A change in the weather

It's the final day of August, a day which happens to be cool, wet and dark, as if summer disappeared literally overnight.  It didn't - warmth and sunshine will be back in a couple of days - but it feels that way.  It would be a good reminder, if I hadn't started thinking along these lines a week ago, that wrap-up time is approaching for much of the annual vegetable garden.  Don't want to leave it all to be done on a couple of blustery October weekends.

The pea vines are mostly brown, yet they still carry living green branches that bear pods and peas.  They aren't as sweet and tender and perfectly shaped as they were in July, but quite edible.  The same goes for beans, especially the rattlesnake pole beans.  After two or three good weeks they seem to go from immature to overdone without passing through an appropriate stage for picking.  So we put up with beans that are a little bulgier than we prefer.  I picked off a couple of shriveled pods from these sad Schweiserreisen plants.  If the seeds germinate, I can pick the rest and put this mess to rest.

Summer squash - zucchini and papaya pear - continue to bear perfect fruit even as their leaves are going yellow (and being perforated by slugs).  It's time to tie a "do not pick" ribbon around a few specimens to ensure we have some seeds for next year.  We grow less enthusiastic about giving away our surplus.  The stem on at least one winter squash has changed colour, which probably indicates that it's done. I could put it away and get the vine chopped up now rather than later.

Onion tops fell over long ago, but as long as they are green I keep hoping the bulbs will continue to grow.  Our onions never get as big as the set package promises.  Leaving them in the ground doesn't seem to hurt them, provided they aren't been set upon by pests.  We have found edible-looking onion bulbs while turning over the garden in the spring.  Garlic tops, conversely, are standing erect and are totally devoid of green.  The whole bed will be dug up when ground dries up a bit.  Some will be replanted, but in a different location.

Great seed-bearing versions of otherwise short plants have arisen and been felled.  Garden cress, pak choy, parsnip and lettuce seeds were collected last weekend.  Radishes are still in the works, if they survive the late summer onslaught of flea beetles.  Some of the Simpson lettuce seeds have been sown with hope that there is still time to grow leaves of a useful size.


Tomatoes are finally ripening - Tigerella, quickly followed by Tribe's Tobique, with San Marzano just starting and Longkeeper stubbornly staying green.  It's no wonder it keeps the longest if it's the last to ripen.  Not a hint of blossom end rot this year.  Is it the frequent watering, the straw mulch, the compost tea, the varieties? Controlled experiments take too long.  We just have to keep doing all of the above.

Potato plants are a bit yellow, a bit holey (slugs again) and very much in the way, having overgrown all pathways adjacent to their bed.  Barry dug up one end of the bed on Sunday, so we can more easily get from one side of the large garden to the other and we now have a large bag of potatoes for eating in the near future.  The tubers seem to keep better in the ground than in the basement, so we'll hold off further excavation for a while yet.  Besides, they might still be growing.

Carrots still have lush green tops and if we're really lucky, chunky little 3-inch roots.  The entire harvest is apt to fit in a bread bag.  We have eaten a few and found they have genuine carrot flavour.  If only they would be a bit more tender (and longer!).  They can be harvested and stored in the fridge as soon as the zucchini and beans clear out of there.  Or, they can stay in the ground until I lose my patience with them for growing so slowly.  (I like the idea of the Slow Food movement, but can't claim to be a disciple.)  Carrots sown under the rattlesnake beans have no doubt died of darkness; those among the white beans live, even if their roots are not substantial.  Since they are near the edge of the garden, they are probably the best candidates to be next year's seed carrots.

The largest of the beets have been picked, a few of them pickled.  It would be nice if the little ones left behind take advantage of the space they have to grow now.  Not entirely counting on it, but it would be nice. So many of the tops have been ravaged by leaf miners, I no longer even bother trying to save the good leaves for eating.  Swiss chard is marginally better in that respect; otherwise I would pull it all now.  Hoping that leaf miners die in the fall while beets and Swiss chard keep going.  Full of wishful thinking.

