About the potential richness and diversity in an edible garden, part 2

Cet article en français.

Facing the sidewalk and right next to the entryway of our yard, some thyme slowly crawls on a chunked cement layer, a byproduct of recent renovations. In my yard, thyme needs to lie over such a dry material to grow well and thrive. This beautiful flower carpet is  sprinkled with tiny Johnny Jump Ups, whose flowers are edible. A wooden half-barrel is a good way to have a ready-space for annuals, either they be ornemental or edible (or even both!). It can also be decorated with a cat. Behold Souris (which means "Mouse"), lounging in it in the picture.

How my idea of a vegetable garden gradually evolved into something else:

Almost thirty years ago, I started a very standard vegetable garden, a rectangle square at the back of my yard, where the sun was. Some years after that, I had to abandon the project, not having enough time to adequately start it in the spring. But I could still find time to grow an ornemental perennial garden throughout the summer. Finally, about 3 years ago, I renewed with the idea of growing edible plants again.

Of course, the image of a classical, rectangular vegetable garden bed came back to me at once. But I knew that in my yard, this was now impossible. About 20 years had passed and the trees in my backyard and my neighbours' had grown so much that the old vegetable patch didn't have the required 6 hours of sun necessary for a lot of the vegetables that we cherish : tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, radishes, carrots, etc. If I wanted this kind of harvest, I had to get to the sun, meaning I had to envision using the ornemental garden that was in the frontyard, in plain view to every passer-by.

That's when a series of lucky coincidences made me aware of permaculture and its principles and through it, different techniques, such as polyculture.



In this daylily haven, the red flowers are produced by "Red Bud", in full bloom at the end of June. Other varieties will take over, one at a time, until fall. The flowering silver stalks with pretty lavender flowers are lamb's ears (Stachys Bizantina), offering a stricking contrast.

I hence found myself faced with that same dilemma that anonymous reader was talking about: would I have to sacrifice my perennial garden to grow a few vegetables? After so many years of work, this thought was disheartening.

Almost 30 years of gardening made me understand that, to do things differently, nothing beats personal experience. I'm also very aware that gardening is more a "general principles way to do things" than a "rigid rules science" since each garden - and each gardener - is unique. I was ready for this challenge. 

Integration of an edible garden in an already established ornemental one:

To this day, my plan as not come full circle yet. It probably never will anyway and that's not necessarily the goal either, since gardens evolve all the time. Here's what I've done up to now.

 The existing ornemental garden was already brimming with mature plants so of course I had to sacrifice a few, or at least reorganise things, if I wanted to have space enough for those new edible plants. After all, it was clear that squeezing a tomato plant between two mature hostas would affect drastically the harvest of those delicious red fruits!

I started with a change that was a necessity in itself: 

Instead of pulling out the white cedar stump 
(Thuja Occidentalis), I decided to bury it
completely. I carpeted newspaper sheets on
the ground to choke weeds, than emptied a bag of
old potting soil, added good garden soil, manure
and compost. I assume the stump will take years
to decompose; it will hence absorb nitrogen but
very slowly. One thing's for sure, it will start
feeding the ground and retain water like a sponge,
which will diminish my task of watering the new
surrounding plants.

It was in the spring of 2011 that I decided I wanted vegetables again. This project coincided with the removal of an enormous white cedar (Thuja occidentalis) that was completely obstructing the east side of our front porch and was on its way to damaging the roof. Actually, the entire eastern side was unusable for gardening since that beast was taking all the water available in the vicinity while casting too much shadow.

Like with many other municipalities, we needed a permit to remove it and we had to replace it with another tree of our choice. No problem there: I wanted a fruit tree anyway. My choice was a juneberry (Amelanchier Canadensis), a tree that would retain a more modest frame, one that would give me delicious berries at the beginning of July and one that would be fine with a little less than full sun.

I planted the Juneberry about 10 feet (3 m) north of the white cedar and I circled it with a ring of daffodil bulbs, which have the reputation of repelling small rodents and competing with spring weeds. I completed with a  sedum groundcover and astilbes a little farther. I planted catmint (Nepeta) upclose. We talk about that plant in detail in our article cat squad, safe berries. I intend to plant comfrey too, since it will help the juneberry by enriching the soil and keeping weeds at bay, and maybe I will also add one or two plants of chives. In one corner I tried to grow strawberries with small success up until now. Once they are well established however, it should go well, but this may take some time. On a whim, I bought 3 plants of cranberries but they died last spring, althought the site's attributes were fine (soil acidity was good, I put a very thick layer of mulch, there was lots of water pooling from the roof of the house). It wasn't enough apparently. I replaced them with a scented hosta.

