Other

These belong to other people in the Community Garden. I'm just posting them because I thought they looked neat and so I took photos of their neatness. From the top: a sunflower, purple cauliflower going to seed, broccoli totally gone to seed, dill.

And look who finally showed up!

Eschcholzia californica, or "California poppy."

You may recall that last year, I planted several varieties of poppies: oriental (failed), "Pizzicato" (failed), "Falling in Love" (epic fail, of course), Icelandic poppy (limited success) and Flanders poppies (wild success, 4000 seeds producing massive amounts of flower that produced massive amounts of seeds).

This year, I decided to be reasonable and seed only one packet of poppies, and I picked these, Eschcholzia californica var. "Appleblossom".

Then I waited.

Then poppy flowerbuds appeared.

Then they opened... and every last one was a Flanders poppy. Well, not for nothing that it's actually a weed in Europe.

So, I spent the summer watching for Flanders poppies and uprooting them as soon as they showed their colours, and hopefully before they could shed seeds.

And then, finally, September 4, 11 days before the average first frost, I have a California poppy. And it's every bit as pretty as I had hoped... Now I just have to produce a hundred more, two months earlier, and everything will be copacetic. Hopefully they're like flax and they'll take care of themselves once they get going.

I DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Finally, after four years of unremitting effort and aggravation, a dozen seed packets, and three attempts to propagate from wild specimens, I got a flax flower to bloom. Typically when something takes me that much trouble, I quit once I get what I was after, but since flax makes very long taproots, seeds itself readily, and is almost immortal once established, I'm guessing I won't have to worry about it much from now on. So that's one thing that worked out in my flower garden.

Well, technically, it's two: the J.P. Connell rose bloomed all season, never showed any sign of discomfort, and is about two feet tall not. If I can make it survive the winter, it has a bright future, I should think.

Sigh...

Brussels sprouts: another plant I don't think I'll be growing again. Like the cauliflowers, they take a lot of room and a lot of time to produce very little. I haven't harvested a single one yet, though I see someone stole a plant from me. Another reason not to grow them, by the way. Some depraved detritus of humanity steals from the Community Garden on a regular basis, which is annoying, but it only eats certain plants: beets, carrots, onions, cabbage and apparently, Brussels sprouts. No theft of peas, pumpkins or turnips have been reported, so mostly my food is safe. But I'm certainly not going to waste my time growing food so that some lazy jackass can steal it.

Fractal-iflower

This is my "Orbit" cauliflower. Though it might be actually "Orbitz". I forget. And some suppliers sell it as "Veronica" which is just lame. In any case, it's a green cauliflower that looks like fractals.

It looks cute in the catalogue, it looks cute here, but it has two problems: one, it makes gigantic plants that take up half the garden, but produce a very small head in the end. And two, it's not that tasty. My peas were exponentially more delicious than store peas. My turnips were exponentially more delicious than store turnips. This cauliflower tastes more or less the same as store cauliflower. It just happens to be green, fractal, and organically grown. Considering that I would generally not buy cauliflower anyway, I'm not convinced I gained anything by growing my own.

Also, it takes forever. I've eaten one head so far. This one is the biggest of four that are currently developing. And one plant is just at the very beginning of forming a head. I think there is a finite chance that I'll try it next year, but right now I'm underwhelmed.

Still, it does look pretty darn cool.

The Great Pumpkin cometh!

See? I have FOUR pumpkins! Five, actually, but the other one is on a different vine at the other end of the garden. These ones, there are three on one vine and one on the other.


This is the Chief Pumpkin, the first and the largest one (in the background in the second photo above). Now it has two more pumpkins on its vine. One is a good size and might make it to orange colour if it doesn't freeze too soon. The other one is about 3" across and won't make it, and I really should remove it, but I think it's too cool to kill it. You can see it in the bottom left corner in the first picture.

What I should also do is harvest the Chief Pumpkin, as it's been fully orange for some time and is probably ready. The thing is, I have a friend who claims to make the world's best pumpkin soup and is indigent, and I've been meaning to give him this pumpkin, but I haven't seen him in weeks to check if he would like a pumpkin. Also I have to get the seeds back. This vine flowered way earlier and produced way more than the other vines from the same seed packet. I want to reseed it next year for sure.

