Seasonal Ontario Food

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.