Harvest 2010... so far

I have been keeping diligent track of the harvest, weighing and recording as I bring things in. Well, I'm not sure "harvest" is the right word. It seems a little pretentious for our wee little veggie garden. In any case, the totals are in, so far. There's still carrots and beets that will stay in the ground for a while, zucchini and tomatoes still coming, and bush beans, I hope. But so far, we have the equivalent of... drumroll please... $55 in vegetables and $80 in fruit.

For a $200 setup cost, it's kind of a dismal return, and I can't count the $80 in fruit against that cost because the trees were already there.

The most cost-effective crop has been lettuce. Go figure. With three successive plantings I've managed to keep us in lettuce and mesculuns continuously since the first picking in mid-June, and have even given some away. Next to lettuce, zucchini, potatoes, broccoli, sweet pepper, and snap peas have all saved us between $3 and $5 at the grocery store. Eek, that sounds so sad. But you know, I'm pretty sure I can harvest a lot more of everything next year. Maybe $10-15 worth for each, and that would really add up.

Don't get me wrong, the real purpose of the veggie garden is not actually to save money, although that would be pretty cool, but to eat lots of healthy foods grown locally, and well, for fun. I want to keep track of the economics of it to have a realistic view of vegetable gardening. I didn't want to be just an idealistic foodie, and it helps to put things in perspective to know that I spent more money than I saved on the garden this summer. With all the labour involved in addition to the cost, what on earth is the point? The point is food security, and learning basic skills for sustenance, and because I love it.

Book Review: "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"

I promised myself I'd wait until I'd finished reading this book to blab about it on the blog, which took all my will power, then I finished it last week and forgot. The sub-title of the book is "a year of food life", which it really is. A year of food life written by Barbara Kingsolver both an excellent author (of reputed fiction fame, just Google her), and farm-dweller. She and her husband and two daughters move to the farm in Virginia that they've owned for years and rented out, but always planned to leave Arizona and settle there permanently. Then they do, and pledge to live off of what they can grow on their farm or buy locally for a year. They did this around the same time as the 100-mile diet people in Vancouver, but were less militant about the rules. (Here is where I admit I haven't read The 100-Mile Diet, but Barbara Kingsolver makes the comparison herself in her book). The narrative rolls through the seasons from April to April and is interspersed with factual info a la The Omnivore's Dilemma (which I did read and loved although found it a bit dense and longer than it needed to be), and anecdotes, recipes and meal plans. You learn about the younger daughter's egg business and how she decides to also sell the chickens for meat, "but only the mean ones" when she calculates how long it will take her to save for a horse only selling eggs. You learn about turkey sex through the author's project to breed turkeys naturally which astonishingly, is an art almost extinct in the US, and the instincts for it are actually bred out of most turkeys!

Wow that was all one big paragraph. Deep breath. Since the European Earwig's Rampage of Destruction, I have not felt discouraged nor felt my energy for the garden waning, but this book gave me a jolt of inspiration I didn't know I could use. If it's possible to be more into the garden than I was before, well I am. Thanks Barbara Kingsolver. I have forgotten all the quotes I was going to write out in this blog for you, so you'll just have to take my word for it and read this book!

Harvest Monday

Every Monday Daphne's Dandelions hosts Harvest Monday on her blog where she posts links to blogs of other gardeners who sent in their Monday harvest posts to her.

We got back from a weekend away on Monday afternoon, and after a patrol of the garden I had Big News and a harvest of a salad for my lunch today.

The Big News is that the mystery of the rotting zucchinis is solved. It was blossom rot that was causing them to ALL rot at a certain size. Thanks to the advice of a friendly farmer I talk with through work, I tried plucking off the blossoms from the ends of the zucchinis, and bada-bing bada-boom, suddenly the zucchinis have doubled in size and are not rotting at all!

