The weather this summer has been weird, and as gardens are mini-ecosystems, they vary with weather conditions. Too much rain and the slugs and snails flourish. Hot and dry weather decreases some insect activity, but will affect the growth and health of plants that need lots of water. This summer has been generally cooler than usual, and for the past four weeks since I last blogged, dryer as well. We have had occasional rainy days, and a few real steamy, scorching ones, but for the most part it has been cool and sunny. This has resulted in particularities in what has been growing well, and what has not.
The flowers have been extraordinary this year. It seems that in the past two years I have planted lots of things that I forgot about, many of which had not bloomed yet. I had a few exotic day lilies which have just opened this week and are really lovely. The biggest surprise was the delphiniums. Iulia had given me 4 last summer, but as she did not know what they were called in English, I had no idea what I was planting, and promptly forgot that I had.
When they popped up in the spring, I was not sure if they were weeds, volunteers, or something I had forgotten about, but I had the presence of mind to ask Iulia first. She looked at me funny and said she gave then to me, so I did not touch them, and was thrilled when the flower spike produced these lovely iridescent purple/blue flowers. I am very pleased with them!
After my battle with creeping bellflower in June, I have slowed down my attack following a touch of carpal tunnel and a lot of shoulder pain. My goal was to have my garden looking perfect for a big party we had in late June, so I cleared it from the most visible of places, and since then I have put a few hours into returning to the cleared areas to clean up stragglers that cropped up from root fragments that we missed or dropped the first time. I have also been religiously pulling out any flower spike to keep the stuff from seeding. Josh wisely suggested to wait until we harvest the garlic before going at the stuff that infests those areas of the garden, so we can clear the area more easily. Its a bit of a jungle in there, but the garlic is thick and healthy so I am ignoring it for now. I did manage to clear the edges of the yard around the garlic on the side of the garden bordering Iulia's so that at least I am not letting the problem spread under the fence anymore.
In the flower garden, everything has been thriving. The hollyhocks have finally started to spread, I have been thinning out the beebalm and goosenecked loosestrife and evening primroses, and promised lots more in the spring for Allan to plant in the Shire. The only challenge has been the lily beetles this year. I picked and squished for a few weeks, and gave in and smothered their bases and lower leaves with diatomaceous earth which seems to work on the adult beetles.
There was one hatching of their grubs, whose clever coating of their larval bodies with some kind of feces (their own? not sure) seemed to protect them. I lost a couple of plants, but did manage to get it under control and had a lovely explosion of colour from the oriental lilies at the beginning of July. I think of them as my July 1st fireworks.
The bee balm has been phenomenal this year. One patch is growing behind a cluster of my fancy, multi-coloured calendula, and next to a pot of coriander, which are all blooming simultaneously. There are a few volunteer sunflowers scattered in the middle which will add some variety soon. It is a real wow! of colour in the middle of the vegetable garden in the back.
The vegetable garden has been a mix of success and failure. The potatoes are the hardiest I have ever grown. Some are up to my chest in height. I have not peeked beneath the hay, and I am hoping there is a direct relationship between the height of the plant and the quantity of root tubers. Some are starting to flower now.
The raspberries and strawberries are prolific this year. What you see in the bowl is one day's pickings (and the bowl is 18 inches across). We may be able to make pie this year! Josh wants to dig up a lot of the Logan (red) raspberry bushes next year, and plant yellow and more black raspberries, and espalier the bushes into some order. This year, the patch is a real jungle. I went out for lunch with a friend this week, who looked at the scratches on my arms and asked if I got a cat. No, just attached by a raspberry bush. The strawberries either love this weather, or are responding to having been uprooted and replanted which digging out the creeping bellflowers, or both. Maybe the decrease in slug activity has helped as well, but the size of my tiny alpine strawberries is double this year. Maybe it was the extra manure I dumped on them too. Whatever, its working.
