I just finished doing my evening rounds – it is so gorgeous out there right now! – which gave me a chance to see how far my daughter got on the garden bed she was weeding.
Before I left this morning, she asked me which beds needed to be worked on, and if there were any surprised to watch out for, like fall plantings of some kind. I said no, we did the fall garlic in the old kitchen garden beds this year, and those were the only fall plantings we had.
The bed she started on is where we planted the Roma VF and Red Wethersfield onions, last year. The tomatoes ended up not very healthy, and seemed to get blight near the end, but the onions… they just disappeared. The seedlings I transplanted around the perimeter seemed to be doing well at first, and then they were gone. Not dug up. Just died away. So I definitely had plans for amending this bed, and we were most definitely not going to be planting tomatoes in it, again.
Imagine my surprise – and probably hers! – when I looked today and saw this.
All along the perimeter, Red Wethersfield onions are growing! There are so many crab grass rhizomes in there, my daughter has basically been digging them up and transplanting them.
I am totally amazed. Onions I thought had died off, with no evidence of them to be seen when that bed was harvested and the diseased looking tomato plants pulled for burning, had been there, all along, and survived the winter!
We started more Red Wethersfield onion seeds this year, too. I was going to give them one more try before giving up on them, at least for a few years. Now, it looks like we’re going to have plenty!
The bed is only about a quarter finished; it took my daughter a lot longer then usual, since she was both weeding and transplanting all the onions she was finding. Even through the crab grass growing around the edges, I can see more little onion bulbs pushing their way through!
Onions are biannual. Which means that these onions, if left alone, will go to seed, which we should be able to save.
Of the four Zucca melon seeds in the container, two were starting to germinate. With the Cream of Saskatchewan Watermelon, four out of five seeds germinated – and two were getting almost overdue for planting!
At first, I thought four of five Sarah’s Choice seeds had germinated, but it turned out the one of the seedlings had gotten big enough that it dropped its shell completely! So we’re five out of five on those.
As for the Pixie melons, I could see a couple of seeds starting to open up, but they are not at all ready yet. They, and the two remaining Zucca melon seeds are set aside now, to give them more time.
I was originally going to use one of the large celled trays for these but, at the last moment, I decided to use individual 4″ cardboard pots. I don’t know how long it’ll last, but I used a marker to label the pots directly, before filling them with pre-moistened seed starting mix. With some of the Sarah’s Choice seeds, the roots had grown between the layers of paper towel and spread quite a bit, so I tore the paper round them rather than risk damaging the roots by pulling them through. I now have all of the pots in a tray over the heat mat, with water on the bottom for the pots to absorb, rather than absorbing water from the premoistened growing medium.
As for the Summer of Melons blend, all the pre-germinated seeds but one have fully emerged.
We now have quite a lot of squash and melon seedlings going! Hopefully, they’ll all survive transplanting, but we have enough that we can afford a few losses. What was that poem again? Four seeds, all in a row; one for the blackbird, one for the crow; one to die and one to grow! Something like that.
I’m glad I got at least one gardening job done today, without making my messed up right arm any worse. 😁
Well, I ended up doing a bit more than I expected to, yesterday evening!
The first thing I did as plant a few more pre-germinated Wild Bunch winter squash seeds. To make space, I changed out what the pots were sitting in.
They are now in a baking pan, over a cooling rack, to allow air to circulate under them. This is a recommendation from Gardening in Canada, as a way to keep the pots from getting moldy or starting to fall apart. The problem, though, is they can’t be bottom watered while on this, which means they’ll be watered mostly by misting.
I would love it if Costco got another shipment of these baking pans. They are basic, 9×13 pans and were very affordable. I didn’t realize just how good the price was, until they were gone and I tried finding more, elsewhere, only to find they cost 4 or 5 times more! Even the restaurant section of the wholesale store I checked out was ridiculously expensive.
Also, that’s the last of my 3″ biodegradable pots from last year. The new ones I got are 4″ pots, which is what the green plastic one is.
