Garden to bed, sailing and garden inspired art

We are getting ready to leave for the winter.

We finished building the raised beds in the deer proof garden area, purchased some top soil and sea soil compost and filled the new beds with this mix.

Have spent some time cleaning out the summer beds and moving plants around into the new beds. Then any bare spots got sown with a green manure- a mix of field peas and buck wheat. The buck wheat may be killed off if we have frost during the winter, but the peas will keep going through to the spring. All helping to hold the soil together and protect it from the winter rains.

The buck wheat doesn't take long to get growing in the warm soil.

We managed one last sailing trip. Took the boat to the main land- to Echo Bay. Incredibly beautiful and lots of sitings of hump back whales and dolphins.
We took along lots of veges from the garden-lettuce, arugala, peas, beans, broccoli, zucchini and pac choi.

We even managed to catch the odd fish.

I have been taking inspiration from the garden this summer and have produced some garden art.

Next week we are off to Thailand where we are developing a new piece of property we are moving on to up in the mountains. I'm sure there will be lots to learn there.

Relish and drying

The end of summer ritual of making my mums relish happened a few days ago. I wish I could say that the tomatoes were from my garden. 

Unfortunately while much of the garden did great in its first year the tomatoes still look like this.

In this cool climate I am thinking there will be no ripe tomatoes with out a green house.

The relish got made and I've started harvesting seeds for next year.

I am currently drying seeds from fava beans, cilantro, field peas, arugala, pak choi, sno peas, beans and a variety of flowers.I have a corner in the house filled with various containers that contain the pods and flowers that I am drying. Every few days I go through them and sort the seeds that have dried off and separate them from the chaff. After a few more days of drying they then go into an envelope and stored for next season.

I have also been drying lemon balm and holy basil for tea. The holy basil has a lot of flowers on it but the plants didn't get very big before flowering. I'll see how that works out. Again a green house would help.
We are also trying to dry blackberries. We are using the oven for this as we don't have a food dryer.
It is a long process but seems to be working. It seems if the blackberries are frozen on a tray first then put in an oven at 140'F for 10-14 hours that will do it.
Our gas oven only goes down to 170'F. We put them in the oven for a few hours in the evening, turned the oven off over night and back on again in the morning.8 hours later the berries are almost dried.

I am making lots of notes this first season. Hopefully next year I'll know what to do different.

We have a month here before we leave for Thailand. My plans include moving plants around from nursery beds into more permanent sites.

Time seems to be running out.