... and, we feel, so much more so, considering what the rest of the country is getting. We’re appreciating the sound of rain, even if it is day after day. We’d rather have that than snow. There is the occasional cessation, with grey skies and even a bit of sun, which allows us to get out and do a bit in the garden. A couple of days ago I managed to get the oil spraying done on the pear trees by the house. The dry break was almost the forty-eight hours needed between rains for the oil to be effective, so I hope the treatment stayed put. I also got the grapes pruned, so yes, this January we consider to be not so bad.



Forgot to mention, in my last posting, something I found this autumn when tidying up some of the garden—an invader on our wild rose bush. Our wildling bush had developed a collection of galls while I wasn’t looking. It’s not technically a native wild flower, but is rosa canina, the dog rose, brought from Europe early on with the human invasion of this continent. Much like the ‘wild’ and prolific Himalayan blackberries, the caninae liked it here so much that they’ve stayed, declared themselves to be native born, and are appearing in all sorts of locations around the country, beautifying our roadsides and abandoned places along with the true originals. The Coastal Peoples of BC are usually cited as having collected the genuine wild rosa nutkana or Nootka Rose hips for food, but perhaps they enjoyed other hips too.



These freeloaders are as pretty in their own right as the rose blossoms themselves, and they last longer, although they have no perfume, nor do they give me any rose hips as they tend to choke off new branchings. I pruned them all off and hope I won’t get any more next year (live in hopes and get carried off in despair, as they say.) Diplolepsis rosae gall wasp is specific to roses and while I know wasps are said to be garden helpers by targetting other ill-mannered insects, when it goes after my garden greens I’d rather do without it’s assistance.



We thought we’d get a little jump on Spring by bringing in a branch pruned from the cherry tree and getting it to bloom inside.

The seed catalogue arrived, we’ve ordered, and are hoping Spring will be a little earlier than it was last year.

Cheers, from the West Coast!

... at the end of September, leaving us with grey overcast days and rain. That meant we'd better start securing the garden and ole homestead for the coming winter. Apples started coming in at the beginning of October, Wolf Creek first (middle)—they're for apple sauce—then the big Kings (left), not too many but nice and sweet eaters, and at the end of October, the Red Jonathan, giving us a great crop of small but beautiful, sweet, slightly tart, deep red apples—winter keepers.



The vegetables were—some good, some not so good and some surprising. We had come to rely on our organic seed supplier for years, but since the place got sold a couple of years ago we've been disappointed with the quality control. Curly leaf parsley grew up as the broad flat leaved type. Sieglinde (aka German Butterball) potatoes came on as something like pale Yukon gold, and the cucumbers we ordered as Sweet Slice gave us such a variety of shapes and sizes they were a source of constant amazement, more like a crop of green gourds than cucumbers. Although the green beans grew true, some of the seed was so small we didn't plant it—same with the cucumbers—which was just as well considering the results of the ones we did. The company also dropped some of our favourites from their catalogue, giving us a smaller choice for planting. We're thinking of finding another supplier.



The beets we've been growing for the past couple of years are Rodina, a cylindrical type which are great for cooking and pickling. Easy to clean, the skins just slip off after cooking, and they slice up into neat rounds for pickles or freezing for a dinner vegie or borscht or salad or... just use imagination. They do have a bit of a problem in that they grow upward out of the ground and need to be earthed up every so often, but to us it's worth it for the convenience, and they're never tough or woody. Maybe next year we'll plant them in a bit of a trough which might make them easier to keep covered.

Our celeriac got going a bit late like everything else and so are quite small, in spite of having grown tremendous tops of healthy dark green leaves which no bugs wanted to tackle, probably because of the distinctive celery aroma they have, which lingers on hands after preparation. We understand that some people eat the stalks like celery, but since we don't like green celery we pass on that. We're leaving most of them in the ground, earthed up to their ears with some top showing. It will be interesting to see if they’ll keep growing on into the next season.

We also got a rather nice crop of grapes this year. Nothing to brag about, too sour, but we cooked them up into a pleasing dessert dish. Sure would be nice to have grapes for wine making, but four little vines and not enough sun preclude that.



Slugs got into the cabbage patch, aphids had a go at the broccoli, which was a bust anyway, the squash produced some small but nice edibles, which for awhile we were afraid weren’t going to make it, along with our little Teddy pumpkins, the dill didn’t make seed, and everybody around us kept telling us what great crops of tomatoes they were getting, while ours—agh!—I don’t want to talk about it. Ah yes. We win some, we lose some. Gardening is gambling—is that legal?

