Rushing to Beat the First Frost

Yesterday I was scrambling around in the garden like a madwoman for most of the afternoon. A check of the weather forecast earlier that day revealed that we were supposed to get a day of rain today, followed by frost both Saturday and Sunday night. Since I have been neglecting my garden for most of October, this meant I had to hustle to get around to doing everything that needed to be done before the frost arrived!!

I got a basket full of tomatoes (mostly green, but there are a few ripe ones hiding at the bottom!), about half a dozen small green peppers, a few jalapenos, a tub full of chard, another tub full of parsley and oregano, and two very full tubs of peppermint! Those are all 4 litre ice cream tubs in case you're wondering - I try to always keep a few around as I find them useful in a variety of situations. The brownish-yellow dried out looking things in the basket with the peppers are pods from my scarlet runner beans.

I'm also trying a little experiment this year, and bringing a few of my veggie plants inside to see if I can keep them producing. I dug up one of my tomato plants, a sweet pepper and a jalapeno pepper plant, and my rosemary and potted them all. It was a bit of an adventure wrestling the tomato plant into my largest terra cotta pot! I stationed them all at the back of my dining room, where I have a large south facing window. I just have to remember to water them!

Now I have to get all those herbs dried and stored away safely, and harvest and store the seeds from the bean pods. The chard is already tucked away in the fridge and will be part of this week's dinner menu. I'll use the tomatoes up gradually as they ripen. I think I'm going to freeze some of the peppers, although I might just make a big batch of stuffed peppers!

Oh, and in case you're wondering what on earth I'm going to do with all that peppermint? I am a big fan of peppermint tea, so that will be how I use most of it. I'm also planning to use some of it for some Christmas projects - more on that in future posts!

Thanksgiving Harvest

We've been having some unseasonably warm weather this fall. Lured out by some nice warm sunshine, I managed to get some work done in the garden earlier this week. My tomato plants, far from looking like the season is nearly over, look better than they did all summer! It was so hot and dry in July and August that I struggled to keep up with their water needs. Now that it's been a bit cooler, they have sprung back to life with a vengeance! I think I might try bringing one of them inside in a large pot - now that they look so healthy I can't bear to let the frost take them!!

Although the overall vegetable garden yield was far from impressive this year (due to both the aforementioned weather and a bit of laziness on the part of the gardener - I never got around to planting a second timeline of anything!) I did fill a small basket with produce while I was out rummaging around. A handful of tomatoes (hubby loves those little yellow pear tomatoes!), about half a dozen each of sweet peppers and banana peppers, and a dozen or so jalapenos. If the weather holds out, I expect to get a bit more of everything before frost. The swiss chard is still going strong as well, and I harvested a bunch of that as well, to blanche and freeze for the winter.

In addition to our own garden harvest, I have also been trying to use up or preserve everything we've been getting from our CSA. As usual, we are inundated with squash! Since I still have a small mountain of frozen squash and and pumpkin in the freezer from last year, I am on a quest to find as many ways as possible to use up some squash and pumpkin so I don't have *two* seasons' worth in my freezer.

Since it's Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada, I thought this would be the perfect time to go a little "squash crazy". We have been fortunate enough to receive invitations to not one, but two!!! Thanksgiving dinners this weekend. Tomorrow we are going to my brother-in-law's, then on Monday we are headed to my brother's place. This is the first year in many, many years that I haven't cooked the Thanksgiving turkey, so I am *very* excited.

But I digress...back to the squash. This afternoon I made a Baked Squash and Apple Casserole to bring to dinner tomorrow. It's the first time I've tried this recipe, so I hope it's good! I also made a batch of Pumpkin Butter (thanks to Dewey's Treehouse for the recipe!), using half squash and half pumpkin (I raided my frozen stash for this). This turned out very tasty and I am going to use this for part of my hostess gift for both dinners (more about my frugal hostess gift plans tomorrow!)

Between wrestling with all that squash, hauling around laundry in various stages of done-ness, and keeping two extremely hungry boys fed all day (hubby has been gone all day working - yes, on a Saturday) I am ready to get horizontal with my book, so that is exactly what I'm going to go and do now .

