...one of my favourites!

Hello everybody,

Wow, what a change in the weather. Yesterday I thought I would melt while I worked outside because it was so horridly hot. We had a good rain last night and the temperature plummeted. It is almost cold today. Well, not really cold but it almost feels like it after yesterday. I will take this weather any day.

We have a bird feeder right outside our living room window as we love to watch all the different birds.

One of my absolute favourites is the American Goldfinch. They are so beautiful with that brilliant yellow colour, on the male anyway, and their bird song is matchless.

This is not the best photo as it is quite windy here today and the feeder is swaying at bit but you can see the stunning male and his blander coloured mate.

That is all for me for today. Hope you all have a wonderful weekend and a very Happy Father's Day to all you daddies out there. Cheers.

... scapes!!!

A very good evening to you all!

The weather has been unbearably hot all day today. Thank goodness there was a good rain storm and that seems to have cleared the air and we will be able to have a comfortable night.

In the meantime, let's talk "Scapes".

I mean garlic scapes. If you decide you want to grow your own garlic and you choose to grow a hardneck variety, you will enjoy a wonderful little extra besides great heads of garlic. I mean scapes!

This is our little bed of garlic. It is doing quite well this year and it has just produced a lovely little crop of scapes.

Now there are two trains of thought about scapes. Some people think that you should just leave them on the plant. Others think that it is better to remove them. I agree with the latter. But not just to remove them for the benefit of the plant but because they are DELICIOUS!

You can eat all of the scape except the tail which is completely inedible which I am noting in this photo.

Simply cut the tail off and discard it.

I made a meat loaf for dinner tonight along with some roasted potatoes and I also roasted a nice little pile of scapes.

A light drizzle of olive oil and some salt and pepper and pop them into a hot oven of about 350F for about 10 minutes or so.

When they come out they are wonderfully crisp and almost crunchy and utterly delicious. 

There are other ways of preparing scapes but we only got one pound off all the garlic plants so we will not be able to try them all. Tonight roasted scapes, tomorrow, scape pesto. Yum. Cannot wait. Give them a try.

Thanks so much for visiting with me tonight. Have a great evening. Cheers.

... planting continued

Good evening everyone,

We have been having a little bit of a humidity heat wave the last few days. Horrible weather. Storms threatening all the time and so humid you would think you could cut the air with a knife. I hate this kind of weather. I feel exhausted just sitting still.

Well it does not really matter how I feel because there was work to be done in the garden.

Yesterday Frank cleared a large patch of ground for me on the other side of the garden from the new raised beds. We had put some veggies in this area the first year we had the garden but then the couch grass returned with a fury and it was quite a bit of work to clear it out. I am sure there is still lots of the roots in there and we will see the grass soon enough. Frank dumped in lots of well rotted horse manure (no, we do not have a horse, a friend does and we get the manure from them) and then tilled it all in well.

Today I tried to time my work to coincide with cloud cover and I planted out yet more tomatoes and lots of squash. Acorn, Delicata (this is a new variety for us), Butternut and Hubbard. I filled the entire area with them and they can send out their vines and go all over the place with no problem at all.

I have also transplanted more broccoli, kohlrabi and kale plants into cell modules. I will grow them on for about another month before I put them in the garden. Fingers crossed these ones do not get devoured like the last ones.

I had purchased a small fig plant last summer and we managed to keep it alive over the winter in the house. It is back outside and today it moved into a larger pot and I am delighted to report that there is one tiny little fig on it. No idea at all whether it will get larger and ripen so we can share it or not but one can always hope.

And lastly I transplanted all my dahlias into clay pots which I have near the front door along with some pots of herbs, namely basil, dill and parsley. I also have a pot of chives that overwintered in it's clay pot. We will not get around to doing any garden work near the house this year so the pots of dahlias and herbs are all that there is.

That is it for me for tonight. I am very thankful that the heat has gone, at least for the moment and there is wonderful cool air flooding in all through all the open windows. We will have no problem sleeping tonight. 

Thanks so much for visiting. Cheers.

... tomatoes!

Hello everybody,

We have been working away on the garden and I completely forgot to post anything this week. Sorry about that!

We have beds 3 and 4 installed and filled with soil and all planted out with tomatoes. I absolutely adore tomatoes. Not those scary plastic things that you buy in the grocery store in the dead of winter but the amazing vine ripened ones that simply taste of a hot summer day. My absolute favourite is to have a toasted tomato sandwich with the first big tomato I can get my hands on. Just love them!

So this year we planted out two raised beds of them. I reckon there is about 40 plants in there and I do still have others that we will try to sneak in here and there. The tomatoes were set in about 18" apart. When I plant them I put them in deep, right up to the first set of true leaves so a lot of the stem is underground. They will send out roots all along that stem which helps to stabilize and feed the plant. I have inter-planted with lettuce, spinach and chard down the middle of the beds. It will be up and out of there before the tomatoes really need the room.

All of them are heritage varieties and with the exception of the roma tomato called "San Marzano", all of them are new to me. I cannot wait to see what they will all be like. One thing I can tell you is that germination was absurdly slow. Some of them took close to two whole months to come up. All these seeds came from a company new to me, namely Baker Creek Seeds. I will be saving my own seed from all these varieties so I will be interested to see if they are just as slow next year. As a precaution I will start them much earlier.