Picture taken in July 2011. The east side of the house as taken a completely different appearence. The juneberry is still young but already producing fruits. After 3 years of gardening in that very spot, I can attest that the crops were plentiful (tomatoes the first year - they are in the picture - beans the second and back to tomatoes the third). Near the wooden balcony on the right, variegated dogwood. The house needs regular maintenance since the wood walls have to be repainted now and then. So I placed a path to give access and space enough to prop a ladder (these spaces are filled with a black mulch). Talking about paint, when we want to produce food, we have to think about a possible contamination of the soil. I'll talk more about it at the end of this series of articles.

I worked on the perennial beds:
I relocated some of my perennials elsewhere creating isles of bare soil here and there, throughout the sea of ornemental plants. I made sure those spaces were big enough to fool the annual vegetables, making them believe they were in a traditional vegetable patch. Their spacing from the perennials is good enough to limit competition for nutrients and water.

On the west side of the baywindow
seen in the opposite picture,
I had already lost 2 clematis in
the past. I changed tactics and in
2011, 2 pole bean plants took over
the space. The cultivar is
"Trionfo Violetto". It produces
very well.

For example, under the big baywindow of our living room (pictured beneath), I can easily place 4 to 6 tomato plants and let them spill on the path next to their bed, while they are screened from public eyes by two other beds between the street and them. In between, a couple of containers filled with flowering annuals are placed to fill the space until the tomato plants are big enough to claim it.

At the foot of the baywindow, vegetables in containers or in ground enjoy the sun and warmth while remaining discreet. On the right of the windows lie my first bed of groundcherries (Physalis). In the foreground, between a container of shiso to the right, a wooden half-barrel filled with annuals in the back and clumps of different varieties of daylilies to the left is my second bed of groundcherries. They form a very pretty bush to boot.

Strawberry-spinach 
(Chenopodium
Capitatum), a small
vegetable that takes little
space but one that can also
be choked by its
neighbouring plants.

These eggplants have been planted straight
in bags.

Through the beds I placed some plants in bags or in containers. I already had 3 wooden half-barrels, scattered through the flowerbeds. As the plants that grow in them are higher then those in beds, it gives them prime sun and prevent them from being overwhelmed by the well established perennials. The next step would be to install vegetables instead of flowers in those half-barrels, but I would also need to arrange them with a water reserve at the bottom, to avoid to water them all the time.

At about 10 feet (3 m) from the sidewalk, just
next to the narrow lawn border that's left, a 
6 square feet (45 cm X 100cm) islet is filled 
with peppers, green onions, eggplants and
strawberry-spinach. Many daylily plants and
bloody cranesbill (not pictured) encompass
the vegetables on each side. In the back ground,
sedums close off the area. On the following
 photo,you can see what this space looked
like at the very beginning of the season .

My garden is largely inspired by the cottage gardens of the victorian era in England: a mish-mash of perennial ornementals planted very close together. I only added vegetables to the mix and not all of them are hidden from the eyes of passers-by, as the picture to the left attests.

Here's a list of what's already in place:

More than 40 species of perennials (that's without counting different cultivars in one species), half a dozen dwarf trees and bushes and about a dozen types of spring bulbs (again, without counting the different cultivars in one species). 



Through all that, I seeded and planted - with different degrees of success depending on the species and the seasons - many types of vegetables: tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, peppers, beans and peas, eggplants, greens of all kinds and cabbages, carrots, radishes and beets, quinoa, strawberry-spinach, Malabar spinach, potatoes and groundcherries. Everything rotates too, so the same family of plants cannot be in the same islet year after year, something that would impoverish the soil and possibly allow some diseases or insects specific to that plant's family to establish themselves.



Here's what the tiny vegetable isle
 looked like at plantation time, on the
spring of 2011. I added a generous carpet
carpet of mulch between the tiny plants.



Some still green gooseberries.

Of course, I don't rely only on my front garden, to grow edible plants. In my backyard, even thought the shadows have spreaded with the passing years, I can still find sunny spots, enough to place other edible plants, especially small fruits who can generally deal with a little bit less than the 6 hours of sun necessary for many other types of plants. It is the case with blueberries, gooseberries, currants, honeyberries, juneberries, black raspberries, strawberries and rhubarb. But it doesn't mean either all vegetables are excluded from the backyard.

Where my old vegetable beds used to be, potato plants have found a good growing spot under a heave mulch of dead leaves. Around this bed, strawberries, daylillies, iris and rhubarbs share the five hours sun that hit the spot. A line of gooseberry bushes (not pictured) protects everything from the north-western winds.

Potatoes in bags, tomatoes, greens, herbs,
flowers, cabbages, beans, peas. The place looks
like a mini-jungle. A couple of plastic buckets,
hidden behind my other containers, hold
part of my rainwater reserve.

Another space was waiting for me, arms wide open!

