Seasonal Ontario Food

Back on this date. 

I only heard one blackbird; our local flock continues very diminished. However, I saw a single vulture soaring over the back yard, and later, a flock of 6 to 8 of them over another local woodlot. 

They all came up on that wave of wildly warm weather we had for a couple of days (24°C in Windsor! and warm here too) and I guess they won't be too happy for the rest of this week. It got down to -5°C overnight; quite a change.

Well so much for my plan to post regularly about our breeding projects here. However, while I still have some memory of the last season, I will try to make a few notes. 

The above photo shows the cauliflower bed at the end of April. Of the 72 plants that went in in the middle of March, the dozen survivors have been collared with tin cans or plastic pop bottles to allow me to keep track of them. The second batch of seedlings went in right after I took the photo. 

My plan to have them go through a "winter" after a "summer" indoors in order to stimulate bolting did not really work out. Firstly, I don't have enough light and warmth to really fool them, I don't think. And secondly, I did not expect my mini-winter to include a week of -10°C, 4" of snow, and howling wind that ripped the cloth cover we put over them to shreds. Hence the abysmal survival rate.

Here are the cauliflowers in mid-September. I was able to collect a decent quantity of seed from 4 plants. Three of them were winter survivors. However, I do not conclude that being a winter survivor increased the chances of producing seeds. They were all from seedlings of the variety Pusa Meghna, the only cauliflower we have previously been able to save seed from. The last plant we got seed from was neither a winter survivor nor Pusa Meghna - it was either Goodman or Early Snowball. I jammed then in so closely together in order to maximize the number of potential parents that I was unable to keep track of the rows once they started flopping around. 

I say seedlings of Pusa Meghna; at least one if not two of them showed signs of being crossed with broccoli. I don't remember broccoli being in bloom when we saved that seed, but plainly there was.

There were a large number of other plants which flowered, although few of them early enough to contribute to the seeds collected. There were 4 more plants from which I collected seed pods at the end of the season, but very little of that seems mature enough to be viable. It is quite dismaying to me how very, very slow cauliflowers generally are to go through the flowering and seed maturing process. Most of these started forming heads in July and were not mature by early December. 

As expected collecting cauliflower in this climate is a tough nut to crack. However, we will try again this year and have plenty of seed including more variety in our own saved seed. Quality of plants is likely to be an issue, although cauliflower and broccoli have plainly met before so I am not too worried about that aspect of things. All of this years cauliflowers have been left in the ground in the hope that some may survive the winter and flower next season, but so far that is a thing that has never happened so counts more as procrastination than an actual plan. 

This is a cross between Knight and Strike peas, both very early fairly determinate pea varies. It resembles Knight more than Strike, but it seems even more determinate than Knight, like Strike, and possibly a few days earlier, like Strike. This is important because we want to get our determinate peas in and out of the garden as quickly as possible, so we can follow them with short-season dry bush beans. We have just long enough of a season to make this possible, although we get some bean failure many years if the season is cool or we have an early frost. Every day earlier helps, believe it or not.

We are selecting plants for best production and it may become our main early pea if it continues to do well. These early peas are frozen for use in the winter, so the more the merrier!

The leek project is not going so well. Here I am removing the least impressive leeks to allow the rest to go to seed. It all looks very promising right now. Things went downhill, though. We collected very little seed because the remaining leeks did not overlap well in their flowering time and at any rate I think I have cut the number going to seed down below their tolerance. I need a bigger space for this project where I can grow about 10 times as many. 

To recap, these are leeks where we are planting the seed in the fall, allowing them to come up and grow at their own pace, then replanting the best deeply to produce the long white stalks that leeks are known for. Usually they are started indoors and planted out in the spring before being replanted in early July. They are quite a lot of work and our method reduces it a lot. However, we have only ever found one variety that will overwinter outside as seed, and the subsequent plants are extremely variable. We have crossed them with 3 other varieties, and are attempting to select for the largest and best overwintering plants. However we plainly need to allot them more space if we are to get the number of plants needed for good genetic stability. Leeks are very, very out-crossing. 