The beans that I planted out last week are mostly up and growing a treat now. I did plant the "un-germinated" seed and that is not up as yet. Frank made a cover from pieces of hardware cloth as the birds just love to pluck those new little plants our of the soil. This will keep them off until the plants are a few inches high and then we will remove the cover.

We have seen a new bird around the house lately. We had to get out the bird book to see what it is and were delighted to find that it is a member of the "flycatcher" family. In fact it is an Eastern Phoebe. They have built a nest on our roof, just where two sections of roof meet and Frank says that there are three little eggs in the nest. 

One last thing. I believe on several occasions I have mentioned that we live in an area known as "The Canadian Shield". Basically what that means is we have a lot of rocks. We are getting ready to put in the next garden bed and there were a couple of rocks poking up from the ground. Frank grabbed a shovel and set to work on them. The first one came out quite easily. It was about the size of a honeydew melon. The second one as you can see from this photo was somewhat larger. It took a while to get it out of there and now we will have to haul it out of the garden as it is in the way. This of course explains the fact that everyone has a huge rock pile or two on their property as well as rock walls around everybody's land. A lot of the time you see a rock poking it's head up out of the soil and it is quite literally just like the tip of an iceberg. These two came out fairly easily but often the rocks are simply massive and you simply have to work around them. Such was the case in one of our asparagus beds. We just had to leave it there and plant around it.

Well that is it for me for tonight. Hope you all had a wonderful weekend and thanks so much for visiting with me. Cheers.

... such delicate beauty

Hello again. Once more post from me for tonight.

I worked in the garden all day today, got bed number 3 filled and planted out with 20 heirloom tomatoes.

As I was heading back and forth with my wheelbarrow of pea stone I chanced to see a butterfly drinking in the nectar from the wildflowers in the kitchen garden. 

So utterly beautiful and delicate. Had to run for the camera and get a picture before it flew away.

Thanks again for visiting with me. Cheers.

... all about beans

Hello everybody,

Hope everyone has had a wonderful weekend. The weather here was just about perfect. Sunny, not too hot and a good breeze. Lovely.

We "rented" our neighbours wonderful son Noah to give us a hand for a couple of hours yesterday. He is just a great kid.

Frank, Noah and I got two more veggie beds installed and while I weeded out the location for the next bed, Noah wheeled in barrow after barrow of the triple mix and completely filled bed #2 for me. 

And that brings me to the topic of this post. 

Beans.

I love to grow them and love to eat them. What I do not like is to plant them, find that some of them have not germinated and then have gaps in my planting. I know, picky. What can I say.

I have come up with a way to reduce the chance of that happening.

I pre-germinate the seeds before I plant them.

I simply lay the seeds on a sheet of paper toweling, cover with another sheet, and spray very thoroughly with water. I keep them in a plastic box to keep in the humidity. It usually only takes a few days for the little devils to bust out and send out a little root. Remember all this from grade school when we all grew beans in science class?

 At that point, I plant them. None of them has gone so far as to send up a shoot or seed leaves. I want them in the ground before they do that so there is no chance of sunburn on the new baby leaves.

I plant them all 4 inches apart, marking the bed off with my finger and a ruler.

Then I poke my finger down the depth of the root and gently slide then into the hole. When the entire bed is planted out I simply take my rake and tap hard all along the top of the bed. This sends soil down into each little hole and firms things up. Lastly I water the bed really well.

And then I wait.

With any luck, those little green shoots should be up within a week or so.

Well, that is it for me to tonight. Hope you have a great evening. Thanks for visiting with me. Cheers.

... starting the veggie garden

Hello everybody,

I have been struggling with the after effects of my dental surgery so have not really done tons of work this week.

However, the day I have been waiting for arrived yesterday!

Frank built the first raised bed for the veggie garden!! I was so happy.

All the veggie garden beds will be built of the same material, namely, Hemlock. The beds we have already built are nice and sturdy so I assume that the new ones will be the same. The only drawback is that the wood is SO HEAVY!

After we put the bed together I spent the remainder of the day shoveling triple mix into a wheelbarrow and lugging it into the garden. I reckon that it took about 18 barrows of soil to fill the bed. What a lot of work, but it will be completely worth it. Alas, I will have to repeat that exercise for all the remaining beds to be built.

Today I planted out the bed with parsnips, carrots and beets. I am using the "Square Foot" method. What that means is that the entire bed is planted. There are no rows. I used a ruler and measured off the bed and used my finger to make a slight indent every 4" in both directions. Then I popped in the seeds, covered them up and watered well. 

Parsnips can be difficult to germinate so I put two seeds in each hole. The carrot seed is so tiny so I am sure that there are two or three in each hole. The beets being much easier to handle got one seed per spot. Now I just keep it well watered and pray for germination. After which I need to continue to pray that whatever it was that ate all my broccoli does not get it.  :(

It looks like I may have lost a couple of the strawberry plants. I gave them all a good watering today as we have had no rain for a while but a couple plants do not look good. Time will tell. The rhubarb has bounced back really well from being transplanted. I thoroughly weeded out the beds and then mulched heavily. 

It has been unbearably hot here today so I had to abandon the garden work for the rest of the day. Still not feeling 100% and want to get back out there tomorrow.

Thanks so much for visiting. Have a great day. Cheers.