We are now four weeks from last frost date

Posted on April 25, 2026 by Just another day on the farm

Its happening, the biggest of the heat loving Tomato plants are starting the in-out cycle! The shelves in the porch greenhouse are getting cleared, the big top ones first for the tomato and cucumber patio type plants. This week the rest of the shelves will get cleared and more trays will fill them.

Officially we are three weeks away from last frost date but i promised you, based on my own tracking over 22 spring of being here on the farm, its four weeks away. Still it is time to get so many of the heat loving seeds into their trays for future plantings.

This includes but not limited to

Pickling cucumbers, melons, squash, zucchini, pumpkins

I need to wait another week or two and then transplant all the cabbage seedling starts that were done in the winter sown jugs, i see others tiny babies in there as well but the cabbage are going gang busters!

The pepper plants are on their second set of true leaves and will no doubt we on the third which is their pinch back time to help create stocky sturdy plants. Yes you are seeing that awful gout weed in this photo and yes that was cleared just a few weeks ago but its back and its a never ending battle.. If you have it, you know, and if you don’t, you don’t want it!

the next four weeks will have all the spaces under grow lights going but i am so excited that soon outdoor plantings will also be happening. In keep this that and as the kitchen garden is now full prepped and ready to go!

Now we turn out eye towards the Park and its many gardens, the big focus is on the Main Gate garden… Its called the Gate garden because of its many many cattle panels and that its one of the few areas that has gates to enter and exit from to keep the hound pack out of.

The amount of vertical gardening that happens in this space is amazing to say the least!

Here are a few examples of it in all its glory on past years..

However, we have learned to not put the tomato’s in this area as they love it just a bit to much , we were we topped them out at 8 feet in their towers and had to stake the towers and prune weekly to reduce foliage. Its better to grow them outside this area. They just take up to much space!

So where are you at locally? Are you starting your heat lovers soon? Are you able to plant out some of your early springs that don’t mind colder temps, got your the soil can be worked seeds in? How are your winter sown jugs looking?

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Fast Beet Soup Recipe

Posted on April 24, 2026 by Just another day on the farm

Sometimes you want your soup to take all day on a slow simmer, slow food is amazing but sometimes you want fast soup.

Fast Beet Soup Recipe

Get out your food processor! Goodness to i love my ninja!

2 large beets, topped, tailed and peeled cut into rough chunks

1 med yellow onion, peeled and cut into rough chunks

1 large or 2 med potatos, peeled an cut into rough chunks

1/4th of a large cabbage, cored and outer leaves removed and cut into you guessed it, rough chunks

1 large carrot, peeled, ends removed and cut into chunks

Put though your chop feature on your food processors, till its large coleslaw bits size, add it all to your cooking pot.

Into the cooking pot, add in your choice of veg broth or mix of chicken/veggie broth, in my case it was all veggie broth. Two quarts or 6 cups, i didn’t want a lot of broth, if you want more, add another two cups

Cooked 25 to 30 minutes till veggies are all tenders.. adjust salt and pepper to taste

To serve in a bowl, pour in a some heavy cream at the bottom, ladle your pipping hot soup over top, and add dill if desired, hubby does not like dill on his, i like dill on mine. If desired instead, place a spoon of sour cream on top with fresh dill if you have it.

This makes 4 hearty supper portions with side salad or bread or six small soup sides. Fridges up well and tastes as good reheated for leftovers!

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Wool Tags for the Garden 2026

Posted on April 23, 2026 by Just another day on the farm

Shearing took place at my girlfriends farm, last weekend, it was not ideally in the sense of it coming off a week of rain but timing is as it goes, I headed over to pick up a HUGE stuffed full bag of so much WOOL!

Once we got it out of the bag and started to pick and spread it out to dry as we have five days of warm/dry, each day i will go out and work on finding the part on each sheer that i want to use for making and selling bags of raw unclean wool for homemade wool tags locally.

