Another gardening thread!

@ a-Q

Wow. My condolences. Sounds like you are at the five-corners garden.

It has actually been a good year for carrots and for beans, and I suspect potatoes as well, though I have pulled all the blighted tops and will wait a few weeks until I dig. Got a nice big potato that was sitting half out of the ground already, though. If everything goes well I should have 40 pounds or so/

I wasn't able to can any tomatoes this year (usually I get 12 or 15 quarts), though I have been eating a few. Bad year, as you say.

My brassicas, chard, and squash are doing well. I have never managed to grown good cucumbers in my yard for some reason.

All in all, a very odd year - the oddest thing being all the new weeds I have never had trouble with before, and no wasps to speak of (though we had bees, fortunately and a few hornets). Plus, after all that rain we got, I just emptied one of my 50-gallon rainbarrels into a crack in one of the garden beds. It sucked the whole thing up, and the surface never even got damp; I didn't even see a drop of it. The upside is I never watered once this summer. I am waiting for the rain this week to start bulking up what is left before I start harvesting it.

As far as putting stuff by, I have some cans of chard, plus roots, squash,  coriander and dill seed and herbs. The brightest spot - I think my apple grafts took, so I need to start about pruning the other trees I have in the yard to make room for something that actually produces food.

Well, they don't call this next year country for nothing. At least we got more water in the ground that we had coming into it. It could have been a lot worse.

Quote:

Wow. My condolences. Sounds like you are at the five-corners garden.

Nope. City plots out by the airport. My cucumbers and carrots are doing well. I've made quite a few jars of dill pickles so far. The basil crop was the best I've ever had, and I froze a bunch of that. The peas didn't start producing until recently, but the yield isn't bad. Some bugs have been devouring my Swiss Chard though - it's like lace.

I just came in from turning over about half of my veggie beds.  What a dismal year!  My spinach, which has been amazingly cooperative every other year, bolted in early summer and went to seed.  My snow peas failed to thrive, and we got handfuls instead of buckets this year.  My strawberries were pretty much small and hard, after five years of growing like...........well, strawberries.  I had lovely cabbages, the slugs ate most of them.  Even my lilacs were sad this year.

I have tons of spuds, beets and carrots -  I just have to pull them out very carefully as they are stuck in the clay.  My carrots look like corkscrews, most of 'em.  My chard and my lettuces are excellent, except my second seeding is only a few inches high and has stopped growing.    My tomatoes are still green, and I am thinking that I need to find something to make with green tomatoes or watch them freeze.

The weeds though, oh the weeds had a brilliant showing this year.  Next year I think I will PLANT weeds, cuz then surely the grass and the veggies will thrive?

Right after I wrote that bugs were eating my chard, I was looking out the kitchen window and saw a squadron of little birds (sparrows I guess) descend on the garden and chomp the Swiss.  These guys were doing this in the spring, too, which held the sprouting plants back quite a bit.

skdadl wrote:

Nobody's helping me with my dwarf lilies in container yet ...

Depends on where in the country you live. My best advice is to dig them and pack them in sand in a cool dry place for the winter and replant in the spring. Leaving them in a clay pot outside will leave them suceptible to frost. Bringing the pot indoors won't work either. Why worry about it. Preparing for next year is part of the fun.

Frost last night, with "killing frost" (cue Skip James) forecast for tonight.

 Just for the fun of it I entered a few things in the local country fair. 

 I won first prize in the biggest squash category.   LOL 

ebodyknows wrote:

Use thai basil for pad gapow...I thought anthing but thai curries was a waste of time till I remembered that I'm in love with basil of all types.

Apologies.  Turns out it's holy basil that's used in pad gaprow.

Most brassicas can take quite a bit of frost.

(that's why they plant the ornamental kind as flowers here on the prairies)

I don't know how far down, but minus 5 for sure. I have had leaves frozen so solid by a frost that you could crack them off that were just fine once the sun hit them. I have only grown potatoes through the winter in Vancouver, but I wouldn't think brassicas would need any special treatment to survive there.

We've recently moved and now have a small (~20' x 15'), south-facing, shady backyard.  It's bordered by a 5' cedar fence, then 10' of pines and cedars, then a major transit route.  It gets some dappled sunlight, but we will likely lose that to a large maple.  We also have a 4' x 6' planter in our very social, also very shady front entrance.

It's all bare sand right now - the previous residents were preparing to lay patio slabs.  We'll probably do some of that, but will plant along the fence.  Maybe bamboo, because it grows quickly and some species do well in the shade.  Hydrangea might do ok in one spot.

Not likely herbs will grow; definitely no tomatoes.

Always happy to read suggestions (I'm looking at you 6079_Smith_W.)

I'd put it all into potatoes, just to see how things go.

