New pics!

I have finally figured out how to put pics right on the text of the blog. You can go back to my earlier posts and see what they look like now all decorated. I also put a lot of photos on the photo page (look at the link to the right near the top of this page.)

Computer challenges

"My therapist hid in the bushes of her tomato and pepper patch during my last rant at the world.
She converts my problems into salsa verde picante."
Farkas' comment on facebook, reprinted with his permission, on condition I promote his itunes. http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/micky-farkas/id408690526
He is an awesome musician. I am not technically his therapist, but listen when he needs a friendly ear, and in exchange he plays great music in my living room and shows up at my door with four kids and pizza. How can you say no?

I tried to add this as a comment on the blog entry entitled Harvest Festivals and Garden Therapy (October 2011)but my new computer is set up with all kinds of firewalls and barriers which I have not been able to master in my first hour using this thing. I decided not to put it directly into an edited version of the post, because it will not be re-read by those who already read it, and I would not be doing Farkas any favours posting his i-tunes link with no one seeing it. I also made an attempt to copy and paste a photo of the pepper and tomato harvest, but that failed as well.

It also turned out that not everyone in my house is asleep. Zara has joined me at the computer and is rubbing the bird's neck, who should also be asleep but is still sitting on my shoulder chewing on my earrings. We are still celebrating national extra hour of sleep day, and I used my extra hour to do an extra blog.

Putting it all to bed

My children believe that the night we change the clocks back from daylight savings time is a national holiday where they can stay up extra late. I usually wait until they are in bed, if not asleep, before taking time for myself on the computer but there was no chance of that today. I woke up before any of them and they are going strong, so I told Josh to deal with them and let me blog.

The past couple of weeks I have maintained radio silence for multiple reasons. First of all, my computer started to go wonky (that is a technical term for malfunctioning in unpredictable and creative ways. First the keyboard froze. Then the internet failed for no apparent reason. Finally, the computer stopped communicating with the keyboard and the screen altogether. I patiently waited for my brother Marty the computer genius to get back from his trip to Italy to take a look at the computer. He graciously gave me some fresh croissants from the baker whose computer he had just succeeded in fixing, dumped an enormous old monitor (still works, kinda blurry) on my computer table for any community organization or poor friend who won't laugh when I make the offer (call now or it ends up on the curb for the local dumpster divers) then set to work to discover he had no idea what to do with it. He left with it, to let a colleague tinker with it.

Isaac's laptop was still functioning and linked to the internet but he is not too generous with it, especially as he was in midterms this week. I was able to check e-mail and assure my mom I was alive and well, sorry I had not been in touch (she is out of town too). So blogging was not much of an option.

It has been ridiculously busy in my life (I mean more than usual) as Josh has been working on a job site out of town and commuting back on weekends. Between being solo mom with some help from my friends (THANK YOU!!!), and the sun going down too early for me to get to the garden in the evening, I have been cramming my end of fall garden wrap up into my already busy weekends.

Gardening in November is all about putting everything to bed. I am racing the clock against the first snow fall. Actually, it snowed a bit on Friday but nothing stayed on the ground. I have removed all of the annual vegetables and occasional weeds which came through the hay from the vegetable gardens. All the broccoli, tomato and pepper plants, stripped bare of all but a few baby green tomatoes and time pepperlings, were tossed into the compost. I dismantled the tomato cages and put the chicken wire and bamboo components up against the fence. Everything looks so naked!! I pushed aside all the hay, recruited my kids to help me plant garlic, rake out last year's compost and put out two large bags of composted manure. I also harvested some small, almost ripe butternut squashes which Orianne had carefully covered up with hay to protect from frost. They are very cute, and hopefully edible. Zara and her friend Marlon had a roaring fun hay fight, which broke up the compacted books of hay and spread them pretty much everywhere (whatever it takes!). Orianne rescued any worms which were accidentally exposed by my shovel and lovingly dropped them in with the garlic cloves before Isaac covered them up with earth. I was please to see I have a ton of worms all over the place.

Iulia next door was also outdoors working on her garden. We swapped a rake for a spade, some garlic bulbs (the super awesome music cultivar from my in-laws) for tulip bulbs and anemone seeds. She also got a garbage bag full of leftover cut down chrysanthemums from her friend who owns a restaurant. He has a terrace which is surrounded by potted flowers, but he doesn't have the space to keep the perennials so he gave them to her. I have no idea what colour they are but I now have some chrysanthemums in front of my house. She begged me to take some of her strawberry plants which were taking over the whole space at the back of her garden. They are domestic strawberries, the big ones like you buy in the store. We already have a cultivar called alpine strawberries which are small, super sweet and prolific with a ridiculously long season (I still have strawberries, in November, in Montreal). I also have patches of wild strawberries which have popped up in unexpected places in my garden. Who knows what interesting hybrids may emerge. I transplanted some next to the bathtub.

Once I finished planting for this year (I swear that is all!!) I went around with bales of hay and covered up the bare spots. I added some around the flower garden areas of my front yard in order to expand the area for next year. I watched Iulia hacking away at a patch of her lawn to plant tulips and told her about the hay method of turning your lawn effortlessly into garden space. It kills the grass underneath and makes planting infinitely easier. I also moved my empty compost box to a new spot, leaving behind the most fertile patch of the garden for planting something or other in the spring. I keep two boxes, one active and one becoming earth. Isaac cringed when I asked him to help spread the compost, but I showed him that, with the exception of the odd eggshell or shrunken corn cob, there was nothing but thick black earth coming out of the box. It had reduced to one-third of the amount that was in it when I shut it last fall. The wonders of compost.

Meanwhile, things are busy inside as well. Last week, I had conflicting advice from friends and family about how to turn green tomatoes ripe. I put our green tomato recipes aside, and tried the paper bag approach. According to Jack who is one of my garden gurus and maker of extraordinary home grown/home made hot sauces, green tomatoes in a paper bag in a cool, dark place, will start to turn orange. He told me to check them every two days, remove the ones which started turning and leave them in the light to finish ripening. I have already made a full large freezer ziploc bag full of red tomato puree from the tomatoes harvested by Naomi and my daughters, several dozen orange tomatoes in a basket on my dining room table and six brown paper bags of green tomatoes which I am not giving up on yet. Josh has bought mason jars in anticipation of the tomato sauce which is soon to come.

The peppers were processed up with a bunch of green tomatoes into a lovely salsa verde. I have something like eight live pepper plants in the basement (I shoved a bunch in one pot, not sure how many) which are producing lots more hot peppers. Orianne has added a school experiment to our basement greenhouse. They sprouted parsley and arugula, and I am trying to keep them alive and growing under the big light. We may eat them before spring, if they make it.

Although my gardening season is ending, I am not closing up my blog quite yet. I have intended to have lots of photos on this blog, and the only way I found to upload photos was to put them in a photo page which can be accessed over on the upper right side next to this text (under Pages, then Home it says Garden pics? I don't know if anyone noticed them way over there). Well, when checking Isaac's blog
(http://thiistheblog.blogspot.com/)I noticed he had cool pics right in his text, so I asked him how he did that. Cut and paste, he said, with a look that made me feel real dumb. I expected something a tad more complicated. I would have redecorated this blog already if I had the time (see paragraphs 2 and 4), but now that the outdoor work is done and I have a computer again, I will find time to download lots of photos into the text. Then you can read it all again and feel like it is summer already.

I also promised back in September that I would dedicated one blog to the recipes through which we ate our garden, and I will get there too. Then I will go offline for a bit until we start planting our indoor seed and convert my basement into a greenhouse, but that won't be before April. I will also be in the final planning stages of a bat mitzvah so I may be playing on-line catch up in May.

In the meantime, my garden is in bed, and so are my husband and my daughters. Isaac is watching another movie, but I am also going to bed.

Naomi to the rescue

I had hoped that Naomi would have a chance to appear somewhere in my blog. She was the friend who helped me on the day I had to dig up my garden at my old apartment. She had planned to be my assistant with the garden this summer, and helped out back in May with the big planting. There are patches of violets on the side of my house which she lovingly planted while Josh and I were disagreeing over where to plant what in the vegetable garden. She did not end up spending as much time in the garden over the rest of the summer, however. Unfortunately, she lost her oldest, dearest friend after a terrible struggle with cancer. Clearly, her energies were needed elsewhere.

This week, Josh started working on a job site out of town. Suddenly I have become a single parent, at least from Sunday to Thursday. I scrambled to clear my agenda of all unessential activities because my back up help (parents, brother) happened to be on vacation this week. I had one commitment which I could not postpone this evening, and needed help. Although individually, each of my kids are pretty good at fending for themselves, when left together unsupervised, pandemonium ensues. Enter Naomi, who agreed to a fun evening of homework supervision, pizza and refereeing.

When I asked her to help out, I had not checked the weather reports for the week. Once I did, I discovered that the temperatures would be dropping down to zero and below as of tonight. I have diligently been picking any tomato or pepper that have the slightest hint of colour to allow to ripen indoors, but as it was supposed to be sunny, I let the green ones keep going just in case they would catch enough sun to start to ripen. Some did, so I feel justified in my choice. I kept hoping for a sudden turn in the weather and a delay of the frost. This morning, I checked the weather and sure enough, nothing had changed. Today was the day to harvest or lose everything. I called Chloé, my mother-in-law, who confirmed the worst.

I had ten minutes between breakfast and when we had to leave, and Orianne came outside with me to do a quick harvest of what we could. We filled a couple of bowls with peppers. On one plant, the peppers were so tightly attached to the plant that the whole plant lifted out of the ground. I ran to the shed, grabbed a big pot, plunked the plant in and pulled out four more for good measure. "Let's go!" I said to Orianne, dropping the bowls of peppers on the counter and the pepper plants under my grow light in the basement with the other potted peppers and the baby columbines, and hustling the kids off to school.