The next step was quite obvious to me : the end of the white cedar naturally meant more light (double what it used to be) on the covered front porch. Suddenly it had the potential to bear a container garden!

This challenge was a lot less daunting for me than the integration of annual vegetables in my perennial beds. I decided to dress a list of advantages and disadvantages about my possible new gardening space:

- Rainwater hoarding can be done on the spot, but the rain itself can't reach most of the plants because of the porch's roof. So I have to water the plants myself even when it is raining.

My bean plants "Blue Lake", at the beginning of
August. The net is nearly invisible from the street
and I don't even bother removing it for winter.
A dozen of these plants give me delicious
green beans to eat fresh from August to
the harsher frost of October. It's not enough
to make preserves for winter however.

- This roof allows me to hang a net or ropes that will make it possible for a vertical garden to grow on. In the middle of the season, this green screen will give more intimacy to the porch's space and protect greens from the stronger sunrays.

- The porch receives full south and east sun exposure, but at the end of the afternoon, around 4pm, it becomes bathed in shadow.

- The heat can sometimes be intense, which normally forces me to give water on a regular basis, since the containers can dry pretty quickly: in a heat wave, I might have to water twice a day, or else risk losing the plants placed in any ordinary container. I had to find a solution to make watering less tedious.

Most of my water reserve is contained in this magnificient sandstone barrel that I found in a yard sale. I think it was used to make wine or marinades in a time past. Leaning on it is the wooden lid painted gray-blue, it was handmade by the previous owner. Once this lid is in place and a couple of potted pelargonium plants are set on it, nobody notices it. On the right side of the picture is my herbs container.

- The stones and cement of the porch and walls of the house absorb a good amount of heat from the sun, as does the water tank pictured above. Furthermore, the space is protected from most strong winds. These two factors together make for a comfortable nook to protect plants from spring colds and fall frosts and from nightly drops in temperature in August. It's a real warmth trap. With this, I gain some gardening weeks at the beginning and end of the season. In this protected area, I manage to collect the last of my tomatoes at the very end of October and this year, my rocket (Eruca Sativa) stayed alive and well until mid-December. It's true that this green as the reputation to keep well in cold climate but still, what a joy!

- When I take care of this piece of garden, I'm protected from the weather as well; lovely when the day is chilly, windy or rainy. I also have good artificial lighting there, which allows me to take care of this garden after work hours, even after the sun is down (useful in spring and fall). In the middle of the summer, the bonus of working when the sun is down is to avoid the heat of the day.

- This porch garden is ideal to cultivate herbs and cherry tomatoes, amongst others, since their proximity to my kitchen means that I am more inclined to use them while cooking something.

I improvised a container for my herbs (the white structure on spindly legs) from a school desk missing the top and left on the side of the road. I carpeted the bottom with two layers of thick plastic sheets and disposed pebbles in it. The containers are balanced on these pebbles. Quickly, the roots of the plants managed to escape their containers through the flow holes at the bottom of them. When I water, I aim to make a water reserve between the pebbles, at the bottom of the plastic bags. Later on, when the soil in the containers starts to dry up, the roots can reach in that water reserve to pump water up. This will keep the soil moist for a longer period of time and the plants will endure until I'm available to water them again.

- Right at the beginning, I installed my plants almost exclusively in containers with double bottoms to make water reserves; some that I bought, others that I made myself out of two different containers. The top container must be perforated at the bottom and it must not touch the bottom of the container under it (the one that will act as a water tank). If both bottoms are touching each other when you place one inside the other, this may be achieved by placing pebbles or bricks, or even small empty yogurt containers upside down at the bottom of the lower container. Any of those objects will act as "legs" to raise the upper container. 

The idea is for the soil in the top container not to soak in the bottom container (the water reservoir), else the soil would always be wet and it would promote root rot. The lower container should also have a flow hole through its side, level with where the bottom of the upper container reaches, this way, the lower container can never be too full. In order to make the water go up, you can make a ribbon made of a torn fabric band and lay it on the bottom of the top container before adding any soil. You insert the ends of the fabric ribbon through the flow holes of the top container: the fabric will get in contact with the water in the lower container and thus will bring water up to the soil when it's dry, simply by capillarity. Eventually, the plants will reach the water below by themselves by shooting a few long roots through the holes. 

With this type of container, I can be absent for at least two days in the worst heat wave, and the plants will have plenty of water for themselves.

