A visit to Alex's garden in Spencerville

I took a few days off from my family after our vacation. Josh was back at work, and I booked Orianne for a last week of day camp, and took off to visit friends in Ottawa and the Ottawa region. 

My last stop on the way home was to Alex's. I had not been to his place for a couple of years, and was due for some inspiration. Somehow Alex is capable of growing an organic garden where everything is three to ten times the size of what I grow in mine. He teaches, and has all summer to work in the garden. 

He grows enough to feed himself year round, with help of a freezer. He also has chickens, which add another level to his compost system. They eat a lot of the things I put in the compost, and produce great manure in exchange.

The mosquitoes were vicious, and it was raining on and off, so we took a quick tour of the garden before moving into the house with corn right off the stalk for lunch. I limited my photography (I only had my phone anyways) but Alex sent a few photos. He has been using beer bottles as a gauge to show the size of his produce. In addition to the fresh corn, I was able to take home a massive kohlrabi, a large onion and 4 dozen fresh laid eggs.

We got to talking about garlic (being garlic harvest time), and I have learned more interesting things. First of all, we discussed the question of pulling off the scapes. I was told by both my in-laws and our friends Gu and Jasmyn that this was the way to ensure larger heads of garlic. Alex has been experimenting and found that it did not really make a difference. In fact, he showed me what happens when you leave the scapes on. I had assumed that it opened up into a flower, something like allium flowers. Not at all! The scape produces a miniature garlic, which is genetically a clone of the root.  Alex explained to me how garlic flowers work detail: 
"The scape produces "bulbils" as well as true flowers. The bulbils are clones (like cloves) but have never touched the soil, so carry no disease. I've read it's a good idea to start over from bulbils every 7-10 years to drop the virus load. Otherwise, this is an inexpensive way to increase your seedstock.  Usually the developing bulbils crowd-out and pinch off the flowers, and I was not able (this year) to coax the flowers into opening by removing the bulbils with tweezers. It is possible though, and the resulting seed would be a new variety, not a clone-plus the variety would "remember" how to produce sexually and so more easily produce garlic seeds next time. Planted in the fall, most of the Red Russian bulbils gave me fully divided bulbs the first year, which will need another year to get to market size. The Russian scape produces about a dozen pea-sized bulbils, while music produces over 100, like small grains of rice. I bet you'd enjoy these planted in a pot in winter, fresh garlic chives will spring up."

 Last year, Alex separated and planted the mini-cloves (bulbils) in a much more restrained area than he would have had they been full sized cloves. Some produced small heads of garlic with tiny but separate cloves, others produces a single round clove, which he planted last fall to produce a decent sized head of garlic. Unlike Gu, who is working on producing large heads that sell well, Alex has focused on maximizing overall volume of harvest. 

He pointed out to me that if I have smaller garlic but more heads of garlic, I end up with more garlic than if I space out my crops and get fewer, larger heads. This is less of an issue for Gu, who has much more area to plant his garden than I do.  Alex is interested in efficiency and volume rather that sellable products. The discussion was a bit of an eye opener for me. There are areas of my garden that do not get enough sunlight and whatever I put there ends up smaller or with a lower yield, but I use the space anyways because otherwise I would have much less room to grow, especially as I am diligently rotating everything and would not have much of a garden if I used the best spots. Also, given that my front yard is even shadier, I have insisted on putting bee balm, phlox, sunflowers, poppies and calendulas in some of the choicier areas.

Alex told me he has let his flower garden go a bit wild this summer, but was playing around with moving some of the vegetables among the flowers, which seemed to be working well. The huge garden has onions, a variety of lettuces and cabbages, dill, asparagus, kohlrabi, quinoa, corn, peppers, parsnips tomatoes. I am sure there are lots of things I am missing.  

He is growing one particular variety of tomato, an orange cherry tomato that grows in big clusters, which he believes is closer to the original wild form of the tomato plant. It grows in a dense, sprawling bush that does not allow itself to be caged. 

