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?

Slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

Alright, after a few weeks mostly spent watering and weeding, we're starting to see some progress. Most exciting is that the cherry tree seems to have set quite a lot of fruit this year. Sadly, neither plum tree got the memo.

Despite a cool and wet spring, the garlic continues to do well and I suspect we'll have scapes by early July.

The potatoes have also all come up (after I feared one whole type had rotted in the ground). The blue caribe are doing well. The Prince of Orange are just barely through the soil. But all seems good.

The wet weather has also meant the rhubarb plants are doing well enough that I could get an early cut. I chopped this and will combine with some frozen saskatoons from last year into pie filling this weekend.

Kale, which I've always thought of as the worst of the leaf vegetables, is now suddenly wildly expensive in the stores so I plants out several rows. It freezes well and I'm hopeful to have enough for stews and soups in the winter.

The lettuce has also started to show up although we're a ways away from salads, I fear.

I should have more to report in two weeks if we get some warm weather and the plants start to put on some size.

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.

Back yard progress: so many potatoes.

Okay, after several months of disruption, I'm back at home and going hard in the yard. Happily, much of the yard has managed to just just fine without me. As always, the rhubarb out front was among the first things up.

In the back, the garlic that we planted in the new raised beds has also almost all come up. I collected some compost from the city this week and top dressed these beds before planting the rest of them.

The bulbs are up, with the dafs being first. This little bee was tuckered out and was having a nap in one of the flowers.

I usually do some stunt gardening each year, such as melons or or weird variety of corn. Given the state o fthe world this year, I decided instead to put in 50 potato plants. They are a mix of Prince of Orange (which did amazing last year) and blue caribe (of which I had some left over seed).

Clearly the seed potatoes were good and ready to go into the ground! I also put the rest of the back yard (peas, carrots, onions, beets, some cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, butternut squash and lots of basil. The remaining tasks are just some flowers and more tidying up.

I can now turn my attention to the front yard. It will be a mix of greens, yellow bush beans, maybe some more carrots and beets, and flowers.

Spring!

Spring has finally arrived and enough snow is gone that I can get out into the garden again. These daffodils were a pleasant surprise when I started poking around in the back yard.

The dog has been moderately interested in my puttering and providing useful supervision.

The chives are up (the first useful green, as usual) along the side of the house and I have been slowly shifting leaf litter to expose the soil in the beds I'd like to start early so they warm up a bit. We've had 20 degrees already so I hope to get spinach and peas going soon.

I built three raised beds last fall in the hottest area of the garden. Yesterday, I repurposed some old metal conduits and some monofilament netting to make a pea trellis on the western edge. When the pears are done I am hope to train some cucumbers up it. This went up fairly easily with the exception being the monofilament's tendency to catch on everything (especially my shoe treads) resulting in several Gilligan moments of entanglement.

Up next: We're off to the manure piles at the equine centre today for a bit of poop and then I hope to get some pea and spinach seeds in the ground before the weather turns. 

Paneer

We've spent the past month cleaning out the freezer and the pantry of last year's produce and are making progress. For a change of pace, I made some paneer today (under the close supervision of the dog), since the store was out.

A pretty straight-forward process. Getting back to the pantry, we're on track to use up the jam and apple sauce we canned and we're making some progress on the dried stuff. More tomato powder and paste will be on the to-do for next year. Also, more minced and dried onions.

We have pretty much everything out of the freezer except for some garlic scape pesto (more pesto in general would be appreciated). We do still have a lot of saskatoons. I need to find some rhubarb in order to make some saskatoon rhubarb pie filling. And I might get ambitious and use some of the apple pie filling we have canned for some tarts. We'll see how bored I get this week.

The paneer turned out well and is in the fridge awaiting dinner on Wednesday. I had a brief moment of insanity and started looking at greenhouses. Temu-style greenhouses are cheap but the reviews are hilariously bad. Real greenhouses are insanely expensive. Happily, sanity has prevailed and I contented myself with a wander around the seed store and purchased some green bean and pea seeds.