Adventures in Mama-Land

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  Other challenges I participate in: Homeschool Diary Menu Plan Monday Welcome… kinda… to Garden Season 5771 (aka 2011). I’m supposed to include a current picture.  Here you go!!!  Dead coleus from last year.  The garden has been kind of a “no-grow zone” so far, with late, cold winter weather moving in just as spring officially began. I garden in a tiny urban front and backyard in Toronto, which is officially Zone 5, but today, more like Zone 3.  Blah. I have two composters , three square foot beds , about four or five sub-irrigated (aka self-watering) planters, a bunch of happy perennials which are generally far outnumbered by the unhappy veggies in my low-sun backyard.  We have some strawberries, raspberries and hopefully, this year, blackberries .  I have a special fondness for hanging plants , though I don’t have nearly enough of them, nor take good enough care of the ones I do have. In terms of homeschooling, I

Water is constantly on my mind this summer.  Why, when I live on one of the world’s loveliest bodies of fresh water ? Maybe because we are hoping to relocate to an area that has water troubles, to say the least.  Where rain is a miracle, never taken for granted.  Where the Kinneret, the largest body of fresh water, holds less than half a percent of Lake Ontario’s volume. It is a water-conscious place, where dual-flush toilets have been mandatory since before anybody here ever heard of such a wonder.  And just like I don’t want to arrive speaking with a bad accent, I don’t want to be some typical bumbly water-stupid North American oleh. So I do dumb little things that probably don’t make any grand-scheme difference… just for the exercise of thinking about water:  where it comes from, where it goes – and have I appreciated it while it’s here? This has been a hotter, dryer summer than we have had since I can remember.  Of course, before I was home with little kids, “summer” w

I promised in the first part that I would post pics of the three hanging things I had forgotten.  And then, today, Gayla Trail of You Grow Girl had a post all about growing sweet potatoes !  She mentions that the leaves are edible, something that’s well-known in Africa and not-at-all-known here.  So even if we don’t have a long enough season to get actual tubers, at the end of the season we can eat the plant rather than throwing it away! So here’s my own homegrown sweet potato, finally growing vigourously.  Lovely foliage!  But, inspired by Gayla , I really, really want to try them in grow bags next year! Click here to see this potato when it first started growing roots, back in May .  It was very slow to start this year – after many many weeks of almost no progress – perhaps because the house was so cold.  I separated off about three slips and planted them separately in a hanging planter.  For more info on starting sweet potatoes, have a look here and here . Here are two oth

Here are the three free sub-irrigated planters I built two weeks ago . First, the two identical tomato planters… doing amazing; check! But the zucchini in the small planter is the star of the show.  Click back and see how runty it was!  And look at it now!  (in between these two homegrown bananas…) Other sub-irrigated (self-watering) news: Two out of three of last year’s planters are doing great.  Kale and tomatoes in the left one: No close-up, but zucchini and a tomato in the right one:   But the third one is kinda runty… I threw in another tomato and pulled out any traces of the leeks that were growing there, in case they were inhibiting the tomatoes’ growth.   This is a bad picture, because it doesn’t really show the setup at all, but I have two more self-watering planters with tomatoes by the side door.  Again, they were easy and FREE to build and the tomatoes are growing stupendously.   I hope by growing tomatoes in self-watering planters, they will h

  This week’s garden high:   definitely waiting for tomatoes! Some years, I feel like waiting for tomatoes even beats eating tomatoes, the anticipation is so delicious. But then, there’s this week’s garden LOW:   potato disappointment!  Or at least, some kind of ugly potato blight.  The leaves are turning yellowish and holey.  Weirdly, it’s only affecting the yellow (Yukon Gold?) potatoes, and not at all the purple ones.  So I may end up with some actual potatoes after all.  But maybe not; like I said a couple of months ago, I have a bit of a potato curse (here’s last year’s potato disappointment ). Getting me past the potential for disappointment is this season’s New Banana Love.  It’s nowhere near as thrilling as last year’s Siam Ruby red banana , but it is a bit exciting because it was only $10 – for what I paid last year, I can’t afford to keep killing banana trees. Its pot is too small; I must MUST buy more potting soil so I can move it to a bigger home.  I used it all

Well, in June I had almost twice the visitors as I did last year (clarification: in June of last year; I'm not doing THAT well!), and some of you even apparently came back to the site once or twice. So, in your honour, and because I’m putting off making supper while I sit down and have a break, I will answer a few recent Google queries. (here are links to my two previous search-engine roundups: Roundup #1 , (mini)Roundup #2 , and Roundup #3 ) What are you looking for??? Recent queries where people actually found their answers at my site! Lots of you want to know about growing vegetables in reusable canvas grocery bags ! Good for you, but they don’t have to be canvas… I suspect canvas wouldn’t work as well as a synthetic fabric, such as these grocery bags are made of. In fact, I’m loading up this bag again later on today to hang it with a tomato. How about a tomato rose sauce ??? I’ve got one of those , and it’s very, very easy! As always, I do have a post a

(in case you’re new here, sub-i = sub-irrigated = what’s usually known as self-watering, which is a misnomer I won’t get into because it’s too tedious to believe) If you want to read more about sub-irrigation, what it’s good for, why I love it, and how I’ve made inexpensive sub-irrigated planters in the past, just click on the “Sub-I” label beneath this post or at left (or, okay, just click here ).  If you live anywhere that watering is not always possible, sub-i planters let you keep on growing by wasting almost no water; it ALL goes to the roots, not in the air, on the leaves, or anywhere else. So I had these two planters sitting around.  I forget where I got them – free or cheap or at the curb somewhere, no doubt.  There are no holes in the bottom of them, which suits this project just fine.  I also had two large pots sitting around (from a similarly unremembered source), with holes in the bottom, that fit inside pretty unobtrusively.  Okay, kind of funny-looking, but I guess th