And the harvest. Lots of lettuces, three kinds of heirloom tomato (Black Cherry, Marmande, and Peace Vine), coreless nantes carrots, gypsy sweet pepper and broccoli, I had my lunch today. A confession: I don't like the taste of all those mesculus. I think next year I will grow plain-flavoured ones and some arugula and maybe that's it. I'd like a red lettuce too for interesting colour. Any thoughts on a good one?

Letting it all go to seed

I decided to let one of the broccoli crowns go to seed. Just to see what would happen. Turns out the bees love it!

Otherwise things are a little quiet around here at the moment. The beets and carrots are still in the ground, and the tomatoes are ripening. The broccoli is shooting out little florets from the sides of the plants where I've already harvested the crowns, and the third planting of lettuce continues to give us as much salad greens as we want.

The zucchini continues to rot as soon as it gets about six inches long. Matt though the problem was that they were not getting pollinated, but someone else told me today that it might be that the flower that's still stuck on the end is causing the rot and suggested I pluck off the flowers. Well I tried that today and we'll see how it goes.

Oh, and I dumped out the big coffee sack of red chieftain potatoes and only got about 2.5 lb. (The picture above is from May 31) Perhaps I was too early in harvesting, but I wanted some new potatoes and it was difficult to pick out just a few. The bag ripped and dumped dirt all over the patio, so I just dumped it all into a wheelbarrow (well, shoveled it because the bag disintegrated). Oh and these potatoes are the most creamy and delicious I have ever tasted. Definitely growing them again next year, although maybe I will do some in the ground too if I can find a sunny spot.

The Case of the Jalapenos without Spice

I harvested the first jalapeno pepper a few days ago and used it in a delicious couscous salad along with chives and parsley from the garden (and a few other bought veggies). Much to my surprise, the jalapeno has no spice. Zero. Not even a hare. What's with that? Is it the seeds, or the growing conditions? How does one grow spicier peppers? You'll see in the photo here that there are more jalapenos to come, and the yellow peppers are gypsy sweet peppers. They should taste like the bell peppers we're used to, but just have a different shape.

In other news I trellised the cucumber in a pot because I read that they produce better when trellised. And I have to say, "bush" cucumber or pea for that matter, is a total misnomer. They should be called "short", because you still need to trellis them, especially the peas, which I didn't realize until too late.

The first of the tomatoes are ripening - the ones in the sunny spot. After my last post I did a major prune on the tomatoes, thanks to Christine's encouragement and link to a video on how to do it. They look rather naked now, but I think it's what they needed. I'm already plotting how I'll do things differently with the tomatoes next year.

Elsewhere in the garden, the third planting of lettuce has been picked twice now, and there is one broccoli crown left, with little shoots sprouting on the plants where I already cut the crown. The zucchinis are rotting, which I think must be due to lack of sun. I've started watering them less so we'll see. Beets are actually looking okay after a rough start, and the carrots are fantastic (we've eaten a few that I've thinned). I planted a third try to spinach and a cat or racoon already dug up the patch and pooped in it. Maybe some will survive.

I am reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle right now and am totally absorbed in it. Book review to come!

The case of the mysteriously different tomato plants

I just watched the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency BBC show on the plane. What fun stories with a serious thread, and really go the spirit of the books. So in this post I am a garden detective. I'm not the No. 1 though, and I have few leads in the case of the mysteriously different tomato plants.

I started five varieties of heritage tomatoes from seed. Planted one of each in a pot for the patio that gets a lot of sun. Then, having run out of space of the patio, planted one of each in the back garden bed also. I know that tomatoes need a lot of sun, and that this garden bed gets about 6 hours a day, some filtered through tree leaves, so unlikely to be enough for tomatoes. but I thought it would be a good idea to try the experiment and see what I could learn. At this stage there are more questions than answers. The top picture is the tomatoes in the not-so-sunny garden bed, and below are the tomatoes in pots on the patio. Garden claw for scale. What you can't see in the pictures is that the fruits on the patio plants are more advanced than those in the bed. But the plants in the bed are huge, like really really huge. And they are huger today than when I took this photo 5 days ago. They just keep growing while the plants on the patio basically stopped growing weeks ago. None of the fruits are getting red yet. I can't really compare how things turned out until the summer is over and there are harvests to compare, but at this point there are so many questions about the factors that are making these plants grow so differently. And perhaps the most important question at the moment is do I start pinching off all the new growth on the huge plants so they can focus on growing the fruit? Seriously, these plans are growing inches a day it seems, and producing more and more flowers. Help? Thoughts? Advice? Leads?