(Almost) everything else, in brief:
Pears are few and small, but acceptable quality
Raspberries are picking up speed
Red bee balm looks tired but could still attract a hummingbird this week
Grapes are hanging on and ripening, despite massive defoliation by leaf hoppers
Peppers, both sweet and hot, are growing green and shiny
Watermelons haven't grown in weeks (the softball-sized one we ate was very nice, though)
Two parsnip plantings are thriving, two not so good
The dominant hue of the red clover flowers is now brown
Basil has been regrowing nicely following severe cutbacks
We have some ugly little cauliflowers.  I might have to double-dog-dare Barry to eat one.

Summer has three weeks to go, officially.  However, September 1 is like New Year's Day for me.  Back to running, back to Toastmasters and clogging, on to music lessons and longer hours at the office.  Gardening season has to wind down, regardless of the weather.

Progress notes

Today I removed from the garden:

Raspberries - still only a dozen or two per day and still extracted with care due to the bees avidly pollinating our future berries.
Pod peas and shell peas - just a handful all together, but I'm pleased they are still producing at all after a long spell of very warm weather
Scarlet runner beans - four or five only, and they are hard to spot
Rattlesnake beans - a big handful of the most delicious pole beans we've ever tried
Papaya pear squash - two perfect shiny yellow pears that went into the fridge; we ate the previous fridge ones for supper today
Zucchini - four good ones and one dark bulbous specimen that was in an awkward spot to reach.  Gave one to the neighbour.  Glad someone posted on Facebook a link to 100 ways with zucchini (if only I could find it again!)
Garlic - one bulb, because we were down to two cloves.  Digging damaged one of the cloves, so it went into the wok with the squash.
Basil - enough to add flavour to the squash, though most of it should have been picked because it's trying to flower
Spanish onions - five that weren't really ready.  These were dug up a week ago and were hanging out to dry
Swiss chard - enough for supper.  A good deep green vegetable to help me grow some new blood cells.  I'm not crazy about it on it's own - butter and red wine vinegar are a big help.

Not today, but yesterday and Wednesday, we harvested two little red tomatoes, a Tiny Tim and a Tigerella.

These are happy times.

Seedy surprise

A week ago Saturday I mentioned that a few blades of grass had been spotted in the front yard sheet mulching.  They were removed, but more followed, many more.  The same happened in the sheet mulch designated for strawberries in the back yard.  Hmmm.   The grass was appearing only in the newer areas.  The difference between the newer and older sections in the front was obvious because the first had been covered with the straw Angela gave me and the later portion had been covered with Granum straw the - colours were a little different.  The first compost I put down must have been finished, the second had viable weed seeds.  I felt a bit of a fool.

That foolish feeling went away in a hurry after I carefully pulled up a couple of blades to examine the roots (Please don't be quackgrass!) and discovered a brown shell at the bases of the stems.  Pulled up a few more, same thing.  That's when I remembered pulling apart another Granum bale a few days earlier and finding intact wheat heads (and recoiling in horror).
This changes everything.  Instead of being a poor sheet mulcher, I am suddenly a wheat farmer, looking forward to amber waves of grain on our windswept front yard.  So it wasn't long before I was rooting through that rejected bale to find those troublesome golden wheat berries.  They were distributed  around the bush beans, which are coming along nicely, and we'll see what happens.  This is awesome.

Besides the beans and volunteer wheat, radishes and garden cress planted in the sheet mulch are showing promise.  The herbs are slow, as expected, and the lettuce mysteriously disappeared overnight.  Slug?

Self-seeding is vastly more pleasant when done by some plants than others, for instance, sunflowers instead of hairy goat's beard.  We have a few sunflowers in the front garden.  Don't remember how they got there.  Maybe I planted them before realizing that sunflowers, at least the ones on our property, always face east.  We get a nice view from the house, but it's a bit rude to people passing on the sidewalk.  The soil is poor and the stalks are thin and stunted, yet they manage to produce seeds and provide a generation for the next summer.  The same happens back in the alley, where they were once planted for privacy and maybe to  show a friendly face to people in the alley - a respectable number of pet walkers and other pedestrians, as well as motorists.  These flowers self-seeded also, but into a much more nurturing environment than their relatives on the street side of the house.  Several have reached 7 feet and the tallest was measured at 9.5 feet on Friday.  Good bean poles for next summer.  Delightful for the time being.

