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!)
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