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!

Spring and Gardening for Kids

We’re still experiencing huge rain storms here on Canada’s Wet Coast, but occasionally the sun does make an appearance around this time of year. Along with the crocuses and other bulbs brave enough to emerge out of the soil, auguring Spring. Our bigger than ever "puppy," Cooper, can't wait for the rain to stop, so he can run around with his canine buddies in a nearby school yard.

This is definitely a special time of year, and it is also the time to start your seeds indoors. We have purchased at least four grow light setups, which work with a rudimentary capillary system of hydroponic watering. Placing our seed into starter cubes, then the cubes in coco coir seedling pots, we let the wet pad water them from below.

We usually get our kids involved in the seed starting process. Even though they’re now in their teenage years, they still get a kick out of germinating seeds sending their first sprouts into the world, full of promises for a healthy harvest in the Fall.

Sara is helping them to plant peas, beans, tomatoes, lettuce, and peppers of various kinds from seeds, as well as cucumbers and squash. Each of these vegetables should be started at different times, in order to take advantage of the most propitious time to take the seedlings out into the garden. Take the tomatoes or the peppers out too soon, for instance, and they’ll freeze.

A great book that Sara and I would recommend to get your kids involved with gardening is called Kids Gardening—30 Great Gardening Projects for Kids, by Susie Johns, published by Parragon.

Some hardy vegetables can go out right away, and of course the perennial flowers and bulbs are already coming up. If you’re not sticky about organics, you may want to use a time-release fertilizer by Advanced Nutrients, that has to be applied only 3 times a year--Heavy Harvest, Spring, Summer, and Fall.

If, however, you’re strictly an organic gardener, like Sara and I, we would recommend 100%Organic Iguana Juice, Grow and Bloom. You can use it at a quarter or half strength for your seedlings.

Sara is in the middle of building a rock wall around our most important garden beds. The driftwood logs we have been using to contain the soil have rotted over the years, so she has decided that something more permanent is warranted. It’s hard work, but she seems to enjoy doing it. I’m usually too busy to lend a hand, but we have some wonderful neighbors who come over and help out, once in a while.