Our other crop of volunteers is the lawn parsnips.  In 2009 we allowed a 2008 parsnip to grow into a huge flower.  It was over 5 feet tall when it blew over in a storm, sending it's seeds far and wide.  The lawn is full of them.  Not much good for eating mind you, since the ground is hard, dry clay, but they could probably produce seeds for us in a pinch.  Some of the errant seeds landed in the garden, though.  One escaped weeding and grew unfettered at the very edge, reaching down beside and then underneath the cinder block border.  It was a huge amount of work to uproot and our biggest catch of that year.

Sometimes I think the good seed surprises make up for the weeds.  Nature can be fair and balanced.

Water works

Lethbridge receives an average of 386mm of precipitation in a year, three quarters of which is rainfall, most of which falls during the growing season.  It's enough to keep our garden green, but only if we can control the timing.  Ideally, it would rain roughly once each week (overnight would be nice) with the amount gradually increasing from May to July, hold steady through August, and diminishing in September.  Ideally.

The 20x50 m lot (guessing) we occupy has its footprint divided among buildings, garden (ground we care for) and ground we don't really care for (pavement, lawn, ugly bits).  Let's say each of these is very roughly a third of the total area (still guessing).  If we can divert all the rain that falls on the buildings toward the garden, rainfall is essentially doubled.  We try.  We aren't there yet.

Two 125 gallon tanks are currently set up to collect run-off from the carport and the eastern half of the house.  There is one more tank, 220 gallons, lying under the spruce tree, waiting for a spot at the western side of the house.  Once we get this in place, we should have no need to put City water on the garden, in a typical year, unless we keep expanding the garden area.

Call us stupid - we have been filling watering cans from the tanks and carrying them around the garden.  Many trips, many hours spent.  Much of that time could have been saved with the aid of a garden hose.  The pressure created by a half-full tank at the current height is as good as the pressure we get from the municipal system. And the carport tank (right) could still be raised a few inches.  Why we haven't been doing this - no idea.

We ran out of water about a week ago.  The last substantial downpour had been July 12, after which we were gravely disappointed to discover that very little of it had been captured.  Too much accumulated crud in the filters.  So we used City water once or twice. The plants don't need to be punished for our neglect.  Thursday brought a fine afternoon thundershower and we are back in business for a couple of weeks.

  The tanks are excellent - enclosed (no mosquito incubation), filtered (not potable, but no build up of solids inside), have taps for pouring and taps with hose attachments, and aren't too hard on the eyes.  Potential problems - plastic degrades in the sun (there are cracks in some of the moving parts), filters get clogged with debris from the roofs.

Known problem with our water tanks - ecological footprint of plastic production likely is bigger than taking water from the municipal system over the useful life of the tank.  Owen Dell has a few words to say about that.  Furthermore, our outdoor water consumption (we don't water grass) is dwarfed by our indoor household consumption.  Typically, we go through about 7 cubic meters of water in a month (according to the utilities bill), for drinking, cooking, washing, showering, and flushing.  The imperial gallon equivalent is about 1500, or both of our tanks filled and emptied 6 times.  I'm fairly certain this does not happen over the course of the entire summer, let alone one month.  I have no argument with Mr. Dell's logic.  What he doesn't address is the aspect of awareness raised by local water collection and distribution.  I now happen to know that the average local rainfall is sufficient for our landscaping needs, but would not be adequate to supply our indoor needs as well.  Good thing we have the Oldman River bringing water from the mountains.  We attempt to keep our landscape watering within the limits of our local rainfall.  Otherwise, why not keep the lawn green for the sake of a beautiful neighbourhood?  As for the carbon footprint equation, I can't calculate it.  I suspect our payback period might be a little shorter than some others because our water has to be pumped 100m up from the river (I'm curious about how this is done) and that has to take a little more energy than letting it flow down from an elevated reservoir as in Vancouver.  Anyway, the tanks have been manufactured - that cost is sunk - and there are far worse ways to spend 60 pounds (or whatever) of plastic.

