Tomatoes and Butterflies

I have been growing potatoes for 3 years now and 2020 was just off the charts with production. These boxes of potato were 1/4th of what we harvested this year: Kennebec, French fingerling and Lindtzer. Delicious, home-bred potatoes!   As usual I sourced a lot of different breeds of potatoes from Eagle Creek Farm . They have a ridiculously wide selection and you are just spoiled for choice. As I am learning, I keep ordering different types, but I can confidently say I have a few favorites.  The packages with the precious load in them! Kennebec stores well and tastes great. It also yields me huge tubers. Kennebec and Norland give me the best yield, one seed potato being able to produce sometimes 10 tubers on its own. But Norland does not store well, so it is a delight to eat and in 3 months it is trying to sprout everywhere in your kitchen and pantry! Better eat it fresh. In second place comes the fingerlings. Fingerling potatoes are usually waxy, a great type for salads, soups ...

September 2020 experienced 3 days of frost! That really does signal fall, together with those lovely days of sunny 14 degrees and a cold wind that can chill our hearts. The inevitable conclusion is to start closing for summer crops, because choices have to be made and I am so bad at that. I should have cut my bean plants much earlier to give some carrots more light and space, but the plants were so vigorous! I cannot just kill them... Hopefully the hidden carrots will pick up fast It took me a full day to go around the garden to harvest and remove plants, pile them in the compost. And I am glad I did it since the very next day, a new frost advisory came and it was a true frost, as per crystal tips on top of o my brussels sprouts. It never gets old to take a stroll into my yard and come back with fresh produce! A great summer mix to eat fresh!   The front yard is now the spot that receives most hours of sunlight and unsurprisingly the production continues. Fall crops are in full p...

 On September 14th they announced frost on my region. That is rather early, although technically possible: the traditional gardener books for here consider the end of the growing season coincides with the Labour Day weekend. Despite that, most of the cool and cold hardy crops are happy to continue. I was scared, since my tomatoes, beans and peppers are still in full production. I was not prepared to lose them. It also prompted me to go to the Centre d'Interpretation de la Courge as soon as possible, since frost usually kills or severely damages curcubits . That is a lovely place to buy pumpkin and squash products, including harvesting them by yourself. It was my birthday, so I went for the full thing (they are also a brewery and winery ;)  ) and came back with a delightful harvest that I could not be able to produce myself. Their fields are an immense valley, fully exposed to the sun, a great advantage my backyard does not possess. A sea of pumpkins! One can carry their preci...

COVID times might have seemed slow to some people, but honestly it has been one busy summer this year for me! And I realized most of the months have had no registry in here, but for the sake of remembering this year's results, I will post backwards so that I will always know what happened!  For now I will start with some highlights.   The bad  The Swede Midge I discovered what is affecting my brassicas, especially the kale. It is an insect called the swede midge, yet another imported pest into Quebec. The larvae eats the new growth part of the plant, usually the tender core. Not only it stunts the plant, the enzymes deform its leaves. One could almost think plant cancer, given the blackened, distorted shapes.    This year was worse than last year's and the problem is that the pulps overwinter in the soil. So crop rotation is more than imperative to stop the cycle. It was a scary discovery, because Brassicas, especially kale, are what grows best for me in my soil...

This COVID19 situation is no longer news, being almost 2 months of quarantine in for us in Canada and for longer since it started in Asia. Before all that, March and April were supposed to be joyous and busy months here in my suburban homestead, where we plant from spring to fall. It has instead been weird and scary and very surreal in the way things have been conducted, from the news, the follow up with the government in public conferences and the incredible lucky reality that both me and my husband have amazing jobs that we love in companies that are full on working-from-home mode. This disruption have for sure kept me from blogging and even from starting the YouTube channel (an idea I had a year ago!), but it has NOT kept me from starting the seeds as needed. In fact, if anything I started more seedlings than our garden can accept, as I am determined to help others with their victory gardens, including my public parks with raised beds from the Incredible Edibles. This post, howe...

I spent most of December and January looking at seed catalogs and dreaming about next growing season. I am a big planner and that time is actually welcome and I indulge in revisiting the catalogs several times, reading blogs, consulting online calendars and weather reports and even drawing a lot. It is a delicious awaiting and at least for me, planning solidifies my confidence and I start the wish list with easily a hundreds of products I want to buy and end up buying tops 20. A great exercise in self-restrain if you ask me! My garden keeps growing every year and on top of that I like to vary and learn something new, try new varieties and just keep myself out of my comfort zone. That being said, the plan around flowers is one that usually has to start very early because many of my dear favorites takes at least 10 to 12 weeks to be able to flower from seed, some of them require stratification and this year I introduced to my family one very difficult addition: Lisianthus .  ...