Still going...

I am not posting much now because I am spending my time harvesting, and getting ready for back to school. So I am just doing a quick update so my loyal readers don't abandon me.

I have reached 1000 pageviews this week. This impresses me, even knowing some of those are just spammers, and despite my regular clicking on the box asking me to ignore my own pageviews, I assume that my own views are still included there. I try to make sure someone is reading over my shoulder so I stay honest. I also have two new members, and I don't know either of them. I feel like I have really gone "public!"

I have an abundance of beans this year, so many I am freezing them or I would be sick of beans by now. They are very tall, right over the fence and above the chicken wire, so I have coopted my son, who has now surpassed 6'2 and can reach a foot higher than me, to become a bean picker. He has a lot to learn, but if I point he sees them.

I have a lot of varieties of tomatoes ripening. I have two varieties of brown tomatoes, one big and wrinkled and the other the size of a large cherry tomato. I have some round red types from Iulia (beefsteak I think) and several varieties of San Marzanos. There are also some round red ones which I am not sure what they are or where they came from. I also have some small yellow tomatoes, and I have no clue where they came from. I lost track of which were planted and which grew as weeds from the compost. I have been bringing the small brown ones to my various offices to share with my staff and volunteers, and they give them raving reviews. I even have requests for seeds. Thank you Nathalie for the plant!

We have started pureeing the San Marzanos and are going to buy a chest freezer so we don't need to keep borrowing freezer space from Lisa and José and my mom. We plan to have a lot of tomatoes this year.

The slugs seem to have been conquered. I think the 4 bags of Slug-b-gone combined with our having skimped a bit on hay this spring and the lack of rain has knocked them out. I have only seen tiny ones, and my tomatoes are able to ripen on the vine without getting full of holes. I anticipate more flavourful pasta sauce this winter. Josh has been spraying the tomatoes with hydrogen peroxide to counter the bacteria, though some are succumbing anyhow. The cucumbers, however, have been decimated. We had one single cucumber that made it through. I saw another cucumber beetle on a plant, and it disappeared so fast I lost it before I could pick it off.

Chloe has offered us to have a colony garden up at her place next summer to grow the things that are too big for our garden in town. We love the idea. I am starting to think about what I want.

Chloe and Abraham's garden

I just got back from visiting Josh's parents for the weekend. This weekend was the Williamstown fair, the oldest country fair in Canada, celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. Two of our nephews were visiting as well, and Josh's grandmother, sister and brother-in-law came to join us all at the fair today. Chloe has been submitting produce from her garden and various breads every year to the competitions, and this year she won twelve prizes, for her tomatoes, garlic, whole wheat bread, multi-grain bread, white bread and challah, blackcurrant preserves and a few other things. She will be entered into a regional bake off for winning first prize in the challah.

We camped out next to her expansive and amazing garden. I waited until today to take photos, and unfortunately there was a big storm with lots of hail yesterday which left a lot of things looking somewhat holey or broken today, and also reduced the number of butterflies slightly. I have never seen so many butterflies in my life, there were swarms of them. I think they are painted ladies.

I learned a few new tricks too. Chloe planted a big patch of buckwheat, and when they start to go to seed, she plans to cut them down and mix the plants into the earth. She says this is a way of enriching soil you are leaving fallow, the buckwheat acts as a fertilizer both while it is growing and once it is tilled into the soil. On Saturday the patch of buckwheat was in full white flower and swarming with butterflies. The hailstorm gave Chloe a hand in cutting them down, so there wasn't much to photograph today but broken stems.

This is echinacea with one butterfly visible.

Above is a photo of the shelves where Chloe leaves her canned goods from harvests past, pickles, jams, tomato sauce. I took a close up of her "Slightly spicy pickles" (I love that she has so many varieties that she has to be specific)

I lost track of how many varieties of tomatoes Chloe and Abraham are growing. She has something called Apricot tomatoes which are orange and slightly fuzzy and shaped like an apricot. These are another type to the right. She has San Marzanos too which are massive.
Below is yet another butterfly on one of her sunflowers. It turns out that this year was a relatively short year for sunflowers, even the winner of the tallest sunflower at the fair was not impressive. This makes we think that maybe I did not screw up my sunflowers, it was just the weather. The colour is due to a mistake in the setting on my camera, but it came out kind of interesting so I am posting it anyways. There are actually two butterflies on the same flower but one had its wings folded when I took this shot.

 Chloe has three types of onions, red, white and yellow. She is also growing dill, cabbage, melons, squash, cucumbers, broccoli, garlic (already harvested, they grew close to 1000 heads this year), two types of beans, peppers, lettuce, carrots, beets, borrage, potatoes and pumpkins. I am sure that is not even half of what is growing and I didn't even start on the flowers.