We have older seed, and will have to go back to it. We have not allotted extra space for them this year but we will plainly need to consider it. This year is already a bust for producing seed as leek moths got into our leeks last fall and laid waste to them. They were covered and we did not check them often enough. Oops!

Watermelons are another one that have been very frustrating. We've given up on trying to breed a better yellow-when-ripe watermelon than Golden Midget. While I think we did breed a better one - larger melon, smaller seeds, thinner rind, better texture - the taste continued to be only so-so. However, the project kept throwing green melons with much better flavour. We decided to grow out the ones we had saved of those green ones (usually for exceptionally good taste) and look for a small, early watermelon with the all the qualities we wanted except the golden rind. Because the golden rind gene is recessive, we expect to be filtering that out now for a few years to come.

In mid August we had a night where it got down to 9°C overnight. We were really dismayed to see that most of the melons could not handle this. Within a week, all but a handful had wilted and died down. They were far enough along that most of the melons continued to ripen, but I don't think they were as good as they could have been. We have saved some seeds and will persevere, and of course the ones that didn't wilt and die are heavily represented in our selections for this year.

I don't think we kept seeds from this one but it gives the idea of what we are looking at. I like the ones with a tiger-striped rind better, but I think this one did not meet our flavour requirements. We'll take whatever rinds do that.

None of the beans in this photo are our crosses; I really didn't take any photos of them this year. We grew out most of our bean crosses but I don't have too much to say about them except that we continue to select them for various qualities including flavour, configuration, and disease resistance. No; this picture is about the lettuce, protected by the plastic pop bottles. 

This is the f3, I believe, of our May King - Tom Thumb cross. It is settling into a few distinct phenotypes, any of which we are happy with. There is much more variability in this generation as to whether they stay sweet as they bolt, so that is plainly what we will need to be selecting for over the next few years. I continue to be quite excited about this project though, since I rarely seem to be able to pick a lettuce before it starts to bolt.We ate quite a few of these but there should be some left in the spring to allow to go to seed - providing they stay sweet and tender.

The interspecies squash project (pepo x argyrosperma) is also trundling along. Here are a number of fruits which we ate, or at least tasted, while they were green. You can see there is still a lot of variation and the Reinau Gold zucchini we crossed into it last year was not as prominently visible as I expected. 

I think we want to cross one more round of straight pepo zucchini into these; the flavour is much improved but still on the mild (bland) side. They were all quite eatable though. Goldini was the open pollinated yellow zucchini I was able to get seed for, so that's what we will be adding this year.

Here's what we eventually left to ripen for seeds, minus one long, large, green-striped one which was harvested quite late. The yellow definitely shows up more strongly in the ripe fruit. 

We keep the rest of our zucchini, grown just to eat, covered against vine-borers. These ones were left exposed as we want to select for resistance. Unfortunately, my observation is that the yellow zucchini are more attractive to vine borers than green ones so my desire for a yellow zucchini is at odds with my desire for insect resistance. However, while quite a lot of them eventually succumbed to vine borers, several plants did not (and their offspring have been noted). Since we didn't let them into the other zucchini I have no real comparison, but I do have a vague impression that they lasted better (longer) than other times when zucchini have been afflicted with borers. But it is absolutely something I will have continue to watch carefully.

This warty pattern has been a feature since the first plants grown from the cross. It's not as pervasive as it was, but it still showing up. I rather like it though I don't think it has any particular utility. 

The sibling of this squash, seen in the group photo at mid lower left, turned out to have a vine borer that attempted to get in just below the stem. This is a thing I've only seen happen in this cross. I think it is actually a sign of their resistance to them - when they can't get in at the base of the plant, they try by the fruits. Interestingly, it didn't make it in very far there either.

So that's it for 2024; at least that I have photos for. I'm looking forward to this year with some excitement. Less than a month until we start on indoor seedlings.

Finally, finally heard the first one of the season today. 

They are late! Usually here a few days before the equinox, so at least 2 weeks late, and I only heard one. WHERE ARE THEY ALL!?

