Earthlings

"THEY LOOK LIKE THEY'RE FROM OUTER SPACE," Owen said.  "NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BE...........THEY'RE ACTUALLY KIND OF FRIGHTENING."
~ John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

unorthodox umbellifers

They are not from outer space, or from the Marianas trench. Nor are they 3D renderings of vital organs depicted in The Far Side.  To the best of my knowledge, they are parsnips, though somewhat different from the parsnips depicted on the seed package.  I had forgotten these specimens, unearthed last October, until yesterday.  It was past time to dig up any parsnips remaining in the ground, since many had sprouted a couple of inches of new green top.  Most of them were of the more conventional parsnip configuration, but there was one more with this strange configuration of multiple roots growing out of one top.  With so much surface area, these creatures are able to keep a solid grip on the ground they live in and I was lucky to have the benefit of soft spring earth on my side yesterday.  It took a little extra digging and a careful two-handed yank before I was able to view the freakish vegetable.  All of these oddities came from the same bed, where they had come of age alongside peas last summer.  Interesting.  While the difficulties of digging and cleaning multi-pronged roots are definitely drawbacks, the food is just as good and they look pretty cool.  Makes me wish there was a pageant they could be entered in. Yesterday's parsnip harvest was the second of this spring and yielded 3.8 edible kg.

surreal sunchokes

Sunchoke tubers sometimes resemble flower bulbs, sometimes a hybrid of the Pillsbury Doughboy and Pig Pen, often a sketch of multiplying yeast cells with random bloops all over the surface.  They readily detach themselves from the plants which bore them and are fairly agreeable about being removed from the soil.  No Easter egg hunt for me, thanks; I'd rather just grope about in the dirt here for tubers.  That's the fun part.  Figuring out what to do with them in the kitchen is the tough bit.  I think they could be excellent deep fried, like potato chips.  But we don't do that.                                                                                                                                                                    






Not far into the sunchoke bed, they started coming up with a generous coating of white fungus.  I haven't been able to find out what it is or whether is is safe to eat the tuber after peeling.  Ce n'est pa grave, though.  We have over 3 kg of good-looking sunchokes, and, given the culinary mystery of them, that amount should last us a while.





(This was two weeks ago.)

Intelligence from the greenhouse

It would be nice if the greenhouse were attached to the house we live in, but it doesn't work very well with the sun exposure.  It is about as far from the house as we could legally build it; not a great trek, yet not a distance either of us wants to travel when we wake in the wee hours and see a negative number on the weather app.  Solution: an extra sensor for the wireless weather station.  It tells us the temperature and relative humidity of the greenhouse (of that precise location in the greenhouse at least) while we remain in the comfort of our living room.  I could even put in on the nightstand.  It is wireless.  While I am not keen on launching a midnight rescue operation, I think it will enable me to stop worrying and go back to sleep most spring nights.  Today when I saw 25C on the display screen (the sensor speaks Fahrenheit and the receiver speaks Celsius - go figure), I headed out for an afternoon nap in the sun.

Terra firma - literally

The highs have been several degrees above 0C all week and the sun has shone on the parsnip bed.  It stood to reason, I thought, that the ground would yield sufficiently to allow me to remove a parsnip or two, even if they had to be pried out of the side of the mounded bed.  No go.  Not with an ordinary garden fork and my ordinary body weight, anyway.  Try again in March.

Desktop gardening

Late last summer I once again did my best to sketch the layout of the vegetable garden and write in what might go where the next year.  The plan has to take into account how much of everything we want to eat, what likes to grow together, and a sensible succession from year to year, ie givers follow roots follow leaves follow heavy feeders, or something like that.  It was all on one sheet of letter-size paper, and was lost to me by the end of the year.  Before I realized it was lost, though, Garden Rant tipped me off that Kitchen Gardeners International (KGI) had introduced an online garden planner.  For the low price of $25 per year, I could draw the plan onto a grid and copy it from year to year, and trust that it could always be found safely on my hard drive (or in the cloud, which is fine).  That was enough to sell it to me.  I believe there is more to it that I haven't discovered yet; that's icing on the cake (or ice on caked soil in our case.)

