Year Five - 2014

During the winter I further increased my research and garden planning. The biggest addition for spring was to be 4 raised cinder block beds, two 4' x 8' and two 4' x 17'. What I love most about the cinder blocks is that you can make them as long as you want. I also love the holes for planting herbs and flowers, but in hindsight wish I had put landscaping cloth underneath the holes as grass and weeds growing up through them is quite unsightly.  I had a landscaping company bring a dumptruck full of potting mix to fill the beds, cost was around $300 with delivery and I had some left at the end of the year. I amended the in-ground beds with some as well and built them up a bit after tilling them well. I also purchased a Mantis 25 lb tiller this spring which helped quite a lot in breaking up the weeds and loosening the soil.

Three of the four raised beds that were added to border the in-ground garden.

In January I eagerly ordered new seeds, making sure this year to only order heirloom vegetables and ordering only from companies that have taken the "Safe Seed Pledge".

I planted tomatoes, peppers and alliums (leeks, onions, shallots) in February. They grew very well, as you can see.

I purchased a 4' grow light system as well and that proved to be very useful for my seed starting.

I continued growing tomatoes and peppers in the large south-facing picture window. They do get quite leggy, but I actually like that in pepper/tomato seedlings because they will grow roots all the way up their stems. So if you replant deeply, right up to the first leaves, they will grow even more roots, and more roots = more nutrients = stronger, healthier, more productive plant.

This year I wanted to incorporate planting more fruit along with the vegetables. I decided that the cinder block bed closest to the house would be my first perennial bed. Perennial plants are those that come back every year and do not need to be replanted. I added two haskap and two blueberry bushes to this bed at one end, and twelve alpine strawberry plants at the other end. Alpine strawberries thrive in our climate, and produce prolific amounts of tiny, sweet strawberries all summer long.

Haskap or honeyberry bushes.
Borealis (left) has a spicier flavored, rounder berry.
Northblue (right) has a tarter berry but delicious
raspberry/blueberry flavor.

Alpine strawberries when first planted.

A few weeks later they flowered.

Unripened haskap berries on the bush.

Ripe, sweet, tiny strawberries

Another new thing in the garden this year is potatoes. My first time growing them and we had a decent harvest. Plus I learned a lot about growing potatoes. Growing potatoes isn't about putting away enough potatoes to last us for the winter for me, it's about having interesting and delicious organic potatoes to try. I bought my seed potatoes from Canadian Tire this year, on a whim. A box of red and a box of white were planted. 

                                                

I had no troubles with them until one day when I came home and saw this in my potato patch:

I ran inside and googled "potato beetle larvae" as this was the only potato pest I was aware of.  Images matching the ones I had taken matched up. Yuck! I spent the next couple of weeks picking them off one by one into a bucket of dish soap and water. Nasty little things and they can totally decimate your potato plants in a short amount of time. I was lucky and got them in time, my harvest was still pretty decent. I decided next year to plant in a deeper bed for a larger harvest.

This year was also the year I let myself dabble in a few more flowers. Mostly focusing on edibles and pest control, I planted marigolds and calendula in the holes all around the cinder block beds, nasturtiums in the in-ground garden.

I plant a basket or two full of petunias every spring for my Mother who passed in 2012.
She loved them and planted basket after basket full of them each spring.

I love fresh herbs. I love smelling them, nibbling on them, tossing them in a salad and cooking whenever possible with them. Basil is one of my favorites, so I grow a few kinds every year, along with dill, summer savory, thyme, parsley, rosemary, sage, marjoram, oregano, mint and cilantro.

Flat and curled parsley.

Mint

Sage

Herb garden in full swing.

Onion bed

Full garden once it was planted.

We didn't use the far bed of the in-ground garden this year.

Another first this year, Sunberries. They are an annual, and seemed to be quite tasty to the flea beetles which nibbled the heck out of them as you can see in the image to the left. The berries were unharmed though and I froze them to make a decent tasting jam. Berries are supposed to be good for cooking, but very bland when eaten raw. I can attest that this is true. A pretty plant though and was interesting to grow. It is a relative of the tomato.

Tomato patch. This would be the first year we got blight
so badly that we lost most of our tomatoes.

Red and green cabbages

Peppers

Kale

Spinach

Cherry Tomatoes

Lilac bell peppers

Costata Romanesco zucchini

Snow peas

Tomato and shallot harvest

Norstar white onions

Red Zeppelin red onions

Overall 2014 was a huge success and I learned more this year than all the other years I've been gardening combined.

 

Year Four - 2013

I really amped up my organic gardening research from the fall of 2012 to spring of 2013. One book I read was "The Vegetable Gardener's Bible" by Edward C. Smith
which highlights using raised beds and organic growing practices as well as Mel Bartholomew's "Square Foot Gardening Method". This method entails planting things in large patches instead of rows, providing room for more plants, while also preventing weed growth by grouping a number of plants closely together. This method intrigued me and if it was less work, more plants and more food than the traditional row method, then I should probably give it a try.