Tomato maintenance

If we had to choose only one food to grow for ourselves, assuming the greater food production system unchanged, it would be tomatoes.  Tomatoes exhibit the biggest difference in quality between what we can grow in our backyard and what we can buy at the grocery store or farmers' market.  This year I selected four varieties to grow from seed: Longkeeper for shelf life after harvest, Tribe's Tobique for cold hardiness, Tigerella for fresh flavour, and San Marzano for sauce.    A couple of Big Beef and Tiny Tim plants resulted from a seed swap with a friend and a yellow-fruited specimen was donate by our neighbour.  Should be 36 plants out there, almost all of which require support and pruning, in addition to the ubiquitous watering, weeding and feeding.

Aside from the Tiny Tims, which are tiny plants (I expected just the fruits to be tiny), all the tomatoes are indeterminate, meaning there is no maximum height.  The vines will grow until they are uprooted or freeze to death.  While the vines are sturdy enough to support the weight of the fruit, they have terrible balance and need strings or stakes or cages to keep them from sprawling on the ground where they are more vulnerable to pests and diseases and also take up valuable real estate.  The ideal support system seems to be a horizontal beam several feet high (maybe five feet for us) holding strings under tension (weighted?) around which the tomato vines can be trained.  We haven't tried this.  Our tomatoes have always grown up inside cages or been tied to stakes.  Placing these supports is easy enough.  Remembering to make regular rounds to make sure the plants are complying with their stated boundaries is not so easy.  They have a tendency to escape the cage rings and grow away from the stakes.  The earlier these deviations are corrected, the better.

side shoot 

The general consensus appears to be that a single vine is best.  It's not what the plants want; they constantly initiate side shoots from the axils where leaves grow out of the stem.  This gets messy very quickly because side shoots generate their own side shoots and soon you need to use calculus to figure out how many vines are in the works on one plant.  It becomes difficult to support all the vines, the plant becomes too crowded for sunlight to reach all of the leaves, and energy is diverted away from fruit production on the main vine.  One source tells me there will be more tomatoes on an unpruned plant, but they will be smaller.  I try to pinch off the shoots when they are just a couple of little leaves.  This also requires fairly regular vigilance.  I forgot to do it for the earlier transplants and now they are all over the place and I can't bring myself to cut off vines with fruit just because the plant is too bushy.


At some point during the summer, the tomatoes should be told to cease and desist.  We do this by cutting the growing tips of the vines.  We have at least a month before we start worrying about frost, and probably a few more anxious weeks of growing season after that.  There is no point putting energy into fruits that will not develop sufficiently, during the remaining time, that they will ripen off the vine.  How long does it take to grow a tomato from blossom to this state?  I don't know.  Today I'm going to tag several stems of yellow blossoms and see what has become of them by the time we hastily  uproot the plants in the face of an impending heavy frost.

A hasty inventory taken a few days ago suggested we might have over 400 tomatoes in progress.  If they all make it, I think we'll be satisfied.

Sheet mulching

Sod off!  It's not a friendly phrase.  It's not a pleasant thing to do.  Three years I ago I spent the bulk of my summer "leisure time" cutting into our front lawn, tugging countless wee sections of sod away from the ground, shaking as much soil as I could from them, and tossing them on a huge pile by the compost bin.  In spite of the enormous effort, it diminished the total grass area in front of the house by no more than  20%.  A permaculture workshop I attended last December reminded me of an alternative method of lawn destruction - sheet mulching. Worth a try.

