Not-So-Short but oh-so-sweet!

 Greetings one and all! Sorry for the time in between! It's been busy lately!

 Blueberries were in season at the store, and I had a schwack of fresh rhubarb, and my u-pick strawberries washed, stemmed and frozen for my use when I had time. So this week I mad blueberry jam and straw-rhu-blue jam! Yummy! I found a few good lower-sugar recipes (without pectin) that worked beautifully! 1.25 cups sugar per 4 cups blueberries, plus the addition of some citrus zest and juices, and a water bath canning process makes for safer, lower sugar, higher fruit tasting jam! :) yay!
Let me know if you want the recipes!

And of course, still harvesting! Lots of cucumbers, some beans, zuchini, green peppers, jalapinos and a few tomatoes too! I had my first all-garden-veggie greek salad yesterday! And yes, it tasted like heaven!! :)



THE FLOWERS! 
 

Hello! :) I thought I'd start you off with a nice big Dahlia! They are finally in bloom! Well, a couple of them anyways. So excited! I'm definitely gonna try and salvage the bulbs from these in the fall and start them earlier next year so I get a longer flowering season.

 So far I have purple and white! There's several other plants with bulbs like the below photo that will come to fruition soon I hope!

 I must admit though, this does confirm my pattern of what I like in flowers. The Dahlias are pretty and all, but my floral cryptonite is a large plant with hundreds of tiny small flowers. I'm not huge into a plant with one giant flower on it. People tend to prefer fewer but larger blooms, or plentiful smaller blooms as far as personal taste in flowers. Still, I appreciate how showy these Dahlias are in general, regardless of my personal preferences!

 I have to admit, Josiah was in day camp this past week, which means 40 minutes of driving in the morning and in the afternoon for me, so the garden got a little neglected this week with watering and dead-heading. So there is a bit more green than color in the pictures than otherwise would be, but overall the plants are doing extremely well!

 This crazy parenneal (check my last post for it's name, cause I forget again! haha! Always write this stuff down, i'm telling you!). This thing has been flowering since june and shows no signs of stopping! Usually parenneals flower only for a brief part of the summer. A stunning but usually short-and-sweet season. These bad-boys just wont quit! I love it! One flaw, is it's probably about 5 feet tall and has just fallen over from our crazy winds this year. still a happy camper of a plant. but next year I may utilize a few peonie staking circles, or tomato cages, to keep these guys upright.

 My rhubarb looks smaller, only cause I harvested a bunch of it for my Rhu-Blue-Straw jam! :) I am really enjoying that tidalwave petunia and how it's spreading and filling spaces! the sedums are flowering but haven't turned pink yet. And you can see at the back left, the giant tree lillies have flowered! Next year they should get quite a bit taller, and up to 8-10 feet  at some point once well established!  The tall grasses at the back are the gladiolus. There are a few that are flowering! So far, all red, despite the bag being a multi-color mixture. Perhaps the red ones just bloom first, or perhaps the person who was meant to stir up the vat of flower bulbs at the factory needs to be fired... :( either way! THey are very pretty!

 If you are also growing Glads, this is the stage where you could cut it from the plant and use it in a vase. It will continue opening up! :) I like to leave them though. Also in this flower barrel is snapdragons and a couple cosmos. My snap dragons have been very short-lived this year. Perhaps just too much heat. They came and went in under 2 weeks mostly. Oh well, I still love them!

 This side flower bed has basically just become a jungle... the reality is we're gonna re-build our deck either end of this summer or early spring. So when that happens, this garden is toast anyways, and will get replaced with a raised bed, since the soil cant really support flowers properly.

 I grabbed a fern from my parents cabin in the forest, and that appears to be establishing well. When I transplanted it, I chopped all of it's leaves in half so it could focus on it's roots, it has since withered those leaves and sprouted new ones, which looks promising! :)

 And the poppies I planted last year (during one of my brother-in-laws tours in the Navy), have sprung back to life! I'll be saving some seeds from those to plant next year in whatever garden we end up with here! :)

 These flower barrels are still my favorite this year. They are just lawlessly wild, with no rhyme or reason, which I love. again, not as showy, since I haven't been doing any dead-heading this week.

