"What's Goin' On" and on

carrots with onion buffer, plus rogue dill and parsnip

Don't plant carrots and parsnips together, says The Vegetable Gardener's Bible.  These warnings don't tend to define "together" very well.  I try to put the bad companions in separate beds, but sometimes it isn't practical, so maybe I sow a row of lettuce (that great peacekeeper that is everyone's good companion) between the enemies and hope that's enough.  Both carrots and parsnips are comfortable with onions, ergo a double line of yellow onions between should stifle animosities.  This bed of carrots was sown sometime in April and has attained lush ferny tops.  In June I realized this was all I had planted for carrots (I wait to see what spaces are left after transplants and then forget) and started hunting around for small patches to sprinkle a few seeds - between tomatoes on the south edge of one of their beds and in the pea/bean/shallot bed, again placing a buffer (the carrots themselves this time) between two bad companions.  Just a few days ago I opened several packages of seeds of various varieties and ages and scattered them around the onions in the zucchini bed.  Besides these, there are a few volunteers around.  Like the parsnips, some might be in their second year.

corn and carrot flowers

Last fall I did leave one patch of tiny carrots to become this year's seed carrots.  They are huge and already flowering, dwarfing the adjacent corn stalks.  We have grown corn three times in the past and have had one or two good ears in all.  It's not the region - Taber, 50 km away, is famous for it's corn.  It has a Corn Fest in August.  I have gap-toothed corn and earwigs.  Too stingy with the fertilizer, perhaps?  Apparently unable to learn from past experience, I am again growing corn, with the seed variety that didn't work out before.  A vacant garden space with no plan for it, a box of leftover seeds (I can't just throw out perfectly good hybrid seeds) - what could be the harm?  It looks good so far, though already leaning from the high winds.

sunchokes

Sunchokes are already at shoulder height and leaning out into the pathway from one of their beds.  That group is so thick I have given up searching for weeds.  It might be just a solid block of tubers below the surface when we start digging them up.  I look forward to seeing how tall the stalks get this year.  The plants in the other bed, the former everlasting sweet pea bed, are the same height, not quite as dense.  Sweet peas keep trying to regain their place and I keep pulling off whatever growth I see.  Now that the sunchokes are getting bigger, though, the sweet peas will find they can get a lot further undetected.

raspberry thicket

As for fruits:
Haskap berries were tart and delicious and are now done for the season.  I prefer the larger berries of the short Cinderella variety and wish it would grow into a bigger bush.  It does have a rooting pot on it, so I hope to have a successful clone plant by the end of the summer.  There are also two rooting pots on the Berry Blue and one on the new Borealis.  The latter should be removed because the branch has clearly perished.
The first ripe strawberry was spotted June 15 and the first raspberry June 28.  There is a big feed of raspberries to come, if we dare enter the thorny mess that has developed.  The task becomes more intrepid when bees are pollinating flowers of the later variety of berry.  No Nanking cherries, no apples, no pears.  We don't know why.  Very sad.  The forecast for grapes is still good, as long as Barry can hold off the hordes of hoppers.

thyme and sage, and chamomile

A few small sage and thyme plants started in 2011 were uprooted from their original location and placed between the chives and walking onions last fall.  All survived the winter and are flowering now.  Some chamomile seeds have landed in the same area and will be allowed to grow as long as the flowers are not in the way; we don't want to risk stepping on bees in the pathways.  Dill is again everywhere.  I went on umbel patrol three days ago and will have to make another round today, even removing entire plants.  Cilantro self seeded itself generously last year.  It's a fragrant stroll past that bed as the leaves release an aroma from the lightest touch.  Somewhere on the interweb was a suggestion to freeze herbs in olive oil in ice cube trays.  Worth a shot.  A new herb for us this year is rosemary.  One year I started rosemary from seed and always had difficulty finding it after transplant  because it stayed so small.  This year I again started with seeds, but cleverly placed them in a large pot instead of the ground.  The two are still less than an inch tall, but they won't be accidentally weeded.  Nevertheless, we picked up a larger plant, maybe eight inches tall, at Greenhaven, to fill a container vacancy (the store was out of tomatoes and cucumbers at that point).  It's a "tender perennial".  Guess we'll find out how tender next spring.

garden cress going to seed

Miscellaneous:
Rhubarb is viable on the boulevard, though not nearly as large as it was when it lived by the water tank overflow in one of the sunniest parts of the back garden.  The two uprootings may not have helped.
Lettuce has been great, but is reaching for the sky.  More has been sown, in faint hope of tender summer leaves.  Cress bolted ages ago, yet it looks lovely leaning against the squash ladder with its tiny white flowers.  I just can't remove it yet.

giant self-seeded radishes

Radishes planted early in the front yard went straight to seed.  Those few planted among the peas in back have been fine.  A couple of volunteers dug up in the tomato bed are outstanding.





