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.

Irrigation Changes

We've had domestic strife. Our cats are battling hard to be completely banished to an indoor lifestyle. Despite their love of fresh air they keep treating the garden as a litter box. We've had two motion sensing sprinklers for quite awhile. But due to the water supply they're constrained to fixed location. I decided to augment them with two heat sensing ultrasonic cat annoyance devices.

Unfortunately, these things work entirely too well for pets. Other people cats using your garden? No problem, use these guys, they work. But, if you actually want your pets to enjoy outside, don't. Our cats didn't even go outside anymore. In fact, when I was outside I could hear the little chirp the device makes when it goes off regardless of any moving heat source. They have no sensitivity adjustment, or convenient off switch (though, picking it up and placing it face down effectively turns it off). These two strikes were sufficient to stop using it, the kicker was that their usage manual says that if you're out in the garden you should disconnect it. As I mentioned, it doesn't have a convenient off switch.

Given that it isn't user friendly for cats or humans, I returned the two units.

I reorganized our motionsensing sprinklers to better cover our garden. I had a spare whose sprinkler I'd broken, but was able to buy a sprinkler head for. Between the three we have almost sufficient coverage. Hopefully it's enough.

Additionally, I put in an automated irrigation for our patio tomatos. Five roma's and some kind of cherry we're not sure about yet. It's hot on the patio, and the tomatos are doing well, they need to be watered twice a day, so this will be a bit of a relief.

Here's a nice picture of a silhouette of said tomatos on our living room wall.

Dinner

We've been eating out of our garden very regularly since last summer. We had so many leeks we didn't manage to eat them all over the winter.

Here is dinner tonight. Some snow peas steamed in a reduced stock, fresh garlic, basil, and chives. They were delicious.

The strawberries are coming thick and fast and are ending up in our salads. The greens for salad were in the fridge when the picture was taken. They were varied from endive to wild arugula, beet leaves and young red romaine.

Lady Bugs Rule

We have been pretty bad about posting. It's been a wet spring. We've been eating salad, and have just started harvesting snow peas. Our apple tree is doing amazing with about 60 apples. We've made a large batch of garlic scape pesto, and planted a lot of everything.

This post though is about aphids, hops & ladybugs. This year the hops have been absolutely invaded by aphids. They covered the undersides of every leaf, and all over all the stalks. Consequently, we've had a lot more lady bugs than normal. This year they're all over the place. As you can see in the picture, they're having a lot sex as well. There's still lots of aphids under the leaves, but the stalks are clean. The underside of most of the leaves are sporting orangish ladybug eggs, so, soon their larvae will take care of the rest of the aphids.

Sprouting garlic

Last week Michelle removed the fabric on our garlic. It's already up around 6 inches. This is fully one month ahead of last year. But, last year we had two feet of snow, and this year, since we have the Olympics, we have no snow (none on the ski hills either).

$70 per square foot!

Just wanted to point here, a very cool post.

We're not dead. Just been sorely lacking in the posts. We've planted a whole new bed of garlic, about 150 cloves again. We are still eating lots of leeks, carrots and have begun to make a dent in the beets we planted.

Currently the weather is VERY cold. As such we're not able to harvest any leeks or arugala, but they'll come back when it warms up.

Hopefully we'll resume posting regularly!

Our well hung carrot

Couldn't resist ...


And the very first apple we've eaten from our garden, a Gravenstein ...

Future

We have had a technical emergency. About this time last year we purchased a four disk two terabyte network storage device. This machine is an excellent little piece of hardware. We striped the disks to a one terabyte raid 5 volume. Unfortunately, the false sense of security that raid 5 tends to give people bit us in the a$$. One of the drives crashed and on the three disk rebuild something went wrong. As a result all of our computer time has been somewhat devoted to dealing with that.

We have potentially lost every digital image we have taken in our short married life. Including all of those of our garden that we did not post here. Backups? It was raid 5. Yes, I know raid isn't foolproof ... but,but,but. Sigh.

In the future, I will make sure we are appropriately intelligent about backups. Fifteen years of being a computer geek, this is the first time I've had major data loss. It will never happen again.

