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.

Getting started

I have never blogged before, but I feel inspired by my first real garden and I want to write about it. I realize that I really should have started this before August, so I will be back tracking quite a bit before I can get into the here and now. I have already done a photo album on Facebook so for now I am not putting any images here, at least until I can figure out how to do that. I am giving myself enough time until my sprinkler has saturated my back yard for starters tonight.

The garden was inevitable. I married a very handy man who has a paranoid, survivalist streak, and is determined to be self sufficient if and when civilization collapses. Me, I just like plants. I have not had a particularly green thumb, and my experience with houseplants has been in the spirit of Nietzsche, what has not killed them has made them stronger (in other words, the ones I have are the true survivors). When Josh and I first rented an apartment together, it was essential for him that we had a place to garden. It did not matter that for fifteen years we never exercised that right, it was enough that we could. We spent weekends out of town, worked long hours, then had three kids, gardening was not the priority. Eventually, we did start gardening and composting in the back yard of the duplex where we lived with conditional access to the garden (based on the whim of the current downstairs tenant), and made a first attempt with broccoli, corn, garlic, strawberries, mint, cucumbers, tomatoes and morning glories (pink and purple). We barely started and there was a new tenant who was insistent that she did not want our garden and our compost in her back yard. She pestered my landlord about us digging everything out even before the snow was completely gone. We requested that we be given until the compost thawed and the plants sprouted so we could at least rescue and re-pot everything. That was when we knew it was time to move.

This was two years ago, and in the process of looking for a new, affordable, large apartment with the right to garden (and compost, of course), we found our house and took the plunge and became home owners. In fact, we bought a garden, with a small but cosy house where we could sprout the plants in the spring. Oh, there was room for three kids to have their own rooms too, which was a bonus. But we bought the house for the garden.

We moved in at the end of May and I heeded my friends' and mother-in-law's advise not to touch the garden the first summer so I can see what is there already.

Once upon a time, someone loved my garden. Though I suspect it was quite some time ago. I regret not having started this blog then, when I could have recorded just what we started with. The lawn in the front and the back was full of weeds, clover with some grass thrown in and under it all, solid clay with patches of gravel. In the middle of the back yard was a circle of sparse gravel with some children's play equipment and a miniature trampoline on it. In the far right corner, there was an area with some rocks suggesting it had been a flower garden once, and in the mess of weeds there were some wild irises that turned up  Foxglove and white morning glories spread in another weedy area along the left edge of the property bordering the neighbour's yard, as did a few spindly raspberry canes (at least they looked like raspberries). Day lilies lined the shadiest strip of the back yard along the house. There was a small, kidney-shaped mint patch, set in deep rich soil speckled with vermiculite, which (I discovered when I transplanted it) was very mature and had bigger roots than some of the trees on our property. This was located in a random place in the grass close to the back door. The area was full of weeds and some small trees which I suspect were not planted there but just randomly sprouted. We dug some up and gave them to a friend, but transplanted two which appeared to be crabapples. We guessed right, as they flowered in pink for the first time this spring, and we now have our first two crab apples growing on the larger of the two. In the same patch was a big, beautiful lavender plant, which now graces the front of the house.

The only truly exciting surprise was that on the day we signed the deed, seventy large morels appeared in the back yard. The former owners, not knowing what a treasure this was, said that they had never seen these ugly fungus before in all the years they owned the house. We have not had a repeat performance (this year there were two), but morels can be very fickle and unpredictable.

The front yard was worse. The lawn was uneven and full of the exposed roots of the many trees, as well as many stumps of trees remaining. At some point it must have been a forest, which may explain the lack of attempted gardening in the past. Half the yard was covered in goutweed, an invasive ground cover plant which apparently chokes out everything else. It is also more resistant to slugs, snails and whatever other pests have been gobbling everything else I have planted, unfortunately, and ridiculously hard to get rid of. I keep pulling it out daily.

Besides the trees and ubiquitous goutweed, there were some scraggly juniper bushes right in front of the house. They seemed to offend Josh who insisted on removing them leaving me with a blank slate to start in front.