I see I didn't post much last year; this year I intend to keep our records of various breeding projects here, and since I intend for us to make some serious progress, let's get started.

Feb 2 2024 - we planted 2 pots Pusa Meghna original seed, 2 pots Pusa Meghna our own saved seed, 3 pots di Jesi, 4 pots Goodman, 3 pots All-the-Year-Round, 3 pots White Snowball, 3 pots Macerata (green), and 2 pots Romanesco (green). This is about 2/3 of intended early spring plants but remaining seeds are still in the mail. 

The hope is that by planting them indoors, very early (I do wonder if this is early enough) we can get good sturdy plants to be planted out mid-March, into still cold and snowy weather (I do wonder if that is early enough, this year) and less light than they were getting inside, and so be induced to believe they have been through the winter and produce some seed once spring actually arrives. We shall see. 

Feb 6 2024 - remaining expected seeds arrived, planted 3 pots Wallaby, 2 pots di Bassano Bonorivo, 2 pots Romanesco Precoce, 3 pots Violetto di Sicilia, and 3 pots Paco's Coloured/Mallorcan cross. All seeds from first batch up by today except Early Snowball and di Jesi. (Some signs of both on Feb 7th.)

Feb 10 2024 - All of first batch up save 2 pots White Snowball; Macerata poor. Reseeded some of both. First of 2nd planting up - 1 di Bassano. (Ferdzy's Fave tomato from first batch also up.) 

Feb 17 2024 - All up save for 1 Wallaby. Fertilized yesterday for the first time. Starting to fear we have definitely started too late. Hoping for a cold spring, sorry everybody.

I took these photos almost 2 weeks ago and they already look so completely out of date. These zucchini are at least twice as large now, and are starting to look like they will form some buds shortly. They are from the interspecies cross that I have been mentioning off and on for a few years now. In particular, they are from 2 plants grown last year, both of which were probably f2s of the original Lebanese White Bush x Tennessee Sweet Potato squash crossed with another zucchini, in both cases probably Caserta. I thought they were the best of nearly a dozen grown out. I crossed them both with Reinau Gold last year and am looking forward with considerable excitement to see what develops this year. There are 6 batches of 3 seeds from one squash and 9 batches of 3 seeds from the second squash. At least, that's how many were planted. A few did not come up. The plant is, as they develop fruit, to remove the ones that seem the least interesting and see what is left. 

This photo is actually considerably older; we dug up these leeks early in May. In spite of the fact that last year was a pretty bad year for a lot of things, and that I don't consider the leeks to have done very well, they were not that awful. Those second-best ones on the left were actually quite superb, and the middle ones were very decent. The runts on the end were usable. Of course, the very best are still in the garden, going to seed. Speaking of which, few of the ones we dug were bolting and the ones left in the garden did not start to flower at all early, meaning that my hope to be able to leave this strain in the garden over the winter for early spring use seems quite feasible.

Those leeks and these are part of our experiment in growing leeks a different way. After having leek seeds from a mass cross overwinter in the garden, we are now sowing the seeds of their descendants in the fall purposefully. Those scratchy little lines of green are them. They look most unimpressive but I am quite pleased - they have grown a lot since I took this photo and are better than the ones planted in a tray for insurance. (Which to be fair have been somewhat neglected of late.) We expect to dig them up and replant them deeply at the usual time to dig up and replant leeks, without having had to plant them first, so that's good. First year of not planting any leeks started indoors.

Attempting to cross Goldana turnips with Scarlet Ono turnips. Last year did not seem to work. I planted half and half from a few of each left to hopefully cross, and got half and half, no signs of crossing. I am a little more hopeful that they might cross this year since the flowering time seemed to overlap better, but we'll see. Next year, as usual. 

Brassicas behind them kept under cover as much as possible these days due to the vile Swede midge.

Tomatoes in; onions, parsley, leeks, and carrots going to seed in the middle of the bed between them. Again, looking much further along in real life. Mr. Ferdzy is currently attempting to get them strung up, and tearing out his hair over how hard it is to find decent string that will do the job, yet compost in the fall.