I've heard that this year is supposed to be just as bad as last year for tomato blight, so I'm not going to put any in.  I'll put a few in plant pots, though, as the potted tomatoes did OK last year.

We're expecting very heavy rain tonight and tomorrow, and it may be the end of all our snow - in which case I'm hoping for an early start to till the existing veggie garden, and start a new one, maybe a combination rock/flower/tree garden.

We have significant shoreline erosion, and I'm on a cliff overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence, so I'm trying to find the best trees with significant roots to anchor my shoreline. I have some small trees on my Vesey's order for June, but I'm always interested in hearing from folks here what plants are good for anchoring the shoreline from erosion.

ps: I'm in Zone 3A

Thanks, I'll look into that, GV.

My cherry tomatoes were blighty along with the others. 

Where's Seedy Saturday this year?  I could look it up, I suppose.   Pete G. alsways keeps me informed of these thing.

According to this, Nettie Wiebe's going to be there.

We had supper at EE Burrritos tonight.  There was a Nettie/NDP pamphlet at the till.  Ernesto, the guy who runs EE Burritos, does a lot of good work for the community.  I've heard he was a guerrilla fighting for the Salvadoran leftists before he came to Canada.

For Vancouver gardeners, Vancouver residents can pick up free compost at the Vancouver landfill until the end of May.

I am playing with the idea of a recirculating compost tea garden this year. Basically I have a solar panel, battery, inverter and bubble pump for an aquarium. So the plan is to use the bubble pump to power a "nano" airlift pump to pump the compost tea from a sump to the plants in a container where it leaks back into the sump. It might even get attached to a composter too, so the compost tea waters the plants and waters the compost too.  Anyway it is a totally experimental low tech system and only a few people are working on it. Virlusun has http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGDV8xBHaOY and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Uuc30M3K0 for those who want to know how these little air pumps work and I have http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKtB1YKoMxk  showing that the tiny super low tech airlift pumps can go really high.

This type of thing might work for recirculating nutrients to a living wall too. 

Anyway, my garden is growing slowly and now that it finally warms up, I have tonnes of work (masonry) to do so little time or energy for the stuff at home.

Brian

I am toying with the idea of gardening now that my son is much more self sufficient and should be able to play while I garden. Problem is I have to wait at least a month until he has his walking out ceremony before I can start. Any suggestions on gardeners who start in mid to late June? I didn't do so well on my last attempt at gardening and prefer vegetables or fruits and have to stick to mainly container gardening because of limited space for gardens here.

@ Refuge

You should be able to do peas (you'll at least get pea greens, which are edible) , beans, some lettuce, Also dill, cilentro.  I think you might even be able to get a feed of gai lan, though really, any cabbage green - kohlrabi, broccoli, kale - you can snip and eat at any stage, so I would fill a row and just harvest it like lettuce.

If you can start some stuff out in flats right now you could get a  lot more - summer squash. for one.

Yes, although at this point you might want to go buy a seedling from a greenhouse, and re-pot it.  THey are also heavy feeders, so prepare the ground well.

Enjoyed a pot of cream of herb soup today, made with lovage, sorrel and chives from the garden. Turned out very nicely.

I packed the pot with loosely chopped herbs (roughly 5 parts lovage to 1 part each of sorrel and chive), just covered them with chicken broth (about 6 cups) and boiled them for a few minutes to soften. Then I pureed it with the hand-blender and added 2 cups of cream and salt and white pepper to taste.

It was somewhat thinner than I remember my last attempt, but tasty and likely much more nutritious. Last time I didn't use sorrel (which is vitamin packed) and chive, just lovage and a store-bought onion.

I'm conceding defeat in the war against the weeds - this is my last year with the big veggie garden. Next year, I'm going to fill it in with shrubs, trees, and wildflowers, and just enjoy the view. I'll keep the small greenhouse for a few essential veggies. I'm fed up with dealing with the weeds every year.

If you want to avoid most of the weeding, you could try using black plastic mulch.

I can get here at the local building supply store those plastic sheets that they remove from their shipped in lumber for nothing.It is usually white on one side and black on the other side. If you use two layers of that to cover the ground it will kill the weeds.And all you have to do is cut some round holes where you want to plant your veggies.  It has several advantages.For one it keeps the ground from drying out. It warms up the soil a bit quicker and prevents the weeds from getting sunlight.It does not kill the weed seeds that are already in the soil. You have to weigh the plastic down to prevent it from blowing away on a windy day and wrecking some plants in the process.

 If you have some old lumber laying around you could make  some rectangular frames and staple the plastic sheeting onthe bottom , black side up. And if you realy want to get fancy you can nail some A-frames on your wood frame and use themto support your taller plants and have the option of covering the plants if you can see a light frosty night coming.