October update

Well it's been an insanely busy month, and we were called away for a family emergency for the first half of october. By the time we got back, the first snows had already fallen! Ack!, now we're looking at finishing the fencing and moving the llama shed and doing a number of maintenance repairs to the shop and the lean-to in the colder weather. It was sleeting yesterday for awhile and too miserable to even think about going out to work in it, plus we were babysitting so just got stuff done in the house.

Today is another day though and we should get a good amount of work done. Poppy, one of our rabbit does had a litter on the wire on friday morning, we saved one kit of the 4, but by the time we got home from work/school at end of day, the baby was nowhere to be found in the nest and cage. Presumably this means Poppy ate the baby, or it spontaneously teleported somewhere. Sunny is due to kindle any time now and I hope it goes better!

Here's some pics of the new critters, and it's outside to get work done for the rest of the day!



Pony Club Activities
Pony Club Activities

Extremely busy day, now what to do with Hera?

Well today we picked up our 5 month old Nubian Lamancha cross dairy goat Aega. Sweet thing she is being coloured beige and white and has a sweet temperament. I got her home and took her to meet the others in our little flock. They were quite interested in her, though Moose the goat butted her a couplle times when she got too noisy. They look like it may take a few days to get her used to them and vice versa before they will accept her into the flock.

So we left her in the field with them while I took Davin to his first Pony Club session where he learned some groundwork with the ponies and got to ride bareback for a bit with me leading the pony. He was scared up on the pony at first, and likely none too comfortable as he had gotten "the runs" just before we arrived there so he spent the first 20 minutes of class in the bathroom. Unfortunately he didn't make it to the bathroom in time and got his underwear dirty so he had to do the class with just his jogging pants on. But he was a trooper and quickly forgot his crampy problem once started working with the ponies.

I was very impressed with how well he listened to the instructor and he followed the directions really well for his first time working with an animal his own size. He was of course at the end of the night really wanting to get back on and ride some more as one of the little girls his age there vaulted onto her horse from the ground right in front of him. She really impressed him with that power move and he wanted to immediately try it out, but the sun was going down and we had run out of time, so next week it is.

When we got home, it didn't take us long to realise all hell had broken loose. In fact a complete disaster. I heard Aega bleat frantically from the front of the house outside the goat field which was wrong. She had gotten out somehow? So I went and got her and then Darren realised something was running around in our sheep field. It only took a minute to see that it was Hera. It was past full dark at this time which made it much harder to figure out what was going on. We caught Hera and her head was bloody. We expected the worst that all the flock was dead or injured at that point.

We caught Hera and locked her in a bathroom with Zipper and started to piece together what had occurred. I was really surprised that Hera sat when Darren demanded she sit so I could catch up to her and clip a lead onto her. We figure that Hera had been so excited with the new noise of the baby goat bleating for its mother that she vaulted herself up onto the kitchen cupboards and forced her way through the screen and partially open kitchen window. At that point she hunted the animals. The baby Aega got away, but both Gordi and Meat had blood on them. Meat's throat was all bloody and it looked like Hera had a grip on his windpipe. He had some lacerations there but seemed ok despite it. Gordi had some lacerations on one of his front legs, and Neither Moose nor Spotty had any damage. I think Moose the goat had attacked Hera back since Hera's face was bloody and she had a gouge by her eye.

Lexie on the other hand stayed in the house the whole time and didn't follow Hera out to cause chaos. What a good girl! I'm not sure what we are going to do with Hera but she has lost her running off leash privileges forever now. The dog pen has now become a top priority to finish over the weekend. I briefly thought about giving Hera away but then decided it would make Lexie very upset to lose her buddy, so some strict training is in order.

For the night now, we have bedded Aega down in the pen I brought her home in on the truck, in the shop with the other critters. At leat she will be safe in there and we can try her tomorrow in the field with the flock again. Hope she has a more peaceful less scary end to her evening now. The rest of the flock is now bedded down in their favorite trees in the corner so all is back to normal now. It's been a long day now, so pics will have to come tomorrow.

Latest Pictures of the Critters

The first pics are small as I just grabbed them off my facebook album. I'll have to download them off the blackberry in their full resolution later.

Bunnies & Chickens & Llamas Oh My!

Well this month has certainly gotten really interesting all of a sudden. The cause/catalyst would be my discovery of the local Edmonton Kijiji website. I have finally found the Flemish Giant doe rabbits plus their new litters I was looking for and got 2 of them along with a New Zealand buck to start my breeding stock out. So we acquired 17 rabbits all in one day. We were smart and also bought their hutches which made getting them home -so- much easier. The baby rabbits are at 5 weeks old now and are going to be weaned this week. We have just re-bred the does over the weekend so can expect new litters within about 32 days.

The very same day we got the rabbits being a mere week after we got the sheep, we also picked up 6 Red Sussex pullets that were about 13 or 14 weeks old so we can get eggs from them. Our truck was completely full up on that daytrip coming back and riding in it felt an awful lot like those old european farm wagons going to market you would hear stories about. Or at least I've heard stories about them...somewhere or other...

That being said I got lucky and found another dozen hens plus a rooster later in the week too. The 2nd batch of hens are all over a year old and creeping up to their 2nd year. So they are laying eggs now for us while we await the pullets to start laying. I haven't yet decided how many of the 2nd batch of hens to butcher and how many to keep since I only want about a dozen birds over the winter. So, we must determine which of the older hens are the best layers and the worst goto the stew pot!

We've also found ourselves our first young dairy goat and will be picking her up tomorrow. It may very well be that we'll add a 2nd one next year after we see how well we deal with the initial experience of getting the goat milk and processing it frequently into cheese, butter, buttermilk, kefir, ice cream, yogurt etc. The by-product of course will be that we'll have goat meat yearly now from the kids in the fall.

Depending on how it goes with the sheep over the winter, we may either get a breeding pair of hair sheep or we'll just buy weaned sheep every year and fatten them up for the fall. Piglets are in the plan for next year as well and we'll start with just getting a couple and raising them up to butcher weight, then we can trot them across the street for a visit to their final live destination before they make it into our freezer. I got to see some full grown hogs at the place we bought our sheep from, and I hadn't realised how large these animals grow when mature!

And then, there's Llamas. We may be getting several llamas to add to our mixed flock of critters. the hope is that they will be good livestock guardians and keep out the coyotes. At the very least, at shearing time every spring we may get enough wool from the llamas to make some rugs for the farm. That would be pretty sweet.

This next year is going to be a whole new experience with fitting the animals into the schedule, and starting winter herbs and veggies shortly too. I hope to have ripe tomatoes by January growing in my plant room in the house. I'm determined to have some lettuces and maybe some cukes so I can have my own home-grown greek salads complete with feta cheese we've also made.

Definitely there's alot of items on our list of projects we've now got a checkmark by vs last year when we had just moved onto the farm! Of course the list is long and will take a number of years more to accomplish. Even so, what we've done so far has completely changed the feel of the farm from just a place where there's lots of ideas into a fully producing farm that is beginning to greatly improve our budget through accomplishing a much higher level of self-reliance and sustainability.

Learning Curve = Straight Up, and so are the Fence Posts

We started fencing parts of the dog's enclosure this evening. We got the first part done except for building a gate which will happen this week. this part will be where the dog house will go, and once it's done we'll fence in the larger part of their enclosure so they can have an area to be off-leash without fear of them eating the other farm animals! Here are some pics of how we tensioned the fence wire using the hitch on my truck and materials we had lying around. It worked not too badly, but was likely not the safest way to do it even if it is the cheapest! Good thing Darren has made fences before since I've had zero experience doing it until today.

Last Night's 90 km/h Winds

Last night's storm tore a chunk of wall off our shop, much to our surprise:



And back to normal after Darren nailed the missing pieces back on:

Why we took a break for the spring and summer

This spring we had a bit of an accident here at the farm caused by our boy and another boy who was over for the weekend. It unfortunately involved some books of matches and playing with them. Long story short, they set ablaze about 2000 sq ft of the fields next to the house and into the neighbour's field too. The flames came within 2 inches of the house and would've taken the house had we not been fighting the fire with buckets and the garden hose and the fire dept. make a very speedy appearance on that windy day. End result was no one hurt, a few trees lost, some very angry parents of children involved, and a complete disruption of our workflow.

Aside from the kids learning their lesson, it brought to light some things we should do at the farm to protect it from threat of fire in the future. We have since reworked our design for water onsite, involving both running more lines to various places on the property, installing more taps around the outside of the house, installing rainwater catchment systems into pressurised tanks, etc. It will take us awhile to build for sure, but will be well worth it! Here are some pics of the aftermath. All of the plants grew back pretty well except for the one tree which had all it's needles burned off.

A Developing Hunter or at least a Sheep Stake-out

Just looked out the window, and caught sight of Davin in the yard. It seems he has taken yesterday's metal cage we used to transport the sheep, turned it on its side, put a plastic bin in there to hide behind, and one of the lawn chairs. He is now currently sitting in his little sheep-blind spying on the sheep!!! ROFLMAO!!!

Fall Projects are Rolling!

We have 4 new additions to the farm and more coming in the next weeks! We've acquired 3 sheep (destined for my freezer and dinner table) and a goat as of yesterday. It was an adventure getting them home since we don't have a stock trailer, but one trip to the junkyard did the trick. We found some metal mesh in the form of one of those cubes that holds the square water tanks we see alot around here. It was in 2 pieces so we chained it into the back of the truck and drove out to pickup the animals. Because of the shape of the mesh and where the attach points are in my truck, we had to lift the animals into the truck. We're really feeling it today as 250 lbs of squirming sheep is not even remotely easy to wrestle into a truck even with 3 adults lifting. Here are some pics of the critters in the truck:






On the way home, the goat slipped out of his halter and decided to lie down for a more comfortable trip as did the smallest sheep though he was still in his halter. As we didn't have store-bought halters, I had to make some out of some rope we had lying around. They worked well except I didn't get the one on the goat tight enough or I should've put an extra loop around his horns, since he is obviously smart enough to escape from it. Thankfully none of the animals attempted to jump out of the truck on the way home.

It took awhile to get a non-slip ramp built when we arrived home, an then twice the time to untie all the cam straps that were holding the mesh on top of the cage in the truck, which was merely there to discourage them from jumping. We took out the metal caging and then untied each animal in turn from the cross tie I had setup in the truck. One at a time we walked each down the ramp (which was our atv ramps plus a 4x8 sheet of plywood and carpet on top of it) and then showed each sheep the water trough before removing the halter.



It was during the unloading of the 3rd sheep Darren got stung by 2 wasps. I guess he won't be wearing the really bright yellow shirt out in the yard again!! Here's some pics of heading to the trough, blurry since my blackberry doesn't do a great job of motion shots:







Once we had the animals unloaded, we got hit with a nasty thunderstorm complete with lightning and 90 km/h winds. That wasn't the sort of welcome we had in mind for the animals, but they did ok and took shelter in our trees. I checked on them again later once the storm had passed and we still had all 4 accounted for and doing fine. Checking this morning we still have all four of them happy. I think they drank from the water trough, or it's slowly leaking I'm not sure so we'll be replacing the plug in the bottom if it drains faster than it should.





It looks like next weekend we are getting the rabbits we've been waiting for too, as I found someone selling the exact breeds we want which are a New Zealand buck and Flemish Giant does. We're building the cages this week to house them and should be getting underway with starting to breed fryers for our freezer within a week of their arrival! We are also waiting on some laying hens too and will also build a chicken tractor this week to house them. Looks like we'll shortly have all our protein needs accounted for, at least for the winter!

testing out my new c

testing out my new connections using cloud apps, this update from gtalk thru hellotxt

New cattle dog Nyx added to the household Collie-Brigade!

We were driving around last week looking for something to do and I was reading the local newspaper and saw an ad for 2 month old Blue Heeler/Black Lab puppies free to good homes. Now having just a week earlier having said no to another Border Collie-Rottweiler mix from the same place we got Zipper, I really only wanted to see what the puppies looked like since we now had 3 dogs in the house.

We found our way to the farm and got a look at the puppies parents, both of whom are working cattle dogs and looked to be quite good at their jobs. I hadn't seen the puppies yet and this got me thinking that they could be really good dogs. I happened to have stopped at home and grabbed a puppy leash and seat belt harness just in case of course. When we got into the yard, all the puppies were outside but they all but 1 jumped underneath the sheds and hid. I grabbed the one who was curious enough and had stayed out, and had Darren fish out the next nearest one from under the shed. OMG they were so cute! and I really should know better than to pick up a puppy. She looked like one of the best of the litter and didn't freak out too much being handled and looked at. We compared her to the other one we'd grabbed and decided she was the better of the two. So I snapped on the seat belt harness and leash and put her in the truck. Done Deal!

Our hope is that this puppy turns out to be a much better cattle dog than our shepherd husky cross Hera who doesn't get why our collies run around all the time herding things. The new puppy has been named Nyx, and once she got over being taken away from her litter mates, she started exhibiting great curiosity and boldness and began to follow us around trying to herd us. Perfect! I think she'll turn out really well. Here's some pix of her:

1st Farmers Market of the Season May 8th

So the first Warburg Farmers Market session of the season is coming up on May 8th a mere 2 weeks away! I plan to be there with a variety of items to sell. The list so far looks like this:

Home Roasted Coffee Beans
Aboussafy Signature Chocolate Chip Cookies - Worth their weight in gold we've seen!
Aboussafy Signature Marshmallow Treats - The kind Aunt Gladys used to make!
Aboussafy Signature Butter Tart Squares
Husband Convenience Baking/Cooking Mixes
Hand-Turned Pens
and Darren's Computer Skills!

and potentially some audio cd's of our first podcast and music we have written as part of our music group Celtic Cadence Bards, time depending!

