Last clean up

The weather has been pretty miserable for the past couple of weeks so when there was a break in the weather I decided to take perhaps my last trip out for a while... maybe.

The gardens were glistening in the sunlight and luckily the weather held. When I arrived at my plot I couldn't see my sunflowers towering anymore and I realized that they had toppled over from the wind and rain, poor things. It looked like the birds had gotten most of the seeds so that's a good thing.

Originally I had been planning to leave them up for awhile so I had to pull them out. They were huge!! The stalks massive! I hope they compost over the winter.  What the heck do you do with these guys. I love growing them for the birds but I might not put in as many next year. Or maybe a smaller variety?

My plan was to pull all my carrots, and spread leaves on the beds. I kind of ran out of leaves and it looked like other gardeners had raked up the ones around the gardens so I might have to take another trip when I get another few bags. I see that a lot of people are putting straw on their beds which might not be a bad idea but I haven't really checked out where to buy it. There is still time. All in all my garden is in pretty good shape and hopefully I will be allowed to rent it again for next year.

I now have a refrigerator full of misshapen and colored carrots. There are a lot of them. I'm thinking of maybe carrot soup... carrot cake...the possibilities are endless.

Remembering the Summer

This has to be the best spot. What a view!

I think I'm suffering from garden withdrawal. When you are used to going out 2-3 times a week it is hard to adjust to not going out at all. It is hard to get used to a different schedule. This is the first weekend that I haven't worked in the garden for months.

It is a really miserable day. Has been raining and raining hard for three days now. I can only imagine the pools of water at the garden now. I do need to make one more trip to spread some leaves, pick the remainder of the carrots and bring home any sticks. The leaves are beginning to fall in copious amounts so as soon as things dry up again (hopefully) I will try and get a few bags of them and tuck everything in.

We do need the rain but this is rather a lot of it but then this is Vancouver or the Wet Coast as I like to call it and if it didn't rain so much it wouldn't be so green.

I'm trying to get my studio all set up so that I can start to paint. I wish I was better at it but I do want to make a better effort to pay more attention, see more and experiment more. My garden photos are going to come in handy I hope.

I'd love to paint this! 

Days like this I like to reminisce about the beautiful summer we just enjoyed.... and for my garden.

Last days of Summer

Technically it is actually Fall but the weather has been glorious. Second week in October and the temperatures during the day are lovely and warm. There has been a frost in the garden as the temperature dips at night but that is to be expected. The warm spell is supposed to last until next weekend so I actually went out twice this holiday weekend and did some more clean up.

I pretty much dug in all my bits of plant material after cutting them up into little pieces. My thought is it should compost down by the spring. My garlic also went in today. It took up one entire bed which is a big chunk of real estate in my garden. If it all comes up I will have a ton of garlic. There won't be anything to harvest until next August which seems like an awfully long way away. I'm thinking that perhaps I didn't dig them deep enough so I might need to add an additional layer of something more on top. The next step anyway is to rake some leaves and cover all the beds as a mulch. They say you should plant a cover crop of rye or something (not on the garlic) but it is a bit of work to turn it in and then you have to wait to plant. If the leaves don't decompose by spring I will just add them to the compost. I may do it on some of the beds next year.

Nothing is in now except for a row of carrots and they won't mind the cool weather. I picked a bunch this weekend so I won't be needing any more for a few weeks. They will do better in the ground than in my fridge anyway. I have to say I'm pretty pleased with my carrots. I was pretty bad about thinning them and you can see I did have quite a few small ones and deformed ones but all in all I have quite a few and they taste pretty good.

I found a great recipe for roasting carrots and actually all root veggies and I love it. Simple and brings out the nice flavour of them. I found the recipe through Pintrest which is quckly becoming my favorite source.

The cleanup continues...

I spent more time at my plot this weekend trying to prepare it for winter. I've decided not to wait until spring before spreading some of my compost around. What better time than now to try and put it in each of my raised beds. Next year I will move the compost to a different spot and the spot where it is now will no doubt be prime real estate!

It is pretty heavy stuff. Of course I have layers of uncomposted stuff on top so it is a bit of a chore to find the good stuff and it is kind of heavy. Full of worms though so while trying to be careful of them, I'm trying to get some into each bed. They are also getting lots of cut up bits of plant material which should, compost down through the winter. I'm starting to take things home, my wire compost bin, my garden tags and the sticks that I will use next year. It will do them no good to sit around in the wet wet winter that I'm sure is coming.

The huge sunflowers had to be staked up, they were so large and heavy they were starting to topple over. My hubby had a brilliant idea to stake them with my bamboo sticks. I said there was no way a couple of sticks would work but they did much to my surprise and worked beautifully. Thanks Andy! Because the beds are raised the sticks are propped against the edges.  The birds have already been feasting on them. They don't look ready to me but I guess they know best.

There is still work to be done but not too much. I was itching to go out today but will make a trip next weekend. Next years project, a fence between my plot and the next one.

Eggplant Pizza!

For the first time ever I decided to grow eggplant. I actually bought two for a dollar each at Amsterdam Nursery this spring. I figured for a buck why not try it. I harvested the last two little eggplants and will perhaps try a little eggplant parmesan with them. They are pretty tiny.

One of the plants was a Japanese eggplant and they were pretty nice in stir fries but I didn't get too many. Wrong location as they didn't get much sun as they were shaded from my towering sunflowers and sweet peas.  I kind of just threw them in as an experiment but I will definitely give them a good sunny spot next year. The plants don't get huge so I will probably plant them beside some pepper plants where there is no shade. Since I am going to rig up a proper greenhouse for my tomatoes they can have a head start in my portable greenhouse. At least that is the plan for now.

A couple of weeks ago I harvested three of my eggplants, they are so cute I just love them. I really hated to pick them. The only thing I have ever eaten them in is moussaka which I love but since Andy isn't too keen on it and I thought I would try something special that we both would enjoy. I figured pizza might be interesting.

I added lots of cheese to the top of this

I found a pizza recipe online from Epicurious and decided to give it a try. I didn't follow the recipe exactly after reading the reviews and it was lovely. I used my own crust recipe which was wonderful and crispy and also put added some pizza sauce with some pesto on the base. Of course lots of cheese. Even Andy liked it. My only complaint was that when I reheated it the next day I found the eggplant slightly bitter. The solution to that would be to eat it all the same day or invite a couple of eggplant loving friends over.

Mmmm!

Roasted Tomatoes

Before

Sigh, the last of the summer tomatoes. These ones were ripened in newspaper. The left ones are heirloom and the right ones are my early girls. I wouldn't normally roast tomatoes as I love them too much raw, but they aren't quite as tasty if they don't ripen on the vine. Don't get me wrong they are good, very very good but they kind of lend themselves to roasting.

It is so easy and they will be lovely in the winter when all you have is canned tomatoes for sauces. I will just add these to what I have to enhance the sauce and enjoy a bit of summer. Roasting them sweetens them up.

You simply cut them up in half or bigger pieces and place (not overlapping) in a preferably glass dish. You can add any kind of herbs with it. I added fresh basil for my first batch and then ran out of herbs so I used a bit of parsley and dried thyme, salt, pepper and olive oil to coat the tomatoes. I threw in some garlic cloves as well. Roast in a 300 degree oven for at least two hours. Turn off oven and let sit for a while. I went shopping, came back and put them in a zip lock bag and froze them. The smell in the house was heavenly.

After