This is war

Dear Critter.

If I find you, I will please me greatly to pull out each one of your pointy little teeth one by one, to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I hope you enjoyed your nibble of my precious zucchini.

Well, of course I won’t actually do that – something about being against animal cruelty or whatnot. A girl can still dream in a fit of garden overprotectiveness, though.

But I was still very angry to find some missing zucchini when I checked on the garden today. Well, actually, I was surprised not to see some yellow and green zucchini poking out at me, since I saw some nearly-ripe ones when I last checked on the garden on Sunday. And then I was angry when I discovered the end gnawed off this one, as well as (on closer inspection) some telltale signs of other, smaller fruit missing, fallen to the same fate.

Stupid critters. I guess this means I’ll be adding “put chicken wire around the garden” to my list of chores for the weekend. Although if it’s actually a squirrel doing this, I don’t know how chicken wire would stop it, short of also putting a chicken-wire roof on my veggies. This will require some further investigation. Any suggestions?

In better news, I picked a pretty good haul off my three types of beans. Delicious! And colourful – although sadly the purple beans turn a rather pale green during steaming. Booo.

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Garden – step 1

At long last – a post about everything we’ve done to the garden so far!

Obviously, lots of weeding. And trimming. And merciless chopping down of a bush or two. But I’ve already talked about that.

A few weekends ago we tackled the raised beds for the vegetable garden. The soil along the side of the house is kind of crummy, so I wanted a repeat of the raised beds we had at the old house. Except I was smarter this time, and made them a more manageable size – two 3×6 ft beds, and one 4×6 ft bed. I also decided to make them a full 18″ tall this time, instead of the 12″ they were before – I figured that even if I may want 12″ of soil, it’ll be nice to have a little bit of space near the top to work the soil without worrying about it falling over the edge all the time.

I started by clearing the area in question – covered in unidentified tall (and very smelly) weeds, as well as some very mature lily and hosta plants. Nobody wanted them, so in the brown bags they went.

Starting with a nice clean-ish slate, we put together the boxes in the driveway, and carried them over to the garden area.

Aren’t they so pretty and new?

Well, that didn’t last long.

In my ambition, I ordered 8 cubic yards of soil.

How much is that, you might wonder?

A half-driveway-size pile.

130 wheelbarrows.

Enough to fill the raised vegetable garden beds. [The holes you see above are from last weekend, when I finally planted my garlic. You'll also notice a future project that must be done - the wall at the left side of the picture is the shed, which is getting a lot of dirt splatter when it rains. This is from the water cascading down from the roof of the shed, so the shed will need to be outfitted with gutters at some point.]

And then add 4-6″ of good-quality soil to the existing gardens, where the roots of some poor trees and bushes were starting to show.

Ahhhh. All better now.

And it seems like I’m not the only one enjoying these improvements – I saw a nice black kitty deposit this little guy in the garden just as I was coming home today.

Maybe the softer soil makes for better hunting? While I appreciate the gift, dear kitty, maybe next time you could give it to someone who actually knows what to do with a dead mole?

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Getting ready for Hallowe’en

Hope you are too!

Earlier in the week, I thought I would get a few more Halloween decorations up before we hit the deep freeze (which was a good idea, since we have snow on the ground right this minute, and it’s still snowing). I’ll definitely have to think things through a bit more next year, as this year I just grabbed a bunch of stuff at the Dollarama and ran, since they had the most loud and annoying alarm start up while I was there. And no, the alarm wasn’t because I grabbed stuff and ran – I did pay, thank you very much! Try digging around for change while trying to cover up your ears to prevent them from suffering permanent hearing loss, though.

Even more unfortunately, when Dan came home that night he informed me that the skeleton had fallen down. Boo. I think it would’ve upped the “creepy” just a bit more to have a skeleton glaring at you from the ceiling.

I spent this morning getting some garlic into the ground, which turned out to be a good idea (see reference to snow above). One nice side effect of redoing the vegetable garden was that the soil is nice and fluffy from all the digging I had to do to transfer the soil back and forth. I think I might turn this into an annual fall exercise, because the soil is just beautiful now. I got a few varieties at the garlic festival this year, and I planted them each in its own row, made by poking holes in the ground with my fingers.