Zara had an interview for a high school mid morning today (she did well, by the way). On our way back to school, we stopped at home for her to change back to her school clothes, and decided to take a harvest break. Zara happily helped me for another twenty minutes to harvest peppers, and we barely got half of them. I wrote a detailed note for Naomi, asking her to have the kids work with her to harvest the rest of the tomatoes and peppers, and to cover the remaining unripe squashes with a bed of hay which hopefully will protect them from the cold for long enough for them to ripen.

I called home at 5 o'clock, just before my meeting started. The kids had forgotten the plan, Naomi had not seen the note. She looked for it and read it while I was on the phone. Poor Naomi had not anticipated outdoor activities (it was cold) and was out in the garden with no jacket for an hour. The girls worked hard. When I got home, the dining room was full of bowls, baskets, colanders. Hundreds of green tomatoes and green peppers and green hot peppers. I am anticipating hot sauce, fried green tomatoes, green tomato chutney, pickled green tomatoes. Naomi finally had her moment of glory in my garden story. She saved the tomatoes and peppers.

Cider House

I will take a bit of an aside from stories about our garden to tell you about some extracurricular gardening activities Josh has been up to lately.

Recently, a friend of ours moved and offered Josh some items he was no longer using. Josh lives for these moments. Among other things, he scored six demijohns . For those not initiated into the world of home-brewing, demijohns (or carboys) are large glass containers used for winemaking or brewing other forms of alcohol. Josh has some experience from before we had children (b.c.)with making apple cider and brewing up other fruit based alcohol beverages. He decided, as it is apple season, to test out his new equipment and brew up some cider.

He bought some Melba apples and yeast, peeled the apples and pureed them in our Moulinex, then set up some cider to brew.

Those of you who know Josh know that he does not believe in doing anything on a small scale, especially when he is having fun. We have been living on a tight budget these days, which Josh takes as a special challenge. As our garden's output has not been enough to significantly reduce our grocery bills, and our apple tree is too young to produce any fruit, Josh got creative in finding apples for free to expand his production capacity. He posted a request on Facebook to anyone who has an apple or pear tree, offering to remove any surplus fruit from their hands. Within days, Josh was filling our dining room with bags and boxes of apples and pears. It is amazing how many people we know who have an elderly neighbour who no longer can manage their tree or have given up a lifetime hobby of stewing vats of compote. The original two demijohns mysteriously reproduced themselves (I am not sure where the next two came from). A succession of juicers were borrowed off friends. Soon pear cider, apple-pear mix, and apple raspberry cider were bubbling away side by side everywhere you turned.

Josh put a second appeal on Facebook for empty flip-top Grolsch bottles, the kind that can be reused indefinitely with the built-in top. He hauled out our own collection, including two extra large ones which he has held onto for years because he liked them and was sure they would come in handy one day. He rescued them from my countless attempts at culling them, and is now gloating at me. Yes you told me you would eventually use them!

Sometime in mid-September, Josh cracked open the first bottle to taste. It was sour, and barely bubbling. I was rather unimpressed and gently suggested he work on perfecting the taste before going into mass production. He stoically ignored my critique and waited another week before giving me my second taste. I learned that I had been too hasty in my judgement, the first taster was far from ready. In a single week, the taste had filled out and sweetened, and developed a crisp, bubbly texture. I approved.

In the past month we have entertained extensively over Rosh Hashana and Succoth. We have served Josh's cider to members of both our families, out of town guests, friends and colleagues, and it had proved so popular that some of them agreed to pre-purchase some of his cider to furnish him the money to buy a second hand wine press (found on Kijiji, along with yet two more demijohns). Al, an old friend of Josh's, hooked Josh up with the owners of an abandoned orchard brimming with organically grown apples, who have allowed them to harvest everything for ten dollars a warehouse crate full. The two of them spent an entire day last week apple picking. Al agreed to house the press and the apples (no room here, too many tomatoes!) So far Al has pureed around 60 litres of apples, and he is just getting started.

In the meantime, on my home front, the sun came out finally for a few hours today after days of rain. I did a small harvest of tomatoes which had just a hint of orange, hoping they will ripen indoors. I am taking my chances, for once the frost hits my garden, all is done. I have no time to put blankets on the tomatoes at night like my friends up north do in late August, and I am not yet set up to do a four season garden (maybe next year). I also picked some green and hot peppers, and a couple of portions of broccoli for dinner tomorrow. We ate a lentil-vegetable soup for dinner made from potatoes, tomatoes, squash and tiny sweet potatoes from my garden as well as turnips (rutabagas?)from my mother-in-law. My kids ate tons of it. I have another batch of tomatoes drying in the oven tonight.

Yesterday, we took down our succah. Living in a Jewish neighbourhood, we have a special drop off site for the schach, the branches used on the roof of the succah. I uprooted some of the dead sunflower plants and tossed them in with my trunkful of cedar branches (the car smelled really nice). The leaves have finally turned from gold to orange and red. Happy fall to everyone!

Garden Therapy and Harvest festivals

It is late October. I had expected to be wrapping up my garden by now, pulling up the dead remnants of the plants, raking out last year's compost and bedding it all down in a layer of hay. Surprisingly, we are not there yet.

My tomatoes are still blooming. So are my squashes. Both are full of green fruits and I am still harvesting. I peeked under the potatoes and sweet potatoes which I planted far too late to expect much and got a bowlful of baby potatoes. The peppers are covered in fruit, with some reddening or turning yellow daily. The four plants that are in pots have been moved under a grow light in my basement, and are ripening much faster. My nasturtiums finally started to bloom two days ago! My morning glories are still flowering. The new patch of lamium I planted in July is starting to flower. The strange mint hybrid with the red trumpet flowers have decided to bloom again too. For those of my readers who are not in Montreal, it has been cold and rainy all week. We are wearing winter coats, but we still have not had a frost so my garden is convinced that there is still hope. I am picking every tomato with the slightest hint of a blush because I am sure nothing will vine ripen before the frost hits. The tomatoes are ripening nicely inside. I am bringing in the green ones that fall down. We have been discussing pickled green tomatoes, green tomato chutney, fried green tomatoes, but Josh decided to throw them in with the assortment of ripe peppers to make the hottest litre of hot pepper sauce I have ever tasted. My mouth felt like the finale in a fireworks show, with each in the series of explosions having a different size and colour.

Given that this was not the weekend of garden wrap up, I will be continuing my blog for a bit longer this season. I have not blogged for a while because I have been in the midst of Jewish holidays. For the past four weeks, I have been trying to balance harvesting with my day job, the kids back at school, violin lessons, gymnastics, visiting open houses for both high school and CEGEP (college), and Jewish holidays. I even succeeded in recruiting my children to help harvest tomatoes ten minutes before lighting the candles for Succoth, the Jewish harvest festival. I have been trying to avoid all gardening activities on the Holy days, leading to mad scrambles to get it all done.

For Succoth, it is the custom to build a temporary shed (a succah or tabarnacle in archaic English) outdoors with branches on top to allow you to see the stars. It is a reminder of the harvest huts of the ancient world, and the shelters in which we slept during the forty years we wandered from Egypt through the desert. We eat in the succah, and in nicer climates than Montreal, people sleep in the succah too. The weather was cooperative and allowed us to entertain two dozen friends and family members in our succah last week. To be in our hut surrounded by our garden, eating our own produce was really special and meaningful.

Among our guests were my in-laws, who brought a basket of goodies from their garden. They had great success with rapini, and brought us a huge mass of giant green leaves. Josh and I decided we needed to do a lot more research on why ours failed utterly, as we enjoyed a wonderful dinner of pasta and fresh rapini. They also brought us garlic, onions, carrots, turnips, cabbage and spaghetti squash (double the size of ours). They give me a taste of what is yet to come from my own backyard down the road.

As I was nearing the end of the holiday cycle, my garden was getting somewhat neglected. Three of my tomato plants did not fit in our well organized cage system, and although we had staked them with bamboo poles early in the summer, we did not maintain them and by last week, the branches with fruit were sprawling on the ground in a buffet for the last remaining resilient slugs. Also, many of the branches of the other sixteen plants, particularly those with no tomatoes on them, were drying up and dying. With the rain, the dead leaves were sticking to the green tomatoes and threatening to rot them. So I decided to tie up the drooping branches and snip the dead ones, tidy things up a bit. The one day this week there was sun, I left my children to their own devices and took to the garden with a scissors and some string. I knew that my children would avoid me like the plague knowing that if they even showed their faces in the back yard, they risked being co-opted to help in the task. I had the quietest couple of hours you could imagine. At some point, my friend Mike dropped by. He is currently underemployed and none too happy about it, and found me to be a very receptive if somewhat invisible ear to his troubles. He said that he could locate my position more from the rustling of the bushes than my occasional comments. I was a totally captive audience. I realized that garden therapy works in many ways. This week, I gardened while he got therapy.

Upon finishing my almost obsessive trimming of the tomato jungle, I can now see all the green tomatoes from my window in the house. I no longer need to dive through branches and lift sections to find hidden treasures. There are still hundreds more which I hope will start to ripen before the temperature hits freezing later this week (according to environment Canada weather). Especially as this late season crop are big, hearty tomatoes with few slugs to bother them. We are still pureeing twice a week and freezing the puree for our first annual Italian style big tomato sauce cook-off.

Raising children, not flowers

Many years ago when Josh and I were looking to rent our first apartment together, we met with our future landlord for an interview to see if we would be a good match. We were hoping to rent an upper duplex from an older gentleman named August and his wife, Helmi. In our meeting, Josh was his usual extroverted self, and when August asked if we planned on having any pets, Josh responded that as I am allergic to fur, he was hoping to have an assortment of non-furred creatures including birds, reptiles, spiders, maybe some exotic insects. Then August asked us if we were married. I was not sure how to respond to this question, as August was in his seventies, and I was not sure he would be pleased to rent his apartment to a couple living in sin. Nervously I replied that we were not but we did plan to get married in the not too distant future. He visibly relaxed and said that he was pleased we were not married, as he really did not like having children upstairs, as they made a lot of noise. Josh inquired as to whether we would have permission to have a small garden space, to which August agreed, being an avid gardener himself. We left with a lease with a full page insert detailing that we were not permitted to breed reptiles, insects or any other unusual creatures. We did respect this clause and Josh only began his experiments with spider and mantis breeding in a subsequent apartment once he had learned to not mention these activities to prospective landlords.