McLaughlin "Urban Farm" Gets Ready for Winter

Wow, it's been a month since I last posted here! That's probably because life has been very, very full in the last few weeks. I hosted a baby shower for a friend of mine on September 24th, then the next weekend we had two birthday parties to celebrate Nathan turning seven (one friends, one family) and last weekend was Thanksgiving here in Canada!

In amidst the flurry of all those activities, I've been busy harvesting, preserving and preparing my garden for winter. We had our first frost this week, so I got everything done none too soon.
Now I have green tomatoes ripening in a basket on my countertop, a fridge full of peppers and celery, and a variety of dried herbs stashed in my spice drawer. I also transplanted a bit of my oregano, parsley, and basil into small pots for my kitchen windowsill so hopefully they will thrive and I will have some fresh herbs throughout the winter.

Another project I've been working on in the garden is putting together a couple of cold frames to grow spinach and lettuce. This is the first time I've ever tried this, so we'll see how it goes. After looking at a few different cold frame constructions, I settled on a less-traditional but hopefully effective design. This is build with three layers of brick (it's a lot deeper than it seems from the photo). The white cloth at the side is agricultural cloth, which will cover the top to keep in the heat (held down snugly with more bricks). Nathan helped me lay some of the bricks for these. I chose this setup rather than the wooden frame with an old window type of design, because I have both limited storage space and garden space and I can totally disassemble these in the spring when I'm done using them for the season (I put the bricks and agricultural cloth to different uses throughout the course of the growing season).

I've also brought in two of my pepper plants to see if I can keep them going through the winter indoors; I've read of others having success with this and I have a large southern facing window so I figured I'd give it a shot. New peppers are still forming on the plants, so things look good so far.

Overall, I'm fairly pleased with the first season of my biointensive gardening experiment. The biggest success was definitely the bush beans (green and yellow) - they were amazingly productive and delicious to boot! The greens (lettuce and spinach) and the peppers also did very well. The hanging tomatoes were reasonably productive; I'm hoping to have some nice planters to plant some on the deck next year as well. My raspberry canes seemed to be thriving and produced a few handfuls of berries (not bad since I just planted them this year). We'll have to wait for next year to see how the blueberries do! I had a few failures too - the pumpkins, watermelon, and cucumbers all died off without producing. Next year I am hoping to add a dwarf pear tree to my mix of fruit; I've read they can be grown in large planters (such as a 1/2 barrel). What with my indoor gardening experiments, tending to my cold frame veggies, and planning for next spring's garden, I should be plenty busy all winter!

Veggin' Out!

After basically ignoring my garden for the past couple of weeks (except for not-frequent-enough watering), I spent the bulk of this afternoon out frolicking in my "cabbage patch".

Here's a photo of the main raised bed; as you can see it's quite a jungle in there! This side of the bed has spinach, bush beans, onions, carrots, and assorted herbs (you can see the mint in the bottom left corner).




Here's the view from the other side of the the bed; zucchini, pattypan squash, cabbage, and some more bush beans (also some lettuce that has majorly bolted!) Oh yes, at the very back you can see the pumpkin starting to climb up towards the deck. I'm so excited- the plants are starting to flower, and if we actually get some pumpkins to grow the kids are going to be ecstatic.










The green beans have arrived! I spent about an hour picking them this afternoon, and there are more on the way.








I've gotten into playing around with the camera and taking some artsy kinda shots of the veggies. Call me crazy, but I really think they are just gorgeous (the veggies, that is, not my pics!) I am pleased with how some of the photos came out, but my digicam is not that sophisticated and I can't get the closeup shots I would really like. These will do for a start; I particularly like this cabbage one.







Here's a pattypan squash just starting, with the blossom still attached










Today's backyard garden harvest! I cannot believe how many green beans I picked (there's got to be at least a couple pounds there) as well as a bunch of spinach and what I could salvage of the lettuce. There are a couple of wee onions too that had gotten mostly uprooted in yesterday's storms. We had some of the green beans for dinner - I cooked them to perfection and they tasted incredible!