Broccoli salad and plans for plum jam

Now things are getting to be really a lot of fun. I feel like I've actually succeeded in having a vegetable garden that produces some real food, and it is so rewarding. Sure there are many, many failures, but we have recently picked and eaten huge, delicious broccoli as well as green beans. And there's a lot more broccoli to come.

Green beans from the little white pot (planted another bunch in the garden, and will see if they have time to fruit before the summer is over)

Can you believe it? Real broccoli...

That I used to make this salad from the "Simply in Season" cookbook.

And now to the fruit trees that I can't take total credit for, but we did do some major pruning jobs on these old, neglected trees. I did two big batches of dehydrated apples, after freezing a bunch and making some apple sauce. It's shocking how much they shrink down when dehydrated, and how easy the are to eat. All that work...

And today's task is plum jam.

Things I can't believe are growing

Some things that I thought were shoe-ins were total duds (ie spinach and radish), and others have been unexpected successes. I hope I'm not speaking too soon...

The bush cucumber on the sunny patio has two little fruits on it and lots of other flowers.

The broccoli is broccoli-ing and looks wonderful! There are 4 other plants like this. But I'm not sure when I'm supposed to pick it.

And here's the zucchini. I suppose I did expect that this would work out, but am delighted that it has none-the-less.

Apples for Pie

What to do with 22 lb of apples? First of all, I think I have figured out what they are: malus domestica (transparent apples). And get this, they're prized for apple pies and hard to find. So our Saturday morning mission was to find an apple peeler/corer/slicer that clamps to the counter. Wow does it ever work well. And the best part is, as some cross between a kitchen appliance and a handyman tool, it is likely to get the male in your house keen to participate.

We have 5 lb peeled, cored and sliced apples in the freezer now, and I don't know how much more to go. Maybe we dealt with a third or so. I'd like to dehydrate some, and maybe use some fresh for baking if it's not too hot out. I wouldn't mind canning some apple sauce, but I'm not sure it's the right apple because when I did a small test batch, I realized that a LOT of sugar has to be added to take the edge of the tartness.

The yellow plums are going to be ripe any day and we're not sure what to do with those yet. We'll eat as many fresh as we can and give some away, but I'm sure there will be more than we can eat. Any ideas?

It's a Jungle out There!

The melancholy of ending our epic sailing trip to Desolation Sound was quickly replaced by the joy of exploring a garden that had exploded into a jungle, and harvesting the ripe fruits and veggies.

On our trip, I had a few gardening-related experiences and thoughts. On a walk through Vananda on Texada Island, we encountered the most beautiful vegetable garden I have ever seen. So lush and organized, like a quilt of food to come. Apparently Texada is ideal for growing vegetables because of the lime in the soil and a warmer, dryer climate than nearby Powell River.

We had a number of books with us on the trip about the history of the places we were travelling to and through, and it's the settler history that was particularly interesting. Very few people actually live in the Desolation Sound area, but in the early 1900's and through the Depression, there were hundred or thousands of permanent residents, many people homesteading and making a living selling produce, eggs, meat, etc to logging and fishing camps, other settlers and even markets in Vancouver. There's one story of homesteaders shipping their berries to Vancouver to be made into jam.