We never did find the time to garden while we lived on Ronald drive. Shortly after moving in, we started planning our wedding, then we got married, then I did my master's degree. At the same time, Josh attempted his first (failed) catering business in partnership with his parents. We then started our family. Isaac was born four years after we moved in. August's early warning about not wanted children in the house became an ongoing issue. First it was my rocking chair that went bump in the night. Isaac never slept and that rocker and the swing were the only means by which I got any sleep that first year. Unfortunately, it woke August up. He tried to help us by improving the soundproofing, tightening the screws on the rocker, but it was an ongoing irritant for him. Before long, Isaac started walking. We were amazed at how loud were the noises from his frequent bumps when heard from below. A wise friend of mine at the time suggested I tell August that I am raising children, not flowers, and they will make noise.

Though this was true, we had developed a close friendship and deep respect for August, especially after the death of his wife. I did not want to cause this man so much stress in his own home. When I became pregnant with Zara, my second child, we decided that it would be better for everyone for us to move.

During those three years that we lived in that duplex with Isaac, we tried to teach him to walk quietly, not make loud noises, and generally be respectful of our older downstairs neighbours. Try as we might, it did not work. Isaac was by nature a loud child, he still is, and all our attempts of changing this did not seem to have any effect. I learned from him and my subsequent two children that they are who they are. As a parent you can steer them, provide opportunities for them to express their talents, or screw them up, but they show up with their own style, personalities, talents, energy levels and interests.

What does this have to do with gardening? I have found it fascinating to see how our gardening experience has been filtered through the different interests, personalities and talents of the members of the family.

I won't talk about myself in this respect, I think that it is a theme that runs throughout this blog. My garden is my opportunity for meditation, for writing, for having a little piece of the country in my own backyard. And for finally being able to raise flowers as well as children.

For Josh, the garden is yet another opportunity to problem-solve and play. He can obsessively emerge himself in the details of putting theories into practice. He can build cool stuff. Find the right matrix to grow his favorite mushrooms. Arbor sculpture his own living furniture. Graft different varieties of apple onto the same tree. He also can grow and cook ingredients which he cannot easily find in the store: the best sauce tomatoes, the biggest basil bushes, exotic melons, Japanese cucumbers. It is his space to do cool stuff. It also eases some of his paranoia, knowing that when civilization collapses, he will already be on his way to self-sufficiency. He even backed down on his anti-sunflower tirades when he acknowledged that we should learn how to grow our own oil producing plants, and they are easier to grow than olive trees in this climate.

Isaac has had almost no interest whatsoever in the garden itself. He is far more interested in the end product than participating in the production thereof. He is fifteen and going through a huge growth spurt, and happy to eat anything (and everything) in the fridge and pantry. He is fascinated with photography and filmmaking, though, and early on this summer I asked him if he could be the official photographer of our gardening experience. Some of the photos on this blog and on facebook are his work. He lost interest quickly and went back to playing on his computer.

Zara showed some initial enthusiasm, and joined Josh on a shopping trip to buy seeds early in spring. Josh and I had spent an evening choosing what we were going to grow, but they came home with all sorts of things which I did not expect. Zara had decided she wanted to grow peppers. She bought six different varieties of pepper, including sweet, mild and hot ones. Once I started planting the seeds, she was very resistant to the idea of planting any of "her" seeds. With my insistence, she helped out for a bit, then decided that I was much better at it than she was and she would rather go out and play with her friends. That was the last time she was involved with her peppers. Although I have planted, transplanted (up to three times), weeded, fertilized, watered and harvested them, they are still "her" peppers. Although if you ask our bird, he would probably insist that they were his personal treat. Throughout the summer, every time I look at a garden and point out the flowers I like, she replies that "flowers don't turn me on." I have learned to not talk flowers with her.

My youngest, Orianne, is the most interested in the garden. She spent a couple of weeks being my daily harvester of strawberries. She has been my partner in crime for my seed pilfering activities. She has spent hours checking out gardens with me up and down the streets and alleyways of the neighbourhood. Orianne has attempted to transplant a mint garden into the crook of the tree growing outside her bedroom window. She takes her friends around to show them the garden and help her pick beans and tomatoes. She is fascinated by the bees, ladybugs, spiders and mantises, and will listen to Josh explain their reproductive habits and how to identify if the females are pregnant. Yesterday, Orianne spooked a pregnant female mantis and it gave her its full display with wings open.

Today, I separated the seeds from the sunflower heads. Once I pulled off the remaining bits of the corolla (I think that is what you call the fluffy yellow bits on top) to reveal the seeds below, I showed it to Orianne. She was amazed. She wanted to paint it. We took some photos (I will post once downloaded) so that she can study at her leisure as I eat the seeds over the next few months.

I had hoped that all of my children would share my passion and take on a part of the garden project. But they are who they are. I can only show them what I like to do, and hope something may catch on. Only time will tell.

Off with their heads!

Josh was just looking over my shoulder at my dashboard for my blog and noticed that I have followers.
"You have followers? That's not as good as henchmen," says the man who has his user language on Facebook set to Pirate English. I thought that would be a good segue into my theme tonight, which involves decapitation. Of sunflowers, mind you. No blood.

Today we harvested the first of the sunflowers. I have been irrigating them for weeks with coyote piss to dissuade the squirrels from stealing them before they were ripe. I have even run after some bolder squirrels yelling in my determination to preserve some of the flowers until the end of the season. Josh, the pirate, outdid me and sprayed some of the squirrels directly while running after them and swearing. Despite all efforts, as many as one-third of the giant sunflowers were headless shortly after opening.

I have not grown sunflowers since I was in elementary school. At the time, I had a pet hamster and a few plants in my bedroom. I kept the hamster food next to my plants on my desk, and being careless, I occasionally spilled some of the food, which was a collection of seeds. I often had a blade of grass or two pop up in the plant pots, and once a couple of sunflower seeds sprouted. My mom let me transplant them into the garden, and somehow they grew to fruit without squirrel banditry. The squirrels of my childhood neighbourhood were insatiable for tulips, but my sunflowers were unmolested. I don't recall much how big they were, or how pretty the flowers, but I remember being blown away by the intensity of the flavour of the seeds. Eaten raw, they made the packaged roasted seeds I loved taste like cardboard in comparison. I could never imagine growing my own garden devoid of this delicacy.

You may recall from an earlier post that sunflowers were a big bone of contention earlier this summer. In fact, the only fight Josh and I had in the longest time was over sunflowers. Being clueless when we planted seeds, I planted a lot of sunflowers, some small ones and some giant ones, expecting a low survival rate. It turns out sunflowers are extremely hardy. The one I tossed in anger (during the famous argument) towards the compost bin snapped, and the leaf touching the earth acted like a root and sustained the plant to continue growing crookedly. Josh was warned by his mother that sunflowers will interfere with the growth of the plants around them, and did not want them in the sunny spots of the vegetable garden. I did end up giving away plenty of them to anyone who would take them, but had a few in the vegetables and more along the sidewalk in front.

The small sunflowers were quite a delight. They were multicoloured, in shades of red-orange-yellow, and produced as many as six flowers per stalk. The same plant would have flowers of different colour combinations. They were small, maybe three inches across the entire flower, petals included. In the morning, they were all facing the east. When I came home from work they had all turned to face west (cool trick!) and on cloudy days, the flowers faced every which way in a confused manner. They have personality. And they are sunny and fun. They are the only plant in my garden that I felt compelled to greet and chat with. It sounds odd, but I wished them good morning and greeted them when I came home. They seemed to be smiling at me. They were how I fantasized my children could be. I miss them. They bloomed early in the season, and produced tiny miniature sunflower seeds which were not worth separating and roasting. Our parrotlet, however, is also a miniature and finds the seeds the perfect size. We have frozen the mini-sunflower heads and take them out for treats (birdy num-nums!).

I have been holding out for the big ones. I was skeptical that we would have success. The flowers I planted in the vegetable garden (four) were decapitated too easily. They were planted along the side of the fence which has large trees adjacent at several points. It is in fact a squirrel highway and my flowers were a truck stop along the way. Those four were the largest and strongest of the plants. They grew in the richly fertilized beds and looked all the better for it. The ones I planted in the front had half the amount of sunlight, were planted in solid clay in close proximity to a spruce tree. They looked spindly and needed to be propped up. I had not prepared their beds because I had planned to put them in the back. Josh compromised and let me have space for four only and I had to find any spot to throw them in the ground. It turns out that the spindly ones put all their strength into producing massive heads. At least the ones which survived did. I lost a number of them, and the squirrels helped themselves to a few of the heads early on before they really developed. Once I got more aggressive with marking my territory, I was able to sustain 8 to 10 of them to maturity.

Based on my past experience with corn, I have been checking the flowers daily for a month to see if the seeds were ready to harvest them in the nick of time. It has been raining all week, so I was concerned that the urine would be washed out. The squirrels have been washed out too, so all was well.

This morning, I picked a seed and lo and behold, it was hardened and had grey stripes upon its white shell! I opened it and put it to my lips. Hallelujah!! I had not tasted such intense sunfloweriness for decades! The crisp juiciness of the fruit, the fullness of the flavour! I ran back into the house and called Josh.
"Harvest the sunflowers today! They are ready!"

As I walked to the metro, rode the train and the bus, sat in my office working on a budget report, I cou

ld still taste the sweetness in my mouth for hours after eating one single seed. Tonight we feast!

