My harvest, August 2008
Can you believe how late my harvest is?! We ate our first pears almost before we ate our first tomatoes. Sheesh. It's been really wet this spring - great for the peas, IF I had bothered to plant any because there's all these mammals out there at night nibbling them shoots down to the ground, so why waste the effort, right? and ditto for the beans, cabbage, carrots, and lettuce... Still, there's FINALLY stuff ripening.
This is where it all begins: on the movable shelf near the ceiling in my kitchen. My husband wired it so it plugs into the wall, instead of a light switch, and I have the light on a timer. Currently, because all the seedlings are busy sulking in the it's-too-cold-no-it's-too-wet-aaah-that's-nice-heat-oh-noes-it's-too-cold-again! weather, I have my houseplants up there. The previous picture demonstrates just how much room we have on our kitchen table in the springtime, when the seedlings are too tall for the shelf (even if I move it down a few notches), but it's not time to plant them out yet. (No idea what the middle-left plant is. Anyone here have a clue? The one on the right is ginger - supermarket ginger. Left is your ubiquitous spider plant, and middle-right is an angel-wing begonia.)
I beat the human potato thieves to my community garden this year! Yay, Elfie! (Last year, someone dug up all of my Russian Blues and Pinks. Let's not understate this: I was pissed off.) This year, I planted Yukon Golds, because that's what suddenly sprouted on my kitchen counter in April. Alas, this pile of spuds is ALL of my harvest from the community garden - five hills. I already dug up and ate the sixth. I planted my potatoes on either side of my corn patch. Most people think potatoes don't play well with others in the garden, but they work so well with corn. Corn is a heavy nitrogen feeder, and potatoes prefer nitrogen-poor soil. AND - they pretty much ripen at the same time, so you can start checking your corn silks closely as soon as you notice the potato vines dying back. I planted Peaches & Cream corn - a hybrid, I know, but my Stowell Sweet seeds were 3 years old, the Luther Hill variety is very short, and that makes it REALLY attractive to raccoons, and I didn't bother ordering anything online since I have a zillion ageing seeds in my stash I would like to use up. I did plant Pink Popcorn heirloom corn, but you're supposed to let the cobs dry out on the stalks, as it's POPCORN. So no pictures of that. Yummy, fresh-picked corn for supper tonight!
Oh, and I should mention that I also grow ROCKS. They're about the same size as those potatoes.
I also grow pears in my back yard. No idea what kind of pear tree it is: it's a curbside rescue. I'm the original owner of my house; the original neighbours planted a pear tree. The third set of neighbours to own that house dug up the pear tree, and put it on the curb on garbage day. (Er... they had a lot to learn about owning a house: everything from how to remove the windows for cleaning to sorting garbage for curbside recycling. You can always tell the apartment dwellers and never-left-the-nest-until-marriage people from the suburbanites.)
I'm SO HAPPY we have an excellent crop this year. Yes, the pears are spotty: the tree will have to be sprayed with dormant oil next spring , there's no avoiding it. Rust is endemic in my neighbourhood. Yes, the pears range from large to small and some are weird shapes; the spring was cold, overcast, and wet for most of May and into June, so the pollinators on patrol were few and far between. Still, I'm SO HAPPY! Because another neighbour planted a pear tree next door, then DUG IT UP AND MOVED 100km away! But the same year, the town planted a pear tree in the arboretum at the end of my street - and THIS YEAR, they bloomed at the SAME TIME! YAY! (Ahem. There is no comparison: pears from the back yard ruin you for store-bought, forevermore.) The scabby-looking brown spots are chafe marks, actually. They don't affect the edibility of the fruit. The black "mole" spots are rust and insect damage - we cut those parts out and eat around them. I'm not giving any of these fruits to the food bank this year because of it. And yes, put some unripe pears in a paper bag with one apple, and a few days later, you have ripened pears. Apples release ethylene gas (I think it's ethylene), which triggers ripening and rot in other fruits. (This is why you never store apples with oranges.) When fruits are transported over great distances, they are picked unripe, and are ripened with bursts of ethylene gas as they reach their distribution centre. Incidentally, pears that ripen on the tree aren't as good as ones that are plucked and ripened in a bag: they're mushier, grainier, and not as sweet. Anyone here know what that is?