The removal of the white cedar brought a lot of sunlight on the porch. Here, roman lettuces are interplanted with beets. They grow in rectangular containers that are equiped with a double bottom - to make a water tank. Each of these containers also gave me a third harvest. Indeed, on the south of the lettuces I planted pole beans in a single parallel line. They take little space at their base, rather spreading upward, climbing to a black net. Soon, they will provide shade to the lettuces, preventing their early bolting and extending their harvest.  The lettuce harvest will be over before the beets get to an interesting size. These 3 vegetables are fast friends, here. On one of the stairs, a white bucket has collected rain from the roof (our house doesn't have gutters). This bucket got filled to the rim within 10 minutes under a good rainstorm. All I need to do now is take it and hide it away.

Here's what the porch looks like from the street at the end of July. The white cedar had been on the corner of it to the right. Most of the passers-by don't even notice that this space shelters vegetables.

Favouring successive harvests, maybe a tad less important than one big one, in order to obtain diversity and continuity in crops:

 All kinds of tricks are possible to maximize the restrained space of containers. For example, at the beginning of the growth of lettuces, when it is time to thin them, I take some of the young seedlings out to make space for the others to grow well. I don't throw away those seedlings, no ! I add them to salads. Comes a time where I don't need to thin their ranks. Starting from this moment, I change tactics again and I harvest them in a different way. I start by taking only a leaf or two from the outside of each plant. The plants keep growing, forming new leaves and getting bigger. 

This way, my lettuce harvest is spread on a longer period, since I don't kill the plants, and the leaves are always very fresh, while I avoid to end up with too much lettuce in too short a period. They can pretty much produce leaves all season too, however with the coming of summer warmth, they engage into another state of growth and the leaves become more bitter. When this bitterness starts to bug me, I take the spine of the leaves out and just keep the thin part of the leaves (the"wings"). This way, I can still harvest lettuce even past its prime, until around mid-July, even if the micro-climate on the balcony is warm.

A score of those  roman lettuce flowers that
I let dry out on the plants before harvesting
them. At the heart of each flower is hidden a
dozen seeds. We need to extract the seeds from
 the dried flowers' envelope and it takes some
time, but it's not hard to do.

Finally, all parts of the leaves start excreting latex, that white bitter substance exuding along any cut. They can't be eaten anymore. At this stage, I only keep 2 or 3 plants to allow them to complete their life cycle. They'll flower and each pollinised flower will wilt, dry up and give seeds that I'll use for next year. With 2 or 3 plants, I will get more than enough seeds for myself, my friends, family and neighbors.  By the way, it is possible to harvest many types of vegetable seeds to keep for the next season, vegetables like peas, beans, radishes and beets. You just need to let one or two plants bolt. In the case of plants producing fruits, like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers or squash, you'll find the seeds inside the fruits, of course.

Just remember that the seeds from hybridized plants that are fertile won't necessarily give offsprings that are true to their parents. But it doesn't necessarily mean either  that they will give vegetables of lesser quality. Nevertheless, there's risk and adventure, here. And sometimes, interesting discoveries...



My roman lettuce seed harvest 2013,
from the flowers of only 2 plants.

About the potential richness and diversity in an edible garden, part 1

Cet article en français.

Louise :

A few weeks  ago, I answered to an anonymous reader who left us a commentary on a previous article that was talking about my culinary discovery of the moment : daylilies.

It is commonly known that daylily flowers (Hemerocallis) are edible. Well, their young spring shoots too. Moreover, they give an abundant and reliable crop each year. Here, the daylily cultivar "Corryton Pink".

This exchange coaxed me to write about growing edible plants in polyculture, according to my own experience. But I don't find the task so easy and, as I want to cover the subject a little more in depth, it will be presented in a series of articles that we will publish in succession.

What is polyculture and why use this method?

Polyculture is a way of designing gardens, garden beds, vegetable patches or even orchards with as much vegetal diversity as possible. In those spaces, if a good number of plants are edible, many others are not. It is because they are there to do other tasks that are equally important. It has been proven  that because it imitates nature, this method builds very resilient ecological systems. Therefore, this idea of implementing as much diversity as possible is one of the basic principles in permaculture.

My front garden beds, in the 3rd week of August. When, many years ago, I started to create an ornemental garden that would be in bloom without interruption from spring to the first killing frosts, I engaged myself on the road of polyculture. But at that time, I did not even know the word... and I was not thinking about edible plants either !

In opposition to polyculture, there's monoculture, the predominant model in industrial agriculture. A good example of this is the apple orchard, basically containing only apple trees growing through a carpet of grass. We can also think about these gigantic farms in the american Middle-West, producing corn, and rotating it with soy in an effort to keep the nutrients in the soil to a bare minimum. This agricultural model does not try to imitate nature, on the contrary, it constantly wars with it with tools like chemical fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides and heavy machinery.

The residential sector also has its monoculture: lawn. In fact, it is the most important irrigated culture in United-States. In this country, the total surface occupied by lawn is three times greater than the total surface devoted to corn.

