farm

I have unveiled the fabric over the garlics a couple weeks ago...and today, I just remember that we'll have to be more diligent in posting updates of our "farm". So here we go.

sprouted rye

I was more than thrilled to discover that the rye has sprouted and they are almost like 2 inches tall. I can't remember when was the last time I checked on them and I didn't see a single sign of them coming out. And it's like all of a sudden, they poked through the soil, and grew overnight.

I took a chance and sew some more in between the rows to fill the gap. It is November in Vancouver, so we'll see if they can make it or not.

Tonight dinner: garden mixed green with carrot and radish. Oh, we're still enjoying the tomato hanging on the dead vine. The flavour is really intense. Great idea to leave them on the vine!

Cover Crop

In order to improve to soil quality, I decided to try growing winter cover crop.

So the test patches are the garlic and the potato areas in the front of the house. Mark took out the pumpkin plant which has spread all over the garlic patch and I randomly spread the rye on top of the whole area and then casually covered them with soil. No, I didn't diligently cover the rye as if I was sowing seeds. Let's see if they will sprout.

Garlic planting

After several years of growing garlic on our small garden, the disease has finally caught up on them. The farmers are right, that you can't keep using the same plot for garlic growing. Though we did switch the garlic patch from front to back for a year, I returned to the same plot the next year, and that's apparently not enough for the patch to recover.

This summer, I went to the Limbert garlic festival in Chilliwack to buy a whole bunch of garlic to use as seed. There were three different garlic farm stands, and I bought some from each of them:
- one sells Italian
- one sells Yugoslavian
- one sells a varieties of garlic. I bought music, porcelain, georgian and red Russian.

When I split up the garlic bulbs today, some of the georgian and red russian bulbs have already turned mouldy and can't be used. Too bad.

Each year we use our own homegrown garlic as seed. This year, every glove is from someone else. I don't really feel good about it. Well, let's hope for the best next year.

Tomato Pasta

Today is one of the rare days when Michelle works late. Ordinarily, this means that it's steak night. However, Ruhlman posted something interesting. We still have many Roma tomatos ripening, as well as some Basil. The Basil is long in the tooth, and won't last long, so I decided to use some and try this dish. I used a whole bulb of our russian red garlic and a fistful of basil. The pasta was made from local eggs, but I guess the parmesan that I added came from too far away for the whole dish to qualify as local. A nice salad from the garden made a great meal.

I have to say that this was one of the more delicious pastas I've ever made. I'm quite staggered by just how good it was for being so simple. Nice one Ruhlman.

October Garden

Two posts in two days?

I was taking pictures for other reasons, so I thought I would take a picture of a portion of garden. There are leeks, beets, carrots, salad, parsnips, and brussel sprouts in view. All plants that will feed us well in to the winter.

Tomato Harvest

Man do we suck as bloggers. It's the end of the summer, and we have hardly posted at all.

This year we had Five 30 gallon buckets on our patio under an eave. In each we had a Roma. They performed amazingly. Today, I harvested a whole bunch and processed for canning. We use the cans all winter long for soup and pasta.

As you can see, we still have a lot that have not ripened. We've stopped watering, and trimmed the plants back, so hopefully, these will still ripen in time.