Tomatoes and Butterflies

Between July and August I have one of the happiest moments of all in my gardening life: harvesting garlic. The beautiful plants are now less vigorous and clearly signalling hidden gems await buried under the soil. Hands down, garlic is my single most beloved crop. I love to cook with it, I love its shape, the colours, the smell, the taste. I love planting it, I love seeing it poke through the soil as one of the earliest signs of life in spring. It is a beautiful once it is stored somewhere, be it braided, in baskets, wherever. I mean, just google it and see for yourself! Be used to just have some of your garlic lying around and ready to cook! My first garlic attempt was on fall 2017 and I had built a brand new raised bed, 2 feet in height, and garlic was the plant to open the season on that bed, being planted in late October. I planted a shy amount or Wrenglers Russian and Inchellium Red, from Boundary Garlic Farm . They are extremely specialized offering a great variety,...

Earwigs , like eathworms, are a big help in converting decaying matter. They specialize in what is above the soil though, eating older leaves and thin stems, dying parts of plants. But also like slugs and coackroaches they can be pests. Here in my area they ARE pests, as we have them in big numbers, which means that they turn their eye to anything they can then eat: seedlings, new growth in mature vegetables, flowers. You can imagine the damage when they destroy a perfect healthy cucumber flower of when you beautiful baby beets that sprouted two days ago just disappeared. They literally eat plants to the ground in a few days, or should I say, in a few nights. Earwigs have been here! Napa cabbage, a favorite amongst slugs, earwigs and flea beetles Like slugs, they are nocturnal. Like slugs, they chomp away big parts of the plant in a raggedy fashion, so it is actually hard to know which culprit you have in your garden until you inspect, at night, with some sort of light. ...

Summer arrived late this year, but is no less tasty! And I also grow potatoes, onion, peppers, all sorts of greens and herbs and a bunch of other stuff. Sometimes I actually just let them grow, like the wild raspberries and strawberries we find everywhere in our backyard. Sometimes I grow plants out of curiosity, like the bee blend flower in one of my planters; out of desire to preserve natural landscaping, like the microclover on our lawn; and sometimes to join my husband in his journey of beer-crafting, like when we planted hops. Monarch-to-be chomping away our milkweed This year we got lucky and registered 8 monarch caterpillars in our very tentative, modest milkweed patch. And 2 black swallowtails in one of our many parsley plants. Not too shabby! It is not without its challenges, though. And it is really an act of devotion to establish a garden as a tiny ecosystem and have it grow to be bountiful and healthy. We are a suburban family and all this is done in our ...