I measured the garden beds one afternoon last week, quite hastily on account of the deeply cold air and colder steel tape measure and the near impossibility of conducting the measurements and notations while wearing mittens.  The grid measurements are only to the nearest 10cm anyway.  The beds in the image below are, to the best of my knowledge, to scale.  The placement doesn't look quite right.  Some are more rectangular in theory than in reality.  But this is a good approximation of what I have to work with in the backyard.  There are a few bits missing, bits for which I wasn't willing to risk frostbitten fingers.  Another day.


Once the beds were all laid out, I added images of huge, awesomely perfect vegetables to them (Barry found the lost sketch.)  Is this what Farmville is like?  The hugeness was a mild shock.  The vegetable plant images come with built in personal space for each one.  Regulation personal space.  Where it shows I can fit three tomato plants into a raised bed, I am more likely to try to cram in ten of them.  Is it possible the experts at KGI know better than I do?

The planner was also kind enough to count up all the plants in the plan and tell me how many of each I will need to implement this scheme.  Next step is to compare this listing to my extensive seed inventory to determine what needs to be ordered from the seed mongers.

Gardening for shut-ins

This is nothing new.  We have sprouted alfalfa, clover, and mung beans on the kitchen counter during many winters.  We have also enjoyed a few crops of arugula grown in a dish of coir.  I meant to get some arugula going last weekend, but could not find the seeds, so instead sowed some of the cress seeds saved from last summer's garden.  So far, spindly.  But I believe they will grow leafier in good time.  This is a plant that readily bolts in the warm sun.  It should enjoy the cool climate of our living room.

Much more robust in appearance is this wheat grass.  Barry has been eating is for nutritional benefits, as well as jaw muscle development.  I'll chew on a small bunch of grass if reminded about it several times.  It isn't horrible to taste, and because it does encourage me to floss, I'd say it's a healthy addition to my diet.


This post is just to remind me that we could be growing more greens indoors in the winter.  We don't want to get all technical and hydroponic.  Just some basic substrate, water, and a window (and remembering to raise the blind before traipsing off to work in the dark morning).

Enduring onions

One day, maybe, we will learn to grow large onions, as large as promised on the packaging for sets we poke into the ground.  That is the extent of my complaints about my onions.  They grow reliably, resist diseases and pests, are edible at different stages, can be harvested with fingertip strength, and have a shelf life (bulbs only) if treated well.

The first stage of bulb curing is a day or two on the ground where they were yanked.  Why?  I have not a clue.  Still, I do this.

The next step is to give them good all around air exposure for about two weeks.  The major soil chunks should be removed at this point, gently.  In the past, I have hung them on the clothesline to cure.  I can't quite achieve all of the recommended conditions - no direct sunlight, good air flow, protection from rain, warm but not too hot - so I choose a couple of them.  Because I was leaving town for several days early in the curing period, I placed them on a wire rack in a shady corner under a narrow awning.  (The photo is indeed of curing garlic bulbs.  Pretend they are onions.)  






After peeling off the flaky outermost skins, this is what we had.  Small shiny yellow onions.  They are in a plastic bag merely for display, and perhaps weighing, purposes.  They must not be left this way.  The onions were stored in a kitchen drawer (short term) and in an open cardboard box in the (semi)cold room in the basement (longer term).











Barry just sliced an onion or two for the salad.  We have four left, in excellent condition, in the middle of January.  I no longer care if our onions are a bit short in the radius.  If they are going to keep like this, I will just plant more sets in the spring.  Problem solved.

August Saturday

In a few days I will be taking a break from gardening, not to return to it until September.  Holy smokes!  Where has the season gone?  This past week there was an overnight low of 2C.  All the things I thought I could get done "over the summer" are not done.  What on earth did I do with all that time?  I present a randomly selected and rather leisurely day of garden maintenance - yesterday.

There was little watering required Saturday morning, thanks to Barry's thorough efforts the day before.  We water everything by hand, which can take a person-hour when everything needs a soak and the tanks are running fast, longer if tank pressure is down or we have to use city water.  I watered a few of the vulnerable front yard perennials and Barry watered the containers later in the day.  Most critical right now are the three newly cut and potted haskap branches that have been working on their root balls for at least three months.

Morning is supposed to be the best time to harvest herbs for drying.  Prior to flowering is also highly recommended.  I can't arrange the latter at this point so decided to at least do the former, cutting a largish sprig of sage with one purple flower on the tip.  The leaves were washed, patted dry and spread out on two dehydrator trays.  Hours later there was almost nothing left of them.  I hope it has mitigated the odor of drying garlic from the previous two days.