,

 This is a Sivan melon (an Israeli variety).

 Chloe succeeded in getting her Romanescu broccoli to look like it is supposed to. We didn't even try this year. She has the room for broccoli, squash, pumpkins and melons. We found they took up too much space in our garden.

 The holes in the cabbage are compliments of the little white butterflies hovering all over the garden known as cabbage moths. The holes in the melon leaves were mostly from the hail.

 When I noticed that my camera had been set on manual and was taking very faded out photos I started over, and this is what the sunflower looked like with real colours.

 Wild roses.










Chloe is using wooden stackable crates which she gets from a neighbour. He has machine parts delivered in these boxes. She can stack two to protect plants when it gets colder, and cover them with a window pane to make "cold frames" which are like miniature greenhouses.

 Here are some of their garlic drying. There is more in the garage too.

 Some of the windowboxes and hanging flowers around their house.

 This is heliotrope, a bit past its most beautiful. Very intense colour of purple. Below is my youngest nephew Ethan with some of today's harvest.

  

Chloe has much more solid tomato cages than we have. She is just trying this out for the first time. She also is growing the Three sisters (corn, squash and beans) together, but only a few beans. Mostly corn and squash. Above (sorry it is not too clear) are some of her tomatoes propped up against a fence rather than caged or staked. Chloe uses hay to angle the plants in the right direction. This is a trick she learned from Ruth Stout's The No Work Garden.

They also have some nice morning glories on a little island in the middle of the garden.

Chloe and Ethan and Noah picked three baskets of onions, cucumbers and tomatoes to send home to Montreal with us and Toronto with my sister-in-law.

Bacteria got my cukes and tomatoes

 My tomatoes are ripening! I have had some interesting surprises. As expected I have a lot of San Marzano tomatoes. The first to be ripe were the ones that Josh bought at the gardening centre, and they are more than double the size of the ones we had last year. We also have a bunch of the cherry tomatoes ripening, and they are cherry size but they are not the orange-red I expected, they are a chocolate tone (like red grapes). Those come from the single plant which Nathalie gave us as a gift last April, and the plant is monstrously huge. It is next to one of the cages and I keep having to tack up branches or they will sprawl in every direction on the ground. I have a whole row of chocolate tomatoes which seem to be turning red and are ridged like pumpkins. I just googled images of chocolate tomatoes and it turned up both the cherry ones and a browner version of the ones I have. Maybe they turn red first? The red one seems firmly attached to the vine still so I will let it continue to ripen. It is huge, but like many of the San Marzanos, it has patches of black. On the chocolates it is in their ridges, on the San Marzano it is on the bottom and moves into the centre of the seeds. I recognize this as the bacteria which Claude identified last year. We have been avoiding using the sprinkler and watering the tomatoes with a soaker hose, as well as spraying hydrogen peroxide on them. 

Many of the tomatoes seem okay, but others are definitely afflicted. Julie e-mailed me today asking for my advice on the same problem on her tomatoes (which came from my sprouts). I had carefully dipped every one of the seeds I planted in hydrogen peroxide before I planted them, but we ended up with so many volunteers from my compost (many infected last year) that my efforts were undermined.

From one side they look perfect, but...

 you can see that bacteria got some of my tomatoes

I also did a bit of research on the cucumber problem. Most of my cukes have collapsed, some with small cucumbers shriveling on the vine. It turns out that it is very likely another bacterial infection caused by the dreaded and elusive cucumber beetle. I found some good advice online, including an interesting blog by Susan Reimer (journalist and amateur gardener), with a section of Q & A with University of Maryland with some solid tips on dealing with this problem (see http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/features/gardening/2011/06/ ). It turns out I did everything
wrong. I should have tilled my earth to destroy their eggs (one of the benefits of the hay gardening technique is that you do not have to till. Maybe I should anyways?). I should not plant the cukes in the same place or even next to the place they were in the past three years. This means a lot of rotating, and keeping track. I guess having the blog can help, I can check where I put the cukes in 2011 and 2012 once we get to 2014. Better keep up the blogging! I also should remove all perennial weeds as they can carry over the bacteria from year to year. I have been a bit slack on weeding in that part of the garden, as the weeds are growing in behind the chicken wire and a bit hard to get too. Another recommendation was to plant the cukes later after June 15. However, this advice came from Maryland, so I am not sure how that will work in our climate. I will try and see, can't end up with a worse harvest than this year's. I also should have removed any affected plants immediately to prevent spread. Whoops. Maybe I can still rescue some before my whole crop is destroyed.  To make matters even more complicated, the beetles move very fast and drop or hide when disturbed, so it is possible to have no idea until the cucumber plants suddenly wither and die. Also makes it hard to pick them off and kill them (I hate doing that anyways).  It was only by chance that I saw the beetle on one of my peppers (not even near the cucumbers) and then saw it again on the St. Henri Garden webpage with an article on cucumber beetles (see my Guerilla Gardening blog). Another suggestion was to spray the plants  with spinosad, pyrethrum, or neem products—which are all organic. Planting a row of corn next to them can help too. Funny, last year the one single volunteer corn which grew in the garden was right next to the cucumbers. Last year, I just stuck the seeds in pots and transplanted the seedlings into the earth and waited and watered and by this time last summer I had huge beautiful cucumbers coming out of my ears. Could there be a connection??