I think I'm going to have to brew up a batch of Lettuce Soup to use up all my lettuce before it spoils. No, I'm not joking, I really do make a soup with lettuce, and it's actually quite tasty. Most importantly, it uses 16 cups of lettuce to make a normal-sized batch of soup!

The other really cool thing I did this afternoon (when I wasn't out communing with the cabbage) was teach Nathan how to knit! He was watching me work on my knitting, and asked if I could teach him how. You should have seen his face light up when I told him I would teach him right then.


This is as far as we got, but Nathan did a couple of stitches of cast on, plus most of a row of knitting, with me sitting behind him and doing a bit of hand-over-hand with him. Oh yes, and he specifically requested blue yarn to learn with (his favourite colour). He wants to work on it more tomorrow. He says he's going to knit Marley a sweater - gotta love that kid!

Life is Good

This weekend was one of those truly wonderful (and not-common-enough) ones of which summer memories are made.

Nothing spectacular happened. Just full of those simple, small but contented moments that, strung together into a couple of warm, sunny days, are exactly what we all long for when we're pining for summer in the middle of January. The kids ran up and down the street all day playing with their friends, and I got some time to do a few things on my own (in between intermittent supervision of the swirling mass of children).

I went for a glorious bike ride full of hills, puttered around the garden, strolled over to the library, and just basically did what I felt like for most of Saturday (is there anything better on a warm Saturday afternoon than sitting on your front porch, sipping a coffee, and knitting, while watching the world go by? No, I didn't think so.)

Saturday night we all went to see Ice Age 2 at Dundas Valley Conservation Area. This is a really cool thing - all summer long they do a "Films in the Forest" program, where you get to see movies outdoors on a giant, inflatable movie screen. And, if you have a Conservation Area membership, like we do, it's only $2.50 for the whole family to get in! What a great deal, and a whole lot of fun.

Sunday morning we got up late, strolled down to the park (with Marley of course) then came back to hang out on the porch when it got too hot. We did a bit of errand running in the afternoon, but as boring as that sounds, it was highly satisfying since we actually got everything we were looking for (how rare!) - and I snagged two new knitting magazines at Chapters.

Most importantly, the raspberries are here!


To my great delight, the canes I planted this year have yielded a (very small) but luscious little crop of raspberries. Not enough to do more than nibble off the bush this year - I don't know how long till I have enough to make jam, but I'll surely enjoy whatever we get. Did I mention raspberries are my absolutely, positively favouritest fruit of all?







The rest of the veggie garden is shaping up nicely for the most part too (although there are some scruffy areas in the main bed as I had to pull a bunch of bush beans which were succumbing to something or other, and all my broccoli bolted right off the bat without producing anything edible ::sigh::)

In this photo you can see a zucchini plant in the middle (it's enclosed in a mesh "cage" to keep it from taking over the entire bed, that's why it looks so tall) Potato plants (also in cages) are to the left, with bush beans, peppers, and assorted herbs somewhere in the mix too. In the hanging bucket is one of our "upside down" tomato plants, which seem to be doing all right so far - they are starting to flower and a couple of itty bitty tomatoes have formed. If all continues to go well, we should be up to our armpits in summer squash, beans, peppers, and tomatoes in no time.

Ahhh, summer!

Vegetables and Treehouses and Chickenpox, OH MY!

I know I promised I was going to post at least 1-2 times a week on this blog - and it's now closing in on a month since my last post! What can I say, things have been *very* busy around here :)

The vegetable garden is coming along nicely, thanks to daily TLC from me.



Here's what things looked like right after my big past-the-frost-free-date planting (a three day long gardening extravaganza that left me with *very* sore knees, wrists and shoulders!)












Here's the way it's shaping up now - this was taken 3 or 4 days ago. We had our first salad with spinach and lettuce from our garden this week (it tastes so much better when you've grown it yourself!)





So what's growing in there? In the main raised bed in the photos, there's spinach, lettuce, pumpkins, watermelon (!!!), broccoli, cabbage (green and red), zucchini, patty pan squash, scarlet runner beans, bush beans (green and yellow), onions (white and red), carrots, garlic, thyme (regular and golden), garlic chives, peppermint, basil (green and purple), lavendar, oregano, and a few nasturtiums thrown in for good measure! In the side beds, there are some of the same things, plus strawberries, a blueberry bush, raspberry canes, potatoes, canteloupe (well, technically musk melon), pickling cucumbers, and dill. If all goes well, we should have enough to feed the whole street.



