Garlic scape salt and more rain

The rainy weather had continued, with July being on pace to get another foot of water. This was the scene at the intersection north of us last night after we got almost 40mm in two hours.

The garden has struggled with all of the water and the lack of heat. Some stuff has done okay. It is, for example, garlic scape season.

I gave a bunch away this year and turned my share into garlic scape salt.

Basically, chopped scapes mixed with coarse salt and pureed into wet, green sand.

After an hour of desiccating in the oven on low with intermittent stirring, I ground up the result.

And voila, garlic scape salt. Tastes a lot like commercial garlic salt but more garlicy.

The raspberries are beginning to produce some and the saskatoons are also ready for picking. I'm eyeing up the pantry and how much jam I still have some last year.

 

We are seeing some nice flowers.

And, happily, the last of the potatoes have blossoms after I feared half my crop was lost after they just didn't come up for ever.

The peas are also about ready to pick (maybe tonight if it doesn't rain).

We;ve been having our deck replaced and are now far enough along that I re-attached the pea trellis and planted a late sowing of peas behind the potatoes.

I've also been eyeing the potentially huge apple harvest and trying to finish using up last year's apple pie filling and apple sauce. This morning I made a crisp.

I see I also have kale to harvest tonight if I can brave the mosquitoes. The last few days have had a little bit of heat and the basil and tomatoes seem to be appreciative as well as the cucumber and squash plants.

So much rain

Alright, this has been the rainiest June ever in Edmonton (26.5cm) and it is raining again today! This has had some impact on the garden!

There have been lots of opportunities for cool picture taking.

The ground, though, is sodden and plants are suffering.

The kale and potatoes are doing okay. Other root veggies (carrots, beets) are stalled and even the peas are way behind. The basil and squash all look like they are about to give up.

Some of the flowers are doing okay.

I've spent a lot of time indoors, to avoid the rain and plague of mosquitoes. I harvested some rhubarb and combined it with saskatoons from the freezer to make and can some saskatoon-rhubarb pie filling, which was delicious

I also baked some Christmas cakes, soaked them with whiskey and put them aside to age in a cool cupboard. The yard desperately needs weeding but what can you do?

Planting completed

Alright, after a fairly chaotic spring, we're back in the yard and pretty much everything is planted out.

While this is a time of hard work, let's start with the fun stuff: all of the spring blossoms. Above, we have plums and below some small tulips.

The saskatoon bushes are also in full bloom.

And the cherries have just started. The cherry tree has a crazy number of blossoms this year so I am hopeful for a bigger crop.

The haskap bushes are still flowering but we also have the start of berries.

The front yard is also full of tulips.

I've spent several hours each day on various projects, including some soil amendments, weeding and seeding. I did stumble across the first of the potatoes to push up a shoot.

I'm also almost done removing the dead canes from the raspberry bushes and burning them. I hope to have the energy tonight to fire the last of them. Then I can get to weeding around the base of them.

I suspect, over the next few days we'll see some more seeds begin to emerge (the kale has just come up). We did have a touch of frost last week and a few of the tomatoes, a basil plant, and some marigolds look slightly scarred. Hopefully, they will come back.

Plums, squash, tomatoes and melons

As we head into fall, the garden is hitting its stride. The sunflower patch is blooming, much to the delight of the bees. I'm hoping the cosmos will also put on a show out by the back gate.

I harvested the last of our plum crop, which was tasty but is mostly encouraging for the future.

We have a couple of squash on the go, including this on giant pumpkin that is presently beachball sized.

We are starting to see signs of a modest tomato harvest (not really hot enough, early enough for a good harvest).

Last week, I had written off the melon crop due to lack of heat. This week, I find seven small cantaloupes  on the vines. I dunno. Fingers cross the frost stays away until October.

I did some carrot thinning and froze a few bags of chopped carrots for use in the winter along with a few more green beans.

The apples are demanding attention and we have been making crisps and such.

I had to call out the reinforcements on the weekend when I made and canned five litres of apple pie filling.

I've also begun digging rough potatoes to eat. Most of the crop can stay in the ground for now.

Now back to apple picking.

Sunflowers, tomatoes, beans

We're in a slow patch in the garden season. The sunflowers are out, finally, however, which is cheery.

Also some of the carrots we missed last year are flowering as we harvest the first of this year's crop.

Jenn and I took a trip to the Devonian Botanical garden and saw some amazing southern globe thistles.

Although we've been eating the beans, we did have enough for me to blanch and freeze some, maybe for Xmas dinner since we didn't have enough of a pea crop to do that this year.

The cherry tomatoes are also starting to ripen.

I picked a few to eat and they were amazingly sweet and tart.

I am coming to terms with the fact that we'll probably only get one lone squash this year (I think this is a giant pumpkin) and maybe no melons. Just not enough heat in July to get the plants flowering fast enough. Oh well!

This week I'm mostly doings one dead heading and watching the apples get bigger and redder. We may need to deal with some of them next week. I also have some dried fruit soaking in hooch to make Christmas cake.

Water, carrots, and beans

We spent much of this past week out of town paddling so this post will be brief. And the headline is all of the rain we've had. The picture below is of what came down overnight one evening!

The rain, coupled with the lack of heat, has meant a lot of growth in greenery but not much in terms of fruit. So no tomatoes yet and I fear the squash will not have enough time to mature even though the vines are really doing well.

There are a lot of flowers, though, including this wild onion.

And I have dill plants as tall as I am, which the bees are loving.

I did get a decent first harvest off the green beans and I need to plant more of these next year.

I also pulled some early carrots and we had a lovely meal with some potatoes and the last of the peas.

The garlic is mostly done curing, I trimmed it up and set aside next year's seed for planting this fall. The rest has gone into storage in the basement.

This week will entail getting back on top of the weeds, maybe thinning the carrots one last time, and giving some thoughts to reworking the raised beds in the back come autumn.