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.

pea and leek: new method

As a new veggie grower, we learn something new every year and we always try to do things a bit different the next year hoping to see some improvements. So this year, we've tried a new pea trellis. I brought a net from the nursery and mounted it on the wooden frame. It looks pretty good, though I believe that the trellis is not tall enough for the pea to climb. Oh well, next year project...

For the leeks, I've tried the trench method. It is a method that I learned while looking for information about vegetable farming on the Internet. Over the course of the growing season, the trench is gradually filled in with soil. The goal is to encourage the grow of the white part of the leek. (the tall green plants are garlics)

Leek -- 2nd planting

New spaces are available for more planting after we took down all the shelling pea and snow pea. So we decide to go for some winter crops: purple broccoli (transplanted, started seedlings indoor) and leek (seedlings brought from the local nursery). Pic shows the leeks that I just transplanted today. Some of the leeks that were planted in this late spring are ready to eat. We just had our first 2008 leek yesterday.

The tomato plants are getting a bit bushy now. Among the four roma tomato plants, the one closest to the house is the biggest. A lot of flowers but not many fruits...but they are coming!




Another excitement is to see the Red striped roman. The physical look of the plant is very unhealthy. The branches are soft with no strength. Water nor fertilizer helps to improve the look, and yet the plant keeps growing. We figure that maybe that's the way the plants look. I only saw two tomatoes growing (have to look really hard to find them as they are "hidden" in the middle of the plant), but that's enough to raise my heartbeat.

Just a quick report on the pole bean...the report: see pic ;)

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.