That is the first Crespo squash that formed. It got to this size and just didn’t get any bigger over the weeks, so I figured I may as well pick it.

There are four pumpkins from the free seeds I got from my mother’s town. Their pumpkin festival is this weekend. While with my mother, she told me one of her neighbours had some beautiful pumpkins in her section of the garden area. My mother offered to buy one, but she said not; they are for her grandchildren. So I offered my mother one of ours. She said yes – but just the smallest one.

She doesn’t want to actually do anything with it. She just wants to have a pumpkin for a few days. Just to make her happy! Then we can take it back and do whatever we planned to do with it. 😄😄

The rest are from the Wild Bunch mix of seeds we go, so we don’t know the names of them. I thought the two green, flattish ones were a Turban squash, but those get very bright and colourful. They might be a Buttercup squash, but from the images I can find, those are smoother. Still, that’s the closest I can find to what these might be.

There are two of those green ones that might be Buttercup squash. Then there are two of the slightly elongated orange ones with a point at the blossom end that looks a bit like a second them. Finally, there are two large orange ones that are round and slightly flattened.

Some of these have some damage to the skin. I tried to put them on boards or bricks to protect them from damp soil, but these still got too wet on the bottoms.

We’ll just have to eat those ones, first.

These will stay in the garage for a week or two before being moved into the root cellar, or eaten.

Except the pumpkin that will be going to my mother, of course!

I’m pretty happy with this haul. There are still more winter squash in the garden, and I hope the frost holds off long enough for at least some of them to finish ripening. The long range forecast has changed again, of course, and right now it looks like we won’t get cold enough for frost until we get into the second week of October. If this is at all accurate, we’ve got at least 2 – 2 1/2 frost free weeks ahead of us.

A lot can happen in two weeks!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: First baby zukes

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Well, it finally happened! Almost half way into August.

The first female flowers have shown up on the green and yellow zucchini plants.

Whether or not they’ll be properly pollinated and actually form zucchini, we have yet to see. In fact, one of the green zucchini flower buds already looks like it’s going to whither away, as it’s more yellow than green.

I was talking to my mother on the phone last night. After telling me about all the wonderful things about my sister’s garden, she asked me about mine. I know better than to believe she’s actually interested – she does this as an opening to find ways to make sure I know what a failure she thinks I am. Still, I told her about how we planted so many squash and melons, we didn’t have room to plant things like the lettuce my sister brings her, or cucumbers, etc. I even told her about the squash we ended up having to harvest because it broke its own stem.

As we were talking, she started say, in a disapproving tone, how she never grew “quash”, that was something she never did. Meanwhile, she’d already told me about how she used to have so much zucchini. I told her, yes, you did grow squash. Zucchini is squash. She didn’t grow winter squash (though, now that I write this, I think she did eventually grow spaghetti squash at some point), but she did grow summer squash. Then I reminded her of the year she let the zucchini get big, and we had so many giant zucchini harvested, when we stacked them against the wall in the basement, they covered the entire wall in the corner. She laughed as she remembered. As a child, I remember that year very well. We had so many giant zucchini, we eve used some to make Jack O Lanterns that Halloween!

As we talked a bit more about the garden, I mentioned that I had to find a way to support the corn because gusts of wind had blown them flat. She started saying how I’ve had sooo many problems with the garden. Which is sort of true, but I reminded her, she had problems with her garden, too. Did I? she asked, sounding shocked. I told her, she had things fail, too (in fact, some of the times I’ve mentioned a thing that didn’t grow for us, she dismissed it by saying, “oh, that happens sometimes… I’ve had that too…”), and then there were the potato beetles.

Oh, the potato beetles!

I remember, year after year, picking off potato beetles!

My parents grew a LOT of potatoes. Enough to last the winter with 7 of us, plus have enough left to plant in the spring. The potato beetles were absolutely brutal. Some years, my dad even went so far as to buy poison to dust onto the plants to save them, because there were too many for us to be able to pick them off.