 The nasturtium are gorgeous... a total waste of their potential where I put them haha! But still gorgeous! Next year I'll plant them somewhere they can cascade down, like on the deck or something.

 Here's one snapdragon plant that has about 12 flower stalks on it. I'm wondering if it's original flowering stem broke, and this is what it did? I may try pruning a few next year! :)

 I know, this photo makes you feel like you're falling down the stairs. Sorry! :) These flower pots haven't been in many blog posts yet cause they don't really have any blooms. So far still nothing, but the Dahlias are getting close!

DAN DA DA DA!!! We HAVE A HOLLYHOCK!! hehehe. Its only like 1.5 feet tall total, but it has blooms!! :) theres a couple more with flower buds, so i'm hoping for cross polination and seed production so I can try again next year!

THE VEGGIE GARDEN! 

 Lets move on to the veggie garden!

 Things are coming along nicely out here!

Due to my own neglect of not checking the garden, an irrigation hose popped off God-knows-when and flooded the back half of the garden for days! So now there's a bit of a swamp, and also a bit of dry sad haggard plants. Woops! You can see the wet soil is even growing a bit of green mildew haha! Life happens folks!

 My squash are finally establishing themselves! It's taken them longer than last year, but they are doing their thing. I find extra watering all over the plant makes a difference as opposed to just watering at the base stem. These plants like to send out roots from their various vines that are touching the ground. So if you water all over, the vine continues to enlarge, making more flowers and more fruits.  The above is my spaghetti squash plant. You can also see how the row of peas has been removed (thanks Mom H!) to make room for the squash. Also, the beans are being pulled as they finish producing. Lettuce and spinach were pulled a while ago, as you know if you've  been following along for a few weeks or more.

 Above is my pumpkin plant. I am underwhelmed with it so far this year, but it's finally starting to branch out! You can see I pulled a bunch of bean plants on the right hand side to make room for the vines to grow. They are also going to invade the wpg harvest peas, which is fine as they are done now too. So I'll pull those out as they get nearer. ANything not in the way of the vines (in the beans and peas) I will leave in the ground to turn to seeds for next year.

I have several incredibly large spaghetti squash on the vines! Last year I had more numbers of quash, this year it's more volume of quash itself! :) I'm okay with this!

 watermelon vines are still pathetic looking, however they do have some small fruits on them! Not enough for me to justify planting them agian next year, but i'm happy they are doing something.

 this is the tobacco plants. The flowers are done, and now they are turning into little seed balls. (see previous posts if your curious why I'm growing tobacco)

 Onion flowers are ready to be pulled and planted as little onion bulbs!

And peas are officially done, and dieing. I let them die in the ground if they arent disturbing anything else. This way I can collect seeds from them. Bean and pea seeds tend to be the biggest rip off of seed-purchasing and are well-worth harvesting. They are also the easiest seeds to harvest for seed-saving as you simply let them die, and collect the seeds which are large and easy to handle.

 My sunflowers are just about ready to have blooms! You can tell this on a plant when the leaves become incresingly smaller and more  concentrated at the tip. Not too long now! I'm happy about this since we have a tonne of bees in our garden, and everything else will basically be done flowering by then. I want to keep those bumbles happy! :)

 another bug that is happy and thriving, are my potato bugs.... :( I wish I could share a brillaint solution, but in the end, the best way to deal with them, is a pair of gloves and a bucket. pick'em off, and kill them. I basically ahvent even tried that this year. The row of potatoes is long, the greens are plentiful, and the fruit of the harvest is underground! Perhaps I'll get on top of it next year... or buy that white powder... either way.

 The hilarious thing about my row of corn is how it shrinks back where the garden flooded. There are certain plants who do best with LESS watering. Root veggies and corn to name a few. So where the plants weren't flooded they are big and happy. Where they were flooded, they are tiny and immature.

 The carrots that I planted for seed are still just flowering. I was wondering if i'd need to rub some blooms together to cross pollinate, until I looked closer! There's actually about 12 insects on this flower. The biggest one, though tiny looks to actually be a sort of bee! It's got the yellow and black stripes. And if it's going from flower to flower, it's not a wasp, that's for sure.  Wasps don't do anything useful for us. I have about 3 varieties of bees working in harmony in our garden. Large fat fuzzy bumblebees, narrow wasp-looking leaf-cutter bees, and then these teeny suckers! I always thought bees were territorial but apparently they are okay to work in harmony.