And, of course, the main event of the evening was carving pumpkins. Dan and I chose to do two pumpkins each, from the pumpkins I had picked up a few weeks ago. Lucky for us, our squirrels didn’t take a liking to them – a coworker was telling me that she’s repeatedly found her squirrels gnawing holes out of her pumpkins. While I wouldn’t want that, a while ago I saw a pumpkin that I just had to replicate.

Husband was hard at work, too.

We ended up with four carved pumpkins – Dan’s are on the outside, mine are the middle two. My second pumpkin is a little pumpkin in a big pumpkin jail.

How was your pre-Halloween night? Happy candy-distributing tomorrow!

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Weekend shenanigans

After two nearly-solid weeks of not being home during daylight hours, this past weekend we finally hunkered down and got to all the household (most outdoors) chores we’ve been neglecting. Winter’s a-comin’, after all!

So on Saturday, Dan raked a full 3 bags of leaves – and that’s just from the front lawn! I hacked and sawed away at the garden, getting it ready for the winter. It looks pretty sorry now, doesn’t it? I’m leaving a few of the more presentable-looking specimen for now, to be hacked down later when it’s time to cover up the roses.

In the process, I also collected whatever veggies were left, and then ripped out the plants. I’m going to use the left-over harvest (i.e. extremely green tomatoes) to make chutney.

The destruction also paved the road to this.

That’s right – an accessible vegetable garden, finally! This has been in my head for the last season and a half, after I realized halfway through the first season that a 6 by 6 foot vegetable garden sounded great in theory, but in practice was impossible to weed beyond the 1.5 foot outside perimeter. So I finally talked Dan into splitting up the bed, resulting in two 3 by 6 foot gardens with a nice wide access area in between. It looks smaller, but the surface area is pretty much the same (minus a few inches lost to adding new boards as sides.

I’d like to add another mini-bed (maybe 1.5-2 feet deep) against the fence in between the two beds, so I can plant some more beans or cucumbers to take advantage of that wonderful fence space. I’ll also be returning to the Earth Depot in the spring for another load of mulch, both to put in the rest of the garden and cover the access path between the vegetable beds. Let the seed catalog perusing begin!

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The harvest rolls on

Yesterday, my gardening inspection yielded a nice surprise. In spite of my tentative diagnosis of the cause of my rotting zucchini as blossom end rot, I was surprised with two nice and large specimen that I had somehow completely overlooked. Hopefully, it was the overabundance of water from all the rain, after all, that was causing the rot!

As you can see, the tomatoes and cucumbers are carrying on nicely, although I’m a little bit disappointed with the “regular-size” tomato harvest. The small red grape tomatoes and especially the yellow pear mini-tomatoes (so delicious and sweet!) are very prolific, but the large beefy tomatoes seem to be underproducing. What a pity! – I had even found a few recipes for tomato sauce, etc. I may have to go buy some at the farmer’s market just so I can test out the recipe.

The plum harvest this year will be dismal, unfortunately – this is supposed to be the good year, but we suspect that the Mother’s Day frosts killed off a good percentage of the blossoms. *sigh* But I loved that plum jam!

The fall planting of mesculin mix is well on its way, and the spinach is not far behind – soon our salads will once again be made wholly with organic, homegrown produce!

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Harvest update

This is my harvest from Thursday. Isn’t everything gorgeous? I think I’m pretty set for garlic for the fall and winter. Although I definitely plan on hitting up the Carp Garlic Fair again this year to try a few more varieties of garlic.

We got just a couple of teeny tiny tomatoes this time around, but lots more are on the way.

Aren’t they gorgeous? I was stunned when I found out that Dan didn’t know that real cucumbers came with little spikey things on them. But… that’s how you know it’s a real, fresh cucumber!

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The not-long weekend

Wow, what a fun and busy weekend!

