Basil Harvest

It has been a busy week. The basil started to flower, and I actually remembered what to do. I picked all the top leaves off and left them to keep growing. Josh took all the tops and made enough pesto to feed our family and my parents and my brother Marty and his fiancé Hilda.  Josh brought the basil up to my parent's place up north, and harvested a head of garlic as well. When he decided to make pesto,  and there were no pine nuts around the house, he improvised with pumpkin seeds mixed with walnuts. It was wonderful.

  I hoped that it would take a while before they flowered again, but perhaps because it has been hot and sunny every day for a few weeks with the single exception of the day of the thunderstorm, they ripened fast and flowered again within a few days. Some of the basil had been munched a bit, by slugs or caterpillars or who knows what, but it was relatively intact. Most was around a foot high, and some of the bush basil reached close to two feet tall. I cut it all back to the lower leaves for a second growth. Josh plans to donate the second harvest to our synagogue to make pesto for a Shabbos Kiddush. He already has discussed this with the cantor who is also the chief cook and mashkiach, and they are planning something really nice.

Josh stripped down all the basil, harvested three more heads of garlic and produced several litres of pesto which we will have to pack in small containers and freeze tomorrow. I donated two more of the volunteer tomato plants to one of the day centres where I worked because the ones they started with are not doing well. Josh, Lisa and I did a big blitz of building cages for the rest of the tomatoes, and they seem to have survived my attempts to thread the taller branches through the chicken wire. It has been really hot and there has been no rain at all. I have been watering everything, and thinking a lot about channeling our greywater into the garden. It is unbelievable how much water is wasted in the city, and to use filtered drinking water to water plants seems so wrong. Orianne visited my parents for a few days up in Morin Heights this past week, and informed us that she could see the water level of the lake dropping daily. I think it hit an all time low. No one has used the word drought but this is really not good. We need rain.

I have been eating a lot of pesto this week. On bought pasta, on homemade ravioli that Josh made while I put up tomato cages on Friday afternoon, mixed with eggs to make green eggs (no ham, but it was definitely a Suess moment), on toast, straight up by the spoonful. We also have been enjoying mint tea, mint lemonade (with wood sorrel mixed in, super refreshing on ice), strawberries, and a few raspberries. I took a break from garden salad to let the lettuce grow bigger. With the heat there has not been much eating it, so it is filling out nicely.

My astilbes and hollyhocks are in bloom. One hollyhock is a bubblegum pink, the other a very pale delicate peachy pink. The surprise one in the back yard is white. There is one more which is not yet blooming. My morning glories in the front yard burst into flower, and they are almost all purple. One single pink blossom. I am not sure what happened to the many seeds I planted in mixed colours collected all over the alleyways of my neighbourhood, but purple seems to trump it all. My blue morning glories on the side of the house have not yet bloomed but are growing up and around the shelving. My gooseneck loosestrife is in bloom and all of my sunflowers and black eyed susans. The sunflowers are a mystery to me, they are all short and blooming early. There are clearly different varieties, some with one flower and others with many, some thick and stalky and a few skinny ones but none more than two feet high. Also, I did not end up with the cool multicolour variety, they are all yellow. My orange and yellow daylilies and stella d'oros are in bloom too. I moved the bee balm into the back, and they are recovering from the move but not flowering.

I have green hot peppers, green tomatoes and flowers on tomato, scarlet runner beans and cucumbers. Harvesting will be very demanding this year, there is so much growing. Josh was talking about expanding the garden but I think it will be too much to manage on top of us both working full time. We decided to keep the frames for the tomato cages (we have more than doubled the number this year) and use them to guide our planting next year. The rows of tomatoes were a bit too close together for me to fit between easily once the cages were put up, and I still have a lot of stray tomatoes outside of the cages which I ended up staking as I was running out of room to transplant them into more rows.

Priviet to my readers in Russia, whoever you are!