The ponds, which dried up alarmingly early, around the middle of August, are now getting ready to overflow due to the generous amount of rain we’ve ben having since the middle of October, and this last couple of weeks we’ve been deluged. Since we’re up on a slope we don’t have the worry of flooding, but when we dug the potatoes a couple of days ago during a short middle of the day break in the rain, we noticed that the earth was getting close to being gumbo. Hope this doesn’t pose a problem for spring planting.

Rain has also kept us from pruning and spraying the fruit trees, as it started before the leaves had fallen and hasn’t quit much since, leaving everything too wet. We need at least forty-eight hours of dry for the oil spraying, and I don’t regard pruning in a downpour as much fun, apart from asking for fungus problems in the cuts, as the rain would wash off my home made spray mix of green soap, soda and hydrogen peroxide which I use to discourage fungus and other insects than pear tree mites, which I get with the oil spray.

Anyone got any pull with Mother Nature? If so, could you ask her to please lay off the west coast rain for just a bit as, although I have a great moss garden growing on the rocks which mostly constitute our pathways, I’d really like to get the spraying done.

Hope you all had great gardens—including whopping great crops of tomatoes. Arrrghh!

Right now we’re enjoying a two or three day spell of showery weather. Yes! BCers, jumping up and down and clapping their hands because it's raining. Haven’t had a decent rain here on the island since the middle of April. Just the occasional day of showers in between none. This isn’t a real soaking rain, but showers are better than nothing.

Here it is, the first week in July, and the garden is nowhere near what it was at this time last year. Although everything is up, it’s very slow. Two early plantings of peas in April served up zilch. Too cold and wet. Then the weather turned from cold to hot—immediately. Third planting of peas is very unhappy with the heat. Except for the potatoes which we put in on the twentieth of April, afraid to wait any longer for the weather to improve, our garden looks somewhat reluctant. Maybe we'll try some compost tea to see if we can give it a boost. Does everybody else use animal manure for their gardens? We're reluctant to do so.

Good potatoes

Slow motion

Nice apple crop coming along

Just as I suspected, there was no Spring. The weather was abominably cold right up to the beginning of June, scarcely ever getting out of the forties, with most often thirties at night. Over the winter our climbing rose bush froze to the ground after two solid weeks of freezing temperatures in January. We don’t expect this deep freeze. The plum tree had a spectacular bloom, but we’ll have no plums as it was too cold at that time, no bees, and even if there had been, the temperature was too low for pollination to take place. I tried the artist’s paintbrush but without results. A friend of ours had his six year old tree die, and the only reason we can figure out was that the ground was too wet, and the roots froze. His wasn’t the only one. Global warming? We’re having a mini ice age.

Down to earth

The problem of the pear tree mites which infested our little Bartlett pear, was treated in the fall with a dousing of just grape seed oil and water, five tablespoons to a litre, and it was about eighty percent clear of the problem come spring. I removed any ‘pink’ leaves which appeared, and it is now a nice healthy green tree. No pears though. It was so put upon last year that it needed time to recover. Maybe next year, after it gets another oil treatment, which we hope will permanently cure the ailment.

Recuperating Bartlett tree

Now we’re cheering for rain. Everything is drying out. We notice that the deer fawns are not as big as they were at this time last year. No lush vegie growth out there for them. For awhile we thought we might not have any swallows in the little blue house under the eves, but they nested at last, and the little ones are just getting close to flying now—rather late in the year. All the wild plants seem to be going quickly to seed, as though they don't expect to last long and had better hurry up and reproduce. Maybe they know something we don’t. Interesting times.

Wild flowers going to seed

However, ‘hope springs eternal’ as they say, particularly in gardeners and farmers who are at the mercy of the weather. Take what we get and make the most of it. So we will continue to supplement our twenty minute daily between-row irrigation with the hose. Hope everybody else’s garden is blooming and blowing and full of good vegie things.

Keep enjoying gardening and never give up! Cheers!

The seed catalogues arrived in early January and we’ve already sent for and received our year’s worth of seed for planting, but—looking at the weather, it would seem like we’re going to have a repeat of last year’s cool spring. Maybe I’m too pessimistic. Let’s hope so, but after the unusual heavy snow and two weeks of freezing weather which came in January I can’t help being a bit wary.

The freezer is bulging with last year’s harvest, but we had nowhere to store the potatoes cool enough without having them freeze, so we took them in from the potting shed, they warmed up and, of course, figuring this was an invitation to sprout, they did. Very willing garden friends, but too early. Maybe we’d better take them down to the new little workshop we built in the fall and see if we can discourage them from being so enthusiastic. It’s cooler there but it does have some heat now, enough to keep things above freezing.