 My cucumber vines are on their way out already. We've had a few cooler nights. And Cucumbers prefer a low of 15 degrees or higher. So with our 7 degree nights we've been having, it's only a matter of time before they just quit on me. They are still making me lots and lots of delicious cucumbers though! I pick maybe 1.5 times a week. Every 3-5 days or so. So it's slowed down quite a bit, but still very good harvesting.

 And tomatoes are just starting to turn ripe! I joke about this... they are turning ripe just in time for our family to leave on our vacation to ottawa for a full week! I fear I'll miss a whole bunch of the prime, of tomato harvest! :( but it's worth it for wonderful family time. And I'm sure Ottawa farmers markets will be full of tomatoes too!

Another one keeping the bees in my garden is the oregano blooms. These are like crack to the bees! Bees everywhere around these things!

THE OUT-BACK! 

 Moving on to our "out-back" As I call it (which curtis usually rolls his eyes at the name I've given it!). It's our back, back yard! our yard is nicely tree'd in but theres actyally another 2-ish acres in the back here that are ours! We started mowing it last year, and have continued this year. It won't be long now before it's a nice lawn. The grass chokes out the other plants when it's all shorter. We've also tilled and planted a shelter-belt back here, that should come to fruition in about 20 years give-or-take haha! We don't actually know what we plan to do back here, but we decided we can figure that out later. For now, we just wanted to reign it in.

 Also not in my blog enough is our berry patch we planted last year! Strawberries in the front, saskatoons on the left and raspberries on the right. Saskatoons look pretty sad, I have to admit. But after that insane winter, I'm just glad they came back at all. No berries this year but they were just teeny sticks last year when we planted them. Raspberries came back well! And they are just beginning to make their fruits.

 Strawberries are done for the season and are sending out their suckers. We still need to figure out a good routine for these. As the suckers planted, produce the highest harvest the following year. Plants on their second year still fruit, but not as much. and in their third year, they turn to a very bizarre plant like the one below!! Its leaves are still strawberries, but the flowers are teeny and yellow, and instead of producing fruit they produce little pods of those seeds you see embedded in the strawberries. So basically a useless plant given that the suckers produce better results! But neat to see the whole life cycle! Anyways, Idealy, each year's plants ought to be last year's suckers. So I have to find a rhythem for that yet.

 This rhubarb plant, believe it or not, is one of the 3 that survived from my seeds, that fought the damp-off in the spring and seemed so pathetic for so long! Here it is, looking like a real rhubarb plant! :) yay!

THE TREES!

 This little beauty is a sour cherry tree I planted last year. Again, with the winter we had, I'm just glad it came back this year at all! Still, no flowers even, let alone fruits. It will need a second tree to really fruit up. But for now, it's still a happy little tree!

 This is a maple tree I seeded from helicopter seeds I collected while we lived on Linden in winnipeg. So if you've ever thought of trying it, YES IT WORKS! :) As a general rule with tree seeds, Spring/early summer seeds can be planted right away, fall tree seeds require stratification (AKA need to experience winter) in order to sprout. So the time of year the seeds fall, determines how to grow them.

 our little maples we bought last year, are making seeds. As a whole, this basically makes them look like a diseased freak-show. but the pretty pink color of the seeds is very enjoyable to me! :)

 And our little choke cherry tree is doing well this year!

Looks like i'm gonna have to learn how to make chokecherry jelly! :) I could also save them and use them as punishment when my kids say mean things to each other... I feel like the way they dry out your mouth is a good analogy of how bad words should taste in our souls. :) hmmm... I may be on to something! Perhaps all parents should own a chokecherry tree! hehe!

Well, that's all for this week! I'll likely not post till after our vacation at this point! And I'm sure it'll be full of wonderful zone 4-5 garden photos for you to drool over! Until then, keep your thumbs green!

Still procrastinating that weeding post ;)

So... in all honesty, our weeds have slowed down a lot already. So I have a feeling that third weeding post will simply wait till winter time when I have nothing else to talk about! The plan will be discussing specific weeds and how to tackle them! For now, summer is busy enough and there's enough to share just with garden updates! :) so please enjoy!
 