Why destroy lawn?  Unless you have small children to run and tumble on it or are a croquet enthusiast, a lawn is just lovely green wallpaper.  That would be just fine if it required as much maintenance as actual wallpaper, but our wind-and-debris-swept, semi-arid front lawn is usually a crispy brown by the end of July, except where it is infested with dandelions, clover, hairy goat's beard, garden bellflower, black medic, and other assorted interlopers that announce to the neighbours and passersby that we neglect our grounds.  We are not willing to pour on chemical fertilizer and weed killer and huge volumes of water; the result is not attractive.  Also, before it gets to the crispy stage, lawn has to be mowed once in a while.  The more items we insert into the lawn area - raised beds, shrubs, hops-on-a-bike - the more edges we have to trim.

Sheet mulching destroys lawn by covering it up, starving the grass and weeds to death, and building a new layer of growth medium on top of it.  The ingredient list is long and exotic - blood meal, bone meal, seagrass, rice husks, stable sweepings, pine needles, sawdust, straw, to name a few.  These are suggestions; you can use different inputs depending on what is available.  I started with unfinished compost, just spread it on the lawn.  Then scattered some bone meal we happened to have and a bag of gypsum we got this year because it's suppose to help soften up clay soil.  Gave that a good watering and covered it up with corrugated cardboard.      After wetting the cardboard, I piled on finished (I thought) compost and gave that a soaking.  That compost hadn't been stirred in a while and smelled foul.  I hoped that the wind would blow directly from the west so that only we would have to smell it.  The final layer was straw, which took care of the aroma and should keep the layers underneath from drying out too fast.  We should soon have a soft, moist, rich, weed-free environment in which to grow useful plants.  Before laying down the sheet mulch layers, I dug holes and planted the new Borealis honeyberry bush and a daylily.  The cardboard was fitted carefully around them as well as the crabapple tree.  If smothering the roots of trees and shrubs is bad for them, I guess we will find out, eventually.

This week I pulled back some  straw and sprinkled a bit of topsoil in strips to plant of few seeds in a let's-see-how-this-works non-scientific experiment.  The trial seeds are lettuce, garden cress, sage, coriander, thyme, bush beans, and radishes.  Radishes will likely have a hard time because it's not far down to the cardboard layer which, while softening, is still intact.  I pulled some of the straw back over to help protect from dessication.  The seeds would germinate if they were covered more thoroughly, but I would't be able to find them.

Without waiting to see if my short-cut approach to sheet mulching is going to be successful, I expanded the front lawn project last weekend and then appropriated a portion of back yard for a new strawberry bed.  I think it's going to work.  Two blades of grass were poking up through the straw layer on the front lawn yesterday.  Maybe from the compost layer, maybe from seeds blown in.  Definitely not from the lawn.  More interesting is what appears to be a potato plant emerging.  I'm going to let that one survive as long as it can.  Further evidence that sheet mulching can work if done improperly can be seen in the sunchoke beds.  Barry set the raised bed frame on the lawn, cut cardboard to fit and inserted it directly on top of the grass,  added a layer of compost, filled with soil and poked in the tubers.  They are doing very well and the base is now soft enough that a bamboo cane can easily  be pushed down past ground level.

We are all out of finished compost now, so no more sheet mulching for a while.  Lots of other work to do....

What goes around

How many scary movie scenes have involved a malevolent plant that persecutes a hapless human by twining itself around the victim and dragging it underground, or suffocating it, or perhaps just  holding it hostage, for fun and profit?  I admit nothing comes to mind at the moment, but I know I have seen such things on screen and even once had a mildly alarming dream of that nature.  It doesn't take much imagination to come up with the plant-as-predator scenario.  If I stood still long enough in our vegetable garden, something would eventually grab onto me and hold fast.

