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Tag: vegetable gardening

Vegetable Gardening, Low-Stress Edition

You might have noticed that the world continues to be incredibly stressful even as the pandemic settles down (please please please). Personally, I’m done. I mean, I keep half an eye on the news and take action as needed, but I’m trying to be ruthless about cutting out or reframing my approach to things that don’t need me to stress about them. Take vegetable gardening. My spouse and I just celebrated our tenth anniversary of being homeowners, and we’ve been growing vegetables for most of that time (thanks to my having grown up with a dad who grew up on a farm). I’ve coddled them, I’ve researched weed control, I’ve carefully staked and pruned my tomatoes, I’ve mourned when something got hit by a pest or a blight. This year I didn’t have the energy for any of that. I asked my spouse to pick out and order whatever vegetable seedlings (baby plants) he wanted, and I would help plant them. Normally we put in some vegetable seeds as well, carrots or radishes, but that’s more my thing, not his; this year, a seed mix of local flowers got scattered willy-nilly in a bare patch. (Some went into pots, too, but for whatever reason, none of those sprouted. Not stressing.) He chose most of our usual things: tomatoes (lots), green beans, various peppers, basil. Then he added watermelon, parsley, mini sunflower, and something called a cucamelon. (Despite the name that makes it sounds like a new and trendy cross, it’s…

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Eating Seasonally

Apparently we’re all thinking about plants right now. Back to nature? Planning for the apocalypse? Both? I don’t know about you, but the pandemic has left me feeling very much adrift in time. What day of the week is it? What month is it? How many months has it been since the last time I walked out of my office building? (Answer: six months as of next weekend, although there are murmurs that we might be going back sometime before December. Dunwanna.) How many years has 2020 lasted? One thing that’s helped me reclaim a sense of time is really digging into seasonal eating – that is, eating what’s in season in my area (on the Great Lakes). My spouse and I have a smallish vegetable and herb garden, and we’ve been buying local more and more…(1) to help out our local farmers and small businesses during the pandemic, and (2) for environmental reasons, which got a boost due to (1). In spring (May-June here), we ate a lot of arugula (rocket), our favourite salad green, peppery and crisp. We grew radishes and ate those, mostly with the arugula. We got introduced to garlic scapes – like green onions except for garlic. If you’re a garlic farmer, you have to cut them off so the garlic head will get nice and big, so you might as well sell them… In early summer, there was basil (all links are to my Instagram) and mint, the beginning of the cherry tomatoes and…

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Gardening Lessons Learned: A List

Things we have learned about gardening this year (so far–there are another six to eight weeks left in the growing season here, so stay tuned): If you buy an oregano plant, put it in your garden, then start eating it and think “Hmmm, this doesn’t taste anything like the dried stuff”, chances are good it’s not oregano even though that’s what the label said. (Turns out it’s an herb called summer savory. Thank goodness it’s still an edible herb, since we ate it for weeks before cluing in…) Basil goes with eeeeverything. We have basil coming out our ears. We’ve eaten it in tomato salads, in stir-fry, on pasta, on skewers with cherry tomatoes and bocconcini (small balls of mozzarella cheese), and there’s still more in pesto form in the freezer…good thing we love the stuff! Related: once you have had fresh herbs, it’s very hard to go back. Or garden-fresh or made-from-scratch anything, really. Since my spouse and I are not actually homesteaders or even homemakers, this is a problem. (We haven’t gotten as far as canning yet, but we did just make fresh Irish soda bread, peach compote, and refrigerator pickles, and our freezer is filling up with slow-roasted tomatoes and chicken broth. We miiight be wannabe homesteaders.) Beets are prone to diseases and pests (at least ours are). But you can still eat the beets, just not the leaves…which is sad because the leaves are tasty too, as it turns out. Squirrels like cucumbers even more than…

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The Gardening Saga Goes High

(No, not that kind of high…although marijuana is now legal in Canada.) In this year’s edition of the battle with the bindweed, spouse and I decided to put in raised beds for our vegetable patch. There is now landscape fabric underneath the beds (with a hole so the worms could get through and work their magic on the soil), and fabric and mulch on the paths between the beds, and new, uncontaminated soil IN the beds to give us a head start. And all the digging and weeding will be an awful lot easier on our backs. Having the beds built in the spring meant that we got a slow start on the planting. It was too late for most things that go directly in the ground as seeds, so we only put in a few–beets, carrots, and bush beans (unlike most beans, these don’t need to grow up a pole, so they won’t shade our neighbours’ vegetable patch that is directly to the north and now two feet lower than ours). I keep meaning to try a fall crop of seeds, too, if we can get anything harvested soon enough so there’s space. (Our first frost date is somewhere around the end of October or beginning of November.) New this year, we’re trying potatoes, which are growing like mad, so that’s exciting. I’m hilling up the soil around them so they’ll be easier to harvest later, but they’re growing so fast I can barely keep up. We’ve also got…

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The Gardening Saga Resumes

If you were around these parts last year, you might remember that my spouse and I kinda gave up on our vegetable garden for a year, covering it over with landscape fabric and mulch to try to suppress the perennial weeds (bindweeds) that had overtaken it. This year we’re trying again. But we’re trying to be smarter about it. Half of the vegetable bed is just plain covered over again. The other half has been divided into a grid system invented by my spouse, with strips of fabric surrounding 1′ X 1′ squares of open soil. (Think plaid.) The fabric parts have been mulched again, and the rest of the mulch will cover the open soil. That way, there will be a strong weed barrier over much of the garden, a weaker barrier over the rest. and we should be able to keep up a little better. At least that was the plan. But due to our work schedules, we can’t do much (or any) gardening during the week, and our last three weekends have looked like this: out of town; rainy; hot as Hades. So we haven’t finished the mulching, and the bindweed has popped up again in the squares. At least the fabric is holding them back for now. Despite our neglect, most of what we’ve planted is thriving. (Thank goodness for my in-laws, who water diligently while we’re at work!) The tomatoes in particular are loving the heat. We still have some squares to fill; I’m thinking…

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7 Lessons from the Garden

What I have learned about life gardening this year: 1. Some things take a lot longer than you think; be patient. Other things happen so quickly they’ll surprise you; be ready. We planted radishes for the first time this spring. They were ready to harvest within a month, and went to flower (meaning no good for eating) just a few short weeks after that. Conversely, we waited and waited for last year’s snapdragons and this year’s wildflower seed mix. After we’d given up, both kinds of flowers emerged and were blooming by mid-June. 2. Novelty is always more exciting, but reliability is invaluable. Every year we try a few new vegetables. This year: parsnips (very few came up), beets (yum), red onions (they stopped growing while still small), snap peas (double yum), and cucumber (it died in the summer drought). Every year we also fall back on our favourites: three sizes of tomatoes, hot peppers, herbs. (And every year we keep hoping for better luck with the carrots and sweet peppers.) 3. Some things just aren’t meant to be. We’ve tried growing bell peppers several times. What we end up with are stunted, squashed bells that don’t ripen past green. (Climate? Nutrients? Dunno.) We do have luck growing hot peppers, but everything we’ve planted turns out to be VERY hot and I can’t handle more than a sliver of it. This year we bought a sweet banana pepper plant and I was excited. Turns out? Either it was wrongly labelled or…

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