If you use bay leaf for cooking you’ve no doubt been shocked at the price of a few leaves to gussy up the vegies and soups—I was—five bucks for twelve small leaves. So we decided to do something about it. Bought some seed from a herb specialist last year and planted our own laurus nobilis forest. Expecting a couple to sprout, we now have five little beauties all waiting for bigger pots. Wonder if we can palm some of the bounty off on the local health food shop when this quintet really gets going and we have to prune them back. Way too much for us, and probably the neighbours too, but they’re pretty plants.

The celeriac experiment turned out promising—small but adequate tubers with somewhat overgrown roots on the sides. I have since researched a little and found out that the top adventitious roots have to be cut off to keep a nice round tuber growing and that they actually sit sticking out of the ground, like the species of beet we plant. Hadn’t really wanted that much hand work. However, since we enjoy celeriac, we’ll plant some again this year and see if we can keep up with them. We left two in the ground over winter, well mounded over with earth, curious to see what will become of them when we dig them a little later this year. We’re told that cold or a bit of frost makes them tastier. We’ll find out soon. Anyone else growing this vegie? Maybe you could let us know how yours are getting along, and pass on some much needed advice.

A friend offered us a couple of fig tree shoots last year, one large, one small, (the same friend who gave us a couple of grape vine whips and a mulberry root the year before) and we innocently took them on. After a little reading, I found that fig trees will take over everywhere and sprout indiscriminately if allowed to be planted out in the open, so we potted them, one in a bucket and the other in a big old cedar planter. Well, along came the freezing weather and to save our two sprouts we hauled them inside. They thought they’d been returned to the warm Mediterannean, smiled happily, and are now putting forth gigantic leaves which are threatening to push out the windows. This, before we dare to let them outside again.

   

Ah yes, the joys of unwitting (or witless) gardeners. Have fun, and do try something new. However, beware of friends bearing gifts which may grow you out of house and garden.

Oh yes! The garden. It's getting on like a happy jungle. From a beginning which almost looked like an ending, this garden has delivered like we never expected. Apart from the absolute lack of tree fruit--one plum, one pear, only a small crop of apples--the rest of the garden is now suggesting that we get busy and process its bounty for the winter.

We're eating lettuce as fast as we can. Cucumbers, Per's favourite, are becoming like too much ice cream every day. We plan to pickle. We have done green beans, swiss chard, kale and boysenberries. There will be more beans and greens. The beets and rutabagas are busting out of the ground as the rain has washed the earth away from them. True, the type of beet we grow, a long cylindrical one which makes for easy pickling, has a statement in the seed catalogue to the effect that it tends to lift itself up. Hey, it's jumping out of the ground. I'm busy with the hoe a lot.



   

The pea crop is in and the potatoes which stuck out of the earth are being avidly enjoyed by slugs as they also enjoy the wet weather. I'm catching them and deporting them to the back five with hopes that they won't find their way back too soon. Our garden snakes are a big help, but they're not into mega meals. Taking a look at the big black ones, I don't blame them. Thus far we have been amazingly free of insects except for the disaster of a currant worm explosion which cleared off our remaining gooseberry bush over one day and night when we weren't looking. Think it's a gone goose. We have yet to figure out some way to deal with the pear tree mite problem.

The celeriac, which I thought was too spindly to hang in there, has grown tops which threaten to imitate celery stalks and we're almost afraid to take a peek at the bottoms. Broccoli is heading up. Carrots are progressing. Mint, comfrey, nettles and origanum are hung up to dry. The parsley is a bit slow but it'll come. Tomatoes, which we grow in pots and cover from the rain, are very slow and probably won't make it until we bring them in to finish off later.

   

We're really surprised and happy that our little garden which went in so late and in such unpromising weather has turned out so well. Makes me think optimistically that everyone else's gardens did the same. We hope so!

We waited impatiently for the weather to warm up and stop raining so much. It didn't, so when we got a few reasonably good days in between we rototilled. The soil was heavy and still not dry but we managed. Then we earthed up the beds and the potatoes went in. They had willingly sprouted nice long shoots as they waited—a little too long—but we were careful not to break them off. They are now greening up nicely.

We then decided to seed everything else, as the fourteen day forecast was no more optomistic than all the others before had been. We hesitated over the beans. They don't like wet weather, sulk and disappear into compost, but if they don't make it we'll reseed like last year—three times. Don't see the cucumbers coming up either. They'll get the same optimistic treatment if they don't show.

On the bright side, the little celeriac seedlings we put in are doing very well, with radish, lettuce, peas, kale, rutabaga and beets cheerfully poking out now. These are the hardy crops which don't mind a bit of fifty degree (10c) weather.