The chocolate chip cookies are likely to be best-sellers considering how many requests we get to make them. Mom even has had requests to send them in parcels to far off locales, and has used them inadvertently for bartering and getting deep discounts on things she purchased because she gave them cookies!

We're making progress on the grounds of the farm too. Today we got the big gas furnace in the shop working again! It was far easier than we thought, and we are relieved it doesn't need major repairs (unlike my truck which we think needs a new engine pretty darn quick. we just replaced the transmission too, argh!).

In the next week, we are digging a couple hundred fence post holes and putting up the new dog pen and goat pen, and all the cross-fencing we're going to need this year. I have to arrange getting the old llama shed behind the house moved to the goat pen so we can get ready for the goats to come. That'll be interesting since it surely needs a tractor to drag it there, it's too heavy for my truck.

I was looking at the plot of land out back of the house where my kitchen garden will be and began clearing a bunch of the ground. It was easier than I thought and I was going strong until the sky began to sleet on me! I waited through 2 snowstorms this morning before it was decent enough to go outside too. As they say, in Alberta if you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes!

I can't wait to get my plants in the ground this season and see how they do. I plan to use the space we have as creatively as possible while trying to use methods to keep the weeds down. I'll be planting all along our east-west fence lines items that need trellising like the beans and peas and cukes. This will save our big strong trellises for squashes, tomatoes and other things. I'm going to make some bean teepees this year just for fun and looks. I'm also going to plant a large number of perennial flowers in strategic locations around the place to attract honeybees (despite my deathly allergies to them) to help pollinate all the veggies.

As the weather gets warmer, we are getting more excited to really pick up the pace and getting rolling! We'll be moving our blog to the new website hopefully this week or next depending on how quick i can build it, so stay tuned for that too!

List of things we are growing this year - part 1

Here is the list of plants we are growing this year. Anything not labelled specifically is generally being grown as an annual. There is more to come with this list as we are currently planning what permanent items are going onto the land. For fruit trees and such, we hope to purchase 2-3 year old stock that is already hardened off, but in some cases we'll have to get seed or seedlings depending. We are seriously looking at some of the hardy miniature kiwi varieties that can survive down to around -35C.

TechCowboys Farm 2009 Growing Season List

Asparagus Perennial Vegetable
Bean Asian Yard Long Orient Wonder
Bean Pea Bean
Beans Scarlet Runner Emperor
Bean Soybean Black Jet
Bean Tongue of Fire
Cauliflower Early Snowball
Celery Green Utah
Cucumber Armenian
Cucumber Lemon
Cucumber Marketmore
Cucumber Morden Early
Cucumber National Pickling
Cucumber Pioneer Pickling
Cucumber White Wonder
Fruit Chichiquelite Huckleberry Perennial Fruit
Fruit Citron Red Seeded
Fruit Garden Huckleberry Perennial Fruit
Fruit Giant Cape Gooseberry
Fruit Grape Valiant Perennial Fruit
Fruit Groundcherries
Fruit Hardy Kiwi Perennial Fruit
Fruit Litchi Tomato or Morelle De Balbis
Fruit Naranjilla
Fruit Orange Master Pomegranate Perennial Fruit
Fruit Pepino Melon
Fruit Purple Kiwi Perennial Fruit
Fruit Saskatoon Berry Perennial Fruit
Fruit Strawberry Patio Temptation Perennial Fruit
Fruit Strawberry Red Wonder Wild Perennial Fruit
Fruit Strawberry Yellow Wonder Wild Perennial Fruit
Fruit White Currant Perennial Fruit
Fruit Wonderberry Perennial Fruit
Grain Amaranth Hopi Red Dye
Grain Asian Amaranth Edible White Leaf
Green Asian Tsai-Hsin
Green Cabbage Chinese Tenderheart
Green Cabbage Early Copenhagen Market
Green Chard Five Colour Silverbeet
Green Chinese Cabbage Pok Choy
Green Endive Full Heart Batavian
Green Kale Chinese Green Lance
Green Lettuce Counter
Green Lettuce Romaine
Green Lettuce Salad Mix
Green Lettuce Tennis Ball
Green Pak Choi Tah Tsai
Green Strawberry Spinach
Green Swiss Chard Bright Lights
Herb Basil Cinnamon Annual Herb
Herb Borage Annual Herb
Herb Lovage Perrenial herb
Herb Oregano Perrenial herb
Herb Spearmint Perrenial herb
Herb Stevia Perennial herb
Herb Summer Savory Annual Herb
Herb Sweet Marjoram Perennial herb
Herb Tarragon Perennial herb
Melon Cantaloupe
Melon Cream of Saskatchewan
Melon Oka
Melon Sugar Baby
Pea Golden Sweet Edible Podded
Pea Homesteader
Pea Spanish Skyscraper
Pepper Blushing Beauty F1
Pepper Cayenne
Pepper Jimmy Nardello Sweet Italian
Pepper King of the North
Pepper Lemon Drop
Pepper Little Blue
Pepper Super Hot Chili F1
Pepper Tequila Sunrise
Pumpkin Small Sugar
Pumpkin Kakai
Pumpkin Rouge Vif d'Etampes
Radish Asian Watermelon
Radish Black Spanish
Radish China White
Radish Plum Purple
Root veg Asian Burdock Takinogawa Biennial Vegetable
Root veg Beet Detroit Dark Red
Root veg Carrot Amarillo
Root veg Carrot Atomic Red
Root veg Carrot Dragon
Root veg Carrot Oxheart
Root veg Kohl Rabi Early White Vienna
Root veg Parsnip Hollow Crown
Squash Anna Swartz Hubbard
Squash Buttercup
Squash Butternut
Squash Gourd Bird's Nest
Squash Galeux d'Eysines
Squash Loofa
Squash Red Kuri
Squash Zucchini Golden
Squash Zucchini Tatume Climbing
Sunflower large seeded tall
Tomato Ball Beefsteak Indeterminate red
Tomato Black Cherry Indeterminate black
Tomato Black Zebra Determinate black
Tomato Brandywine Red Indeterminate red
Tomato Bush Beefsteak Determinate red
Tomato Bush Early Girl Determinate red
Tomato Earl of Edgecombe Indeterminate orange
Tomato Early Girl Hybrid Indeterminate red
Tomato Gartenperle Determinate red
Tomato Goldie boy Determinate orange
Tomato Great White Indeterminate white
Tomato Green Zebra Indeterminate green
Tomato Japanese Trifele Black Indeterminate black
Tomato Kellog's Breakfast Indeterminate yellow
Tomato Manitoba Determinate red
Tomato Purple Prince Indeterminate black
Tomato Rainbow Blend Indeterminate red
Tomato Red Belly Indeterminate yellow red
Tomato Roma VF Determinate red
Tomato Ropreco Paste Determinate red
Tomato Starfire Improved Determinate red
Tomato Sub Arctic Plenty Determinate red
Tomato Sweet 100 hybrid Indeterminate red
Tomato Sweet Cherry Hybrid Indeterminate red
Tomato Tiny Tim Determinate red
Tomato Tumbler F1 Hybrid Determinate red
Tomato White Currant Determinate white
Tomato White Queen Indeterminate white
Tomato Yellow Pearshaped Indeterminate yellow

A New Year a New Bunny! Welcome Bender!

The era of bunnies has now dawned at our farm and the first bunny has arrived. This new bunny is Davin's 4H project this year. I found a bunny that was free to good home, and so Bender (named by Davin after watching 2 seasons of Futurama) has moved in as of yesterday. For now, he will be an indoor bunny since it's been really cold here temps from -20C through to lower than -30C. We are building up the leanto at the back of the house and finishing its insulating and adding a partition wll and door to complete the first part of the rabbitry. We will temporarily house it in the lean-to until we build a really nice rabbit house later on. Bender is a Netherland breed of rabbit, male and un-neutered and about a year old. He was part of a rescued litter taken in after the parents were eaten by coyotes. Here are several pictures of Bender in his new hutch:





Also soon to arrive are some meat rabbits. We have finally found a couple sources for meat rabbits in Alberta and are going to ge a buck and 2 does to start with. With some good planning and a little luck, we should have a good supply of rabbit meat for our freezer later in the year. From the research I've already done, it seems that it will be about 17 weeks from a doe being bred, we could have market-sized fryers ready for the freezer. That should put our first time for butchering/processing sometime in May. That's not too bad of a time frame at all. Depending on the breed we get, we could expect an average of about 3 pounds of meat per rabbit and I'd say an average of 7 rabbit per litter, so 21 lbs of meat average per litter. With 2 does breeding, if we attained the full 5 litters per year @ 80 total kits, that would be 240 lbs of rabbit meat in a year.

On the vegetation front, I have begun compiling my list of things to grow for this season and realised today that I need to get planting into the seed trays this week for flowers and veg that need 10-12 weeks before last frost. I plan to build poly tunnels and use coldframes this season to extend our season as much as possible and hope to set my planting out date for the first week of April. For Alberta, that's early, so the polytunnel(s) are going to need to be heated. I think I'll be getting my planting gear organised tonight!

Sustainable & Convenient Living: Making your own convenience mixes

This post is the first in an ongoing stream I'll be doing on sustainable living combined with making household life more convenient & inexpensive. A big part of our moving to the farm is to evolve our family's way of life into a form that works with our busyness and keeps costs down as well as trying to live in ways that are sustainable long term, no matter what sustainable turns out to be in each instance.

The first thing I will have a look at is BBQ Sauce. My favorite sauce is Bull's Eye, but the bottles are small and they cost around $5 a bottle. Great profit margin for the manufacturer, not so much for my pocketbook. I could easily go through a bottle in a week or two. So I found a copycat recipe that tastes close enough to the original rather than go without enough sauce.

I discovered that with a large enough pot, it's -really- easy to make the sauce. The steps are really basic: 1. Measure ingredients into pot. 2. Stir till thoroughly mixed. 3. Heat till simmering, and cook till desired thickness is reached, stirring occasionally. (I'll post the actual recipe once I retrieve it from home.) The ingredients on the list are all readily available, and you can use homemade tomato paste for it. I'll cost out the recipe soon too and post the comparison results here! I added some hot peppers that we grew this year to the mix and it made for a really nice complex sauce mixed in with the smoke taste. The length of time to prepare was only a couple hours. I didn't bother processing the cans in the pressure canner as the first batch was to test it out and I was pretty sure we'd go through it really fast. I was right, and will have to make another batch very soon!

The next batch I likely will process in the canner, and make many more jars than the first time around. I found that pint jars and quart jars are nice manageable sizes for this sauce.

The next thing I made was a copycat of Hershey's chocolate sauce. Again very easy to whip up in a pot on the stove. Add ingredients, boil, and put in jars. Recipe to come shortly and cost comparison. This sauce has found a permanent place for a jar in the fridge.

3rd thing I've made and have made a number of times over the past 10 years is pan grease for baking. It's a half and half mix of crisco shortening and flour, mixed well and put in a tupperware container with sealing lid. I use this mix to grease my baking pans all the time. It works very well and doesn't lend any additional flavours to the foods made, yet helping them release easily from the pans.

So these 3 different things have saved our household a good chunk of change since we don't buy them pre-made from the store, spend the gas to drive to the store, and spend the time heading to the store either. When the batches are big enough and infrequent enough the batch production cost and overhead is very little in comparison.

We now make all of our bread and haven't bought any since we moved into our new farm! It's far better to eat our own than what's in the store. We also are using our -big- crockpot most nights of the week so time is saved when we get home and supper is ready.

Settled in to the new farm, looking ahead for next season

Well, it's been a few months since I posted and as life always gives you the unexpected, we've had a wild ride this summer into fall. Typically my family will "reboot itself" every September in some fashion and this year has been no exception, but with the addition of being extremely intense!

We gambled our harvest in order to gain a 7 acre farm of our own and the gamble paid off! This means of course that we ended up moving at the beginning of July and then again at the end of September. We've purchased a 7 acre farm in Warburg AB that will be perfect for growing our veggies. No more traveling between different cities to grow things! With the house-hunt this summer combined with the driving distances between Alberta Beach (Mission Creek Estates) where we were renting to Mundare & Camrose, our final harvest amounts were nowhere what I had initially hoped for since we just weren't able to be everywhere nearly enough to tend things. It became a case of resources spread far too thin and not enough hours in the day when working full time in Edmonton. We did get plenty of tomatoes, potatoes and carrots, though the cucumbers failed this year along with the pumpkins and much everything else except peas.

My parents stayed with us for the month of September so our son would be able to start school right in Warburg at the beginning of the school year. It was a grueling haul as everyone left the house and drove in different directions at least 80km each way. My parents spent about $50/day on gas and my gas usage that month came out to about $1200!! I'm very glad we don't have to do that again!

