Harvest

Just about two months after planting, the garden is coming into its own and providing food for the dinner table.  I have had salads and greens a-plenty in the intervening weeks, but now there is real variety in the produce.  Here’s today’s dinner:

• yellow pattypan squash, grilled on the barbeque with a black pepper
• roasted Purple Chief potatoes with thyme
• roasted baby beetroot (Detroit Red) with rosemary
• Aladdin peas
• and a grilled halibut steak from the Antigonish Farmers Market

What a great meal!  And there’s much more to come.  The purple Blauhilde beans have been grazed by deer to about 5ft off the ground but there are plenty of beans above that.  Strangely, the only other deer damage was to my garlic shoots.  They don’t seem interested in the onions though.  There are aubergines (eggplants) filling out and masses of green peppers waiting for sunshine to ripen them.  We ate the first ripe tomatoes at the weekend — a delicious yellow cherry.  The first red tomatoes are not far behind.  We have a globe artichoke ready to eat, and more to come.  While the broccoli is nearing its end there is still a red cabbage to eat, and the kale is recovering from the caterpillar onslaught.  I have continued to pick off caterpillars but the wasps are always buzzing around the kale plants and have done most of my work for me.  Soon the first sweetcorn will fill out enough to eat.  There are wild raspberries on the edges of the woods around the house, and the fall berries I planted a month ago are already starting to form.

How quickly the excitement of the first of a crop ready to eat can turn into hair-pulling over a glut.  The first cucumber was exciting – this is something I hardly ever bother to grow in England, as I don’t eat that many and they are readily available and cheap from local growers.  I’m not sure why I thought it would a good idea to put some in my Nova Scotia garden, but I did, and they grew and grew to the point that I am desparate to give them away.  There is a saying here that you don’t need to lock your car except in August — otherwise you’ll come back and find your back seat full of zucchini.  I don’t have the zucchini glut – in fact my ‘mixed summer squash’ seed packet has yielded a monochrome of yellow squash so far.  But I do have far more cucumber than anyone can reasonably eat.  Pickles anyone?

Picking bugs off potatoes

Not the most thrilling of gardening chores, but I have discovered two kinds of bugs on my potato plants, so needs must.  The prettier of the two is also the more destructive (drawing no analogies to human life of course): shame the Colorado Potato Beetle didn’t stay home.

This is a young Colorado beetle, still small. If I let it keep eating my potato plants it will grow. You can see what it has been eating already.

A quick google confirms that before humans started invading its territory it was a harmless stay-at-home eating Buffalo Burr (part of the potato family).  Then it discovered how much tastier potato plants are, started growing faster and bigger, and managed to spread itself across the whole of North America.  Europe stayed free of them until after the Second World War when the Colorado Potato Beetle started appearing around American military bases.  Now it’s everywhere, though not widespread in the UK (thank heavens for the Channel) so it was new to me.

Besides picking off the larvae and adult beetles, there is not much more I can do at this stage.  But I’m thinking about future years.  The beetles overwinter in the soil to emerge in the spring and lay more eggs to hatch into larvae and eat more potato leaves.  I do wonder where they have been all this time, as there has been no garden in this spot for many years and the nearest vegetable growers are well beyond beetle-flying distance.  But here they are and if I don’t watch out the tomatoes and aubergines (eggplant if you’re reading this in North America) will also come under attack.

No pesticides for my garden — and in any case, they don’t work for Colorado Potato Beetles, which have quickly become immune.  But there are some good tips for preventing (or reducing) the over-winter problem by clearing the ground, clearing away the uncultivated areas that adjoin the garden, and making sure next year’s planting in the potato family is well away from the beds that house this year’s.  For more information on Colorado Potato Beetles click here (it rather amazingly has a whole website!).

Easy to miss, until they jump away, the Potato Flea Beetle is here too

But these are not the only hungry critters on my potatoes.  I noticed some small drab brown insects that fly or jump away when I get near.  These are Potato Flea Beetle.  They look like they would do less damage as they are so small, but their leaping about makes them much harder to pick off and dump in a can of water.

So now the daily routine includes an eagle eye along the potato rows, looking for beetles.

Taming the tomato forest

Back home in England tomatoes are a frustrating crop.  Most years I swear I am not going to bother with them again.  Even where I live in the southeast of England, which gets the most sunshine and least rain, tomatoes need a lot of coddling and fussing.  There’s no getting away from latitude – we’re a long way north and though the Gulf Stream transforms our weather we don’t have enough sunshine for long enough to suit these southern creatures.  They like warm soil, lots of sun, plenty of food and ‘just enough’ water.  In England I grow mine in large pots or in growbags in the greenhouse, having found they don’t do well planted in the soil (probably not warm enough).  Then there’s the feeding (special tomato liquid feed), watering, staking and tying in, removing the suckers .. the work goes on.  Too often, just when the tomatoes are finally ripening at the end of August comes the dreaded blight.  Blight is an airborne fungal disease that attacks tomatoes and their relatives the potatoes.  Overnight the leaves turn brown and the plant has gone.  Swift action can save the tomatoes on the vines and turn them into chutney – but chutney is a poor substitute for the joys of the vine-ripened tomato.  And those joys are such that I keep growing tomatoes.  Most years the ones in the greenhouse survive the blight, and the outside ones survive often enough that I keep trying.

Spending a few days visiting old friends in Tennessee I was reminded of how ‘real’ tomatoes taste, and it’s nothing like the store-bought kind that have been shipped hundreds or (in Canada) thousands of miles.  They taste of hot, lazy summers and nothing beats a tomato sandwich dripping down your chin.

So I was eager to see how my Nova Scotia tomatoes are faring.  This is what they looked like after planting on 22 June.

Tomatoes after planting on 22 June. The black IRT plastic warms the soil. Note the little white plastic tags with the names of the varieties.

What a difference a month makes: they are doing very well — too well as the plants have turned into a forest.

The tomato forest on 30 July. I have just started the taming of the plants on the left. After this row there is another half row to work on.

Action is needed, otherwise I will have lots of green shoots but not many fruit.  I need to be ruthless, and cut out side shoots that are not very productive, to encourage the plant to put its energy into the tomatoes.  But there is a puzzle.  When I planted them each of the varieties was carefully marked with a little white plastic tag.  There are about 15 plants and 8 varieties in this row, all kindly donated by Jay who grew them from seed.  Some are ‘determinate’ which means they grow only to a certain size and limit themselves, so they don’t need to be cut back by me.  The rest do need me to remove the suckers and side shoots.  But mysteriously, throughout the garden, all my little white plastic markers have been moved.  Some have been discarded in random places but many have just disappeared.  Crows? Chipmunks?  Who knows.  But it’s a problem as I don’t know which tomato plants to work on.  I can’t tell the difference by looking at them, so they’re all getting a trim.

It requires some discipline to hack away at these flourishing plants.  They look a bit shivering and bare when I’ve finished, but I think a good feed with liquid seaweed and a few days of sun will set them right. I’m eager to taste that first red (or yellow) tomato straight from the vine – pure sunshine.