Aside from one other jalapeno and a handful of Little Blues, this is my entire pepper crop to date. COLD. WET. WEATHER. The Purple Beauty is my first of good size ever - now I know what I've done right: WORM CASTINGS. The Little Blue is a hybrid plant, just something cute I thought I'd try. I don't have any other pepper seeds in my stash, so I had to buy those. The Jalapeno and California Wonder were freebies from the community garden I shoe-horned into my plot as the solstice neared. I have a few other Jalapenos, and a couple more golf-ball-sized CaliWonders on the plants, but really, this year is a bust for the entire Solanum family.
The onions went in too close to solstice (long-day) to really bulb out properly. They're plain white. Aside from one Black Sea Man (about the size of a Brandywine, and the colour of the Nyagous), and three Black Cherry tomatoes (colour of the Nyagous), this is my grand total of picked tomatoes. The Hat-Waiting-to-Happen Woodchuck helped himself to my community garden Nyagouses, and I told my kids to pick what wasn't already eaten. (They took the biggest ones - they're learning how to tell when a tomato is big enough to ripen off the vine, and I thought they hadn't listened and watched these last 5 years, oh, how I love them!) The Yellow Plums started out as "Ivory Egg", but cross-pollinated, and I thought I'd save the seeds and see what it turned into finally. It looks like it's going to stabilize as a Yellow Plum.
I have a couple of Japanese eggplant plants in the garden at home - one thumb-sized fruit on one of them. That's it. I have a box of potatoes back there as well - grown in a box instead of in the ground because my garden at home is hemmed in on 3 sides with a birch, the pear, and the neighbour's maple. This is my last year growing anything in the ground, I think. An interesting potato experiment: the ones at home are shade-grown under the pear tree, in a box above ground, and covered in ashes from our brazier (mostly pine). We'll see what difference that makes compared to the community garden potatoes grown in the ground in compost next to the corn. :-)
Thanks for letting me share your gardens this year. I've been living vicariously through you all. And I can't fax anyone a tomato, sorry. I have none to spare. I can email you plenty of pears, though.
Cross-posted to
organic_garden.
This is where it all begins: on the movable shelf near the ceiling in my kitchen. My husband wired it so it plugs into the wall, instead of a light switch, and I have the light on a timer. Currently, because all the seedlings are busy sulking in the it's-too-cold-no-it's-too-wet-aaah-that's-nice-heat-oh-noes-it's-too-cold-again! weather, I have my houseplants up there. The previous picture demonstrates just how much room we have on our kitchen table in the springtime, when the seedlings are too tall for the shelf (even if I move it down a few notches), but it's not time to plant them out yet. (No idea what the middle-left plant is. Anyone here have a clue? The one on the right is ginger - supermarket ginger. Left is your ubiquitous spider plant, and middle-right is an angel-wing begonia.)
I beat the human potato thieves to my community garden this year! Yay, Elfie! (Last year, someone dug up all of my Russian Blues and Pinks. Let's not understate this: I was pissed off.) This year, I planted Yukon Golds, because that's what suddenly sprouted on my kitchen counter in April. Alas, this pile of spuds is ALL of my harvest from the community garden - five hills. I already dug up and ate the sixth. I planted my potatoes on either side of my corn patch. Most people think potatoes don't play well with others in the garden, but they work so well with corn. Corn is a heavy nitrogen feeder, and potatoes prefer nitrogen-poor soil. AND - they pretty much ripen at the same time, so you can start checking your corn silks closely as soon as you notice the potato vines dying back. I planted Peaches & Cream corn - a hybrid, I know, but my Stowell Sweet seeds were 3 years old, the Luther Hill variety is very short, and that makes it REALLY attractive to raccoons, and I didn't bother ordering anything online since I have a zillion ageing seeds in my stash I would like to use up. I did plant Pink Popcorn heirloom corn, but you're supposed to let the cobs dry out on the stalks, as it's POPCORN. So no pictures of that. Yummy, fresh-picked corn for supper tonight!
