Seasonal Ontario Food

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.