Saturday was actually pretty uneventful, except for piles of work spent by Dan on the bathroom, so I’ll fast-forward to Sunday already. Actually, no, wait – I remember now, I’ll go back to Saturday.

Dan did spend a lot of time working on the bathroom. As a break, however, we also cut down the cedar which had slowly been encroaching on the corner of our walkway. I think that corner looks way better without the tree, my plants are getting more sunlight, and turning that corner is not as much of a pain as it used to be. I can’t wait for the first full load of groceries I come home with. The plan is not to leave the wall bare but to plant some nice vine, perhaps jasmine. Meanie-no-good-husband, however, informed me that I have to wait a while for the root to dry out before we can dig it out. Maybe I can plant around it.

I also did a bit of other random work in the front garden, but not much. The real fun, in the back garden, came on Sunday. By then, I decided I was brave enough to plant my tender little seedlings outside. But first things first. That being the installation of the soaker hose. I had one last year, but it turned out to be a POS black weeper hose, that sprung a few larger holes halfway through the season, turning it absolutely worthless. The one I bought this year has two small tubes running parallel, with the odd hole here and there, and seems much better constructed – and comes with a 5-year warranty under “normal gardening use”. Home Hardware will definitely be hearing about this from me if this thing breaks in the next couple of years.

Next – what do you need to install a drip hose? Staples, of course. I had seen these handy little lovelies at Lee Valley the other day, but thought I could do better than 25 cents apiece. Half an hour and a few dozen metal clothes hangers later, I had my solution – and it was free, with the added benefit of freeing up space in a storage closet! I knew I was keeping these things around for a reason.

First, snip off the twisted hanger part – Dan warned me I’d go crazy if I tried to unravel it. Then, snip the remaining hanger into 4 equal-ish parts. Bend with pliers into the shape of a staple – with the added bonus of adjusting the size of the loop to whatever you need. Aaaand………

Done. Starting point on the left, finished product on the right. I had to adjust some of the staples so they weren’t pinching the hose, but otherwise, I’m calling this experiment a success.

I let the soaker hose do its work for a few hours, so I had thoroughly moistened soil to work with when I transplanted the plants. In went the tomatoes (yellow, normal-sized red and snackable-sized grape red), the cucumbers, and the zucchini. Some “heirloom” tomatoes remain, which I grew from a mystery packet of mixed heirloom seeds I got from my mom. Those will be planted in pots. I’ve already read about a few heirloom varieties that I’d like to try, and will probably get on the ball with that earlier next year. I just feel so bad throwing out all the seeds that I still have remaining in all the little packets I have!

Next year, along with the plans to expand the perennials garden to the front, I’d like to use some of the perennial beds to grow my vegetables. Probably not something as visible and recognizeable as a tomato, but probably garlic and maybe some of the beans could fit in reasonably well. Do you think spinach would make a nice path border?

As if that doesn’t sound like a lot of work, on Sunday, before I started any of this gardening fun, we took my mom out for brunch at the Merlot (the revolving restaurant). As always, I forgot to take pictures of the food. The view was absolutely fantastic, though, with only 4 clouds that we managed to spot far on the horizon.

Ottawa’s downtown is pretty cute already, but it sparkles in the spring sun from a few hundred feet up. The food did not disappoint – I would stay away from the breakfast-y part of the brunch spread (which was good, but nothing mindblowing), and head straight to the fish/pate/cheeses/marinated vegetables section. Ok, I lie – I would actually head for the humongous dessert spread – this is definitely one of those cases where you have to  share with a friend in order to be able to get a taste of even half of the yummies on that table.

And that’s our weekend in a nutshell.

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Plants update

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about my seedlings, or the outside plants braving the elements, but rest assured they’re getting daily attention.

So, first, “the grow-up”. The yellow room is still off-limites to both the kitties and Dan, and the seedlings are doing pretty well. The other day, I had to re-pot some of them due to some underestimation of the  … rate on my part. For a few varieties, since the seeds weren’t bought this year, I wasn’t sure how many would come up, so I put two seeds into some pots to make sure something would come up. Well, *cough*I was wrong*cough*. Most of the seeds I planted came up, which meant I was left with many smallish pots with quickly-developing double seedlings. Luckily, I think I caught it in time, and didn’t have to detangle too many roots. I think the seedlings survived, since it’s been a few days. So… who wants tomato plants?