Upon arriving home, half of the sunflowers are headless. As I write this, Dreydle the parrotlet is sampling his first of the giant sunflower seeds. He is quiet, contemplative, with a contented look on his little face. Seems I will have some competition.

A Berry Picking Primer

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time during the summers picking berries. My parents have a house on a mountain called Blue Hills which was named for the multitudes of blueberries that grew there. We took day trips up the slopes of the ski runs at Mont Avila because there were even more blueberries there. We picked strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and of course blue berries which we learned to recognize by the little crowns. The other berries that were blue were poison, or so my brother told me and I was never brave enough to try for myself. Berry picking was a great way to keep us busy. We would get lost in the bush for hours, spurred on by the promise of pies if we brought back enough fruit. It was also a superb way of getting us to be quiet on long walks, as my mother had us convinced that if we were quiet enough we could hear the strawberries growing. Eventually we wised up, but not until my mother had got a lot of quiet mileage out of it. Somehow it never worked on my kids.

The best part was that I was the absolute best berry picker of all my friends and brothers. This was in part due to my being a ridiculously picky eater who could not stand eating berries. I just picked them. Because I was not spending half my time eating my stock, I picked a lot more. And because I did not eat half my stock, I came home with a lot of berries. I also had more time and patience to figure out how to find the best and the ripest berries, as well as the spots where there were the most berries in the bush. It also helps that I am short, significantly shorter than both my brothers, and therefore much better positioned to find the good berries which are only visible from under the bush.

I have not spent much time over the past few years contemplating berry picking. I still engage in it when visiting friends and family in the country, and of course in my strawberry patch which up to this year has been the only berry patch in my daily life. The past few weeks, however, now that I am spending up to two hours per week harvesting tomatoes I have been thinking about it quite a bit.

You may be wondering why I am thinking about berries while picking tomatoes. Tomatoes are, technically, a fruit. In fact, to quote my rabbi, the difference between wisdom and knowledge can be defined as follows: it takes knowledge to know that a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom to know that it should not be added to a fruit salad. Not only is a tomato a fruit, but it has the same growth pattern as berries. The best and the ripest fruit are inevitably low and deep in the bush. They are also inevitably surrounded by biting insects. I have discovered this summer that the bigger the berry, the bigger the biting insect. Strawberries are swarming with some kind of noseums that leave tiny itchy bites. My tomatoes are swarming with large ravenous mosquitoes that always bite my upper arms just as I am reaching far into the most unreachable depths of the tomato jungle. I have no idea what the official definition of a berry is, but if it is a fruit that grows on a bush near the ground, it seems to me that the same principles apply.

I also realized that I am still better at finding and picking the good ones than anyone else in my family. I send out Josh or one of the kids to check for any ripe tomatoes and after they come out empty handed, I go out and find 25 ready to pick. So I decided to share my methodology.

The author of the book The Fruit Hunters, Adam Gollner, describes how humans are one of the rare species that can visually differentiate between green and red, a trait which is very beneficial when searching for ripe red fruits in a green jungle. He even suggests that stop for red and go on green relates to an instinct to keep going through the green leaves until you spot the red fruit and stop to eat. Although this does not explain our tastes for kiwis, bananas, green grapes and avocados, it is an interesting theory which I contemplated as I hunted in my tomato patch for the slightest hint of red. The theory is appealing, although I have no idea where he got it from. So the first key to berry picking is to duck low and look for red (or blue, or black as the case may be).

The second part of the technique is to lift up the branches and look underneath. The good stuff likes to hide in the leaves. Also, no matter how frequently you pick, there are always a few that stay hidden in some corner and eventually you find them perfectly ripe and ready to go just when you thought all the good ones were gone.

That is it. Go low, look for red, and lift the branches. It takes time and practice. It takes focus, concentration, and a meditative obsession which is why I love to clear my head after a long day of work and hide from my children under the shade of a jungle bush, and feel completely primitive. I have picked over one hundred tomatoes in the past three days. It really works.

Seeds

We have a friend who has an incredible green thumb. I remember twenty years ago, Claude walked into my apartment, looked at my plants and explained to me that what I thought were fruit flies were something called fungus gnats. He also taught me how to get rid of them and save my plants from death by using diatomaceous earth. For those of you who are not acquainted with this wondrous stuff, it is a powder made of fossilized plankton, which is harmless to mammals but lethal to insects, as the sharp, jagged edges of the dust gets into their exoskeletons and tears them apart. It is great for getting rid of cockroaches, for example, or pests in house plants. Though non-toxic, it is too effective a pesticide to use in the garden, where it would destroy bees and other beneficial insects along with pests.

Claude has since channeled his love of growing plants into a career as an agronomist. He is the guy who farmers and industrial growers consult to solve problems. He does not do a lot of garden consultations for hobbyists like us, but in exchange for a home cooked meal and an afternoon of hanging out with our family, we got some free and valuable advice.

I wanted to know why my lettuce was too small, how to make my broccoli flowers grow big and dense, what plants should grow together and which shouldn't, and how do we decide where to rotate plants from year to year to prevent depletion of the soil. Claude looked at my tomatoes and announced that we had a bacterial infection. It was obvious to his practiced eye when he saw dark spots on the tomatoes, and a lot of the lower leaves were getting yellow. I just thought it was because it was fall. And there had not been spots on the tomatoes I had picked prior to that day. Lo and behold, the next ones starting to ripen had dark speckles on them. Claude told us that this particular bacteria were airborne, and by using a sprinkler to water our plants, we dropped the bacteria right onto them. Also, the wet leaves helped it to spread. He highly recommended watering our plants at ground level and not wetting the leaves. He also told us that once the bacteria was on the plants, it would be on the seeds as well, and would appear on the next generation of plants. His recommendation was to dip all seeds in hydrogen peroxide before planting them. In answer to my specific questions, he suggested that we have a soil analysis done next spring. It costs $30 and can provide us with very concrete recommendations as to how to improve our garden.

Claude's recommendation about the hydrogen peroxide was probably the most timely advice he could have given us, because right now, my life has become focused on seeds. I am saving, drying, packing and labeling all kinds of seeds for next year. Of course, some come from my own garden such as the cucumbers. Others are from things we would like to grow, such as that great Korean melon we bought at the local oriental grocery store.

I have been walking and biking around my neighbourhood on seed missions. I took my youngest daughter Orianne, who has recently mastered her bicycle, on a bike tour of the alleyways of our neighbourhood. The alleys are great because you have a view of everyone's backyard and gardens, and inevitably there are flowers growing against the fence and dropping their seeds on the pavement. What a loss! That is where I come in, rescuing all kinds of interesting cultivars at the limits of their yards. Orianne, while helping me pick dried seeds from four or five different varieties of pink morning glories, asked me if I was stealing. I told her that if I walked onto someone's lawn and dug plants up from their garden without asking, that would be stealing. Seeds are a different category, especially if they are growing over the sidewalk or on the other side of the fence from their garden of origin. I am careful never to walk onto someone's property, I only harvest what sticks out onto public grounds. Some of the beautiful dark pink cosmos I raided for seeds were growing on a square in the middle of the sidewalk.

We went away this weekend, and spent time with another friend who is a superb gardener. We had visited Alex a few years back when he was working on his PhD in philosophy, his thesis describing his experience of being self sufficient, living a minimalist life. He had built his home from recycled materials, provided his own energy using a combination of solar power and a windmill, had the first composting toilet I had ever seen, and an unbelievable vegetable garden boasting the largest imaginable produce: huge lettuces, pumpkins, and squashes. He has subsequently graduated, married and moved into a charming but more conventional house. He has been there for a year or so, and the vegetable garden is just getting started. Alex is particularly interested in heritage plants and unusual cultivars. He is growing, among other things, tomatoes which are green when ripe, some Kong sunflowers which are huge and produce tasty, purple shelled seeds. I came home today with some sweet red pepper seeds, some Kong seeds, some (highly toxic) castor beans (I had never seen castor plants before and fell in love). I also have finally obtained a clump of the elusive red day lilies I have been seeking. I hope they are red. They are no longer blooming and Elyse, Alex's wife, was pretty sure those were the red ones. I also came home with a clump of lilies with lovely small purple flowers, and a few wild gentians which I am trying out on the side of the house.

I am still trying to guard the few giant striped sunflower heads remaining in my garden. The squirrels are bold and the heavy flowers keep drooping down into their range. I have decided not to grow them along the fence next year. Despite my frequent spraying with coyote piss (which is running low), the little beasts keep running along the fence and whittle away at the edges of my last remaining flower in the back yard. I call my technique "pissing them off" but it is a constant effort. I have tied all the flowers in the front lawn to stakes to support them and dowsed their stems in piss. I may yet have sunflower seeds this fall.

One last update on the slugs. Things improved for a few weeks, but we had some rain and the slugs seemed to be coming out in numbers again. I have spread Slug-b-gone everywhere again, and today I did not see any when I harvested my tomatoes but there is still evidence of their appetite. Next year I will start earlier.

RECIPES

Sorry to be a tease, but I am posting a list of the things we have done with our harvest. When I have the time, I will add recipes, but by then I may lose track and forget some of the good stuff. Here goes:

Pesto genovese
Nut pesto
Dried tomatoes
Salsa
Sunflower seeds
Wild and wonderful salad
Broccoli and bean stir fry
Josh's pasta sauce
Apple cider
Peary (pear cider)
Stuffed squash
Mint lemonade
Moroccan mint tea
Strawberry cheesecake
Lentil squash dahl
Squash soup
Cucumber and tomato salad

Why garden?

Today friends of mine who have been following my blog came over to see my garden. It was fun to show them around, and their 8 year old son had fun harvesting anything he could find that was ripe. They took home green beans, tomatoes and a hot pepper. Caryn, his mother, asked me how much does it take for a garden to break even. I asked what she meant. "When what you save on groceries breaks even with what you spend on the garden."

