Adventures in Mama-Land

Tomatoes!  Planted yesterday – very, very, VERY late in the season, especially considering how warm it was in February and March.  I didn’t bother firing up the whole seed-starting rig, which is under a ton of clutter at the moment anyway.  This is the countertop grow-op, just a bulb at the right height over the downstairs kitchen counter, which happens to be clean and clear because of all of Ted’s Pesach organization down there. I had altogether too many varieties of tomato seed waiting to start, and I only wanted to do one tray (36 plants, under ideal conditions)… so I forced myself to start 4 each of 9 varieties.  I let YM pick a couple of his favourites (based on the names only), and chose a few of my favourites as well (based on either past experience or Googling to see how well-behaved each variety is, in terms of fruit size, plant growth habit, days to maturity and flavour).  All these seeds were free, either saved myself or gleaned from various seed ...

On Friday, the kids and I went out back and, in shame, I dismantled the garden.  It was a time for confessions :  I didn’t do enough, I didn’t care enough, I didn’t water enough, I didn’t chase the bad guys away (weeds and bugs).  I let stuff go see that really shouldn’t.  I let the brutes (bee balm, perennial sunflowers) take more than their allotted space.  I let beloved plants die through neglect while I baked breads and cared for my family instead. It was also a time for catharsis :  sure, I didn’t do enough all summer, but I’m not going to take this Fall thing lying down!  I tore out the pathetic, bitter-tasting tomatoes, the shrivelled, aphid-infested kale and rampaged at the weeds that had dared encroach on the square foot beds. And finally, it was a time for hope .  I emptied one composter; dumped rich finished compost on all three beds and all around the garden.  The little kids seeded the square foot beds with a birdseed cove...

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...

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 l...

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...

  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 c...

It’s July, and welcome once again to Things That Hang! Here, we have a tomato happily growing in my Vesey’s Revolutionary Planter (year 2 in my garden).  Running out of room for this plant, actually; it’s hanging pretty low and kind of encroaching on one of my other tomato plants. Experimental hanging zucchini and tomato – the tomato is hanging from the bottom of a regular (read: FREE) hanging plastic planter that I found at the curb last year.  It’s a good-sized pot with a single drainage hole in the centre.  That’s where I stuck the tomato in:  forget those fancy upside-down gadgets and just get yourself a POT with a HOLE in it.    Easy, cheap! When I hung it up on the trellis, however, I realized the pot had cracked on the bottom over the winter (drat), so I’ll need to chuck it after this season, but meanwhile, it’s holding in the soil and tomato and doing just fine, as is the zuke, which has flowers but no actual zucchinis so far.  I...

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...

Thanks to a couple of dedicated mamas, our first (of many, I hope) neighbourhood funfair took place at a small local park very close to our house. I ran a Kosher Bake Sale table , selling buns, muffins, brownies and Ted’s famous Triscuit mini-pizzas, and surpassed all of my wildest expectations, selling just about every baked thing I brought to the park.  I was glad there was a kosher presence at the funfair – that’s why I volunteered to do it.  They were asking people to contribute 10% of their profits to cover the park permit and expenses, but I gave a little more than that, plus I paid Elisheva something for her tremendous and cheerful assistance all afternoon.  (you can see her behind our table in the photo above:  she’s the one in the white ballcap and long pink skirt) My plant sale went a little less well, but I did sell a few potted daylilies and tomatoes.  Forgot to write the varieties on the pots and they got all mixed up – oops! The mamas runni...

Oh, I am in LOVE.  The garden was at its absolute BEST of the year when we pulled up at home yesterday.  A little sun, a little rain… PERFECT! In this photo:  shasta daisies, bee balm almost ready to flower, five “The President” clematis blooms (near the top left of the archway), daylilies in the foreground and too many other wonderful things to possibly name.  There are even a couple of fuchsias visible in the basket hanging off the garage.  Really, the shasta daisies steal the show.  It rained all Shabbos, so they kind of drooped, but I hope with sunny weather tomorrow, they will still perk up. Yarrow with bolted bok choy flowers (okay, not every flower is a wonderful thing, but these are still kind of pretty together!): Stunning bee-balm and daylily together in the front bed: Raspberries bursting wherever we looked!       Even a few tomatoes, coming along slowly… Milkweeds, doing their job of attracting butterflies...