I found a great garden planner program at http://www.growveg.com/freetrial.aspx and downloaded it. They have a free trial for 30 days, and then it's $24 a year, but you can always use a different email address for a new free trial if you don't want to buy it. I did that a couple times, but found it so useful that I finally bought a 2 year subscription and unless I find something better I will probably keep renewing it. It's a great program with tons of information for beginners and experienced growers as well.

So after getting my free trial for this, I began planning my 2013 garden in August of 2013. Here is my final plan for the 2013 Garden:

I love this because it lets you set the varieties, shows you when to plant, what to start inside, and when to plant it out. On the square foot gardening mode (this plan does not use SFG mode), it shows how many plants you can fit in each square foot. I hadn't found that option on the program when I designed this plan, unfortunately.

We have a large south-facing window, perfect for seed starting. I started onions, shallots, scallions, leeks, tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers from seed in February. Maybe a bit too early, but live and learn. Some friends also gave us some ground cherry seedlings. Everything grew very well, the tomatoes and peppers were a bit leggy, but I bury them deep so I wasn't concerned.

Onion, leek, and shallot seedlings

Pepper plants

Ground cherries in foreground, tomatoes in background

My Mom passed away the day after American Thanksgiving in 2012. One of the things she loved most about summer was planting and enjoying flowers, especially her petunias. She grew pots and pots of these outside her house, and then her apartment every summer. It was sad that she didn't make it to another summer to grow her petunias, so I grew some for her. I bought these locally and threw them in a big pot together.

Mom's Petunias

This year a friend's dad came and tilled for us. I had him till an additional 5' on to the length of the garden. The soil has improved greatly, likely due to the 15 bags of leaf mould I had tilled in the previous fall. Lots of worms present now, hard at work. There were 8, 4' x 20' beds this year. Erin had the task of digging manure into each bed and picking out rocks while I planted. We had the idea to put the rocks in the paths, thinking they would choke out the weeds, but that didn't really work, just made the weeds harder to remove.

Northern half of the garden

You can see why this method results in very few weeds. I probably should have thinned this patch of beets a little better, but we mostly eat the greens so I wasn't that particular.

Beets

Peas

Mom's Petunias

Lettuce, I believe the variety is Lollo Rossa. I love taking pictures in the garden right after the rain.

Heinz tomatoes

These are nasturtiums. They are beautiful and edible. You can use the flowers to brighten up a salad and the leaves are very peppery and nice with other mixed greens. They also keep some pests away, so I like to plant them here and there around the garden, as well as marigolds.

This variety of zucchini is an Italian heirloom called "Costata Romanesco". They are beautiful, prolific, very tasty and best of all, they put out a large number of male blossoms. This might not excite most people, but we love our deep fried zucchini blossoms here. This variety is definitely worth growing for a number of reasons.

This is a small Lilac Bell pepper. They are supposed to be the size of a regular bell pepper, but we had a very rainy summer this year and it just wasn't hot enough for the peppers to thrive. Still, very pretty.

I will completely admit that I have a total tomato addiction. Not even so much eating them, but the smell of the plants, the different varieties and how beautiful they all are. I can't help but grow half a dozen varieties or more every year. They grew very well this summer, but the damp got to them eventually and late blight set in. We lost most every plant, only salvaging a couple tomatoes from each variety.

The tomatillos on the other hand were a smashing success. We harvested over 40 lbs of them and made a delicious salsa verde with them. Tomatillos are great to grow if you enjoy Mexican cuisine, plus they are easy to grow as well.

Another addiction I have is Calendula. This was my first year growing it and I loved how beautiful the blossoms were. They brought a lot of bees into the garden and I harvested probably 20 times as much seed from the ones I planted than there were in the original packet.

These were the only peppers that really took off this summer, banana peppers. Despite the cold and rain, they grew and grew and grew. I harvested them all summer long.

Yellow and Royal Burgundy Beans

Orange Fantasia Swiss Chard

Carrots

This was my first try with garlic. I bought some spring garlic from Vesey's. It seemed to take off okay at first but then just stopped growing and rotted in the ground. Not sure what happened, but I found out later that planting fall garlic is much more suitable to our climate.

If you haven't ever grown ground cherries, you should. They are related to tomatoes and tomatillos and they're delicious and one of my favorite snacks in the garden. They look like little golden berries, about the size of a blueberry and they grow in little "lanterns" that hang off the plant. I like them best raw, right in the garden. Not a lot of them make it out I have to admit. Those that do have made a lovely jam and I imagine would make an interesting pie. They have a bit of a pineapple-ish flavor. They grow in just about any conditions and are very prolific, as well as easy to harvest. You can gently shake the plant and any ripe ones will fall to the ground in their little "paper" lanterns, when you open them they are completely clean and pristine and don't even require washing.

  

I'm not really a huge radish fan, but I liked these. The variety is "French Breakfast", and while I doubt I'd ever have them for breakfast, they are quite mild and very tasty sliced into a nice garden salad.

Broccoli grew well, but never formed an actual head.

 

Overall, the garden was quite successful in 2013, despite a really crappy, rainy summer and some pest and disease problems. Cucumber beetles decimated all our cucumber plants, they were everywhere. Cabbage worms got the broccoli and of course, the aforementioned tomato blight. We harvested a lot of other stuff though and learned a great deal from all our successes and failures alike.