Funny. When I mentioned the potato beetles, my mother just laughed – and changed the subject! 😄

Today we’re supposed to reach 24C/75F. As I write this, just past noon, we’re at 21C/70F, with the “real feel” at 25C/77F. I did end up watering the garden this morning, even though it’s not going to be exceptionally hot. Most of it, anyhow. We have so many things growing that need a lot of water. I’m not watering the garlic, though. Those are looking like we can finally start harvesting them. Maybe not today, but soon.

One thing I do want to do today is take some garden tour videos. It’s a bit early, but today is one month before our average first frost date, which is Sept. 10.

Yup. We technically have only 31 days left in our growing season.

I’m still holding out hope that we won’t get frost until later in September, but as I look at the long range forecast, I see it has changed again, and we’re looking at temperatures possibly dropping as low as 3C/37F, even before the 10th.

At the very least, we’ll need to be prepared to protect some things from frost. Most things, like the melons and squash, are just too large to cover, but we should be able to protect the high raised bed, the pepper and eggplant bed, and maybe some of the tomatoes, if it comes to that.

*sigh*

I look forward to when we have a greenhouse.

Meanwhile, I need to get back to working on the cat isolation shelter. The rescue has us booked for some September spays or neuters (depending on what cats we manage to trap), so we’re going to need it. I got nothing done yesterday. While on the call with my mother, I found myself feeling ready to fall asleep. After the call, I quickly finished the blog posts I was working on. I was falling asleep at my keyboard! Once done, I went for a nap, crashed for 3 hours, then woke up still feeling completely groggy and drained. So I made it a day of rest.

Not that I had much choice.

Today’s goal with the isolation shelter: painting and wheels. I’ve gone through our paint cans to see what we have left. Mostly, it’s the bright blue I used to paint the folding table and floating benches.

Hmmm… I should see what is left of the red paint. They are the same type of paint. Maybe I can combine what’s left. I like purple… 😄 It’ll be a while before I can buy more paint, so if I can stretch what we have, all the better. We’re not after winning any beauty contests here!

I’m thinking of painting the cut pieces before putting the shelter together, since it will be difficult to paint it once assembled. Especially on the inside. I plan to start painting one side of the cut frame pieces first, then putting the wheels on the base while the paint dries. Once the wheels are on, I plan to paint the base. By then, it might be long enough that I’ll be able to paint another side of the cut pieces. I know we have paint rollers and pans somewhere, so I’m hoping to use that and make the job get done faster.

Time to go digging around the basement to see if I can find some paint rollers and pans!

Or the sun room…

It’s really hard to keep track of the stuff that we found while cleaning up this place. 😁

The Re-Farmer

Evening harvest and a change in plans

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Well, I’m going to be running around tomorrow, after all.

But first, while doing my evening rounds, I found myself bringing in a small harvest.

At first, I thought I’d just grab the few ripe Indigo Blues I spotted, but then I noticed the Red Swan beans, among the purple corn. The plants are small and sparse, but once I started looking around the leaves, I kept finding more and more larger bean pods! The yellow zucchini was one I looked at this morning and thought would wait until tomorrow or the day after, but it was noticeably bigger by the evening.

I really should know better than to move the peppers to see how ripe they are. Where the sun hits turns brown rather quickly, while the parts in shade stay green longer. They are completely ripe when they are all brown. The problem is, their stems are fragile, so when I move a pepper to see the other side of it, it just snaps right off!

Which is fine. My daughter is using it for her meal right now.

Meanwhile…

While still at my mother’s, I got a message from my husband letting me know there was something to pick up at the post office. One of the packages was RAM for his computer. He was very excited about it.

Some time later, I came out and noticed he wasn’t in his room. Eventually, I found him in the living room, reading on his tablet.

Not a good sign.

