Winding Down

As the garden winds down for the year, it seems as though so is the blogging.

Over the past few weeks everything excluding the carrots and turnips have been harvested and removed from the garden.  Unfortunately a lot of it is literally just lying around the house while we keep our fingers crossed that it will ripen. At the moment there are spaghetti squash in the living room in front of the windows and green tomatoes covering a table and the floor in the basement while others are hanging in the cold room.

The spaghetti squash needs sun and warmth to ripen which is why it has taken up residence in our living room; I am glad to report it is slowly turning yellow. (That’s a good sign.)  There hasn’t been much change in the tomatoes but there are a few that are starting to turn red. (We might get some after all!) 

We do have one lonely zucchini plant in the garden that is living under a permanent cover of burlap.  When I picked the last of the zucchini two weeks ago I left one plant as it was just starting to form a few zucchini and I was curious to see if they would develop.  The last time I looked they were still growing, slowly, and more leaves and buds seem to be growing as well.

The beets, both red and yellow, have be picked and pickled, the onions and garlic and drying in the cold room, the last of the swiss chard has been blanched and frozen, and the potatoes are drying in the wheel barrel in the garage.  The turnips (what doesn’t have worms) should be cleaned and blanched within a few days, and the carrots will probably be staying in the garden until Thanksgiving weekend.

I have an assortment of shorter blogs started regarding specific vegetables so be prepared to see and handful of new entries posted later this week. (hopefully)

Standing in the garden this afternoon seeing it so empty was both exciting and sad.  After a long summer of gardening it’s exhilarating to pull the plants knowing you don’t have to worry about them anymore; it gives you the freedom to move on to other things.  At the same time it’s sad because, well, it is done.

Not much left, 'tators are gone now too...

It’s kinda ironic but as one garden winds down, the next is already being planned.  While standing in the near empty garden this afternoon, and on a few other occasions, we’ve already had discussions of what to plant next year and how to do things differently.

Frost: A Silent Killer

For a garden, frost can have huge implications.  In the spring it can wipe out your new seedlings without hesitation and in the fall it can kill mature plants spoiling their fruit and an entire summer’s work in one night.

The average first frost date in Grande Prairie is September 13.  So far we’ve had “damaging” frost three times this year.  I say damaging frost because excluding these occurrences, there were signs of frost but the garden was not affected.

The first damaging frost occurred on the evening of September 1.  Because of the warmer days it was hard to imagine having a frosty evening so I reluctantly threw some burlap over the spaghetti squash.  The next morning the spaghetti squash was warm and cozy and the zucchini, tomatoes, and beans all had their top leaves burnt and killed by the frost.  Thankfully it was not a hard frost, but it was enough to do damage; it saw to the end to most of our zucchini plants.

The second occurrence was a few days ago (11^th) and was a hard frost, it fact, it actually froze.  This time we had the tomato plants, squash, zucs and beans covered and they survived reasonably well.  Instead of fighting with poly and small pieces of burlap, we dug out a huge tarp and covered just about everything in one sweep.  Surprisingly, the potato plants got hit extremely hard; they now are all brown and withered and will have to be harvested soon. 

The past week has seen frost on several occasions: I am beginning to see trend.  I was planning on picking everything that is above ground this weekend but ended up starting to pick the tomatoes mid week.  With the weather being cooler and the days shorter things are not going to ripen outside so it’s time to bring them inside and see what some warmth can produce.

In this country frost is a nudge telling you that it’s time to wrap things up, it’s a watered down preview of things to come.  I guess I can’t complain too much as we were lucky to avoid frost throughout the spring and summer months (if you exclude the June snow).

What’s been goin’ on...

The past 2.5 – 3 weeks have been a busy time for me.  Thankfully our summer was surprisingly extended until last Sunday.  The weather over the past few weeks has been well above seasonal with some of the hottest days of the year; we even came close to 30C a few times. 