The morning harvest also included a few ground cherries, a couple of zucchinis, the first ripe bunch of grapes, two ears of corn, the first raspberry of the final crop.  

Weeding has eased off lately, largely because of the lack of rainfall, I believe.  It would be nice if it is also an indication that I am winning the battle for the garden beds.  Unwanted foliage is still rampant in other areas and I try at least to nab the flower heads before they are ready for flight.  Dandelions are rare these days, but sow thistle and hairy goat's beard continue to plague me.  I pulled up purslane, grasses, pig weed, and a few undesirables that I know well by sight but can't name.  CBC Calgary recently aired some feedback to pesticide restrictions in the city from farmers who say urban weed seeds end up in crop fields and increase their herbicide usage.  This is interesting.  I try to do my part for the Coaldale area farmers, but without the use of toxins.  

Besides the noxious weeds, I also disposed of some of our abundant borage, at least the parts that appeared to be done flowering.  Where there are blossoms, there are bees, which I like immensely.  Nevertheless, any part of the plant with an aphid feedlot gets removed, nectar-producing or not.  Though we don't poison them, we also do not provide an ant-positive atmosphere.  For the most part, I am too late to prevent self seeding of borage for next year; most of the flower capsules were empty.  Unlike sow thistle and field bindweed and deadly nightshade, this is a plant with huge leaves that I will have no trouble locating and removing before it goes to seed next year.

The garden had some midday visitors, a Lethbridge friend with her mother and aunt from out of town.  They lightened our zucchini load by three and left us with two jars of home made home grown raspberry jam.  I'd say we got the better deal on that one.  For a moment I considered the danger pay factor of harvesting zucchini, but raspberries are hazardous, too.

After lunch I returned to the boulevard, where I had been breaking up some old sods to use as a base for a new bed.  The sods came from where the lawn has been replaced on the boulevard and from some parts of the back yard and have been drying in the hot sun for some time now.  They fragmented quite easily.  Not knowing (or not wanting to decide) what to do next for bed preparation, I brought some salvaged bricks from the back and continued the winding border around the elm tree then installed a short brick pathway across a strait in the bed.  We don't have enough bricks to complete the loop and I have no solution to that, other than to use plastic edging until we happen upon some more unwanted bricks.  An elderly woman cruising by with her walker told me I am a glutton for punishment, in reference to my toiling under the afternoon sun.  She may be right; I had to take some ibuprofen for a headache early this morning.  Now the headache is gone and I'm pleased with the progress I see when I look out the bedroom window, even though the project is far from complete.

While I worked on the boulevard, Barry picked most of the remaining basil, some badly slug-eaten, all past it's pre-flower prime, and prepped it for a large batch of pesto.  He used sunflower seeds for the nut component.  We grow enough sunflower seeds that we could have used our own (from last year) if only we could find an easier way to get them out of their tough shells, and before the tiny creatures get to them.

After the tools were put away, we clinked our beer glasses together and toasted the bounty of our garden.  The beer is from the store down the street.  We grow hops, but both plants are male, so no actual hops are available.  We don't grow barley, unless those volunteers from the straw bale are barley.  (We both chewed on a mouthful of the grains and decided they were gummy enough to be wheat.)  I'm not keen on adding beer-making equipment to our already over-stocked household.

The ensuing dinner included dill zucchini with garlic sauce (our zucchini, onion, dill and garlic; imported oil, rice and yogurt), potatoes (ours) with pesto (our basil, garlic, Swiss chard; imported sunflower seeds, parmensan cheese, and oil) and sour cream (imported), beet greens (ours), beet salad (our beets and onions; imported vinegar,, sugar and mustard), and corn (ours) with imported butter, plus curried lamb sausage from the Old Country Sausage Shop.  We are a long way from providing our own meat.

After dinner I meant to write and post this recap, but fell asleep instead (because of a poor sleep the night before, no due to Saturday's modest exertions).  Today is another day.  We have so far watered the works, harvested more zucchini, and sliced zucchini and garlic for drying. Barry is in construction mode, finishing a raised bed he started weeks or months ago.  I should get back to work.