He had installed the RAM, which was absolutely the right hardware for his computer, but when he turned it on, it wouldn’t work. He just had a black screen with a spinning circle on it.

Turns out, this is a known problem with his brand of computer. It doesn’t like being upgraded.

After fighting with it for a while, he reinstalled the original RAM.

And it still didn’t work.

His computer was dead.

At which point, he pain killered up and lay down for a while, because installing the hardware really did a number on his back. When he couldn’t handle being prone anymore, he moved to the living room.

At least he was still able to research his issue, then try something else.

Ultimately, he was able to get the original RAM working again, and he has a working computer again.

He’s also going to return the RAM.

That requires printing out a return label.

The printer is in my room. We don’t need to print a lot of stuff, but the self cleaning uses a lot of ink, anyhow. I’m out of cyan and magenta. You’d think we’d still be able to print out a black and white label, but nope. Even when it’s set to black and white, if more than one colour of ink is out, the printer simply won’t print.

Which means that tomorrow, I have to go to the nearest place that sells this brand of ink.

Which is a Staples, in the smaller city.

Then, after the ink is installed the the labels printed, I’m going to have to go to a Purolator to send the return out.

Which is driving to either the town we usually go to, or the town my mother lives in. Considering were the Purolator depot moved to in town, there isn’t really any difference in time or distance between them.

So I’ll have a couple of hours, more or less, of driving to get the ink and bring it home, then another 45 minutes to an hour of driving to get to a Purolator.

A significant portion of the refund is going to have to go back to paying for the gas and ink!

Well, so much for starting on that tomato sauce tomorrow.

The Re-Farmer

A survivor!

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One of the things I did in the garden last night was go through the squash patch and cut away any dead or dying leaves, dropping them for mulch.

Which is when I found a survivor!

The slugs were especially bad around the yellow zucchini. There were two plants in the mount, and one of them was completely destroyed.

Or so I thought!

Not only did it survive, but this morning, it was blooming!

It’s so spindly and has barely any leaves, but look at all those flower buds!

There is even at least one female flower in there.

Talk about resilient!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: morning harvest and how things are looking

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I didn’t pick any bush beans for a couple of days, so there was plenty to pick this morning!

I also grabbed a few Gold Ball turnips, Uzbek Golden carrots – a first harvest of those – and snagged a yellow zucchini. There’s some green ones starting to grow, and one that is almost ready to harvest, but not quite!

I uploaded other photos onto Instagram. As you go through these, can you please let me know if any of them look like the files got corrupted somehow? I am having problems with viewing batches of photos like this. They look fine as I go through the process, but after they’ve been published and I view them, there are usually visual changes to some of them. Some are so bad, I can barely see the image, so I delete the whole thing and start over. I had to do that with this batch, and I still see problems. The images are at least identifiable, though!

Please let me know if you see it to, or if it’s just my computer messing up!

The first image is of the North Georgia Candy Roaster squash that is getting SO big, so fast! It seems to be getting noticeably bigger, every day! There were also a lot of new female flowers among the candy roasters and the Pink Bananas.

There is a little patch of allium flowers that come up every year through a crack between sidewalk blocks and the laundry platform steps. They are in full bloom right now, and the bees loves them. I tried taking photos and just happened to catch the bee as it flew off to another flower head!

The earliest Sweet Chocolate bell peppers are turning colour quite nicely right now.

The next photo, of the chamomile flowers, looks like it has a block of purple over all but the top of the photo. Do you see that too?

The chamomile are blooming quite enthusiastically right now.

The very first luffa flower has opened – and is being pollinated!

Last of all is the first flower on the Classic Eggplant. Check out those spikes on it!

On another topic entirely, I brought one of the yard kittens in, so my daughter and I could wash its eyes out. They were completely stuck shut. As soon as the dried gunk was softened enough that the lids started to open, they started oozing more gunk! It’s nose was all gummed up, too, and somehow a tiny piece of flexible plastic was stuck to it! My guess is it was from the strips of plastic that covered the adhesive on the new roof tiles. We’re still finding them blowing around.

