Exposing our garlic

Today we took the fabric mulch off the garlic patch. The tallest of the sprouts are about 3 inches. Parts of the patch show no sign of life, but the alfalfa mulch is thicker in those places. Nothing more to say ... here's the picture.

Snow Day!

Well, we got quite a dump of snow this week. My predicition that we were going to have a mild winter isn't really incorrect as the coldest it got was only a couple of degrees below zero. But, this is much colder than I expected. We got about 30 cm but it warmed up soon enough.

Regardless the radishes are still surviving in that cold frame. Our leeks and arugula have perked right up again. The fennel has looked better but I suspect it will come through ok too.

We haven't done anything in the garden with regard to life, save killing a few plants to eat. But, today was the first sunny day in a long time and while I was cleaning up the garage I noticed that at 2pm while the sun was shining on the whole garden, our radish seedlings were in shade. The front of the cold frame is too tall. The radishes though are still alive despite a couple of sub zero nights.

So, rather than shortening it, I made a trip to Rona (the second of the day as always seems to be the way). I picked up a glass scoring tool, and a piece of tongue and groove cedar fencing. I had some glass laying around that I had salvaged from a local teardown/reno. An hour later I had transformed the cold frame to more of a greenhouse. I'm quite pleased with it, and I'm expecting it to make a big difference.

We checked the garlic patch and they have sprouted and are just starting to poke up through the alfalfa mulch. We'll probably take the cloth mulch off in a week or two.

below zero

The temperature has dropped below zero yesterday, and it remains below freezing point during the night. I wonder if the seedlings will survive.

Transplanting Radishes

The radish seeds that we planted in peat pucks last Sunday germinated very quickly. The roots were poking out through the fabric of the pucks, so time to transplant. Admitedly the middle of January is quite early for putting them out, but what the hell. We planted them in the cold frame obviously, but if we get a cold spell I imagine they won't survive. Right now it's been mild and forecast to stay mild for at least a week. We're crossing our fingers.

That's a picture of them in a cut open milk carton to germinate. Follow the link to flickr for more pics.

Cold frame

Yesterday, we built a cold-frame.

We have had two wood frame windows lieing around since we did some reno's a couple of years ago, and courtesy of the neighbour taking down their fence we had some free lumber. It's a little taller than the standard cold frame, but I envisioned starting some tomato plants in it too, plus our backyard is sloping southward so it should work out fine.


At some point we'll make a second one with the other window. We planted some radish seeds and left them in the house to germinate. After they do, I'll move them to the cold frame. Hopefully we'll have fresh radishes in a month or so.

We also picked some veggies for dinner. A leek (which broke when I tried to pull it out) will be slowly braised with some arborio rice and jarred artichoke hearts we bought in the summer from Donna. We also picked a radish and a carrot to eat with some our arugala salad.



The carrot is so short I think because of how we grew it. We used the little peat puck germinators, and then transplanted them. I didn't break apart the mesh well enough, and the carrot was never able to push through it during the fall. Live and learn.

Welcome

This blog is here to help us document our garden. We've had three years of growing experience on our property with nothing more to show than our health and a few random pictures. Our intent here is two-fold; first to give us an archive of our garden which will allow us to plan a new season and to hopefully inspire others to do as we've done.

Our property is a small lot which we've divided up into a few different fruit and vegetable plots. In this first post we want to provide an overview of our garden. We have three main plots. The first is about 20 feet by 7 feet and the second about 10 feet by 12 feet. These comprise virtually our entire back yard. The first one used to be about 15' long, but last year we shortened our parking area in order to have more growing space. Our car is very small. Here is a picture of the backyard. It doesn't show where we grow strawberries, raspberries and hops, nor all of the herb bed, but you get the idea.

All of our beds are currently covered with a layer of alfalfa mulch, though you can see that we still have harvestable veggies. We have leeks that we are slowly eating, parsnips and beets as well. Also, we have kale, fennel, more parsnips and some purple broccoli that will be ready to eat shortly after it starts warming up.

You can also see a small corner of part of our composting system, we'll write a post on that at some point.

The third plot is currently only for garlic. It's in our front yard so we wanted to use the space for something that has a long growing season and doesn't need much attention. This plot is about 4 feet by 8 feet. Last year was the first year we harvested garlic from it, we got around 150 cloves from it. We planted quite a few of those again back in the middle of October but we still have a lot of garlic left. Enough probably to last us until we harvest these in July.

This bed is also mulched with alfalfa, but we also used the fabric mulch because the neighbours cat would otherwise dig in this plot.

So, that's basically our garden. In the future we will post on planting, sowing, harvesting or anything else that occurs to us. Maybe just a nice picture ... here's one of our leeks.