Crazy weather!

We had something unheard of last week. Mid-September we had our first frost warning, a full month earlier than I remember ever having. Fortunately in my back yard, it got cold but it did not freeze. I did, however, scramble around after work to get sleeping bags and blankets on the tomato plants, and brought in all the pepper and basil plants which are in pots.

Just before the sudden, untimely plunge in temperature, we had been having an exceptionally hot September. Back to school meant piling into sweltering classrooms (air conditioning is not a basic commodity in our climate, especially buildings not usually in use July and August), and a sudden belated ripening of tomatoes. For two glorious weeks, I was picking a basket of ripe tomatoes daily. Despite Josh's boasts in past years, I have never had that many ripening simultaneously, and usually pick every 2-3 days. We managed to get our first batch of pasta sauce made, and I have been busy pureeing and freezing at a frenzied pace. Then suddenly our late but glorious harvest was slowed to a trickle with plunging temperatures. I am now picking anything moderately orange to ripen indoors. I moved the pots back outside, all but one plant which I missed, a monkeyface pepper. After 4 days indoors, all the leaves started falling off, so I picked the green peppers to ripen off the plant. I still have not figured out why that happens to my peppers.

The raspberry plants seem unconcerned with the radical weather shifts and are productive beyond belief right now. The berries are big and sweet and very popular. I hid yesterday's crop so I can share them at our Rosh Hashana family gathering.

I harvested the potatoes. The ones I put in the hay bales did not do as well as the ones that were on the ground directly covered in hay. I think the humidity was too high in the bales, and the potatoes I planted rotted too quickly. My yield was not too impressive but I did get some new red potatoes for the holidays. I harvested carrots yesterday, some nice Nantes ones, which are being served with dinner tomorrow night at my mother's. Isaac helped me pick the highest beans which no one else could reach.


I separated the beans from their pods and they are drying out now for soups and seed stock for next year.

The nasturtiums are doing phenomenal. They have climbed up the sunflowers and spread widely. They are in my most fertile area, right in the middle of the garden, and have huge leaves and flowers everywhere. So much for the advice to put them in crappy soil. .



The tall sunflowers are in bloom now, small heads but many blossoms per stalk like the shorter ones so they make a nice, cheery contrast to the general look of entropy in the garden. The cosmos are still going strong, and the hibiscus looks like it is ready to bloom, if it survives another cold night and frost warning tonight (with a high of 21 and sunny tomorrow, then going up to 27 by the weekend!). My gentians just bloomed (I always forget about them!) and have spread a bit despite tough competition from goosenecked loosestrife and periwinkle.

There are hundreds of green tomatoes which, barring frost, should be ripe by the weekend with more sun and heat coming. And my spring lettuce mix, which I have been selectively harvesting since June, is still going.

I have started thinking about next year. I have decided that we will be starting a new garden patch in the centre of the yard, where we get the most sun. The kids are not doing much playing in the yard at their ages, and we really have not been entertaining heavily. The new patch we started this year was not very productive, even by this year's particular standards.

Gardening in haybales was a mixed experience. For small items like broccoli and basil, it worked fantastic. The tomatoes were amazing but supporting them was a big challenge. We are looking at using very long stakes to make cages that start in the ground below the bales so they remain solid even if the bales don't. Also, I am thinking of using half'-bales so the structure has a lower profile. I also need to give items growing in bales more space because they really do get quite a bit bigger that the same plant in the earth.

Next year, the potatoes are going back into the ground. In fact, some of them, and more than half of the onions, are staying in the ground for another run next year.
We managed to get rid of most of the potato bacteria with hydrogen peroxide. Claude said that the same solution will kill off the mildew that covered half of the bee balm (one patch, not the other), as well as the phlox and the peas. I haven't tried, we had a lot of rain recently so I decided it was a losing battle at this point in the season, but I know for next year.


Vanier college started a little gardening project this summer, and small patches of mixed herbs, flowers and vegetables appeared in raised boxes and small beds. I noticed them this summer when my daughters went there for day camp. In the weekly staff newsletter, there was an article about the gardens and a call for donations. What great timing! I was beginning to be concerned about overruns of bee balm, gooseneck loosestrife and dozens of baby columbines cropping up. So last week, I did a bit of culling, and added in some small samples of periwinkle, creeping thyme and bits and pieces of other ground creepers and spreaders, and delivered them to Vanier, as well as gave some care packages to friends starting gardens. I am sure by the spring I will have more to donate, if anyone is interested.