APPLE TREES
 Last year, we planted 3 apple trees in our front yard. They all came back this year which is wonderful! :)

 This first tree is an Oddessy Dwarf apple tree. All three varieties were chosen for having large semi-sweet apples. I like a good tart crabapple, but I hate dealing with teeny little apples. So these are all nice large tart apples, somewhere around a tart granny smith apple type flavor.

 This one is the Norkent Apple tree. Again, a tarter, larger apple tree.

 And this sad looking creature is our dwarf goodland apple tree. Sadly, Kaiser had his way with it when he was a pup last summer, and chewed it to a pulp! So no apples on this one, but at least it survived! We'll give it a couple years before we judge it too harshly for not bearing fruit. It had a rough start! haha!



 HERBS
 I've got herbs in various places this year. Scattered throughout veggies and in rows of their own as well.

 I decided to try hyssop this year. It was a slow-grower it seems. I may try digging some up into a pot over the winter months to over-winter it. No idea if it'll work! :) but thats a good green-thumb experiment to be had! It was simple enough to start from seed, and seems to be fluorishing in our modestly average soil!

 My oregano is in full bloom. Oregano is a parenneal here. So try cutting yours down this fall and wait for it to return next year! I usually take my tomato cages in the fall, and stick them overtop my parenneals so that I know where they are all winter, and in the wee spring months when you can't see them yet.

 This is borage! A member of the mint family.  A fun plant, with pretty flowers, but sadly it's not having it's desired affect on the cabbage pests... more on that in the veggie section though!

 My dill is also in full bloom. Most herbs are flowering a little early this year simply from our insane heat. Thats okay with me, cause as a seed saver, it'll be nice to actually collect seed this year and not have to buy it next year! :)

 my basil is doing quite well! The lemon basil (on the right) is starting to flower, but my cheap-o dollar tree basil seed is still going strong with not a flower in sight! :)

 Summer savory growing well and thriving. No flowers yet. Generally its good when herbs aren't flowering. The flavor of the leaves changes a bit once there are flowers.

 here you can see my parsley (still green) and my cilantro (white flowers). Cilantro always flowers early I find. I'm not sure how it's so popular in mexican cuisine. I can't imagine it's easy to grow in their even-hotter climate! 

 

And lastly, my chamomile, which I have dispursed between my pepper plants for fun! It's so pretty eh!? different than the pavement-crack chamomile, but just as sweet smelling. I haven't picked any yet, cause it's so pretty, but I really should start. 

FLOWERS:

 Here's my flower barrels, still going strong but starting to show signs of ware from the heat. The tiny white flowers of alyssum are starting to finish flowering in all their various locations in my yard. This is just fine with me, since other flowers are just taking over. I love the filler of Alyssum in early summer while everything else is still establishing. Also in these barrels are Nasturtium, snap dragons, calendula, cosmos and asters. All started from seed indoors in late winter. :) check back in my blog posts if you want to read up on that! The barrels are from dollarama!

 My write-off shade garden... I'm managing to get some blooms out of my impatiens with a weekly application of a liquid seaweed fertilizer called "sea magic". It's a small envalope of powder you can buy at any greenhouse for about $11-12, and you disolve it into 4 litres of water. You then use about a Tbsp per galon of water as you water the garden. So that little packet lasts quite a while! My usual routine with that fertilizer is to water the garden with the hose the night before, so things are decently wet, and then do a sprinkling of the fertilizer in the morning. I dont like to over-apply it when the plants are bone dry. It seems like a waste to me. This way I somehow feel like it dispurses better in the soil. But I could be wrong.

and yes, there's a tonne of weeds in there. This viney thing that is just impossible to get rid of... and in all honesty, I've mostly washed my hands of this garden bed since the soil is too poor to grow anything of merit anyways. This will be a great location for a raised flowerbed with fresh soil in it. :)
 
These poppies decided to return though! At first I thought maybe it was one of the 6 daisies I planted (yes... even daisies didn't return in that darn bed!!) but it's the poppies I planted in honor of my brother in law's deployment last year!  So that's exciting that they are back. :)

 My front-step barrels are thriving! Snap dragons blooming wiht cosmos. Dahlias are just about ready, starting to form buds, and any day now the Gladiolus will also send up their flower shoots.

