A little harvesting

 Today I harvested some of this year's garden bounty.  It has been a cool summer, at least in my opinion, and not a great year for the garden.  It was also very wet.  The cabbages started to form heads but then just went slimy and rotted.  Things are already slowing more than in previous years, based on my pictures, and they never got as far as they did in previous years either.

Fortunately, the greenhouse stays warmer and the tomatoes are finally yielding.  Here's an assortment of tomatoes I picked yesterday.  There are black cherry, jaune flammée, big rainbow, yellow brandywine, sunrise bumble bee, and probably a couple of others.  I've already made some roasted tomato sauce for freezing and I'll be doing some dehydrating.  There are a couple of cantaloupes in the greenhouse that look like they might ripen before first frost....I hope so!  You can see a little bottle of Monin hazelnut syrup for my coffee in this picture - I'm not using that on the tomatoes.  It just lives on the counter near the kettle.

The rhubarb has had a very good year, and I harvested quite a lot in the spring.  It slowed in the midsummer, but is doing very well again now.  Here's some I chopped and froze today.  There were two more large size freezer bags like these yesterday.  I also made a crumble with some yesterday and made stewed rhubarb and plums that I'll be enjoying with my breakfast yogurt this week.

I also harvested some potatoes today.  I don't grow an awful lot of potatoes because my province is a potato region, so I can always get local potatoes and they are usually very well priced.  However, it's fun to grow some of my own as well.

This is the second year of actual production for two grapevines that I planted 3 years ago.  The first year they just got planted and didn't do much.  Last year they made some grapes but unfortunately the raccoons cleaned them off the day before I was going to harvest them.  This year, they have done really well.  Here's how they looked in August on the arbour.

I decided I would be very proactive about harvesting them, so I've cut some before all of them are fully ripe.  It won't matter because I'm going to make some jelly with them.  They are a mix of Beta (a table grape) and Marechal Foch (a wine grape).  The Beta grapes are larger than the Marechal Foch.  I'm not sure about their "typical" sizes.  It has been a very wet summer so I would have thought they got enough water, but maybe not enough heat to achieve full size.  Anyway, I've clipped some that seemed well on the way to ripeness, just in case the raccoons show up and pull off the same stunt as last year.  

Here's hoping that another week or so will allow for more ripening without raccoon interventions!  

Garden Update: Fruiting Plants

In addition to the raised beds I recently posted about, I have also been busy putting in some fruiting shrubs this year.  I wanted to get those planted as soon as possible this year because they can take a while to get properly established.  I'm a big fan of growing my own fruit.  When I lived in Iowa, the climate allowed me to harvest a wider range of fruit, but here in New Brunswick, the growing season is short, so my choices are more limited.

Blackcurrants are a family favourite - something that I grew up with because I have British parents.  Many people aren't familiar with blackcurrants, or think that they are related to "currants" of the raisin type, which are a different fruit altogether.  I had 8 different blackcurrant varieties in Iowa, but here I was having trouble finding any, even by mail order.  Fortunately I was at MacArthur's Nursery in Moncton a couple of weeks ago, shortly after they'd received an order of fruit-bearing plants, including 4 blackcurrant bushes.  I bought 2 of them!  I left the white hanging basket container in this picture to show the size - the hanging basket container is the "regular" size you see in most stores.


The blackcurrants are the Ben Connan variety, which is bred from a combination of Ben Sarek and Ben Lomond varieties, both of which I grew in Iowa.  I was really excited to see such big, healthy plants.  They have already been planted in amongst some of my existing perennials.

At the nursery, the blackcurrants were sitting next to some gooseberry plants, so I immediately grabbed one of those as well.  This is an old classic "Pixwell" variety.  Some people think they're sour but I think they're great!  As you can see, it's found a spot next to the tulips, which are almost finished for this year.  If we could just stop having overnight frosts, it would be great.  These late frosts have already wreaked havoc on our province's grape and blueberry harvests. 

I need to ensure the berries get adequate sunlight, so planting them in with the other perennials is one of the best places, since those beds do receive a reasonable amount of sunlight.  I was also able to purchase a small but relatively healthy looking red currant.  It is also already planted.  The leaves are a bit pale but I'm pretty sure it will green up quickly.

I was also lucky enough to find a jostaberry, which is not a well known berry here, but is another that I used to grow in Iowa.  It's a cross between the blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum), the North American coastal black gooseberry (Ribes divaricatum) and the European gooseberry (Ribes uva-crispa).  The flavour is somewhere between a blackcurrant and a gooseberry - kind of a milder version of a blackcurrant really.  Very nice for jelly and other sweet treats in the fall kitchen!

In addition to the berry bushes, I purchased two different varieties of dwarf sour cherries.


I love the zing in the flavour of sour cherries. Sweet cherries are nice too, but the flavour of the tart cherries is just superb in my opinion.  I bought "Romeo" and "Cupid" varieties, which both originate from the University of Saskatchewan dwarf sour cherry breeding program.

I used to grow "Nanking" shrub cherries in Iowa, so I'm hoping these will do equally well for me here.  I would like to find a couple of Nanking cherry shrubs here as well, but I need to keep looking because I haven't found any yet.  For now, Cupid and Romeo will, I hope, grow big and strong!

This perennial bed has now become a half fruit bed, with 3 currant shrubs and a rhubarb plant from my in-laws that I planted earlier this year.  I also received a lovage plant from a friend of mine who has a vegetable farm.  I've planted it on the left side near the rhubarb.  The same bed  has a white climbing hydrangea on the bird feeder pole, some yellow loosestrife, some cranesbill, daylilies, echinops, irises, and lavender, as well as the forget-me-nots that are in all my garden beds!  In the front left there's a submerged pot that has mint in it - the pot prevents it from taking over the garden, since mint can be so invasive.

I'm not sure whether I'll get much of a fruit crop this year, but the blackcurrant bushes do have a reasonable number of little green fruits already, so maybe I'll have enough for a little jar of jam!