Trying some new things

This year we had tricky weather. It was warm very early in the spring, then we had some cold nights mid-May, followed by a lot of rain then a heat wave. By late July we had unseasonably cold weather and some more rain on and off, and now that we are heading into late August we seem to be getting one last heat wave. This resulted in some things doing fantastic and others not too impressive. To the right you can see my pepper plants which I grew all in pots with the intention of taking at least some inside to overwinter. They have just started to produce peppers, which seems to me to be somewhat later than in years past. I have been dutifully spraying the plants with my anti-aphid solution as they are close to the apple tree which is still infested but improving noticeably. The nasturtiums did fantastic, as did the basil plants. The Thai basil  (below) was wonderful, and with the corriander (left with white flowers), we made a lot of Thai stirfries this past month.



Before I planted the basil in the garden, I had almost killed off the Thai basil and the lemon basil. Chloe had given me seedlings which were pretty far advanced ahead of the basil which I grew from seed, and I don't think it had enough light or water. I put them in the ground and they did come back to full strength by mid June. I have been using the lemon basil directly in salads. This week we harvested the Monmouth basil, the sweet basil and the bush basil, leaving enough behind to regrow for a second harvest. We used our own garlic and basil to make a first batch of pesto. I don't think I have as much as last year,  which does not bother me as we still have a bit of pesto from last year. We are also still working our way through last year's tomatoes, which is good because the tomato harvest is also late. I had a relapse of the tomato bacteria, and the first few tomatoes I harvested were half rotten. Josh and I have been spraying with a hydrogen peroxide solution after it rains, and the tomatoes I picked today were mostly in good shape. My friend Julie noted correctly that the San Marzano tomatoes seem to be more susceptible.

 I finished the garlic harvest. I cannot for the life of me figure out how some of the heads are massive with huge cloves, and others are tiny. Regardless of the size, they are all beautiful with no rot or badly developped cloves and they are bursting with juice and flavour. My bicycle shed is decorated with a couple of hundred hanging garlic plants, and everytime I take out my bike I get dried mud in my hair and I get hungry.

The sunflowers are at their peak right now. They are by far my favorite flower. I planted a mix of seeds from packages, from friends and from harvests from the past two years. I have been refreshing the coyote urine to attempt to keep the squirrels away, but they were brave enough to nip the buds off the two Kong sunflowers to my dismay. I managed to have two of them grow to seven feet. The plants are doing well but are unfortunately flower-less. All the other varieties have kept their heads on more or less, but have not been large enough to produce big seeds. I have been trying to introduce sunflower heads as a treat to my bird Coco who does not seem to have been exposed to them before. For the first time he did a real happy bird dance, but I am not sure it was connected with the sunflower as he was not eating it at the moment he started dancing.  My black-eyed susans and white echinacea are still going strong, and I had some surprise purple and white flowers which Iulia had given me last year start to bloom. I may have accidentally pulled some of them out thinking they were weeds. I hope not as they are very pretty.

 This year my cosmos were a wipe out. I had a lot of the pink ones come back, but none of the orange and red ones which I planted last  year. They stopped growing at six inches high and only a few have bloomed. They reseeded themselves further into the shade which I think is the problem,
as my neighbours down the street whose cosmos have some sun are having a lot more success than I. I am reseeding them closer to the sidewalk next spring and hoping for the best.  Last week, Iulia and I ordered a batch of bulbs from Vesey's catalogue: hyacinths and tulips, allium and some wildflowers. We had planned to get some lilies too, but while I was on vacation, Iulia found some nice lilies on special at Reno Depot. So I took a trip with her to see what we could get on special end of season, and she convinced me to buy a hibiscus despite the fact I have managed to kill every hibiscus I ever grew including the apparently dead Blue bird Rose of Sharon bush which looks suspiciously like sticks right now (Iulia's is doing fine and spreading.) We also found some nice day lilies, so I have added those to the garden as well.

 

 

 I arranged the largest, nicest of the stones I picked up in Grand Manan and put them on display in the front of the house. At Josh's suggestion, they are on top of large flat stones to prevent them from being swallowed up into the earth. I will also cover them with containers in the winter.

 I had a surprise. The freesias which I had given up on  have produced a single shoot. So far that is all. I am not sure what prompted it to start growing this late in the season, but I am interested to see what it does next.

Today's harvest included my first significant number of tomatoes and a lot of beans. Turns out that the kids do not like cooked beans, they like them raw. I found this out after I cooked them. More for me! I also decided to pick a few of the carrots. They are pretty small still, but as I planted them far too close together, I am thinning them out a bit by eating them gradually. A few of the ones I picked were a decent size, beyond "baby carrot". They tasted a bit green and earthy, but they were juicy and crunchy too. I am planning to try cold frames this winter for the first time. We saved a few old windows when we had our windows changed this spring, and I have a lot of hay we haven't used yet. I hope to keep some carrots going and I planted some more lettuce today for fall/winter. The plan is to surround the plants with hay bale and put a window on top to create a mini green house. I know it works better if you put your plant bed in a raised box, which is what Chloe has been doing, but I am going to give it a try anyways and see what happens.

