Grimace la Limace

Cet article en français.

Hélène:

In March of 2014, a great event happened in my life. Four books on which I had been working for 2 years were published! The Series is called "Les Aventures de Grimace la Limace" (The Adventures of Doug the slug, if I ever get them in English). These books are made of cardboard, they are 16 pages each and aimed at kids 3 to 6 years old. They are in French, but I thought it was still worth mentionning on the english blog regardless. I'm the author and illustrator of these books.

Each book ends with a "Did you know?" section and relates a fact about insects or plants' lives. The books were published by Les Éditions Broquet and are available almost everywhere in Quebec, althought the library might have to order them anew (it's been two years, so it's not unusual). You can find them on Amazon, too.

Here's Grimace's facebook page. But the real news is that today I made my personnal website online. Since the books work so well with a gardening blog, I thought it fitting to promote it here. Welcome to the illustrated garden! If you have projects you need an illustrator for, I'd be happy to be of assistance!

Veseys and Cheerios

Cet article en français.

Without bees, it's farewell garden.

What's the link between Veseys and Cheerios? Well, both companies created a beautiful partnership. To save the bees (Cheerios), the companies created a project where everyone who signs up receives free flower seeds (Veseys), the kind of flowers bees love! The participants are also entered in a draw, the prizes are 5 wilflower garden makeover worth 5000$.

Here's the link to participate. Hurry up, it ends on the 5th of May 2016. The contest is opened to almost all canadians (read the rules here to know more).

A simple photo to spread the joy.

UPDATE ON THE 15th OF APRIL, 2016:

I received my seeds!

UPDATE ON THE 10th OF AUGUST, 2016:

Finally everything is blooming! From the tiny white flowers of the sweet alyssum (lobularia maritima) to the yellow-orange of the california poppy, there's also daisies of all kinds in there!  In the background, there's my golden origano (the yellow leaves, left) and the tri-foliate of a special variety of strawberries (dark green, right).

A friend of mine allowed me to show you a picture she took of her results with the gifted seeds. Thanks Ève-Marie!

Successes and failures, part 3

Cet article en français.

Louise :

The small, third garden that was behind an appartment building is no more. The owner moved the year after it was constructed. Therefore, it will be replaced in our blog by a new vegetable plot located on agricultural land which, from now on, will be refered to as the third garden. But as we don't want to be distracted from the true purpose of today's topic, we will postpone its story for another time. Today we will talk about the successes and failures of this new garden during the summer of 2015. 

On our woodland, the rocks make for an omnipresent kind of harvest.

Since I like to keep the best for the end, I'll start with what didn't work out well.

Failures on the farm :

I planted this new green in March, in the
greenhouse when there was still a lot of
snow outside. I left two plants to seed,
so I have enough seeds for next year.

They are not that numerous and can mostly be explained by the coldness of the summer of 2015: the peppers produced little and, just like at home, we didn't get a single eggplant. The groundcherries didn't produce much either. Barely nothing came out of the harvest of wild red raspberries, contrary to the year before that. Only two plants of zucchinis out of six survived the transplantation phase. They did produce, but not overly well.

I didn't managed to make mâche plants sprout very well and the couple of plants that got through their rough beginning didn't grow very well either. For a first experience, it's not a success!  

I wanted to have new perennial vegetables, including egyptian onions and chives. However for the chives, only half a dozen (out of 36 seeds !) made it and I lost all the egyptian onions. For what reason? They were located in two different places in the garden. The egyptian onions were set at one extremity of a new garden bed, directly in the ground while there was garlic at the other end. The onions all died but the garlic managed quite well (I'll talk about it later on). For the chives, there's a theory for this partial failure: I made them germinate on top of a bale of straw and that sometimes make uneven germination because seeds can sink between the straw stalks and the humidity in straw is hard to maintain constant. I thought I had managed to avoid these two traps, so who knows! 

Successes at the farm :

In the spring of 2015, the strawberries planted the 
previous year came back strong. I planted onions
all around. These two plants lived well together!

For the small fruits: we had two dozen strawberry plants called 4 seasons, half of them planted in the spring of 2015 (the other half, the year before). We were able to harvest berries from June until the first hard frosts, about a handful everyday. I always made sure that the young runners - those appearing at the end of the long stalks that the motherplant produces - could root well since they will ensure our future production. Our strawberry plants grow directly in strawbales and they seem to love that.