As part of the reboot, I rather unexpectedly found myself back on the job market. After a brief 5 days of looking around I signed on with Able Automation in Leduc AB. This works well as the daily commute 1-way is about 35 minutes on dry roads without snow. We'll see how long it takes me when roads are snowy, I really hope the county maintains our highway well since it is fairly busy all the time. I am really glad I bought a 4x4 truck now that we are out in the country full time, since it will certainly be a help in many ways around the farm as well as driving each day to work - especially since I do a lot of service calls into Edmonton and area now.

Looking ahead to next season, we have much work to do to plan how we are going to utilise our land & buildings and what to implement first vs. $$$ available for each project. I think it could easily take 5-8 years for us to fully develop the place. We have an approximately 7,000 square foot, 3 floor shop (read old aircraft hangar/quansit) to work in which is fabulous! There is enough space not only to park our vehicles in one bay, but enough space to start all my plants indoors under lights year round, a room to do wood/metal working, a place where my husband can fix/build computers, a big room for multimedia workshops (as well as playing guitar hero on a big screen), and tons of other space.

This week I need to get out in the field and measure up next year's veggie plot layout. At the very least I'd like to do either raised beds, or build polytunnels or both. We'll see how much it costs and how much time I have to build things. The first hurdle to get by with the field is all the grass that is about 3 feet tall and mostly laying down on its side. That needs to get cut and moved off the area so I can get at the ground. But all in good time.

I am finding all my studies into Six Sigma methodology is really helping with the enormity of the farm project and the multitudes of details. Right now we are picking off all the activities that give us the most progress for the least/easier effort. Winterising the house is well underway, with applying polyfilm to the windows, caulking cracks and seams where needed, wrapping pipes with insulation etc. I am making a new door for the master bedroom to replace the folding door that the dogs keep pushing open and running through too. I'm putting all the plans into a MS Project 2007 file to manage it all, though I've started it as a spreadsheet in Excel just to get things fleshed out so I can see it first.

We've been learning which things are the most important to tackle and what sort of things we should have on hand. Last month while it was still warm, there was a really bad windstorm, and although stuff stayed intact around the farm, the wellhead froze! We woke up on a sunday morning to no water pressure, and we thought fantastic the pump broke or something. Going out to the well house turned up that we hadn't yet plugged in the heater in there (it was still warm enough everyday). We messed around with it and couldn't get it going, but it was freezing in the pumphouse so we got the heater setup and let it run for a few hours just to see if that would help since we thought the pump had died. Lo and behold, once the well head warmed up the water began to flow again. (We had pointed the heater right at the wellhead since we'd noticed some ice near where condensation normally would drip.) From this experience we realised that we should have on hand a duplicate pump/set of equipment for various things around the farm like the septic pump, the well pump, a new hot water tank, potentially a new furnace. Certainly a generator would be a good thing to have too. I'm glad we have the space to store all this extra equipment, which we still need to buy!

Once I get our list of things really fleshed out, I'll post a copy so people can get an idea of the hugeness of the project we've taken on. It's going to be fun (I hope), and a ton of work. But the result will end up being an energy-self-sustaining farm, well productive in food and other goods. Our first podcast will hopefully be recorded and published just before Christmas!

New additions to the family since we've started all this moving are 2 new dogs Hera, a 1.5 year old white shepherd husky cross, and Zipper a now 5 month old Border Collie-something-er-other cross. Lexie our first dog really likes having buddies, although Zipper is teething so Lexie tries to avoid her for now, not wanting to get chewed on. They have learned their jobs as farm dogs, which is to guard the farm of course and they love to run around the 7 acres as much as they can. We'll be getting a rabbit shortly for Davin's 4H project once we find out where to buy mesh for the cage/hutch, so we'll have to teach the dogs to leave the rabbit cage alone. They certainly don't leave our garbage bags alone, causing us to have to lockup the bags before dump day each week! Here's some pics of the dogs and other stuff going on right now.

Update on the chicken bone incident

I'm happy to report Hera is doing fine! Now I can turn my attention to figuring out what to sell at the local farmer's markets and getting our first podcast recorded and produced!

Hera ate a chicken bone!

Well, the new dog managed to eat a sharp chicken bone that Davin accidentally spilled onto the floor during dinner last night. We couldn't get it out of her before it went down her gullet!! I had my forearm pretty much halfway down her throat and I just couldn't catch it - it slipped away on me. We called the animal hospital right away and they said to feed her ALOT of food, so we did: bacon-fat-soaked kibble, yogurt, and cookies. She got about 6 cups of food, and now we wait. The vet said the food should help encase the bone and may prevent it from getting stuck so it can pass right through. I hope this is the case.

It was a chicken leg that she had bitten in half so it had a sharp point on it. The point went in last so it may have a good chance of sliding through. They said it could take 2 days for the bone to pass if it is going to, and if she shows any signs of distress to bring her in for an xray. The problem is that if the bone gets caught and rips things up inside, there's not much the vet will be able to do for her except put her down. We are praying we come home to one poo-filled crate and a dirty-but-safely-relieved doggie, not a dead one.

So what was a good weekend on the farm went completely the wrong direction on us last night. We did get half the compost bin built and the first bin (of 3)is now in use. I can say though, that I'm glad it wasn't Lexie who ate the bone. She's been around 3 years and we are really attached to her, whereas the new dog is still new yet we've started getting attached to her too. Wish us luck in the recovery! I hope it doesn't see us bereft of 1 dog.

Red Rainbow from last weekend's storm

The storm that spawned this red rainbow also spawned grape-sized hail near Busby Alberta. Watching the clouds roll over our house was fascinating yet somewhat alarming since they were some pretty nasty clouds! It's tornado season here, so whenever the storm warnings pop onto my cell phone, I have a look at the radar if I'm near a pc with internet, and then take a look at the skies. Since I got my new camera, I try to keep it handy for neat weather events etc.






Here we have some more dog pictures - The dogs are inseparable!
Looking out the window at Darren
Lying down exhausted among boxes being unpacked, after an afternoon of wrestling and chasing each other. Notice Lexie is hugging Hera!


Here we have my plants on the back deck, some still in the beer cups they were transplanted to as seedlings. I really have to get those in the ground!

The first ground cherries produced this year. They tasted really good!
ground cherries
blue mini peppers
blue mini peppers. there are 3 plants in this large pot.
One of my new grape vines is producing grapes!
Ground cherries, 3 in a 3 foot container beginning to produce alot.
from back left to front right: Zucchini, Peppermint, Lemon Balm, Parsley, Ground Cherries in plastic Costco beer cups, a cucumber and several tomatoes mixed in the front.
the Zucchini plant. It's an F1 endurance variety
The first fruit on the F1 Endurance Zucchini plant. We already picked it and it was great!
Borage! Cape Gooseberry on the left, and I can't remember what other herbs are with it. I'll have to look at their tags.
The marigolds are thriving, and the other flowers not so much. they keep wilting on me.
mmm lettuce
tomato pot #1
Tomato pot #2
Basil, misc other herbs and some mixed cuke seedlings

Here we have some final pictures from the old place as we were moving out. Good riddance to small spaces!



Small space I had for a front yard at old place. not much room or sun for plants.
Lexie's half of the old yard. Notice how the grass got worn away despite our best efforts to get it reseeded. There is actually alot more grass there now than at the beginning of the season. The soil is pretty rock hard and compacted in that spot.

Getting Settled In & New Addition to the Family

Well, our move to the new farm is finally complete! All of the plants I had growing outside our old place in town are really loving the new digs and flourishing. We are getting regular occurrences of rain to keep things watered and our rain barrel is always overfull. One of our many things on the new to-do list is to get a few more rain barrels and add gutters on the 3/4's of the roof that don't have any. right now, only the front porch has a gutter and the amount of rainfall captured on it is always overflowing the one rain barrel that is there. I'm going to put a 2nd one beside it with either a swiveling downspout & float device to switch to the other barrel when full, or connect the 2 barrels with piping further down to fill the 2nd one by way of gravity feed/siphoning. It depends on what's going to be the best solution and most economical all around. Here is a link with some diagrams I welcome your comments on this idea to help me decide!

I'm definitely going to be installing gravity-fed drip irrigation everywhere on the farm I have plants in containers or in the ground. The system we are testing in our Mundare garden works quite well and the plants are generally happy with it.

We've had a new addition to the family by way of a 2nd dog. Her name is Hera and she's a 1 year old shepherd husky cross. We felt that with the new bigger space for Lexie to play in that she might get lonely and wander off into other people's farms if she didn't have a friend to play with. The two are getting along really well together and they are exhausted from playing at the end of each day! I notice now after the other dog has been with us about a week, that Lexie doesn't yelp at us when she's outside in the dog pen and we go to the other side of the house as she now has someone to keep her company. Also she doesn't jump up hardly at all now either. Both are good things! Here is a picture of Hera:





There are some nice flowers established in the front flower beds of the house and they look like this:









This weekend I am going to get my compost bin started. I have found a triple-bin plan I like and I am building it from reclaimed pallets that I salvaged from various places. 3-bin plans Here are some other links for compost bin plans:

A bin i'd like to build!

A 2-bin system Page with some great plans listed

A portable single bin system

Wooden Pallet Bin

Pretty looking composter, single bin.

I also saw a really intriguing thing on the Geek Farm Life website recently relating to composting and using red wiggler worms: You can put the red wigglers under your rabbit cages and they will process the waster from the cages! What a phenomenal idea! It's definitely something I'd like to try when we get some rabbits. Aside from that, I found some good plans to convert a rubbermaid tub into a red wiggler bin so will use that idea to get a bin started for over the winter.

While we are thinking along the lines of household waste, I have discovered the dump is a great place to find things you can recycle. So far I've found fencing for making trellises and metal poles for such, good pallets for bins, and miscellaneous bits of things for making cold frames for the garden. In terms of actual garbage produced by our household now, it is minimal for people just moved from the city. We are producing maybe a 3/4 full bag of garbage per week during the move while we used disposable plates and cutlery when the dishes were packed. I expect the amount of waste will go down to 1 bag every 2 weeks once we separate out the compostable items. This makes me really happy, and garbage duty not so much of a chore!

Well, that's all for now folks. Stay tuned for developments later in the week! (especially the pictures of the red rainbow I captured with my camera during the thunderstorms over last weekend!)

Big News! The garden has been "upgraded" for next year!

Well, things have been silent on the blog for good reason! All this past month we have been in the throws of moving to.....A FARM!!! W00-HOO!! After many years of dreaming then planning for it, we got the chance of a lifetime to jumpstart our plans 5-10 years ahead of when we'd planned to be able to get a farm. We found one for rent that we should be able to buy in a mere couple of years time! So we are mostly moved onto it now, and this weekend is the big push to get the last stuff out of our old place and the once-over for cleaning before we turn the keys in.

The farm is a 5.7 acre farm setup for horses and small animals, with plenty of space for kids and dogs and greenhouses and gardening! It's everything we had hoped it to be, in a size manageable for city-people just starting out. Later on we might also be able to buy the adjacent property which would have it at 12 acres total, but that's a plan for the future.

I have everything planted in the Mundare and Camrose gardens that will get planted this year due to our unexpected time constraints, and am eager to get back to them and check on their progress as I haven't been able to get to them since the first week of June pretty much! I have also planted various squash and peppers at the new farm, and have zucchini in a pot plus some herbs and lettuces in pots. The neat addition to the farm is flowers - there is a huge permanent bed for them running the length of the driveway and around the front porch up to the front door. I have started to weed them and plant seeds as the last tenants let them overgrow.

Now that we have the farm, the blog is going to change it's nature a bit with the addition of audio/video podcasts to chronicle what all is going on at the farm. Naturally, the new podcast is going to be titled "TechCowboys!"

We'll be setting up a regular release schedule and have recurring segments like many radio shows to keep things lively and intriguing all the time. Darren is keen to cover all of our alternative energy projects and gadgets, his Steampunk radio build and other Steampunk mods, and general pc geekery; and I'll be covering the agricultural geekery things like the gardening, animal husbandry, and food preservation/cooking topics etc. We're excited that we'll finally be able to try out and document our journey into sustainable farming!

Like other shows we've been inspired by (Geek Farm Life - Farm phone Rocks!!! 206-202-GOAT) we're going to have the ability for listeners to leave us feedback in various different ways: voice phone calls, mp3's, blog comments etc. We believe that the community aspect of Smallholder/farm life is really important so we'll be seeking your feedback all the time!


And now, some pics of the new farm!

2008 Planting in full swing!

Wow, has May been busy. Running 2 gardens both an hour away from my home (plus training for a marathon in august) makes for one incredibly busy schedule on top of the usual working and family life.

We'll start with experiments for the front yard this year:

Mini-Greenhouses: I bought 2 of these from Home Depot, they are about 4 feet wide and deep enough to hold a seed tray lengthwise. I can fit 4 seed trays per shelf. I got the shorter 3 shelf version of the greenhouses as they were on sale! In one of them I put an electric heater with a thermostat on it so it keeps the air at a minimum temperature which is really nice since our weather and temperature can be quite erratic. (we got about 30cm of snow in mid april accompanied by a plunge of temperature, all after 3 nice relatively warmer, drier weeks. All of the tomatoes, peppers, ground cherries, and various herbs and flowers in them have now been moved out either into their places in the gardens or into the yard to get full sun and wind.