I resorted to asking a forum for help with the problem of our little pear tree. If you're into using the internet for seeking information, try ubcbotanicalgarden.org. Sooner or later someone comes up with an answer or a suggestion. It seems we have a pear mite infection which is not easy to get rid of. The suggestion was that I wait until fall spraying time and use lime-sulphur-oil spray. I know it's common practice, but I'm reluctant to do this as hydrated lime is not in my book of happy solutions, and instructions for use seem like getting dressed for a stroll through a chemical mist.

So far I've removed all the infected leaves, and am now considering what to do next. Since we're not getting a crop of fruit I wonder if some sort of spray to raise the pH of the tree would discourage the beasts.

Does anyone know if pear tree leaves are on the acidic side?

Hope everyone out there has also managed to get the crop in and are able to at least lean on their shovels a bit, if not take it easy.

Here are a couple of photos from our house garden: wild sedum and fringe cups


and chives among lemon balm, columbines and forget-me-nots

---

Looking at the weather forecast, our hopes for an early spring have faded somewhat. The chilly weather is persisting and what little efforts we’ve been able to put into the garden have been limited to cleaning up and preparing the soil with dolomite lime and some manure.

These are some of our celeriac seedlings ready for planting


And here’s a shot of our veggie garden with beds ready to be seeded

Over a two year period it has become infected with something and a hunt on the internet has yielded nothing like the problem we have.



This spring the leaves and some bunches of flower buds are already covered with rose-coloured spots even before leaf and flower buds have barely opened. I sprayed the tree in the fall and spring with a solution of five tbsp. hydrogen peroxide, two each of green soap and baking soda per gallon of water. The problem, whatever it is, has come back worse than before. Last year I spent a lot of time partially denuding the tree of mottled leaves whenever any appeared and burned them. I cleaned up under the tree in the fall.



So far our Bosc and Conference pears haven't been infected. What's going on? Can anyone help diagnose this and tell us what to do to get rid of it? Please email me if you can help.
            —Lynetta

Yesterday it snowed for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Reading the forecast last evening we prudently took in the pots of geraniums from the deck. The temperature fell from 43 to 32F overnight and it snowed—and it's still snowing. Our little grape hyacinths are out there holding up their snow caps and hoping for something better. This is not what we usually expect in the middle of April but maybe we'd better get used to the idea. It seems like a repeat of last year's cool wet spring. Weird weather seems to be a trend setting in everywhere.

As far as planting is concerned we're going to stick to our general habit of not planting until the earth reaches a temperature of 50F. This is further reinforced by the fact that I put in some lettuce and peas in March when what appeared to be the beginning of warm spring weather arrived. I was encouraged to do this by catalogues and friends who go on about these plants liking cool weather and theirs are doing fine. Well ours didn't. The patch is still vacantly empty and waiting for something else to happen to it. I figure that, being about five hundred feet higher than the lowlanders, we have an entirely different micro-climate. There are lots of those on this island.

As we don't use pesticides, the problem of the white grubs was solved by physically removing the lot of them a shovelful at a time. Gloved hand at the ready I'd turn over the earth, remove the little beasts into a small bucket of soapy water and continue the process.

At least I hope I got them all. Fortunately this infestation was confined to a small patch surrounded by rock. I'll have to move those and see what's there. Although I think June bugs and beetles are very beautiful, I'd like to admire them in in the wild, not in my garden. Their overall length varies between 15 and 25mm.

I also caught some other villains in three of my flower pots. I haven't identified them yet. I think they're some sort of cut worm although they're very small (about 15mm in length) and thin and usually curled up tightly. They got the physical treatment too, plus some green soap water. Any ideas about these? If you know the name of these little worms please email me.

Outside gardening is now suspended until better weather arrives!

Looking at the weather forecast, our hopes for an early spring have faded somewhat. The chilly weather is persisting and what little efforts we’ve been able to put into the garden have been limited to cleaning up and preparing the soil with dolomite lime and some manure.

We’ve also found that we have an infestation of ‘white grub’ which most likely came from a number of plants in pots we were given by a friend. These had come from a nursery and probably contained either the eggs or the grubs of the ‘june beetle’. We’re now considering ways in which to get rid of this invader who is notorious for eating roots, not just of lawn grass but any other kind of root as well.

We’ll see what remedy we come up with.

Here’s a recent shot of our Ferguson FE35 tractor in front of the dormant garden —

So, here goes our first posting:

Although we’ve had many nice, warm days—both in February and March—cool temperatures at night have kept the garden too cold and wet for anything to really get started.

This week has started off with rain, and we expect rain for most of the rest of the week.

About us
   Contact us