Now that we have our freeze dryer to preserve more veggies, we’ve decided we can grow more food. We’ve made some changes to our garden plans to accommodate more of the things that can be freeze-dried.
NEW in 2024, we started a separate area for pumpkins & winter squash. Typically we’ve grown our pumpkins & winter squash in our raised beds, but since these plants take up so much space, we decided to move them out to pasture… another area to allow for other veggies better suited to raised beds.
With our new Kioti tractor, Tim dug down & leveled out an area in full sunshine for the squash. It’s about 20’ x 20’, and fully fenced with deer fencing, 6’ tall. This area is close to our garden water source and easily accessible. It’s shown in the photo below. (This photo was taken in late October, showing nothing in the main garden and lots of dead vegetation. Note the shaded part of the Main Garden—this is not shaded during the summer months.)
After the tractor work was done in late April or early May, beds were created by adding layers of manure, leaves, duck shavings and soil. The beds were allowed to rest 4 weeks prior to planting.
The squash & pumpkins were started in soil blocks under lights in the greenhouse, then transplanted to the large, maxi-sized soil blocks and allowed to grow further in the greenhouse, about 4 weeks total. They were transplanted outdoors June 7th. Fortunately this year there was no frost after that date, but we were prepared with frost cloth just in case.
We grew three Sugar Pie pumpkin plants, two Lakota squash, one Waltham Butternut, and one each of Celebration, Honey Boat, Zeppelin Delicata & Sweet Dumpling. Additionally, we added some Borage & Comfrey as companions.
Our harvest was wonderful! As always, it gets a bit dicey in the fall with worries about when frost may hit us, and wondering whether we should cover things up. The frost hit around September 17th, to kill off the leaves. The squash/pumpkins were harvested at that time, and most were delicious. A few, still greenish, weren’t quite mature before the frost and didn’t keep as long in storage, as expected.
Next year, I’ll remove any squash blossoms that appear after August 1st, as I doubt they will be able to mature before any frost, and they won’t be worth keeping. That’s one thing about our short summer season: we just have to do the best we can without pushing the limits.
For 2025, I’ll attempt some “three sisters”, and grow some corn & beans along with the squash. I did attempt to grow some corn the first year we were here, and it did not do well. I tried a shorter variety of corn in our raised beds, which was also supposed to have been a short-season corn. Perhaps it was just not a good variety or perhaps not a good year. I have heard of people growing corn around here, so I’ll give it one more try.
2025: Jerusalem Artichokes
We’re also planning to extend the size of the squash bed to include one row at the north side for Jerusalem Artichokes, otherwise known as sunchokes. There’s plenty of room out there for their height, so we’ll give those a try.
Early in May, we began to see evidence of chewing on some of the freshly transplanted seedlings, particularly things like the broccoli, cabbage & cauliflower planted in the beds around the perimeter. We’d always known mice would be able to fit in through the stucco netting which surrounds the garden perimeter beds, but we hadn’t experienced problems with them previously. This year they came with a vengeance. We put out bait stations as well as snap traps, and began catching 1-4 mice each night. Eventually there weren’t as many caught, and after the plants were larger, the mice didn’t seem to gnaw on them as much. But, almost nightly we reset the traps and each morning went out to check them, unsnap them, and retrieve any dead mice.
The first inkling that we may have pack rats was May 30th, when I discovered this neatly laid pile of onions next to the onion bed, and these potato stems and cabbage leaves dismembered from their plants. (Fortunately these plants all survived!) I didn’t think that the mice would be able to do this, and the only thing I could think of was that it may be pack rats, known to be in our area. Below are photos of some of the damage found that day.
In addition to the damaged plants, the four bait stations we’d left out for the mice were gone! Not just the bait, the whole plastic bait station. Gone! Clearly, this had to be a pack rat family.
Eventually, Tim found a DIY rat bait station idea online. He made a couple of these, put them out, and the first night the PR’s got into them and ate all 5 blocks of the bait out of each one. It’s large enough for the pack rats to get in, but not the cat, dog, or ducks. The bait blocks are suspended from the top on a rod or wire, each one falling to the bottom as the bottom one is eaten. After the first two were successful, Tim made about four more, and they are scattered all around out property. At this point, we seem to have taken care of the problem.
What about the cat, you ask? She does catch mice, but is locked inside each night (either the RV or a shed) to keep her from becoming coyote bait. We had been keeping her in our RV at night to keep the mice away, and it worked great….until she got bored and started tearing up the edge of the sofa. Now she’s in the shed at night. After moving the cat out of the RV, the pack rats found a new cozy home inside. We discovered they’d gotten in to the kitchen cabinets under the sink. After cleaning it all up & removing all the kitchen wares, Tim put another big trap out by the side of the RV, and they haven’t been in there since. Or else, they’re really neat and don’t poop or leave weeds laying around.
We had plenty of warning and had planned as best we could to harvest whatever could be harvested and protect any thing else that might be saved. Some things will be lost. I’m hopeful that the remaining brassicas, lettuces, spinach, and root vegetables will be okay and may even produce more growth. The potatoes, tucked underground, will be fine, but I doubt that the plants will grow any more. A couple of cauliflower were planted in July and were still small–I will be interested to see if they survived. Obviously the zucchini pictured here did not survive.
This is the first year we’ve ever experienced a problem with mice in the garden. We always knew that mice would be the only thing that might get through our defenses..it just hadn’t happened. On May 5 I went out to discover that 2 cabbages and 2 broccoli had all been chewed pretty well. Guessing it may have been mice, we put out a trap the next night we didn’t catch one, but the trap had been sprung. The third broccoli in that bed, and the two cauliflower were chewed. The following night sure enough, one squashed mouse was found in the morning. We began setting two traps nightly and set out some D-Con bait traps as well. I cut out the bottoms of some plastic bottles and began setting them over the plants at night. The mice also ate some lettuce & bok choy, but not the spinach or the chinese cabbage. Surprisingly, one morning I found that they’d eaten several onions in another area at the far side of the garden. I’d read that mice did not like onions–not so! At this time, traps are still set nightly with an occasional casualty, and the D-Con seems to have sent a few mice to our ducks’ pool looking for a drink of water and finding a watery drowning instead. It appears that the cabbage and broccoli survived their torture; however, the two cauliflower were too well chewed to come back. Now, for all things transplanted to the perimeter beds, they are covered with bottles, which seems to work well both to keep out the mice and the cold.
