Mary-Ellen Zands

Thanks for the tip!  I have a cast iron griddle pan sitting op top of the toaster oven. So if I wanted to keep food warm I’d put it on top of that.
No I don’t buy the old ones. The ones I buy are used with a timer. A dial. So no danger of it staying on unless the timer fails. There is always someone home here!  
Glad your story had a good ending!

Well I’m just looking for an AGA stove. No room in my life for an air fryer!  Or in my house!  No more counter top gadgets!   Just trying to downsize. For now my old Bravetti toaster oven works great! I do most baking cooking and grilling in there.  I just bought another standby as a backup for when this one gives up!  All 2nd hand of course!

More from my garden. I’ve almost run out of space in my yard so I’ve extended planting to the cow fields!

Here is what came up in the last 2 weeks

My Dutch roots run deep!  I’m planting bulbs every fall, hundreds and in the past à few thousand. What I’ve learned over the years that there is no point planting tulips if you don’t surround them with daffodils. Otherwise the squirrels have a tasty treat!  Remember that towards the end of WW2 in Holland people were surviving on tulip bulbs. There was nothing left to eat!

Plus I plant for the bees. So the first thing coming up the snowdrops, then the crocuses, the bees absolutely love them.

Silkworms love my morus alba. I tasted the leaves thinking I wonder why the worms like the leaves so much!  Kind of bland. I do dry them for winter teas. The whole tree is edible. I read many years ago, could have been here, there was a woman making soups and concoctions from the outer bark, inner bark. Pith and even those bright orange roots!  When I’m planting bulbs near my mulberry and I accidentally dig up roots I always prune them to dry them for my teas. I do give them a little simmer first.

Cy Cobb wrote:2 years ago I did a sort of mini hugel with potatoes & carrots.  They all did well enough, but that was about the only way I could get some loose soil for root crops to actually grow in the hard soil I had at the time.  The downside, is with so much woodchips, bark chips, & old straw mixed in, it was a haven for insects like pill bugs, centipedes, crickets, etc. I ended up losing a third of my potatoes & all of my carrots to bug damage where they were eaten underground, then rotted as I cured them.  Not sure if this helps or not, but I always have to try something myself to see how my gardening style, pests, & rain patterns affect things in my area.  In this case, the plants were healthy above ground, but I had no idea they looked like Swiss cheese below ground.  Give it a try, you won't know for sure until you do.  Unless you are growing long radishes, they mature very quickly, and stay fairly shallow, so you should be ok there.  Beets go a bit deeper, but might still work fine if picked young.  I bet it can be done, Good luck!

Yes same for me. The varmints didn’t even leave enough to share with me!  This was also grown in my hugel beds.

Ra Kenworth wrote:Has anyone had success in zone 4a with the black plastic mulch technique?

I haven’t tried the black mulch technique but I planted summer 2023 in the ground and the mice and voles loved them. I just got the leftover bits!  I’m just on the border of la belle Province so we have similar growing conditions as you I think at Mont Ste Anne.  This past summer I grew them in a huge metal ancient steamer basket. That take a tractor to move them. They are full of holes. Which was perfect for putting the potato slips into. They grew fantastically!  It was just a trial so I only planted 1basket. The leaves covered the whole basket so you couldn’t even see the basket under them. I harvested a lot of leaves for fresh eating. Yummm
Spring started out very wet which was why they thrived. They didn’t do so well later on when we had a drought. I gave them a bucket of water a day which wasn’t enough. I will have to line the bottom of the basket with plastic this coming summer!  

Lucky you to live in Iqaluit too!  I love it up there!  Was there quite a bit in the ‘80s.

Luke Mitchell wrote:We have just repurposed a trampoline safety net as a cloche/butterfly/bird/shade net for our cabbage transplants.

We can get hold of trampolines quite easily, free for the dismantling and removing, and have been collecting them with a view to make a polytunnel.

The netting is working great for crop protection (hung over bent lengths of hazel, driven into the ground at both sides of the bed).

If only we could find a use for the trampoline mesh.

I use the trampoline mesh that I have dragged home over the years for putting under the mulberry trees to catch the abundant harvest of berries in June!  Works great!