In most cases it seems the homesteads only lasted for one generation, and there's barely a trace of them today. We scrounged around one site in particular, (Mike's Place in Melanie Cove that's described in The Curve of Time), and although we could pick out a few remaining apple trees covered in moss and on their last legs, and a few remnants of the rock terraces Mike built, we were amazed at how, in 80 years, there was virtually no trace. What hard work it must have been, and how sad I felt, to see it all but disappeared.

Back to my urban homestead, Yukon Gold potatoes that I planted in the little coffee sacks (pictured in this post) were dead when we got back. The big sack with the Red Chieftains is still going, so I wonder if the little sack got too dried out in the hot weather. Well I dumped out the sacks into a wheelbarrow and rummaged through for the potatoes. A sad little harvest, but it will do for one supper I suppose.

In the fruit tree world, we need to do a major prune on the cherry tree because they are mostly too high up to get even with our 10 foot orchard ladder. It's the only tree we didn't get around to pruning over the winter. We did a great job with the apple tree, and arrived home from the trip to find a lot of them had already dropped. So I picked them all today, and got 22 pounds. Hooray! They're a baking apple, tart and a bit of a mealy texture. I made apple sauce with a few of them yesterday, which turned out quite well. What will I do with the rest? Pie? More apple sauce? Dehydrated? Other ideas?

We didn't do any spraying of anything, wanting to see how the apples turned out on their own the first year. Many of them are blemish-free, but maybe 1 in 10 looks like this. Any ideas?

How are your gardens doing?

Off the Dirt for 19 Days

You won't hear my sordid tales of bugs and snails for a while. We are off in the Ooviloo for 19 days sailing up the coast and down again. Don't worry, the garden is being watered, and a couple of friends are looking forward to gleaning the ripe fruits and veggies while we're away (peas, lettuce, cherries, raspberries, strawberries, to name a few)

Hope your gardens are fruitful, and the sun shines and this weather gets a bit warmer (both for the plants and for swimming from the sailboat! Signing off.

June Tally: $6.75

Since there were peas, there have been more peas and more lettuce, and raspberries and strawberries for grazing. (Okay, there have been two ripe strawberries and a handful of raspberries so far, but it's a start.) Some of the radishes have been all greens and very little below the ground. Any ideas? I heard that radishes are one of the easiest things to grow, so what's going on?

Between the peas and lettuce, I'm estimating we've reaped $6.75 of harvest so far. Pretty minimal, but it's still early, and I'm a rookie.

Finally all of the veggies I started inside are out, and potting them and planting them all was quite a bit of work. There are 5 varieties of tomatoes, two plants of each; one in a pot on the patio, and the other in the garden. It's a bit of an experiment to see where they grow better, and I got tired of buying soil for pots. (Note to self, must learn how to re-use this soil for next year so I don't have to re-buy every year.) There are 6 sweet pepper plants (gypsy) and a few jalapenos. Some in pots, some in the garden. The wee little cucumber is out in a pot, and hope it gets a growth spurt soon.

Oh! And the sweet peas are climbing up their trellis and flowering. Sweet peas remind me of home and growing up. I don't know if we had them every year, but we had them a few times at least, and I really like them.

Here are some patio pictures:

Suddenly there were Peas

It seems like only days ago that I noticed the first flowers on the bush peas, then suddenly there were peas. And they totally caught me by surprise. I don't know why, but I imagined it would be weeks longer before the peas grew. How satisfying after various setbacks involving earwigs, slugs, snails, and other unsolved mysteries (like the beets germinated, but they are totally stalled out, almost no growth beyond the first set of leaves. Why?).

The peas are the second harvest (I picked two today, just for a taste), but the first was actually last week, and I didn't manage to post pictures at the time. I snipped off some lettuce, picked one radish, and some of the first borage leaves (the borage, by the way, is going great gadzooks now, happily blooming flower after flower). I put it all together into a simple yet totally satisfying salad.

Garden Aesthetics

I may not have anything to eat yet, but the garden is beautiful to look at right now. I just put down fresh mulch around the garden beds, and it's so aesthetically pleasing I can't get enough of it. There also is enough greenery now to make it actually look like a garden rather than a patch of dirt. I think I can pick some lettuce leaves and radish any time now, but the spinach was a total dud going to seed before it produced any useful leaves.


