A long awaited Garden update!

Boy oh boy! For a gardening blog, you'd think I would be spamming you with posts in the summertime eh? Apparently that's not the case! The reality is, your green thumb, and my green thumb, are pretty well satisfied this time of year. No one has a desire to read about new gardening techniques, or has the gusto to try something exquisitely new in their gardens... people are relaxed about it all now. Just maintaining, slowly harvesting, and generally waiting for the first frost, to get things cleaned up.

The reality of my garden update is, not a lot has changed in the last 1-2 weeks! In fact, the photos I'm using were taken August 15'th, and it looks generally the same right now. With the cooler nights, growth slows down pretty rapidly, if not comes to a stand-still.

In the last while I've done some canning! I made 33 jars of salsa. Still at least another 22 to make if I want to match the volume of salsa we consumed last year! I already have three boxes of tomatoes in the fridge ready to go. I also have some delicious grapes from my mother in law in the fridge. Beautiful Manitoba grown concord-style grapes! Those will make a lovely jelly!  We will be fully stocked in the "Jams and Jellies" department if I do say so myself. (Gru would be proud! If you don't get that reference, then you need to watch more Dispicable Me).

Chokecherry Jelly canned.

VEGGIE GARDEN:

 Starting with my squash plants. The above one is SUPPOSED to be spaghetti squash! But this right here is a prime example of lazy seed saving. It's pretty clearly 1/2 squash, 1/2 Manitoba Sugar Pumpkin! I did not do any exclusive pollination for seed saving. I simply saved seeds from the best of my fruits last year. Oh well. I'm sure it'll be delicious! :) (hashtag: home made GMO's)

 My zucchini has somewhat underwhelmed my expectations in that I haven't been over run with it's production. That being said, my fridge is still full of zucchini, and I haven't checked the vines for several days!

 Manitoba sugar pumpkins appear to be true to type this year. The vine is small and there's maybe 4-5 pumpkins total. Enough for our use but not great. All my vines have underwhelmed me this year compared to last year. I can't really determine if it was the irrigation, lack of actual rain, or if our soil was generally depleted last year, despite having fertilized. The reality is, our neighbor down the road has uncontrollable vineage from all her squash plants, and a bumper crop of produce. So I know it's not simply the weather this year, it's a controllable factor of some kind. Still, we have plenty for our own use, we just wont be sharing much this year. My speculations are currently in the realm of the things we do differently from our neighbor. We err on the side of over-watering, their on the side of under-watering. They fertilized this year, we did not. So it's one-or-both of those variable differences in my mind.

 There's plenty of brown starting in our garden too. A welcome color for those of us who are seed savers! Above are my pea plants. As they die, the pods dry out and i can harvest seeds for another year's crop!

 My tobacco plants (grown for truth and reconciliation purposes) are beginning to let out seed. I'll collect the seed, as I really haven't done much with the leaves. Maybe another year!

And my dill, gloriousely giant and happy, is beginning to make seeds too! Those I may save a few, but mostly I'll just let them fall, and see what volunteers come up next year!

 There are many plants still doing very well. Cucumbers, though they are quite slow now, are still producing the odd fruit here and there. I only check them once a week now, and I only end up with 5-10 cucumbers maybe.  The nights are dipping a little too low for their happiness.

 Peppermint in two varieties (plus plenty of weeds!!) is still going strong! I've chopped it off and hung it to dry out. It makes excellent tea once dried out!  Peppermint is a parenneal that comes back larger each year. Definitely worth investing in!

 Our corn may yet produce! I haven't totally discredited it yet. It seems happy enough and there is the odd ear growing. Still, I think corn will go on the list of crops I don't need to grow again. It takes so much from the soil, and i've had two not-great years in a row with it. Not worth the soil depletion when its honestly so nice, sweet, and cheap at a market stand!

 My Borage is still as happy as can be! And so are the bees with it's presence.

 Hilariousely, my sweetpea flowers I planted in spring have finally determined that it's spring time! haha! They are flowering like its early may!

 Peppers have done very well this year so far! I was pleasantly suprised. The heat and irrigation combination appear to make them quite happy. So they will stay on the list of things that can grow here!  If you may recal from previous posts, their reputation was also on the chopping block along with corn and watermelon.

Beets are doing wonderfully this year! And I do love me a nice sweet beet! I could live on these things, I'm sure!  Even the really large ones are quite sweet this year. Not woody or bitter.  These were just "detroit dark red" beets, seeds I got from the dollar tree.

 Other plants have not fared so well. As I said, anything in the cruciferous family (think "gassy veggies") decided not to grow at all. Kale, Kohlrabi, Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower...These usually do well in our climate, but they all require a nice cool spring time... we definitely didn't have that!!  Above is my Kohlrabi plants at present... I seeded them, and then again in June when nothing came up in may. Still, this is all that became of them. This was simply not the summer for cruciforms.