Speaking of “biodegradable” pots. The last thing I potted was the coffee tree I got for my daughters. I repurposed a pot that we’d planted thyme in, last year. The thyme had been started in one of these biodegradable pots and the whole thing was potted up. Unfortunately, the indoor thyme got forgotten about and died. It was set aside until tonight, when I finally went to remove the dead thyme – and pulled out a pot! It was completely whole; only brittle from being so dry. No degradation occurred while the plant was still alive, at all. That is not how these pots are supposed to be! When it comes time to plant these outdoors, I will most likely break the pot up so that at least the roots won’t be constrained. If I can remove them completely without damaging the roots, I will!
But I digress…
After potting the pre-germinated seeds and rearranging the aquarium greenhouse to fit them, it was time to work on the San Marzano tomatoes. I decided they needed to be done, even though they are still recovering from their accident, as they were just getting too crowded. I used another deep cell tray to transplant into, but instead of filling it with seed starting mix, I use a Pro Mix potting soil I picked up today. As usual, I premoistened the soil, first.
Good grief, there were a lot of sticks in it!
I can’t even say it’s a brand problem. My second bag of Miracle Grow seed starting mix was full of sticks, too. The first bag of Miracle Grow had them as well, though not as bad. The first bag of seed starting mix I got – Jiffy, I think, but I can’t remember for sure – was probably the best of the lot, with only a few sticks in it, but it was also a much smaller bag.
Once the new tray was full of potting soil, I went through the San Marzano seedlings. A couple were pretty much dead, so I just pulled them. After removing and potting up the “spares”, I top dressed the ones left behind with vermiculate, then set it back at the window.
They are definitely still in rough shape. I hope that, now that they have more room, a bit of fresh soil and the vermiculite, they will recover faster.
As for the spares I transplanted out, there were only 9 strong enough to transplant to the new tray, plus one that got transplanted into a cell in the original tray that lost its seedlings to the fall.
I’m honestly not sure these will all survive. 😞 We shall see!
That left 12 cells available. I had the small tray with 12 cells planted with three different types of tomatoes in them, so I decided to thin those by transplanting. With the Chocolate Cherry and the Black Cherry, there were 4 “spares” to transplant out, but with the Forme de Coeur, a couple of cells had 3 seeds sprouting when I thought I’d planted only two, giving me 6 “spares” to plant out.
Once I started working on them, though, I realized I would have to plant all of them out of the little tray, so once these were done, I planted the remainder into 4″ plastic pots.
The outside rows of 4 pots are the Black Cherry and Chocolate Cherry. I didn’t have room for all the Forme de Coeur, though…
… so the last one went into the bin with the peppers and thyme.
Hopefully, I didn’t want too long to transplant these from those little trays! This one’s looking particularly rough. 😞
I hadn’t planned to be filling an extra fourteen 4″ pots, so these ones were filled with a mix of seed starting mix and potting soil.
The other small tray with the peppers in it will need to be potted up, too. I’ll probably use Red Solo cups for those, since I only have 4 or 5 of the green pots left, and the new biodegradable ones I got, I’m saving for the winter squash. For the peppers in the small tray, I don’t think I’ll thin them by transplanting, though. Instead, I’ll just keep the 4 strongest seedlings of each variety.
Speaking of room, I need to make a decision on these guys.
These are getting large enough they’ll need to be moved out of the aquarium greenhouse. The question is, do I try to thin by transplanting, or do I just thin them?
Who am I kidding. I can’t bring myself to just yank and kill off so many strong, healthy seedlings! However, transplanting them means 7 more pots, on top of the 6 already here. I can fit them in the mini greenhouse frame at the window, if I can move out the onions and shallots.
Hmmm… onions are a cool weather crop. I could start hardening them off and transplant them outside.
Speaking of planting things outside, the last thing I did for the evening was set the snap pea seeds between wet paper towels for the night. Tomorrow, they go into the ground!
I love having cool weather crops that can be planted so early – earlier than usual, this year. I’m hoping the long range forecasts are at least close to accurate! Even if things end up cooler, this is stuff that should survive anything but an unseasonal deep freeze. Hopefully, we’ll soon be seeing our garlic coming up, as well as the snow crocuses.
We got quite a bit of rain overnight! Enough to completely fill the rain barrel I’d returned to the corner of the sun room. When I came out this morning, I had to put the diverter back on!
It was still raining ever so slightly while I was out (I counted 31, maybe 32 cats this morning). The only garden related stuff I did was to take the mulch off the sunchokes and asparagus beds – the last beds that needed to be uncovered – so they can thaw out faster.