Lexan Codframes: I have the prototype assembled for this, and within about 36 hours of initial assembly I discovered the unit decided to be "self-venting" ie, the lexan shattered. I'm pretty sure it was not due to impact damage from the neighbourhood soccer balls, but more think I had the angle of the top curve on the unit to be too much. I'll be slicing off the broken parts and getting a smaller rectangular piece of lexan to cover the resulting gap.

I have enough material to make another one the same, but will have to change the design a little so nothing shatters. I think I'll cut the next piece of lexan into 3 and use silicone caulking to fill the 2 cracks, thereby avoiding this first shattering issue I've seen. I may even try to find the technical specs on the lexan I bought in case there is a datasheet that has the acceptable bend angles for the stuff. It's a lot of money to keep breaking those panels at $85 a pop, so I'll take a few more precautions with the next one.

The final components of this coldframe design are the solar panel, fans, and thermostat which have yet to be wired in and all affixed to the side of the frame. In testing the frame without the electronics, it works pretty well but needs to be tipped up to provide venting space to avoid cooking the plants. The tomatoes living under the frame are currently pretty happy, though 1 of them hadn't survived the transplant process and got discarded.

Here is a picture of the Coldframe:



I haven't yet had time to install the thermostat, solar panel, fans & carrying handles, but the plants really like it in there since there was the break in the lexan. I may have it so the replacement piece has the fans embedded in it and hinged to be able to swing down for even further venting.

Raised benches: We have built a raised bench for the various plant containers this year, in order to protect them from the plant-eating lawnmowers brought by the landscapers. So far, it works beautifully and gets the plants that much more sun than if they were sitting at the base of the fence.


Box of compost getting ready for transport
Zucchini hardening off
Supervisory Garden dog!

Here are some pictures of the Mundare garden this year. The only things left to do there now are plant the beets and onions and finish the trellising. We installed a gravity-feed drip irrigation line we bought from Lee Valley Tools and are testing it out this week on my tomatoes and peppers. It looked very promising and had no leaks when we finished installing it. I figure it should take about 2.5 days to drain the barrel it's attached to...

south east corner view after amending all the soil
west side after applying landscape fabric - am not happy with the brand i bought this year - it lets too much light through and there's some weeds under it!
looking west
looking southeast before trellising went up
west end of garden
Showing this year's row spacing, lots of room for wheelbarrow!
Potatoes coming up
Siphoning water to rain barrels, wasn't working until darren got a mouthful of dead flies from the hose. eww yummy! protein! bleh!
West end of garden, tomatoes visible in middle row.
Cuke row planted and watered
Vine Tomatoes
Bush tomatoes just planted
row of squash
Squash and corn in this row, corn on the far end
Sunscald
Covered tomatoes - they got no windburn. sunscald on the other hand...
Covered Peppers, they like it warm in there
Cuke sprouting
Cuke grown at home
Lettuces just planted
Rain barrel aka garbage can for gravity feed irrigation system test
Potatoes coming up!
Gravity Feed...
Close-up of drip head feeding a tomato plant
Drip heads
Drip line
Drip head
Pumpkin!
Canteloupe grown in the house, hope it survives!
Peas 'n Beans go here, need to be trellised.

And here is how the Camrose garden is looking:

during cleaning up from winter
during cleaning up from winter
during cleaning up from winter
Onions go here!
Tomatoes with soaker hose line marked
Peas
Cukes
Squash

Missing Final Pictures from last season (2007)

Here are the missing final shots of the Camrose Garden for 2007!

Planning the 2008 Season!

I have just finished up my propagation & planting calendar for the upcoming growing season! The completed calendar can be viewed via my Google docs account at:

2008 Planting Calendar

Check out the coloured dates and you'll see descriptive pop-up comments as to what I'll be doing with the plants on a given day. I've documented the days I'll be starting seeds indoors, accounting for germination times, then the dates to begin hardening off the plants in cold frames or temporary greenhouse, and then planting out days, with a few succession planting days.

Today I get all my trays and such organised, as well as the new gadgets I've started collecting. I got a light meter to ensure my light levels are ok, and a soil/compost thermometer to ensure soil temperature is ok. I'm experimenting with capillary mats for watering this time and am going to make some over the next week.

Drip irrigation is very high on my list of things to fine-tune this year, starting with inside the house. with the square footage so much larger this year, I need to be really efficient in all aspects of the growing process.

Raised beds are still on the build list for Mundare, though i need to re-budget since I bought a new truck (instead of renting one) since my old blue 1986 240dl Volvo Station wagon died in the severe cold a couple weeks back. So the truck is really expensive on the monthly payments, but it sure is nice to drive, and it gives me the ability to haul a decent trailer and carry loads of compost and gardening tools around!



There are new re-usable gadgets available at Lee Valley Tools to make the creation of the raised beds in the Mundare plot a -much- easier prospect. Here is the link for them:

Raised Bed Grow Box Corners

More to come as the plans progress. I'm now working on the planting layout maps for both garden plots.

Harvest is all done and winterising completed

Well after an incredibly busy fall which brought many unexpected things outside of gardening, I'm finally getting back to the blog. I've yet to tally up the final numbers for everything, but we did really well on the Tomatoes with over 200lbs! There was lots of squash - zucchini, pumpkins, and spaghetti squash - totaled, these came in at over 100 pounds. I spent many days with the pressure canner putting away the tomatoes for the winter into various sauces.

Next month, after my next major exam at school, I'll have some time to sit down and review what cultivars we'll be using next season and will get those published with a full summary of what we learned this year.

We'll be running the Camrose plot again next year and adding a second larger plot in Mundare. The challenges will be new at the Mundare plot since there is only well water at the site and what can be captured in rain barrels. We are going to experiment with a few different technologies to solve this issue and give our plants as much water as they need without tapping the well.

Efficiency and automation technology will be the name of the game since both Camrose and Mundare are an hour outside of Edmonton in different directions with an hour between them too. So getting to each garden more than twice per week will be hard at times. We'll be using the landscape fabric again for sure to eliminate weeds, and building proper coldframes and vented, solar, mini-hothouses for much of the crops. we have alot of ideas going down on paper we need to sit down and work into a concrete plan of action.

I'm sure we'll have a good number of weekends of building the hardware offsite at home during the winter since I want to be ready weeks before the last frost to get everything installed and warming the soil so we can have a much earlier start. If I want to grow things that need 120 days to mature, we really need to get the soil warmed in April!

I'll be starting all the plants I can in the house under lights again and understand better the timings of when to start them so they are the right age to plant out. Everything should be easier this season! and I've so learned my lesson about hardening off the plants properly!

Currently I have several pepper plants growing in the house under the lights just to see how they do in a full cycle. One has a 3 inch long pepper on it and another plant is just starting to put out a pepper!

Well that's it for now. A full report with all the missing pictures from the season end to come soon!

Good weather again!

The weather has warmed up...relatively speaking for the past week. With luck we'll get a couple more weeks of it before the frost comes. The tomatoes are starting to turn to their mature colours now. In the millwoods garden the tiny tims are coming along as well as the Ultra Sonic tomatoes. The rest appear to be at or very near the mature green stage. I was able to harvest a few from the Millwoods garden from the tiny tims, ultra Sonic and Tiffany plants. From the Camrose garden today we harvested a tomato from the Park's Whopper, some from the Sub Arctic Maxi and a couple from the Early Time plant. I also pulled some of the final beets and got a few cucumbers. The garden looks drier than I thought and it seems the soaker hoses got accidentally turned off sometime during the week. There was only 2 zucchini's ready today, but we've collected a total of 7 in the past week from both gardens. 5 from the camrose garden...The pupmkins looks great hanging from the trellises and we have some nice sized ones turning orange. I hope they can ripen before the end of season. The parsnips look great in both gardens too with fabulous leafy growth. I'm about 3 weeks behind on posting pictures, soI'll be uploading them in the morning!

Dog days of August...or should I say FOG days?

It's been really cold this month so far with only 1 decent week to be had over 20C. There are tons and tons of green tomatoes maturing in all 3 gardens, and only a few starting to change to their mature colours. I'd've expected by now that I'd be swimming in ripe tomatoes but that is -so- not the case. I can only hope now they will all ripen before the first frosts coming in september. Our average first frost around here is Sept. 7th, so I may have to look into covering the plants for protection.

I know for sure my gourd plant will not have the fruits ripen in time, so I'll leave it outside as long as I can and then bring it in the house under grow lights to mature the gourds. If all goes well with that, I intend to cure the gourds and make them into Shekeres, an African percussion instrument. Any extras I make will be for sale.

Ok so here's the garden roundup report!

Front Yard: the landlord's groundskeeper nipped off one of the growing tips of one of the cucumber plants with the lawnmower. God help that person if I find them, they are going to get a strip taken out of them for pushing the mower so close to the plants, and for mowing right after we'd put fertiliser on the lawn as the little pellets got flung everywhere! How frustrating!

Anyway, the cucumbers are starting to produce, the White ones are a bit behind the ones that were started in the house surprisingly enough. And even more surprising I've had 2 long green cukes off the one from in the house. There are plenty of flowers on the white ones indeed and I've cut several cukes from them on sunday for pickling.

Tomatoes: one of the branches on the right-hand Tiny Tim plant fell over and snapped since the fruit got too heavy and I didn't catch it in time. I had to cut that branch off and took it inside and hung it upside down to attempt to ripen it as much as possible. If they stay green, i'll fry up some mini fried green tomatoes. Otherwise the Tiny Tim plants are -really- loaded with fruit. I am very impressed at how well they do for a compact plant. My plants grew to about 2 feet tall and about 1.5 feet wide.

The Bush beefsteak tomatoes in the corner of the yard are producing as well. These are interesting because of the confined space I put them into and the 3 plants to a big pot. They seem to need more fertiliser than the other pots largely due to there being 3 plants in there. I will be measuring the harvested fruit and counting how many each produces. the foliage has adapted to the small space and appears pretty compact. The other pot of tomatoes with the yellow ones and the christmas grape are also doing well and have each set several trusses of fruit though the christmas grape has set fewer trusses. I have topped each of these vine plants and continue to prune the suckers to encourage the plant to develop the trusses it has and the remaining flowers.

The spices are doing great and I will harvest them at the end of the season, dry them and generally measure their output. I didn't thin them at all so there's lots of short plants. I will try growing some in individual pots to see how large the plants really can get.

Millwoods garden: We harvested all the beets since there seems to be a slug infestation going on eating them up. I also pulled the parmex carrots and silverskin pearl onions. the beans are still producing though we've gotten most of them picked now so I think the plants are starting to wind down as are the peas. the peppers here are really only just getting going now with tiny peppers visible. The tomatoes on the plot all have green tomatoes and some are showing signs of changing to their mature colour now too. The holy mole pepper plant has a few large peppers on it that are almost ripe and a neat chocolate brown in colour.

The zucchinis are coming along and producing zucchini, I am harvesting at least 1-2 per week. The plants were not planted all at the same time, so the smaller ones have begun to produce yet. The real impressive plant in the garden this year are the pumpkin plants. we have about 8 or so very nice looking pumpkins hanging on the trellis. The only thing to mar it is that i discovered what looks like powdery mildew on one of the leaves. I cut that leaf off and got rid of it but i don't think that really got rid of the issue as it has been so wet and cool recently.

The cucumbers in this plot are starting to come along as well and I have harvested a few. the parsnips are looking great and I hope they yield a decent crop.

Camrose Garden: It's a jungle out there! The squash plants are doing their best to overtake all the space around them and above them!. They have taken over the pathway between them and the peppers completely. Now I know which plants need 3'sq to exist and which ones are going to travel all around. There are about 10-12 pumpkins I think that I counted, and numerous white and yellow spaghetti and winter squash as well. The tomatoes are all doing well and only just starting to get a few change colour. I picked almost all the beets and thinned the carrots. the peas and beans are still producing, and the cucumbers are going crazy now as is the Zucchini plant. Even the sunflowers have finally developed heads and will bloom soon. The corn we thought would be ripe by now, but it isn't yet after testing it. The strawberries are sending out runners and rooting well next to the parsnips.

Anyway, more later in the form of current pictures I took that still need to be uploaded to the blog!

Squash production!

The Camrose garden has produced 4 spaghetti squash now and a zucchini! They are growing very fast. there are little pumpkins doing well hanging from the pumpkin trellises too. They have grown so fast they have shaded out the watermelon, but I'll know better for spacing next time around that the watermelon needs to go in front.

This past week has been very busy away from the gardens with visits every 3 days or so for watering and harvesting. The peas and beans are ready and being picked and the zuchini plants in both gardens are producing. So far the white zucchini plants have produced the fastest. The cucumbers are all begin to really come along and we have many green tomatoes everywhere. I've harvested on monday the parmex ball carrots from the Camrose garden and about 1/2 of the beets.

I'm definitely going to make more seed tape to control spacing better for the next round of plantings. I might be able to get in one more fast crop if I seed in the next couple of days. The Camrose garden produced a single head of romaine lettuce and the germination rate on that packet of seeds was awful!

I'm pretty glad I put the landscape fabric down in the millwoods garden so weeding is a non-existent thing just about (except in the pathways) since I managed to get my foot broken on a rafting trip over the weekend. It's definitely hampering my mobility! I'll have some new pictures up later on today of all 3 of the gardens. It's nice to see them going full steam ahead now.