 Here's one Dahlia flower bulb thats almost ready to open. So excited! I'm guessing it'll be yellow from the color of the bulb. It was a variety pack of flower bulbs so I never know what'll come up! :P

 Moving on to the front flower bed. In the front corner with the pink, red and yellow flowers is Cabaret cocktail mix flowers I bought from my neighbor's greenhouse called  "hillside greenery". Loving it! The two splotches of green are both alyssum that never really flowered. This soil is also not amazing. But parenneals are at least establishing in it alright! My plan in future is for this to be a 100% pareneal garden. So i'm not sweating it if I need to fertilize annuals, or add compost from year to year.
Behind the Cabaret, is a Sedum, starting to bloom. Behind that, with the purple flowers is the delphinium seeds I started. Their beautiful purple color makes me smile.

You can see the bright yellow calendulas still going strong. They were the earliest to flower of the seeds I started. One of these flowers stopped flowering actually! I ended up cutting the whole plant down to within a foot of the ground, and applying some seaweed fertilizer. It's come back with full-vengeance now! :)

 near the centre of the above photo you can see a little splash of pink, which is one of the lilly bulbs I planted this spring, just starting to flower. The purple below it are  verbenia I purchased from my neighbor's greenhouse "hillside greenery". The row of speckled blue near the back are my forget-me-knots from my seedlings. And the larger grass-like shoots in the back are an entire row of gladiolus. Same as the barrels, any day now they will send up their flowering stalks.

 This giant beauty in the center, I have finally pulled out my binder to verify it's name! It's a Heliopsis, and this is only it's second summer! It's about 4.5 feet tall if the branches weren't all bent over. Very tall, and an excellent show! The flowers have been blooming for well over a month already and don't show signs of stopping just yet!

 And off to the left is more of the same. Gladiolus, froget me knots, Verbania, calendula, alyssum, and you can see the leaves of one of my lupines that I seeded. The one in Josiah's little garden bed has a flower on it! But not mine. :)

all the way over to the left, you can see my rhubarb, rudely trying to take over my tidal wave petunias and sedum. Behind the sedum is those giant tree lillies. They are maybe 2 feet tall this year, but supposedly they can get as tall as 8 feet! So hopefully they return next year and we'll see what they are made of! They have nice big flower buds on them, so hopefully they will open soon! They will be white.

HARVESTING PRODUCE:

 Currently it's a half-time job harvesting in the garden! Lots of green beans, snap peas and a few beets to be had!

 These beets are just tiny. I was only harvesting a few here and there to thin out the rows. More on that later.

My jalapinos are in full swing I believe! And there is almost no difference between the ones I started earlier and the ones I started later, according to their suggested seed-starting dates. So there's a good lesson to be learned there! 

and... CUCUMBERS! :) SO MANY DARN CUCUMBERS! It's wonderful though. I've managed to give away plenty and we still have more than we eat. This photo is approximately our every-other-day harvest amount from our big row of cucumber plants (25 plants). The white ones are especially delicious. never bitter and no peeling necessary. I will definitely be doing them again!  I have really had almost no bitter ones this year. I don't know if that's the particular summer, or the irrigation system to thank for that. I strongly believe that bitter cucumbers comes from dehydration, and fluid from the stem and fruits moving back and forth as the plant dries out and re-hydrates. So potentially, the regularity of irrigation is preventing bitterness?? this is an organic 100% speculated wives tale from this wife though! lol so don't take it as science. ;)

VEGGIE GARDEN

 You could say things are... growing lol! lot's of green! We've tilled about 3 times between the rows and I imagine that'll be the end of it, since the squash will begin to take over very soon. In the above photo, you can see I counted my losses, and pulled my bitter lettuce and bolted spinach to make room for my spaghetti squash plant.

 I have about 4-5 small spaghetti squash on the plant already. I'm starting to give the squashes extra water around their perimeter so as to encourage them to spread. My logic is that where the water is, the plant will grow. So if you only water the base stem, it'll stay where you planted it. but if you water around the outside of the bush, it'll continually expand. creating new roots, new blooms and more fruits! :) Again, my own personal wives tale lol.

