Finally posting pics!

I have been incredibly busy trying to keep up with everything that posting just did not happen for a while. I have diligently been keeping a photo record of what's been happening in the garden, so this is actually two month's worth of pics. I am still harvesting tomatoes, beans, potatoes, raspberries, mint, more tomatoes, basil, a few shy cucumbers, more tomatoes and, well, more tomatoes. I have never had such a prolific tomato harvest. My cherry tomatoes have hit 9 feet tall. I did not know tomatoes grew on trees.

This year I planted fewer beans because last year I was drowning in them, and as my kids don't really like them, I was just growing them for me, and giving them as gifts. I planted what I think are turtle beans for the first time. I am not big on dried beans, so I pick them while they are still young and tender and eat them raw or steamed. So yummy!

 The garlic harvest came out very well. I still have a few late-planted ones to harvest from Gu, who sent them to me around Christmas, so too late for a fall planting. Josh has been telling me that our friend Alex plants his garlic earlier in the fall, lets it sprout and establish roots before the frost which seems to have greater results. He is also planting broom corn on the areas of his garden where he harvested the garlic, which he later harvests and uses for mulch to keep the nutrients going back into the soil, keeps the soil functioning and prevents erosion and drying.

 I am intrigued by the ideas, but struggling to find the time. Now that I am single, I do not have a partner who takes over making dinner and doing chores while I manage the garden. The kids are pulling some more weight but need a lot of supervision (aka nagging) or things just don't get done. Since mid-August, I am back working more than full time with a really heavy teaching load at Vanier and part time at UQAM, so I am barely managing to harvest, let alone plant, plan, process and eat everything.

I have a huge mystery squash plant that popped up. I have not quite identified what it is. It now looks like a small, green pumpkin. Actually I should say they look like pumpkins, there are 5 on the plant and they are a decent size. I will send Alex a picture for identification. It grew from the spot where I had one of my compost bins last year, but it is nothing that I have ever bought, eaten or even seen, so not sure how it got there. The light green version is from August, now it is dark green, so not looking likely to turn orange at this point. Something took a nibble exposing orange underneath, though.

 My garlic did beautifully this year, a really good harvest. I had a lot of surprises from ones I must have missed last year, which grew back in tight clusters of tiny garlic bulbs with mini cloves. Isaac was annoyed that I insisted we use those first before the big ones, which lasted us almost two months. We are now starting on the mid-sized, as the biggest I am saving for planting. Although I would like to try the idea of planting them earlier, I need to wait to finish my tomato, squash and corn harvest (I have two corn plants that the groundhog missed which have ears. They are an African variety given to me by my sister in law Dahlia, and looking good.
According to Alex, corn stocks make great mulch when you chop them up.

Note the tomato plant climbing up the lilacs is actually taller than the corn. And the lilacs. And still growing. Yikes!

With thanks to my friend Elan who took on the project of finding me a new source of hay this year, Isaac and I had a very dusty day fetching a dozen old, musty square bales from a riding farm south of Montreal. The hay was packed tight covering the entire top floor of the huge barn, and had to be extracted and carried to the window and dropped to the ground. My lungs still hurt just thinking of the moldy dust as we pulled out the old, jam packed bales with the strings fallen off. They were mostly not intact by the time they landed. A very messy business, but as they were dry (at least) they were in perfect condition for the garden. Isaac was a wonderful help despite my leaving half of the directions at home (Isaac has GPS on his phone), and not thinking to bring masks which was a bad idea. He did not complain, shlepped and dragged dutifully.

The groundhog seems to have moved on to greener pastures. We reached a truce back in August, he ate the lower leaves of my phlox (which tolerated it), the clover in my yard and my lamb's quarters. I put cayenne on the tomatoes a few times, and put some coyote pee dispensers right on the tomato cages, but he did not take any interest in the tomatoes. Later summer, the Japanese beetles and more recently snails and slugs seems to be the biggest pests, and they are eating the raspberry leaves more than anything. The raspberries don't look healthy but are producing well, so I am not bothering about it.  I have been using hydrogen peroxide to keep the tomato bacteria at bay successfully.

My friend Moishe found me a pineapple sage plant. I have brought it indoors already, along with my guava, hoping they will survive the winter.

The flower garden is unbelievable this year. I am loving it. 

To all my Jewish readers, wishing you a happy, healthy and fruitful new year. Shana tova!

 

Things are heating up

I have been rather slow in keeping up this summer. My brother and his family were in town for a couple of weeks, which overlapped with my father getting sick again and being in hospital almost three weeks now, so I have been barely keeping up with garden while juggling family time. Though technically on vacation, I have been gradually doing reading and preparing for my fall courses. My motivation has been much lower this summer. Between feeling generally tired, having all kinds of other things going on, and losing a lot of my early crops to the groundhog (lettuce, broccoli, peas), as well as all the sunflowers, I have not had the same level of gratification as I have in years' past.

Then the past couple of weeks, when the front garden exploded with lilies, echinacea and black-eyed susans, and this week the basil and garlic ripened. Because I am not about to leave on vacation just as the garlic is almost ready, this year I am selectively harvesting as they ripen. Based on my crash course a couple of years ago from Jasmyn and Gu, I only am taking those with 4 remaining leaves and leaving the rest to ripen a bit more. Olga came over on Friday and helped me tie up and hang about 80 heads from my first round. Today I harvested another 40 or so.

Friday night we had gnocchi with homegrown pesto. I splurged and added some cream, cheddar, parmesan, pine nuts and olive oil to fresh picked basil and garlic. It was absolutely divine!



