We’ve been readying the garden for winter. The blueberries in the front yard have already changed into their fall colours. I’ve trimmed the lavender back so that it won’t get too scraggly next year. I’ve pulled up all the basil and processed the leaves for pesto. I removed the rest of the tomato flowers to encourage the remaining tomatoes to ripen. I harvested the spring onions and froze them, chopped, on a cookie tray. I pulled up all the carrots (a couple of decent-sized ones and a handful of tiny ones). I’m waiting for the rest of the tomatoes to ripen and for us to finally feel like eating lettuce, and then we’re probably done for the season.

What worked well this year?

• The spring onion cuttings grew really well. Instead of planting starters, I simply saved the last inch or so of the green onions that we bought for cooking. I grew them in a ramekin of water, and then moved them out into the garden once the roots were established. Free spring onions for the rest of the season!
• The cherry tomatoes were great to snack on. Whenever I passed the garden cage to or from the shed, I raided the plants for a couple of ripe tomatoes if some happened to be within reach. (Or sometimes, even if they were harder to get to.) Sweet and juicy!
• The carrots were an interesting experiment. Most of the carrots were really small because I planted them late (and in a box that we weren’t really tending because it ended up taking the overflow of the limestone screenings), but they leafed up nicely and some of them actually grew to a decent size. Next time, I’ll overrule W- and save the carrot tops for stock or other things instead of composting them. =)

Things that didn’t work so well:

• It turns out that I’m not particularly keen on eating lettuce.
• Many of the plants in the more shaded area didn’t get around to setting fruit.
• I didn’t water the plants as regularly as I probably should have. Next time, I should stop wondering about the weather forecast and regularly schedule some time to give the plants a good soak.
• The dwarf peas grew only halfway up the strings. Maybe a regular variety next time, and sugar snap peas for extra crunchiness…
• We realized we weren’t using the lean-to greenhouse, so we gave it away.

Next year:

• I want to grow tomatoes and basil again, although I might need to move these around to avoid pests or blight.
• I’d like to have planter boxes up next year. We skipped them this year because W- was working on the deck, so I didn’t end up using the bag of potting soil that we bought. The basil grew really well in the planter boxes last year.
• I’m going to keep giving bitter melon / kerala a try, maybe with more sun. Ever the optimist!
• I’ll grow carrots along the borders. They look pretty.
• I want to cook with more herbs.

We gave the strawberries a rest this year, although a couple of them decided to “volunteer” in the back garden. I saw a little sage plant growing too. I transplanted it to the opposite side of the garden so that we’ll have sage growing there too, although I don’t know how established it will get before winter.

The house gets very little light and we have cats who like munching on plants, so I don’t think I’ll be able to start plants from seed before the last frost. I could set up the spare room with lights, but it’s carpeted, so that can be messy. Although it’s more expensive to buy starter plants and the selection is smaller, the tomatoes and basil that we bought did really well, and I don’t mind doing that again next year.

I’m getting better at recognizing weeds versus regular plants. Yay!

Timothy Kenny and I were chatting about blueberries. He wanted to plant enough blueberry plants to be able to make blueberry pie. As it turns out, blueberries ripen gradually and not all at once, so… no.

I told him that you can get a lot of enjoyment out of one blueberry at a time.

My blueberry story started when W- and I were joking about planting blueberries and attracting random bears. (We live in Toronto. Probably the only time I’ll see a bear is if I go to a zoo.) When I saw the blueberry plants on sale at the end of the season a few years ago, I scooped them up. We planted six in the front yard – small bushes, not even very bushy.

This is a picture of our first blueberry “harvest” from 2011:

We haven’t gotten more than a handful of blueberries this year, but that isn’t the point. When we notice two or three have ripened, we eat them: tiny explosions of flavour, and then they’re gone.

It’s not the same as digging into a fruit salad or baking a pie, but it’s a different sort of enjoyment. It keeps me in tune with the passage of time. I see the bushes awaken from dormancy, bud leaves, flower, fruit. And the fruits are a nice bonus, a reminder that the supermarket doesn’t give us everything.

We also have cherry tomatoes in the backyard. We don’t buy cherry tomatoes at the supermarket. They’ve always felt like a bit of a luxury, and I tend to buy whatever has the lowest unit price. The cherry tomatoes that grow in our yard hide the cost of compost and water and soil, so I get to enjoy them guilt-free – again, one or two at a time, always a treasure hunt.

Our garden isn’t nearly as productive as Mrs. Wong’s front yard down the street She has a veritable farm in front of the apartment building. It’s in full sun and full growth. Last year, she grew these huge squashes that hung pendulously from the vines. She works hard on it, though. She waters seedlings by hand, frames the plants with twigs from High Park, breaks up pumpkin shells after Halloween, and adds what we will politely refer to as night water. Our garden is shaded by pine trees, so our plants tend to get a little straggly. I’m not as conscientious as Mrs. Wong, although I do try to water when it doesn’t rain.

