Catie George

3/4 of my grapes, and both of my roses died over the winter. I haven't planted enough to have killed much this spring (yet).

May Lotito wrote:Not just about money. I grew this plant from 4" starter for 3 years and it started blooming this spring. Without this one, the other blacklace elderberry won't bear fruits. I guess it is soil fungal infection. I am going to get a compost tea application and see if that will stop the progress.

I understand the hard work of plant breeder need to be acknowledged and protected. The thing is there seems to be less and less choice of heirloom plants in the stores. Majority of plants sold in Lowe's are propagation prohibited if you read the labels carefully. Fine with perennials but for annuals, that's lots of money to buy them very year. I bought most of my plants from walmart: no brand, no label, cheap and robust. and I can propagate as many as I need. Or I just do wildflowers.

Very old thread to respond to, but Canadian law is very sensible about this. I can propagate a 'patented' plant for my own personal use (in Canada plants aren't patented, but there are Plant Breeders Rights applied).

I can't sell  those plants (without paying royalties).
I can't sell parts of it from the plants I have propagated (like cut flowers, or fruit).
But I can divide and propagate my own plants in my own garden as I please.

Which is a good thing, because I'm a compulsive plant propagator, and despite generally avoiding patented plants out of principle, some times I don't notice until too late.

I feel like this is a good balance between protecting the plant breeder (who obviously has money tied up!) and protecting the home gardener.

I still find the PBR system frustrating, but at least it seems sensible (trademark names get sillier).

From Gov of Canada

"Plant breeders' rights do not restrict anyone from using the protected variety for:

- private and non-commercial purposes
- experimental purposes
- breeding and developing new plant varieties
- storing and saving seed harvested from a protected variety for planting by farmers on their own land"

It seems to do well from underground root segments

Early this spring I decided to dig up a two small rhubarb plants from my mom's, as a gift to a friend with a new house.

They were small plants (3 or 4 year old plants I had divided and removed half of last year, for my own garden),  so I made sure to get "all" the roots.

Anyways, he now has nice rhubarb plants.... And I can't even figure out which one of my mom's rhubarb I "entirely removed'. All 4 in the row  look the same.

Thom Bri wrote:

The '3 sisters' is kind of untrue anyway. What records we have show that lots of stuff the old natives planted was in monocultures anyway. Particularly squash which loses a lot of production when together with corn.

I worked in a small village in Central America for 2 years. People still tilled with oxen pulling scratch plows, and hoes. They mostly didn't intercrop much. Some squash and occasionally beans were planted together with the corn.

Do what works for you and ignore most of what you read on the internet!

By the way, grass is by far my worst weed. About the only thing that works for me is to absolutely bury it under mulch and I still spend more time killing grass than almost any other activity.

3 sisters is traditional local to me, but I wonder at changing climate.

I strongly believe the most traditional way to garden is to experiment until you find something that works and feeds you, with as little effort as possible.  I think 'doing what works' is a far longer tradition in agricultural history than any prescriptive planting regime.

When my mom was a child, her family planted lots of things in mounded rows to avoid plants drowning and didn't irrigate their vegetable patch almost ever.  This worked for the first ~175 years my family lived in this region.

Now I need to irrigate in the summer and plant in level beds. Probably the other change is I am using hand tools and planting more densely vs. horses/oxen/tractor to plow between rows, which does increase water needs, even as it dramatically lowers how large of a garden I need for a given amount of production.

My worst weeds are grass, creeping Bellflower, and chicory. Bellflower loves mulch, but if I can keep everything else under control, then I have time to hand pull the creeping Bellflower.

I have mulled trying 3 sisters again in a few years when I have weeds more in control, but planting corn in pits instead of mounds. The pits would boost the soil moisture for the corn, and allow me to easily hill it up a bit later.

I will be following this with interest again this year.