Zucchinis and Berries and cherries Oh My!

We went berry picking at a friend's place in Mundare on sunday and got a 4L pail of Nanking Cherries and 6L of Saskatoon Berries....the plan is to make some cherry jelly, Saskatoon Pemmican, Saskatoon Chutney, and maybe a Saskatoon pie!

Interestingly enough there is a nice and unused space there in Mundare that we're being let use for a veggie patch next season! So we'll be able to experiment with many varieties again next year!

Reports on the gardens:

Front Yard:
Flowers are all over the tomato plants and the cucumbers, with little tomatoes on most of the plants. The vine tomatoes have yet to set fruit, but the Beefsteaks and Tiny Tims have started setting fruit. There are flowers on the cucumbers I started in the house, which is amazing since they recovered from being dumped on in a storm. The white cucumbers I planted from seed have not put out flowers yet, but the buds are there so they are close. The Sage and Thyme box is doing well and are about 2-3 inches high with those seedlings. The gourd plant is doing really well and attaching itself to its cage. I'll be getting it to climb the mesh trellis I put next to it as well. The White cucumbers have tomato cages crammed into their box now as well since they were trying to escape. Now they are climbing up the cage and hopefully the trellis behind their box too.

Millwoods Garden:
It's all doing very well. I planted a new zucchini seedling the other day for a late season harvest. The pumpkins are climbing everywhere and have set some fruit. The 4 tomato plants next to them are getting shaded and so are dwarfing, but still setting fruit themselves. The tomato plants on the east and west corners of the garden are all setting fruit now too. The Holy Mole pepper is hanging on on producing more peppers. I have tied it's main branches to the cage to give them more support and take off the stress from the branches.

The Zucchini plant...or was it vegetable marrow...has 4 zucchinis on it! the cucumbers are coming along as well as all have flowers and some fruit has started to set. Peas and Beans are coming along with pods developing now. The pepper plants are flowering and starting to set fruit too. The beets look yellow still through the middle of the patch, I think they need thinning and more water at this point. The beets in Davin's row are looking fabulous as are his carrots. Still no lettuce in Davin's row so it'll get replanted with something else. The tiny tim tomatoes are setting fruit now, and the carrots and onions and garlic are all doing well too.

Camrose Garden:

Pumpkins: Escaping! they have found the pepper trellising! I'm finding them so quick to grow it can be hard to keep ahead of them with the training to the trellis. they have set fruit as have all the squash except the zucchini. the other zucchini seeds still haven't come up. I don't think the top layer of soil is moist enough to germinate them. So lesson learned: Germinate all cucurbits in the house!

Peppers: Many tiny hot-hot-hot! peppers! some sweet red bell peppers, sweet banana and hot banana peppers have set.

Carrots: tall and green!
Beets: lots of them and the greens look great.
Beans: starting to set pods
Peas: setting pods

Cucumbers: Flowering! soon to be setting fruit!
Corn: Really liking the manure mulch. The leaves are prolific and a nice dark green
Sunflowers: Getting very tall. No sign of flower heads yet.
Parsnips: Looking good!

Strawberries: sending out lots of runners. Next season we hope they will have grown to 3ft wide x the length of the bed and we'll extend the bed out another foot and let them take over. The parsnips can go elsewhere!

Tomatoes: They all have some amount of fruit set, and many more flower buds still. Looks like we could have a great harvest if all those flowers set.

Plants in the Garden room in the house:

The tomatoes are getting pretty tall in there and putting out flower buds - Yay! The peppers are doing fantastically and grwoing more leaves and thicker steams, the Elephant garlic is coming up now, and the lettuce has sprouted...or is it the spinach...

That all being said, we had rain finally last night, since it's been dry for almost 2 weeks. I'll check the moisture levels tonight and top them off. I'm also going to give all the plants some fertiliser too. Pictures to come still since I forgot to bring the camera!

Explosion of growth!

We went to both gardens this weekend and did some work, discovering that there's been explosive growth in the Camrose plot!

First a report on the Millwoods plot. We were getting it ready for the Community Garden Competition judging which occurred on monday. We put down landscaping fabric (herein referred to as mulch) to control the growth of any weeds and help with watering on 2/3's of the beds. So the Tomatoes, Peppers, Cucumbers, Zucchini, Pumpkins and Squash all got mulch. The carrots and beets have not been mulched for the time being since they were growing thickly enough. the onions and garlic, peas and beans might get mulched but could be fine without.

I have discovered weeding is hard on the knees with all the crawling around pulling them, and also discovered how well a hoe works this weekend. Amazing I've gotten this far and not used one before...But it cleaned up the pathways in very quick order. I've also attached all the tomatoes to their respective trellises where needed and the pumpkins too. I quite like the look of the trellises and landscape fabric. It brings a nice, neat organisational structure to the whole garden. Must be something born out of my technical background since our plot compared to the others looks pretty architectural! :-)
















Now for the report on the Camrose plot! We finally got the mesh up for the peas and the the Japanese tomato ring. This leaves 1 trellis I need to fabricate some custom hardware attachments for and then add mesh.

The Squash patch: has gone crazy with growth and the vines have discovered their trellises and using them to reach for the sky and neighbouring beds! I had to spend alot of time weaving the vines back into place and affixing them with twine. For some of them, it's a matter of coaxing and going back every few days and tightening up the loop to bring them closer to the desired position.

Some of the squashes have flowers on them. I have to check and see which ones are male flowers and which are female and get to pollinating them. They must be cross-pollinated from what I have read, but I will double-check before I go ahead. We don't plan to save squash seed this first year and intend to roast, salt and eat the seeds as snack food.

Here are the pictures of the squash patch for this week:









Camrose Tomatoes: are all doing very well. There are tons and tons of blossoms on them, especially the starfire plants. Even the little Manitoba tomato plant that the ants had lived under and I had moved has survived and put out a blossom. I am discovering just how vigorous tomato plants can be and why the bush varieties need 2' square of space to grow. You can hardly see the store-bought tomato cages, and I understand now why there are so many devices on the market to stake your plants with. I think I'm just going to have to learn how to weld and build my own custom design...test it...and then patent and sell it...

The Japanese tomato ring was not hard to build, but got a little complicated getting the vines tied to it and maintaining air space between the branches and trying to make sure everything would get sun. It will need a bit of adjusting when we go back tonight. Visually, the ring is quite interesting and there is plenty of circulation down the middle of the circle is about 2' in diameter give or take a bit. We took 8' 2x2's and drove them into the ground about 2-2.5 feet for support. All the vining tomatoes are liking their trellises as well. I will have to come up with some additional options for supporting some of the taller bush tomatoes that are getting taller than their cages, but without damaging roots.

I was reading on greenhouse tomatoes the other day and found that when twining a tomato plant up a vertical wire for support, to always go in the same direction without change, else when loaded with fruit, the plant would slip and collapse. Good to know.










Camrose Cucumbers: These have discovered their trellises and are putting out tendrils to wrap around the wire as they go skyward. I'm wondering if the 1 foot spacing of the trellises might be a little close for easy harvesting and pollination but we'll see. Darren can easily reach in past the 2 foot mark into the middle of the beds between the trellises.




Corn: Has been fertilised and mulched with composted manure...unfortunately, Darren misheard me and used the whole bag on the one bed! We may have some giant stalks of corn that need a ladder to harvest from...




Radishes: We harvested all of these as they looked like they'd go to seed this week. Nice sized radishes, fairly hot in the eating. Davin even helped pull these up and trim and bag them, of course we couldn't get him to actually chew and swallow any. I'll have to try cooking them to mellow the flavour.

Beets: growing nicely and have started bulbing.

Beans: doing very well, not sure if they really need the trellis they have, but it will do fine for supporting them.

Peas: They love the trellis!




Lettuce & Spinach: We really like the Grand Rapids lettuce. It's a very bright, light green which is a nice contrast in the garden, and tastes very sweet. The spinach has gone to seed so has mostly been harvested. I left a few plants there minus their seed heads to see if they will put out more leaves. The romaine is finally starting to come, but it's pretty hit and miss with it.

I have started some Romaine and Spinach in the house and will try growing it completely inside for comparison.





Sunflowers: looking taller and thicker of stem now. No flowers yet, but I hope they double their height before putting out flowers.

Parsnips: They actually came up! There's about maybe 30 of them I counted which was an awful germination rate. Next time I'll try germinating indoors and transplanting to root trainers, then out to the garden for a better success rate.

Strawberries: Look very happy in the space next to the parsnips, especially since we removed the grass that was invading them.

Peppers: Success! One of the indoor-started plants has peppers on it! and to think I thought that plant wasn't going to make it. Very interesting that even though the plant got kind of tall, it sprouted leaves all up the bare section of stalk. Giving it some support with the trellis enabled it to survive too. This was one plant that got hardened off outside. Some of the other peppers have fruit too, especially the extremely hot one. It has very tiny skinny-pointy peppers.






Carrots: Growing, what is left of them! The dog running into the carrot bed likely killed the newly germinated seedlings by crushing them, so we have a spotty carrot patch. Next time around that will be better fenced from the beginning.

Green tomatoes growing!

There are green tomatoes growing now in both the Camrose and Millwoods plots!

First green tomatoes at the Camrose Garden!


In the Millwoods plot the Early Time plant is certainly ahead of the other ones with 2 little tomatoes on the way. Almost all the plants have flowers now, so I've been making sure to go around and give each flower a bit of a shake every time I'm there to help them pollinate ad set the fruit (I've heard that using an electric toothbrush if more efficient and encourages more even pollination). I applied organic tomato fertiliser this week on all the tomatoes to give them a little boost. In checking out the soil to see how well it's holding its water - It's doing great with the peat moss and perlite! It's dry in the top inch or so, but below that there is a nice level of moisture. The mix I have can go for more than a week without really needing to be watered!

The jack rabbit around the millwoods garden I saw again last night thieving in the gardens! Oooooh that wabbit! In response to the existence of the rabbit, over the weekend Lexie got a new stuffed bunny-friend. We were hoping she'd treat it like a prey animal...but alas, she's treating it sort-of like a puppy, albeit a well-mouthed puppy that's not allowed to go very far from her... so much for letting Lexie catch the jack-rabbit! Lexie even understands the toy's name when we tell her to go get it...Lexie! Where's bunny? Get it!

Lexie with her bunny stuffie.


Blossoms on the Starfire Improved Tomato plant

Vegetable marrow and other squash plants beginning to be trained up the trellises...note the ties of brown jute and green plant velcro.

Sunflowers getting tall.

I have begun in both gardens to train the squash plants up trellises, though one patch in the millwoods garden of zucchini, watermelon and cantaloupe I will train around the sides of their pen to contain them so to speak...

I am also quite happy with the growth of the Beefsteak tomato plants in my front yard in a pot. I think fertilising them and ensuring their growing medium has a mild amount of fertiliser plus watering crystals and or perlite, as well as compost have done very nicely.

Beefsteak tomatoes in the front yard.

Back from Vacation and wow lots of weeds!

So the weeds came with a vengeance this week. This will not be fun to pick since while on vacation I nearly had to go into Emergency with some really bad intestinal pain. It's taken days for it to go away and is only a bit sore now unless I move the wrong way. I tried some weeding yesterday for a little while and got really tired. I had to go home again for a nap! that was pretty frustrating and cut into my productivity alot.

We visited the Millwoods garden yesterday and there are finally some zucchini growing there! What's not growing is the radishes! In fact they are completely gone. Not harvested by us :-( I hope it was a hungry bunny rather than a hungry person.

Missing radishes, you can see the holes where they were and a chewed remaining radish.

In comparison, I think the Camrose garden is doing way better than the Millwoods garden. I walked around the rest of the Millwoods garden and compared their plants to mine. I think the shade from the tree has all my veggies substantially smaller than others who don't have shade. I'm glad I put in the windbreaks for the tomatoes though as they are doing nicely. The peas are finding their way to the trellises and the beans will need a little help perhaps since they are just going straight up. The 2 pumpkin plants are Growing as are the beets, carrots, onions and garlic. The cucumbers are growing but they are seeming to be much slower than I had thought they'd be.

Even the cucumbers in my front yard are growing better than the ones in the millwoods plot...Perhaps some organic fertiliser is now in order.

I have revamped the garden room in the house and have 5 tomato plants I'll let run their course inside, and 4 pepper plants. I've planted several more ground cherries to try wintering as well as a winter squash and another gourd plant. The lights are completely on timers now, as is the big fan. I have the fan set for 5 times per day at a half hour each session. I hope this will encourage much stronger stems than previous plants from the garden room.

The Beefsteak tomatoes in the front yard are doing fantastically, There are 3 plants in a big pot and I fertilised them before going on vacation. They now have a lot of new leaf growth, flower buds, and really nice deep green colour. The sage and thyme have both sprouted, the cucumbers are doing well there and the tiny tim tomatoes are doing will too with flower buds coming. The gourd seedling has put on more leaf growth.

Now for this week's pictures:

Tomato flourishing next to windbreak.

Beets and some lettuce. The lettuce didn't germinate well.

Tiny Tim Tomatoes and onions

Carrots, Onions, and garlic

Holy Mole Pepper and its companion tomatoes.

Tomatoes behind windbreak, no windburn on leaves.

Vacation! Radish Harvest!

