Glorious garlic

This weekend I was at the Haliburton garlic festival.

It is here that the local growers have an opportunity to sell their garlic, and other produce.

 

How I grow garlic in Canada:

In the fall amend the soil with lots of compost.

Plant the individual cloves about mid October 5-6" apart, pointy end up about 2" deep.

After the first hard frost, apply some mulch to the bed to help stop heaving of the bulbs.

Next spring after the snow has melted, expect the green shoots to emerge.

Keep weeded, and watered. Harvest in the summer, after 2-3 leaves have turned brown. 

 

Red is the new yellow

My first red sunflower of the season.

Perennial sunflower reaching for the sky.

 

Hollyhock

 

Nasturtiums adding a splash of colour. The beneficials love them too. Try them on a salad to brighten it up....yummy

 

Visited my friend Bob's garden. Love the tomato trellis.

 

He has quite the squash crop on the go.

 

And here they are hiding under the leaves.

 

Abbey Gardens

Down the road aways there is something magical happening.
A 210 acre gravel pit site, has morphed into a massive garden. They call it Abbey gardens .
It is part of a robust local foods movement, whose aim is to provide local organic produce to restaurants, families and weekly customers.
I went for a wander through the gardens yesterday.

A straw bale building houses the produce for sale.

 

Lots of produce for sale inside

 

 

Garlic drying on the veranda.

 

The gardens are an abundance of vegetables and flowers, and there are signs  describing what is happening in the various areas and why.

Bush beans

 

 

Red cabbages in the pickling garden

 

Corn

 

I found myself lusting after the hoop houses and the raised beds

 

Kale

 

Poppies for a shot of colour

 

Scarlet runner beans are worth growing just for the flowers

 

This sunflower seemed too perfect to be real

 

These chickens are an older breed,that does well in cold climates

 

 

 

Abbey Gardens is a wonderful place to find inspiration, and to learn more about how to provide food for ourselves, while at the same time caring for the environment that we grow it in.

Bouquet du jour

An apple by any other name.

Yesterday there was an apple on the ground. After sampling it we decided that it was ripe, so we picked some more.
I think this tree is ready to go. It seems early to me. I thought I'd have to wait a few more weeks. I don't know which one this is. I did write down the 5 varieties we planted 2 years ago, but that was before we moved, and the book is still packed in a box somewhere. It could be a Cortland. I know one of them was.

 

I'm not sure we have enough that any will last for a pie. They sure taste good straight off the tree.

 

The tree is not very tall and the echinacea have grown right up into it. The tree was growing hard against a building, almost naturally espaliered against the wall with only a little pruning. But the weight of the apples and a few hard rainfalls seem to have given it a list away from the wall. We may have to anchor it back to the wall somehow.

I'm hoping the deer don't find the tree before we've finished harvesting.

 

 

Salad Days

I don't like to buy tomatoes, so it is always a mark of summer when we start harvesting them from the garden.We've been eating salads from the garden for a while now, but it is only in the last few weeks we harvested our first tomato, albeit a cherry tomato.
Here we have 3 different lettuces, arugula, basil,tomatoes, sno peas and the flower petals of nasturtium, bee balm and calendula.

There are some of us (not to be named), who say that a cherry tomato isn't a real tomato. A real tomato is one that you can cut thick slices off and make a sandwich with.
Today we harvested our first "real" tomato.

Now that is a real tomato!

 

Perpetual Parsley and other Herbs

Parsley is always in my garden, and I never have to plant it. Both in New Zealand and in Canada, it self seeds with abandon. Yes it is a biennial. That is, it produces leaves only the first year, then flowers the second year before dying. I find that if I let it go to seed it self seeds quite nicely. If the seedlings are in the wrong place, then in early spring it is easy to transplant them.I must have planted it originally, but now every year I have both last years plants flowering, and the new seedlings establishing themselves. The beneficial insects love the flowers.

 

I also have chives, both the regular chives with the pink flowers, and garlic chives with white flowers. Both can be divided as the clumps get bigger.

Thyme slowly spreads along the border. The bees love it when it is in flower. It also self seeds if it finds the spot to its liking. I've had it self seed abundantly in a gravel pathway.Lovely to walk on.

 

Oregano is more of a thug, spreading quickly where ever it can.

 

 

 

Not as bad as mint, which has been banished from the garden, and is growing where the lawn meets the wilderness. I have regular mint and chocolate mint.

Beebalm (bergamot) spreads its way through the garden, fighting it out with the other thugs. Red is my favourite here.

I usually grow some of my basil plants in a pot. The roots seem to enjoy the extra warmth, and I can keep them well watered and fertilised, which they appreciate.

I grow 2 kinds. Italian Basil which makes great pesto,

and Thai Basil, which I love for the flowers, and for cooking Thai food.

I keep the Italian basil picked free of flowers,so it will keep producing new leaves. The Thai basil I usually let it go to flower early on because it is so pretty.

Sometimes I'll grow a small leaf Greek basil. It forms perfect mounds of leaves, and looks like it has been trained to rounded globes. Four or five plants in a pot makes a very attractive planting for on the deck. It tastes good too.