Garden July 4, 2014

Someone posted pictures of their garden on Facebook today, and I realized I hadn't done that yet this year.  So here is this year's garden.  Just slightly bigger than last years, the garden is now 20x40, or 800 square feet.

Every year I have problems with different pests.  This year it is flea beetles (which I've had in the past), and cut worms.  As a matter of fact, cut worms took down two tomato plants and one of my cabbages (and another cabbage is greatly stunted from cut worm damage).  Oh well, that's how it goes in a garden.

Aphids!!

Got up this morning and headed out to weed the garden.  For some reason I looked at one of our 2-year-old cherry trees to see if cherries were visible yet and I saw something bad.  Really bad.  The bottoms of most of the newer leaves were black.  Like dirt had been sprayed up under them.

Upon closer look, I saw that several ladybugs were present on the tree as well as ants.  And a few of the black dirt spots were developing wings - aphids!

I don't like to spray insecticides - they tend to kill of of the bugs, not just the bad ones - the spiders, ladybugs and ants can stay.  But the aphids had to go.

So I got out the best tool I could think of - my fingers.  I went branch by branch and squished as many of the little buggers as I could and then sprayed them off with my hose.  It took an hour and a half to remove the majority of the infestation.  Believe me, I have no illusions that I got rid of them all.

I literally had blood on my hands!  But aside from using insecticides, I couldn't think of what would do as thorough a job.  I just read where garlic is a good companion plant for cherry trees.  Not sure if I can still plant garlic at this late date, but I think I'll try - even if it doesn't produce, it might help keep the pests at bay.

As I went through and got rid of the aphids, I marked each branch with a bread bag tie (being careful not to damage the branches) - it was confusing not knowing which ones I'd done already and this definitely helped.

As an interesting aside, I found 3 ladybugs together - I assume the males were fighting over the female - or there was something kinky going on.

Storm Window Greenhouse

Okay, so I've had these old storm windows sitting around for a while, and some of the ones that came off the house this year will not be going back on.  My husband, in his trials to keep things tidier than I do, wanted to take them to the dump, but I insisted we keep them.  I'd love to purge stuff, but there is a saver in me (I won't use the term "hoarder," thank you very much) and an environmentalist who wants to re-use everything.  So they stayed.

Well, today I finally got around to doing something with them.  With nothing but old hardware and such from around the house, I built this:

Be kind - they are old, old windows and it needs a coat of paint, but I'm fairly proud of myself right now.  We'll see if it works!

Time to order seeds

For those of you who are thinking of planting a garden this summer, and wanting to get special seeds from special sources, now is the time to sit down with a catalogue or the Internet and do your ordering!

It's really hard to think of such things when there are two feet of snow on the ground and it is currently falling, but it is a nice ritual to sit down and plan out the garden with the hope of spring eventually coming.

I have used the Heritage Harvest Seed Company in the past because they are from Winnipeg and surely, if it grows near Winnipeg, it will grow where I am (and I'm Canadian and it's a Canadian company), but there are lots of great organic providers out there.  A search on the Internet will find someone who has the types of plants you want for the zone in which you live.

You might want to sit down and think of what plants you want and where they are going to go - remember that the tall plants shouldn't block out the smaller ones.  Lettuce needs less sunlight than many other plants.  And Carrots like Tomatoes - the name of a great book about companion planting.

Good luck.

If anyone out there is reading this and lives in my area (Central Alberta), does anyone need help planning their garden?  Or have questions about anything?  I'm not huge expert, but I've been doing it for a few years and would really like to encourage people to grow their own food.

Tomatoes!!!!!

As I mentioned on my other blog (Renaissance Woman) yesterday, I've been feeling rather lackadaisical lately.  I think I've been busy with a lot of things, uninspired and just feeling like the world was rushing past at an alarming rate (still am feeling that, actually), so I just haven't felt inspired to blog.  I barely felt inspired to garden, which is strange for me.

This year, instead of planting the upwards of 100 tomato plants that I've done in the past, I planted about 40.  I paid very little attention to them, sprayed with copper spray (which helps prevent blight) only 2 or 3 times all summer when I should have probably been doing it every 10 days or two weeks, and only trimmed the plants occasionally.  I really let the garden do it's own thing - with the exception of a few concentrated days of weeding mid-summer.  I didn't water very often because we had some rain and I just wasn't into it.  And when I did water, I'm ashamed to say I didn't take it out of the rain barrel, but used the sprinkler.

By all accounts, I should have had overgrown plants with very few tomatoes, blossom end rot and blight.  They were kind of overgrown, but no blossom end rot (which is caused by inconsistent watering) at all and very little blight (a few, but so far, not too bad.  I could still end up with a lot of blight - a couple of years ago most of my tomato crop to blight after they were all picked.  I estimated about 200 pounds worth.  So I'm not counting that out yet, but I do have a few tomatoes to deal with:

I'm thinking I'll have to make tomato sauce this year - and maybe green tomato pickles (although I really don't enjoy eating pickled things at all).  I've already canned about 30 jars of just tomatoes!

Any other suggestions?

We also got lots of potatoes, carrots and onions this year.  Not so many peas.  Maybe I'll blog about that one next.

Climate Change and why we should all garden!

This blog is not intended to be a political soapbox.  And this post is not intended to be political, although some people might think it is.