The last week of August I took some time off from work and I made use of just about every minute.  I wasn’t planning on spending the week in the garden but ended up there just about every day for some reason or other.  If I recall correctly I spend 2 – 3 days picking, blanching and pickling beans, one day pickling cucumbers (Steve managed to get a hold of 20 lbs for me), one day picking and blanching swiss chard and peas.  Just by looking at everything in my freezer I know I did more but it’s all such a blur right now.  I don’t know how I would have managed to get everything done had I not had the extra time.

Needless to say everything is the garden is close to being done and it is starting to look a little anemic.  If it wasn’t for the warm weather it would have been done a while ago; most days I wish it was done already. 

After their last harvest the peas and green bean plants were removed.  The yellow beans are still in the garden and have just recently stopped producing; the green were pulled because we simply just didn’t want anymore.  The red beets have recently been removed as well and have already been pickled; the golden beets are still in the garden until I figure out what to do with them. 

The warm weather was a welcome gift for our sunflowers as it gave them a boost and they are now flowering and hopefully the frost doesn’t kill them for a while.  Unfortunately the warm weather didn’t help our tomatoes and we still don’t have any that are ripe.  We’ve had frost a few times and have taken to covering things at night because it would be such a waste to lose the green tomatoes and squash out of laziness.

Looking at the forecast I have a feeling the rest of the garden, excluding a few root veg, will be removed and brought inside this weekend.  This is something I am actually looking forward too; it’s the time of year where I’m ready to move on from the garden and do something else.

I’ll post some pictures from the past few weeks on facebook in the next day or so.

The Spinach Experiment

About three weeks ago, ironically just after complaining about being overwhelmed, I had a crazy idea. 

I had just returned from the Farmer’s Market where I had gone in search of spinach.  We didn’t get much spinach out of the garden this year so I thought it would be nice to buy some so that we would have more in the freezer to last through the winter.   There wasn’t a single vendor at the market that had any spinach and I was told by one that “you can’t grow spinach this time of year.” 

This got me thinking, why can’t you grow spinach this time of year?  I’ve tried a second planting of spinach two years in a row and have yet to have any success.  So I got on my computer and started doing some researching.  As it turns out spinach is a cold weather crop; it does best in the spring and in the fall and it is one of a few plants whose seed has a very poor germinate rate.  Also, if you plant spinach in the warmer months, it simply will not grow.  Once temperatures reach 23C it becomes dormant; seeds will not germinate and plants simply refuse to grow.

As the weather was cooler and it was mid August, I got the crazy idea that I would try planting some spinach.  I took to my computer again to see how I could increase my odds of success.  One common suggestion that I kept coming across was to soak your seed and to get it to sprout before planting.

So here I was, August 13, soaking spinach seed for a fall planting.

After soaking the seeds for almost 24 hours, I transferred them onto damp paper towel that was laid on a plate and covered them with another damp paper towel placing another plate on top; it was kind of a damp paper towel and spinach seed sandwich with plates for the bread.  The idea was to keep the seeds moist by keeping them in direct contact with the paper towel.  Twice a day I sprayed the paper towel with water to keep it damp.  After one day the seeds started to sprout.  We left them in the paper towel sandwich for a few days and then planted them in garden.

Seeds Sprouting after a day on the damp paper towel.

Sprouts planted.

Once planted, we watered them regularly and waited for something to happen.  Within 3 – 4 days it started to grow; and then it disappeared.  Everyday we checked it and saw new growth but the next day it was gone.  We had failed to take into account something very important.  That something was the over abundant amount of grasshoppers; they were eating the spinach as fast as it could grow.

New growth to feed the grasshoppers. :(

We tried covering the new growth to keep the grasshoppers from eating the spinach but then the weather turned unseasonably warm, we got tired of fighting the grasshoppers and eventually gave up.  It was frustrating because if the grasshoppers weren’t so plentiful I would probably have a decent amount of spinach in the garden right now.

It was an interesting experiment and if grasshoppers are a non-issue, I will attempt a fall plantings of spinach in the future.