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.