$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...)