I am of course very excited to use a huge amount of this wool in my own gardens, i have studies on what it can offer in terms of plant growth. There are so many studies now compared to when i started doing this, i remember at the time of my first posting on this, i could only find three studies out of EU all of them very positive, the big one was how amazing they were for tomato’s and that they were using it as a natural peat moss and how well it could feed the soil in dessert like conditions.

More efficient nitrogen utilization through wool pellet and soil inoculation – Kovács – 2024 – Agrosystems, Geosciences & Environment – Wiley Online Library

Now, you can find so many studies, in Canada, in N.A. and across the world, the bottom line is that all of them are proving what i have seen with my own eyes, they can be used in many ways in the garden and all of them can and will prove to be useful, common sense is needed.. clearly adding them to a cactus pot would not be a good idea lol

However adding them to your patio posts, YES, add them to your garden Heck YA! Raised beds, you want this big time, IN ground.. you bet!

Now if you want it machine perfect, there are more and more folks that are investing in the machines to shed the wool and then put it though a pellet making machine and i am doing some experimenting on this myself on a very small scale

If you want to do it yourself, put a post out to see if any of your sheep owning friends have wool trimmings available or if they have extra to share or barter for, if they raise sheep for fleeces for spinning and such, they will still be trimming the edges and those leftovers can be used in the gardens or pots

I will have limited farmgate sales and some local spring sales in prepared different sizes, and the good news is that the wool acts as a slow release upwards of 6 months More information on availability coming soon.

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Happy Earth Day!

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Just another day on the farm

Happy Earth Day, You are one with all, Things Die, Things are reborn and live again, hug your loved ones, hug a tree and remember great things come from small seeds.. plant a seed, hold it tenderly and have faith it can grow to be! Farmgal Self Portraits, other then the hug the tree, Farm Helper R and are sharing a bonding moment in the forest!

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Sweet Pickled Beets Recipe

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Just another day on the farm

The Keys to Farmgal Pickled Beets is Roasting your beets (never boil them) and the brine..

Sweet Pickling Brine per 4 pints, double or triple or more at will..

  • 2 cups of Pickling Vinegar
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 3 tablespoons Pickling spices ( simmer in your brine for 5 in a spice bag, then remove)
  • This will make enough bring to cover around 4 pounds of prepared beets

In a non-reactive pot, add the above together, bring to a boil, bring down to a simmer or turn off and allow the spices to age in the brine, if you let it sit and i have been known to do so for upwards of 20 minutes, bring it back up to a boil after the spice bag is removed so you are filling your hot jars with hot brine before going into your water bath canner.

Now almost all recipes are going to tell you to boil your beets, even worse recipes will tell you to peel and slice your beets and then boil them.. Please don’t do this! Choose fresh beets, remove the greens, leaving the top and tail intact, place them in a 375 oven in a large roaster pan with around 2 to 3 inches of water and cook them till fork tender, small to med approx. 45 minutes, large beets up to a hour or more, the fork should not break the beet up, but it should go in easily. if needed, add a touch more boiling water if there a few layers of bigger beets, do not allow the roaster to run out of water.

This allows the natural sweetness and depth of flavor in the beets to develop, once out of the oven, carefully remove them from the pan into a bowl of ice water or a freshly washed sink with cold water, the skins will slip off or you can take a small paring knife an peel/skin them, if you have chickens, ducks, pigs or even cows or horse, they will love the beet peelings

Then for me, i cut them in half, and then into as equal cubes or if you are using small round beets or if you are using slicer beets, which have been breed to grow perfectly to give you small/med round as you cut them for slicer pickled beets, the key is trying to get them as even as you can reasonable so that they will pickle evenly if you are wanting to use them quickly, its less a issue if you let them age properly before use. Best after two weeks or longer.

Follow all standard Water Bath processes, Hot jars to hot brine into hot water bath for the time needed for your personal sea level, for me at quart size, it is 30 minute’s once it comes to a boil, remove and place them and wait 24 hours before checking them for seal, remove the ring and wash the jars, label and place in a cool, dark place for storage. Ideally use within a year but will hold in properly conditions for 3 or more years.

