Todays harvest

Here is some of the harvest for tonight. Lots of beans and peas, and the first of the summer squash.

 

I have started to make sour dough bread. I have been making bread in a breadmaker for along time now. Recently I started to make it out of all spelt flour, as that is meant to be more healthy to eat.

That made nice bread.

But I have avoided making the even more healthy sour dough bread because,I wasn't sure it would work in the breadmaker(and I love my breadmaker).Since we returned to Canada in June, I have been playing around with making the sour dough starter and then making the bread. Everything I read suggested that making sour dough bread in a breadmaker wasn't that successful. With my first attempts,I fussed around, with the breadmaker hoping for the best. It turned out great from the start, and now I just throw the ingredients into the breadmaker as I used to for yeast bread, and have had consistently good results. I'll try and get my recipes up here for the starter and the bread.

How and why I garden

I love to eat and I love to garden, it's that simple.
I don't want to eat pesticides or herbicides, so I don't use them.
Because of the way we live I garden in four very diverse climates. In Canada(zone 4) I have a short season garden-2 1/2 months frost free if I am lucky, followed by very cold winters. In New Zealand I garden in a mild temperate climate-almost frost free all year round, and in Thailand I am gardening in a tropical climate.
Most of my garden practises are based on a permaculture approach. That is I try to be sustainable and build in lots of diversity which cushions me against crop failures and pest invasion.
My gardens aren't big, but there is always something to eat in them no matter what.
I try and eat in season, and according to the country I'm gardening in.
I have compost bins and worm farms on the go, and every now and then spend enough time in one place to even keep chickens
.
Here is the garden on June 29th a few weeks after arriving back in Canada, just weeks after the last frost of the season.

 

and here it is again today, 1 month later.

 

 

I am eating lettuces, arugula,peas-both sugar snap and sno pea,beans,summer squash,pak choi,rhubarb,basil,chives, parsley.

The lettuce and parsley self seeded from last fall,so that gave me a good start.

Beans and Peas

I've been saving the seed from these beans for a while now. They started as roquefort, a yellow variety. But it seems like they have started to cross with the purple podded variety I also have on the go.They taste great,so I'm not that worried.At least they are still a bush variety while the purple podded beans are definitely climbers.

The sno peas have started to produce before the sugar snap,which doesn't usually happen. This year though a deer go into the vege patch and chomped on the sugarsnap peas. They have bounced back, and are starting to flower again. The fence around the garden is a 3' high chicken wire fence. Obviously not a deterrent for the deer. However extensions screwed into the corner posts and fine bird netting draped around the garden to about 5' high seems to be a good deterrent. They don't seem to like the almost invisible bird netting, so stay away from it.

 

Mid summer in Canada

I am gardening in cottage country,in zone 4b. The season isn't very long, but with the long days, and the heat of summer, things grow quickly.
 Now I'm half way through the gardening season. The garden is producing well inspite of a late start to the season. A combination of getting back to Canada later than usual, and then alot of cold weather, that seemed to continue into July.
But the hot weather has kicked in, and together with the long days and lots of rain, things have gone wild in the garden.
With the cool wet weather the beginning of July, the lettuce has done especially well.

Tomatoes were a little slower, but with the recent hot weather they are catching up.

Hollyhock starting to bloom

Purple Cone Flower