Other gardening notes: Having realized that I really enjoy the part where seedlings are breaking out of the ground (even if they don’t end up growing to their full potential), I’ve started the second batch of snow peas, another round of lettuce, and a round of beets. (At least I think they’re beets. I forget.) The bitter melon is gamely trying to grow, although it’s nowhere near fruiting. The zucchini isn’t as prolific as gardening blogs let me think – we haven’t gotten any yet. We’re letting the strawberries rest this year. Next year we’ll plant more.

Maybe someday I’ll learn how to supplement more of our food budget with home-grown vegetables. People figured out victory gardens, and maybe I can too. In the meantime, even these slim pickings are scrumptious meditations.

This weekend was very much a home sort of weekend. I planted pansies in the front flowerbox. Planted peas and beans in the back, too. I want to see how much I can learn about gardening during my semi-retirement. I love the way plants grow. For example, the spring onions I transplanted to a pot keep inching upwards, and there are rows of seedlings peeking out of the mounded rows in the back cage. Yay! Maybe this week I’ll buy a 6-cell pack of cherry tomato seedlings and get those started too.

Prepared and froze Japanese croquettes, getting through most of the bag of russet potatoes that we bought. Future yumminess! Also prepared yakiudon, which W- helped me cook. We’re getting better at improvising dishes based on whatever looks good at the supermarket. It takes us a while to shop for groceries, but it’s social time.

Life stretches before me. I think it would be wonderful to get really really good at gardening and cooking and all of these other things that make life better.

If you leave a little bit left when chopping green onions, you can grow new ones. The ones on the right are remnants from last week’s cooking session. Look at how quickly they’ve grown! It’s fascinating to see the difference day by day.

We don’t grow many plants indoors because the cats like chewing on things. I wish I could grow herbs like parsley and rosemary throughout winter, or start seeds for tomatoes and basil, but we don’t have the sun or space for it. We have a spare room upstairs, but it’s dark and carpeted, so working with soil is less fun. Oh well! When the weather warms up enough, I’ll jumpstart the garden with seedlings and set up the greenhouse for more seeds.

I bike through High Park and along the lakeside trail on my way downtown. There are many trees along the trail, and they’re starting to fuzz up with brown leaf buds. I’m sure we’ll see more green soon!

What will we plant this year? The garlic we planted last fall has survived the confusing weather. It now pokes out through the chicken-wire that we stapled over the box to thwart squirrels. We’ve been cooking with a lot of cilantro, parsley, bok choy, and green onions, so I’d like to grow those. Snow peas and sugar snap peas, mmm – I hope it’s not too late. Lettuce might be nice, too. And I’d love to give bitter melon another try, and maybe zucchini.

I want to spend more time gardening this year, so let’s see how that works out!

After seeing me lug my tank of a bicycle up and down six steps all spring and summer, W- decided to get a bigger shed. Now I can store my bicycle in the shed! (Well-locked, I hope.) I have my very own shed key. By golly.

He had folks come in and install it, which was good because it took much less time than it would’ve taken us to build it ourselves. The garden tools are there now, too, and we’re looking forward to moving some of the less-frequently used items to the shed as well.

In other news, the garden is doing pretty well.

We rehabilitated the front and back planter boxes, mixing in plenty of composted cow manure into the sandy soil. I like being able to feel the soil changing character as we mix more organic matter into it, pulling out roots and raking it back to a fine texture.

I planted edamame. We’ll see if it makes it in before frost. I also planted lots of basil. It’s a bit late to be starting things from seed, but none of the vegetable plants in the home centers looked particularly good, so we figured it was worth an experiment.

Lavender did so well in the part of the front garden near the stairs, so we replanted the front box with more. We paired it with some yellow flowers, also perennial.

I’m going to set aside more time to enjoy tending to the garden.

W- and I spent Sunday afternoon gardening. We dug up the boxes, amended the raised beds with nine bags of sheep manure, and filled the deck planter boxes with soil. We had bought twenty bunches of seedlings the day before at this corner store that had a large variety of plants and sold them cheaper than Home Depot or Rona did. Somehow we managed to squeeze all of them in.

I love gardening with herbs. Pulling up weeds among the lavender sprigs, separating the basil seedlings, planting cilantro in the boxes – all those scents wafting through the air, sticking to my fingers. The memories of tastes: basil in pesto and salad and sauce, oregano spicing things up, rosemary sprinkled on potatoes or sausage. And then the softness of a fine tilth, still a touch sandy but better than it was when we started. Our garden doesn’t have a lot of colour, but maybe we’ll plant more flowers next year. Other people’s gardens and the Toronto parks are filled with vibrant colours. This week, the tulips are putting on a show.

Computer work is abstract, but I’ve been building other senses into my life. Drawing teaches me to look more closely, and painting (digital – less clean-up!) gives me a new appreciation for colour combinations. Touch comes from kneading dough and working the soil and cuddling the cats. My husband and I both enjoy cooking, so that takes care of taste and smell. Sound is the one sense I tend to forget. I tend to find music distracting and earphones have a high failure rate in our household (aforementioned cats), so I usually work in silence. Maybe I’ll play around with that.