The coyote pee was doing a fine job repelling hungry local mamals until the sunflowers started to go to seed. Despite refreshing the pee containers (not sure refreshing is the right word), the scent of sunflowers must have overpowered all else, and I ended up with a feeding frenzy of squirrels. It turns out the none of the varieties I planted this year had large enough seeds for people to enjoy. I know this from the few quasi ripe heads I managed to rescue, as well as the seeds scattered everywhere on the ground by squirrels. Now I have tons of birds dropping in to snack on the remnants, so maybe I won't have a jungle of sunflowers growing everywhere next spring.

I also seemed to have gotten a handle on the aphids on the apple and crab apple trees. Not eliminated completely due to my lack of consistency in spraying, but definitely controlled by the soap and baking soda solution. The pepper plants seem unaffected, which is important given I will probably be hauling them all inside again tonight.

We are coming up on the Jewish holidays, and I may be even less available to blog in the coming weeks, not like I have been prolific in writing this year. I thank all of my readers for their patience and devotion to following my rambling thoughts and observations and sharing my joy and wonder as I am starting to feel less like a complete beginner.

To all my Jewish readers, I would like to wish you all a very happy, healthy, prosperous and peaceful new year. To all my gardening readers, may you be spared early frost and have a bountiful harvest.

From Chloe's garden, a mini-fruit bowl

Trouble with Tomatoes

This summer's unusual weather patterns continued through August, although it finally warmed up. We have had some very hot weeks with no rain and then heavy rain for days running. I have not had to water much, but the weeds were rampant and my time to deal with them was more restricted than usual. In addition to taking a longer than usual summer vacation (two whole weeks!), I came back home to a job offer from Vanier College, teaching in the special care counselling program. Very exciting! However, my gardening time has been curtailed significantly as I am busy trying to get myself one step ahead of my students. In theory, I am working part-time, and if I had been working for several years teaching the same material and familiar with the workings of the College, I just might have been working part-time. Currently, I am just being paid part time.

Usually, in my recent but limited gardening experience, I have been flooded by tomatoes by late July, however this years weather patterns resulted in late tomatoes. They flowered late, produced tomatoes late and took a very long time to ripen. This past week we had some very unseasonable hot, sunny weather which made teaching very uncomfortable (the air conditioning system was broken in the part of my building where I had class), but the tomatoes have finally started to turn red.

This year, I did a lot of experimentation. I started a new plot which had less direct sunlight than other parts of the garden. The sunflowers I planted there bloomed three weeks later than those on the other side of the garden, which ended up being a nice touch. The tomatoes plants behind them along the fence, however, are small and have few tomatoes which are slow to ripen. I rotated away from what were my best spots for tomatoes in previous years, and tried growing in hay bales. I had some serious complications later in the season. In one patch, I set up a cage around the plants. I had initially intended only to use one of the bales for tomatoes, but I had a lot of leftover plants with no where to put them. I stuck a few in the other bales without a cage, and staked them up instead. I did not have long enough thin bamboo stakes to go into the ground beneath the bales, but the bales were fairly tight, so I stuck the stakes and the cages into the bales and they appeared to be pretty stable.  Unexpectedly, the effect of heavy rain and growing on the bales lead to prolific leaf growth and very heavy, strong branches. By mid-August, following a weekend of non-stop rain, the haybales where I had the caged tomatoes started to come apart and the cage listed to one side. At some point in July, wasps found their way into a crack in the haybale which had opened with the rain, and by the time I got back from vacation, I noticed a constant coming and going of large numbers of wasps under the tomatoes. I planted some potatoes directly into the hay behind the tomatoes, and harvesting by shoving my hands into hay infested with wasps was not very appealing. I am leaving those potatoes to keep growing until later in the fall. I tried to straighten and reposition the cage, which really annoyed the wasps. I did my best, but it has continued to rain heavily at times, and the cage is flopping precariously, thankfully in the direction away from the entrance to the wasp nest. The foliage is very heavy, and it is hard to see the tomatoes. I got a lecture from Iulia that I should have nipped off the suckers, which I have not needed to do in past years, but may have been helpful this year.

The tomatoes which I staked also had their challenges. The hay kept the humidity high and nourished the plants very well, but eventually broke down too much to be a stable base for the stakes. The branches thickened and became hard to stake up over time, probably because I waited too long to tie them up again. I tried running a string from stake to stake to hold the branches up but the plants got too big and the stakes and strings started collapsing over. Josh suggested I put empty buckets along the side of the bales and put chicken wire frames horizontally along them to support the branches. It is not an ideal solution, but it prevents the tomatoes from dragging along the wet surface of the bale and going rotten or feeding the slugs.

