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.

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.

Point-form updates

• I harvested my first zucchini a couple days ago – fresh as a summer's rain.
• My pole beans turned out in fact to be bush beans. I harvest beans from them every couple days, but they're not producing much, and some of the leaves are yellowing. I don't think they're getting as much sun as they need.
• My friend Jen visited a few days ago and she helped me transplant quite a few lettuce and spinach seedlings, and more are on the way. I keep harvesting lettuce, so there's always more room to plant.
• I keep having to tighten the trellises for my tomatoes; the fabric they're made of is gradually getting stretched. They're pretty effective, though. No longer are the neighbouring onions gasping for sunlight.
• Every day I gently steer a few pumpkin or melon vines to follow the trellises or directions I want. I'm trying to aim them north, out to the back lane where there's space, but they're naturally inclined to grow the other direction, towards the sun.
• I'm still picking off the leaf miner-attacked fragments of my chard leaves on a regular basis.
  
• I mounded up my potatoes a while ago. I couldn't find another tire for one of the stacks, so I made do with bits of brick I've collected from the yard over the summer, which I laid around the edges of the topmost tire. Soon I'm going to have to come up with another solution, though.
  

A-trellising we will go

I got back from my trip, and my garden was still intact! Meta was watering every day, apparently, and there were three significant rainfalls. The only casualty was the spinach plant I'd been trying to save for seed, which was a wilted puddle of yellow when I came home. It was already going that direction before I left, and I have no idea why. I actually saved two spinach plants for seed, and they both did the same thing. Too much heat, maybe?

But that also meant that my tomatoes and pumpkins were getting out of control. One tomato plant had grown so big and toppled over, smothering the onions, basil and poppies. I had to do some trellising, which is what I spent today doing.

I posted two stakes at each end of the tomato bed and tied two lines of twine (made of recycled jeans) between them. This propped up the tomato plants pretty well, but I spent some time perfecting the arrangement by gently maneuvering the delicate branches between the lines.

I also got a tip at Everdale about dealing with yellowing lower tomato branches. Apparently it's a form of blight that is contracted through contact with the soil. As long as you remove the lower branches, you'll be fine. But you have to wash your hands thoroughly after touching infected branches before touching the rest of the plant.

The flax was also a little flimsy and falling onto the pathways, so I staked some small bamboo stakes around the flax patch and tied some wool around them to keep the stalks upright.

My pumpkin, melon, and cucumbers were also starting to sprawl, so I found random branches and stuck them around the plants in various configurations until they were sturdy, and gently convinced the squash plants to climb up them.

The corn cobs are ripening!

Seedlings & sowings

I just realized that what I thought were weeds, might actually be the groundcherries! They look like weeds, perhaps because they are, in fact, considered weeds by many. And if I recall correctly, groundcherry was growing rampantly out on Plan B farm when I was visiting last year. Also, groundcherry is closely related to the tomatillo, which I remember at Everdale confusing with pigweed (before closer inspection). So I may have inadvertantly weeded out some of my groundcherries, but I've saved what I think are two tiny seedlings. The only thing that made these seedlings stand out to me from the other weed seedlings were their fuzzy stems, which I know tomatoes have as well.

Yesterday I began double-digging my fourth raised bed. It's the biggest one so far, and I only got about a third of it fully loosened. That was enough for the time being; I really just had to get two large tomato plants (one Sweetie and one Scotch Bonnet) and several oversized Simpson lettuce seedlings into the ground. Between the two I transplanted a bunch of white globe onion seedlings, which are a companion to both tomatoes and lettuce.

Today I sowed cucumbers, pumpkins, butternut squash, sweet dumpling squash, Pride of Wisconsin melon, and butterfly milkweed. I'm bringing the cucumbers and pumpkins inside during the night since it sounds like they require higher soil temperatures for germination than the other squash (according to the not-so-informative seed packets).

I tried to pick up a rain barrel today from a nearby Freecycler. Unfortunately, it was about 4 inches too wide for my bike trailer, so I had to leave it there. It was big and beautiful – a real functioning rain barrel, not just any old barrel – and it would have worked amazingly. Alas, I just don't have a big enough wagon, and I don't yet know of a local fossil fuel-free wagon producer. ;-)

I was working outside virtually all day today, and that was a mistake. I didn't realize today was a smog day in Toronto. I should have taken a clue from the characteristically orange-tinted sunlight, but I just wasn't thinking. As a result, I've felt a little sick all evening, especially after mowing the front lawn with garden shears. This is the first time I've ever noticed the effects of smog on my health so acutely.

Seedling Swap

I haven't been posting much lately because I've been spending most of my time practicing with Meta and Chris for the Cowboy Mimes' second show last night. My amazing friend Kelly from Everdale kindly drove my big-ass keyboard to the gig at no charge, and it was a good chance for
us to swap seedlings. I gave her some of my many sweet pepper seedlings, and in return she gave me a zucchini, two varieties of tomato (beautiful, large mini-plants they are), and an unusual kind of eggplant that's produces orange-coloured fruit (I'll find out the name).

My own tomatoes are doing very poorly. None of my groundcherries have germinated, and only two of my ruffled red tomatoes have sprouted. All my seedlings seem to be growing very slowly, despite the amount of sun they get. Perhaps it's still just too cool at night? Or maybe my potting soil is too dense and the roots don't get enough oxygen? Beats me.

What do people think about transplanting seedlings into 100% compost, just to give them a boost? Maybe I'll experiment.

Hulless happiness, germination damnation

A while ago I ordered some different grain seeds from Salt Spring Seeds, a heritage and heirloom seed supplier on Salt Spring Island, BC. I was looking for hulless grains in particular – grains that have naturally loose hulls that can be separated by rubbing or shaking. Most grains these days need to be hulled, which is generally done mechanically, though I'm sure there are many non-mechanical ways of accomplishing it, too (this is why I must spend some time visiting some traditional cultures). Since I'm interested in self-sufficiency, I'd like to grow grains that require a minimal energy investment. A rudimentary search for hulless barley and hulless oats (the only hulless grains I've yet discovered) led me to the catalog for Salt Spring Seeds, so I ordered from there.

I got the seeds a couple days ago, along with golden flax and Indian Blue corn I'd also ordered. It wasn't a new moon recently – rather, quite the opposite – but it's getting late in the season, so I thought I'd forgo the cosmic calendar this once and sow seeds anyway. Meta also thought it would be nice for some morning glories to swallow the backyard's ramshackle fencing. So I sowed.

It seems I haven't been doing a very good job getting my tomatoes and sweet peppers to germinate. In case you were wondering, none have germinated yet, and it's been several weeks for some of them. I don't know why I thought it would be okay for my ungerminated tomatoes and peppers to spend their nights at or below 10ºC. I guess I forgot to read the instructions. I read some guidelines today, which clearly state that peppers germinate best between 24ºC and 29ºC (at least above 18ºC) and that tomatoes germinate best between 21ºC and 27ºC (and never below 10ºC). Maybe that's why most greenhouses have heaters, hey? Yet the concept still seems kind of wrong to me. :) I suppose I should really just stop trying to grow tropical vegetables in Toronto.

So I sowed the last of my pepper seeds and a bunch more tomato and groundcherry seeds, and this time I've brought them inside to germinate. One of the articles I read suggests putting the trays on top of the fridge. I think I'll try that and see how it goes.