For next year, I also have some Lumina and Neon seeds, and we're building a greenhouse at the Community Gardens. Although by "we" I don't mean me. I had planned to volunteer on it, but the people who have put themselves in charge of the project annoy the crap out of me (and their dog bit me), so I'll volunteer for something that doesn't involve annoyance. But anyway, where I was going with this is, starting pumpkin seeds early in my house didn't help much because I don't have enough light or room to keep pumpkins for more than two weeks, so they got leggy and then the wind broke them when I bedded them out too early. But for next year, I can start them in the greenhouse, and hopefully that will be more successful.

Anemones

These are anemones, or windflowers. They're very pretty. They're also not nearly hardy enough for our winters. I can try to dig them out in the fall, but maybe I'll just leave them alone, buy more next spring, and plant them in a planter. That way I can bring them into the house in the fall.

Or not. Whatever I plan for my garden, I never actually do it.

Also, a cauliflower

Have I shown you my cauliflower before? It's called "Orbitz". I picked it because it looks like a fractal. It's awfully late in the season for cauliflower, considering that everyone else is almost done eating theirs, but oh well. At least it's coming. So far it's about big enough for one bite, but in a few more weeks it might be snack-sized.

If at first you don't succeed, there's always blackmail

This is my latest pumpkin. I have three Baby Pam vines, and this one kept producing female flowers and letting them die. So I said I'd just pull it out, since it was just wasting space. But when I went yesterday, finally it had one bud growing instead of shrinking. And if you think it's just a coincidence, you don't know plants. They know everything.

On the other hand, the one Lumina, which is a semi-bush type, hasn't even put out any female flowers yet. It looks like there is one female bud coming, but that's pretty pointless this late in the year. So that one is probably going to get pulled for real.


Meanwhile, this is my second pumpkin. It's two weeks old and bigger than my fist. That's not much for a pumpkin, but it's bigger than any pumpkin I grew up to now, except for:


My first pumpkin. It's turning orange! It's turning orange! It has four more weeks to put on some weight. I hope it gets big enough to feed a few people. My friend Brian claims to make the best pumpkin soup in the world, so I'm hoping he can cook this bad boy for us and we can have some friends together to eat it.

Next year we're supposed to have a greenhouse in the Community Garden, so hopefully I can start pumpkins way ahead of time.

Quousque tandem?

That's Latin for "you're starting to piss me off."

Consider:



The top one is one of my double oriental lilies that I paid a fortune for. They started to come out of the ground May 18, and they've had flower buds since at least July 20. That is, one staid four inches tall for ever, turned brown, and died back, so it won't flower this year, if ever. The second one has buds, but they're not getting bigger, and I don't think they'll flower. And the third one, which I was hoping was Lodewijk, is doing this. One of the petals has since separated from the rest and it seems to have some light pink on it, suggesting it's gonna be Soft Music instead of Lodewijk. But whatever it's doing, it's just not doing it.

And the bottom photo is from the other lily location, where I put my Stargazer from last year and the "black" Asiatic lilies. As you may recall, one bloomed but was orange. The other two got immensely tall, didn't flower, turned brown and died back. And then when I cleared the weeds away some days ago, I saw that three out of the four lilies are coming up again. I'm guessing the two big ones are the two that didn't flower before, and if I recall how they were in the planter before I put them outside, it seems to me that the small one right next to the pear tree (if you can tell what's a pear tree in this mess) is probably the Stargazer. But whatever the case may be, none of the three has a flower bud. Again.

I am not amused.

"They" were right!

What? How is that possible? "They" are never right. You know, "they". As in "they say". "They" never say the right thing. And in the Community Garden, "they" really say all kinds of nonsense. But in this case, "they" are not the people in the garden.

What I'm talking about is this: if you read anything about growing your own vegetables, you'll notice "they" say that vegetables from your own garden are far tastier than the ones from the supermarket. I assumed they were talking metaphorically, as in "you'll enjoy them so much more because of all your hard work" kind of thing.

I was wrong.

On Monday, I picked some peas from my garden. Then I didn't eat them right away, because I had to finish some other food that was in the fridge. Then on... Thursday, I think, I fixed some leftover ground beef with a tiny onion that I had pulled from my garden because it was being crushed by pumpkins. And pasta. And I was gonna cook the peas to go with it, though it seemed kinda weird, in a sense, "cooking" my peas. I mean, clearly, we cook vegetables all the time, but first they've been frozen, wrapped in plastic, and put in the store, and it seems normal to cook them. But somehow, putting my garden peas in hot water seemed weird.