This is an interesting question. At the beginning of the summer, I was thinking much the same way. I have been known to track costs with an accountants fastidiousness, but for the garden, I have not been tracking. This is partially because I got the sense early this summer that I would have to look at the cost over a long-term period. Now we are buying lots of black earth, but over time our hay and compost will enrich the garden and we will make our own earth for a lot less money. I would have to amortize the costs of fencing and patio stones, chicken wire, perennials, rental of equipment and so on. By mid-summer, the weekly cost of beer was easily balancing out my savings on produce. Thanks to Slug b gone, I have dropped my grocery bills again. The depanneur staff must think I am a recovering alcoholic. Once harvest time started, the idea of cost having anything to do with gardening disappeared completely. The garden seems to be able to offer benefits which are impossible to measure in dollars.

The garden is the ultimate urbanite experience in grounding. It literally pulls you down to the earth and connects you back with your roots. There is a thrill in climbing through the jungle of tomatoes to find the ripe red treasures hidden in the bush, discovering the mantis hiding perfectly camouflaged among the green beans, finding a patch of wild strawberries popping up from a cinder block. There is a profound satisfaction in running outside barefoot in pajamas to pick beans, cucumbers, basil and green onions to make a salad for lunch. Everything tastes better than store bought, even better than produce from the farmer's market. Leftovers from a salad made from lettuce, cucumber, wood sorrel, orpine and lamb's quarters stayed completely fresh and crisp for more than a week, even after it was washed and cut. Yesterday I made a salad from store bought boston lettuce purchased a week previous, and the lettuce was half-rotted before I took it from the bag. I have become acutely aware of how long the produce in the store must be, how much more like cardboard. The garden food is tastier, crisper, fresher, and you have more choice of variety than you do at the supermarket. I have never seen San Marzano tomatoes or Japanese cucumbers in stores. We have alpine strawberries which are smaller and sweeter than what the stores offer. I am growing 9 varieties of peppers, 3 types of beans. We are collecting seeds for all kinds of interesting plants for next year, including Korean melons (crisp and sweet), and chocolate tomatoes (named for colour, not flavour). I know what I am growing, and I know what I am eating: it is all organic, my pest control is organic and eco friendly unless you are a slug.

Can I put a price tag on what I have learned in one single summer? On the opportunities for bonding and sharing with friends and neighbours that my garden has provided? On the fun I have had, the exercise, the relaxation, the meditation and the fabulous meals built around my harvests? I think I have more than broken even.

A special thanks this week to my mom, who delivered the promised poppies. They are planted among my blooming sunflowers. And to Chloe, my mother-in-law, who sent a bag full of day lily rhyzomes. I need to think about what to do with them before planting. And to my partner in gardening, Iulia, who bought a bag of tulip bulbs and is sharing them with me. I find myself already planning out for next year. I think I am hooked.

Production time

As I write this,  there are tomatoes gently drying in my oven. My freezer is overflowing with pureed tomatoes and pesto. My counters are covered in tomatoes waiting to be processed. I have a line of butternut squashes on my kitchen counter. There are three huge carboys of pressed fresh apple juice brewing into cider (we cheated and bought apples at the market, our tree is too young to produce yet). I plan to call my mother to ask for use of her basement freezer to take the next batches of pureed tomatoes. Tonight we dined with friends on pasta with pesto made from our own basil, a big cucumber and tomato salad, broccoli and three types of beans (green, yellow and green with red speckles) all grown in my garden. My house smells good.

I just came home from a wonderful weekend out of town visiting with some old friends. Anita is a veteran gardener who has designed and worked on her own garden for years, and has adorned it with her own copper sculptures, a fountain, paths and a bench. She keeps rainbarrels and uses their water for her garden, never the hose. She has impressed others in her neighbourhood and been engaged to design their gardens. She has stringent expectations of any plant in her garden. It must survive without needing more water than what the rainbarrels can provide. She will not allow anything that spreads too much and roots too deeply. She has her own brand of botanical Darwinism. She described lots of interesting plants which I have never heard of and of course cannot remember the names of (I asked her to e-mail them to me along with the name of the product she puts in her rainbarrels to prevent mosquitoes from breeding). She will only plant flowers given to her from friends' and neighbours' gardens, no shopping. I have not seen her garden in a few years, as she lives in Newmarket and I don't get out that way often but I am tempted to visit next summer.

We were both staying with mutual friends, Paul and Barb, in the beautiful home they bought last year. Prior to our arriving, they spent a lot of time this summer renovating, repairing and landscaping. They have a small flower garden out front. It was fun to be consulted on some garden design ideas. The only crops they have this year are apples (super delicious! They are not sure of the variety but they were really good), and crab apples. They have devised an interesting way of dealing with the fallen crab apples to prevent a pile of rotten goo. They rake them in a pile and  vacuum them up in their shop vac. Paul confided to me that Barb has discovered  if she puts the hose over her shoulder while vacuuming, the crab apples give her a noisy but effective massage. I will keep that in mind once my trees produce more than the current two or three fruits.

Inevitably, upon returning home, after a hasty hug to my husband and children, I spent an hour harvesting for dinner and the tomato assembly line. The tomato, squash and bean plants are still flowering, and the basil is regrowing for a third time. I also noticed that some of my spring flowers are starting to bloom again along with my sunflowers. The coyote piss has done wonders, and now that the squirrels are not decapitating them, my remaining sunflowers look gorgeous. I took photos and will get to posting them soon.

On a different note, I am reading a book lent to us by my mother-in-law called The Fruit Hunters by Adam Leith Gollner, which I am finding delightful, entertaining and informative. I am reading a chapter that outlines the horrors of the huge international agricultural industries, nothing I am unaware of but seeing it all compiled together is nightmarish. He touches on the power of pesticide companies and questions how much we should trust the assertions that foods/chemicals etc. are as safe as claimed. I am thinking of doing more research on the miraculous Slug b gone, which seems too good to be true. I am still spotting the odd slug, but no question the numbers have dropped. 


Anyone interested in Josh's recipes for pesto, tomato sauce, cider, etc, let me know in the comments!

Caging the Wild Tomatoes

Tomatoes are a very popular choice for vegetable gardens. I know lots of people who have almost no space to garden but will have a few potted cherry tomatoes on their balcony anyhow. There are tons of varieties, some are better raw and others bred for sauce making. Slugs do not seem to eat the plants but they will go after the fruit, at different stages of ripeness depending on the species. Whatever my mother grew this summer was susceptible to slugs while still green. My San Marzanos have a tougher skin and the slugs shunned them until they were nearly ripe. When we figured that out, we started harvesting them when they were still orange and let them finish ripening indoors. We lost more of the riper tomatoes to slugs, and even found an earwig in one, although I am not sure if it was making inroads after a slug tore a hole in the skin. Besides being a better bet against the slugs, they are also the best sauce tomatoes, and produce masses of tomatoes. We are picking a few hundred a week and the plants are still flowering.

I have discovered as well that there are very firmly held opinions about the best way to cultivate tomatoes. I have heard heated arguments about the need to pull off the "suckers" which are branches which sprout between two other branches. They are so named because they produce a big, non-fruiting branch which sucks the plants energy away from producing fruit. My mother quietly whispered to me (so no one could hear and argue the point) that tomatoes don't like being mutilated and will do just fine with the suckers left intact. I caved in to pressure a few times and dutifully mutilated my tomatoes by pulling off tiny leafy sprouts as well as some well developed branches which were not producing flowers. Later in the summer I got too busy pulling flowers off my basil and fighting slugs and forgot to keep up with the suckers.Whether I pruned or not, the tomatoes seemed to flourish.

The other point of disagreement is the best way to support a tomato plant. Breeding them for maximum fruit has resulted in top-heavy plants that get floppy, and tomatoes touching the ground are a feast for many bugs.  My neighbour's mother insists that each tomato should have its own stake.  Josh is a fan of the tomato cage. We have used it before in our first small garden and loved it, and repeated it again this year.

It works like this. When the plants are still quite small, we put up a framework of posts around the tomatoes, and string a sheet of chicken wire on top of the tomato plants at the level where their lowest branches should be once they are larger, maybe 4 inches off the ground. We put ours a bit too high this year which decreases its effectiveness. The purpose is that the young plant will grow right through the wire, and their lowest branches will rest on and be supported by the chicken wire. Eventually when it produces tomatoes, they will also rest on the wire. When ripe, any tomatoes which fall off the vine will never reach the ground, and you can collect them easily by sweeping them off the wire floor. As the plants grow, you add more levels of wire. Our largest plants are big enough for a fourth wire layer, we just never got around to it, so they have three. The important thing is that there is room on all sides of the cage to be able to move around it and pick tomatoes easily. We found out the hard way that it shouldn't be wider than two plants across. We had to chop our wire in half midway through the season because I couldn't reach the interior of the cage. As it was, the plants became so thick and bushy it was like climbing through a thick jungle to pick the tomatoes at the back. When the plants are tiny they looked like they were well spaced out. Maybe it is the type of tomatoes, or the weather conditions, or the hay and compost and manure mix we used, but WOW did we have successful tomatoes!

We tried to plant our tomato patch in a concentrated unit for caging purposes, but we had three leftover tomato plants which I ended up staking. I am not sure it was because of  the stake vs. cage arrangement, the location in the garden or some other factor, but the staked tomatoes were far from the best producers in the garden. Not the most scientific study, but there you have it.

Besides having put the first layer of wire a bit too high resulting is tomatoes "under the wire" which makes picking more challenging, we also used a grade of chicken wire which was just a bit too large (2 inch). I had a number of tomatoes fall right through, and others grow in a hole in the wire and get stuck in there as they matured to full size. We had used this size with Roma tomatoes and it worked fine, but San Marzanos are a bit slimmer it seems. Once the tomatoes have grown up into the wire, there is not much you can do.

So what do we do with all these tomatoes? We have used a bunch for salads, for salsa, soup, and bruschetta. We will dry some. We are blanching, peeling and pureeing hundreds, and freezing them until we have no more room in the freezer, then Josh will make a huge pasta sauce and can as much as we can. We liberated an entire shelf in our basement for this purpose.