I'm on vacation all this week and have left Darren in charge of weeding and watering! It'll be nice to have a brief time off before everything starts producing. This last week I planted out in a pot in the front yard, another gourd seedling since Not as many germinated that I had hoped. It'll be interesting growing that in a pot...

Both gardens are doing well now as all the plants appear to be really taking hold and thriving despite all the rain, hail and wind that occurred these past several weeks. We haven't had to have the soaker hoses on since it's been so wet, which is good. On friday we got 6 inches of rain over 3 hours at the camrose garden!

We've had our second little harvest in the camrose plot: Radishes! It was time to thin them a bit. Here are pictures from this week:

Radishes - we got about 2 dozen picked.

Sunflowers - really going strong


Corn - Showing some promise!


Roma Tomato - looking really healthy beside the garage

Interesting things this weekend

First off, I have got the front yard pictures. Our place faces north so the only sun the yard gets is on the north edge. Here's a pic of everything arranged:








In the Camrose plot today I put up 3 more short fences with chicken wire to 'remind' the dogs to stay out of the beds, The carrot patch keeps getting trampled, so maybe this will help. I also used stakes and flagging tape so Davin can see where the asparagus patch is and where he's not supposed to walk through. Here's a pic:





Here is the lone green zucchini seedling from 24 seeds planted between both gardens. Talk about a miserable germination rate! I scratched up the seed coats of some white zucchini and planted the seeds to either side of this seedling in hopes we get at least 1 more plant from it!




Some very happy plants in the squash patch. All the squash are really taking hold now and showing plenty of vigour - even the small sugar pumpkin plant I thought would die is doing great now.



Here is something curious. This tiny tim tomato used to be doing well, now it seems to be dying. I saw a lot of spiders on it, so am not sure what happened. Here is a shot of the one next to it that couldn't be healthier....curiouser and curiouser...





All in all, 95% of the tomatoes are doing great as is mostly everything else, though the parsnips haven't come up yet, and it's hard to tell in the lettuce patch what is a weed or lettuce/spinach sprout...

The beginnings of a small Japenese tomato ring. It's just missing the mesh now.
Lemon Boy Tomato - Look at the nice thick stem!
Sunflower seedlings

Planted more in my frontyard!

I planted 2 more containers in my front yard today: The round pot has a Christmas Grape Tomato plant, and a Yellow Pear-shaped tomato plant. Both give small cherries so should be great for the container...assuming they survive our daily thunderstorms. The other long, short, rectangular container is half planted with sage and the other half is thyme. As these two are perennials I'll bring them inside to the garden room when the cold season comes along.

So this brings the front yard inventory to:

1-3ft box of white cucumbers (direct seeded, June 15th, sprouts appeared June 21st)
1-3ft box of straight eight, and long green cucumbers (transplants from in the house)
1-3ft box of Tiny Tim tomatoes (transplants from in the house)
1 Big round pot containing 3 Beefsteak Tomatoes (transplants from in the house; I think big beef, hybrid, indeterminate types, though without running outside to check I'm not sure...will check later)
1-3ft box of Thyme and Sage

It occurs to me I completely forgot to post the pictures & planting report from the first day I planted things in my front yard! I planted them on June 15th and had them in the shade sheltered on 3 sides from the wind, which was a good thing since we had some nasty storms. In fact I left one of the cucumbers too close to the edge of the roof and the eaves trough overflowed during one of the storms and dumped right into that unfortunate box! It washed out 1/3 of the soil, left the perlite and the plants and looked quite a mess. So, I put more soil mix into it and gently washed all the dirt off the plants and re-staked them too so they look much better now. We'll see if they survive that!

I also found some plastic lattice I scavenged from the recycle bin area in our complex so am using that tied to our front fence as trellising for the cucmbers to climb up. I'm also using 2 ft bamboo stakes to get the cucumbers started towards the trellis. The Beefsteak tomatoes have a 2x2" stake in the middle of their pot with stucco wire wrapped round it and attached to the fence. I'm going to try to grow them up and then sideways, to see how that works using the fence to support part of the plants, and then grow them along the top of the fence. The other 2 vining tomato plants have 2 u-shaped bamboo stakes to twine along. Finally the Tiny Tims merely have straight 2ft bamboo stakes to climb.

Here are some pictures from the first day the Tiny Tims and Beefsteaks were out on the 15th:

Porcupines are like rocks

On the way home from the Camrose garden last night, we hit one of these:
Luckier pet porcupine than the one that encountered my car

We were pretty fortunate in that the oncoming traffic was far enough away that we didn't hit any cars in swerving to try to dodge it. Today in the sunlight we should be able to see if there are any quills stuck in the tires. Hitting it broke off the bottom potion of the bumper on the car, but not so much that it's going to fall off. Now we need to figure out how to reattach it. But for an animal the size of the dog, it really felt like we'd hit a rock with the car instead. Darren managed to dodge enough that it went between the drive train and the passenger side wheels so hopefully caused less damage than if it went anywhere else. We managed to stay on the road too, which was good. Being in a ditch in the middle of nowhere at 11:30pm would've been a BAD thing. So we got ourselves in order and back to the other side of the road for a quick check to see if we could continue and then on we went. We thought we were out of the woods when we saw 10 minutes from home a deer going to jump onto the road. Luckily, it saw us coming and stopped, else the car would've been totalled and maybe us not survive. From now on I think we'll make the effort to go home -before- twilight kicks in to minimise the chance of meeting animals on the road.

The better parts of the evening were actually at the garden. Every bed got thoroughly weeded and some pictures taken. I discovered a -huge- mushroom growing in the long grass beside the corn patch. I had kicked it off its stem trying to figure out what it was and thinking it was a rock we'd somehow missed. I was very surprised to find it was a mushroom about 10 inches across. I'm not sure if it was an edible variety so were not eating it. Here is a picture with the spray gun from the hose beside it for a scale comparison:

Gi-normous mushroom head

Other highlights of the garden - the big max pumpkin plant is making a remarkable recovery from the sunscald/windburn it had. I hadn't thought it would be able to regenerate dead sections in the leaves but it is doing just that as well as spreading out new leaves too. Here is a pic:

Big Max Pumpkin

Carrots are growing their first True leaves and starting to look like carrots!


Holy Mole Pepper seems to be doing alright

Things that are growing in the Millwoods plot

After we got home last night, a big storm rolled in. It was producing nickle and dime sized hail!! Apparently the cloud was spawning funnel clouds before it reached Edmonton, though it's rotation slowed by the time it reached us thankfully. Here are some pictures of how the plants were doing before the storm, and I'll go take some more shots tomorrow to see how they fared.

Tomatoes left to right: Park's Whopper, Early time, Big Bite, and Health Kick

Radishes French Breakfast variety

Beans! Dwarf Stringless Variety

Beets!

Here are how things are growing in the Camrose plot:
Camrose: Sunflower Seedlings

Camrose: Corn Seedling

Camrose: Beans

Camrose: Assorted Peppers

Camrose: Strawberries, store bought from Canadian tire

Camrose: Tiny Tim tomato Plant, it's starting to flower!

Camrose: Squash Seedlings

Yay! The Big Max Pumpkin plant is going to make it! It has put out some new leaves at the top. We may get a Halloween pumpkin yet.

Whew! Not as bad as it could have been.

So we went and took a look at the millwoods garden to see how badly damaged things were. In the end, we got away relatively alright. We lost 3 tomato plants and had their cages thrown about, The big Holy Moly pepper plant got pulled up and thrown across a few plots but I found it and replanted it. With luck it will survive the shock.

the Zucchini cage got knocked down and the posts broken off. That will have taken some effort. There was some bending to a couple of the metal trellises, but they fared pretty well. I'm glad now I used metal anchored with rebar as that made it very difficult to damage without tons of effort. Our tomato cages didn't get all twisted up which was good, but others' got mangled into tiny messes.

All the ground cherries in their pop bottle hotcaps got pulled up and thrown, but I replanted the ground cherries since they survived. The rest of our plot had several footprints through it in planted areas, but the spots will survive. Davin was understandably very pissed off someone stepped in his purple carrot patch, but relieved to know things are still growing.

Here are some pictures of how things looked last night:

Vandalism at the Millwoods plot...what is Wrong with people?!!!?!

I'm really mad this morning, I got an email in from our garden coordinator that major vandalism has occurred at the millwoods plot, broken plants, broken tomato cages, greenhouse glass broken etc and all the gardens apparently got hit. I will be going in after work to take pictures and assess what needs to be rebuilt and replanted in our plot. So much money and value was so senselessly destroyed. What the **** is wrong with people!!!

That's about $1000 spent on setup I think (now I have to go over my receipts in detail and do the accounting) in parts and labour now. It took us days and days of long hours after work to build what we had there, for the purpose of feeding our family over the winter. I'm going to have to explain to Davin why his planted squares are wrecked and he's going to be heartbroken. If we didn't have our Camrose garden things would look pretty dire right now. That vandal deserves a beating to within an inch of his/her/their life for it, but I don't have much hope the police will catch him/her/them.

I hadn't expected such a loss with our first efforts at a garden and it reinforces with me that the city with so many people is just not the place to be growing veggies in peace. If I had the money right now, I'd purchase land and move on it today and replant there instead....with big guard dogs and electric fencing. why can't people just leave the gardens alone?

I will post pictures tonight of the damage, and find out when we can get in to replant and rebuild. I guess I'm going to have to go really cheap now since the budget is gone for more supplies and we'll have to use what we have. Thank-you Camrose guy who donated us the rolls of stucco wire, and the Construction site in Edmonton for donating wood!

Final (I hope) planting layout for the Millwoods Plot

I went to Hole's Greenhouse in St. Albert last night to get some replacements for the too windburned peppers and see what they had for vine tomatoes. I couldn't resist the full grown and already fruiting Holy Mole pepper plant for $15 so picked that up. I also got about 16 other tomato plants to fill the last empty spaces at each garden to replace the windburned plants. I picked up 4 each of: Park's Whopper, Golden Girl, Big Bite, Health-Kick, and Early Time; as well as another Bush Beefsteak.

So the currently planted species list is different than I started out with, but that's ok. Next year I'll start the tomatoes out in Camrose under a mini, bottom heated glass cold frame so they have full sun right from the get-go and a better chance of surviving when coming out of the shelter when summer hits. I'm currently revamping my indoor garden room at home now that I've gained some experience. Some of the tomatoes I have in there right now are sprouting flower buds, but the plants got too tall and spindly to support any fruit. I'm going to pick up a light meter to help me adjust the light they're getting. I finally got the timers all setup properly on the plant lights as well as the oscillating fan. I hadn't really been using the fan since I had way too many seedlings on the go (most of which got given away to good homes), but the fan may have helped them get more stocky stems than what they had.

The next things to setup in the house are: automatic watering and fertilising according to the life cycle stage each plant is in, figure out how much fan time is enough, and how far away from each plant to have the lights to prevent legginess. I am looking into the differences in light that the plants require at different stages to see how I can best adjust between the red and blue spectrums for optimal development.

I had a look at the utilities bill since we started growing things in the house and the jump wasn't really too bad. We only used about 3 more cubic meters of water, and when water is only $1.38 per cubic meter that's not too bad.

I'm looking into building my first red wiggler vermicompost box from a rubbermaid tub just in time to feed the worms with the scraps of the harvest. I can't wait to feed the worm compost to the seedlings for next year! I also learned that when I've got my farm running and I have rabbits, their poo can go directly into the garden with no extra composting needed! That's great since we intend to raise rabbits for meat for our freezer, and all that rabbit feed ends up...somewhere!

We have started to look for somewhat affordable land in the vicinity of the city, far enough out to be cheap, but close enough to still have broadband internet so we can work from home at our current jobs. Cross our fingers and hope to be in the new place within 2 years...

Now that I've rambled enough, here's the list of tomatoes we have planted between both gardens:

Big Bite
Bush Beefsteak
Burpee Early Pick
Early Time
Golden Girl
Health-Kick
Husky Red
Lemon Boy
Manitoba
Park's Whopper
Roma Gusto Italia
Starfire Improved
Sub Arctic Maxi
Tiny Tim
Ultra Pink
Ultra Sonic

Wow that list was longer than I thought. Now for an update on the Camrose garden - Ants! Some ants moved in and decided to make a home around the base of one of my Manitoba tomatoes! The plant was looking kind of stressed and had begun to curl its leaves. I pulled it and washed off the roots and inspected it pretty closely. I think it might still survive, so I replanted it where there were no ants. We found 2 places the ants were and decided to try putting a shovel-full from each place onto the other colony, hoping the colonies weren't related. they were supposed to fight to the death, but it didn't seem to make a difference so they must've been related. we also discovered them in the main potato bin where I put some sweet potato seed chunks. who knows if anything will come out of it or if they'll eat the chunks I put in.

I updated my Millwoods plot map with where everything got planted yesterday, and we were there till sundown building windbreaks to try to prevent the windburn from getting the new tomatoes. It's funny but the other veggies don't look affected by it. I was surprised store bought transplants were affected so much too, so up went some plastic to break up the breezes and give them a chance.

Updated planting layout for Millwoods plot

Here is the updated planting layout for the Millwoods plot. I still have several squares empty that need something. I'm put in 4 vining tomatoes and another square of romaine lettuce tonight.