Looking at other people's gardens is perhaps even more thrilling than looking at my own, and I just had a cyber tour of Sustainable Eats garden in Seattle. Then there's Garden Therapy in Vancouver and the before and after pictures. Oh why didn't I take a before picture here when it was a mound of dirt, garbage, and the full range of invasive species?

From earwigs to slugs and snails

The European earwigs appear to be gone, and now the slugs are eating my pea leaves and the snails are eating the dahlia I bought. I am coping with slugs and snails and feel that I will pull through this latest invasion without too much of my spirit crushed. It is heartening to hear that expert gardeners also experience losses and setbacks like the dying cucumbers and pole beans that didn't come well in the modern victory garden. I made a trap for the slugs in an old yogurt container filled with yeasty water and found it dug out and overturned by my suspected feline trouble-maker. I put a ring of crushed egg shells around the dahlia and it seems to have kept the snails away last night. Either than or they didn't bother coming back because they'd already completely defoliated the thing and even nibbled on the flower.

Otherwise things in the garden are coming along, slowly with the cool weather. Lettuce should be ready to pick for a small salad soon.

I may not have mentioned yet that we have a giant walnut tree in the yard. As a result of dealing with the harvest last fall, there are cast off walnuts pretty much everywhere, being collected with leaf debris and used as mulch, or tossed in the compost and also ending up the the garden. So now we have little walnut trees popping up everwhere. I've put three in pots to grow them just as a fun experiment, but the rest I have to pull up. Check it out.

Another lovely surprise is the first borage flower today. Thanks for the plant Sonja.

Lawn Treasures

I've turned my focus to flowers this past week. The zinnias I planted outdoors over a month ago barely have their second set of leaves, but the ones I planted indoors more recently are getting huge. When the seed packet gives you the option of planting directly outdoors or starting indoors, they seem neutral on the topic, not giving you an advice one way or the other. How misleading! Oh I have much to learn.

I have poppies popping up outside (free seeds at the community garden), marigolds that survived the earwig rampage of destruction about to bloom, and then I went on a wee shopping spree at Buckerfields on the weekend. Lavender, a dahlia, status, allysum, and heliotrope (the last two for the shady patio in the back. Oh, and the sweet peas I planted ages ago are about six inches tall now, and we installed a trellis on the sunny patio for them to grow up.

But pictured below, are the tiniest, cutest little pansies that I found in the middle of the lawn, managing to flower between mowings to announce their presence. I quickly extracted them from the lawn and planted them in a flower bed. Aren't they amazing? There are two plants, and they're each about 3 inches tall and have lots of blooms.

In vegetable news, I believe I eradicated those European earwigs with my traps of beer and insecticidal spray, either that or they just finished up on their own and died or moved on. Hard to tell. They got 2 broccolis and 5 marigolds, and severely damaged all the carrots and radishes. I'm ready to put that behind me though, and think it's nearly time to plant another row of lettuce, spinach and carrots.

European earwig goes on a rampage of destruction

Oh I was supposed to have more successes than failures, right? I was supposed to have an easy, productive and rewarding first year at the garden to give me the enthusiasm to face the trials and tribulations ahead, right? Apparently the European earwig had different ideas.

It's been about a week since I first noticed something missing. Something being an entire marigold plant (a little one that I'd just planted outside after WEEKS of nurturing it under the growlight). Then the next day another one gone, and the next day another. Since I'd only planted three in that little spot, I guess I thought when they were done with those three marigolds that would be it. Nope. Then the jumped the retaining wall and started on the next two. Saturday morning we went away sailing for the long weekend, and in a last ditch effort to save the biggest and last remaining marigold, I put a toilet paper role around it. At this point I figured it was rodents chewing the plants). Well that did absolutely nothing to keep the leaf chewing at bay.



