Our Garden Slowly Says Goodbye to Summer

The torrential rains today were most welcome in Sara’s flower and vegetable garden beds! We tried to irrigate them as best as we could with our system of soaker hoses that could be hooked up with a click of a plastic connector, but some parts of the garden had to be watered manually, including a series of Dahlia flowers that she is cultivating to enter into the Fall Fair competition.

Hedgehog is looking forward to adding wheels and decorating some huge zucchinis to enter into the races at the Fair. We added extra Iguana Juice and Voodoo Juice to the

zucchinis to help them grow big. Some of the beneficial nutrients and microbes spilled over to the pumpkins growing next to the cucumbers, and a huge pumpkin that still has a lot of time to grow before Halloween, is the result!

With our tomatoes, we seem to have hit the jackpot! We eat Greek salad almost every night, so we grew a lot of cherry tomatoes. The orange cherry tomatoes this year are very numerous and have a heavenly taste! The yellow ones are okay, too, but the orange ones are superb! We also have some red ones, but they take a very long time to turn red.

The long dry spell and warm sunshine worked their magic on the hot Hungarian peppers. If you haven’t tasted one of these straight off the vine, you haven’t really tasted any. The supermarket variety pales in comparison. It’s not that they’re the hottest I’ve ever had, it’s the freshness of the flesh of the vegetable that makes me go back for more, each time. Next year, we’ll plant a lot more of these.

The phlox are still trying their best, but we’ll have to start deadheading them soon. The black eyed Susans are still in their prime, as are some yellow flowers whose name escapes me at the moment. Sara has collected so many different kinds of plants over the years, that it’s really hard to keep up. Even she draws a blank sometimes, when asked.

This rain will be followed by summer sunshine and temperatures over the Labor Day weekend, but after that Sara will start slowly removing the yellowed, dried up stalks and deadheading the flowers. She redesigned her main flower beds and it’s still a work in progress. As a result, we had very few roses this year. I’m sure that will be corrected in the coming year, because we both love roses!

Harvest Time Is A Special Time

Harvest time is a special time in every growers life. To see all your hard work pay off (finally) and to realize that those cherry tomatoes you nurtured from seed now offer you such magnificent tasting fruit that you can't believe it--well, it's priceless!

The heirloom and beefsteak tomatoes, even though huge and beautiful in color, are still a bit watery. Perhaps we have to let them ripen some more in the September sun before harvesting them.

Our squash, zucchini, and cucumber plants are producing fruit of high quality. Some species have been chosen to give us huge zucchini's, so the kids could enter them in the zucchini races at the annual Fall Fair.

Yes, it's back to school time and we look back on the bounty of summer with gratitude, but also a bit of sadness. The time went by much too fast. With a few visits to the beach, water parks and the PNE, as well as a quick trip to Harrison Hot Springs, and it's almost time for our annual trip to Telegraph Cove to connect with the Humpback Whales and the Orcas that congregate in the waters near the Cove.

We've continued to eat five kinds of lettuce from our garden for the past month or two, and the plants just regenerate themselves, as long as the warm weather holds up. Yes, some of them have bolted and gone to seed, but we planted plenty of them from seed, so we have a large array of salad greens to choose from--every single night!

Pretty soon it will be time for Canadian Thanksgiving, and Harvest Time is always a time to give thanks!

Thanks to Iguana Juice and the other great Advanced Nutrients products, once again we are the recipients of the produce from Sara's Garden of Delights! :-)

Thriving Zucchini, Beautiful Roses, Economical Hydroponics

Those of you who've read this blog before know that Sara does the flower gardening and I attempt to grow vegetables in the back of the house. It's not often that I have a success story to boast about, but this year my two zucchini plants have taken off like a comet shooting across the sky.

My cherry tomatoes are coming along, but I don't seem to have enough buds on the heirloom and beefsteak varieties. I think a treatment with Nirvana is in order. Nirvana is an all-organic foliar spray and that encourages your plants to produce more and more buds.

Some of you know that we grow our flowers and vegetables organically, usually fed by 100% organic Iguana Juice, made by Advanced Nutrients. There is Grow for the vegetative phase of all the plants, and Bloom for the flowering phase. I have to be careful not to allow the Bloom to fertilize the lettuce next to the tomato plants, otherwise the former will go to seed and taste bitter.

Sara, in the meantime, has helped produce a bouquet of incredible roses of different varieties, a bunch of glorious daisies, exquisite phlox of different colors, as well as black-eyed-susans, clematus, and some other flowers whose names I have forgotten.

The other day I received a confirmation of our decision to grow everything organically. I went into a Chinese grocery store and saw that while the regular bananas were all green and unappealing, the organic kind were perfectly formed and yellow and very attractive indeed. I opted for the organic kind, and even though I had to pay a bit more, when I tasted one the difference was heaven and earth. Non-organic bananas will never touch my lips again!

Even if you grow your vegetables or fruits hydroponically, you can still grow them organically if you use quality fertilizers like Iguana Juice and quality additives, such as Nirvana.

Speaking of hydroponics, such a setup doesn't have to cost a fortune. The current issue of Rosebud Magazine (the one with Justin Timberlake on the cover) has an excellent article written by hydroponic guru Erik Biksa, entitled Eco Growing Systems, Simplicity That Can Feed Our Planet. It describes in detail a new hydroponics system on the market that is affordable and simple to operate. Look for it in quality bookstores and newsstands. Better yet, pick one up at your favorite hydroponics store.

I leave you with a thought from the great Persian poet, Rumi:
"Observe the wonders as they occur around you.
Don't claim them. Feel the artistry
moving through, and be silent."