On a completely different note, I have been given the name of a product that kills slugs which a few of my friends have sworn by. It is called "slug b gone", I am not kidding. I was warned that ground hogs love it and have broken into my friend Alex's shed to eat this stuff, so I warned Josh that he was to apply the coyote piss we bought online from the Pee Mart (again, I am not joking! see www.thepeemart.com) at the same time so it would work. I also made him spray that vile smelly stuff on the top of the fence so that the squirrels would not eat the head off my few remaining sunflowers. Unfortunately it has been pouring all day today thanks to Hurricane Irene, so he will have to mark our territory again tomorrow. We put out beer too, and had very few slugs in the beer this morning so maybe the slug b gone is working. I will keep you all posted...

Harvest time: Successes and failures

This summer has been quite a learning experience. I just got off the phone with my mother who compared notes with me on what has worked and what has not.  We both had a generous crop of cucumbers which seemed to be largely untouched by beast or bug. I had one or two large cucumbers daily for three weeks, and now I have one every three days. We both had a lot of difficulty with pepper plants, the leaves being devoured by some unknown bug (not slugs, we decided). This is interesting because our gardens are more than 100 kilometers apart, with completely different soil conditions, and altitudes, though fairly similar weather conditions. 

Tonight we pureed and froze a few dozen tomatoes, and picked a whopping 89 more. Within a few weeks we will be ready to make a years supply of pasta sauce. It has been a race against slugs, who have become better climbers now that the tomatoes are turning red.

The bag of potatoes which I found sprouting eyes in late July were thrown under the hay instead of composted, in a reckless moment, and are now shooting leaves and stocks through the hay. I am letting them be until next year. I seem to have at least one potato grow from compost each year, so maybe they will ride out the winter under the hay and sprout in the spring. I have small but mature broccolis, (brocolinis?) which we are harvesting before the flowers open. We had some for dinner. We planted Romaneso broccoli, which were supposed to have grown in a strange circular clusters of pyramids, but they just looked like tiny little broccolinis on huge, leafy plants. I left them until the first flower opened pretty and yellow (who knew?) and knew it would be too late if I left them another day. Needless to say, I was disappointed. It is worth checking an image for Romanesco brocolli on line to understand just why I am so disappointed. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brassica_romanesco.jpg)

Knowing when things are ready is not easy. My cukes often look like partially inflated balloon animals. Josh says that mature hot peppers are not green so wait until they turn. I have nine different varieties, and although I attached the seedpack to stakes in the garden to identify which was what, they got wet and I cannot make out the pictures anymore. I can’t remember if some of them are supposed to be green. I am trying to follow a basic rule of thumb. If the slugs suddenly take an interest, pick them immediately. Ready or not!

There are butternut and spaghetti squashes taking over an entire third of my garden, they are in the broccolis and tomatoes and the highest flowers are 15 or more feet up the neighbour’s lilac tree. I will take and post a picture when the squashes grow up there. The basil is still keeping ahead of the slugs, so I will have more pesto by the end of the summer. My lettuces, the original row which the ground hog has left intact, have stopped growing at about half size. The green onions I planted in spring are holding on well and I am gradually picking them and using them in cooking and salads. The second batch I planted in late July are still tiny little wormy sprouts, and not getting bigger. The squirrels have eaten two of my giant sunflowers before the seeds even had a chance to develop. There go my plans for peanut-free home grown school treats for the kids.  The sweet potato vines are lovely, I keep forgetting they have sweet potatoes underneath.

My orpine is doing great. I got three small orpine plants from my friend Jasmyne, who has an extensive knowledge of edible and medicinal wild plants, and has supplied me with a few interesting and unusual plants in my garden. It is related to sedem, has delicious leaves which are great in salads or for cooking, and gorgeous pink flowers which attract bees like nothing else in my garden. My three plants have spread to ten, and my selective harvesting of leaves seems to have not done any damage. The slugs have not noticed them. I have no idea what they smell like because I would have a noseful of bees if I found out. I plan to plant some colonies of orpine in my flower gardens. I figure if they spread too much I can eat them, or maybe give you some to have in your garden. Let me know!

My flowers have had some great successes and some dismal failures. I finally looked up how to root a rose cutting on the internet. I checked a few different sites and none seemed to reflect what I had done, nor agreed with each other. Of the six cuttings I tried to root, two are alive and well. I had one under an empty vinegar container and the other under a clear plastic soda bottle with the bottoms cut off to make mini-green houses. I took them off the surviving cuttings today. I had given up on my first few attempts which had no leaves left.

There is one part of my garden which has been a black hole, but I think I will save that for its own post. Other than the patch of death, I have had a few random failures of flowers that I tried to grow from seed directly in the garden, to no avail (black eyed susans, irises, poppies, and bleeding hearts). I had success with all of these plants when I transplanted them from someone else’s garden, sometimes right next to where I put the seeds. Except the poppies which are still in my mother’s garden up north, and I have not forgotten that she said I could have some at the end of the season. I hope she hasn’t forgotten.

I also had a bunch of tiny daisy sprouts from Iulia which keeled over and died shortly after I transplanted them in the front of the yard. Iulia’s did well, so maybe it was the lousy earth I put them in, or not enough light. I am looking forward to next year when we can swap all the things that are spreading too much. 

Josh and I are already discussing what we are going to do differently next year. There will be no sunflowers in the front yard. They were stunted from lack of sun and the squirrels beheaded them before they had time to bloom. We will have learned by then how to make our own beer so we can afford to keep our slug traps flowing. We will employ a coyote full time to make his territory around our yard. Maybe the whole block if we are feeling generous. We will rig up a scarecrow so I can grow corn. We really should do that this week, as our single stalk of corn has two ears and the crows are going to notice soon. I think we will forget the broccoli, too much space for a few mouthfuls. The chicken wire for the tomato cages needs to be a bit finer as the San Marzano tomatoes are a bit long and skinny and have been getting stuck. I guess I will write about tomato cages as some point too. In fact, given the relative weight of tomato compared to everything else combined in my garden, I think tomatoes deserve an entire post for themselves. I am, at least, developing some knowledge of tomato cultivation. Josh really wants asparagus. We will continue to fight about giant sunflowers, but if coyote piss doesn’t save them from squirrels next year, I may just give up on them.

Coyote piss, mantis ooths and beer

What do these things have in common? Organic pest control! A little about each.

There is a groundhog in our neighbourhood. It has been plaguing Iulia's garden on the west side of my property, and her neighbours' on the other side. They have been seeing it and evidence of its appetite for the past month or more, but it didn't seem to have found my garden, which puzzled me. Iulia has fences all around her yard, so the beast has to work to get at her tomatoes and cucumbers. We took down our wooden garden gate because it blocked the sun on my herb garden. We are still planning to replace it with a chain link gate to match our neighbours' fence, but ran out of money once we paid for the sod, earth, etc., and decided to put that in our garden budget for next year. You can't eat a gate, and flowers are prettier, so it was put on hold. My youngest child being nine years old, we did not have the same need for security as Iulia and Ovidiu who have two toddlers. So our vegetable garden has what amounts to a red carpet inviting the groundhog to come and go as he pleases. Somehow our garden escaped his notice. Until I planted my second round of romaine lettuces. I waited until before I left on vacation to start a new crop, as my first plantlings were getting big enough for salad. I kept the pot of baby lettuce up on my table and had friends water it while we were away. They were big enough to plant last weekend, and I put them in three neat rows near the bigger lettuces. There were too many to fit, so I put the remaining three plants up in the bathtub between the basil and the sweet potatoes. They were doing great until yesterday. I came home from work and they were gone. Almost all of them were gone, the three in the magic bathtub were still there. What happened??? As with every new development, good or bad, I immediately went to Iulia who had just pulled up in her car home from work and told her. They are gone!

"It's the marmotte," said Iulia. (We speak a mix of English and French in Montreal.)
I had a Bugs Bunny moment.
"This means WAR!"

Passionate discussions ensued with Josh last night. He wanted to follow it home, find out where it lives and pressure the owner of the property to do something about the marmotte. Or buy a slingshot and shoot it (my youngest daughter is appalled by this option.) So in the end we settle on an option which a former neighbour of ours has used. Coyote piss.

Where do you get coyote piss? Garden centres? Hardware stores? I suggested the internet. You can find anything on the internet.

If I have lost you by now, I will explain. Coyotes mark their territories in the way dogs do. I don't think I need to explain how that works. Prey animals will avoid the smell that indicates they are on the territory of a predator which will eat them. Coyote urine sprinkled around around your yard should keep out some of the critters that munch on your produce. We learned (online) that you can buy it in liquid, pellets, powder or gel format. So we ordered some and I will let you know how it works. I have been thinking about how this miracle product must be obtained, and have put this on the list of the top ten worst jobs I can think of.

Hardcore gardeners will know that it is a great thing to have a mantis in the garden. An ooth is an egg case, which will hatch out 200 to 400 tiny mantises the size of mosquitoes. Once again, the internet is the resource which offers gardeners and farmers the opportunity to order Chinese mantis ooths  (these are the type that you see locally. They live and breed well in our climate). Mantises, like ladybugs (which you can also order online), are voracious predators and will eat the bugs which eat your garden. I have had more personal experience with mantises than anyone I know because I am married to a mantis freak. Josh, an amateur entomologist who is good buddies with the folks in charge of the Montreal insectarium, and trades live bugs and spiders with a world renowned British entomologist (now a close personal friend), has raised and bred exotic mantises in our living room. I have become adept at spotting runaway mantises on my kitchen walls and scooping them back into their plastic cups when they are tiny. When we have had Chinese mantises hatch out in the past, Josh walked around our neighbourhood and dropped extra baby mantises on gardens he likes. Now that we have a big garden, he ordered three ooths and we attached them in random places around the yard. Unless you are present to witness the hatching (easier when it is in an aquarium in the living room), it is hard to tell if the ooth is full or empty, dead or alive. So it was with great excitement when I finally spotted a mantis, not yet full size but getting pretty close, in my tomatoes. I saw him again (or another one, same size) yesterday.