Yesterday I harvested all the basil for the second time, and it filled a garbage bag.Actually, I discovered I missed three basil plants which were hidden by the nasturtiums and must have bolted last night, because today they towered over the flowers. Josh had the idea of donating this second harvest to our synagogue, and spent three hours with our son and some friends at our synagogue last night making fresh pesto. They froze it, and Josh hopes to sponsor a fundraising pasta dinner featuring homemade fresh pasta and pesto made from our basil and garlic. We may even manage a third harvest, I left enough of each plant intact so we can hope.


 Today, in the rain, I planted a whole pack of delphinium seeds. The ones I bought and planted last year did not survive so I am trying to do it from seed this time. According to the package, they should be planted in August or September. Okay, I will see. Also, one of my colleagues told me she grows calla lilies in her garden, which inspired me to plant the calla lily Lisa gave me next to the black eyed susans. Hope they will do well.

Sunflower ready to bloom

Disco Marietta marigolds, love the name!

Orpine in bloom

Today, my blue morning glory finally bloomed! My friend Miriam gave me a pack of seeds, and I shared them with Naomi. Naomi's bloomed a few days ahead of mine, so I still had hope. It is gorgeous! I also had a new flower bloom. I cannot remember who gave it to me and once again have no idea what it is called. Its bud looks like a white box which opens into four petals. I will take photos and post them next time. Most of the photos featured on my blog today were taken by my son, Isaac.

I was very excited to see that today I had a reader in Sweden. How did you find me??

Rock gardens of Grand Manan

 I mentioned in my last post that we camped on the edge of a cliff. This is what the view looked like from our tent. The campground has the unlikely name of The Hole in the Wall Campground, named for a huge natural stone arch nicknamed the Hole in the Wall. The views along the edges of the cliffs were breathtaking. We took a long hike down a trail that follows the cliffs around the edge of the campgrounds.



 


Below you can see in the water a weir, which is a fish trap. You can see them all around the island, and the seals and gulls like to gather around the weirs for easy meals.

These are some of the wildflowers growing on the edge of the forest at the top of the cliffs. I am not sure what the ones on the right are, but below is a thistle. We had thistles around our campsite, and there were wild roses down the path too (I did not have my camera on me when I saw the roses, and when I returned there were people camping close to them so I did not want to invade their space).

 As we rock hopped along the boulders jutting off the cliff, we saw all kinds of plants and wildflowers growing off of the rocks.

 There were some fantastic, brilliantly coloured lichens on the rocks. The humidity is high, between the fog and the ocean spray.

 

 I was initially surprised that the trees were small, but as we hiked through the woods I noticed many larger trees uprooted and knocked to the ground. We had only one rainstorm while we were there, where the winds blew the rain at our tent horizontally, but I suspect that it was mild compared to how bad storms must get in the winter. Along the edge of the cliff, you see trees like the one below and pines with half their branches dead and dry.

 This is from the edge of the forest on the interior of the island, away from the cliff.

In the forest there were paths where the moss on the sides was the most thick and luxuriant moss I have ever seen.

 

 This is a photo along the side of a sandy beach further down the island. I believe that this is borrage growing wild. It has pretty pink and purple flowers.

 I know this is not a garden photo. I want to share just a few of the other wildlife photos we took.

 

 The photo above and to the right were taken on White Head island, a short ferry ride from Grand Manan. Above is a field of fire weed. The the right, a beach facing out into the bay of Fundy with gorgeous beach rocks of all colours. The tide in the Bay is the highest in the world. When we were there it was rising 7 meters and some at high tide. This means that it drags rocks and sea glass and driftwood onto the beaches that come from all over the world.

 A flock of Canada geese.

Blackbacked gull flying below us. They are very large, and beautiful to watch as they fly and fish in the waves along the shore.

This was the best of many photos of the seals at the base of the cliff where we were camping.

 The beach at Dark Harbour covered in sea weed and beach plants.

This is called samphire, or sea asparagus. Josh was introduced to it by his mother, and has bought it on occasion in Montreal. He found them growing in the rocks at Dark Harbour. They are salty and taste a bit like seaweed, but are very crunchy.

Below is another plant growing on the beach among the rocks. At high tide, the sea covers this whole strand.