 

Blueberries start off small and greenish; as the season progresses they become larger and whiter. Then, suddenly, some of them apparently double in size and turn blue. Does that mean they are ripe? Could be, although many of them then need to sit and ripen some more for best flavour. We have discovered that the best way to pick blueberries is to pull them very, very gently - if they don't come right off, they need longer. Nelson in particular wants to sit for quite a while at the blue stage before coming off. Nelson is a sturdy bush with good, upright stems. 

Arlen is a more delicate bush. The stems tend to arch and if they are really loaded they can drag on the ground. You can see we have placed some stakes around it to help hold them up. We are willing to do this, because it is well worth the trouble. Those stems were just loaded with amazing berries. 

While neither Nelson nor Arlen were producing with the earliest berries, they both started in early August, and are still producing.

This one is Jelly Bean. (Actually, it's 2 Jelly Beans.) One is over, the other is about half-picked. We picked this one up in the parking lot of our local grocery store. It is marketed more to urban and casual gardeners than serious growers, perhaps because it is a dwarf bush, maxing out at about 2 feet tall. It's described as being just as much an ornamental plant as a source of fruit, and indeed, it's very pretty and turns red in the fall. Before then, new growth is an attractive lime shade (you can see some) and regular mature leaves are a nice bluish green. However, it produced more berries than any others that were not Nelson or Arlen and they really are extremely tasty. They started to ripen a bit earlier than Nelson or Arlen, but only by a few days.

I understand blueberries can be successfully grown in containers (the shallow roots help, I guess) and while I have not tried it, this is one that I think would work well for that.

And finally, I am recommending this one, who's name I don't remember. I suspect it's either Elliot or Aurora - I think perhaps Elliot, which sounds more familiar - but both are popular late-fruiting blueberries. We got this one at Whiffletree, but they are not carrying either of those at the moment. Whatever it is, like Jelly Bean it's a solid second tier in terms of quantity produced, but unlike Jelly bean it does not really even start ripening until the last few days of August and continues well into September. We are really reluctant to say goodbye to our daily bowl of fresh blueberries and we are so happy to have this one to keep us going a little longer. 

So there you are; four(ish) excellent blueberry varieties. I'm saying for the home garden, because they do all produce over a fairly extended period of time. I suspect this is not a great feature for commercial growers who want to go in like a swarm of locusts and strip the bushes all at once, but for the home grower it is ideal. Twenty minutes of picking every second day kept us well supplied with berries, over a good solid 3 months. I even made a batch of jam and 2 pies to freeze. That helps console us for the fact that the season is coming to an end; that and the hope that next year will be even better.

It seems I lose a week every month in reviewing the garden. Oh well. It is definitely moving along, losing that mid-summer lushness and letting some of the cracks show. We've been having some insect problems, and have been spraying with a mixture of neem oil and insecticidal soap. It does seem to help, although it is certainly not a miracle cure.

I don't know how there are all these photos of Mr. Ferdzy applying it by himself. Mostly he sprays, while I come along behind carrying the bottle and pumping at the same time, or trying to anyway. Bickering ensues. I guess that's why I left the last bit of the bottle to him. 

There are very few carrots that we left for seed that survived and are forming seed, but at least 2 or 3 of them are. The cucumbers are doing reasonably well and pickles are being made. The peppers... oh, the peppers...

Also the eggplants. Both so very, very sad. I think night-time temperatures have been too low (not unusually down as low as 10°C this summer) and they just can't cope even though the daytime temperatures have been adequate. For some stupid reason we failed to cover them and, well, this is the (lack of) result.

Watermelons, on the other hand, are kind of late, but seem to be doing much better. We'll see when they ripen. They went in a bit late in addition to the coolness of this summer.

After last year's success with corn we are trying again. This variety is "Double Standard". Unlike the other it is not advertised as resistant to pests, and it isn't. We can tell when the corn was ripe because it was eaten. Squirrels, I think. We've been trapping and removing a bunch, but the are like a box of tissues. I'm not convinced there's a bottom to the box though.

