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!

The largest and best tomato plants in the entire neighborhood!

Sara has been diligently nurturing our vegetables (tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, snap peas, lettuce--of five different kinds, dill, oregano, red bell peppers, yellow Hungarian banana peppers, beans, pumpkins,  and the best damn home-grown carrots you can imagine.) They are growing in a flower bed circumscribed by a wooden enclosure in the front, or in another bed made of composted kitchen scraps and shredded fallen leaves, in the back of our house.

Our summer weather is nothing to write home about, but we managed to get enough sunny days, between rainy and overcast ones, to enable the Advanced Nutrients organic Iguana Juice to work its magic. The lady from the local garden club came by and told Sara that she has the biggest and most fertile tomato plants in the entire neighborhood!

As usual, Sara's flowers are twice the size of what they should be (a three-foot Phlox is now a six-foot super Phlox!). Sara does take good care of her soil, to be sure, but I suspect it's the regular application of the Iguana formulation that causes the growth spurt. As well as the prolific number of Roses on one of her prize bushes.

She started growing Dahlias in semi-hydroponic plastic containers. You have to fill up the reservoir at the bottom of the container and the soil and the roots get moisture through capillary action from below. Sara also has a network of soaker-hoses intertwined with her plants, and buried near their root systems to keep them well watered during the hot, summer days.

It's a lot of work, Sara's style of gardening. She is redesigning the main flower bed and has bought some very nice rocks to build a rock wall around it. Prior to this, the soil in this particular bed was contained by select pieces of driftwood, which are slowly rotting away and are even growing mushrooms!

The huge Lilies dominate one portion of her garden, not just by their sheer size and beauty, but also by the wonderful fragrance they emit, causing each passer-by to comment very favorably!

I wish I had more time to document Sara's garden, but this will give you a taste of what it's like living near this small Paradise surrounding our home--and created by my wife.

BTW, that muddy gardener is our new puppy, Cooper!

 

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."

Tulips Love Organic Nutrients


Well, we have four more years of Harper, but at least the Green Party got a seat in Parliament, so the interests of gardeners everywhere will be voiced frequently, we hope. Spring is my favorite time of year, when the life force of Nature surges forth in every bud and bloom.

I also have a fondness for Jack Layton and I am glad that he did really, really well in the election. I am tired of shouldering the costs of social programs while huge corporations are not only given tax reducti0ns but in many cases, subsidies as well.

The crocuses are gone, but some beautiful daffodils are still in bloom and the newcomers, the exquisite tulip varieties are bursting forth everywhere. At one time, these flowers were worth their weight in gold! During the tulip mania in 17th century Europe, a single bulb would fetch as much as a tradesman made in ten years of hard work. The bubble burst, and prices plummeted.

Some blue hyacinths still remain in Sara's garden and some different perennial flowers are beginning to make their appearance. The roses have all sprouted fresh leaves and the poppies are going through their vegetative growth. Everything seems to be a month behind last year, when we had a very warm spring.

We continue to feed our plants 100% organic Iguana Juice, as well as some supplements, such as Humic Acid and Fulvic Acid. These ingredients create a very fertile soil which will guarantee a bountiful supply of flowers, as well as vegetables in the back of the house.

I hope you enjoy my photographs of Sara's magnificent blooms and that you'll come back to this blog again and again to check out the progress of our organic Gabriola Garden.

Organic Gardening Pays Off in Spectacular Blooms

Sara's flower garden is the talk of the neighborhood. Passers-by are constantly asking, "how did you get your Roses to grow so big?" "How is it that I try to grow Phlox, and they're three feet maximum, while your Phlox are six feet tall?"

Sara has asked me to print out a page from the Advanced Nutrients website on Organic Iguana Juice. After all, this 100% organic plant nutrient is the secret behind the robust plants that she grows, whether using Grow during the vegetative stage, or Bloom, during flowering.

So now when people ask, she just hands them the page and smiles. "It's available at your local hydroponics store," she adds. And we've had many neighbors make a beeline for such a store and purchase this fish based miracle food, because they've seen the results.

We also use other AN products, such as Scorpion Juice to keep pests and pathogens at bay, but most of the glory should go to Iguana Juice, and of course Sara's diligence in creating the best, most fertile soil on Gabriola Island.

"The soil on the island is quite sandy. So we've brought in trailer loads of composted horse manure and kitchen parings, and bought the best, organic soil stocked by our garden shop," explains Sara to Melanie, a single mother from further down the road, who brings her six-year-old daughter each day to see the pretty flowers.

"We have nine different kinds of Phlox, Black Eyed Susans, two different kinds of Cone Flower, ten varieties of Hybrid Roses, three or four Lilies, and the Anemonie is in flower right now, with its graceful canopy of delicate blooms."

My vegetable garden needs some catching up to do, even though last night we enjoyed some fresh Snow Peas with our meal and our Zucchini Squash are growing big in anticipation of the Zucchini races at next month's Fair.

Our upside-down tomatoes are thriving, but I'll leave that 'til the next posting, when I'll have some close up pictures of the fruits of our labor.