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Canning Pantry -Beets, Beef and Chicken Soup

Posted on April 21, 2026 by Just another day on the farm

The Canning pantry on the farm has been in steady use for the past two years with not much refill, between my own personal health issues, Hubby’s foot issue getting him a medical leave to work full time from home for 6 months and the insane drought of 2025, full jars come up and empty ones go down. The biggest items added last year was peach sauce.

2026 is a turn over year and a restock year, a turn over year in the fact that anything three years older or more is getting eating, or turned into fodder and those jars are getting cleared, washed and hopefully most of them refilled.

We are heading into spring of 2026 with no canned beans, i mean i normally carry at least a two year supply sometimes upwards of a three year on our most favorite canned farm raised veggie, diced beans and we are OUT, out of bean, out of corn, both of those were full failures last year in the gardens, the coons got the corn early and took out our hopes there, turns out that area can grow corn but its not a good area for wildlife eating your corn, the beans got planted late in the new big garden and got heat stunted and then killed..

beets were ok in the kitchen garden but we did a fresh eating and storage and they were gone, as was the drought potato’s, they grew perfectly, they were double hilled, flowered and they put out a lovely crop of babies and then the drought hit and they died back and we just had buckets of itty bitty baby ones to harvest and eat, good eating but no winter storage.

So when i got the chance to pick up a big old bag of Quebec grown beets, i took it and added a 25 pound bag to process into jars until we can get our first new crop of the year, i am very much looking forward to having pickled beets regular back on the table.

Canning Pantry Count to April 2026 Total Jars to date 35

  • 4 8oz jars of Black Current Jam
  • 5 quart jars of grass fed stewing beef
  • 9 pint jars of Chicken Barley Veg soup
  • 9 pint jars of diced beets
  • 7 quart jars of Sweet Pickled Beets
  • 1 pint jar of Coltsfoot syrup

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Mushroom Compost

Posted on April 19, 2026 by Just another day on the farm

We picked up 500 plus pounds of twice bloomed mushroom bags from down the way about ten minutes give or take, love supporting small local farms, we have been buying mushrooms from them for a couple years now, so when the chance came to buy them in bulk at a discounted price point, it was certainly taken up on.

We had bought a Wine Cap kit from them last spring and it was producing its first flushes last fall, and i look forward to expanding on those but the fact that these 100 bags have all the different types they produce still active in them means that as we spread them, there is a very good chance that we can create new spots on hedgerows, in shady spots, in spots i know get water moves threw or edges in the rains to help create flushes of the different types.

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Its Coltsfoot bloom time!

Posted on April 18, 2026 by Just another day on the farm

Its that time of year that the coltsfoot blooms are up and out on the sunny days, they come out before the leaves and while its a very good idea to dig out the creeping roots in your spring garden clean up, its also time to pick and redo the cough syrup.

I don’t make much as it not something that is used often if at all. I make a pint jar of the flowers steam juiced for future cough candy making and one 8 oz jar of the syrup itself, this gets made and swapped out on a rotation base in the herbal cupboard.

I know, you are thinking why do that if it almost never gets used? Its local, its here on the farm, it is effect for most people, and for very short term use, its more safe then many other things. I would rather have it on hand if it was needed, then be wishing i had put some up.

I have tried to dry the flowers because then i would not need to use a jar lid but at least on my tries, instead of them drying down into yellow flowers, the heat pushed them into fluffy seed heads, you should have seen my surprise as i opened the dryer to check on them, not having turned the flow off, after all why would i need to and whoosh, out they flew LOL

I expect i could try again by taking them in the bud stage and drying them but for now, i am happy with my system. With no idea really what will be effect supply chain wise, this year my full restock the herbal pantry from top to bottom, all season long, everything that can be refreshed will be, extras jars will be put up and I will be putting my new to me vacuum jar sealer to use and we will see if it helps keep things fresher, I am quite hopeful.