We got the kitten cleaned up as best we could, then set it outside again, but not before my daughter got a picture of it. The Cat Lady is going to be coming for Ghosty soon. I hated to asked, but I sent her the picture and asked if they would be able to take a second sick kitten.

She had to check with her husband, who was monitoring their cat that just came out of surgery not long ago. Their cat seems to be doing all right, so she will take the sick kitten. With its eyes gumming up so much, it tends to stay by the house a lot, so we should be able to find it and catch it, once we know she’s on the way.

The down side is, the rescue’s budget for August already done, having gone towards spays. Which means they’ll be taking on these two, out of pocket! They’ve already spent thousands on just two cats in the past, but they’re still willing to take on these two. The other downside is, once they’re all healthy, it’s been difficult to adopt cats out. Partly because she wants to keep them! 😄 I do expect Ghosty will get adopted out easily. She is a rather unique looking kitten. A bit freaky at times, too! She’s got blue eyes, and when the light hits them just right, her pupils glow red. We think she might have partial albinism. Her eyes are still sticky, too, but she has gotten much better since coming inside.

The Cat Lady commented that the strain causing these problems is particularly bad this year. Not just with so many sick cats, but so many kittens dying this year, too. So it’s not just at our place! We’ve found so many dead kittens this year, plus losing Question, even after bringing her inside. We’re still tossing the outside cats’ kibble with lysine to help their immune systems, but it’s the little ones that are suffering. The adults seem just fine, but with the littles, it seems that as soon as they start getting weaned, it’s just not enough.

Well, we do what we can! I feel bad asking the Cat Lady for help, though, but after Leyendecker, we just don’t have the budget to take another cat to the vet. The Cat Lady’s rescue runs on donations, but they do a lot out of pocket, too. Her husband, thankfully, makes good money, but it’s still a lot to cover out of pocket!

Ah, well. I’m just glad she’ll be able to take Ghosty and this other kitten. She is so awesome!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: harvesting squash and corn

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Well, the last of the stuff that needed to come in before tonight is done – at least as much as possible. The girls and I put bottles with warm water under the eggplants in the grow bag (the only ones fruiting) and, since they were right there, with the sweet potatoes, too. The eggplant and one grow bag with sweet potato got covered, but the sheet wasn’t big enough to cover the other two grow bags. The apple gourd also got bottles of warm water placed beside them, but we could only cover two of the three plants, so we covered the two biggest ones. As I write this, we are down to 9C/48F, and it’s supposed to keep dropping until we reach 1C/34F at about 7am. Between 6 – 8 am tends to consistently be the coldest time of day.

While I was harvesting earlier, I went ahead and grabbed a bunch of the Latte sweet corn, too. I don’t think they are quite at their peak, but I think they’re about as good as we’re going to get. There are still cobs on the stalks that were pretty small, so I left them be.

With the summer squash, I grabbed all the little – but not too little – patty pans, and the last of the zucchini.

In the above photo, the six pumpkins across the top are the Baby Pam pumpkins. The others are all hulless seed pumpkins. On the far left are four Styrian, in the middle are six Lady Godiva, and on the right are two Kakai. Tucked in with the patty pans are two Boston Marrow. There are so many little Boston Marrow squash forming, but they are just too small and have no chance of ripening after being picked. I’m not even sure Boston Marrow does continue to ripen after being picked!

The pumpkins are now all set up in the sun room. We cleared a shelf in the window, and all but one of them fit in there. The last one joined the onions on the screen. I think it should still get enough light there.

The hulless seed pumpkins are grown just for their seed, not their flesh. The flesh is probably edible, but there would be less of it than for an eating pumpkin. I will give them time before we crack any open to see what the seeds are like. At least we do have the one tiny, fully ripe kakai pumpkin harvested earlier that we could try any time we feel like it.

