Monday, May 19, 2014

Long weekend busy-ness

The Victoria Day weekend is always a busy one. The 104th Street farmers market was back outdoors and busy. We arrived at 11 and the crowds were much larger than the photo below suggests. Jenn pickd up some flowers for her mom (which we later planted) and some sausage and apples and a tub of butter chicken sauce.


The yard has been responding to the additional heat this week and the phlox is starting to bloom. It is hard to get a good picture of the very subtle mauve coloration of the flowers (usually they just wash out in bright sunlight) but a moment of cloudy weather helped.


The radishes in the cold frames are starting to form nicely. These are a bit bigger than the photo suggested--about one centimetre in diameter. Anticipating the harvest, Jess planted some zucchini seeds in the bed.

We also spent some time thinning the pumpkin seeds, selecting for the first up and fastest growing seeds from each of the eight clusters. I thinned out the elm seeds that germinated under the glass (love the trees, hate the seeds) and we've decided to just leave the self-seeded lettuce and then harvest it as the pumpkin plants get bigger and need more room.


The onions and garlic are coming along and jumped up again after a big rain last night. There are a few walla walla slips that didn't survive the snow that fell we had after I planted them so I have filled these in with a few addition yellow bulbs.


Something I meant to do last year but didn't get to was try grafting. We have an ornamental cherry tree in the back. It is perfectly located for a clothesline but otherwise doesn't do much for us. So I decided to graft some Evans cherry branches onto the many, many suckers that come out of the base. My friend Marc donates the cherry branches and we'll see how my grafting went as the summer progresses.


Jess was asking me what the red bump coming out off the rhubarb was last night. It split open this morning to reveal a new leaf, which was pretty exciting (our lives are a bit staid, so you take your excitement where you can get it).


This afternoon we'll be planting some Hooker's sweet corn our front (soil seems warm enough). Most of the rest of the garden is in except a few spots for cucumbers, the interplants we'll do with the corn, and a later seeding of carrots. If I get organized, we'e going to drop the canoe in the water this afternoon.

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