 My zucchini plants, healthy but not really fruiting yet. flowering for sure, but not a lot else. I'm wondering if we don't have very many of the squash bees. There's a specific kind of bee that polinates squash plants. They are attracted to the giant yellow blooms, and they usually cover a much larger ground than other bees do, in order to find more squash plants. Who knows! If I don't start getting fruits, I'll get in there with a Q-tip and cross polinate blooms myself!

 Pumpkin plant! Not as healthy as last year's but it's also growing away from the irrigation. So perhaps I should be watering it more than I do. No fruits yet. I few blooms have started making small pumpkins, but they just fall off and rot. Maybe that's just an un-polinated bloom, or perhaps the lack of water. The pumpkin plants are between beans and peas. So once those are done for the season, they will also be pulled out, and then the pumpkin can take over. There are about 4 individual pumpkin plants here.

 This thing that looks like a weed is actually my watermelon... Not overly impressed with it really. This year is strike 2... I probably won't try watermelon again if we don't get a harvest this year.

 Here's a shot of two rows of tomatoes. I mulched around them with straw to help them retain moisture better with this crazy heat we're having.

 

Lots of smaller green tomatoes starting to form, and lots of flowers. So the best is yet to come with the tomatoes still! 

 

 Here's my winnipeg harvest row of peas! I've already donated well over 10 lbs of snap peas, and as you can see there's still plenty more to harvest.

 Here's a shot of my cucumber plants. I'm beginning to learn that cucumbers much prefer to trail on the ground as opposed to climbing. They are so happy and are producing like crazy this way!

 My tobacco is doing well! (growing it for truth and reconciliation purposes). I did a bit of further research, and learned that I should have been deadheading the flowers to encourage larger leaf production. but it sounds like the leaves are still fine to use after flowering unlike some other herbs.

 I am a little bit in love with the tobacco flowers though! So unique. medium sized trumpets with a nice large volume! Once pollinated, they form little bulbs that will fill with seeds about the size of a poppyseed.  I'll collect these for next year and try try again! ;)  Apparently tobacco needs to be dried and then cured... So that should be a fun little experiment with such a small volume of tobacco! haha!

 The sun flowers I planted later in the spring are taking off nicely now. Well established.

 the leaves are starting to bunch at the top, so i'm hopeful for blooms before not too long yet! :)

 The kohlrabi I re-seeded remains tiny and unimpressive. I've lost hope in a kohlrabi harvest this year, alas!

 The hollyhocks I snuck in at the ends of my veggie rows are looking healthy! mostly just leaves still, but this one looks like it has tiny flower buds!  :)

 Here are my beets! Freshly thinned out and ready for expansion!

 The beet I planted for seeds, remains a flowering plant. Unfortunately only 1 out of 2 actually came back to life... so I'm fearing that without cross polination, the flowers may not turn to seeds. we'll have to wait and see!

 So as I said in the herbs section, the borage is not having it's intended affect of deterring the cabbage worms... Oh well! Live and learn. I'm not a crazy cabbage lady anyways haha!

 I'm sure it would've been worse without the borage though. But I mean, this cabbage is rubbing up right against a borage, and it's still getting pests.

 Above you can see one of the mennonite stuffing peppers (the cherry tomato of peppers). they are mostly blooms still, but one or two tiny starter peppers here and there!

 Bell peppers are beggining to show signs of fruit! Which is exciting cause I usually have rotten luck with peppers. This heat is clearly helping my peppers grow.

 and of course, Jalapinos are well under way! :)

 My potato plants are still pretty happy. Finished blooming, and now potato bugs have found them... I havent done anything to deter them really... But in reality, I've seen a couple on my asparagus too, so i'd rather them attack my potatoes than my asparagus!! Still i'll have to do a little google search and figure out some hippie spray for my potato plants.

 corn is doing averagely unimpressive haha! Oh well, thats the part that flooded several times from the irrigation. So that has taken it's toll.

 My carrots, also freshly thinned, are thriving well. At the very back of the row (hard to see) are the peak of the market carrots I tossed in the ground. 4/6 are sprouted and producing blooms that look very similar in appearance to a dill flower. So I betcha I'll get carrot seeds! :)

Well, that's it for this week! Lot's of good stuff to report, lots of growth and as always, lots of hard work!!
Until next time, keep those thumbs green! (and keep things well watered!)