My garden beds and my potted vegetables, in August. To achieve my dream of a sunny garden in continuous bloom, I sacrificed the major part of our front lawn, which used to spread itself between the road and the house like a conqueror. I never regretted it, not one moment.

Here's the young bed
where I trialed my
polyculture seedlings.

The vegetable bed in polyculture :

Take note that the term "polyculture" may also refer to a very specific method of gardening where we spread at random a mixture of many different vegetable seeds on the same garden bed.

We choose vegetables that can be sown early in spring but won't mature all at the same time (radishes, beets, carrots, mustards and different types of lettuce, for instance). While the young shoots make their appearance and develop, we harvest some in the spots that are too crowded and we eat them as greens or baby vegetables. We leave the others in place to continue their growth. We repeat this harvest as long as it is needed, until the distance between the remaining plants is sufficient to let them grow fully. 

In opposition to the traditional method, the operation of thinning the rows is not done all at once at the very beginning of the plants' growth, but in succession, only as needed. Furthermore, the young plants that are removed are viewed as an edible crop instead of being discarded as waste. Finally, because the types of plants are varied, they can occupy the space without hindering each other. For example, while a carrot grows underground, its slender leaves find their place in a nook between two lettuces that are spreading over the surface of the ground.

While we proceed with this ponctual harvesting, it is interesting to create a few clearings just big enough to put in it a young transplant of a bigger vegetable that will grow much more slowly: a brocoli or a cabbage are good candidates for this.

One of the islets where vegetable
seedlings grow, surrounded by black
mulch. I protected the young seedlings
with small branches poking out of the
ground like a barricade. This trick is
useful against cats looking for a
litter or a soft spot to sleep on.

I tried this kind of polyculture, two years ago, in a half-shaded young bed between our house and the neighbour's house.  I didn't use all the space, but only three small clearings in which I sowed a mix of vegetables: many kinds of lettuces, carrots, turnips, radishes, beets and small onion bulbs.

Lettuces and turnips were interesting while the rest was somerwhat disapointing, probably because the space where the trials happened just didn't receive enough sun. The carrots and beets stayed small and I'd rather not mention about the radishes. Actually, I haven't yet found the spot in my garden where root vegetables have managed to do well.

Most of us gardeners are already practicing polyculture: 

In fact, rare are the gardeners that cultivate only one or two plant species. And the reflex to physically separate our plants is weening. From my stepmom's confession, no one would have mixed annual vegetables with ornementals in the 1940's. Yet, this strategy is particularly useful in our city gardens, because of their small size and unusual conditions. It as become common to see, in a city garden, a rhubarb plant neighbouring a rose plant or tomatoes snuggled between a shed and a spirea hedge.

But the more we try to produce food on our small parcels of land and balcony, the more we need to find ways to maximize the space. Here, polyculture may lend a hand.

Between sidewalk and house, perrenials are queens, but still share the space and sun with fruits and vegetables. The brown patch of soil in the center of the picture is one of those discreet spaces I keep for annual vegetables.

Polyculture, an ally for the gardener who cultivates edible plants:

Snow peas are easy to grow on a very
small surface, because they can climb
vertically on a physical support such
as a pole or a trellis.

Of course, as in the traditional vegetable garden, we still have to give each plants their required space, sun, water, warmth, soil requirements, etc.

Actually, those annual vegetables we so prize are generally more fragile and finicky than many a perennial ornemental. Their capacity to adapt to different conditions are more limited (if you want a good crop, that is). It is however normal: most of these plants come from sunny and warm countries. Moreover, we do ask more out of them than just growing well and looking pretty. To reach what we want out of them, they went through a tough selection throughout the centuries and have become domesticated.

In my opinion, heirloom varieties have more to offer to the gardener than the recent hybrids that saturate the market. These hybrids have been selected more for their abilities to produce well and be resistent to certain disease in monoculture situation. They need constant irrigation, fertilizers, insecticides and pesticides. 
Leave them to themselves however, and they are less able to thrive in a natural environment (one that has, for example, other species of plants to compete with or that  is subjected to the occasionnal dry spell). Some farmers recognized for their work to advance the fields of ecological agriculture and polyculture - like the famous austrian farmer Sepp Holzer - have realized that these vegetable hybrids lose quality in taste and even in nutritional value what they apparently have gained in productivity.

Tomato "Sub-Arctic", from Solana.
It is easy to grow in containers and it produces
early in the season (45-50 days). It doesn't need
hot weather to bear well. Even more, the fruits
are delicious. It is however a determined variety
meaning it will produce all its fruits at the same
time (over a period of 2-3 weeks, then the plant
will stop producing and eventually die). 