Today was K-day: the first time I’ve eaten kale! Ever! Naomi and I have been growing some – in a head-to-head kale-growing competition, one $1.49 four-pack planted in a tub at the side of the house and one in a sub-irrigated planter at the back (no pics of either; sorry!). Weirdly, kale has been the only veg to grow better in a non-sub-i planter (ie a traditional POT, albeit a big one)… perhaps it prefers to dry out between waterings? Anyway, today was Kale Harvest Day. I took as much as I could without killing the plants: The Vehicle for kale was a soup… White bean, Garlic and Kale Soup. I suppose you could call it Tuscan, or Portuguese, if you wanted to make it sound even hoity-toitier. In honour of a vegan blog visitor, and because the idea of a dairy-free soup appealed to me today, I left out the butter and made it with olive oil instead. I also decided to pre-roast the garlic, rather than fry it, but unfortunately, I think I had the oven too high (400) because it

Finally got all three  sub-i planters ramped up into productivity mode.  I made these three last summer.  I’ll throw in some links below about how they were made, because it is SO unbelievably inexpensive to make them and so rewarding compared to growing stuff in plain old pots.  Do a test, if you don’t believe me.  Buy two identical seedlings and stick one in a pot and one in a cheapo sub-i planter, and then get back to me about which one survived the summer.  Sub-irrigation (aka “self-watering” – a misnomer unless your planter has a hose connection and/or legs), is actually, secretly, deep down, my Grand-Scheme of Things Plan, capital P, for gardening in Israel.  Water is so precious there, of course, that you can’t just throw it in the air and hope stuff gets wet, like we do here.  But I hope, using some combination of sub-i planters and grey water (ie milchig and pareve dishwater, and perhaps laundry rinse water as well), that at least a few containers could be a possibility.

Just realized that every plant in the house is going to need a heck of a good watering before Yom Tov… or they will die, or at least, seriously wilt.  Seedlings don’t have a lot of wiggle room in terms of how much drying-out they can take.  When your roots and stem are no thicker than a hair, once that hair’s-width pipeline dries out, that’s it.  And yes, a lot of it is “self-watering” but that, as I’ve pointed out before, is a serious misnomer.  If you don’t put water IN in the first place, the plants – far from self-watering, which would involve running to the tap with a little cup or watering can – can actually droop and die almost as fast as plants that are in regular pots and peat pucks.  There is a little more wiggle; the mats under my “self-watering” (aka sub-irrigated) seedlings do hold a bit of water, even when they feel almost dry, and the roots can get that water out, with a bit of a struggle. But why make them work?  Why not just water them before Yom Tov starts?

…But I’m a sucker, and I saw a mixed-seed packet at Plant World this morning and decided, why the heck not?  With bottom heat, I hope these will sprout quickly and grow fast.  I can always hope, right? I also bought a cell-pack (79 cents) because, snapped in half, it fits in the square Jiffy 5 x 5 greenhouses I have been using.  I have decided to avoid peat pucks because they are SO hard to keep watered, and I’ve also installed self-watering mats under the plants I do have in pucks. So half of the cell pack in a square greenhouse tray holds 24 plants.   I decided to use 12 for the new coleus seeds and half to transplant the “Black Dragon” coleus seedlings , which are getting too crowded in their peat pucks (and are too valuable to thin by snipping).  Just noticed, by the way, looking back, I sowed these Black Dragon seeds just a bit less than a month ago, on February 14th.  So this is what they look like at ALMOST one month.  Not bad…   To replant these, I tore off the wrap

Just a couple of quick snapshots of what’s going on in the sub-i planters! Actually, a comparison of the three Sub-I (left) vs two conventional planters (right): Keep in mind that, as with all my garden experiments, this is not a well-set-up or fair test.  I didn’t use the same types of tomatoes, for example.  STILL, I think you can get a very clear picture of the overall health of the plants! This wilty thing happens to all my conventional-container tomatoes by this time of year.  I could probably improve their immensely by watering more regularly (the watering spikes aren’t doing the entire job, apparently) and even fertilizing from time to time.  I did mulch the surface of all the planters with hay, which adds trace nutrients, and also conserves a bit of water. However bedraggled they look, the vines in the conventional planters are both producing fruit which is well-formed and tasty.  Here’s an Ildi tomato from the left one: These have been a bit of a myste

Well, I decided my beautiful broccoli growing in Sub-I planter #1 was ready… and got outside to harvest it for quiche, only to find it looking decidedly bedraggled and coated in unappetizing shiny trails.  I suspect slugs, even though I felt like the container was pretty much slugproof.   Where can they be hiding? As cheesy as it is, I suspect Sub-I planter #3, the makeshift stuck-together one , is probably the most bug-proof and slug-proof, since it has an  open “moat” of water that may help discourage the critters. Slugs don’t seem interested in tomato foliage, luckily (unlike the beans, which are having trouble getting started), and here is one tempting morsel almost ready in Sub-I planter #2:   Hard to believe that huge tomato “tree” started out not even three months ago looking like this: Why did I even think that little cage was enough to stand up to “Early Tiny Cherry”?!? Two more garden-related points of interest as I sit here nursing a still-sleepy boy: WPT!