Spring Gardening

It's Spring in my garden again and everything is starting to grow and bloom!

The crab apple tree has lovely pink and white blossoms.

The honey crisp apple tree when it was getting ready to bloom.

Here's what appeared afterwards!  A future apple!

The blueberry bush has lovely green and pink honeysuckle-like flowers.

Pretty white and yellow strawberry flowers.

Even the brussel sprout plants left over from last year are blooming!  As a side note, I recently discovered that you can eat brussel sprout leaves, not just the brussel sprouts.  These leaves are actually quite tasty, so what a plus that you can basically eat that plant all year long!

Here's a Kale plant that is still growing from last year. 

This a a parsley plant that also survived Winter. 

Pretty purple chive blooms (you can eat those!). 

This is some strange leafy prickly plant that my mom calls "Gao Choi" in Chinese.  She picks the leaves off and makes a soup filled with it.  It doesn't taste half bad, but I have no idea what it's called in English. 

My sister's in-laws gave us two persimmon trees that they grew from seeds.  They are still small as bushes, but the leaves look pretty. 

The raspberry bushes are starting to fill out.  I can hardly wait for when they start to produce fruit. 

The oregano and thyme plants from last year are multiplying. 

Some kind of kale-like plant that grew last year from seeds.  I cannot be sure that it is Kale since it seems much shorter than the other kale plants we have, but it tastes good.  It might be the mustard plants we planted last year?  Anyways, it's not just a weed and we have been eating it all Spring. 

There's a whole plot of them growing among the English mint and Lemon Balm. 

The seed potatoes on the shelves outside got raided by the local rodents, but it looks like some seed potatoes got left behind in the plot since some healthy potato plants are growing out of the soil already.

Here are some pansies that look quite pretty.  I guess we must have had a very mild Winter since almost everything survived this year.  I'm excitedly waiting for other good stuff to pop out of the ground.  

So far I have planted different kinds of peas and beans, beets (first time!), and kale.  We put crushed egg shell around the sprouts to deter snails and slugs.

There are some store-bought tomato plants that need to be put in the ground too.

Happy Gardening!

Gardening Bliss

There are so many yummy things growing in the garden lately!  I love it!

I have eaten so many raspberries!  We started off with one bush and now there are quite a few bushes.  It made friends!  I think we will have even more by next year because I can't seem to eat the berries fast enough.

We have cooked so many different kinds of peas and beans too.

If you don't want to cook them, you can eat them fresh and crisp from the plant.  I have done that a couple times and it is fun to pick snow peas and to eat them immediately  :)

There are strawberries too.  Very little ones with lots of fragrance and flavour.  They are so sweet!  I wish I could grow them bigger, but they are so yummy in their little forms too.

We planted an apple tree and it actually grew some apples this year! 

There are 7 apples on the short, stick-like tree.  Not bad  :) 

For the first time this year, I am trying to grow eggplants.  They actually look pretty amazing!  They have lovely purple flowers and then this dark purple, shiny fruit starts to grow out.

My mom has been fertilizing the flowers with pollen from the other squash plants... apparently that works because we have a lot of eggplants growing!

I think this is a Mo Qua squash.  It's very fuzzy!

Here is a yellow squash I picked today.  I can't wait to find out what it tastes like!

We have a lot of different tomato plants with giant clusters of fruit.  Grape-like tomatoes and then some beefy tomatoes.  There is a small animal that keeps taste-testing the tomatoes.  This is what I found today... tsk tsk! 

I dug up some potatoes today!  It's so fun to dig up potatoes! 

We left the potatoes from last year in the soil and they must have seeded. 

Look at the all the potatoes it grew!  These are just the bigger ones.  I replanted all the little ones.  Maybe I can have a second crop later in the summer!  The original plants are still there too.  They had lots of little tubers still attached so those will probably make more for me later too.

I am having so much fun in the garden.  I hope you are having a good growing season too!

Take care, 

Marie

Fun In The Garden - What's Growing Now

Welcome to my garden! Here are some more pics to give you a peek into what's growing now, and how they look.
First up is the Cosmos. There are five Cosmo plants in this cluster, and they look stunning with their bright magenta flowers! There are some pale pink ones in this mix, but you can't see them in this picture. The key to keeping Cosmos looking good is to cut off all the wilted flowers. The Cosmo plants will keep blooming non-stop, and you won't have unsightly dead flowers making the blooming ones look unhealthy. Cosmos also grow quite tall, and don't have dense foilage. Plant lots of green, leafy plants around them to provide support and background foilage to set off the bright flowers. You can see a white stake in the picture that was necessary to support one stem that fell over.
I like to grow vegetables like tomatoes, but I hate to leave the vegetable patch barren and boring. To remedy this problem, I planted a row of impatiens in front and marigolds and pink dahlias behind them. The impatiens haven't been flowering as densely as in the springtime, but they have been growing bushier, which is nice too to set off the bright orange and pale pink.
This very flowery dahlia bush is the parent of all the pink dahlias that I propagated and put into planters. It seems to grow best in the ground. This is probably because the ground is cooler and wetter compared to the potted versions which tend to dry out and heat up during the day. Dahlia plants look best if you remove all the dead and wilted flowers. The wilted flowers snap off easily so you don't need to cut them off. If you keep the dead flowers removed, the plant will keep flowering and look more lively and healthy.