The availability and popularity of different varieties of edible plants has varied widely throughout the years.  For instance, many flowering plants have passed from giving strongly perfumed flowers to cultivars that have pretty flowers but are almost scentless. Phlox is a good example and many varieties of other plants that can now produce double flowers.

On the other hand, many hybrids are sterile or produce babies that aren't like their parents. In vegetables, it's generally not something we favor when we want to gather our own seeds for the next year's sowing. On the other side, some hybrids do have interesting qualities that aren't available in older cultivars, like the tomato "Sub-Arctic", presented on the picture above.

"Anna Russe" tomato is an
heirloom and the fruit is
heart-shaped. This variety
is particularly delicious,
especially when the fruits
are very mature. The plant is
indeterminate, which means
you will have a huge sprawling
plant that gives fruits throughout
the season. Another one we
found at Solana.

Hélène :

Of course, these plants choice of selection also stem from marketing considerations. Nurseries rather prefer selling annuals instead of perennials since it means a reliable repeat of customers year after year.

At the grocery store, fruits and vegetables have changed a lot in the past decades and althought we do have more choices than before, the taste of those products coming from industrial agriculture is generally inferior to the taste of our garden's produce. This is simply because the produce grown by mass agriculture have been selected first for their appearance, yield and transportability, not their taste.

Remember those Florida strawberry that were pinkish, kind of hard and barely tasted strawberry?

A beautiful and good fruit, well matured on the plant doesn't bring back a dime if it becomes jam through its Florida-Québec trip. Right now, California strawberries supplanted them, and good for us ! But in my humble opinion, none of them beat the taste of our local strawberries - at least when the season is agreable to their good growth.

The "Pantano Romanesco" tomato is
often ribbed and dented. But she
gives meaty fruits that are very good
fresh or in sauce. Again, from Solana.

Louise :

Furthermore the consumer demand favors good-looking fruits, which closes the door to many otherwise good varieties whose sole defect is its looks. Of course, a farmer will select plants accordingly and favor plants of reliable uniformity, color and appearance.

And this often lead to a wasteful attitude that the client himself is rarely even aware himself: the farmer can't sell these defects for human consumption (an important amount of the initial harvest, by the way, sometimes as much as half of it) whether they be ribbed potatoes that are hard to peel or carrots that aren't perfectly straight.

Some of these defects generally end up in the 50 pounds bags tagged for deers and sold to hunters in fall. I've been bold enough to try one of those bag for my own consumption. I ended up with dirty, broken or crooked carrots, some with 2 legs or bigger than standard, but they were delicious. They required more work to clean and peel and there was a certain amount I had to just throw away (something my worms were delighted about). But I payed 11 cents for a pound (24 cents for a kilo)! I did, at one point, get a bag of carrots that had a strong carotene taste. But the very same thing happened to me with a normal bag from the grocery too, so... 

The point is, when we make a vegetable garden, we can expect some to have defects: siamese tomatoes, crooked carrots or too small carrots, imperfect skin or irregular color, especially since the seed merchant whose aim is us, gardeners, tend to favor varieties whose first qualities aren't appearance, but taste and originality, for instance.

With a dash of open-mindedness,
a failure can become a resounding success.
For instance, half of my turnip's harvest
turned out with roots slimer than normal
but I harvested a lot of healthy, green leaves too.
I prepared those like spinash, as an
accompaniment for a meal or even in a soup.
I used them about half a dozen time before
freezing some for winter use.

In our garden, no one will stand between our harvest and our table to discreetly eliminate all those deviant specimens. The new gardener who doesn't know about that may hence feel disapointed when he finds out part of his harvest is so imperfect - especially since we live in a world where perfection is the game, this failure is disheartening, even if it's actually quite normal.

In older times, farmers and gardeners who were producing their own seed stocks weren't spared from these vicissitudes. But with perseverance, they managed to select, year in year out, varieties of vegetables that were very well adapted to their specific local clime.

As gardeners, we too can explore the vast array of choices offered by seed merchants to find fruits and vegetables that do well where we live. Those varieties not only live better in gardens that are appropriate to their needs but they may also deliver better for our needs and taste too.

Successes and failures 2013, Part 1

Cet article en français.

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The June garden gets greener everyday!

Last year's related article :

Year 2012

Hélène:

It goes without saying, this year as been my best since this blog started! Harvests have been bountiful, weather was better than the previous years and failures were few. 

Abundant and diversified harvest : juneberries top
right, strawberries under, small green peas 
down left and linden flowers top left
(for herbal tea).

The failures:

The only noticeable problems were the abundant rains at the beginning of the season (althought I still prefer too much than not enough), but all these clouds offered less sun. In my garden, this made strawberry harvest a tad late and less sugary than usual (sun = sugar, after all). At the grocery store, this lack of sun and too much rain manifested by a shortage of local strawberries. It also forced farmers' markets to open later in the season than previous years. This lack of sun put in motion curious events: I barely had any sunflowers. Actually, the 5 sunflowers that managed to grow matured only at the end of September and they weren't as tall as they should have been. Surprising, considering everything else was bigger than its usual size.