Yes, this has been the best year ever for snails and slugs. I used more slug be gone than ever before, but the population is rebounding again and I have to get some more. They have a great fondness for Swiss chard and burgundy beans apparently. It has also been ideal conditions for bacteria growth, and my first tomatoes were heavily affected. I had to wait until there were a few consecutive days of sun to spray with hydrogen peroxide in order for it to be effective, but I did manage to stop the damage, and this week's harvest looked pretty good even if it is still paltry. There are tons of unripe tomatoes, so as long as the weather stays warm and sunny, this year will not be a total write off.

There is no question that the haybales had an effect on the tomato plants. So far, it seems like they have a lot more tomatoes than those grown in earth, but it is hard to tell with all the foliage. I am worried about missing tomatoes as they are much harder to see. Also, I am not tracking scientifically. I will definitely need to work on my support systems for next time to prevent the collapsing haybale jungle effect.

Lettuce and greens and beans were prolific. I am still selectively harvesting the same batch of lettuce (spring mix) since the beginning of spring, and only one plant has gone to seed. I ate beans daily for several weeks, and have left the rest to go for seed and soups, partly because they grew too high for me to reach. I had some powdery fungus or something which grew on the bee balm and seems to have spread to the peas and the phlox. Claude is coming later today, I will ask him about it. The onions are pretty small, so I harvested only half and I am leaving the rest to try for bigger next year. We have eaten some of the baby potatoes (the ones not near the wasp nest), onions, garlic, chard, herbs, celery, carrots and tomatoes. Not huge quantities, but enough to complement whatever we are cooking. The soya beans and bok choy never grew this year at all, and the beach peas sprouted and died off early in the season.

Our coyote pee has done a stellar job keeping the squirrels out, they have not touched my sunflowers or tomatoes, though I see them occasionally come off the fence for a few minutes.


The flowers are now active in the front corner of the yard, white echinacea, black-eyed susans, cosmos and morning glories. The small dahlias have yet to flower, but the giant ones are blooming near the house. The backyard sunflowers are a riot of colour, the sunset variety having 10-12 blooms per plant. I have a few giants which are tall but have smallish flowers just starting. The bee balm look pretty ratty, but still attracting bees so I am not touching them. 

A trip to Jas and Gu's garlic farm

Halfway through our vacation, we took a two day trip north to visit our friends Jasmyn and Gu (and their five kids, their dog,  two cats, three kittens, 7 chickens, 25 chicks, and a few houseguests and neighbours.) I have mentioned them before in the blog as Jasmyn has the greenest thumbs of anyone I know and I know a lot of green thumbs. They are living a three hour drive north from Allan, beyond Mont Laurier in a beautiful rural area. They too are living in a three room house converted from a barn and spend a lot of time outside for obvious reasons. There is a lake with an access point 5 minutes from their house, but the water was fairly cold so I was the only one running to swim for a change. Even I did not last long in the water.

Jas confided to me that she was not a true chicken farmer at heart, and that this year she and Gu decided to make a go growing garlic professionally. They expanded their already huge and diverse garden and this summer were learning techniques for growing and harvesting with the intention to turn most of their harvest into seed stock (clove stock?) for next year and then sell commercially. We arrived in the middle of the garlic harvest, and in between entertaining and catching up with various kids, I eagerly soaked up as much as I could about how to grow garlic that is easily 5 times the size of what I

just harvested the previous week 200 kilometers further south (which is quite a feat!). Unlike me, who asked my mother in law when to plant and which end goes up, Jas and Gu spent the winter reading up on garlic growing and consulting with a friend in the area who has been growing for some thirty years. I also have been growing exclusively for eating, not having enough space to grow surplus for planting, and it turns out that how you harvest and store for planting is different from how I do it for eating purposes.

My technique for raising garlic, if you can call it a technique, is to stick the cloves in the ground 6 inches apart with the part that sends up a green shoot facing up, late October/early November, and cover the area with hay. Once the plants have sent up a flower shoot (a "scape"), I wait until it has made a full circle and cut them off. I then wait about a month more, when the leaves are going yellow, and rip them out of the ground occasionally tearing the plant off the bulb. I root around with a handspade often damaging the bulb to get out the ones that got away, and some are left behind to pop up surprise garlic clusters the next spring. I tie them upside down
and hang them to dry for a few weeks in my bike shed

and then they are ready to eat or store in a cool place for later.

