Garden Update

I'm learning more and more about gardens this year. We planted some unusual things, like kohlrabi and tomatillos and beets and parsnips, and it's been fun to discover and learn and enjoy new things. We've learned some stuff.

We love kohlrabi. It's fresh and crisp, much like a jicama. It makes a great slaw and salad ingredient. We'll be doing that again.

Carrots don't do really well here. I don't know what we're doing wrong, but I think we might need a looser soil and a little less rain around planting time.

Parsnips are like carrots, above, but they grow such large leaves that the few parsnips we do have make it look like we have a ton. That's awesome, but they're still not ready yet, so we're anxiously awaiting the cooler weather that will help them sweeten up. Also, you shouldn't plant them until the ground is warm. One website told me to sit on freshly turned soil with a bare bum to feel the warmth. If it doesn't give you an uncomfortable chill, then it's ready. I just waited until June and left the actual temperature to guesswork much to the relief of my wife and neighbours.

Onions don't shade the ground, and as a result, they will be the first ones to die from a drought. True.

We get grumpy when the greenhouse doesn't do fall crop broccoli. Apparently the weather this year was just too hot at the wrong times. Fail.

Mint should always be planted in a container, not a large bed. ALWAYS. Even my mint in a pot on the porch is sending out runners to expand the colony. They will not find fertile ground, but open air. Mint: 0, James: 1. It's nice to win at least once in a while.

Tomatillos are fun, but they're only good for salsa before they ripen. After they ripen, they're much more appropriate for jam and salad, because man are they sweet! Also, drought and heat will effect production. We didn't get many of these. Certainly not enough for salsa.

Beets. Out whole family likes beets. We won the beet game this year by planting a ringed variety that looks like a target when you slice it. The look is cool, of course, but the real win is that there are almost no dark beet juices to stain your hands, counter, and tools. Really, they look almost too cool sitting sliced on your dinner plate. Little beet bulls eyes.

We don't really like beans. We grew six varieties this year ranging from an also ran green string bean to lima to purple to a marbled one with a fuzzy shell to our asparagus beans that are, at maturity, over 18" long. We don't want to eat them, we just want to have their vines grow beautifully up our sunflowers and over our trellises. The asparagus bean vines grew all the way up our 6' trellises, then all the way back to the ground again. They are awesome to behold. The super long beans, along with our kohlrabi, are what I affectionately call our "alien vegetables."

Sunflowers are awesome. We're getting ready to harvest our seeds, but I'm not sure we're going to get to them before the birds do. Only three of our sunflowers actually grew, but they 12 feet high and just spectacular. Michael is hoping that the heads will spill their seed on ground (Old Testament reference, anyone?) and grow a forest of them for next year. Um, yeah.

Funky weather finks with your expectations for harvest. We harvested our first crop of butternut squash (over a dozen large fruits) at the end of August. They're just finishing their warm ripening off, and they'll soon move to cold storage. We have another round ripening on the vines now. We're so excited for these, because we LOVE butternut squash in the winter. Thick creamy soups, here we come!

Hydrangeas are the order for fall planting. We're tearing out some yew bushes and replacing them with some giant maroon hydrangeas. I'm so excited. We also got some beautiful grasses and they'll have a lovely home in our side garden.

Two weeks of constant rain can undo an entire summer of drought, at least when it comes to your lawn. We are enjoying overgrown, lush, green, delicious grass in our own yard and in the whole city. It's like spring again with all the new, fresh, healthy grass. Even the dead spot where we kept our pool for a month of 100˚ weather is starting to sprout again. Hallelujah.

We almost tore out the giant forsythia next to our garage, but I did some googling on how to manage it, and I think I can make it beautiful for next year. I also learned that if I prune in the winter after the leaves have fallen, I can bring the branches indoors and force them to bloom. I fully intend to try this. Also, I learned from experience this year that forsythia only bloom on old wood—the branches bloom before anything new grows. I'm going to master that giant bush if it kills me, although I would have been happy with the small Japanese maple I picked out to replace it with. The maple would not have showered our yard with a blaze of yellow spring flowers, however, and so I'm happy with my choice.

So here we are, facing down the end of another season of planting and sowing, and wondering what our yard and garden will bring us next year. It's exciting to know that it will never be complete, but always changing and moving and evolving as we change and learn and evolve.