 'Wonderberry'

 This year, I tried a new berrybush that produced really well. The fruits were ready by Mid-August. It's a Nightshade hybrid called 'Sunberry' aka 'Wondeberry' comonly called Garden Huckleberry (Solanum Retroflexum aka Solanum x Burbankii). If the autumn frosts hadn't killed the plants, I believe they would still be producing ! Personally, I love the taste of these berries, but not everybody agrees with me. Some find them rather bland. But they are tiny and tedious to harvest. They are also fragile - their skin looks a bit like that of a blueberry but thinner, so it rips much too easily. They don't keep well either, but my sister made an awesome jam out of them ! Their pulp looks like that of a blueberry too and it's filled with tiny seeds - luckily, these don't diminish the enjoyment of savouring them in any way. Careful ! It Solanumhat this plant can ressed itself abundantly. But more important, don't eat its berries when they are green, as they can be toxic (like green potatoes - same family) and don't mistake them for the European Black Nightshade (Solanum Nigrum), which can be mortally toxic.

We have a humongous wild rose bush that produces lots of rosehips, but we didn't harvest them -  for the second year ! It's simply because we were much too busy with more urgent tasks and didn't take the time.

Trout lily is a bulb that grows in our maple
forest. Althought it grows very slowly, over
many years, it can manage to cover an
expensive surface of ground early in spring.

Perennial vegetables and herbs: 

This is my linden flower harvest of 2015.

My personnal Horn of Plenty!

I managed to harvest some wild plants after assiduously identifying them. One of them was the Trout Lily, for the spotted leaves. It's also called "yellow trout lily" or "yellow dogtooth violet" (Erythronium Americanum). I didn't harvest that one; I only tasted it, since it's reported to be edible. On the other hand, I harvested a good quantity of  goutweed (Aegopodium Podagraria), as usual, but the variety with plain green leaves. The rosemary and the oregano patch did very well too and gave a good harvest. Mint grows  in great quantity on the bank of our small lake and the property is planted with a dozen mature linden trees, so I was able to harvest an entire year's worth of my two favourite herbal teas. 

Annual vegetables: First, the half-successes. If we had as many tomatoes as last year, it's only because we planted triple the plants we had then. The harvest wasn't as big as last year maybe because of the new location we gave to the plants (less sun) but maybe because of the low temperature too. Potatoes didn't produce as much as anticipated but they were planted on a new garden bed receiving barely 8 hours of sun. The ground wasn't ideal neither. It was a new bed made right over the grass that I covered with many layers of cardboard. Then, I covered them with bagged garden soil, compost and manure. This mix isn't bad but here's the deal: The time it will take the cardboard to decompose, the grass will have died. That barrier prevents grass from taking over the new bed but it also prevents beneficial microbes and insects living beneath the grass to colonise the new soil. It takes time for all this to happen and I noticed that new beds made this way don't produce very well at least the first year.

In the fall of 2013, we planted 28 garlic
cloves of a rustic variety with hard
necks  - different from the varieties
we usually get at the store. In 2014,
we put aside 48 cloves for our fall
plantation (picture taken in July 2015).
In October 2015, I planted 60 cloves.
Each year, I make our crop bigger.
Each year, I move them to a different
spot in the garden to insure a rotation.

On the other hand, I finally pierced the mystery of how to successfully grow onions: you have to plant them as early as possible, since the varieties that grow well here in Quebec are photosensitive. This means that they stop producing leaves when the days start to shorten, after June 21th. If the leaves haven't grown enough, they don't produce enough energy to help the bulb to grow. This year, we managed to harvest bulbs of a more respectable size. A first!

Many of our vegetables did very well. We had a nice kohlrabi harvest (the heads were a bit small, however),  nice beets, rutabagas and forage beets harvests too. The forage beets were used for my sister's horses as winter fodder. We could have used them ourselves: we just had to harvest them young and tender. The leaves are also edible but we didn't even bother to sample them. 

We had a great quantity of good, big carrots. On a whim, we tried to replant the carrots we pulled out at the clearing stage. This was my sister's idea. We planted them en masse and then took out the seedlings that were too close together). These unwanted carrots managed to reroot themselves well, but they ended up malformed, some of them coming out round like an apple! Still, they were delicious and most of them really big.

The dwarf beans and the climbing beans produced a lot, so did the peas and radishes. The roman lettuce lasted until the end of August!

One of our many garden beds made from bales of oat straw. For the curious ones, like Helene, the lean-down fence was placed there to prevent the dogs from running through the garden - they were taking that path as a shortcut instead of going around it before.

Dwarf beans, hybrid squashes, forage beets grow in these straw bale garden beds. The wire fence at the back leans on a tree stump and is used to make peas climb up it. At their feet you can see roman lettuce growing, they are a nice shade of light green.