I tried the 3 sisters method for the second time last year, and had poor success. I think by the time it's past last frost here, it seems to also be past spring rains, so the hills become a detriment. Rain was long, long past by the time it was bean planting time, with 1 ft tall corn. I did have success with no racoon predation on my corn, after focusing on surrounding the corn hills with squash, which I had read deterred them.  The hills were a challenge to irrigate. it was also a brand new garden, and weeds were a major challenge, since I started it with filling under weedy grass.

My plan is to plamt my corn this year in a block, completely surrounded by a circle of squash. I'll try  to plant beans on the edges. Sort of 'best of both worlds'  idea.

I think that’s a really practical way to look at things – starting with high impact/commonly used items, and things touching hot food, and then considering where there’s diminishing returns for improvement. I also try to prioritize storing acidic and oily food in glass vs. plastic where possible.

I ask myself -would spending the money to replace an item 1) make a significant difference in exposure, and 2) make enjoying/prepping food easier, or harder?  

I’m not likely to reduce my plastic exposure if I were to remove all my convenience appliances that have plastic, and find myself instead eating more prepackaged food!

I have one coated kitchen appliance – a rice cooker that claims to be PFAS free (what chemicals it uses in the coating, and if they are better or worse, is up for debate!). Most of my pots have plastic handles.  

My blender is made of glass, but has a plastic lid.  My food processor is plastic.  I don’t worry about my plastic mandoline, either, despite being perfectly capable of switching to a knife and wooden board, the time savings are worth it for canning/processing, and I use them infrequently.

I have a few plastic food storage containers that sometimes end up in the freezer, but leftovers are stored in glass casserole dishes. I have a silicone spatula I’m unlikely to abandon, and I break out the silicone muffin pans when I have too much muffin batter to fit in my metal muffin pans (or sometimes for freezing individual portions).  I do try to make sure silicone I use is from a reputable brand.

I’m slowly converting my kitchen storage of things like beans, flour, sugar, spices, etc, from plastic containers to glass pickle jars/jam jars/mason jars. I would like to move away from storing things in their plastic bags long term, partially for ease of organization.

I have zero interest in trying to replace my very good kitchen knives, which have plastic handles, with wood-handled versions I’d need to be more careful with.

Freezer bags are definitely the sticky thing I haven’t figured out how to improve yet. I don’t find glass jars practical for freezing vast quantities of vegetables, and I really don’t have the energy/interest to attempt to can more than I already do. My dehydrator is mostly plastic. Would switching to commercial produce in the winter, be lower plastic contact? I doubt it.

And attempting to find low-plastic grocery items feels like a lost cause. I don’t think I could afford to switch to the fancy mayonnaises, sauces, juices, etc, in glass jars. I could potentially commit to canning more convenience foods – things like barbeque sauces, ketchup, mustard, etc that hang around in the fridge for ages. I already make my own hot sauces and relish.

In my experience, cover crops are no match for established perennial weeds. They are useful for maintaining a fallow bed, but not for smothering established dandelions or competing with rhizomous grasses. I have started to use them to CREATE mulch for future crops, rather than in an attempt to smother existing weeds.


If you asked 100 gardeners how to weed, you'd get 100 answers but if it were my bed I would be:
-Removing all flowers before they go to seed. This is my #1 weeding priority - never letting weeds go to seed.

- Adding some sort of mulch - likely paper held down with sticks and stones to give me a fighting chance

-Hand weeding the rest - 15 min a day is enough to make a big impact in such a small space. Expect to have to re-weed, but the goal is to keep the above ground portions of the plant from having time to feed the roots below that the weeds resprout from.

If I wanted to plant something fine seeded, I'd probably fork the bed, hand pull what I could, and disrupt the rest with a hoe, wait a week, hoe it again, then plant.

I am a big proponent of mulch, but don't think there is any system that is truly zero weeding required.

Jay - I have two wooden spatulas/scrapers similar to what you describe and I LOVE them. One is called a 'wok Turner' and great for scraping frying pans/woks. The other was I think an 'angled Turner' and is perfect for scraping the corners of pots.