In fact, when you think about it, that's not it at all. I have a mental block about eating food from my garden. Like when my spinach was ready to eat, I didn't feel at all comfortable eating it. I mean, it came out of the dirt. There is manure in there, you know. I put it there myself. And it's all been sitting outside in the dirt, where insects and dogs can pee on it. Ew. I don't want to eat stuff that's been out in the dirt.

That being said, the spinach was really quite tasty. Too bad there was so little of it. And when it comes to peas, if you think about it, they're safely stored in a pod, so they can't get dirty. Much. So I opened one pod and I thought I'd taste one pea to see if it was ok to eat.

Well.

Well, well, well.

Welly, welly, welly.

Wellitsy, wellitsy, wellitsy.

Seriously? That was the best pea I had ever eaten in my life - so far. It's not even "like the store peas except better". It's nothing at all like store peas. It's not nearly as sugary, for one thing. I don't have much of a sweet tooth. These peas, possibly from having grown so far north, are not sugary. They're the most wonderful peas in the world. So I shelled them all and then ate them like candy until they were all gone.

Then I went and picked more.

And more.

Today I just stood in the garden eating peas right off the plant. I did bring some home, too, of course, but only because there were so many, it would have taken all night to eat them. Now they're in a bowl on the table and I keep going over to eat more. Who knew peas were so addictive?

The sad thing is, we only get only two months or so of peas fresh off the plant. The rest of the year, I might have to go back to eating disgusting store peas. Or else never have peas out of season again.

Next year, I'm asking for two plots, and I think one is gonna be just straight peas. A huge forest of peas. Mmmmmm... peas...

Six more weeks...

Only six more weeks of summer left. Poop... However, I think my Brussels sprouts might need it.


See?

I bet you don't see, so here is a detail:


Now you see? Tiny Brussels sprouts. Mmmmmm... Brussels sprouts... All my sources agree that they're tastier after a frost, so if they take six more weeks to get edible-sized, that's ok. So, I might still get some yet.

My cauliflowers, on the other hand, are distinctly unpromising. I found one that's got something like a head, possibly due to the fact that peas had grown over it and tied the leaves shut. It's a common practice to tie leaves over the heads of cauliflower; maybe I should have done that. So I did it after finding that minuscule head (too small to photograph). I guess, you know, six weeks...


And these are my tomatoes. I don't remember what kind of tomatoes they are. I found the plant by the shed, where someone had left a bunch of them in a wheelbarrow, presumably for lack of room to plant them. So I rescued this one, which seemed like the healthiest, and now it's got tomatoes on it. Mmmmmm... Tomatoes...

You know, this vegetable-growing thing is turning out after all.

Pumpy-umpy-umpkin!

20 July:


23 July:


27 July:


Wow. I hadn't taken a photo since this one because every time I looked I kept thinking "it hasn't grown at all". But when I opened this photo to look at it I thought "haha, look at the tiny pumpkin!" Clearly, it's time for another photo.

This is my lead pumpkin so far. There have been several other female flowers that I thought were pollinated, but then the fruit buds just shrivelled and fell off. But as of today, I have one other pumpkin that's clearly growing, and another that I'm fairly confident is growing.

Mmmmmmm... Pumpkin...

Meanwhile, in the vegetable garden

The vegetable garden, 3 June:


The vegetable garden, 8 July:


The vegetable garden, 20 July:


Well. That ain't not bad, actually. I never thought the d-ed thing would produce anything, but there's quite a bit of greenery coming up. I even got to eat the spinach that are in the foreground in the middle photo.

The cool thing is, for the longest time, my garden looked like crap compared to everyone else's, but now it's starting to be one of the better-looking ones. Partly, I think it's because I'm actually there every day, or every other day at the latest. Some people seem to garden in fits, a few days once in a blue moon.

Another issue is fertilizing. Many people have been listening to The Local Garden Expert and adding nitrogen to their plants. Then some of them put way too much nitrogen and burned their plants. But either way, nitrogen is not the answer in a vegetable garden. Nitrogen grows leaves and stems. If you're after lettuce, that's a good thing, but if you want your plants to bear fruit, they need... well, I forget whether they need P or K, but that's what they need, not nitrogen. So I've been feeding my garden with tomato fertilizer, once a week, as per the manufacturer's directions, and it does seem to be working. Consider the following:


A pumpkin! First of all, last year I didn't even have my first flower until July 20, the first female bud was August 2, and the first growing fruit was August 19. So I'm doing well for time. Second, this vine does not have a pumpkin, it has four. This is the most developed one, and the others will get eliminated later on to leave only the top contender, but clearly, pumpkins like it way better out there than on my balcony.


