Last harvest, for real

I dropped by my garden one last time to pick some last little treasures:

Morning glory seeds	Dried valerian root
Rainbow chard	Random tomatoes

Bye-bye, urban organic garden! You will be missed.

Last harvest

I'm moving out in two days, so I spent today harvesting whatever was ripe (or almost ripe) before I leave, which included cherry tomatoes, ruffled red tomatoes, and sweet peppers. I hope I have a chance to harvest a few more ruffled reds on Thursday – there are so many big, bulbous unripe ones!

I also harvested all my basil, which I am in the process of putting into freezer bags to preserve over the winter. (Freezing basil seems to be the best way to preserve its flavour, in my experience. Though once freezers become too costly to operate, drying it is!)

I still have to harvest my parsnips, valerian root, lettuce seed and flax seed. My eggplants most likely won't be ready before I leave. They're really tiny things. Maybe I'll drop by at the end of the month (while I still have legal access to the property) to see how they're doing.

Piddling potato harvest

Here were my two potato stacks this morning:

From these I managed to excavate a mere 550 g of potatoes, which I think was actually less than what I planted:

Go figure. This happened last year at Everdale, too. I think potatoes really need a lot of soil depth to grow productively. I only mounded them once because I wasn't able to find any more tires, but had I mounded them at least three times, as I should have, I probably would have ended up with three times as many potatoes.

In other news, I harvested my onions the other day. They were smaller than pearls. Aww. I also picked all my barley, which I didn't bother hulling yet because I don't have the time, so I just put it all in a paper bag. The corn cobs I saved have finally dried out and I "hulled" the kernels off a couple days ago (what do you call the process of popping off the kernels?). They look great. Corn is so easy to grow, so I think it will be a big part of my future farm. Soon, before I move, I have to harvest my flax, lettuce seed, and parsnips.

Melon for the morning

Pride of Wisconsin muskmelon - harvest yours today!

For some reason the squirrels avoided this little beauty, thus giving it a chance to ripen to maturity. Fruit from the garden - so exciting! If I were going to live here another year, I think I'd grow all melons instead of pumpkins and other squash.

No shortage of tomatoes

My squash are all suffering from this mildewy thing. It's a little disappointing, but there doesn't look to be anything I can do about it. The cucumbers are still growing, albeit very slowly. I'm hoping to have my first lemon cucumber in maybe a week or so.

Both my pumpkins have been successfully destroyed by the squirrels. Whatever. :P

Tomatoes are doing fine, beans are basically done, peppers seem all right, basil looks good, flowering lettuce are going to seed, flax and barley are getting good and dry, parsley is a little paltry, eggplants are slowly maturing, chard is insane and I'm tired of harvesting it, potatoes are looking really healthy (I just wish I had more tires to stack them higher), valerian is slowly gaining size, and I'm sure I have quite a few other veggies that I've now completely forgotten about.

D is for dig, T is for transplant

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I have been doing stuff in the garden, I've just had no time to blog about it. Pictures will come this evening! I can't take photos during the day because the middaylight makes things look crappy on film.

So, I don't remember where I was at in terms of number of raised beds last time, but I'm up to 5 now. I'm getting into the groove; it doesn't take me quite as long to double-dig a bed anymore. Here is the layout of the raised beds and what I have planted in them:

Yesterday I double-dug the fifth bed – the square-shaped one in the middle – and transplanted lots of things into it. I also transplanted more things into the bed on the right. I've managed to cram a lot of different kinds of plants into a pretty small space. We'll see if they like it!

My method of choosing where to plant what was rather ad-hoc, but I often make use of these three guidelines to help me decide:

• Companion planting: Which plants grow well together, and which do worse?
• Shading and space: How tall and wide to the plants grow?
• Age of seedlings: What needs to be transplanted most urgently?

The second guideline came in handy for the tomatoes, sunflowers, and squash. I know tomatoes and sunflowers can grow quite tall and produce a lot of shade, so they should be planted close to the north-ish edges of beds. Squash tend to take up a lot of horizontal space, so I planted them at the back of the yard so they could sprawl onto the back laneway.

For the curious, here's an exhaustive list of what's now planted in my garden, listed alphabetically:

• barley (Arabian blue)
• basil (sweet)
• carrots (Scarlet Nantes)
  
• chard (rainbow mix)
  
• cilantro
  
• corn (Indian blue)
• cucumbers (lemon, Pointsett 76)
• edible flower mix:
  • calendula
  • borage
  • cilantro
  • cornflower
  • sunflower
• flax (golden)
• lettuce (French heirloom Merveille des Quantres Saisons, black-seeded Simpson)
• melon (Pride of Wisconsin)
• morning glories
• peppers (Frank's sweet)
• pole beans (Blue Lake)
• poppies (Shirley)
• potatoes (white and red, though not sure exactly what varieties)
  
• pumpkin (small sugar)
• radishes, now going to seed
  
• spearmint
• spinach (Bloomsdale)
• tomatoes (Sweetie, Scotch Bonnet, Ruffled Red)
• zucchini

I've also been picking off the leaf miner-infected parts of my spinach and chard on a regular basis, and it's definitely helped. The plants seem to be happier, even though they've suffered much defoliating, and the leaf miners aren't making fast progress anymore. I was finally able to harvest my first spinach leaves a few days ago (which is accounted for in the list on the right).

First harvest: radishes

I was away from home for the last few days, performing at a barn-raiser and spending time with family in Cobourg. I got a chance to see my cousin Elizabeth's gardens on my grandma's acreage. It was bliss to be out in the country again. The sights, smells, and sounds (and especially lack of sounds) of the countryside are unequaled here in the city. The notion of escaping smogville became doubly attractive for me. If every inch of unused land in Toronto were to be gardened intensively, however, I think I could find summertime breathing to be infinitely more enjoyable.

I came back from my weekend in the country to a tiny patch of now overcrowded radishes, and it finally looked time to celebrate my first harvest:

I picked the biggest ones and ended up with 450 g of radishes (about 2 bunches). I'm banking on the rest of the radishes to increase in size after this thinning.