Comments ability just added to the blog!

I figured out how to enable commenting for the blog finally. Feel free to leave me some feedback!

New Sprouts at the Millwoods plot...

Checked in at the Millwoods plot this evening and did some weeding and picture taking of the new seedlings. I also discovered the pumpkins I wasn't sure if I had actually planted the seeds or not (note to self: do not plant seeds when tired) had actually sprouted. Those I transplanted to their new home in the north-center bed of the garden.

I noticed 1 squash seedling had snapped off, but the one next to it is fine, and a broken tomato branch or two, nothing too bad. It was rather annoying to find a vodka bottle had been thrown into the garden, which luckily didn't damage anything. Curious holes had appeared in the white cucumber leaves too, but not so many or so large that the plants would be hampered. Looks like some little bug had at them but the culprit was nowhere to be found when checking the plant.

The whole garden has been pretty windy this past week with the storms and rain blowing through and it has been leaving signs on the plants. You'll see sections of windburn on all the tomatoes. I hope they will still grow well and bear decent amounts of fruit! Tomorrow when I go out to the garden, I'll be setting up windbreaks on the beds to help prevent further windburn, and setup the cages for the squash and tomatoes that need it. Also the last 2 panels of mesh are getting attached to the cucumber trellises now the cucumbers have passed the surface of the soil.

While looking at the pictures I took this evening I came up with a bright idea for when we have the farm - Automated row covers!!! Since I'll be building raised beds a couple feet off the ground (think beds 2 ft tall of cinder block or bricks) it would be a cool idea to have row covers that swivel up to cover the plants when there is a frost warning and then swivel back to uncover them when desired. I think for total geek-factor I need to make it wind, light, temperature, and moisture sensitive so it'll do it's job by itself when not on manual override. and then I'll need to make the sensor array and controls have different thresholds to allow for different conditions like frost, heavy rains or hail, or the need for shade in scorching conditions. Now I need to make drawings so these can be built...then hook it into the Internet so it can monitor the weather website for the frost warnings! I think we'll make a prototype over the winter to test out the concept....

Now onto the new pictures! Notice the wind blowing the Lemon boy and Ultra Pink tomato plants, gives you an idea of the stiff winds they've been experiencing.

Seeds sprouting in the ground

Checked out the Camrose garden this weekend and did some weeding and watering. The seeds are starting to come up nicely! There is Corn, Sunflowers, some ripening Strawberries, Radishes, Cucumbers, Onions, Squash above the ground now with their first leaves. I didn't yet see the zucchini and was curious, so dug up a couple seeds to have a look. They have germinated and cracked their seed casings so should be popping their sprouts out this week. The peppers are doing well and some of the indoors-sprouted ones are surviving nicely and some are struggling but hanging on.

The tomatoes are more hit and miss with the ones sprouted indoors. Since we didn't really get to harden anything off slowly it's been pretty interesting to see what happens to them in the great outdoors. I know what wind-burned plants look like now! Some haven't survived at all, and others have, and that may be very dependent on where they are located in the garden. We'll see how they produce if they survive. All the store-bought tomato seedlings are doing quite well with no wind burn at all. Tonight we'll go take some pictures of the Millwoods plot for comparison. In the meantime, here are this weekend's pictures! I'm trying to get pictures of the seedlings right when they first show up as well since I haven't found any really decent reference pictures like that yet, and they'll certainly help other new gardeners figure out what's a weed to pull vs their veggies!

Sweet Potato #3
Spaghetti Squash Seedlings
I forgot which type of squash these are, likely winter squash or gourd

Radish Seedlings in the Camrose plot
Sweet potato seedling #1
Sweet Potato Seedling #2
Corn Seedling
Asparagus went to seed
Unknown squash

Big storm went through!

On monday evening a big storm went through that spawned funnel clouds to the northwest of town in Wabamun, complete with hail and rain. The camrose plot got 2.5 inches of rain and some hail that wasn't large enough to damage anything. We're going down there tonight to check the progress of everything. We went to the Millwoods plot last night and the peppers and radishes had weathered the storm pretty well. A few peppers were lying flat but no stems were broken so I propped them up on their trellis again. I'm not sure how much actual rain fell on the millwoods plot since it seemed fairly dry when I got there last night to water.

I had to move things around in the garden in that the trellis for the pumpkins was too high and apparently going to block the next plot over later in the season. So, the pumpkins and winter squash have been moved to the north 4x8ft bed in the garden and will be caged in place rather than trellised, and the zucchini and watermelon in the southwest 4x8 bed will be left there and caged to grow lower to the ground instead. I'll let the leaves and vines lie on the ground and train them around the edges of cage as they grow and hang the growing fruit from the cage itself to keep it off the ground to help prevent premature rotting before harvest.

I expect in the next 3-4 days that the zucchini and the rest of the cucumbers and peas should be pushing up shoots as the white cucumber plant on the north side of the plot has 2 nice little seedlings just sprouted. I planted a bunch of different bush type tomatoes that I got on sale at Canadian Tire, and will be planting a reduced selection of indeterminates because of that.

New pictures to come later tonight!

Planting is almost completed!

After a marathon weekend of planting seeds in a frenzy and getting quite the sunburn, the seeds are all in the ground on both plots! All that remains in Camrose is to put in the vining tomatoes and the potatoes, and the vining tomatoes and the peppers into the Millwoods plot. I have decided to try a small version of the Japanese tomato ring in both places to support some of the bush tomatoes. I'm also trying out some store-bought cages, and lastly the florida weave to see which the bush tomatoes like better.

Here are some pictures I took tonight at the Camrose plot:

Front view of the car with the donated stucco mesh on it, securing it for the trip home. Note the waterproof Outback hats in the front window we use for farm/garden type stuff and camping - they work great to prevent sunburn on your face and they are relatively cool in summer, yet warm in winter. well worth their cost.
Side view of the stucco mesh on the car.
The squash bed
Davin with the peppers
A view of the peppers through the mesh
Lexie sporting her new seatbelt harness for car rides. She -loves- car rides to the garden...or anywhere else either. Note the new leash happens to be a horse lead rope. She snapped the last dog leash she had tying to go visit a puppy in our complex she was determined to see.
Lexie going after birds...or at least seriously considering it.
More peppers...and Davin's feet...

Planting is a third completed!

We went to both gardens last night and planted seeds like mad!

Davin and I planted in the Millwoods plot: Parsnips; Davin's 4 sq ft of: 1. Purple Haze Carrots 2. Romaine Lettuce 3. Early Wonder Beets and 4. White cucumbers! He helped out with the first square, but didn't want to help with the other 3 saying 'oh, well we planted lettuce at school, so I already know how to do that and don't want to do it again!'. He was intrigued that you could make beets into purple pickles and the white cucumbers into white ones! He also didn't want to have Darren's squares right next to his own. I didn't tell him that Darren doesn't have -specific- squares of his own :-D

In the Camrose plot we planted: Parsnips, Pumpkins, Zucchini, Vegetable Marrow, corn, and sunflowers. Darren got some mesh cut and put on the frames too. We brought along the potatoes and sweet potatoes but ran out of daylight to plant them.

I made seed tape for the parsnips and carrots! I used 2 ply toilet paper and an UHU glue stick and the seeds with my spacing guides. It worked pretty well, was a bit finicky to not rip the paper when applying the glue (don't let the glue sit uncapped for more than a minute or it sticks too much and rips the paper). I put a swipe of glue where each seed was to go, dropped on the seed and folded over the the paper. for a 3 square length (about 1 foot) of paper I got 2 strips from it. I cut the strip in half lengthwise, and folded it across the short-edge. I'll take some pictures of it later today. I'll be making lots of seed tape this winter as it makes planting much faster.

The peppers and tomatoes at the Camrose plot looked pretty unhappy last night. Apparently there was a stiff wind for 2 days straight from the south, so they are pretty wind-burned. Hopefully they survive that. The peppers had been mostly coverd, but the tomatoes - not so much. If they don't make it, we'll get transplants and seed again!

We'll be picking up strawberries on saturday for planting out on sunday at the Camrose plot.

The Planting Begins...

We've started getting the plants in the ground! In the Camrose plot are 15 pepper plants and 4 roma tomatoes, with more to go in on wednesday evening. In the Millwoods plot we have in onion and garlic and 3 types of carrots so far. more will go in tomorrow! Davin has decided he wants to grow marigolds in his 4 sq ft of his own. (only 1 sq ft of marigolds, 3 squares of other things like his tiger carrots.) I was surprised by his decision until he said they'd planted lettuce and marigolds at his class at school. Some pics of the progress...

Digging all done at the Millwoods plot!

The digging is done...though not the best thing to do for 6 hours straight right after spending 4 hours running around West Ed Mall doing the Unknown Challenge for Dell in the 2007 Edmonton Corporate Challenge Games this year...

We started on the trellises and still have to attach the mesh. we ran away since the mosquitoes decided to swarm us about 9pm. So we'll be back on monday and get that done plus much of the planting too. Tomorrow is off to the Camrose plot to do the same thing. And we heard tonight the soaker hose system really is pushing water through to the end of the hose which is great!

Here's some pix of today's progress at the Millwoods plot:

Digging every evening

The weather is cold and wet, or dry and dust-stormy take your pick! We've been out to the Millwoods plot for a couple hours every evening this week so far. We picked up a load of scrap 2x4's from the construction yard and replaced the really crappy scrap wood we found on monday night. so now we've got almost all the wood dug into place forming our in-ground veggie beds. I've got 2 more to do then can mark out the spacings for the various plants and put up the trellises for the climbing plants. We should be able to plant this weekend! The Camrose plot is at the stage of building and putting up the trellises and acquiring compost. we should be able to start planting this weekend there too.

I still haven't been able to get the tomatoes and cukes outside to start hardening them off since everytime I'm ready to do it a storm with high winds blows through! Well, we'll start with the seeds that need to germinate outside and get to the tomatoes by midweek, then we'll use row cover for a bit with the tomatoes until they are ok to get exposed to the elements completely. And the landlord definitely doesn't like our temporary plant shelter (greenhouse), so we really need to get some decent weather to harden those plants off and dismantle the shelter once done. Next year i'll come up with some other solution to harden off the plants. Maybe I'll build portable coldframes that you can break down flat that are no taller than the fence surrounding our place.

I'll be taking a couple pictures tonight once the last 2 beds are dug in, and then again as the trellises go up!

First progress at the Millwoods plot!

Just got back from the Millwoods plot and we got alot done tonight! Found some scrap wood and cut it to size so we have a little over half the boards needed for the frames of the beds.

Got the peat moss bales x2...and those really were not fun to attempt to get out of the home depot cart and into the car by myself. Some nice guy put them in the cart for me, made it look like they weighed 5 pounds instead of about 100lbs. (Lexie is around 60 or 70 pounds and I can lift her even when squirmy, but these bales were just about too much entirely for me.)

Also bought 40 litres of perlite to add to the soil. the compost was available too. So we shovelled like mad and spread the compost, peat and perlite onto the areas planned for the beds and fortuitously found a rototiller and tilled it in. That made it go really fast! now I just have to get the rest of the boards and cut them to size and get them dug in to mark the beds. Once that's done, I build and install the vertical frames and cages. then I can plant!
It looks very hopeful to have the garden planted by the end of the 28th if the weather remains dry.

Here are some pictures of the Millwoods plot. We are plot #12. check out the chunkiness of the soil - I think the school must've rototilled when the soil was still a bit wet and mucky perhaps.

Lookit the chunks in that dry soil!

Ah, The untouched plot.

Darren brining up the tiller to the plot. Thanx uh...Tim? for leaving the tiller there for the evening! hope you don't mind! We owe you some gas for it and a beer!

A good view just before the final till.

Darren getting ready to till in the additives.

Our plot right after tilling in the compost, peat, and perlite.

Kickin' into high gear

Spent all weekend working at the Camrose plot. Got all the beds finished up with added peat and perlite. We discovered the compost pile belonged to the city and they weren't at work when we went to see about getting it. maybe we can get some this week sometime and top dress it in just before we plant... Now we're at the stage of building all the trellises. so next hours will be spent on affixing mesh to the frames and finish cementing the frames together. We'll have to put up some chicken wire to deter the dogs from the south side of the garden though, as they like making 'deposits' there!

I've decided for all the bush-type determinate tomatoes to do the California/Florida weave method of support for them. That was more cost driven than anything else since the wood posts were cheap and the metal ones I wanted were hideously expensive. $1.64 vs $9.50 or so and since I needed about 34 of them...the math came out to a huge hit on the pocket-book. Now of course we'll need a ladder to drive the 8ft poles into the ground several feet...

All the soaker hose is in...but I guess the manufacturer was serious about you can only have 150' of hose before you have psi issues. The leader hose is too long so our last 50ft of hose doesn't push out any water! Gonna have to get a shorter lead hose and then we'll get at least half of that last hose working. The rest of the garden will need to be hand-watered. We got the timer working so it'll water for an hour, every 8 hours, ie 3 times a day. That should be enough? We'll see I suppose. I don't think the Camrose water is metered so we should be able to water cheaply as much as we need.

It never ceases to amaze me how many worms are in the dirt. I found one the thickness of my little finger and about 8 inches long! It wasn't very happy it got accidentally dug up either, so I replanted it before I thought, hey, maybe a picture of that would've been smart!

