I am a little late on this post, as well as a little delayed on writing anything lately. It has been a busy month, which has unfortunately left little time for writing. Luckily, I should have a bit more time to share what we have been up to and some future planning.

Looking at the July weather, it is very much on par for 2022. We have once again seen a lot of hot, sunny days with little to no precipitation. Although it notes 2 days of precipitation, it was just a light rain that dried up within minutes of it stopping. For most of July, our region was in a drought level 4, which seems to be the standard for our summers now. Nothing has improved for August, rather things have been progressively going downhill with weather and the state of our region. But I will get to that in another post.

This time of year, we are mostly eating salads with some protein. The hot weather makes a person less inclined to turn on a stove or oven, so we mostly BBQ something to go with a nice fresh salad. Of course, as much of that is from our garden as possible. This year, with the addition of the landscaping fabric to keep the weeds down, we have also noticed not as many pests getting into our vegetables. Root around under the fabric and there is plenty of life, which is good, and so far all the positive little bugs and insects that keep the soil health. Due to this, we have been able to better enjoy our beet greens.

I hadn’t thought to try lettuce varieties again as I have had terrible luck in the past from it either being fried in the sun or eaten and infested with bugs. Next year I am definitely going to give it a go. For this year, to supplement the ridiculous cost of lettuce from the stores, I have been including beet greens into our salads. It adds a wonderful flavour and cuts down on the amount of lettuce per serving, helping stretch it longer. We have also sauteed it and added it to rice bowls, which is super yummy.

I have been eating a lot of beets. Kurt eats them once in a while, but my go-to lunch is the beet salad that I shared back in 2021. I do change it up and add some other veggies when we have an abundance of them from the garden, but the base of the salad is the same. I have actually done a second planting where I have removed beets so that I have them well into the fall and hopefully a good harvest to keep me going for a while in the winter. I just love the earthy flavour of them when roasted. As you can see from the comparison, we are definitely doing better with our beets this year.

This year we did the Touchstone yellow, which I really like, but I missed the red beets last year. This year I did a few rows of the Touchstone, and then did a bunch of rows of a beet mix. The beet mix is good, though I think I will just stick to the yellow and red beets next year. There are white beets in with the beet mix, and although tasty, are somewhat bland compared with the others.

The broccoli is ok this year. It took a lot to get the seeds going this year as I believe I got a bad batch of seeds. In the end, I did manage to get some plants, but the growth has been slow and somewhat stunted. The broccoli that we are harvesting is delicious, and I have already made a few dishes with them as well as just dipped them in hummus for some tasty snacking. I will continue to pull this little crowns off as they develop and enjoy the plants as long as they keep producing. The don’t however seem to be producing as many secondary crowns as the plants last year. I think I will be changing up a few things with the brassica’s next year.

Hopefully I will get enough to make some cheddar broccoli soup as that is the one dish I haven’t made yet. I have started freezing some of the harvest so that I can ensure that I am able to get enough to do at least one pot of the soup.

Although the grams for the harvest is above or on par with last year, the plants are not. The plants this year are quite small with fairly small stems. I am not sure the issue, though they are once again seeds from the same company as the others that are struggling. I know that it could be many things, but it is odd to me how all of the seeds that I ordered this year are the plants that seem to be struggling, while the other plants from a different seed supplier are thriving.

Regardless, I am going to try a different brand of seed as well as a different variety. The Tango celery has been good, but I think it is time to try something new and see how it fares with our weather.

We are once again, finally, producing a good number of cucumbers! When we started gardening, we couldn’t keep up with the cucumbers that we were getting, but the last few years have been barely enough to keep up with our needs. This year we are back to giving away vegetables to friends and neighbours, which is what we wanted to do with such a big garden.

This may sound counterintuitive, but next year I would like to try some other seeds. The patio snacker has been a great seed, but the cucumbers can go from perfect size to oversized and seedy in a day, so you have to be on them constantly. I would like to get back to a nice long english cucumber if possible.

We didn’t do garlic last year, so this is the first year for recording. It was an ok year. We had a great time with the Garlic scapes and enjoying the first harvest that you get from garlic plants, but we still have a lot to learn.

Overall, we had a good harvest, with pretty much every clove planted producing a new bulb. We however, got too lazy after the garlic scapes came off and did not weed the bed nearly enough. We have quite a few small bulbs this year, especially when you know how big the Red Russian bulbs can get. The size of the bulbs may also have been in part due to the cloves we planted as well. The person who I purchased the garlic from also noted that their bulbs ended up a bit smaller this year than expected, though theirs were still much bigger than ours.

I will plant some of our larger cloves this fall. I also bought some more from the nursery that we buy all our flowers from. The bulbs and individual cloves are very large, so I am hoping that will bode well for larger bulbs next year. We will also be much better at weeding the garlic!