The rain looks like it has stopped, but it’s too muddy and chilly to do the work I had intended to do outside today. I did end up setting out the Purple Caribe potatoes to chit in the old kitchen.
A couple of them were large enough that I cut them in half, and those ones are perched on the carton in such a way that they will have air flow under them, so the cut areas will dry out.
Looking at how many 1kg give us, I’m rethinking where we will put the 2kg of German Butterball potatoes. My thought had been to put them where the squash were planted last year, but that’s a huge space. I’d basically just have one row of potatoes. So now I’m thinking we might use one of the low raised beds, instead, where the soil should be softer.
We really need to think about increasing the acidity of our soil. It is very alkaline, and pretty much everything we are growing needs soil that is at least a little acidic. We should pick up a bale or two of peat, but that has a very minor and slow effect on acidification. A lot of the usual soil amendments, like adding compost, actually increases the alkalinity, which is the last thing we need. I ended up running errands in the small city yesterday and was looking for Sulphur, but saw nothing. We do have a box of fertilizer we found when cleaning out the old kitchen years ago that is for acidifying the soil; it’s meant for azaleas, but should work for other things, too. If it’s still good. Does water soluble Miracle Gro have an expiry date? I have no idea how old this stuff is. The box was opened but, based on how full it looks, it may only have been used once!
Since today was an indoor kind of day, I started pre-germinated some winter squash.
We’re at just under 7 weeks before last frost, which I hope is enough time for these. Not knowing what varieties are in this mix means we will have different days to maturity among them. I’m still hoping to be able to start some other varieties of winter squash as well – ones we actually know what they are! I’m just not planning to grow entire rows of each. With pre-germinating the seeds, I can start just a few of each and not have to be as concerned about germination rates like when they’re sown into pots or pellets.
I’ll need more pots, though.
Among the last seeds I want to start indoors, by about 3 weeks before last frost, are several types of melons.
Last year, we started so many squash and melon seeds, then had entire trays where nothing germinated. A real waste. I think we’re going to have a much better success rate using the pre-germination method. It should be interesting to see how much of a difference it makes, as time goes by.
The next few days are supposed to continue to be colder and wet, with possible snow, with Friday having a high at, or just below, freezing (it’s Tuesday as I write this). By Sunday, we’re supposed to be back up to the double digits (Celsius), but our overnight lows will be staying close to freezing through most of May. We don’t expect to be direct seeding anything until June, but there are quite a few cold tolerant things we’ll be able to direct sow once the current cold snap is done.
May will be our month for building more raised beds, and harvesting more dead trees to build with.
There is so much that needs to be done!
Weather willing, we’ll have more prepared garden spaces than we had last year, but I’m not sure we’ll reclaim enough to match what we were growing in – well, trying to! – the year before.
Well, it finally got done! At about 1am, the video I meant to post yesterday was finally uploaded to YouTube, which then was going to take another hour to process it, in three different quality options. I waited until the lowest quality one was done, so I could select a thumbnail, then went to bed!
The question is, was it worth it?
I’ve watched the video myself, selecting the highest quality option, but I really can’t see much of a different.
Here is the video in question.
Could I ask a huge favour?
Could you please watch this video on YouTube, selecting the highest quality option, then compare it to this one…
… also on highest quality option?
Then let me know in the comments how you watched it, and if you could see any difference in quality or play.
I’m using my new desktop to watch these, and the YouTube settings for both allow me to watch them at 2160p/4K.
When exporting the older video in my software, I used the default “good” quality setting. There is little difference in file size with either “good” or “high” options, so it should not have taken so very long to upload. I don’t know if it was an issue with our internet, or with YouTube itself. Or both. I’ve had this happen before where the upload took so long. it was basically stopped. I gave up and started over again. The problem with doing that is, no matter how far along the upload was, trying again starts at the beginning, not from where you left off. In that case, when I tried it again, it uploaded much faster and without any problems the second time around. I seriously considered doing that again with this one, and probably should have.
First, thank you for the kind words I received after my last post yesterday. I’m happy to say I did actually get sleep, and am in much less pain today. I’m going to take it easy for a day or two, so I don’t have a relapse, but I did take the last step in preparing the bed I’ve been working on.
I got a couple of hoses set up to give it a soak and grabbed the first nozzle I found.