Have I covered all the edibles now?

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.

Dill patrol

When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it.  If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.  ~Author Unknown

carrots and dill weed can co-exist

Back in the spring of 2005, when we first settled this small piece of Lethbridge, we bought a package of dill seeds and planted them in the garden.  Haven't planted dill since, and every year it seems we have more.  I noticed that the plant is often referred to as dill weed, mainly to differentiate the feathery leaves from the seeds in order to achieve the desired result when cooking with dill.  Nevertheless, if dill is sprouting spontaneously along the sides of several of the raised bed, utterly uninvited, shouldn't it be considered a weed?

dill umbels (potential seeds)

The dictionary I checked offered the following definition of a weed - any undesirable or troublesome plant, especially one that grows profusely where it is not wanted.  Grows profusely - yes.  Where it is not wanted - yes.  It's not recommended as a good companion plant to carrots or tomatoes; it made a full scale invasion of the carrot patch on the left (seen after a good weeding).  Undesirable - no.  It smells good in the garden and can be put to use in the kitchen.  Also rumored to attract beneficial insects.  Troublesome - no.  The carrots are doing fine in spite of the encroaching dill.  Still, I don't want dill out-competing  the carrots for water, nutrients and light, so it is subject to some control.  Recently I pulled several plants out by the roots, or broke the stems near the ground because the roots hold so well in our concrete soil, but left many more to continue growing and supplying.  However, I am practicing some birth control to deal with the population explosion.  From now until severe cold arrives, I'll have to conduct regular patrols of the dill and pick off any umbels that have formed in order to prevent seeding.  I don't even worry that we'll have no dill next year.  There must still be many ungerminated seeds from past years, deep  in the ground, that will inevitably be brought close enough to the surface one day.  And there will be those plants which escape my notice until it's too late.  The dill patrol will carry on.


Dill is much more desirable than some of the other species growing profusely where they are not wanted.  Top five: black medic, black nightshade, yarrow, bindweed, and something from the huge Asteraceae family that I've been calling knapweed even though it turns out not to be.  They are all in reproductive mode right now and I can't keep up.  Black medic is the lowest priorty because it's already everywhere.  Yarrow also has become well established and we settle for just pulling up the flowers when they arise instead of going after the vegetative parts (we've been told that Roundup is the only way to get rid of it).  I tug at bindweed when I spot it, but it takes more patience to deal with than the others because it usually has a tight grip on a plant I want to preserve.  Nightshade is less profuse than in past years.  We might be winning that war.  The not-knapweed is my focus this year.  Obviously I let down my guard last summer, or the one before that, allowing a plant or a few to go to seed.  It's everywhere.  It grows among the densely packed parsnips, inside tomatoes' cutworm collars, next to bolting radishes that look much to similar to the hurried eye, and in the protected inner circle of a pea cage.  Next thing you know, there's a tuft of seeds on the top of it, ready to drift away with the slightest motion.  Dill patrol is a cake walk compared to this.

yarrow would be more appealing if
 not bent on world domination

black medic

not knapweed

black nightshade
pretending to be a
pole bean

The news isn't all bad.  This week's harvest included, again, snow peas, shell peas, Swiss chard, a couple of carrots, papaya pear squash, lettuce, dill, rhubarb, strawberries, and raspberries.  The garden is serving its purpose very well this summer.  The war on weeds is an investment in next summer.

Experiments in propagation

 I hacked of two branches of the Berry Blue honeyberry bush today, and didn't do a great job of it.  Ouch.  On April 25 I wrote that two rooting pots had been attached to the bush, after scraping the bark and stabbing the twig to allow roots to form more easily.  A check of the pots after nine weeks did not reveal the  dense root balls I had hoped for.  Discouraged, I closed them up and just about forgot about them, which wasn't difficult given how well they were hidden in the now dense foliage.  Today I decided to face them again.  After the warm spell we've had, it was now or never.  Never was probably a viable option.  The branches didn't seem to be suffering any adverse effects from the attachments.

 At the same time, the bush has become far too dense and it was probably to its benefit to remove the branches, an option that included the possibility of two new bushes and many more berries next summer.  Getting the pruning shears under the rooting pot to make the cut was awkward and I couldn't see what I was doing.  Hence the botched attempt above.  The second cut was very clean.  Two bad that ugly gash was further down.  My attempt to clean it up was far from successful.  What's that they say about an ounce of prevention?

 Fortunately, there is pruning sealer, a substance much like extra-firm Vaseline that is smeared all over the wound, preferably at least 1/8 inch thick.  This wound got extra.  I hope it will be okay.