When I packed up to put my things in storage, years ago, I threw out all the kitchen utensils that I hated. Basically everything plastic, and anything 'coated', many things I'd bought as a cheap university student, and been too cheap to replace because they worked well enough. Several years later, after buying a house and unpacking, I discovered I had almost no kitchen utensils and went on an emergency buying spree at IKEA,(while refusing to buy plastic). I have slowly rebuilt my kitchen and am very happy with it.

I've attached pics of my favourite/most used plastic free kitchen utensils. They don't feel like 'settling', I am genuinely annoyed not to have them when I go to other people's houses and cook with their utensils, the metal and wood work better than plastic.

Avoiding plastic in my cookware and kitchen has been an ongoing goal of mine. When I talk about it, I have often been told that it's not worth doing, as there are so many other sources of plastics in our lives that avoiding plastic contact with food isn't worth the effort, or that the plastic in food is an insignificant source of plastic in the human body.

Anyway, a study in Nature Medicine just came out showing that avoiding plastic in your diet/kitchen can reduce the plastic compounds (phtalates and bisphenols) in your urine in just 1 week!  (By 30+%, depending on what intervention/compound was tested).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04324-7

Other interesting take aways:
- Plastic packaging upstream matters - including things like buying produce in plastic packaging, or that produce previously being handled on plastic (so! Grow your own whenever possible if avoiding plastic matters to you!)
- Both avoiding plastic packaging/plastic touching food, and avoiding plastic in your kitchen made a difference, independently of each other - so achieving 'perfect' avoidance wasn't necessary to reduce exposure (by 30+%!).
- Almost 60% reduction in bisphenols was possible
- individually packaged items are significantly worse for plastic contamination than bulk packaged.
- plastic in food prep appliances matters - possibly also in dishwashers...
- Avoiding plastic tends to lead to a healthier diet
- Even researchers attempting to provide a non-plastic diet struggle to provide plastic free food thanks to upstream contamination
- Researchers speculated some plastic compounds may be stored in adipose tissue.
- Avoiding plastic contact in personal care products (shampoos, soaps, etc) also made a difference
- Study participants who had the lowest levels before the study were those who 'rarely consumed fast food, highly processed foods, foods in plastic packaging or microwaved foods in plastic'


This study has definitely reaffirmed my decision to avoid plastics in my food choices and refuse to microwave items in plastic. I'm now seriously considering my remaining food contact plastic usage, the largest of which is freezer bags for storing vegetables in my freezer. I'm also considering my personal care products which I tend to buy in bulk but are stored long term, in plastic...

My understanding is most commercial pie fillings are made with moschata squash too.

Honeynut is a hybrid  moschata variety known for being sweet + small. Might be worth a try? I haven't tried it personally but keep stumbling on rave reviews for it.

Not sure where you are in Canada, but I had a boss who had worked in various tropical and subtropical jungles, and northern Canada, who said northern Canada wins for mosquitos.

You may be able to manage them in an urban location, but for a remote/rural location, good luck. Mosquitos are uniquely evolved to thrive in Canada. The more untouched the land, the more untouched the mosquito population.
(And possibly also the black fly, deer fly, and horse fly population. And no-see-ums)

I advise investing in bug nets. And screened in gazebos. I had a bug net on my bed as a child because our house had holes mosquitoes would enter.

A strong fan can also help, as does keeping areas open with lots of wind.  Orient any unscreened decks or porches for max wind, and keep trees away from the house.

Treasure and use the early and late season before and after frost to do as much as possible, then learn to love working in the rain and sweating in long sleeves.

In better news, I can normally get my first 150 bites of the year over with in a couple days, and not really notice mosquito bites for the rest of the year, plus mosquito bourne illness is rare.

Edit: I have now moved to southern Ontario, where mosquitoes are a mild nuisance, not a life style.