Ground cherries or Husk cherries are new to the garden this year. I have enjoyed them from farmers markets or on baked items in the past, so I decided to grow them this year. So far it has been quite fun growing them, though they do really take over an area. July saw an abundance of the berries, but it wasn’t until the end of July that they started falling from the plant, which means they are ripe and ready to collect. I kind of like that you don’t actually pick the fruit, but rather wait for it to fall off to know it is ready.

Having landscaping fabric down beneath the plants has made it really easy to collect the fruit as it falls off the plants. Though, as you are collecting, it is constantly knocking more fruit off all the time. I am going to make some jam with the first big batch of them that I collect. I quite like the taste of them fresh off the ground, so I imagine the jam will be quite delightful.

I am on the fence about whether this will be an every year plant, or an every second year plant when I need more to make jam. I guess I need to explore some more recipes to decide.

It’s funny seeing the comparison numbers, because I feel like I have been harvesting way more herbs than in past years, but I guess not…unless I have been forgetting to track it, which is a possibility.

My little/big 6′ x 1′ herb garden is thriving! It is so full with lush, healthy herbs. With it being conveniently located just out the back door, I find I am constantly grabbing little fistfulls of herbs to throw into whatever dinner or lunch I am making.

I do however, think that I will switch up the parsley with cilantro as I use cilantro way more. I am not actually sure why I did parsley and not cilantro. Not a problem though, it is an easy fix for next year.

The onions are doing well, and we have harvested more than I thought we would have at this point. I’m always so eager this time of year and end up harvesting the smaller bulbs because. I have a recipe that requires onions, in this case this year it is salsa, so I pick them before they are fully grown. But it is worth is.

The other issue the onions are having this year is a neighbour that doesn’t follow boundaries. I may have underestimated how much the potatoes would take over the surrounding areas, so the poor onions are buried under the unruly potato plants. Kurt just harvested one of the corners of the potato patch to try to give the onions a little more exposure and growing time.

Our peppers are doing ok. The plants are quite small still, but we do seem to be getting some decent peppers off the plant. I have used a few in recipes as well as just topping a salad.

Our cayennes have only just started flowering, so we will see if we get anything this year from those plants. It is definitely late for our salsa making. I may be able to use some in a late summer batch, but we will see.

The rhubarb is about on par with past years. The plant is abundant and happy in it’s new home. The transplanting of it did not slow it down one bit! I do, however, tend to harvest mostly from the right side as it grows into the strawberry tower quite regularly. It doesn’t cover the strawberries, but it does push against the netting that we put over the strawberries.

In my last harvest, I noted that the pesky ants seem to be cultivating aphids on some of the leaves. They keep the aphids happy on a leaf or two, and keep away any lady beetles that tend to eat the aphids. We have never had so many issues with ants in the past! They destroyed all my cabbage in the spring (ants not aphids), and now they seem to be setting up shop in various ares throughout the garden. Speaking with neighbours, it seems to be quite the issue with everyone this year. Normally, ants are fine in the garden, but this year, I have definitely lost a few plants to their over abundance in the area.

Despite being somewhat buried under potato plants, we have still been able to enjoy the scallions. We have been adding them to salads, stirfry’s and egg salad sandwiches. It has been nice to have them at a quick disposal for all the tasty dishes we need them for. I am somewhat tempted to grow some in the herb garden, but why when we have so many to pull from in the onion patch?

This one surprised me. Our strawberry patch has been non-stop producing this year, and so I felt that we would have WAY more harvest than last year, but it is actually on par. Apparently our overgrown strawberry tower actually produced quite well last year. We have noticed though, that the strawberry production has really increased in the last few weeks, so we will see what August numbers look like.

Although I have frozen quite a bit for some jam making in the fall, we have been eating a large amount fresh from the garden this year. Why grow these beautiful strawberries and not eat them fresh? They are just so delicious.

The sweetie pie tomatoes are doing great. We regularly have a batch ready to enjoy on salads or as a snack. We have however, lost one of the plants. It dried up after getting some spotted leaves, so we will have to look into what caused that. We thought about doing a few more sweetie pie tomato plants, but 2 seems to work fine for the amount of the small tomatoes that we go through.

The big beef have been slow to ripen. There have been a lot of tomatoes on the plants, but they stayed green for a long time. Kurt had pruned the plants to ensure the tomatoes were getting the sun, but it was only toward the end of July that they finally started turning. Now that they are going, I imagine our harvests will be much more significant.

Romas, romas, romas! These plants are doing great. They also stayed green a little longer than normal, but did ripen much faster than the big beef ones. We have noticed though that 2 of the plants seem to be getting blossom end rot regularly, so I will have to check the soil and maybe add some nutrients. Still, it has been a good salsa making season!

August is sure to bring a good harvest. The last few weeks have had quite a few plants providing large harvests of cantaloupe, carrots, corn and potatoes. Mmmm!