You can do the same with marigolds that have faded, but don't throw marigold heads away. Instead, dry them and save the seeds for the next year. All of the marigolds in my garden were grown from seeds saved from last year.
These are some of the snow peas growing in my garden. Snow peas are cool in that you can eat both the peas and the young shoots. Early in the season when your snow pea plants get tall and lanky, cut off the top young shoots. This will cause the plant to grow new shoots from all of the leaf joints. Flowers grow from young shoots only, so this means more beans from your now bushy plant. The tender, cut off shoots can be cooked and eaten.
Here is a snow pea that has grown old. Notice how it is swollen and is turning yellowy. I am going to let it get a bit more old before I pick it and save the peas to plant next year. About half of the bean and peas in my garden are grown from last year's seed.
Finally, here are some vine tomatoes in various stages of ripeness. If you haven't eaten home-grown tomatoes before, you're missing out. They are much more flavourful and tasty than store-bought tomatoes. This might be because you can pick them at full sun-ripeness in the garden whereas store-bought tomatoes are picked earlier so that they can have a longer shelf-life. Tomatoes are one of the easiest vegetables to grow, just water and fertilize them well (manure is best). They are like weeds and tend to grow lots of fruit, which is fine by me! They can also grow in containers well, as long as you give them a really big pot with lots of rich soil.

I bought two tomato plants this year, cherry tomatoes and roma tomatoes, but I have about five tomato plants growing in my garden. I think some extra tomato plants grew from tomato seeds in my kitchen and garden compost. This leads me to believe that tomatoes grow easily from seed. I wonder if they can be propaged easily as well? Hm...

Well, that ends my quick, whirlwind tour of my garden. I hope your garden is growing well too!

Have a happy long weekend!

Beans and Tomatoes - Gardening for Food

I wanted to show you what I harvested from my garden the other day - beans and a tomato! There are snow peas and some kind of green bean. I actually grew them from seeds I saved from last year's crop. You just let the beans get old until the beans get really big and the pod turns yellow. Then you pick them, let the seeds dry, and plant them the next year! I do this every time I forget to pick the beans and they get a bit too fibrous to eat :)

What I realized recently before the beans were ready to be picked, was that I'd starve if I had to survive off my garden. I have so many flowers, thanks to obsessive propagating, but really very little that I can eat. What I'd be subsisting on is chives, rosemary, basil leaves, and something gross like dandelions. For a few weeks, I'd have strawberries and blueberries. I think I should grow some lettuce and salad greens next year. Then I could at least eat those in case of an emergency.

Now I know how canning and jams began. It was probably to sell to negligent farmers like me that not only grow more flowers than food, but also occasionally forgot to water their potted plants during the hottest days of the summer. Eeeps! That would be me the past three days during this hot spell. Luckily, I only lost a few of my propagated flowers. They look so shivelled and sad now. I'm watering them feverishly now in hopes that they'll sprout a few green leaves from some magical, hidden life source inside the crispy brown stem.

Plants I Want To Grow Next Year For Food
1. Beans - (summer-late summer crop) Plant more than you think you need, and many varieties. They grow fast, and they have a non-stop crop for a good few weeks. Eat them while they're fresh, but you could probably can them too. Be sure to save seeds for the next year - the more the merrier.
2. Tomatoes - (late summer-fall crop)Buy a few plants, or start them super early in the season from seed. Grow both cherry tomato varieties and the larger ones. You can eat the cherry ones while the biggers ones are still ripening, and there are usually lots of them. Get roma tomato varieties for small-medium sized tomatoes earlier on. Eat them fresh for great flavour, but you can also can them and make tomato sauce.
3. Lettuces - (late spring-summer crop)Grow from seed and eat the leaves all growing season in salads and sandwiches. Grow many varieties, or choose the mixed seed packets.
4. Herbs - (spring-late fall) Basil is annual so you must buy a new one each year, but rosemary should last through a mild winter. Chives also come back each year. Cilantro/Chinese Parsley can be grown from coriander seeds from your spice rack, but most seeds will not grow so sow densely. Rue is perennial.
5. Zucchini - (late summer-fall crop) Buy at least 2-3 plants so that they can cross pollinate with each other to produce maximum zucchinis. You can also manually pollinate them with a paintbrush or cotton swab to increase crops. Once they start to produce zucchinis, you will have too many. Plan to share them with friends, to eat a lot of them, and to bake zucchini bread (mmmm).
6. Squash - (late summer-fall crop) also buy a few plants to increase cross-pollination. They tend to produce male and female flowers at different times for the same plant so it's good to have other squash plants to increase possibility of male and female flowers being open at the same time. The good thing about squash is that it can sit around for a while after being harvested. This increases the chance that you'll still have it around for winter months.
7. Strawberry - (summer-late summer crop) self-propagates to give you more plants each year, can survive through mild winters. Plant lots to give you lots of fresh summer fruits. Make jam when crop is most plentiful to last you year-round.
8. Blueberry - (late summer) only blooms once so keep more than one plant around in order to get more blueberries. Enjoy fresh, and make jam to last year-round.

Are there any other vegetables or fruits that you would recommend growing for food?