We planted so many different winter squash, and it was such a horrible year, I’m thankful we have as much as we do. Hopefully, next year, we will have better growing conditions. I made the mistake of calling my mother before I started this post, and talking about our garden. I mentioned that our beets did not do well this year. She started lecturing me on how to grow beets, and how they need to have the soil loosened around them, etc. I told her I knew how to grow beets (this is not our first year growing them!); they just didn’t do well this year. We didn’t even get greens worth eating. My mother then launched into how she always had such big beets, and always had such a wonderful garden (this after she’d mentioned to be before, that some years things just didn’t work) and how she only grew the “basics” and everything was just so wonderful – and the reason my beets failed was because I don’t garden like she did, and that I shouldn’t be gardening “from a book”. Whatever that means. I reminded her that I tested the soil and it is depleted. We don’t have good soil here anymore. She got sarcastic about that, and basically made it like my not having a perfect garden like she did was because I’m not doing things her way. As she got increasingly cruel about it, I called her out on it. I told her that just because she can’t understand something like soil science – which she doesn’t need to – that didn’t make it okay for her to be cruel to me over something she knows nothing about. Nor would I put up with being treated like that. I even asked her, why couldn’t she try being kind for a change? Maybe say something like “I’m sorry to hear you’re having problems”, instead of basically saying “I’m better than you.” She went dead silent, so I changed the subject, and the rest of the conversation went okay. Then she cut the call short because she saw the time, and her program on TV was started, so she had to go.

My mother is pretty open on what her priorities are. 😕

Ah, well. It is what it is. I’m just so thankful she is no longer our “landlord”, and that my brother now owns the property. There was a point, before the title was transferred, that we briefly but seriously considered moving out because of her.

Funny how something as ordinary as gardening can bring out the worst in her, though.

The weird thing is, when I spoke to my brother after he’d visited her to talk about the roofing estimates, apparently my mother had lots of positive things to say about how well we’re taking care of things here.

I guess that doesn’t include the garden! 😄

Well, I guess I should go see what I can do about that corn! 😊

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: mulching, growing and harvesting

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I didn’t get a photo of the finished squash patch last night, so I got one this morning.

All the paths are now mulched, too. There’s no carboard under the paths, so I expect things to start growing through, but at least it will be more sparse.

The plants themselves are seeing new growth and lots of flowers. It’s a race against time and the weather to see if we’ll have anything to pick this year.

I love that you can see the giant pumpkin from so far away!

I swear, this thing is visibly bigger, every day.

Of the two other pumpkins spotted, this one is making it and growing fast. The other did not get pollinated, and withered away. I see no other female flowers, so we’re probably just have the two.

In checking the Red Kuri squash and Apple gourds, I found both male and female flowers blooing at the same time, so I went ahead and hand pollinated. The Red Kuri is doing well, but with the Apple gourds, all the female flowers so far have withered. This morning, I found a female flower on one plant, and a male on another, si I made sure to hand pollinate

Thankfully, tomatoes are self pollinating.

The are so many of them changing colour right now! I have to check myself, to make sure I don’t pick some of them too early.

The one big Sophie’s Choice tomato I recently picked was enough for the girls to make a tomato salad out of it. I’m glad they’re enjoying the variety.

I finally picked the one bigger golden zucchini this morning. There were not a lot of yellow beans to pick, but there were more of the pole beans, with many more little ones on the vines. There will be more peas for a while, too. There may not be a lot of quantity from each of them, but altogether, it’s pretty decent.

The only down side this morning are my pain levels. I over did it yesterday, while pruning the trees. I was so distracted by the heat, I missed my other “time to back off” warning signs. Frustrating.

Ah, well. That’s what pain killers are for. Today is going to be a hotter one, with possible thunderstorms, so it’s not going to be a day for significant manual labour, anyhow.

The Re-Farmer