This years experiment with growing in large, round hay bales has been a disaster. I think the problem was that the hay was fresh. Last year, the stuff was quite aged and decomposing very actively. This year, it is so fresh that it keeps popping up fresh grass on the surface, attracting meadow birds (a whole flock of Juncos in June!) to eat the grass seeds which is fun, but as a medium to grow in it has been a bust. We visited my in-laws over the weekend and ate their beautiful, large broccoli. The plants I put in the bale are barely larger than when I put them in two months ago. I put some basil in the cucumber pots, which have already started to put out flowers (meaning they are close to harvest) which the ones in the bales are two inches tall. The same with the peppers, although a couple of the tiny bale peppers are starting to flower despite their miniscule stature. Josh added some fish-based organic fertilizer a couple of weeks ago, but I have not noticed much improvement. I decided that today I will do a rescue mission and move them off the bales into the earth somewhere.
The biggest disaster this year has been the tomatoes. I learned that I have had flea beetles on my tomato plants. I noticed in past years that when I plant the young seedlings in the garden, they get tiny holes in the leaves for a while then it stops. This is the calling card of these little beetles which I have not seen but now recognize their handiwork. I think that the weather conditions were such in the spring that the tomatoes took longer to grow, and were more susceptible to the beetles than in years past, where they were clearly present, but did no lasting damage. This year, I had very mixed results. First of all, I decided not to grow tomatoes directly in the bales (turned out to be a good decision), but tried a hybrid technique of planting the seedlings in a thick pile of hay, so the roots were still in the hay for some time in the spring before growing long enough to hit earth. Had the hay been more rotted and nutrients more available, this could have been a great idea. I suspect, however, that combined with a cool spring, it delayed their growth and resulted in the beetle damage phase being prolonged. For some reason, perhaps more hours per day of sun, the tomatoes in the centre of the yard, those in the new patch I opened up this year, were the least affected. Though they are easily a foot smaller than they are usually at this time of year, the tomatoes are producing flowers at least. The cherry tomatoes were unaffected and look healthy and tall. The tomatoes in the main part of the garden ended up completely stunted. I had a few surprise volunteer tomatoes that popped up in the area where last year I had the hay bales, and I am pretty sure now that a few tomatoes fell between the bales. These came up in June and were not affected by the flea beetles at all, so although they started to grow more than two months after the ones I planted, they are more than double the size. I moved the larger ones into the tomato cages, and am hoping for a late and smaller harvest, but a harvest nonetheless.
After all my excitement with my visit to Jasmyn and Gu's at garlic harvest time, I have been discussing his techniques with my in-laws and have learned that, like most things in the world of gardeners, there are huge differences in approaches. Chloe and Abraham went to visit our mutual friend Alex, another master gardener, this week, who told them that the garlic is three weeks ahead of time this year, and he is already harvesting. Furthermore, he is harvesting them long before the leaves turn brown and fall off. My in-laws compete in the Williamstown fair every August, and Chloe usually wins prizes in multiple categories. Last year she missed top prize in garlic because they are judging appearance and not taste (strange criteria, in my mind, but I suppose they want to have something to show at the fair and photos of garlic that have been cooked and eaten are not as much fun to see as the real thing). She subsequently learned that the garlic cloves should be tight in their skin and not starting to separate. So they are harvesting their garlic for taste, size, use for seed stock as well as for looks. That's a tall order. Josh tells me that Gu has enough garlic this year to eat, sell, use for his stock next year and give seed stock to friends who are growing. Josh hopes to use all our harvest for eating, and get seed cloves from Gu. I prefer to put aside what we need, and if Gu does have enough to generously supply our future garden (we will know by October, one way or another) we can always eat what I save and plant Gu's garlic.
So Chloe suggests to me another way to see if garlic is ready. She says to pull a few out, cut them horizontally to see if all the cloves are filled out, and if the cloves are just starting to separate from the base, and then they are ready. Josh pulled out three. They are still pretty small, so we think that they are not ready. I am also a bit leery of this approach because I know that my garlic have never ripened all at the same time. They have different amounts of sun in different spots, and probably all kinds of other variations in conditions. I am holding out for a bit before harvesting.