So here is what I have learned. According to Gu, pulling the plant up by the leaves can bruise the bulb and affect the next generation you grow from the cloves, so he does not use my brute strength method (I kid you not, after yanking 250 heads in a few hours, your shoulders hurt). First, he inspects the garlic for spots on the leaves, because this seems to signal a fungus in the plant which can destroy the bulb if left to mature fully.

The garlic is still edible, but will deteriorate if left in the ground, and is best not used for planting. Then he counts the number of leaves on the plant, and the proportion that has started to turn yellow. If it has 4 leaves he picks them, and if it has 5 leaves, he waits until more than half are turning yellow. More than 5 leaves indicates it is not ready. The plant loses leaves as it gets mature, so one with 4 has already lost some. He uses what I believe is called a Hula-ho (or stirrup ho, either one being pretty suggestive of something it is not!) to dig under and lift the garlic out without breaking or damaging it. This nifty

device is also great for weeding without needing to bend over. I want one!!

I am getting ahead of myself, however. They start off by putting bone meal under each clove they plant on raised beds with good drainage and no weeds. Jas's consultant friend warned her that planting small cloves resulted in small garlic heads, but she tried adding extra bone meal when the cloves were smaller and got amazing results.

She also has a few chickens wandering loose in the garden at any point in time which keeps the fertilizer replenished.  I may have a hard time reproducing the chicken factor, but I am definitely looking into bone meal for this autumn planting. This year we tried fish emulsion, liquid sea weed fertilizer and epsom salts for extra magnesium, but no bones.

So rather than picking all at once like I do, they are selectively picking the ripest ones over a period of time, letting the smaller ones keep growing. We laid them out on shade cloth to dry and at the end of the day, we tied them in bundles of 7, wrapping the cord

up the stem to keep them upright when hung in groups of 4 under a tarp.

They planted something like 4800 garlic plants, and they were just beginning to harvest and tie them up the day we arrived. Having enough space to dry them properly was already posing a challenge, and Gu went off with Josh to check out the neighbour's barn as a drying space. Needless to say, the garlic is keeping everyone busy and extra hands were very welcome, even if it meant entertaining kids for a while.

Besides lots and lots of garlic, and some chickens, the garden has corn, lettuce, chard, beans, bok choy, onions, peppers, eggplant, wild and cultivated flowers, berries, and probably a lot more (I was busy in the garlic patch trying to learn how to get those crazy huge heads!). The area is full of raspberries right now, heading soon into an abundance of blueberries, and you just might stumble on a bear who has the same interest in berries as you do.

The previous week, Jas was picking raspberries up the road with the dog, Shrek, who insisted on trying to bark down the bear who showed up on the other side of the bush. Jas retreated back home to safety. Shrek turned up home unscathed a few hours later. Gardening can be dangerous at times.

They also are growing a wide variety of herbs for cooking as well as natural medicinal herbs. Jas gave me some dill plants, savoury and wild Canadian mint to share with Allan, as well as a weed called polygonum hydropiper (water pepper) which has a hot peppery taste and a lemony aftertaste. Interesting stuff. I will try cultivating it in a container and see what happens.

 

We headed back south the next day, and took a
beautiful drive down the whole length of the 327

highway from Mont Tremblant to Lachute near Allan's place. The road is scenic, curving through the mountains and small towns, passing a huge caribou and deer farm near Arundel (too far off to get good photos, but a forest of antlers was really quite a sight).

I had two side missions, one was to take photos of beautiful Canadian landscapes for my neighbour's artistic inspiration, and to find second hand tractors for sale for our friend Allan. Both resulted in multiple spontaneous u-turns and pulling up on the shoulder of the highway and taking an odd assortment of photos of old tractors, for sale signs, covered bridges, country fields, wild birds and rivers.

I decided to skip on posting the tractor pics, but it was an interesting aside.

I added a few sky pictures which I took a couple days later on Highway 50 heading from Montreal back up to Lachute. There were some even more spectacular shots of the sunrays bursting through the clouds which I missed because there was no where to pull over safely, and of the gorgeous rainbow which Allan told us we had just missed over the Shire which was probably at the same time. Still, not bad for some off the road photography.

All in all, it was a beautiful and restful vacation, and I am ready to get back to my garden at home in time for the next phase of harvesting.