It promptly broke. The threaded portion cracked right off!
I couldn’t find the new nozzle we got last year, but I did find another older one (these were nozzles we found when we moved here, and they outlived others I’d bought new!) and that one got the job done.
I took all the plastic off again. There was condensation built up under it, as we had a touch of rain last night, but the soil beneath was still dry. I spent about 20 minutes going back and forth, giving it a deep watering. With the melting snow and water actually being absorbed by the soil instead of washing away, I know there is moisture close to the surface, so the amount of watering I did should be enough.
I ran out of ground staples while putting the plastic back, so I had to find weights for the last section.
The bricks being used to retain the soil is temporary. We will be gathering materials for something more permanent. I’m thinking something about 3 times the current height with the bricks. When that’s done, we’ll take the extra time to make sure everything is in a nice, straight line. In the process, we’ll replace the boards that are holding the soil from falling through the chain link fence with something better. The path itself will eventually have bricks or something, so it’s not to muddy.
A path we will make sure doesn’t get buried like those sidewalk block chunks I’ve been finding!
Looking at the forecast, I’m thinking the earliest we can plant the Purple Caribe potatoes in here will probably be next weekend. We’ve got a couple of warm days, then the temperatures are supposed to drop to freezing, then take a few more days to warm back up to double digits (Celsius).
I’m already feeling time slip away from me. Half of April is almost gone already!
I was able to get a few things done outside today, and I am so happy!
While waiting for the septic guy to arrive and replace the pill switch in our tank (yay! That’s done!), I took the time to remove the mulch in the old kitchen garden beds. At this point, the mulch is insulating the soil from the warmth instead of the cold, so it needs to come off.
There is garlic planted in the tiny raised bed with its own cover, the long and narrow bed against the retaining wall, the short part of the L shaped wattle weave bed, and down the centre of the rectangular bed in the middle.
In front of the tiny raised bed is some walking onions. I’d planted bulbils for last year, but basically just left them be. They produced new bulbils and now both the onions from last year, and their bulbils, are starting to send out new shoots! I could plant the new bulbils somewhere, but the whole point of walking onions is that they plant themselves.
While uncovering the long section of the wattle weave bed, I found what looks like surviving thyme and strawberries! I wasn’t sure if they’d make it through the winter. It should be interesting to see if the chamomile self seeded or not.
These had a grass clipping mulch, which has just been set aside for now. We’ll use it again, after the ground is thawed an as we are able to plant things.
By the time this was done, it was coming up on 2pm, which is when the post office opens for the afternoon, so I headed out. Not only did I get the packages I was expecting, but the missing pieces from the shelf I got to make into a multilevel cat bed came in. A job for tonight will be to take care of that.
When I got home, the septic guy was here, so I stayed around the area as he went in and out from the tank to the basement, so make sure no cats got too curious about the open tank! That gave me the opportunity to move the mulch over the saffron crocuses we planted in the fall, and I got a real surprise, there!
They had already sprouted – and look how long those leaves are! This mulch should have been removed awhile ago. Hopefully, the shock of being exposed to sunlight won’t set them back too much. I’m really surprised they were already growing, considering the soil under the mulch is still quite frozen! These are supposed to be hardy only to zone 4, but our mild winter seems to have been excellent for them. So far, it looks like one corm didn’t make it, but now that it’s uncovered it might still show up.
After the septic guy was done and headed out, I was able to keep working on the bed by the chain link fence. I ended up finding another buried piece of sidewalk block! I was able to get the entire bed reworked and somewhat weeded, then replaced the brick border to make the narrower bed. I was able to pull out quite a few weed roots, but not everything, so when it was done, I covered the entire surface of the bed with clear plastic from bags we normally use for our recycling. Because the bed is now so narrow, I cut the bags along the sides to make long pieces. It took 4 of them to cover the bed, to solarize them. Something else I learned from Gardening in Canada that I want to try.
The idea is the direct contact plastic will basically cook those roots. Hopefully, this won’t take too long. Once I can remove the plastic, I want to plant some of these…
I’ve decided I will plant the Purple Caribe potatoes in this bed. I won’t be able to hill them, but if I plant them deep enough – something that can actually be done in this bed – I won’t need to.