Rattlesnake beans

It's not every plant that give me this feeling, not tomatoes, or radishes, or carrots, or beets, or any of their close relatives.  Cucurbits (squash, melon, cucumber) and legumes (peas and beans) are the more, let's say, clingy types.  Pole beans cast about for something to wind themselves around, preferably more vertical than horizontal, and then start to grow very quickly.  This spring there was still a generous supply of Rattlesnake beans saved from three years ago.  I planted them all, unsure of their viability.  The pole structure has now disappeared and the vines are just twisting around each other as they carry on above and beyond the apex of the poles.  The first part of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk was also not a product of a fertile imagination, just everyday observation.  (I give the writer credit for thinking up a giant at the top of it, though.)  The Scarlet Runner beans a couple of meters away are doing the same thing.  If only they would head toward each other and form an arch of Scarlet Snake beans.  One plant still is not with the program and I have recently had to shoo it away from the rogue dill across the path.  That would have been a trip to nowhere because of my habit of suppressing the dill, but the dill was never going to be as tall as the sunflower poles anyway.   Reliable sources suggest some pole beans will grow more than ten feet. Less reliable sources have suggested eighteen feet.  We limit the ambitions of our beans to the range of my reach for picking.

Winding one's entire body around a pole several times seems like a pretty secure way to hold oneself in place.  Peas and cucurbits opt for planned redundancy instead.  Grab early, grab often.  Peas, more than cucurbits, are also into mutual support - you grasp my tendrils, I'll grasp yours.  My preference would be that they grasp the nice chicken wire fencing that Barry installed for them, but they have other ideas.  The shell peas climbed only about three feet and now just want to be in a big thick huddle where they can hide their pods from us.  The snow peas, on the other hand, support each other in growing upward beyond their five-foot cage structures.    Maybe the circular configuration is the way to go with peas.

upwardly mobile winter squash

confounding coils of
summer squash

Given the way winter squash vines travel, through the tomato bed and across the lawn, grasping onto whatever is available as they go, I figured they might like to try climbing and so put some wire fencing in place for a few of them.  It took a while for them to get going - the sudden vertical wall may have been a bit abrupt for them - but with a bit of coaching there are now three individuals (two Uncle Dan's Dakota Desert and one unkown) that have scaled the full height of the ladder and two others (Butternut) are getting started.  The sixth in that group is a zucchini that shows no climbing tendencies.  It has a different twisting behaviour.  The comparatively tiny Blacktail watermelons are growing like fans across a wire grid on the exterior of the greenhouse and the hanging cucumber is clinging to its own tendrils in an effort to avoid sinking any lower.

Meanwhile, grape vines are reaching out at a rate that's hard to keep up with.  They tend to grow out horizontally into absolutely nothing.  It must work in their native or usual habitat, but here they have to be trained, either twisted around or tied to another vine, until they find something to hold onto.  Barry ran a length of old clothesline around the exterior of the huge greenhouse window.  It looked ideal for grasping, to me.  The grape tendrils appear to prefer roof shingles and pepper plants.  If there is a report card, I get a C in "Anticipates the needs of others".


Some alliums also have that instinct for going in circles.  Remember the garlic scapes from July 15?  The follow-up to that is they have undone themselves.  Whether I cut off the seed head or let it be, the stems unwound into the shape of the crook on a shepherd's staff.  Perennial onions develop all sorts of odd and vaguely creepy configurations, and sometimes by accident end up doing loops.  This one appears to be children coming to visit a parent.


Went to the farmers' market on Saturday morning.  Looked at the produce displays.  Got it, got it, getting it soon, getting it soon, got it.....and so on.  Came home with only sausages and baking.  Cool.  Then I got to work in the garden.  After an hour I saw that I could give the entire day to removing unwanted life from the yard (the weeds in the garden beds are largely under control).  This was disheartening, as I have been hoping to get ahead with improvements rather than playing catch-up.  So I switched focus to the positive and utilitarian aspect of this whole project and harvested everything I could.  It was early to be pulling up onions and digging for potatoes, but they are totally edible and it made me feel better.  Last night we enjoyed beet greens, mixed summer squash, and Russian potato salad with the sausages.  (Confession - the potatoes were imported because I didn't want to sacrifice any more large potatoes of the future.  But the delicious beets and dill were homegrown, as would have been the carrots had I followed the recipe properly.)

July 30 harvest