I'm hoping to be ready to plant this coming weekend for both gardens, so it will be a gruelling haul to get all the rest of the work done. Mon-Tues, Thursday-Friday at the Millwoods garden and Wednesday and Saturday/sunday at the Camrose garden.

Things to be done at the millwoods plot this week: determine if there has been a car drive through our plot or not (there was a report that one had randomly clipped the gardens); frame our planting areas; Buy 2 bales of peat, and mix it, the remaining perlite, and some compost into the planting areas; setup trellises; install upside down watering bottles where needed; mark out the plant spacings; plant the plants! and put on row covers for the ones that need it; and last but not least, help dig more sod up in the area needing digging. We dug 25 sq ft already of the 500 or so that is there.

Here are some pictures of the peat and perlite going into the Camrose plot. We used 4 bales of peat total, and 2/3 a huge bag of perlite. There's also a picture of Darren cutting metal pipe for some of the frames. I discovered the flat rebar I had will not fit into the 1/2 inch metal pipe, but it will fit into the pvc pipe. Good thing I have a lot of round rebar too.

Peat and Perlite before mixing it in
Giving new meaning to the term double-digging!
Darren Cutting conduit for the vertical frames...note the safety glasses!
A shot of the garden showing how much peat was used and perlite. The perlite bag is on the right. Perlite application was easy using a big chunk of pipe i found as a scoop. Darren said it was off a snow blower...

Layout for Millwoods community garden plot

Here is the planned layout for my plot in the Millwoods community garden. Work will begin on that plot as soon as the school gets it all rototilled...hopefully this week sometime. the numbers for the veggies correspdond to the same list from earlier posts...

Productive day...

Got out to the Camrose plot today for about 8 hours, and got a lot done. There are all the new pictures posted to the Picasa web album, so check them out! it's come a long way from being a weed-choked plot a few weeks ago to where it's now at. I think the addition of the first bits of hardware are really starting to give me an idea of how this is going to look in reality vs the diagrams I have on paper marking out the spacings and what goes where. Here's a couple pics:

1/3 of the boards still to be dug in to frame the planting beds - north edge of garden.

1/3 of the boards still to be dug in to frame the planting beds - middle view of garden towards west.

View of southeast corner of garden. You can see the raspberry patch there on the east edge. There is also some grass in there which the resident dog Sox and my dog Lexie like to eat. So the dogs try to help when they're not causing mischief. (I had to re-dig the SE bed several times as Lexie kept digging up and running away with the boards she could reach)

These show the garden with 2/3s of the boards dug in to frame the beds. The next thing to go in was the 3" pvc vertical watering pipes. here we discovered that to rent a powered auger, you need to get to the store when they open, not at 2pm. we got a non-powered one and it was pretty useless. We (meaning Darren by himself since I was putting in rebar and cutting the trellis pvc), took quite awhile to get in the 3" pvc and ended up using a digging stick, sledgehammer and a piece of 2x4 to losen the dirt and pound in the pipe. and though he hit clay at the 1.7 ft mark in some places, it turned out to be hours faster than using the manual auger. still hours could've been saved with a powered one. pictures of the watering pipes and rebar so far:



the rebar is easiest to see in this picture. It is light grey and visible around the edges of the beds.






This is the bed Lexie kept digging up the boards on yesterday. You can see how much grass and old plant matter are in the raspberry patch, but the canes -are- growing leaves.

While Darren was busy with that, I pounded in all the pre-cut rebar we had, cut the trellis pvc to size after realising I didn't measure twice or even read my list with the measurements I wanted, so all the uprights got cut to 5ft instead of 6. crap. oh well, the trellises will be a little shorter....then I used pvc cement to attach the pvc elbows to the uprights and left them to cure for an hour. once that finished, it was time to insert the cross beams for a few of them before the light ran out for the day. I managed to get 1 section of mesh onto a frame to see better how things are going to look, here's some pictures:
















We'll be going back out on wednesday to continue at the plot....building frames, getting compost, laying soaker hose etc...

recycling materials!

While digging through the garage I found some great stuff for the garden that will cut costs down - old orange tarps and rebar and steel piping. so now I can make orange mulch to increase the lycopene content of all the orange and red veggies, and make vertical trellises for some of the climbing plants! I had been having difficulty finding this metal conduit the square foot garden posts around the web and the book have been talking about, but this is good start!

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Here's the definition of Lycopene from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycopene

Nutritional benefits
Lycopene is the most powerful carotenoid quencher of singlet oxygen.[1] Singlet oxygen from ultraviolet light is a primary cause of skin aging.[2]

There is evidence that frequent intake of such products is associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer (especially prostate cancer), diabetes, osteoporosis, and even male infertility.[3] Lycopene may also be related to a reduced risk of oesophageal, colorectal, and oral cancer.[4]

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A full day of garden-prep is ahead on sunday. I discovered that digging holes without proper tools is no fun, so I'm renting an auger to dig the 3" holes for the experimental pvc watering pipes. and of course i forgot the camera the other day...will try to bring it and get some great in progress shots of all the prep for this visit! We'll see how much 3 people can get done with about 10 hours each and all the supplies we need.

Still the 4x8 waterbin needs to be cleaned out and filled with soil medium, the compost bins cleaned out and re-setup, and the potato bins cleaned and setup as well. i'll be glad once all the hard stuff is done!

A week of bad weather...

A week of bad weather sure slows down the prep at the Camrose site! As well, it put a halt to my efforts to start hardening off the seedlings. I got 1 good day of them being out for several hours in the coldframes and then it became too stormy, wet, and cold to bother with putting them out. It's supposed to improve now as of tomorrow so things can get going again.

Tonight we'll head to the Camrose plot and get the rest of the frames laid into the ground and dig some holes to drop in my experimental pvc pipe watering system. (pictures coming) I found some 3" diameter, pre-drilled, pvc pipe which I'm cutting into 2 foot lengths. The idea is to sink it into the ground leaving about an inch or so above ground and water into the pipe for a slow release into the soil. I'm not sure how many I would need for each block of veggies so I plan on making 10 lengths and comparing it to hand watering and a soaker hose too. This year is truly going to be experimental, so next year we can improve the methods. Of course, having a small almost non-existent budget also leads me doing things in the way of hardware on a smaller scale than I'd like. But this will prevent any expensive mistakes the first time around too!

I took some new pictures which will be posted tonight to the afore-mentioned picasa web photo album from a previous post. You'll get to see that some of the cucumber seedlings have opened up some male flowers already! ...They were supposed to wait until they got planted out!

Adventures in rototilling!

Wow, now I've met the rototiller, and I'm pretty tired from it. It's a good thing I weigh as much as I do or there would've been no chance of me running it as it would've run away with me. As it was, I just did a few rows of the garden to try it out and let the husband do the rest. Between the nasty vibration while it did its tilling and the way it wanted to jump forward and run away when it hit something denser, I had to generally throw my weight constantly backwards to ensure I could keep control of it. My fingers are strangely stiff and sore after that as well as my forearms. After all the raking and digging, I was getting tired really fast while using the rototiller, and who knew the horseradish would've spread so much through the plot?

We got the tilling done in about 2.5 hours and the rest of the time was spent getting the yard more ship-shape than it's been in awhile. Even the dog was helping! She saw me rolling logs to a new location, and when I came within the radius of her tie-out leash, she grabbed the log with teeth and both front paws and started pushing and pulling it too! wish I'd had my camera with me...and I did, but I forgot it was in my pocket! curses! It would've been an awesome picture. Of course there are some more logs so maybe we can get her to do it again. Very smart dog. when I was doing the initial raking to clear the area to be tilled, she tried to help with that too by batting at all the grass and debris on the rake when I was dumping it into a pile. It was all good until she decided the pile was a comfortable place to lie down and watch the proceedings. Later on, Davin was trying his hand at digging in the freshly tilled plot, so of course the dog decided she needed to dig a big hole of her own. Everyone else was digging something or other, so why not her too!

After the tilling and raking etc was done, I laid out the lumber to make the frames for the veggie beds. I had gotten just enough lumber in the car to do the job which was good. I discovered I had to remap the garden a bit as the dimensions weren't quite the same shape as I had thought. So, remapped it is, and we have a few more square feet to plant from it. Here's the new remapping (click on it for a larger size in a new window):




By the time I was forced to quit working it was getting dark, and I was getting rained on. I'd reached the point of diminished returns for the evening. So off home we went with plans to return on wednesday to finish laying in the frames.

Next up at the big plot: finish the frames, and acquire the compost and peat moss and start mixing it in - I've been told there is free compost available which I will go retrieve; setup vertical frames and cages.

Next scrounging run: find more materials to set up the vertical growing frames and cages with.

I've also finished 3 cold frames for the front yard so I can start to harden off seedlings over the next 2 weeks. So far it seems things are more or less on-track.

Freecycling to build the hardware

I've been keeping a keen eye on the local freecycling list at Yahoo for materials I can recycle in the garden. As my budget for building the hardware needed to setup a specifically square foot garden is extremely limited, I need to use reclaimed materials as much as possible. I'm hoping the only costs would be for soil improvement since there's no way i could afford to pay for enough compost, vemiculite and peat moss plus organic fertilisers if/when needed to fill -every- box in both garden plots. The things I expect to buy are some amount of compost, an amount of peat moss, soaker hoses and a timer or two. (I think i need minimum 150' of hose). I still have some math to do to see how much I can get away with. also a rototiller needs to be rented to get the camrose plot into workable shape after lying fallow for 6 years. the rest of the vertical supports I hope to scavenge from somewhere or other.

Plans for the garden hardware

The thick red and blue border lines in the layout map correspond to a trellis in that space. All the indeterminate (vine) tomatoes are getting trellised, and the determinate tomatoes are getting caged. I'll be trying out several types of trellising such as orange snow fencing secured on a metal pipe frame; metal frame with vertical string for each plant; latticework cages; the california/florida weave;

I'll be growing the following veggies vertically:

Tomatoes (some caged)
Peppers (caged)
Cucumbers
Beans
Peas
Cantaloupes
Pumpkin (small sugar, not big Max)
Watermelon
Winter Squash
Zucchini
Vegetable Marrow
Gourds

The potatoes and sweet potato will be grown in barrel containers and be hilled up with soil as they go giving more space for more tubers to grow.

Some amount of Companion planting has been planned into the layout, but for ease of organisation and maintenance this first year, I've done alot of block planting. I took care not to place anything by another plant it doesn't do well next to.

I'm wanting to succession plant as well, but we'll see how that goes when squares start to open up and how late in the season it is by then. I will also grow some items in the house like lettuce and celery just to see if I can.

I bought a rhubarb plant this weekend which is going into a large plastic pot of its own since I don't want it to take over everything else. I may leave it in the front yard and keep the dog out of it since she would have much fun digging it out of the pot and then going for a victory run with it. also up for some container gardening are some strawberries and Ground Berries. the ground berries are another type of ground cherry which i just put into peat pellets yesterday. hopefully they sprout! I started more ground cherries too since the first packet had a disappointing germination rate compared to all the other seed types.

Here is the veggie planting layout map for the plot in Camrose....and also the key for which numbers refer to what plants. the garden is laid out in 1ft blocks. One I find out how big the community garden plot is in Edmonton, I'll post a layout for that one too.

The Saga begins....Garden Experiment 2007

Step 1: Start seedlings.....

Here's how I started the seedlings and the equipment I've used:

- 3x 4' shop light fixtures with 2x 40w flourescent plant/aquarium lights each.
- wire linen closet shelving cut in 4' lengths, plus brackets for attaching to the wall
- Various plastic trays and clear lids from HomeDepot and Rona to grow the seedlings in.
- Several Jiffy pot trays - which are little dehydrated peat pellets that expand when you add water, and then you plant the seed in that. each tray holds 72 pellets. the cheapest bulk price I found for the pellets so far was at Hole's Greenhouse in St. Albert where they were 10 cents each.
- Bags of seedling starter mix for trying to start the seeds all together in a layer of mix.
- Mister, and watering can
- Seeds

- Got lots of books from the library, am intrigued by the Square foot and cubed foot gardening methods. I will be applying principles from those schools of thought into this year's garden.

Check out the online photo log of the garden's progress:

GardenPix2007

Step 2: Forget which days what got planted...

First some tomatoes got planted (maybe too early?), then a few days later some more tomatoes, then a few days later some cucumbers, then later some peppers, and some weeks later pumpkin and cantaloupe...

Step 3: Pot up like mad....

Things are growing really, really well...except for the groundcherries of which only 5 of the 12 seeds germinated. I bought a bale of Aggregate mix #4 on the sage advice of another shopper at Home Depot who seemed to know what he was talking about, and am now transplanting the seedlings that have outgrown the trays into larger pots...and cups since I've now run out of peat pots. I didn't realise I'd need so many pots...and that they'd take up so much room. Now's the time I realised I'd have to give some seedlings away since far more have sprouted than I thought would sprout. Davin's class got a tiny Tim Tomato plant each.

Step 4: Start sourcing materials to build the cold frames and 4'x4' frames for the garden plots. I asked at a construction site for their wood scraps and things are looking good to get enough materials. I found cheap materials at a used architectural supply yard too. I got 2 rolls of orange snow fencing for next to nothing so am going to test it out for all the vertical gardening.