Tomatoes and broccoli – getting more leaves! There’s one broccoli plant that’s turning out to be a real leafy monster.

Chives – don’t they look funny?

At one seed sale I went to a few months ago, one guy was selling bags of dried peas. His suggestion was to use them to grow “pea sprouts”, and use them in salads, sandwiches, etc. when they’re 4-6″ tall. I loooooooooooove peas, so this one was a pretty easy suggestion to try out, despite the fact that I feel just a little bit cutting these seedlings down in their prime. Curly AND delicious.

Outside, things are moving along nicely, as well.  The individual garlic cloves I planted last fall are looking pretty good. It also looks like I missed a whole bunch of small garlic heads last year, which have now also sprouted. I think I’m going to let them go to see what happens. The peas (that I’ll let grow into pea bushes instead of cutting them down in their prime for a snack) are starting to come up, as well. They’re possibly my most favourite early vegetable. Tomatoes still win the second half of the summer, though!

The lettuce growing outdoors is also adjusting nicely despite (or because of?) the recent frosts.

The lily of the valley lives, wahoo! I know it’s invasive and hard to get rid of once established, but I can’t wait for it to get established faster. I want more lily of the valley, dammit! Spread, my pretties, spread!

The tulip and daffodil bulbs I planted last year, while pretty, look to disorganized. For next year, I’m actually going to make a plan and plant them in clumps in areas I want them, instead of spreading them around haphazardly. It will be better, I promise. And I’ll actually have time to deal with it in the fall this year! In particular, I need more daffodils. I realize now that I love them way more than tulips, and I’m still not sure where many of them went – I swear I had more than a dozen bulbs! And I can’t even blame the squirrels for this one – in fact, you’re supposed to plant daffodil bulbs next to bulbs you don’t want dug up since squirrels despise daffodil bulbs.

This is supposed to be the on-year for the plums – plum trees apparently work on a two-year cycle, with one year producing a good yield of delicious fruit, and the next producing lots of flowers, but not a lot of plums (and at least last year, the plums that did start, withered and fell off pretty quickly). I’m very excited for some more plum jam, too, because the 2008 vintage was excellent.

Finally, another star of the show – my white lilac bush. So tiny, it already bloomed last year, its first year. It looks a bit bigger this year, so I’m excited to see what it will come up with!!

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Weekend of chores

I’m slowly adjusting back to the “real” life – and catching up on all the things we had fallen behind in the 5 weeks we were gone. Like gardening. Today, I took out my gardening gloves, pruning shears, and a stack of large yard waste bags. I forgot to take pictures – but to be honest, perhaps that’s for the better, since everything was in a pretty sorry state. I’m vain enough about my gardening skills that I don’t really want people to see just how bad I let the garden get. Yes, I suppose a wedding is a good excuse. But still.

I cut, I pulled and tugged, I dug (to plant spring bulbs and garlic), and I stood back to admire the somewhat-restored order. In the process of turning the soil in the vegetable patch, I even found a few more young bulbs of garlic (I planted it in the spring instead of the fall this year since we only built the vegetable bed in the spring), which was a pleasant surprise. In it went for the broccoli cheddar soup tonight.

I’m working through the thank you cards. Slowly. I want everyone to get a personalized message, but my brain is only good for so many original thoughts in one day. So bear with me.

BB is keeping me company, which is incredibly adorable – ever since we got back, she’s been jumping on my lap whenever I sit down at the dinner table. I’m being spoiled by this little portable heater!

And perhaps the most convenient addition to my routine since our return – the laptop. It was my parents’ wedding gift to us, and I must say that it’s everything that I never knew I wanted. This means that I’ll actually be warm this winter while on the computer in the evenings – since I’ll just take this little baby down to the couch next to the fireplace.

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