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.

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.

Starting with seeds

Sending away for seeds makes me feel more like a real gardener.  For years I have listened to or casually read of the of the more experienced (and successful) vegetable growers who carefully choose their seeds from catalogues, while I continue to pick up mine at Canadian Tire.  Finally, I'm trying it their way, even if only to save the effort of going to Canadian Tire.

My aunt in Cape Breton told me that a fellow in her Gaelic class had mentioned a seed company he favours.   How can you not trust the judgment of someone with the gumption to learn Gaelic?  So I asked her to find out the name of the company and shortly thereafter put in an order to Hope Seeds in Granville Ferry, NS,  for 25 packages of seeds plus a pound of Jerusalem artichoke tubers.  The website - www.hopeseed.com - is easy to navigate and allows online orders.  Descriptions such as "slow to bolt" and "this one survived a hard frost that turned the other varieties black" are very helpful.  The price is more than I used to pay, two to three times as much in most cases, plus shipping and handling.  But let's face it, seeds are cheap, so paying three times as much still isn't that much, especially if they work better.

Some seeds were started last weekend, in the aforementioned fiber pellets:
Early Snowball cauliflower
Marketmore cucumber
Black Seeded Simpson lettuce
Jericho lettuce
King of the North sweet pepper
Costata Romanesca zucchini
Red Kuri winter squash
Tigerella tomato
Longkeeper tomato
San Marzano tomato
Borage
Black Cumin (Nigella)
Santo coriander
Sage
English thyme
Minnesota Midget musk melon
Blacktail Mountain watermelon
Ring o' Fire pepper
Tribe's Tobique tomato

Lettuce, thyme, cauliflower, zucchini, cucumber and borage are all awake and now I have to think about how to keep them happy until it's safe to put them in the ground.  Lettuce, thyme and cauliflower can suffer the slings and arrows of a southern Alberta April.  Zucchini and cucumber will have to be coddled indoors for a while and then in the greenhouse until the end of May.

It's too soon to give a full endorsement of Hope Seeds; that has to wait until we've tasted the fruits of this year's experiment (it's always a bit of an experiment).  So far, so good.