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!
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