In fact, now that I know it's the European earwig (or at least it's the best match on this website), I've realized the toilet paper role actually attracted them rather than kept them away. At least it allowed me to figure out what was going on, because when I took the toilet paper roll away the dirt moved and I found these.

In the meantime, they got the carrots, broccoli and radishes, and may be responsible for some chews in the beets and spinach. They seem to have left the lettuce, peas and cilantro alone, if that's any consolation.

Oh and some neighbourhood pet left a big poop in the spinach. Where is the justice?

Well I am not going to let the European earwig get the better of me, so I have laid traps, as the helpful information from McGill University told me to do. Traps of beer. That's right. I thought that was a better first option compared to making a "bug juice" of blended earwigs and water to spray on the other earwigs.

Not all is lost, but my spirit is dampened. Has anyone dealt with these bugs before? Do you think I have it right? Are these indeed European earwigs?

Hypothesis #1: Starting seeds may not be worth it

I didn't even question my plans to get a grow light and start all my seeds indoors as part of becoming a vegetable gardener. That's until I see all these sales this time of year at the nurseries, and how cheaply you can buy a six-pack of this or that, and how much bigger these bedding plants are than the ones I've been nursing in the basement or the windowsill for weeks.

I sowed carrot, pea, lettuce, radish, spinach and beet seeds all directly outside, and that seems to make sense. But the broccoli, cabbage, peppers, tomatoes, cucumber, sage, basil, marigolds and zinnias (impulse seed buy) are all being nurtured indoors. With a little garden like mine, I only need a few of each of these veggies, and there's no way I'll use a whole seed pack. Lets say I want 4 tomato plants, well I can probably buy those at the nursery for little more than the pack of seeds would cost, they'll be bigger than the ones I've started because they're grown by the pros (or maybe fertilized like crazy?), I wouldn't have to spend the time nurturing them, and I would save on electricity use because I won't need the grow light.

So why did I assume that starting my own seeds would be better? Partly I wanted to learn how, but I also figured it would be cheaper, and didn't account for the fact that my plants would be half the size of those you can buy in the nursery. I probably also felt very clever and proud of myself for doing it all from scratch. Perhaps a little bit of ego was involved, like buying plants at the nursery is for lazy people or something. But I'm just not sure my garden is big enough to really make it worthwhile. I spent about $50 on seeds this year, didn't empty most of the packs, and I think I could buy a lot of bedding plants for that.

I'm definitely going to buy my one zucchini plant at the nursery. I've been repeatedly warned that I only need one zucchini plant or we will be drowning in them!

On the other hand, I got 5 varieties of heritage tomato seeds for Christmas, and I probably couldn't buy them as bedding plants in a nursery.

Bees and Blossoms

I had a serious thinning session on the weekend which left me dizzy but satisfied, and I've tentatively planted some of the tomatoes outside, but other than that things are just growing along.

Here are some pictures of strawberry and raspberry blossoms, and the mason bee house (and one bee in the picture)

The Cyber-Gardener

Well why wouldn't there be zillions of gardening resources on the Internet? Of course there are. And there's even an app for that.

There's a Seattle mom blogging about how she manages to supply all her family's vegetable needs from her garden from May to December, Dan from Ontario and his post on toilet paper seed mats, (this is so cool), and City Farmer in Vancouver that has been promoting urban gardening since 1978 (I am obviously not the trend setter here, but I am in good company).

And then, my heart is still palpitating from the absolute joy of discovering The Modern Victory Garden blog and their 2010 garden economics. This is exactly what I intend to do on my blog, but they actually seem to KNOW what they are doing! I haven't calmed down enough yet to be able to actually read through their absolute goldmine of information.

Back here in MY yard, I needed to make more room under the grow lights so moved some of the plants to a sunny window. Pictured here we have 4 varieties of heritage tomatoes, sweet peppers, jalapeno peppers, broccoli and two marigolds.