On this theme ... preparing for the future; we left a few shelling peas on the vine longer than you should would you be planning to eat them. Reason being was to save the seeds for next year. We harvested about five pounds of shelling peas and vacuum packed them for the winter. Here's a picture of some of those peas that escaped the freeze to hopefully sprout next year.


N.B. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Tilia for twenty years of service through the manufacture of their first generation of vacuum packers. My parents purchased it when I was very young. I have used it to pack hops and other harvest for the past four years. I've had to maintain it, but after twenty years, it finally blew a seal (or something) deep inside the vacuum pump. Fortunately I had been lusting after one of these. I am perfectly happy to sound like a shill. If you want a home vacuum sealer, don't go to your local department store. This is a real tool, a delight to use. This is a proper tool, not a toy, lightyears ahead of our old Tilia food saver.

Canada Day

It is a sunny but cool day. Compared to the cold and wet spring/summer of 2008, so far we have been having an excellent year. The garlics, which we usually harvest them around mid-July, seem to be ready. I pulled out five garlics just to have a look and they look great, except that the skin is a bit wet, so I turned the sprinkler of that section off. We may plan to pull them all out this weekend.

Planted more beet seeds

It has been hot and dry for the past few weeks. So we didn't sow anything at all. However, the weather will be changing this week and rain is supposed to stay with us for a few days at least, so I guess it is a good time to sow some seeds.

I soaked the beet seeds for a few hours ahead of time (not sure if that makes any difference). Seeds are down at the end of the left side yard (looking from the house), by the tomato plant at the end of the right side yard and under the apple tree. The seed colour is the same as the soil, so it is really difficult to sow them evenly few inches apart. Time will tell how good the job I did when they start to sprout.

Broad Bean is done. Bye!

We have tried, and we are disappointed.

Today we harvested all the broad beans. There were seven plants in total and altogether we have less than half a bowl of the beans.

I might have planted the seeds to deep to begin with, and that took a long time for them to surface above the soil. However, once they have made their appearance, their growth rate was slow and their size was small. We had allocated quite a large space for them. With that little result, we felt it doesn't worth growing them again.

Did I also mention that it was a pain to take their shell off?

strawberry

Moving the strawing plants from the patch under the patio staircase to the backyard path is a great success. Not only they don't take up extra growing space, the strawberries lies on the ground cover and it decorates the path. The only minor problem is that every step we take has to be careful or we will step on the little sweet goodies (as a matter of fact, I did already...)

The weather has been rather friendly for veggie growing. We have hot sunny days and then a day of rain in between. Seeds that were sown are all sprouting, including the slow germinating carrots. The friendly weather definitely helps. I also tried to sow the seeds on the day when it was about to rain; and I covered the seeded area with a light floating fabric. The fabric might help with trapping the moisture in the soil.

The leeks have grown taller also. Time to start filling the trench...and you know what, I think I didn't dig the trench deep enough. Another lesson learned.

There are holes on the cherry tomato plants. What causes that?

more seeds

It was a sunny hot Sunday yesterday. (max. 23C) We took our chili plants and seedling trays out for sun bathing. Today, it was a 360 degree change (max 16C)...cloudy in the morning and then followed by rain. The radio said this Victoria Day weekend will be the perfect time to do gardening due to the predicted change of weather. They are right. I planted the seeds in the morning, and let the nature takes care of the rest.

Today I've sown the following seeds:
carrots (by the shelling pea)
beets (by the shelling pea, 2008 seeds)
radishes (all over, 2008 seeds, the round type)
salad mix (by the end of the shelling peas, by the edge of the cherry tomato plant)

Also, the leeks seedlings were also down in the field (by the shelling pea/carrot seeds).

We pulled out a number of leeks (planted last year) and made leek and potato soup. There are still leeks remaining. We have been keeping a close watch on their growing as they seem to grow in height only instead of width (the white part). The flower stalk is coming out from the leek one after another. I guess it is time to finish them. In case you wonder, no, they don't taste old. They are still very fragrant and delicious.

Update of the previous sowing: the carrot seeds from the first round of sowing have sprouted, so as the Gai lan. The radishes are still not ready yet. Though the salad seeds have sprouted, they seem to stop growing. I'm glad that we still have constant supply of green salad from the kale that we planted last year(?), red lettuce and arugula. The kale flower is delicious.