Who says you can’t enjoy some summer flowers in October. Every year many of my clematis experience what I believe is clematis wilt. The bottom leaves turn brown and drop, leaving a poor looking climber in the garden. A Polish Spirit clematis that climbs a beautiful globe trellis just outside our bedroom patio does this… Read more »
The Garlic Is In
Thanksgiving weekend finally provided us with a respite from rainy weather, allowing the garden to dry out enough to plant our fall garlic. Growing garlic is remarkably easy. Garlic is said to grow in a wide variety of soil types, in fact I was told at the Stratford Garlic Festival that, over time, garlic adapts… Read more »
Holding Back The Weeds
I do everything I can to keep weeds from encroaching in my garden… … I mulch my gardens to supress weeds and limit new seed germination by supressing light to weed seeds; … I pull weeds in all of my gardens by hand when they are small. An old fashioned two pronged hand weeder is… Read more »
It’s Festival Season
What a great weekend we had. On Saturday we visited the Stratford Garlic Festival where I picked up some garlic to plant in the garden for next season’s enjoyment. Unfortunately I got a bit carried away, again. Remember the 7 varieties of potatoes? Well next year is going to be a similar experimentation year for… Read more »
It’s That Busy Time Of Year
I’ve been a bit behind on the blogging front the last few weeks, having spent my time instead… Harvesting and preserving 4 bushels of tomatoes into 3 types of soup, 2 kinds of tomato sauce, and plain tomatoes now filling a large chunk of my freezer. Harvesting 9 rows of potatoes — who’s idea was… Read more »
Sunflowers
We saw this field of sunflowers in Essex County while visiting my parents. Now I’m excited to plant a major patch for myself next year.
Drying Onions and Garlic
I harvested both our onions and garlic this week and am now drying them for storage. Onions are ready for harvesting when the tops have started to yellow and have fallen over. Garlic is ready to harvest once the leaves start to turn yellow. Wait for a dry day about a week after the majority… Read more »
It’s Potato Season
We have been harvesting potatoes at least two times a week for the past couple of weeks now. Our potatoes were planted in a brand new garden this year and while we removed a lot of rocks from the soil prior to planting there were still quite a few in the ground we found when… Read more »
My Life Is Ruled By The Weather
We’ve had a great summer so far — lots of rain from thunderstorms but also lots of sun and heat. As most gardeners do, I plan my day or week based on what the weather predicts. This week, with both my kids in camp and sunny weather predicted all week, I decided it would be… Read more »
Bounty From The Garden
Summer is here and the vegetable garden is really in full swing. After enjoying much of our early season harvest of peas, lettuce, spinach, swiss chard and kholrabi we are now enjoying the bounty from our summer garden. We picked all of the vegetables in the above picture today and still have a red cabbage… Read more »