Oh, and I should mention that I also grow ROCKS. They're about the same size as those potatoes.
I also grow pears in my back yard. No idea what kind of pear tree it is: it's a curbside rescue. I'm the original owner of my house; the original neighbours planted a pear tree. The third set of neighbours to own that house dug up the pear tree, and put it on the curb on garbage day. (Er... they had a lot to learn about owning a house: everything from how to remove the windows for cleaning to sorting garbage for curbside recycling. You can always tell the apartment dwellers and never-left-the-nest-until-marriage people from the suburbanites.)
I'm SO HAPPY we have an excellent crop this year. Yes, the pears are spotty: the tree will have to be sprayed with dormant oil next spring , there's no avoiding it. Rust is endemic in my neighbourhood. Yes, the pears range from large to small and some are weird shapes; the spring was cold, overcast, and wet for most of May and into June, so the pollinators on patrol were few and far between. Still, I'm SO HAPPY! Because another neighbour planted a pear tree next door, then DUG IT UP AND MOVED 100km away! But the same year, the town planted a pear tree in the arboretum at the end of my street - and THIS YEAR, they bloomed at the SAME TIME! YAY! (Ahem. There is no comparison: pears from the back yard ruin you for store-bought, forevermore.) The scabby-looking brown spots are chafe marks, actually. They don't affect the edibility of the fruit. The black "mole" spots are rust and insect damage - we cut those parts out and eat around them. I'm not giving any of these fruits to the food bank this year because of it. And yes, put some unripe pears in a paper bag with one apple, and a few days later, you have ripened pears. Apples release ethylene gas (I think it's ethylene), which triggers ripening and rot in other fruits. (This is why you never store apples with oranges.) When fruits are transported over great distances, they are picked unripe, and are ripened with bursts of ethylene gas as they reach their distribution centre. Incidentally, pears that ripen on the tree aren't as good as ones that are plucked and ripened in a bag: they're mushier, grainier, and not as sweet. Anyone here know what that is?
Aside from one other jalapeno and a handful of Little Blues, this is my entire pepper crop to date. COLD. WET. WEATHER. The Purple Beauty is my first of good size ever - now I know what I've done right: WORM CASTINGS. The Little Blue is a hybrid plant, just something cute I thought I'd try. I don't have any other pepper seeds in my stash, so I had to buy those. The Jalapeno and California Wonder were freebies from the community garden I shoe-horned into my plot as the solstice neared. I have a few other Jalapenos, and a couple more golf-ball-sized CaliWonders on the plants, but really, this year is a bust for the entire Solanum family.
The onions went in too close to solstice (long-day) to really bulb out properly. They're plain white. Aside from one Black Sea Man (about the size of a Brandywine, and the colour of the Nyagous), and three Black Cherry tomatoes (colour of the Nyagous), this is my grand total of picked tomatoes. The Hat-Waiting-to-Happen Woodchuck helped himself to my community garden Nyagouses, and I told my kids to pick what wasn't already eaten. (They took the biggest ones - they're learning how to tell when a tomato is big enough to ripen off the vine, and I thought they hadn't listened and watched these last 5 years, oh, how I love them!) The Yellow Plums started out as "Ivory Egg", but cross-pollinated, and I thought I'd save the seeds and see what it turned into finally. It looks like it's going to stabilize as a Yellow Plum.
I have a couple of Japanese eggplant plants in the garden at home - one thumb-sized fruit on one of them. That's it. I have a box of potatoes back there as well - grown in a box instead of in the ground because my garden at home is hemmed in on 3 sides with a birch, the pear, and the neighbour's maple. This is my last year growing anything in the ground, I think. An interesting potato experiment: the ones at home are shade-grown under the pear tree, in a box above ground, and covered in ashes from our brazier (mostly pine). We'll see what difference that makes compared to the community garden potatoes grown in the ground in compost next to the corn. :-)
Thanks for letting me share your gardens this year. I've been living vicariously through you all. And I can't fax anyone a tomato, sorry. I have none to spare. I can email you plenty of pears, though.
Cross-posted to
organic_garden.