Garden Update

This has not been a good summer for gardening so far. We didn't get warm weather until just recently. Even now the temperature has seldom been above the mid 70º's, (about 22ºC). When we get up in the morning the thermometer is standing at 5º to 9ºC, or about 40º to 50ºF. Makes for good sleeping weather, but not such good growing weather.

The other problem is that we are being overrun by three pests: deer, mice and mosquitoes. These were two very niceButtercrunch lettuce heads. I pick the outer leaves, and the plant goes on producing for a long time.

The deer found them delicious, but they prefer the very centre of the plant. I'm afraid these are goners. I found a metal rack to protect the lettuce, so the damage will cease at this point.

Here in the garden's centre path is clear evidence of the culprit.

Here's what they did to the Sugar Snap Pea

vines. In fact, I think they browse this buffet every night! These vines just can't make any headway. But we were able to pick enough mature pods yesterday from this row and the row on the opposite fence to enjoy some with our dinner.

They haven't bothered the corn at all. I usually plant

our corn in 4" pots in the greenhouse sometime in April, but just didn't get around to it this year. By the beginning of August we are usually enjoying fresh corn on the cob. So far I haven't seen any cobs forming, but the plants do look healthy. They about five feet high at this point.

The best corn in the world is the corn you pick from the plant, take into the house, shuck and boil for one minute before serving. Don't forget the butter, salt and pepper!

Today we were able to pick the first pods of

the green pea crop. The deer are keeping

these vines "pruned" back also. We have

eleven rows, so we should be able to pick

quite a few green peas in spite of the deer.

The bed on the right is the potato bed. I've dug up just one plant when we had company, to serve small new potatoes. They were a little too big to leave whole, but when I cut them up I had a surprise: each one had that brown cavity in the centre. I've never seen that in small potatoes before. It could

be that they were too wet for a while. We did have a lot of rain this summer.

Not all the beds are in vegetables this year. Here's a

bed of Asiatic Lilies, and to the right, not blooming yet, is a bed of Gladioli.

Some summers we have lots of beautiful flower bouquets in the house, but somehow this year I just haven't gotten around to it. We'll just enjoy them in the

outdoors.

Strange Clouds, New Potatoes

Last night at sunset there were some totally weird clouds.  One looked like a huge exclamation mark, something that you'd see on the front page of a grocery store tabloid, captioned, Is God Trying to Tell us Something?  And to the left of that a very long, torpedo-shaped cloud, such as I'd never seen.  First picture shows the exclamation mark, and the leading or western edge of the torpedo cloud, the second picture shows the eastern end of the torpedo. 

I've never seen a cloud with such an unusual and definite shape.  I've no idea what such a cloud would be called, but no doubt that it was formed by the action of the upper winds.  It was an interesting, but not threatening sight.  

The night of the Pine Lake tornado we had been watching the sky, which was quite threatening.  Jim called me to the back door to see a massive cloud, roiling just north of us.  I took a picture, because it was the most awesome cloud I'd seen, and later we found out that at the time I took the picture, that cloud was pouring down a funnel on a resort about 45 minutes from us, taking 12 lives and leaving massive devastation behind.

In garden notes, today I picked lots of spinach, since it's begun to bolt, and we had boiled spinach for dinner.  There's a new row just coming up, but we won't be able to pick from that for a few weeks yet, so I'll baby along some of the smaller plants in the old row, and hope for several more spinach salads.

I couldn't resist the new potatoes anymore.  Here's the harvest from just one plant:

These are Red Norlands. Scrubbed, boiled briefly, buttered and sprinkled with parsley, they are divine!  We still have lots of potatoes from last year, and they are still fine, due to our excellent cold storage building.  I prefer to make mashed potatoes, potato salad, or oven fried potatoes from them when they are this old.  Now that we've tasted the new ones, I'll probably let them grow for the rest of the season, and then harvest them all at once.  Unless, that is, I get a yen for new potatoes again.