This will allow me to reuse canning lids in a safe way and save on costs to put these jars up. Do you have coltsfoot in the garden or by forage? Do you buy it at the local pharmacy or order it online? Do you keep it in cough drop form, or syrup or tincture? Or for you, do you keep it out of your herbal pantry altogether?

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Current Propagation -Pinning

Posted on April 17, 2026 by Just another day on the farm

Red, White, Black, Gooseberry, Jostaberry are all part of the current family, and they all can be very successfully cloned by pinning.

What are some good reason you would want to pin your favorites? or ask your friend to do so on a type or bush you admire.

  1. Free Plants, why buy more, when you can easily working with your mother plants create more.
  2. Clone your Favorites
  3. Can share your old faithful or your new WOW favorite with Friends, Family and FARMGATE SALES
  4. You can create a whole new starter hedgerow this year to be planted out next year!
  5. Micro zone: you know this plant works in your soil, your climate and you know the parents health status!

What do you need?

  1. Mother plant of your choice
  2. A way to pin the stem to the ground, this can be ground staple, this can be as frugal as a rock if need be, or a small wedge of wood. I recommend using a steel staple for best results but i am going to own that i have been known to lower a branch, pop a rock on it to hold it in place with the rest up in the air.. the rock is big enough to keep that spot down, small enough to not effect the rest of the plant and the next year just remove it, cut on the mother plant side, lift the rock, take up the rooted and the front branch, i will trim the branch to match the root ball, and replant or pot up. The reason we ideally buy and use the metal pins, they can clean them, we can see where they are, and no one is going to think that its a rock in a odd place and move it (trust me its happened lol) but if you pin, i recommend covering that area with a bit of good soil
  3. Time, don’t be in a rush, give them a year to root and grow, cut and remove them in the spring before they fully wake up.

Currents are easy to grow in most climates, as a northern gardener, the fact that they are zone 3 to zone 8 with a few even doing well enough in zone 2 with a bit of help makes them a fundamental in homestead gardens.

We are always looking for ways on the homestead to have things to offer at the farmgate or the farmers market stall, a few well grown potting up current bushes are a very welcome item to add, as is the Juice, Jelly, Jams, crushed and dried fruits are amazing to add to tea blends or in baking or think outside the box for meat glazes, salad dressings or more.

Here are a few favorites i have shared over the years! What are some of your personal favorite ways to use currents, do you like one type over another?

Indulgent Red Current Chocolate Cake Recipe

Black Current Bundt Cake Recipe | Just another Day on the Farm

Orange Black Current Cookie Recipe | Just another Day on the Farm

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Chicken Barley Veggie Canned Soup Recipe

Posted on April 16, 2026 by Just another day on the farm

Pint jars at two cups each are perfect sizes for Dear Hubby to take as a lunch soup or for here on the farm as a reheat and go! Our pressure canner does 18 pints jars per load.

Chicken Barley Veggie Soup Recipe

Per Pint Jar Add

  1. 1/2 cup of diced fine white breast meat, or if you are being more frugal, thigh meat OR as in the case for these, i had thawed out two whole chickens, parted them out into breast meat, legs/thigh and wings, and then i roasted the rest, and afterwards pulled all the extra off and chopped it up for these soups.
  2. 1/2 cup of mirepoix, a equal blend of Onion, Carrot and celery, in my case i also had red pepper in there this time.
  3. 1 tbsp of pearl barley
  4. 1 tsp of italian herb blend, 1 tsp herb blend (use what your family likes for your own blends for chicken soup) and 1/4th tsp of black pepper
  5. Chicken broth, you can add in 1 tsp of dry broth, or you can use homemade broth, in this case, per hubbies request.
  6. Half cup of homemade tomato sauce plain and the water required to fill to one inch head space

Remember to wipe your rims with clean water or vinegar, lids finger tight and as they are pints 75 min at 10 pounds pressure at my sea level, please check your pressure canner to figure out if YOU need to adjust due to your sea level

Once they are out and sat for 24 hours, they will have their rings removed, be given a wash and sent down to the cellar for storage and used over the next year or sooner.

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