I brought a few of the ripe ones home with the intention of keeping the seeds, but Josh ate them while I was unpacking so I will need to ask Alex to save me some and send them. We chatted about weeds and pests. Alex did not know about use of hydrogen peroxide for bacteria speck in tomatoes (early blight), so I was happy to be able to share something with him. I talked about my use of lamb's quarters, and Alex told me that they are closely related to quinoa, in fact they close enough to hybridize, and Alex thinks that you can use lamb's quarter seeds as you do quinoa.

Friday night dinner was Shepherd's Pie, with new potatoes, garlic and herbs from my garden, kohlrabi and onion from Alex's, and some tofu from the grocery store. I made homemade challah with Alex's fresh eggs. Yum!!

On the homefront, I have been harvesting beans, potatoes, raspberries and a few odd strawberries. The tomatoes are still green, but at least there is something happening on that front. We have a baby rabbit which has taken up residence, and does not seem to be deterred by my recently renewed coyote urine in the dispensers. I think he is eating my lower beans, and the younger lettuces. I just planted more seeds for bok choy, lettuce, mache, arugula, and I suspect I am just setting up a buffet for bunny.   My neighbour's kids have fallen in love with the bunny, so the will to chase it from the garden is not very high.

Now that the garlic is out, and I am back from vacation, I have started to attack the creeping bellflower in the vegetable garden. I am very discouraged. In the front of the house, where I spend days pulling out root after root, the damned stuff is creeping back. I spent a couple of hours today and covered around 2 cubic feet of earth. There has to be a better way!

I had tried to grow poppies from seed (the annual type) with seeds from Alex, but I planted too late. They are difficult to grow in my yard for some reason. The ones that came up finally were ones that I must have accidentally dropped into the pots where the peppers are. Josh thinks they may have fallen in from last year's plants, but I added new soil to the top third of the pots so I am not sure that is how it happened. I recently moved them out of the pepper pots to the area where I had the onions, in the same area where the perennial poppies are. Within a week, there was a big storm and the tiny plants sunk into the mud and more or less disappeared. Josh looked for them and dug them out. Only a couple of them are still going, and they are tiny, but one has produced a tiny flower bud, smaller than a smartie. 

A few words about our trees. Earlier this summer, we had around half of the lilacs trimmed down very low to the ground. Josh plans to arbour sculpture the shoots that come up next spring, but in the meantime, I have gained a lot of sun in the back corners of the garden. The raspberries have exploded, as have the potatoes, and the apple tree is happily producing its first seven apples. I have followed up my early summer spraying of the trees with garlic/cayenne with an application of savon noir, and there seems to be limited aphid action. I noticed some bright orange spots on both the apple and crabapples, which I have researched and discovered to be a fungal infection. I have been pulling off affected leaves hoping to contain the damage. The magnolia tree has rallied, putting out a few new branches from the base. The three small elm trees in the right back corner appear to be dying. Those belong to the city I think, so I am not sure we can do anything about it. I have noticed that I can hear the sounds of traffic more than I used to in the back yard.

 

 I have integrated some new beach stones into the garden. A bit of White Head Island to keep me going until next vacation. 

 

 
 Although the plants are on the small side, the hot peppers have managed to do fairly well. Lots of green ones, but none ripe yet.

 

 The diatomaceous earth seems to be working for the cucumber. So far they have survived. It seemed to have kept the lily beetles in check too. I have Japanese beetles in the raspberries, but they are up on the leaves, not at the roots, so I don't think I could afford to use diatomaceous earth so close to where the bees are. The area is right between my bee balm and the beans, and there are so many bees. On Friday when I was in there harvesting, a bee landed on the back of my hand and sat there a few minutes grooming herself, then flew onto my shoulder before flying off. Another bee flew so close to my ear that I could feel the wind off its wings. I watched some on the unripe raspberries, they seem to be collected something (pollen? nectar?), which was interesting. I thought they were only interested in the flowers.