The beer is for the slugs. As mentioned before, we seem to be cursed with a ridiculous quantity of slugs on our property. I have been researching ways to address this problem as they seem to really love eating almost everything I have planted in the garden with the exception of green onions, lilies and mint. I have tried surrounding every plant with egg shells, then with coffee grinds, neither of which worked. I tried beer and lime (not the kind you put in your corona, the powdered mineral that you sprinkle on the ground) at the same time, and I am not sure which one made more of a difference, but that was when things started to turn around. There are still slugs everywhere, and they are still munching my plants but not to the point that the plants are eaten to nothing, just lightly nibbled.

The beer solution involves putting out cups or containers of beer, poured about an inch deep, dug in level to the ground so it is like a beer wading pool. Slugs go crazy for it. They are not picky about quality (Labatt Blue dry had been my choice because it is the cheapest stuff they sell in my neighbourhood), and they don't care if the bubbles are gone and the alcohol is evaporated, because they are still diving in a few days after I have refilled the bars. What is important is that it attracts them like a magnet, and it is fatal to them. It is gross, but I can keep track of how well it is working. It also has demonstrated to me just how many slugs I am dealing with, because despite finding between 50 and 100 of them pickled daily, I am still finding more on my plants.

My other two techniques I have tried were suggestions to deal with aphids on my new baby jersey mac apple tree, a gift from our friend Jacques. After a few minutes of scientific fascination watching ants farming aphids (I have read about this but never seen it), I decided it was quite enough and they would have to go so my tree would survive and eventually I would have apples (and a whole new level of pest control to learn). I first tried a solution of tobacco, a cigarette soaking overnight in a spray can full of water. I tried this for a couple of weeks on the tree and on my pepper plants (I am still not sure what was eating them, maybe slugs or something else), without much dramatic improvement. I could still see the aphids under the leaves and the ants running around the trunk and branches. The ants all abandoned ship when the spray showered down on them, but they were back later on. My second attempt seemed too simple, but in fact it worked really well. A few drops of dish soap diluted in water in the spray can, for a few days (reapplied after rain or the sprinkler), and the aphids seem to be completely gone. I have started using it on the rest of the garden now.

Up until my tomatoes started to ripen, I had nothing eating the leaves or fruit. I found two tomato hornworms (never had seen or heard of them before, but my amateur entomologist husband recognized them) who had been heading towards my tomatoes, drawn by the smell or something, but who never had a chance to do any damage. I found out this week that slugs like ripe tomatoes. Time to buy more beer...

Who me? A garden slut?

True confessions. Once I started gardening, I found myself obsessively checking out every garden in sight. Then grilling anyone who looked like they may possibly own the garden to find out what things were, did they have any idea where to get seeds or seedlings? Can I have a clipping from that one? (I still seem to have no clue how to successfully take a clipping, but some have survived. So far...) Did you really want THAT many red lilies? I can take a few off your hands.

It started with Siberian squills. They are these little blue bell shaped flowers that spread like mad in some people's lawns. Occasionally they seem to have originated in a garden and spread outward, sometimes there are just a random few. They bloom in spring and then disappear, and do not seem to do any harm to lawns or other flowers, and they add a sparkle of blue to the lawn for a while. I like them. I had no idea what they were, or how to get them. I suspect that most people who have them don't know either. At least the ones I asked don't. I spent one afternoon walking around and asking until I found someone who felt that they had more than they needed and allowed me to dig up a bunch. I spent almost as much time searching through hundreds of images of blue flowers until I found a name. I believe they are Siberian squills. They have bulbs, but I can't find them in my bulb catalogues (I now have bulb catalogues.) They also don't transplant well, but one or two popped up this spring so I may have more in the future. I was emboldened by my first raid, and have gone on to admire many flowers and plants of friends and neighbours and come out of it with seeds, cuttings and a few extra plants they could spare. I have been tempted to steal a few bulbs from public floral decorations (does the Cavendish/Heywood intersection really need that many red lilies??) but I won't stoop that low.

It is not that I am not spending money on my garden. Inevitably, we have bought earth, manure, peat pots, chicken wire, seeds, seedlings, hoses, sprinklers, tools, sand (I will save that for another post), a ridiculous quantity of beer, lime, mushroom spore, mantis ooths and probably a lot of other things that I can't think of right now. If I were to buy everything I wanted in my garden I would be:

1) bankrupted pretty quickly
2) unable to obtain things that I have no idea what they are called
3) unlikely to find groovy things like siberian squills and orpine (more on that later)

I have found that some people are very generous and have given me amazing things, and lots of advice. Others have happily offered me their extras, including a few things I had not wanted necessarily, like the three hostas from Iulia, but which I took out of desperation because they like shade. I have made my peace with the hosta which is happily thriving in the part of the garden which has killed all other things but goutweed. I have some end-of season promises from those who keep a really tight, neat garden and don't want to leave holes mid-season (thanks mom! I await a poppy or two before the frost!).

I have also become privileged to be invited into some of the most exquisite gardens.  One belongs to Alan. He deserves to have his story told. Three blocks from my house, there was a sign on a lawn which said "plant sale." I pass by the house daily and was intrigued by what this meant. After a few weeks, I walked over and rang the bell. Alan is a retired nurse who loves to garden and has the most breathtaking perennial garden.  I will at one point ask him if I can photograph his garden and post it. He has climbing roses up to and around his second floor balcony, layers of flowers of all types and colours, many of which I have never seen before. He has for several years been taking cuttings and seeds and bulbs and growing potted indoor plants and outdoor perennials and selling them to passers by. He donates the proceeds to the institute where he once worked. I love this guy! I drooled over his plants, forced my family to chip in to buy a precious few of them for my birthday (pink and purple columbines, a blue bird rose of sharon bush, multicouloured hollyhocks including pink and black and some other stuff whose names I have already forgotten). They are still all babies so not blooming this year, but have had a much higher survival rate than most flowers I have tried in my garden. After visiting every few days with another friend or neighbour or my kids, Alan told me this was the last time he was having a plant sale. He said it was too much work. I nearly cried. I couldn't afford to buy out his stock but I would have if I could. The good news is that he likes me enough that he will let me have some seeds and some cuttings, and promised advice and coaching so I would not kill off his gifts. I am overdue to invite him to see my garden.

An exciting moment for me was when I was actually able to reciprocate and this summer gave friends and neighbours strawberry plants, mint, lungwart, sunflowers, and periwinkle. There is hope for me yet.

Weeds are just plants in the wrong place

Starting out as a gardener seemed like a daunting task. My friends and mother and mother-in-law who are veteran gardeners seemed to have a whole different vocabulary. They can recognize what is a weed, and what is something that was deliberately planted in the garden, what all these strange things were called. They know that what it written on the seed packet is invariably wrong in some way and how to compensate. I clearly was not born with this extensive knowledge and I felt like I had when I gave birth and had to figure out how to deal with an infant or when I started a new job. I suppose the stakes were not as serious, and daisies and poppies are ultimately easier than diapers and poopies. Or maybe not, mine all crapped out before getting bigger than one inch tall.  "Just try things and make mistakes until something works" was some of the nicest advice I got. Also, don't plant anything much the first summer, see what comes up. This was when I learned that I had no clue what was a weed and what wasn't except for the obvious dandelions (which I actually like), and nettles which I had the misfortune to have met before. Josh showed me what burdock was and helped me get rid of it. At least we tried to, it is not easy to succeed.  I did manage to identify a few real plants but there were lots of unknown out there. I left a lot of things alone for the time being. I had the further challenge at the beginning of this summer in that I planted all kinds of things and I could not remember what I planted, and where I planted it, nor did I know what they looked like as new sprouts. I was afraid to weed up my baby garden so I took it real slow. 

My friend and veteran gardener Olga taught me an important lesson. Weeds are just plants in the wrong place. Some of them are lovely flowers whose seeds were dropped by a bird or blew over the fence. My super beautiful spaghetti squash plant which grew up my back neighbour's lilac tree was an amusement for us all. The other one that crossed through Iulia's fence and started to strangle her mother's tomatoes was less welcome.

So I have now learned that these surprise, unexpected plants (formerly known to me as weeds) fall into a few categories. There are the unwelcome ones, invasive plants which may be attractive but strangle out other plant life. Goutweed, morning glory, even mint and oregano can easily cross the line, as well as creeping charlie (Chloe warned me to get rid of it even though it is pretty and looked like a cute little violet to me). Josh is a genius for containing these plants so we can enjoy my electric purple morning glories and drink mint tea and mint lemonade all summer without it taking over everything else.

Another category of weeds are the edible ones. I already knew that young dandelions can be eaten in salads or added to soups. Olga introduced me to lamb's quarters which I have added to my selection of salad greens. I like it so much I am letting it go to seed and spread among my peppers and basil. She also really likes nettle soup, but they are really a pain to deal with because the thorns go right through my garden gloves even if I just accidentally brush against one. I gave up on tolerating them and spent two days removing the spines embedded under my skin when I cleared them out of the bathtub (the one in my yard, full of basil. A bathtub full of nettles sounds like a bizarre medieval torture!). I suspect they will grow back. Maybe we will achieve a soup at some point. Josh says no we won't because he "really really hates them." Another surprise was that what I though was a variety of clover which sprang up on the fringes of the hay turned up decorating a cake at a friend's birthday party. "Is that edible?" I asked. Elvi told me it was shamrock, or wood sorrel. It has a surprisingly lemony taste. It also adds a nice touch to salads. I suspect its seeds were part of the hay. It spreads slowly and has small yellow flowers so I let it grow and harvest a bit at a time.

