Our garden end of August

Here are a few snapshots of the garden at this time of year, when harvests are bountiful, flowers are their fullest, and weeds are not able to be kept up with anymore.   This heat and humidity has meant a productive year for tomatoes, beans, basil, kale, rosemary, and the tallest sunflowers we've ever grown...

Take a walk through our garden!  Enter through the garden gate and follow along...

 The marigolds are absolutely vibrant this year!

The dragon's tongue beans, a favourite, growing in the hooped bed.  Planted as a second crop after our salad greens from spring were done.

 Interplantings of nasturtiums, kale, beans, and greens.

There's always something to snack on - we grow lots of quick and ready to eat veggies for the kids, such as cherry tomatoes, lemon cucumbers, green beans.

Water conservation is so important, especially in a dry summer like this one has been.  Gravity fed basins of water in the garden for convenient watering, fed from the house rain barrels.

View of the newly glazed passive solar greenhouse, south facing of course - with our patio of figs, lemon verbena bush, and sea buckthorn plants, and cold frames for extra greens in spring and tomatoes in summer.

Pond area, nice place to seek shelter during the hottest parts of the day.  Habitat for frogs, toads, birds, fish, and even the visiting raccoons.

Alkanet flower in the newly planted dye plant section of the herb garden!  I hope to use the root for soap making at some point.

 Kale is abundant, our barn studio in the background.

We try to grow new varieties where space permits - these are heirloom red kidney beans that we got from Seeds of Diversity, a Canadian seed saving non-profit where we can find amazing varieties of heirloom seeds that are shared.

Speaking of heirlooms, here are some tomatoes we grew this season - cherokee purple, Nebraska wedding, Brandywine...

We try to interplant flowers wherever there is space, for beauty, pollinators, cut flower bouquets, and companion planting.

And the hops arbour is full and ready for harvest. Always more to do...

Pumpkin harvest!

One of this weekend's projects around here was starting to clean up the garden.  This included the last potato harvest, storage potatoes and fingerling potatoes!  Cleaning up finished zucchini and squash vines, picking the last basil and tomatoes, and harvesting our pumpkins.  The pumpkin project was our daughter's this year.  At the top of her garden list back in January was to grow pumpkins, even if it meant losing space to other things.  She has been waiting patiently all season, watering them, watching them ripen, checking each day in the past few weeks to see if they are ready yet.  She had a nice harvest of 9 pumpkins and felt quite pleased with it!  She had wanted to try "milk feeding" them just like in the book Farmer Boy (Little House on the Prairie series), but that would really only be economical if we had an abundance of milk, which we do not. 

This Moment

{A special moment from the week to remember, savour and enjoy!}

In the garden

In the garden these days...
zucchini, eggplants, basil and more basil, chard, pumpkins growing (the patch quickly taking over the side yard)!, first tomatoes (finally!  such slow ripening this year), kale in abundance, beans climbing high, fresh cukes, and flowers! sunflowers, zinnias, bees bees bees!

This Moment

{A special photo from this week to remember, savour, enjoy...}

Mulberries and urban fruit foraging

Our mulberry tree is finally producing - we have both a male and female tree in our yard, both planted not by us but by birds dropping seeds.  It's one of the nice surprises we got when we started tending our overgrown part of the yard (former driveway) that was behind our strawbale house addition after the building project was done. The male doesn't produce fruit, but the female tree is loaded with berries this year.  This tree is already high enough that the top branches need to be harvested by ladder, but luckily the low branches droop down and many higher berries fall to the ground when ripe.  There is certainly more than enough for us to gather.

It reminds us of the many forgotten fruit trees, berries and other wild edibles all around our city, left over from old orchards or planted in parks, boulevards or yards.  Just in walking distance right in our own neighbourhood, the service berries lining the boulevard of the next street over are in full swing with delicious berries just low enough to reach when you walk by on the sidewalk; there are several large mulberries in a park nearby; wild grapes and raspberries are growing all along the old railway line; and an old apple orchard with 4 well-producing trees is behind an older factory.  This is not even considering all the fruit trees that may be forgotten in yards where homeowners no longer tend them.  Our cities are full of food, and we could be much more organized in planting, tending and harvesting it.  In many cities there are urban harvesting groups that are banding together to collect these delicious resources - Not Far From the Tree in Toronto is a wonderful example.

Asparagus season

Our first asparagus is upon us.  This is one of our annual rites of spring, seeing the asparagus poke up from the ground next to the other early garden regulars like rhubarb, dandelions greens, chives and sorrel.  We've been eating our fill of asparagus, delicious and simple when steamed and sprinkled with a little sea salt and oil, but soup is one of our favourite ways to prepare it.  Here is our recipe, easily adjusted based on what vegetables you have at hand.  As you can see, our hens love to come around when we are harvesting the asparagus, as any digging in the soil puts them into a frenzy!

Spring Asparagus & Nettle Soup

1 large bunch asparagus (about 10 stalks), chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 large potato, chopped
handful of chives
handful of fresh nettle leaves (picked carefully using gloves)
2 cloves garlic, chopped
optional - carrots, mushrooms, kale, dandelion greens, etc
2 cups soup stock
2 cups milk or milk substitute
sea salt and black pepper to taste
top with yogurt or cream

1) Saute asparagus, onion, potato, chives, nettle and garlic in a large soup pot using olive oil or butter.  Add other optional vegetables is you like or have available.
2) When asparagus is tender, add 2 cups soup stock and bring to a boil.  Let simmer over medium heat until all vegetables are fully cooked. 
3) Remove from heat and puree with a submersible blender.
4) Put pot back on medium heat, add 2 cups milk and heat stirring often.  Season with salt and pepper.
5) Add additional milk or water to thin the soup to consistency you like.  Serve with a small dash of yogurt or cream.

Fresh syrup!

Well...after collecting sap from our 8 trees (we're just a small homestead in the city!) for 2 weeks and boiling the sap down, we came out with just over 2 litres of delicious syrup!  What a fun learning experience, small-scale that is was, with so much anticipation and incredible results.  Remember, these were syrups made from Black Walnut and Manitoba Maple, not Sugar Maple.  There was lots of tasting at all stages: sap from the tree to thickening syrup, and in the end both our syrups are delicious, yet very distinct flavours that are different from other maple syrup.  More wild and nutty tasting, and oh, so satisfying!  Just another one of those projects we've wanted to try, as we continue to learn to make our handmade life here at our little city farm.  I'd do it again next year, or even look around the neighbourhood to see if other homeowners would like to either share their trees or do their own tapping and share the boiling (in that case we could build a larger evaporator and boil on a fire pit).

Eating our pancakes this morning was the perfect blend of seasons - made with the last blueberries of the past year's harvest, yogurt topped with our last jar of home canned peaches, side by side with this fresh new syrup was the ending of the old year and starting of a new year of production, garden and harvest.  Happy spring!