My dill didn't fair well either : the spot where the seeds fell last year was covered with plants before the dill managed to grow since everything else was so vigourous. The asparagus have been slimmer than pencils this year, so I didn't harvest any. But I filled up on hosta sprouts that have a similar taste.

More bad news were the strong winds that blowed throughout the season; they actually were so strong my tiny lilac "Miss Kim" in front of my house had to be replaced (by a linden tree - Tilia - which gave me a marvelous flower harvest to make beautiful linden herbal tea) and my only mature tree behind my house, a birch, lost its major limb! I'll most likely have to change it next year.

Finally, the last problem came at the end of August. Temperatures dropped drastically at that time, especially at night and althought we had bits of good weather here and there, I was anxious during September and October since the date for closing the garden was hard to predict. Furthermore, the first two weeks or so of September brought rain, cold and clouds everyday; there was so little sun that my groundcherries became a failure. I had a lot, they just never could ripen enough to be edible!

The garden is well on its way in June, here. My daylily "Bitsy" starts to flower at the front here (the yellow flower). Next ,to the left, chives with loads of purple flowers and the bluish leaves of brocoli. Following up from the chives, milkweeds with their long woody stalks and at the foot of the milkweeds you can spot the yellow sage (yellow leaves visible through the chives). Then there's a Hosta, tomato plants and a weigela (pink flowers with amber leaves). In the tires, a red nasturtium flower is deployed but the place was soon filled with a squash - discussed a bit later in this article. Finally, in the black container, I have part of my potatoes.

Successes:

Oh there are so many! From tomato to potato, I'd rather show you loads of pictures to express the success rate in the garden this year.

I made a couple of lacto-fermented jars of radishes, by far my favorite way of eating this otherwise uninteresting root (in my opinion, at least!).

Raspberries (2 colors please), strawberries and groundcherries (in sparse quantity) were fabulous at the beginning of summer. My golden raspberries don't make a huge harvest but they deliver throughout summer and part of autumn. Actually right up to first frosts. That's amazing! I was still munching one or two here and there near Halloween!

Someone fancy herbal tea? Here peppermint, spearmint and lemon balm
promise a tasteful evening.

 Mixing plants to make a cup of herbal tea feels limited only to the imagination! In the picture to the left, a cup of thyme just before pouring hot water on it. Thyme is ideal if the body needs strenghtening against viruses - a bit like echinacea. The photo just down shows lavender flowers. I like to add lavender flowers to any tea, my favorite mix must be peppermint, lemon balm, dill seeds and lavender flowers.

Lavender flowers are delightful in pastries too: lavender powdered biscuits are scrumptous.

The potato harvest has been magnificient! This year's variety was a red potato called Norland from Veseys and it's delicious. It makes awesome fries and combines well in a soup. I wouldn't recommend it for mashed potatoes since the resulting texture becomes sticky and bland.

The tomatoes in the picture to the left are only at the beginning of harvest time. Later on I had much bigger harvests than these, like the picture just down here. On average, I was harvesting a full bowl like this every 2-3 days.

My harvest of a day, literally up to the rim, decorated with a stem of basil of the variety
"African Blue". On days when the tomato harvest was even bigger -
like shown on the next picture, I used to freeze those big red tomatoes, a variety
called 'Pink Vernissage' from Solana. They make an
amazing tomato sauce by the way. The two other varieties are
'Orange Grape' (a cherry size, delicious tomato, it was the first year I was trying it)
 and 'White Currant', a raisin size variety that I keep cultivating each year.

One of the many ways to use my potatoes : homefries!

Some harvests don't need a picture even thought they were plentiful! Like turnips. We'll have enough for the entire winter! Mustard harvest was also colossal, so was fennel seeds (I'll be talking a little more about this at the end of this article). Actually, herbs and flowers have done really well.

Beans have been incredible too: on the picture above, the beans to the left are called Jacob's Cattle (they are white with wine-red spots giving them a certain bovine flair) and the beans to the right are a mix between two climbing varieties, Scarlet runner beans (my favorite variety above all, the beans are black and purple) and Painted Lady (similar to Scarlet, but the beans are white and brown and the two-tones flowers are prettier than the one-tone of Scarlet).

This squash is a great variety called Sunshine, that has been recommanded to me as one of the best tasting. And it is so true! The flesh is crispy and juicy and makes a delightful puree for the perfect pumpkin cake (here's my favorite recipe on the web; even without any frosting it's sublime).