 The cabbages I DO have, are the ones I started in the milk jugs. And as you can see, planting them with the borage did nothing to help fight off cabbage worm. I think cabbage may go on the next chopping block list. It also gets very cheap when in season... and the only way to really grow it in your own garden is to also use some form of a pesticide... so really we're no better off than buying it. I may try using some netting next year, but that wont keep out the teeny bugs that are also attacking this crop.

 Potatoes grew okay this year, especially considering all I planted was last years mushy potato leftovers! Still, each plant produced maybe 4 potatoes. and the potato bugs have had a HAYDAY! I think I'll not grow them next year... see if I can starve out the buggers, and start fresh with them the following year. 

 Tomatoes are doing decently! The amount of fruit on each vine is underwhelming this year, but this appears to be the case across the board. That, and a tomato blight fungus that causes the bottom half of the fruit to rot before it's fully ripened.  We don't have that thankfully! And I definitely had a little of it last year. I assumed that was "blossom end rot". So I will take this as one victory of having tossed coffee grounds and aspirin into the holes of my tomato plants! I'll keep that up for sure!

This photo does not do justice to my indigo rose tomatoes. In the photo they look like some kind of alien life form! But in reality they are quite pretty. Green vines adorned with dark navy jewels. Very pleasing to the gardeners eye. Now If only I could tell when they are ripe!! haha!

FLOWER GARDENS:
 

 Well, not all is going as planned in this department either! Above is a photo of my glorious nasturtiums. Beautiful as they were, a tiny fruit-fly-sized insect also agreed with me... and ATE THEM ALL! remember this was 2 weeks ago already these photos. The plants... are literally just gone!

I took some time to google these pesky things. At first I just assumed it was a fruit fly invasion, but my neighbor pointed out their black glossy hard backs, making them appear more like teeny little beetles than a fly... In my research I learned they are called "Flea beetles" and that they are particularly attracted to nasturtiums! So I guess I wont be planting those for a while... I'm hoping they will just go away if I don't have flea bait growing in my yard. Still, they've definitely attacked other supple flowers. My gladiolus, and snap dragons to name a couple... Also my cabbages in the veggie garden, and the tiny kohlrabi leaves and my one single sprout of kale... It's been a strange year for insects really. No mosquitoes, tonnes of crickets, very few spiders,  and now these flea beetles. So who knows what'll happen next year! I can't imagine all of these bugs will be back once our wet weather returns. It sounds like Texas outside in the evenings with all those crickets!

 What was once a glorious floral display is really quite an embarassing sight now... Not much to show for them with the nasturtiums gone, and the snap dragon blooms disappearing almost as soon as they open up.

 To top off this lovely insect issue, I think over-watering has left my Dahlias in a less-than-favorable state. The blooms are rotting before they open. For me this really just means that I wont be growing them again. I'm more of a small-flower person than a large bloom one. They were a bit of a leap for me, and they just took too long to bloom, and are somewhat unimpressive to me.

Their colorings are very pretty, but if they can't even open without looking dead... and not till end of August, that's not worth my flower-pot space!

 There have been a few gorgeous Gladiolus though! The trouble has been that just like my snap dragons this year, as soon as they open, they are dieing... I've yet to have a fully bloomed stem of flowers. It's really quite sad! So much effort and no show. Last august my gardens were all breathtaking. This year I'm mostly just disappointed.

 Still, being that I enjoy nature, I'm out there often enough to catch a glimpse of these blooms before they die. You can see in the above photo, how the blooms on the bottom of the photo are all withered and falling off already.  We have however, seen hummingbirds also enjoying these Glads! So if they are the culprit for the dieing blooms, I'm totally fine with it! They are worth seeing! :)

 The overall appearance of my front flower bed is mostly green by now. Last year it was an insane show of blooms from every angle... but those crazy daisies are still just going strong! :)

 My evening primrose is roughly 5 feet tall now. I'm beginning to understand the pattern of how they grow. They send out a bloom, which withers in the evening. The next day, a new bloom forms above the old one. And so it grows, up and up and up! With immature seed pods all along the stem. It's very pretty and will be an addition again in future! These were my biggest milk-jug success story I'd say.

The reality of my floral failures... is that it's fall, and there are fall mums prettymuch everywhere! So next week i'll let you know the end results, but my intentions are to replace a bunch of my disasters with some fall mums and let them catch my eye for the remainder of the season! :)

Anyways, that's all for this week! A pretty decent update. Until next time, keep your thumbs green! (And if you didn't catch our big news in the last post, maybe scroll back and have a read!)