Plus, it's colonizing the rest of the garden. Booya!

Then, there is this:


A Brussels sprout or cauliflower (they looked identical back then) on June 17.


A cauliflower yesterday, July 20. They don't have heads yet, but considering how minuscule and fragile they were when I bedded them out, I'm pretty impressed that they turned into such monsters.

Also:


The peas have pods, and some of them (such as this one) are starting to fill out.


The red onions seem to be doing well, though it's hard to tell since the important part is underground. Most of them you can't see anything, I just hadn't mounded this one yet.

And most importantly:


It looks like a jungle. If you ask me, that's the main point of a garden. (Someone described it as "artistic". I think she was trying to be diplomatic.)

Who are you, and what are you doing in my garden?

A pansy. Yes, it's a very crappy photo of a pansy, but that's not even the biggest problem. I planted several varieties of pansies. Expensive ones, might I add. Which I selected carefully from among the immense variety of pansies in my catalogs, because of their beauty. This is not one of them.

I don't know where this thing comes from, but it is NOT any of the pansies that I was expecting. I'm most aggravated. Especially because the dog has been quite determined to destroy all the pansies, and there might not be too many besides this one.

Poop.

At least the roses are well

The flower garden is not going at all according to plan, except this:


My J.P. Connell is in bloom, and doing very well, thank you. So that answers the first question: can roses get enough sun on my balcony?

The second and equally important question is: can roses survive the winter on my balcony? You see, the 4' x 4' x 15" flowerbeds with 2" ridig insulation on the bottom should theoretically provide a fair amount of insulation for my flowers, and therefore a fair chance of wintering, but in order to give the JP Connell the sunniest spot, I had to put it in the most exposed place, uncomfortably close to the windward corner of the flowerbed. Of course I'll add batt and mulch and anything else I can find, but I really have no idea whether it will live.

Baobab some day

Zadok is putting out some new leaves at the top. It's something baobabs do: first they shed all their leaves for the dry season, and then they leaf out before the first rains. Strange, eh? It rained on Monday after weeks of draught, and Zadok put leaves out ahead of that. And I was worried about its straggly appearance, until I looked at it from this angle and noticed it's got a bare trunk and a leafy crown, "just like a real baobab."

BOOYA!

Abimelek is behind Zadok and you can't see much of it because there isn't much to see, but it's still alive. Baobabs are not actually trees, but succulents, so when they die they decay completely and quickly instead of drying out. So as long as Abimelek has a trunk and isn't falling apart, I figure it's still alive, unlike, say, a mayday tree, which could be dead as a door nail and you wouldn't really know it.

It's not all bad

Forgot to mention, my third double lily finally showed up on Wednesday, so now I don't have to buy more next year. Booya! At least one thing went right in the garden this week.

Mulch, schmulch

According to the organic people, you can kill weeds by covering them with cardboard and mulch. Therefore, all the paths at the Community Gardens are covered with cardboard and mulch.

HA!

Let me tell you, that stuff does NOT work! I spent an hour weeding around my plot this morning. So long that my dog got bored with running around digging for varmints and started whining to go home. The weeds are EVERYWHERE and they don't give a fig about the cardboard or the mulch. The cardboard gets wet and decomposed and looks untidy, and the cedar mulch makes it that much harder to find the weeds, but weeds there are. That stuff is bosh.

So other than weeding, I raked up some of the mulch, to make it easier to see the weeds in future. Down with mulch!

You know what else?

How come I had to weed both sides of my plot, all the way to the neighbours'? Shouldn't half of the weeding on each side be done by said neighbours?

Bah.

Baobab Sunday

Bah. I should have shot Zadok a few weeks ago at its peak, when there were lots more leaves and they were much greener. But then, I put both baobabs out on the balcony during the day so they'd get some sun, and with the dry winds and the hot temperatures the first week, I think they figured it's dry season, because they started shedding their leaves. Baobabs normally have no leaves for nine months a year, so I guess this isn't exactly abnormal, but it still looks depressingly ratty. And Ahimelek has no leaves left at all, besides being rather short and squat.

I haven't measured Ahimelek lately, because it hasn't been getting any taller, but Zadok is 10 inches tall. Strange, because I could have sworn I measured it at 11" a while back.

Oh well. They're alive, at least. That's progress over this time last year.