 Some of my poppies managed to grow and bloom. I had some orange ones in a window box under one of my kitchen windows, and some white ones with a purple centre in the middle of the nasturtiums. I realized that I have to plant a lot of poppies, and start them indoors because the ones I planted directly in the garden did not come up, the perennial ones I planted last year and the year before never came back, and the few which grew bloomed one at a time. The effect leaves something to be desired.


We try for large quantity next year.

I grew marigold from seed and they were huge!

One poppy amid nasturtiums

We take our garden camping in Grand Manan

Josh and I just got back from a wonderful week in Grand Manan. This year, for the first time ever, we did a big harvest just before we left and also raided our frozen supplies still remaining from last year’s garden to take with us for supplies. Some of my garlic was just ready, so we had fresh picked garlic, the last of the pesto from last year, tomato sauce, refried beans and chili made from tomatoes pureed in the freezer (its July and they are still going), fresh lemon basil and Thai basil, lettuce, coriander. 

While on the island we found wild mushrooms, chanterelles, shrimp rousselas and boletus to add to our supplies. Needless to say, we ate well.

This year we decided to do things we did not get to last year. We did a lot of hiking and walking, spent half a day sea kayaking, visited the Whale museum and research station.

On the sea kayaking trip we saw the cliffs of Grand Manan from below, and I regretted not having brought a water proof camera to photograph the beautiful and incredibly resilient wild flowers which grew upside down off the nooks and crannies all along the cliffs. Considering that the tide rises up to 27 feet daily, and storms can push the waves more than double that height, it is amazing what can live on those rocks.  These pictures are from a short hike we did in Pette's Cove, near where we were camping. 

Sea urchin on the top of a cliff. 

 

We saw a lot of honeybees on the wildflowers.

This is a sunset photo from our campsite of the Swallowtail lighthouse.

Wildflowers on the rocks, Pette's Cove. 

We went back to White Head Island where we went last year, but this year we took more time and went for a long walk on the beach up to the light house. We went to visit Alphie, an incredibly bright and gregarious woman who has lived part time on White Head island for many years, and as of this year full year round. She lives in an old lobster shack during the summer, and has a hobby/business of painting beach rocks with beautiful paintings and selling them from a little table in front of her cabin. 

We stayed for a while to chat, and I told her about my interest in gardening and wildflowers, and she took us for a walk to see a variety of her favorite local wildflowers: wild beach morning glories, beach peas (I took some home to see if they will grow here. Chloe suggested I spray salt water on them), viper bugloss (she pronounced it bluegloss). I did not plan to repeat my blog from last year, so I took most of the wildflower photos on White Head rather than on the cliffs around the Hole in the Wall campsite, where we stayed again on the most scenic cliff 26.

This year we got much luckier with the wildlife, as it was a great year for herring and with the schools of herring followed harbor porpoises, Minke whales, Finback whales, harbor seals, grey seals and Humpback whales, cormorants, herring gulls and big black backed gulls, and a slew of other water birds. We took a lot of photos of whales, most of which look like a dark smudge on the water, but a few turned out acceptable and even recognizable.


 What was amazing was that we saw them all, even the Humpback though only from the Ferry ride home, and not close enough to get a good photo. This, by the way, was best viewed directly from our campsite. We turned our picnic table so we could sit side by side at breakfast and dinner facing the sea with camera close by. Although whales really have nothing to do with gardening, I have included a few of the best photos of the sea and the whales.

We spent a whole morning slogging around the Castalia Marsh, which is like walking around on the sea bottom at low tide. I suspect like many of the island beaches, it pretty much disappears at high tide, along with some roads which run on the edge of the island and between Grand Manan and the adjacent Ross Island (you need to plan your hikes carefully).  On the marsh and on the beach at White Head Island you can find the most amazing variety of rocks which wash up from just about anywhere on the planet. I filled my pockets and Josh’s as well, and left piles of the larger stones in strategic spots to pick up later. I came home with a lot of great stones, and some of the larger ones are going to become part of my garden. I will take a picture and post when I decide where they go.

One of the interesting plants I noticed this year was a ground hugging juniper which grew along the clifftops and down over the rocks. On a long hike we did from the southernmost tip of Grand Manan up part of the eastern (unpopulated) side of the island to Bradford’s Cove, we stopped to rest and look out for whales over the basalt cliffs and sat on the very springy, fragrant and comfortable juniper plants. No whales, although we spent too much time watching what ended up being a large rock that was whale-like in its shape. The photos which Josh and I took are real whales, not rock whales.

In addition to the very lush forests and wildflower meadows, the sun and the sea and the clouds are breathtaking. We were woken daily at dawn to the sound of whales blowing, and made sure to be awake and on our campsite for both sunrise and sunset daily. 

These very strange photos are of the world's largest axe in Nackawick, NB. The park where it is located is on a beautiful river with gorgeous flowers and landscaping. That tiny person below the axe on the right side photo is me. We took some shots of the flowers right in front so I had an excuse to include it on my blog.

Back home, I have now harvested most of the garlic which is drying in my bike shed. Our cucumbers are in full production, even as they are succumbing to the cucumber beetles. Josh and I decided to try hanging the plants next year rather than planting them in the ground. My tomatoes are still green, with one red one looking ready to harvest. No flowers yet on the pepper plants, but the basil is about ready for the first harvest.