The broccoli  are hidden under the plastic sheet,
on the left hand of this photo, to protect them from
insects. The sunflowers produced nicely, which allowed
us to give many seeds to our chickens throughout the
fall season. 

Broccolis, grown from seeds (too much seeds, actually), have been transplanted and produced nice heads and  a multitude of smaller heads, that we picked on three subsequent harvests! I also learned that in mild enough climates, broccoli could produce for two to three years! If I had left them in the ground instead of ripping them off at the end of October, we could certainly have had more. I chose instead to keep the best leaves for ourselves and give the rest to the horses.

The four plants of sweet potatoes gave us a harvest of 10 lbs (close 5 kg), about thedouble of what I managed back at my home (same number of plants at the farm and at home). There was more space for them to grow at the farm however, but the weather was cooler. In both gardens, it's still a great success considering this vegetable doesn't like cool weather.

 We got 68 squashes (pumpkin, Butternut, Buttercup and a delicious hybrid of spaghetti and Buttercup, from my friend, Aya). The only one who didn't fare well was a variety called Kumi that produced only one fruit.

New in the garden: I managed to grow amaranth and yellow nutsedge (Cyperus Esculentus), chinese mallow, aka cluster mallow, (Malva Verticillata) which leaves are good to eat, and Bunias Orientalis (goes by many names: warty-cabbage, hill mustard, turkish rocket, etc.). It's a perrenial I'll be able to taste next year.

Conclusion:

Up to now, we presented through this blog a garden located in a village, another in the suburb and briefly, a tiny tenant's garden, situated at the back of an apartment building.

Of course, the garden we are presenting here is different on many levels: the size of it, the climate, the closeness of a piece of forest, the presence of animals, both domesticated and wild. I'll be interested to reveal it little by little. I have the firm intention of trialling a wide array of plants and techniques here and to showcase it, on this blog. Keep a close watch!

Let me introduce you to Petit Coeur (Tiny Heart, our young red rooster, shown here lying in the foreground) and three of his ladies. The picture was taken in September and they were all born on the 10th of June, 2015. It was our second summer  raising meat chickens. We meant to send them all to the slaughterhouse, a bit before September. We didn't plan on keeping any chickens throughout winter; our chicken coop wasn't settled yet to protect well from our harsh winter weather. But Petit Coeur was such a great boy, following us everywhere, begging to be petted and observing our every move while we were working on the chicken run. That's what saved him. Also, of all the "male" chicks that were sold to us, we found out there were five females in the bunch (sexing on just-hatched chicks is quite hard and is done by observing certain feather on the wings). Three of them started to lay eggs in mid-december.

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Successes and failures 2015, part 2

Cet article en français.
 

White-flowered viola ready to harvest for both the flowers and the heart-shaped leaves. They make wonderful salads. I also have yellow-flowered and mauve-flowered plants. They easily re-seed by themselves so I always have a lot on hand. On this picture , we can see a baby plants at the base of the mother plant (in the bottom-left corner). In the back, a crawling stonecrop (sedum)  makes a nice green carpet.

Louise :

Linden flowers with their long bracts (the yellow
wings that are attached to the flower stalks).
Normally, I do my harvest in the surrounding
neighborhood, close to my house. But we have
seven adult trees on our new property,
so this year 2015, the harvest was done there. 

2015 saw good and bad, pretty much like its climate: Spring arrived later than usual and was followed by a cold summer; but rain has been adequate and there's been enough sun ! 

This year's successes and failures are partly due to a very big event in our lives: We bought land between Sherbrooke and Drummondville. I haven't talked about it yet (not enough time or pictures) but the short story is that on this new land, everything either needs to be heavily rennovated or built from scratch. We don't live there: we have tenants and during the summer of 2014 - amongst other projects - I built a giant garden there that was doubled this past spring of 2015. This massive project took so much of my time, I neglected the garden back home. But take heart, we will speak of this adventure soon!

The failures at home :

In the foreground, one of my 6 sweet berry honeysuckle (lonicera caerulea), bearing branches that have a reddish tinge at the start of the season. The tiny cream, triangle-shaped flowers should have made good berries.

Back home, my 10 tomato plants have given me a meager dozen of fruits, only 4 plants of beans have actually sprouted, I only harvested a handful of  ripe groundcherries and the peppers and eggplants have given me zero fruit. Furthermore, having little time to spare on my berry spring harvest (strawberries, sweet berries and black currants), I barely even noticed if they adequately set fruit!

