June garden harvest & plantings

We've finally started the work of finishing up the outside of our strawbale house addition. We have a large wrap-around porch to build, front steps/deck, new landscaping and retaining wall along our driveway, and of course, the most important, finishing the exterior plastering of the walls. We'll be posting more photos and details as we move along on that process this summer. It's an exciting prospect to consider finishing the house this season!

After a busy weekend spent digging post-holes for the new porch, preparing building materials, hosting a variety of overnight guests in our B&B, and a short relaxing break to meet some friends at a local Kite Festival in the park, we took a few hours in the garden this evening to start our first round of succession plantings. We planted more radish, zucchini, basil, chinese cabbage, mizuna, chickory, several varieties of lettuce & mesclun greens, chard, beans, beets, coriander/cilantro, nasturtiums - and harvested fresh garlic, lettuce, orach, green onions, rhubarb and the first strawberries for dinner. Indoors we've started more kale, zucchini, greens, and tulsi (sacred) basil gifted us a few weeks ago by visiting interns from the Saugeen CSA in Durham. We hope to continuously have new transplants ready to be set out into the garden in place of the larger plants being harvested.

It's also time to start harvesting wild edibles (nettle, wild grape leaves, orach, chickweed, purslane, lamb's quarters), as well as herbs that we dry for our tea blends & herbal products. Already the raspberry leaves, mints, bergamot, sweet grass, yarrow, lemon balm, sage, lavender, marigold, wild rose, oregano, catnip, comfrey and nettle are ready for harvest.

Above are a few photos of what we are enjoying in the garden - the blossom colours of May in the garden are white (forget-me-not, bloodroot), and now early to mid June our garden is purple - orach, sage flowers, lavender, chive blossoms, purple lamb's quarters, wild rose blossoms, pea blossoms, wild lupines, and a gorgeous heritage variety purple fava bean that we're growing for the first time.