The pictures I took of my beans don't show you the entirety of my harvest: in reality, I froze 1kg of fresh, out of the shell beans that didn't have time to dry up on the plant. The picture on the left shows you the typical cow pattern of Jacob's Cattle beans.

In August, Scarlet Runner Beans (vines adorned with tiny red flowers that are climbing the balcony), daylilies of many colors (the beautiful two-tones orange and the wine-red are both fabulous varieties) and mullein (yellow flowers on spires) enliven the glorious garden!

New surprises :

Hemaris Diffinis,
Snowberry Clearwing

Every year, I like to observe life in the garden and I look out for surprises: stuff I didn't expect. I had some this year althought nothing as spectacular as previous years like the one about mice or this mystery squash growing where it shouldn't (althought this year more than ever I had to be unrelenting about new tomato plants that were sprouting everywhere in the garden and feel like a weed to me by now).

From the kingdom of insects, there were some new faces like the Snowberry Clearwing I spotted in my lilac (Hemaris Diffinis, Sphinx du Chèvrefeuille in French). My neighbour has a huge honeysuckle next door, one of the staple food for this tiny moth, but it loves lilac too! It looked like a bee but its movement - so unlike a bee - caught my eye. What a chance! Its transparent wings gives it an incredible elegance.

Otherwise, the ladybug population in the garden boomed this year. They are, for me, a good indicator of the garden's health, so I was really pleased to see so many... Especially when I spotted them feasting on aphids that were on my sacrificial plant of the year (a thistle, considered a weed pretty much anywhere and everywhere).

There was a lot of snails too that had beautiful shells! Slugs were also present, but they don't make such great pictures. :)



The surprise plant this year is fennel. I planted some last year (2012) and at the end of that season, I didn't took the time to clear the plants out. I thought that maybe some of the seeds would allow my fennel to make a come back. Well, not only did seeds sprouted quite happily, but the winter didn't kill the mother plants either! My son loves fennel and whenever he's in the front garden he nibbles on it. Personally, I don't like it much: too much anis flavored for me. But the seeds make delightful (not too scented) herbal teas, so I decided to harvest it this year.

Herbs harvested : Top left, 69g of mustard seeds,
top center, dried, purple sage,
to the right, dried thyme,
and down middle, fennel seeds.

Finally the end of October came, and a night frost took out every tomato plant still laden with immature fruits. A couple of harvests later,  it was clearly time to close the garden doors. Here, thyme, lemon balm and daylilies mingle in the frosted dew, signaling the end of the great 2013 gardening season.



The story of a false strawberry

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Hélène :

One Sunday afternoon in September, during my visits to some friends, an intrigue arose like this.  

"Come look at this, Helene, maybe you know what plant this is. I say it's a strawberry, my wife says it's not."

Moments later, on a shadowed corner of the yard, there's this huge dark green carpet of low plants on which perfect, flashy red pearls are lying on. After a look at their leaves, grouped in threes just like strawberry leaves, I answer assuredly : "Yeah, this looks like a kind of strawberry!" And then, the taste test. One berry, two, three. Huh. They taste almost nothing, something like faint strawberry water mixed with a dash of watermelon. Crunchy because of all those seeds covering the fruit. I'm still pretty sure it's a kind of strawberry, however one that unfortunately, doesn't tastes much.

After a bit of research, however, the fruit's story appears : It's called Potentilla Indica, previously classed Duschesnea Indica, aka Mock Strawberry (Fraisier des Indes, or Faux Fraisier in French; Falsa Fresa or Fresa India, in Spanish). The flowers are yellow instead of white or pinkish, an element that distinguishes Potentilla Indica easily from your normal strawberries (Fragaria), but not being in springtime, I couldn't rely on this clue.

Mock strawberry is an agressive plant. Here, the lawn can't keep it at bay.

In its English version, Wikipedia states that it comes from eastern and southern Asia, and in the French version, it says it comes from Afghanistan, India, Indonesia, Japan, North Korea and China. Wherever it comes from, it grows really well here, in Canada.



September's herbal tea.

Even if, to me, the taste seemed bland at first, it is probably due to me expecting the strong taste of strawberries. Otherwise, this plant as many advantages : First off - to my eyes - the plant as great value as an agressive but really lovely groundcover, speckled with bright red, perfectly round beads. It could probably be used with some measure of success in some part of the yard deemed difficult. Second, an herbal tea can be made out of the leaves. The taste is quite pronounced and pleasant but would most likely be enhanced by adding another plant like raspberry leaves (to my palate at least). I think the berries, besides being eaten as is, could be agreably mixed to a lemonade without changing the taste much but adding a nice pink coloring.

The most interesting thing about this plant however, is that it is a berry that's abundant in September, a month where - besides groundcherries - there is very little variety in the family of berries !