First off, the topic of climate change should not be political, although it seems to have become one (and I use the term "climate change" on purpose here, as opposed to "global warming", only because in some places on the planet, we are seeing a cooling instead of a warming - although the planetary mean temperature is going up, some people use colder than normal temperatures to argue against "global warming" and I don't want to be part of that silly discussion).  In my mind it isn't a matter of the "climate change supporters" opposing the "climate change deniers".  It is a simple fact that our weather is changing and becoming less predictable.  I don't think at this point that we're in the "we can't survive it" stage.  It's just more severe than it used to be.

In 2005, I lived in Calgary when we experienced the worst storm my husband had ever seen (I'm not sure I can say that since I did see a storm that spawned 20 tornadoes when I lived in Texas, but the Calgary storm was pretty nasty).  It produced what was called a "once in a hundred years" flood - many basements were flooded and the moose had to be relocated from the zoo.  Then we moved away closer to Edmonton, about 2.5 hours north.  Four summers ago the stage at the Big Valley Jamboree was torn down and one person died under it, in a storm that also saw my family huddling in the basement and a large tree land on our garage.  Two summers ago, in Millet, Alberta, (10 minutes north of us) I saw the results of a hail storm that left gardens in tatters and vinyl siding looking like the victim of a 1930s Tommygun attack.  And this past week we've all been watching in awe as Mother Nature left Southern Alberta struggling to come to terms with more water than they've ever experienced before - ALL of the animals at the zoo had to be moved and I think 75,000 people moved from their homes in Calgary alone (not to minimize it, of course, a whole lot more horrible things happened, but you can Google it - let's just say it was many times worse than 2005).  A mere 8 years after the "once in a hundred years" flood, we suddenly had a "worse than ever recorded" flood.

Climate Change is not a political subject, my friends, it is a reality.  It IS happening, whether we like it or not, and denying it's existence will not help fix it, nor will it help us deal with the consequences.

So here's where I think we can all do a little bit to secure ourselves.  If these massive weather events continue to occur, our food safety will be in jeopardy - I'd say it's already tenuous.  We will not necessarily be able to get corn from Iowa if there are droughts there.  We will not necessarily be able to get wheat from Alberta if there are massive floods.  We will not necessarily be able to get oranges from Florida if they have frost.  We need to be able to at least partially feed ourselves.

WE NEED TO GARDEN!

And we don't just need to garden so that we can sustain ourselves next winter if the power goes out and we can't get groceries for a few days.  We need to learn how to garden (and teach our children how to do so) so that if our infrastructure collapses significantly, it's become a part of our daily lives to sustain ourselves.  We are a the whim of a very large, complex transportation and economic system that is very vulnerable to major weather events - and we are having them.  Frequently.  We really need to take more responsibility for our own day to day needs so that we are not left suffering when our regular way of life isn't working anymore.

And we need to grow more food than we need - so that when our neighbours are dealing with a catastrophic event, we can help feed them.  And vice versa.  If my garden is decimated by a hail storm, I'm hoping someone a few miles away can share their food with me.  I really am hoping that.  Please share!  I'd rather have to end up composting some of my bounty because no one needed it, than not have any to give to those in need.

I'd lost perspective on all of that this year.  I haven't been as passionate about my garden - or about not using plastics, or about recycling and reducing.  But the Calgary floods brought it all back into perspective.  Although it's hard work, and sometimes it feels like everything is just ticking along status quo and the hard work isn't worth it, major disasters remind me that things are indeed changing.  That urgency I've felt to adjust my life and to get a better handle on our self-sustainability wasn't just a whim.  It's real and I need to get back to it.  Time to get back to taking care of my people and the Earth.

Late Start

Well, it's been a late start to the garden this year.  Our weather was crazy and we seemed to have gone directly from winter to summer in the matter of 2 weeks.  One year I remember planting some of my peas as early as mid-April (which, believe-you-me, is early for around here).  But this year I only got them planted on Monday (May 13).  A few peas were growing on their own, so I re-positioned them and have a few plants that are 4 or 5 inches tall at this point.  I also had 3 carrots survive in the ground over the winter (thought I got them all, but there's always a couple), so they are now in pots and I will try to get seed from them like I did with my lone second-season carrot last summer.  You see, carrots have a 2-year life cycle and only go to seed in the second year.  More information on carrots can be found at the carrot museum!  And there are about 6 onions I missed last year, too.  They are all sprouting.

I've gotten most of my plot weeded, although there is still a lot left to do.  And I did manage to plant a couple of potatoes that had very long "eyes" as well as the garlic.  So today I will go out, continue weeding, maybe thin out my raspberries, and possibly plant some lettuce.  Spinach should be planted now, too, BTW.  Although if it's too hot, neither will do terribly well.  We might have missed the lettuce/spinach window, but no harm in trying.

As a lot of you know from FB, I have extra tomato plants if anyone in my area is interested.  Most of them are heirloom, but not all.  I'll be most likely planting mine on Sunday as it seems any threat of frost is past (famous last words).  Of course, if frost does come back, we cover all our plants with old sheets, buckets and towels.  Never throw them out, they come in handy in early and late summer when frost threatens our little crops.

I'm going to be slightly less ambitious with my garden this year.  Every year I just pack the soil and the garden ends up like a jungle by the end of the summer.  This year the plan is to stick to the plants we really utilize, and not to crowd everyone.  To that end, I've planted my pumpkins in a separate area by our fence - not technically a garden, but I guess it is now.

Hope you all have a chance to go out there and get dirty.  My toenails won't be clean again until fall - so don't look at them!