A Fun Afternoon Project

For several years I've had a "patio dress" from Sears that I put on in the morning so I'm presentable, without actually getting dressed.  We used to have housecoats, and then we had muumuus, and this is just an updated muumuu.  But it was getting pretty ragged and needed to be replaced.  

About two weeks ago a friend gave me a whole whack of material samples, 100% cottons, and I had a great time sorting through them.  One interesting group was 14" long pieces of width of fabric (42") gold polkadot fabric with changing hues across the width.  This was just the ticket for a replacement of the patio dress.  

I cut the old "dress" apart to use as a pattern and in no time, serging the seams, had the new one ready.  Then I spent two hours handsewing the bindings and the hem.  The result is a really jazzy garment I'm calling a "pop-on".  Just pop it on when you get up in the morning.  Here's a front and back view, since the colors change throughout.

Can't help but feeling cheerful when you're dressed in something this colorful!

Today I spent time in the garden.  Put in 160 Sweet Spanish Onion sets.  The potatoes are showing in several places, nice dark green, crinkled leaves.  But the first planting I did several weeks ago of cold weather crops never put up one leaf.  I think it was just too cold and too dry for them to germinate, so this afternoon I planted some more spinach, lettuce and snap peas.  I also put in the two zucchini plants, two acorn squash, and two cucumber plants that had been started in the greenhouse.  But the parsley is going to live on the window sill of the laundry room.  Last summer the parsley was doing fine in the garden and then suddenly died.  We couldn't figure out what was wrong, but we were without parsley all winter. So this year I'll put it in a good sized pot on the windowsill right away.  

First Planting and a doggie adventure

D.H. and I had decided last week to begin planting the cold weather crops this Monday, so I got out there around 10 a.m. today.  There was a heavy, cold wind, but this was the day!  I got out the rake and the weed puller and went to work.  

There were only two dandelions in the bed I chose, and Jim had spread old manure lightly and evenly last fall, so there was very little preparation to do.  I made a light mark in the soil and started planting spinach seed.  Finished three and a half rows of spinach and then put in one row of Prizehead lettuce and one row of Buttercrunch lettuce.  These were in bed #4 (out of 11).  I keep track of what goes into which bed each year to insure rotation, especially of potatoes, peas and corn.  You can see where the rows are marked with a small stone.  The half row is the second from the beginning--because the beds are angled, I insert a half row so the others can run perpendicular to the long sides of the beds.

Then I went to bed #8 and planted 32 snap peas along the chicken wire fence at the south end of the bed.  In two weeks I'll plant a row along the fence at the north end of the bed.  We love the fresh, raw sugar snap peas.  They're also very good just lightly blanched and used in salads or stir fries.

This is a picture of the beds on the south side of the garden.  To the left, the north, there are another six beds.  Two of those have strawberries, still covered with vegetable matter, and one bed holds some perennials and tulips.

On Saturday I put out food for Honey, our little mixed spaniel mutt, around four in the afternoon.  She usually gets fed about that time, but didn't seem to be around right then.  She knows where to find her food dish in the garage, so I wasn't concerned.  Sunday morning when we left for church I noticed that her food hadn't been touched, and I hadn't seen her around at all.  And then when we returned after church and dinner with friends, the food was still untouched.  I asked Jim if he had seen her that day, but he hadn't.

About 4:30 we got a phone call that some people out walking had found her stuck in a culvert just south of our property.  We know she does wriggle through culverts. This time she had gotten into a culvert under a driveway that was plugged with ice on one end, and apparently didn't know how to back out.  By the time we arrived, they had broken the ice plug and freed her, and she was anxious to come home.  She was soaking wet, and very cold, but apparently unharmed otherwise.  And she was sure ready for her dinner!

Today she's taking it easy, finding a sunny spot out of the wind to recuperate.  We hope she's smart enough to learn from this experience, but she's not the brightest kid on the block.