Oh! I’m just watching that video again and she says the soil should be deep watered first. I haven’t got any hoses set up, since we still dip below freezing some nights. It’s too late in the day to do that now, so I’ll get the water turned on from the basement and set up a hose in the morning.
We’ve got a few more warm days, then in the middle of next week we are supposed to get a bit chilly with some rain and possibly some snow. By next Sunday, we should start getting highs in the double digits (Celsius) again, and stay there.
I wasn’t planning on chitting the potatoes but, after looking at the forecast, I think we can go ahead and do that, while waiting for better conditions to plant them in. That will give us time to prepare the area we want to plant the German Butterball potatoes, and even do some solarizing there, too.
The first seedling to break soil surface was a drum gourd – one of the two in the middle pot – but then a Crespo Squash, on the right, burst through and exploded out of the soil. It seems like every time I look at the pots, there’s more visible growth.
What I’m really happy about is that not one of the seedlings emerged with the outer shell of the seed stuck on the leaves. Last year, there was more than a few times that I had to very carefully remove the shell, because the seed leaves were being killed off. As careful as I was, sometimes pieces of the leaves would break off, because the shells were so tightly encasing them.
I really like this pre-germinating technique!
The heat mat will need to be unplugged very soon. I won’t move them off right away, as I need to arrange space. I won’t need it until I start more seeds.
This weekend will be 7 weeks before our last average frost date. I will go through some of my seeds to see what I want to start first. The seeds we have left are pretty much all supposed to be started 3-4 weeks before last frost, but if I started all the ones I want to, I’ll run out of space in no time at all – and I will have way too many things that need to be transplanted, all at once. So I plan to stagger them.
I might even start some of these.
Baked Potato SquashMashed Potato squash
I had to go to town today and finally picked up the mail. There were probably in and waiting for a while. Since we have so many varieties of winter squash seeds, we will probably start just a couple of seeds of each. At this point, we’re still after trying out different types to see what we like the most, and will then probably drop it down to one or two varieties.
Who am I kidding. We’ll probably be constantly trying new ones! Just maybe not quite so many different types, all at the same time.
That’s one thing about having the luxury of space like we do. We can spare some to try growing new things we don’t even know if we’ll like, yet.
It’s been a while since we could get to the bed with the carrots in it. Previously, we had no issues harvesting them, and the bed did have a nice thick layer of mulch.
One of the first things I did was detach the arched cover from the box cover in the centre, and switch it to the bed on the left. This way, we could put the cover on the carrot bed onto the box frame, making it much easier to attach the plastic.
The painter’s cover sheets I got are 12’x8′. My daughter and I folded them in half to make them 12’x4′. Once we had the plastic over the arched cover, she went to start removing the mulch for me while I attached the plastic to the frame. This is temporary, so I just stapled it down. The staples didn’t want to go in all the way, though, so I had to go around and hammer them in.
I can see wind is going to be a problem with the plastic.
As for the carrots, I had a bin all ready to collect the last of them, but it was not to be. Not only was the soil frozen solid, so was a lot of the mulch! My daughter got off as much as she could, then we put the cover, now with plastic over it, back on the bed.
We then took the other arched cover and set it back on the box cover. The mesh on this one is temporary. The chicken wire I used is too bendy and easily misshapen, so it will be replaced with stronger welded wire or something, later on. For now, though, it’s enough to hold some plastic. It went faster this time, as I went around stapling the plastic down, and my daughter followed with a hammer, tacking the staples down so the were actually holding the plastic in place. Very frustrating.
The second arched cover’s wire is a bit smaller than the first one we did, so there was more excess plastic to tuck under at the ends, and a bit more on the sides. This one went onto the bed next to the compost ring, which still has quite a bit of snow on it. It also did not get weeded or reworked as thoroughly as the one in the middle, before things got too cold.
So now we have two beds with plastic “greenhouse” covers on them. We’ll need to check on the carrot bed regularly over the next few days. As the ice in the mulch thaws, we’ll remove more of it, until the soil itself can finally start thawing out – and we can finally harvest those carrots!
Note for future reference. If we use this method to store carrots again, we need to either use a lot more mulch, or have it covered in plastic like this – or both!
It’s 10C/50F right now, making for a gorgeous day to work outside.
This is what it was like, a year ago today!
We were having to dig ourselves out and were still expecting a blizzard.