The other big project around here in the last few weeks has been construction of the boy's "treehouse". There's no actual tree involved, but it is up off the ground in typical treehouse fashion.

Here's day 2 of construction (day 1 involved wrestling the corner posts into correct position)










Here we are about 2/3rds of the way through the project (of course all the neighbourhood kids have been to check it out, plus most of the parents too!)










Ahh, what a beautiful site! The completed treehouse. Now I can get Joe to start working on the fence that needs to go across the back of our property (on second thought, our bank account needs to recover from the outlay for the treehouse first!)





Amidst all this flurry of activity, both Nathan and Noah came down with the chickenpox (just to add a bit more excitement to our life). Thank goodness they're on the mend and will be mostly recovered (just a few residual spots but no longer contagious) for our camping trip next week - we leave Tuesday morning!

(Wo)man Against Nature, Part I

After all my excitement about getting serious with my vegetable garden, I had my first major setback today. I spent a couple of hours planting my very healthy looking seedlings yesterday afternoon. It then proceded to pour down with rain for a good while after that - I was hoping it wasn't hard enough to damage my seedlings. Early this afternoon, I went out to survey the damage. As it turns out, I needn't have worried about the rain. The &*#@^$$ squirrels had done enough damage that the rain was irrelevant. They had dug up almost all of the seedlings and had a nice little feast. Wah!! My beautiful scarlet runner beans, turned into squirrel food. I'm not a person given to violent tendencies, but let's just say I'm tempted to get a BB gun and become a squirrel sniper. I planted some beans directly into the ground to replace all the damaged bean seedlings. Most of the cabbage and zucchini were salvageable (apparently the squirrels have a fondness for beans). Joe rounded up a bunch of mason jars for me and I used those as "cloches" to protect the surviving seedlings. Meanwhile, the kids were trying to console me, and ready to join me in the squirrel hunt.

Okay, squirrels, I lost the first battle, but I'm not surrendering yet. Stay posted to see who wins round II!

Experiments in Urban Agriculture

Inspired by another unschooler's blog (Blue Skies Urban Farm), I'm going to try and document a lot of our adventures with growing our own food this summer. Previously, we've dabbled in fairly standard backyard vegetable gardening - a few tomato plants, peppers, and zucchini, with some herbs thrown in for good measure. I've been wanting to branch out a bit more for a few years, but the last few growing seasons have been crazy-busy for us, and it just hasn't happened!

This year, I found a copy of Small Space, Big Harvest by Duane Newcomb at the library and was instantly intrigued. Using his methods, the author claims you can grow more than 200 lb of produce in a 5' x 5' plot. Since space is definitely at a premium around here, I quickly dove into the book and started making some fairly ambitious plans.

We have 1 raised bed that's roughly 8' x 8', plus another long, skinny strip I've divided up into 3 sections, roughly 4' x 4'.

This is half of our 8'x8' raised bed (that's garlic chives starting to shoot up there in the bottom left corner)

This is one of our smaller 4'x4' ish beds.

The soil doesn't look great because I hadn't turned any compost or topsoil into it yet!

I also decided to try my hand at starting a few seedlings this year, which is something I've never done before.

I took this photo a couple of weeks ago, when the sunflower seedlings were just starting to come up. I've also got scarlet runner beans (which have gotten huge and really need to go in the garden ASAP!), zucchini, cabbage, thyme, oregano, and some morning glory and sweet peas growing away.

The last frost date here is May 20th, so any day now I will be heading to the nursery to get the rest of my vegetable plants! We are also going to try some strawberries and blueberries along with the vegetables, as well as a variety of herbs. The thing that attracts me most to the Small Space method is that you interplant everything close together in the beds, rather than growing rows of individual vegetables. It maximizes the space, and it looks a lot more eye-catching too!

Since it's the beginning of the growing season, my enthusiasm is high. The trick will be to keep up with the garden maintenance once I get it all planted!