That was the good branch, the one I started correctly after failing to remove the bark on my first attempt. Somehow, that first branch put out a few roots as well.  In fact, it had more roots than seen here, but they mostly dried out and broke off due to neglect.  What's left doesn't look like enough to keep the branch going, but at this point we have nothing to lose by planting it.  The stems below the new roots were scraped up a bit and coated with rooting hormone, then each plunged into a small container of very wet potting soil.  They look pretty smart so far (after a few hours).  If they look this good in three weeks, I'm declaring the mission accomplished.  In the meantime, they will sit in the partial shade of the struggling apple tree and receive my guilt-fueled coddling.

We are looking forward to the buckets of honeyberries we will be consuming in the future, but what happens when the season is over at the end of June?  Obviously, we will need to boost the strawberry crop in order to meet our growing expectations of delicious berries.  I worked on that today, too.

The back yard strawberries occupy four apparently random positions in the lawn and are now mostly surrounded by tall red clover.  We have to clip out a border now and then so we don't lose sight of them.  The plants have been thriving in this area.  Maybe it's the clover, maybe it's the relative calm - the original strawberry bed is a breezy location.  For weeks now the plants have been sending out runners into the grass and the clover.  They are unlikely to find a good place to root that way.  I really must build them a proper place to live, but for now I'm providing soil-filled potted for the offspring to stick roots into.  By the time the new bed is built, there should be at least a dozen new plants to put into it, if this scheme works.

Today's harvest included:

Schweiserreisen snow peas - many gleaned in a culling of the mess left by high winds a couple of weeks ago. The oldest pea vines had grown well beyond their extended pea cages and had been holding onto each other for support.  It wasn't enough to stand up to the wind and they all bent at their highest contact with the cages.  Most of them survived and continued to grow and blossom, but they also continued to grab on to each other, forming a dense mass and making it hard to locate the pea pods.  I got rid of a few but just couldn't snip the ones that were most healthy and productive.

Green Arrow shell peas - we can't keep up, but I believe they have good longevity in the refrigerator.  One wants the pods to be full, but not mature.  Mature peas tell the vine its work is done; we aren't in favour of that.  I've been squeezing the pods gently before picking, choosing those that can't be easily compressed.  If I do pick one that has a little extra space in it, I justify it as avoiding the risk that the peas will mature if I don't happen to pick again for two or three days.  The peas have been incredibly sweet.  I'm starting to think they are second only to tomatoes as a good reason to grow your own.

Raspberries - they are not exactly dense in the thick tangle of thorny canes I have to reach into, but it looks like that should improve.  Picking in our raspberry patch turns around the idea of "the low hanging fruit".  The low hanging fruit is the hardest to get at.  I'm quite relieved when that is all picked.  At the end of the season I'll cut down all the fruit bearing canes and maybe the growth won't be so thick next year.  Maybe.

Swiss chard - it's doing very well in the raised bed, getting the odd bit of leaf miner blight but mostly keeping ahead of it.  The other patch, under the scarlet runner bean tipi is not so good, hardly worth harvesting.  You just never know how things will turn out.

Yesterday, Barry picked a plethora of basil leaves and uprooted a bulb of garlic to make pesto.  I've worked insanely hard on this garden, and yet I sometimes feel pampered by it.

Food stuff

Tonight's supper was combined home-grown zucchini, Swiss chard and shell peas with fish and chips from the freezer aisle.  (We don't have a fish pond and our potatoes aren't ready yet.)  The zucchini was our first Costata Romanesca, a variety reputed to be tastier than the basic smooth dark green zucchini we have grown the last few years.  It was good, but I couldn't tell that it was really different from the others.  It was a bit pale, though.  The recommended size is 10-15 inches and we took it at ten.  Maybe we'll let the next one grow bigger.  There were also a couple of little deformed individuals, darker than this nice specimen and looking a bit like long balloons only half blown up.

This wasn't our first summer squash of the season, though.  On Tuesday I took a chance on a few papaya pear squashes, uncertain if they were the right size and shape, and sliced them up for the barbecue.  Completely lacking any culinary intuition, I seasoned them with thyme and sage only because it was available at the other end of the same garden bed.  They were tasty and beautiful.  Now we have a couple that have grown bigger, so we can find out if that's better.




After supper we had a small quantity of berries to enjoy.  Strawberries have been available for about two weeks now, raspberries for a couple of days.  It's not a huge amount, but a huge treat to slowly savour a small handful of these intensely flavoured fruits every evening.

Everything is growing so fast, the once-a-month photo is not enough.  The standard shot from the upstairs window was taken in the morning sun.  The camera instruction book might give me a hint for how to deal with the reflected sunlight, if I ever bother to read it.