Gentle autumn

Most unexpectedly, since mid-September, the weather has picked up. We have had alternating rain, clouds and sunny days with temperatures varying from a low of 1 degree to 24, sometimes within 48 hours. Although this resulted in a very early season for colds and flus, it also produced spectacular shades of red and orange fall leaves and an extended harvest. My hibiscus as well as some purple flowers Iulia gave me waited until perilously late to bloom, and seem to be undaunted by the thermometer hovering just above zero at night. I have not needed to bring in the peppers and basil again, nor cover the tomatoes, although I have all my extra blankets and sleeping bags piled up on a chair in the basement ready to roll if needed.

I am continuing to harvest tomatoes, hot peppers, basil, lettuce, some occasional beans, mint and green onions. The raspberry bushes are at their peak, I was picking a cup per day for the last few weeks, though they are slowing down over the past few days. I have a few strawberries still ripening as well. With the cold nights, the onions I left to overwinter in the garden have thrown up new shoots. I may check if they have grown enough to be worth harvesting some before winter.

The Jewish holidays were beautiful. Despite intermittent showers, we managed to eat in our sukkah every day through the holiday of sukkot, sometimes in a winter jacket and other days in t-shirts. Its been that kind of a fall. On a couple of evenings we waited to eat a bit later until the sky cleared. One evening we tolerated a bit of drizzle as we shared a cheese fondu with friends. A few evenings we had to clear the table and finish with dessert in the house. It was a beautiful week.



On Thanksgiving Monday, I took a break from piles of correcting to take a walk with Josh and Orianne. A friend of Josh's mentioned to him that he found a lot of mantis ooths in the bushes behind the parking lot of the local Walmart. We decided to take a walk. It was a beautiful late afternoon before sunset. The area is technically private property, once owned by Blue Bonnets race track, a small strip of land with tall grasses, wildflowers, and a few odd trees on a hill which looks like it was made by excavators dumping earth when the racetrack or the parking lot were originally built. The chain which marks the edge of the area is loosely ignored by the occasional dogwalker, but it is a fairly low trafficked area. We were interested in picking up a few mantis ooths and attaching them to convenient locations in our own yard. It seems that the local variety of mantises prefer to lay their eggs in areas with tall grass so the newly hatched babies have a good food source, as they tend to prefer crickets and grasshoppers to flies. Our garden does not seem to meet their criteria for an ideal nursery, which would account for why most of the hatchlings we had migrated and laid their eggs elsewhere.

We found no ooths, despite a lengthy stroll through tall grass. We did find wild roses, several beautiful crabapple trees in full fruit, and to our surprise and delight, two apple trees, one of which was covered in fruit at the perfect stage of ripeness. We had pockets, a plastic bag intended to collect ooths, and a couple of hats which we filled with some of the crispest, tastiest sweet/sour apples I have ever had. I am eating one as I write.

On our way home, we took a shortcut through an alleyway, and Josh spotted some perfect shaggymane mushrooms, just around the corner from our house.

Now that the holidays are over, we are waiting for the first frost to finish off the harvest and wrap up the garden for the year. Until I take the tomato plants down and dismantle the remaining haybales (the only ones left are those in which tomatoes are still growing), I cannot do the rest of the preparation for winter: cleaning up, weeding, laying out last year's compost, putting down new hay. Josh is following up with our friend Jack to try to find a source of hay. I am hoping for some soon, but it looks like the weather is holding out for another week at least.

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.