It’s not at all unusual to have at least one last blizzard in April. We aren’t expecting anything but warm days and mostly sunny skies for the rest of April, this year. In fact, if the long range forecast is at all accurate (ha!), May will be chillier than April.
Gosh is feels good to be able to work outside right now! Yes, I know, we need more snow, and we’re expected to have drought again this summer, but I will enjoy what I can, when I can!
So I went through my seed bin again – main bin, not just the smaller bins organized by “direct sow” or “start indoors” – and found my package of Uzbek Golden Carrots from last year. I really liked these carrots, so I want to plant more this year. I also found my leftover Napoli carrots. Those are pelleted seeds, so no need to do anything with those, but after how well it worked out with our Naval carrots last year, I wanted to make seed tape with the Uzbek Golden Carrots. I also found some other things, but more on that later.
The package still had quite a lot of seeds in it. We planted only one row, about 14′-15′ long, last year, so we didn’t use much.
Like last year, I used strips of toilet paper the length of the end of our dining table, split into single ply. I pre folded the toilet paper, lengthwise, to make it easier later on. A flour and water paste was used as the “glue”, and I used a bamboo chopstick to apply the paste with the thick end, and to pick up the seeds with the narrow end. Once the seeds were in place, the toilet paper strip was folded over, pressed into the flour paste, then set aside to start drying while the next batch was done.
After a while, the stack of drying strips was getting rather thick. There were still plenty of seeds when I stopped, so I took another look at the package.
A minimum of 800 seeds! Wow!
Each strip has 20 seeds in it (a few got pairs of seeds stuck together, but I’m counting those as one). I counted the strips, and had another 20.
I think 400 seeds will be enough! I’d estimate there’s still close to 300 seeds left in the package.
The seed tape is now draped around the cat free zone in the living room to finish drying, before they get rolled up and stored until it’s time to plant.
As for the other stuff I found…
I confirmed that I do have a few Crespo squash seeds left. I really want to grow those, as they are supposed to be quite delicious. I got the seeds from Baker Creek, but they don’t seem to carry them anymore, so I want to be able to save my own seeds. I also am thinking of trying the African Drum gourds again. Last year, I had issues with the gourd seedlings and replanted a few times, to the point I started getting the pots mixed up. By the time the survivors were transplanted and started producing fruit, we discovered none of them were drum gourds! Hopefully, I’ll have better luck this year.
I also was surprised to find I still had luffa seeds! Last year, they also had issues and got replanted a couple of times, but it’s also the first year we actually had a luffa develop. So I think I will try those again, this year. Being in the old kitchen garden was so much better for it compared to our previous attempts, so I will take that into consideration when it comes time to transplant them. It’ll be the same thing with the Drum gourds and Crespo squash. I’ll need to really think about where they need to be planted, as much to protect them from the deer as anything else. The first year we grew Crespo squash, they did fantastic, until then got eaten by deer and groundhogs three times before we could get them sufficiently protected! They recovered very well and started developing fruit like crazy, but there just wasn’t enough growing season left for them. Last year, we had one develop to about the size of a smallish pumpkin, but I think their location got too much sun, and the plants got baked.
Anyhow.
I will try starting the three of them within the next couple of weeks. I still have some larger peat pots left from last year, so they’ll go straight into there. Hopefully, that will mean there will be no potting up needed. The pots didn’t break down after transplanting the Crespo squash, like they were supposed to, but they can be broken up without disturbing the roots at transplant time. The main thing will be to keep the pots moist until then. Otherwise, they dry out and suck the moisture out of the seed starting mix!
I’m still waffling about whether or not I will try growing corn again this year. We have some short season varieties, but I don’t know that we’ll have enough space prepared for them. They are not a priority, compared to some of the other things we want to grow this year. A lot will hinge on being able to get those new beds built in time for planting. We’ll be growing potatoes where we grew winter squash last year, so we’ll be needing space for the squash we want to grow this year, and I hope to grow quite a bit of both winter and summer squash. We’ve got a melon mix this year, too.
Well, we’ll see how it works out when the time comes. For all the plans we’ve made, I’ve found it’s awfully easy for things to side swipe them!
Still, I’m happy to at least have the seed tape done and ready for planting, once the ground is thawed out enough. Carrots, at least, can be planted before last frost, and I can hardly wait!
The Re-Farmer 