My apple tree has five or six apples ripening. About half fell off in late June, which I have checked on line and learned that the "June drop" is how apple trees triage the healthiest fruit and discard the rest to maximize the quality of their harvest. I am very excited that the tree is viable and fertile! The magnolia tree is also hanging on still, finally started popping leaves out of the base so we are letting it do its thing for now, and consulting with Olivier on the best way to bring it back to life.
Last, a word on pest control. I started seeing aphid activity in the usual places, crab apples, apple tree and the orpine patch just below the crab apple arch. With a lot of detective work (and finally a link from Alex), I found a company that sells Neem oil in Canada. Seems the stuff, although organic, safe and effective according to every source I checked, has been banned in Canada. I think the company where I got it sells it for cosmetic uses rather than agricultural so it slipped between the cracks. While sourcing Neem oil, I also ordered something called Savon Noir, stuff made from olive leaves used in North Africa as a natural, organic pesticide which a gardener friend of mine swears by. While awaiting my orders, I tried another on-line recipe for aphids, fresh garlic, cayenne pepper and soap spray. The stuff did wonders, reduced the aphid problem to almost nothing before my heavy hitting purchases even arrived.
Next year, or if I have problems later this summer, I am ready for a comparison of all three methods. In the meantime, I am ready for anything.
This year, we have had an abundant crop of both raspberries and weeds, so for dinner last night we featured both. This is the first time that we had enough raspberries and strawberries within a three day period to bake a berry crumble with no purchased fruit for filler, even with everyone including our bird snacking on the berries before we baked.
Last Sunday, my father-in-law Abraham asked us what percentage of our diet is actually coming from our garden. This is an interesting question. I had once tried to answer my mother's question about whether gardening led to us saving money (I am still not sure if the cost of buying earth, hay, gas money for picking up manure, seeds, bulbs, the occasion purchased seedlings when my crop fails ends up cheaper than groceries when they are at their summer cheapest, though I hope we are breaking even). I had not really kept track. Given that we devote a lot of garden space to garlic, tomatoes, herbs and hot peppers which we use gradually over a long period of time, we are still buying a lot of produce in the summer. We estimated about ten percent, though it goes much higher at harvest time when the beans, peas and raspberries are ripe. So this weekend, I decided to consciously track what we ate from the garden.
Lorena came over mid-morning and we did some yoga together outside in the back yard, then had a lunch before getting down to the business of weeding and cooking. I have been volunteering at Vanier College in their garden project, and it is harvest time there too. All volunteers are encouraged to harvest and take home whatever we like. I have been nabbing kale and swiss chard because I did not grow any of those in my garden, and they are abundant and ripe for picking. My daughters are going to camp at Vanier, and they have a big camp show every Thursday evening. I biked over half an hour early and jammed a bunch of kale and chard into my bike bag. I noticed that the basil was getting ready to flower, so I pulled a bunch of the tops off those too. We'll be making pesto soon so the more the merrier. Josh had pulled out a few heads of garlic which were ready to eat, and I harvested a couple of onions. They were pretty small again, especially as I planted them two years back, but they were in good shape to eat. I decided to make a florentine omelette with vegetables and herbs from the gardens (mine and Vanier's) to get us in the mood for garden work. For my readers who like recipes, I made it from garlic, onion, chopped up chard and kale, fresh basil, thyme and rosemary, and added oil, salt, pepper and eggs from the grocery store.
We made lamb's quarter soup, this time including some new potatoes I had picked, a touch of cream, wine and parmesan, onion and garlic and fresh herbs from the garden. Josh chopped up some wood sorrel as a garnish. We made homemade pasta, ravioli stuffed with a ricotta mix using lamb's quarters instead of spinach. Lorena had brought back a gift of truffles from her travels in Italy, which Josh added to the cream sauce. Josh also made a rosé sauce for those of us who dislike mushrooms, and I was disappointed that our stock of puréed tomato from last year's harvest is finally finished, and after two full years, we had to buy canned tomatoes.Some salad and a raspberry crumble for dessert left us pretty much immobilized.