The raspberries are producing well. On the weeks when my youngest daughter is in my custody, she eats them as fast as I can pick them. On the other weeks, I can sneak some into the freezer, and even had enough to bake raspberry tarts to celebrate my son's 20th birthday.

We have an overabundance of Japanese this year and they seem to love raspberry leaves, and something else is eating the berries, possibly snails because I am picking them along with the berries (and tossing them over the fence). There are enough to go around, so I am not getting too fussed about it.


The groundhog has set up permanent residence in my yard. He has started munching on the lamb's quarters and my phlox (just the leaves). My tomatoes are still green, but I put some cayenne on the lower leaves as a precaution in case he (she?) decides to indulge those. Happily, the ground hog has no interest in garlic and basil, and cannot reach the cucumbers.



My apple tree is a big favorite of the squirrels, who have been harvesting the apples while still green and eating exactly half of each before discarding them on the ground. Olga picked a couple that looked close to ripe to see if they were good yet, but they are still too sour and grainy so I am taking my chances that the squirrels will leave something for me to ripen.



One squirrel has been digging in the remnant of my hay bale. I suspect it is storing things for later, but will be disappointed when I dismantle the hidey hole to cover the bare patches after I finish harvesting the garlic.

A mystery has been solved! The bitter red lettuce which was the last thing to grow in the garden late last fall, and the first thing to appear already sprouted under the snow has revealed itself to be chicory. It seems to be a biennial, and although the groundhog ignored it earlier in the season when he had access to baby romaine and sunflower sprouts, he seems to have taken a liking to the leaves now that it is flowering. He has left the flowers alone, so hopefully I will continue to have more in the spring.

 

Groundhog day

I have been overconfident the last few years about issues with groundhogs because they seemed to avoid my garden while visiting my neighbours. I had seen the little bugger in the yard and chased him out a couple of times, but it seems that he decided that the buffet was for his personal use, and ignored the olfactory warnings of a large predator. I ordered my coyote pee two years back, and used the last bit of the bottle to fill my dispensers late in May. It smelled pretty potent to me, but what do I know? I just ordered a new batch today, in hopes that fresher piss will help, but I am not hopeful. While I was out of town, Mr. Groundhog decided that walking around the fence to one of the three gaps in my back yard was too much of a bother, and dug an express tunnel from the back alley under my fence and lilacs, directly in front of the area where I planted broccoli, basil and lettuce. The groundhog seems less fond of basil, and didn't go for any of the basil in the pots. He also is ignoring my strawberries (not complaining!) but I am told they like tomatoes which is bad news as mine are flowering and I have not found a way to dissuade him from nashing on my garden.

I noticed him popping up through the tunnel just before heading out for an evening downtown with friends at the Montreal Jazz festival, and took a moment to put one of my tomato cage chicken wire frames over the tunnel, weighed down with 2 bags of earth (the easiest thing I found for the job on short notice). I doubt it will hold him back much, but it was a quick fix.

So after a month of serious neglect of the garden, I found that only two of the carrot seeds I had planted had sprouted, none of the lettuce I planted from seed, all of the sunflowers were destroyed, the romaine lettuce I bought to supplement the ones which did not grow from seed were devoured, the broccoli was decimated. So much for variety. The groundhog did not touch the basil and cucumbers which were growing in pots, and the peas and beans which I planted sparsely after last year's legume overload are doing okay, though not too many of the peas came up. The garlic is doing gangbusters and the tomatoes are flowering nicely.  The weeds also have been flourishing. It seems the groundhog has no interest in even the tastiest of the weeds, so plenty of wood sorrel and lamb's quarters in my cooking and salads, though I miss freshly picked lettuce. So I put a call out for some help with getting my garden back in shape, and had the pleasure of Moishe and Elan work with me to get the tomato cages up while I yanked out weeds and dug up the root networks of the creeping bellflowers, which seem to be  thriving, though some patches I worked on last year appear to be mostly clear. A few days later, just before I went out of town for a trip to Portland, Maine for a week, in desperation, I ripped out all the stems with flower buds just to do some damage control. I don't see how I can dig out all the roots and still have time for anything else, garden or otherwise. Anyhow, the groundhog seems to have become the bigger threat. Very frustrating!

Another issue has been the lack of hay. I still have the remaining core of the huge round bale which Jack procured and delivered in spring of 2015, but I have been very sparing about using it to cover the garden, in order to have enough for my compost (I do layered composting, and use hay for the dry layers). The hay bale has finally decomposed enough that it is not sprouting grass all over the place, but the hay that I put down last fall on the ground stayed fresher and has been growing timothy grass and whatever else was in the hay all over the garden. I have not had this problem in the past to this degree because I have generally used old, rotten hay, and that is what I have been looking for. My usual rural contacts have not had any luck, so my friend Elan took on finding hay sources as a project, and I have some interesting leads, so hoping to be covered soon. Literally.

The black raspberries are ripe, and so are the alpine strawberries, but not much exciting to report yet. I have started cooking the weeds as I pull them, and made a hot and sour soup with lamb's quarters and wood sorrel, and plan to make pasta shells with lamb's quarters instead of spinach. I am open to any suggestions on the gentle removal of groundhogs, or surefire ways to keep them looking for another buffet!

Fortunately, the groundhog has no interest in eating my flowers and my early July fireworks are in their full glory. I had a big expansion of my milkweed patch, which I am very pleased about, hoping to attract some monarchs. The irises are done, and the roses are finishing up, but the lilies are at their peak. So beautiful!