'Red Robin' cherry-tomatoes, growing indoors
under artificial light in the middale of winter.

 At the end of spring, I also interrupted my indoors garden since it was time to change the soil medium anyway. Thus, my cherry-tomato plants 'Red Robin', that were giving me fruits since 2011, seemed exhausted,  and at that point, gave me little fruits and mostly made new leaves to replace the ones that kept dessicating at an alarming rate. 

I brought those old plants outside, thinking I would compost them later on. Surprisingly, they came back with vigour in the middle of summer, something like a last spurge, even thought they barely had 5 hours of sunshine per day ! This was their last saving grace, since I didn't bring them back inside at the end of summer. I knew that in fall, I would have a busy workload - too busy to start back the indoor garden. It was a wise decision overall, but I still miss the fresh tomatoes in the middle of January ! 

The half-successes at home :

Croustillants morceaux de rhubarbe,
prêts pour la cuisson.

  The juneberry that's stationned at the front of my house gave me a modest amount of fruits, but the bush is still young and it did give me double of what I harvested the previous year. However, the one at the back of the yard is having trouble and produced very little (and the fruits it gave weren't in good shape).  My blueberries gave me 3 lbs (1,5 kg) of fruits. It's good, by I usually get double that amount! Maybe they took a year off. The rhubarb did fantastic, as usual, but I want to split my plants so I only did a spring harvest, and skipped the late-summer one, to keep them strong. This decision prevented my from harvesting enough to make my usual reserve of frozen rhubarb juice that I use to replace lemon juice in recipes.

The real successes at home:

My wood garlics are now well established and they even grew a little (I have four clumps). The bulb of these plants is edible and it produces long, bluish leaves that are also edible. This is what I harvest since harvesting the bulb would kill the plant. I use the leaves sparingly everywhere. Not too much because the plants take a long time to grow.

Third week of July.
From the top and clockwise,
'Crimson Passion' cherries,
juneberries, 2 four-seasons strawberries,
 gooseberries, blueberries. 
One cherry-tomato in the center.

The gooseberries produced a generous amount, like most of my edible perennials (daylily leaves, hosta leaves, violas, mint, lovage and horseradish).

The black raspberries (in the picture above, with fruits in my hand) have made so much fruits, we harvested 10 pounds (almost 5 kg) of them! That's without calculating what we ate on the spot - at least two pounds more! We had so much we gave some to family members.

The plants are located on a part of the yard that we leave almost wild, it also overlaps a bit on the neighbour's property, a store that doesn't use this piece of abandonned -to-nature land.

Our wild cherry tree, a chokecherry (Prunus Virginiana),  produced about 15 kilos, but I only harvest about 5 (about 10 pounds) in the middle of August. The rest was out of my reach and so there was enough to also feed the birds of the neighbourhood. Most of that harvest ended up either as jam, syrup or coulis. We also eat these fruits fresh, even thought we ended up with puckered mouths, but a good helping of happiness - call it a childhood memory reprise. The three pictures below show both the complicated harvest and the prize !

  

I do have two dwarf cherries called 'Crimson Passion', bought in 2012.

One of them was transplanted in 2013, thus stalling its growth. It gave us fruits for the first time this year (three berries in all). The other produced for the second year and gave about 60 big, round and juicy fruits that we ate fresh, till the last. They are delicious and sugary, for cherries that can grow here, althought they are a bit tart. At my home, they produce in July. The plants have been categorized as a zone 4 and you have to place them in full sun and with a protection against the cold winds of winter. They can grow up to 2 to 3 meters high and wide (6 to 11 feet), which makes them good candidate for urban gardens. They can be trimmed to keep them in shape. Mine, pictured left, hasn't been trimmed yet and still retains a good shape.

Picture left : mini bok-choi ready                        Picture right : sweet potato slip 

 to eat.                                                                   (Ipomoea Batatas), just before planting.

 

As for the annuals, I only planted 2 cucumber plants and together they gave me about 20 delicious fruits. I harvested a tremedous amount of roquette, lettuce and... sweet potatoes! Seven pounds of them! 

  

Conclusion:

Even thought the summer was colder than usual (which may explain some of the fruits and vegetables failures, as welle as those that prefer warm temperature like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc.) and even if I couldn't give all the time the garden would have required to really thrive, I'm still very proud of what it brought to heart and table. What makes me sing is that regardless of the failures, there was always something to eat. The wide variety of fruits and vegetables I cultivate in my yard contributes to my happiness as a gardener like nothing else!