Beans are doing okay. Some signs of virus and disease but nothing terrible yet. Lots of time still, of course. Squirrels seem to be leaving them alone. They don't like them as much as peas or corn. Me neither, squirrels. Me neither.

Here is a fruit from our interspecies zucchini cross. Last year's attempt to save seeds failed; the fruit fell off the vine and failed to ripen. I was very sad because it was such an excellent plant, crossed with a yellow zucchini. This one appears to have crossed with Caserta, a fairly obscure variety.

We went back to the first year of the cross for these seeds; we wanted to keep the proportion of argyrosperma to pepo as high as we can. This second hand-pollinated squash being grown  out for seed also appears to be a Caserta cross. These two were the most productive of the 8 or so plants we grew out, also healthy without being insanely massive (but large, definitely large). 

I hand pollinated them with Reinau Gold pollen. The Reinau Gold plant did very badly. At first I thought it was just a genetic dud and was a bit worried about using it, but it turned out we had covered the squash too late, and there were already vine-borers at them. They seem to like the bush zucchini the best, and perhaps the yellow in particular. I covered the pollinated flowers, but I know a few bees snuck in there during the process, so while I expect any resulting seed to be mostly half Reinau Gold, there will be a few wild cards.

On the left you can see the remaining zucchini, after we went through and pulled the badly damaged ones and performed surgery on the ones that looked like they might survive. Those very dark leaves at the furthest left are from the interspecies cross. They were far less hospitable to the vine-borers, and are generally now in much better health. Well, this is why we are growing them out and it does seem to be worth the effort so far.

In the middle, the garlic has been pulled and is curing in the garage. In fact it has been out for 2 weeks and we intend to clean it and bring it in to the house today. Lettuce seed is also picked and pulled. Onions on the right look a little tatty but are fine, and should start the process of dying down for storage soon. 

In the back you can see some Iroquois Corn Bread beans. We grew them out as part of our late-planted set for the last few years and got only a handful of seeds. This year we planted them at a more usual time, in the old strawberry bed (they are coming out on the installment plan) and have been amazed at how very huge they have gotten. Not exactly a pole bean, but not really a bush either. They are so much happier and we expect a bumper crop.

Speaking of both bumper crops and berries, our blueberries are the best they have ever been. This bush is particularly loaded, but most of them have been great. We are getting about twice or thrice the berries of last year, and last year was the first time we were able to eat berries every day for several months. I've actually made and frozen a couple of pies! If they pile up again faster than we can eat them - what a concept - I will make a little jam too.

This is the result of applying both sulphur and blueberry "inoculant" (a fertilizer/soil acidifier combo). Wow, what a difference. 

On the right, melons. On the left, peppers. Both looking pretty sad. The mild weather that has made the brassicas quite happy does not suit either of these sets of plants. We'll see what harvest, if any, we actually manage to get.

Garlic started to look a little ratty from the now endemic leek moth, but a dose of diatomaceous earth seems to have improved things a lot. 

Sweet potatoes are slow; potatoes look good. It's been oddly cool this year in spite of the occasional very hot day. I feel like things are really quite behind - I will have to look at some late June/early July posts from previous years to see if that is true.

 

Last year around now I was making Chinese Cucumber & Radish Salad, and Creamed Spinach Filled Buns.

On the other hand, my quince is flowering for the first time since it was planted. I thought it wasn't going to, but it seems it's just later to flower than apple blossoms. It would be exciting to have some quinces this  year! But we'll see how that turns out.

But after all those noes and maybes on the fruit front, the main fruit beds look like they should be loaded with fruit this spring and early summer. Haskaps - excellent. Strawberries - first ones already taking on colour with masses to come. Blueberries - flowering non-stop. We are really looking forward to all of these, especially Mr. Ferdzy who is a fiend for fruit.

We have also been picking wild amounts of asparagus; up to 3 pounds a day. It is slowing down, but we probably have another week of picking. Fresh - really fresh - asparagus is the best thing ever.