Some "weeds" are baby trees. I have had several crab apple trees sprout, of which I have kept two, but have also had an oak tree and countless other less exciting trees sprout. A friend with more land than I have has adopted the oak. Some are what Amy taught me are called "volunteers."  Some lovely purple flowers which I admired in a neighbourhood garden turned up in mine this summer, and I am certain I never planted them. My black-eyed susans are surrounded by some flowerless weeds with similar leaves, as well as a few foxgloves, and until the flowers came out, I had no idea which one was which. I still haven't ripped out the ones which were not the flowers, just in case they still surprise me. A patch of milkweed popped up in an unlikely shady spot where I was delighted to let them spread, as they form a monarch nursery. None of the other butterfly-attracting flowers I planted over the past two summers grew. I am still not sure if the milkweed was part of that seed mix or just a surprise. I also had some pretty purple orchid-y things that have added a nice touch to my flower garden.

The last category are the compost pop-ups. This year I have one potato plant and one corn plant. Josh did not want to bother with potatoes, and I talked him out of trying corn, but the garden made its own choice so we ended up with one of each in the middle of the pepper patch (which had got the bulk of the compost this year, being right next to the ripe compost box).

Looking back, it seems that I have already learned a lot. My goal next year is to learn what all the stuff in my garden is called, weed or not.And to recognize what I planted this summer when it sprouts...

Building a garden from a sea of mud

Summer 2010. We had ambitious plans. We were going to finish the driveway, sift out all the rocks from the excavated earth, break up the clay, add woodchips and compost, build garden beds, finish renovating the kitchen, finish the attics and in our spare time, tile the front hall. Only new home owners can be this naive. It did not take long before I realized that this just was not going to happen. I am sure Josh figured it out right quick, but was afraid to tell me. He was relieved when I said to postpone the inside of the house, I cannot continue to live in a sea of mud. That was what our lawn had become. Piles of muddy clay and gravel everywhere. Our friend Amy's brother is a tree surgeon with a wood chipping machine, and was more than obliging to dump several tree's worth of wood chips in our back yard. As summer wore on and we spent every waking hour after work and on weekends sifting earth, we decided that the only way to get through was to recruit reinforcements. We called and e-mailed and facebooked everyone who would not hate us for doing so to come out and sift. A few people really love us and put some back breaking work into building our garden the hard way. I am sorry I did not keep track, so I may miss some people. In fact, some who came were friends of cousins or other friends and I don't even know their names. Alexander, Alan, Kevin, Shaun, and lots more. Friends visiting us from as far as Germany discovered the joys of letting their children play on our mud mountain. Summer wore on  and we decided to finish before the snow. We managed to sift out enough of the earth to put mounds of earth where the garden beds would be. The first ones done were in the front yard to let me plant the flowers I had been sneaking off to buy at the grocery store, and then the perennials I had gotten off of other friends' gardens. I think Josh was tired of my complaining that I could not garden yet. While he diligently sifted, I took breaks to dig up and replant mint, crab apple trees and give my uprooted strawberries from our old apartment a place to put down roots. I did my fair share of sifting, getting plenty of mosquito bites as I always ended up getting to it around dusk. By October, the mud was getting colder and thicker, and I had given  up on the idea of finishing. I finally said it was enough. We will have time between the thaw and planting time to get it done. So we covered the earth in all the garden beds with our fall leaves, and let the snow bury our twin mountains of mud and wood chips.

Josh spent the winter planning. We would seed and sprout indoors with a grow light and a fan. We would check out the cost of renting a machine to finish moving the mud and woodchips into place. Josh was willing to let the remaining stones stay put, as the remaining earth would be used to level the lawn. The grass was pretty much destroyed by the mud mountain anyways. He also looked into the cost of sod and mushroom spawn. I just smiled and nodded.

By March 2011, we chose what to plant. What I mean by this is that Josh took our daughter Zara and bought 2 kinds of basil seeds, corn seeds, asparagus seeds, 2 kinds of squash seeds, cucumber, tomatoes, savoury, 6 kinds of pepper, broccoli, rapini, green onions, mixed spring greens, romaine lettuce...I am sure there was more. It was too much. I argued against corn and asparagus. I was not ready for that. Our first attempt at corn at our old house involved a crow peeling and devouring the only ear of corn we were able to produce just before we planned to harvest. I did not have the time and energy to devise scarecrows yet, and hated the heartbreak of the corn experience. Asparagus was too much about timing. Too late and you have a garden full of ferns. I really wanted our first big garden to be a success.

So we planted lots of everything because of course a lot of it wouldn't even sprout. But it did. The packages said it would take 14-21 days to sprout. It took two. My basement became a greenhouse. Everything outgrew the Jiffy pots too soon and I had to transplant everything. When May rolled around, Josh gave me a proposal for the cost of setting up the garden and finishing the lawn quickly with use of a cool machine (mini-tractor) for a weekend and sod instead of seed. I asked if we can have it done by June 24, so we could finally have a housewarming party. We kept postponing because of the sea of mud the previous year, and I really wanted a yard and garden by the time the kids finished school. Josh got the machine, and was able to flatten the mountains and mix in the woodchips in a weekend. Vive modern technology! The mushroom spore had the double function of breaking down the woodchips in the earth and making it into good black earth, while simultaneously producing some tasty gourmet mushrooms. Josh is a mushroomer who knows his stuff, which are the mushrooms to eat and which to ignore. He co-opted our friends Kate and Maya who worked hard alongside Josh and miraculously within six weeks I had a lawn and garden beds ready to go. Hallelujah!

The last step was cleaning up the junk and weeds that had already accumulated in the back yard which was less noticeable when it was a mountain of mud, but now was an eyesore. One item of dispute was the bathtub. Josh loves old clawfoot bathtubs. Our new neighbours did not, and one of the first renovations they did when they moved in was to replace theirs. Josh could not let them throw it out. We had no plans to renovate our bathroom, at least not for a long time, so the bathtub sat outside near the shed and started to collect lilac rootballs and branches and all sorts of things for future projects. By this time, two years after our move, the projects collecting in the bathtub were put in cold storage and so were the items collecting there. However, the bathtub was not allowed to go. So I proposed using it as a planter. This was a happy compromise, and it moved up into the garden bed where it was planted with basil and savory, with sweet potato vine training down to cover up the splotchy paint job. I chose the basil in particular as it is a favourite of slugs, and I discovered that slugs do not like to climb up into big pots. The basil planted directly in the earth was almost totally decimated. The bathtub provided the bulk of our first basil harvest out of a few robust, slug-free and beautiful plants.

I want to note that we have had a lot of inspiration, support and advice from many people, but mostly from my mother-in-law Chloe, who has been using Ruth Stout's no work garden method. Being someone who has not experienced the all work garden, I can only say I shudder to think how much time that must take. In fact, if I had to turn over my earth and mix my compost and plow and weed, I would have called the whole thing off. I mean, seriously, I work full time and have three kids. The grocery store is 3 minutes away by bike, 2 by car, I am doing this for fun in my limited spare time. That being said, it has taken a lot of work to make this garden. We raked out two year's worth of compost, added manure and store bought black earth. Josh built the garden walls from the façade of someone's house who gave it away on Kijiji (I forgot to mention that there were also mounds of bricks all around the mountain of mud and wood chips). We discovered that we were a bit short of the pink, pressed concrete fake stone bricks to finish the walls in the back yard. We prioritized the driveway walls and front yard flower garden beds. So Josh bought a few cinder blocks and interspersed them evenly in the wall. They made perfect flower planters along the garden wall.

We were ready plant. By the time the sod was setting in mid May, we put the seedlings out to "harden" which I learned meant to get used to being out in the elements. We had too much rapini. Too many sunflowers. A stupid amount of basil ("it's ok, we can make lots of pesto and freeze it.") I kept asking Josh to let me know his plan. He wanted to wing it. So of course we ended up arguing. I wanted the sunny spots for sunflowers. Chloe said that other plants won't grow near sunflowers. Josh did not want them where he put the mushroom spawn. There was not enough sun in the front of the house. I started giving sunflowers to anyone who would take them. I managed to convince him to let me plant 4 giant sunflowers behind the broccoli, and the little sunflowers in the cinder blocks with a promise to reassess for next year. I put both small and giant sunflowers in every spot that got some sun in the front yard. Those sunflowers ended up being stunted and many lost their heads. The ones in the back did wonderfully. The plants near them seemed not to have suffered. Josh conceded that sunflowers are good for producing oil, so it was in his survivalist plan to try them out anyways. The small sunflowers provided a year's worth of treats for our parrot, and I am hoping the giant sunflowers will provide some guaranteed nut-free snacks I can send with my kids to school this year to jazz up their school lunches. If the birds and squirrels don't beat us to it.

Following the Ruth Stout approach, we covered our entire garden thickly in hay, which keeps in the moisture and warmth, prevents weeds from growing, and decomposes to create rich black earth full of worms underneath. The plants love it. Unfortunately, so do slugs. We had a large indigenous population of garden snails on our land, radiating out of the lilac grove on the eastern border of our property. We seem to have added to this a huge crop of slugs. I have been told by friends that this year everyone had slug issues, so I can only suspect that the hay gardening technique exacerbated the problem. So as I innocently planted my little seedlings, they were instantly devoured and I nearly lost all my peppers, my non-bathtub basil, my lettuce, broccoli, violets, impatiens..well you get the ugly picture. We tried surrounding all the plants with eggshells, with coffee grinds, sprinkling lime everywhere, and then put out a dozen bowls of beer. Slugs are drawn to beer like nothing else, they dive right in and drown. Labatt has become this year's sponsor for my garden. The bar opens at sunset, and I refill the beer every 3 days if it has been hot, and after big rainfalls which dilute it too much. I am getting embarrassed bringing back the empties. "I swear, I am not an alcoholic, it is my slugs!" But it works. Not only do I see evidence of the alarming number of these little pests drowning nightly, my plants have survived and have mostly bounced back.