Another peculiarity was that there was a clear place for a parking spot or a driveway, which was identified by some large stones and a sprinkling of gravel. We parked our car on the spot over our first winter, and by the thaw, had churned a big section of the yard into thick mud. I suggested to Josh that we put some gravel down before the next winter as this was a huge mess.

So began the biggest obstacle to starting my garden. Josh decided that there was no point in making a makeshift driveway, it made sense to do it right the first time. We were completely broke, so renting machines or paying a company to make a driveway was out of our reach.

Before I continue, I need to make a note about our neighbours. Iulia and Ovidiu are a young couple who decided to buy a house after having their first child. By chance, we bought neighbouring houses and moved in the same weekend. It was an instant bonding process. We had fun swapping items that came with the house which were not of interest to one or the other of our families. Iulia had the fortune of having her incredibly industrious do-it-yourselfer parents come to stay for several months, so we jealously looked on as they had four adults to one child, while we had three children who had to be taken to activities and helped with homework. Needless to say, their back yard and garden was turned over, reseeded, planted with flowers and vegetables, a deck and shed were build, a chain link fence erected with a request to prevent morning glories or other climbers from decorating the fence. Ours still looked like a war zone. Watching the deck built in a weekend, with manual excavation and laying down of gravel and patio tiles, Josh became inspired that we could build the driveway by hand. In fact, to cut the labour and expense, and be good neighbours in the same effort, we offered to share the driveway with our neighbours even though most of the land fell on our property. They have a beautiful, city-owned linden tree where a driveway would have been. They took us up on the offer.

The driveway took most of the month of May to complete. It turned into a Huckleberry Finn type of project, where a lot of the kids in the neighbourhood joined in on the action of digging and moving earth. With a minor expense of some geotextile to line the pit, then various grades of gravel and rock dust, plus rental of a machine to compress it, we ended up with a really professional looking driveway. Where he could, Josh found free material on Kijiji. He scored an entire façade of a building (concrete blocks which look like pink stone) which formed the walls for the driveway as well as the garden walls all over the property.

His intention was to recycle the excavated earth and use it for garden beds. The problem was that the "earth" we dug out was mostly clay mixed with gravel. It seemed someone had dumped gravel on the lawn once to make a makeshift driveway, but with nothing to hold it back, the gravel mixed into the muddy clay several feet deep. Lousy gardening earth to say the least. Josh had a plan: filter the earth, remove the gravel, break up the clay, mix it with compost and woodchips, lay it in beds, cover it with hay and wait for it to be decent earth before starting to garden.

The problem was that we have a mountain of earth to process. We put all other projects on hold, co-opted as many friends and relatives, bribed our children, and spent the rest of the summer sifting earth. By October we had managed to filter a good part of it, but the back yard was even more of a wasteland than before. Prior to moving the mountain of earth to the back yard, I succeeded in rescuing the iris, lilies, mint, crab apple trees and lavender and moved them all to safe and, hopefully, permanent places out of harm's way. I also moved the only survivors of the original garden (strawberries) out of the pots where they lived for a year into the first small piece of our garden. They are doing fine. The lilies I painstakingly dug and transplanted to a spot where they saw the sun for the first time in their lives and exploded. The mint were installed in a large tub so well camouflaged that only we know why they are no longer running out into the lawn anymore. The crab apple trees have become Josh's first attempt at arbour sculpture and will perhaps someday be shaped into an archway into the back yard.

The summer was spent in tension between my deep desire to get started on the garden, and Josh's determination to hold off until everything was set up. I rebelled and planted potatoes where the weed and iris patch were, and started my first raids on perennial gardens. I have Amy and Jack to thank for starting their flower garden 5 years earlier than I did, and for their generosity with bee balm, irises, violets, lavender,  black eyed susans, lungwart, and some other things which can tolerate the shade which I seem to have an abundance of. I also discovered lots of pretty perennials at my local grocery store and planted oriental lilies, stella d'oro lillies, astilbies, hydrangeas. It still looked pretty sparse but it was a start. My mother-in-law gave me a bleeding heart (next to the goutweed and lungwart, my garden sounds pretty sick). And so we ended our first year with strawberries, mint, some flowers and a mountain of mud.