BeanDreams: my inspiration

This is my Gidu (or Dido, however you like to spell it, it still means Grandfather) in his garden in Cape Breton, NS, back in the 1980s. As you can see, it was Prolific, with a capital "P"! Enormous quantities of beans and other vegetables, and tons of gorgeous flowers, most of which were bigger than I was! Huge Dahlias, and as you can see in this pic, gorgeous poppies (told ya Ukrainians love poppies!)! His soil was always rich and black, thanks to his composting. In the winter time, I remember visiting his house and seeing many coffee mugs lined up on the window sills, full of drying beans gathered over the summer.

It was pretty much every Ukrainian's dream, upon coming to North America, to have a property of their very own, to grow crops on. In Ukraine, the vast majority of people were serfs, who worked the land but weren't allowed to own it. So North America was very tempting, even if it meant leaving your brothers and sisters and parents behind. He worked in the steel mill in Cape Breton for decades, as did many other foreigners who came to this land around the 1920s (hard, hard labor), but he still had time to follow what I believe was his first love - gardening. As you can see, he was very good at it!

Aside from all these things, he was an excellent singer, actor, accordian player, liked to make jokes, read, cook, play solitaire and do jigsaw puzzles. But more on that another time. :) Right now, I just want to focus on his gardening - the man had an incredible green thumb, and did everything "organically" before that was even a buzz word.

So I definitely take Gidu as my biggest gardening inspiration! I hope to do him proud in my own vegetable gardening over the coming years. :)

I miss him...

BeanDreams finally updated!

Sorry it took so long! If you want to get all caught up on BeanDreams for the last half of the summer, check it out:

http://ann.learnpysanky.com/blog/beandreams.html

BeanDreams: time to put the garden to bed (shortly)

I'm going to have to put the garden to bed soon - it's so late in the season, there really isn't much more time for the tomatoes and cukes to grow. And with the frost warnings starting to appear regularly on the weather forecast, the time to dig up the garden has come. I've picked several tomatoes already (for ripening inside), and I'll have to do the rest in the next couple of days.

It's kinda sad: on one hand, you don't really want it to end...but you can tell from the chill in the air that Nature's saying "it's time to button up for the winter!" So it doesn't feel unnatural, you can clearly feel in the air that growing season is over, that it's reached it's natural conclusion, and it's time to move on.

Thanksgiving is in a couple weeks - just in time for the end of our growing season. I'll process my tomatoes for freezing, and serve them as part of our harvest meal. :) I'll give lots of details on my prep for this feast coming soon!

Sorry I haven't been updating my garden stuff more - with the big server migration last month at my web server's company, I wasn't able to do a lot of updating, and I got behind. But I've almost done catching up, and will upload it shortly. :)

BeanDreams Realized! (or, A Bean Come True)

Beans! I have BEANS!!! Wheeeee!!!

Just saw them today - one of them is really big already!! It shouldn't be too long now, till I get to taste one! :D Still has to turn yellow, though, so it will be at least a week. Terribly exciting though! I must say, it's very rewarding to grow your own produce! I remember from my parent's garden, that there's nothing to compare with eating veggies straight from the garden, the flavour is unsurpassed - and now I get to experience it again with my very own garden! :D

BeanDreams, BlossomDreams

The garden's coming along really well!

The tomato plants are thriving nicely, but I'm sure they, like everything else, would benefit from some sunshine - it's been unusually overcast here in Nova Scotia this summer, we've hardly had any sun at all. But the plants are still doing okay. As you can see in this photo, the blossoms are getting ready to open (and some have already)!

The bean plants are doing well too, with lots of blossoms already - and there's plenty more summer left for them to expand and grow even more!

This huge plant is the couple of potatoes I planted, from ones that had sprouted in the bag - they're doing amazingly well! I'm sure I've got tons of potatoes growing under there!

And this, this is my one precious lettuce. For some weird reason, I CANNOT get the lettuce to grow - this little guy is the only one out of 3 (THREE) separate plantings to come to fruition! And even then, he got completely eaten down by slugs and had to start all over again. Poor little guy, he's such a trooper!

And check out the Empress of India nasturtiums! Wow! Gorgeous dark foliage, and beautiful orange/red blossoms - a fantastic addition to this year's garden!

And here's the lovely "regular" nasturtiums, a lovely orange with its typical lighter green foliage - all nicely offset with those really pretty red petunias I got from the garden centre a month or so ago.

So, everything's been growing well! :D Yay!

BeanDreams: Beans are up!

The beans have arrived!!! I check the garden every day, and this morning, I finally saw the beans peeking up! Yay! So everything is looking good - the tomatoes that Dave's mom bought for me have all transplanted well (and I think some of my stunted home-grown ones might be still able to be salvaged), and my sage is big enough that I could use some on the roast chicken I made for my grandmother the other day. The weeds, though...man! There's a LOT of them. I weed a little every day, but there's always more - part of the joy of gardening. :) So the only thing that hasn't really taken off is the thing that should have done the best with these coolish temperatures: the lettuce! I'll have to reseed and see what happens - I'm not weeding in that area just in case I'm not recognizing the lettuce - when everything gets bigger I should be able to tell. :)

BeanDreams: Finished the fence!

Dave and I finished putting up the chicken wire fence - looks pretty good! As long as it keeps Casey out, and discourages rabbits, I'll be pleased! :)

BeanDreams - Victoria Day Weekend Garden Fun!

And now it's Victoria Day weekend, the tradtional start of gardening season here in Nova Scotia. Woo hoo! I finally finished deweeding the garden today, and added the lovely well-rotted chicken manure that Dave's mom brought me. So it's all set to plant! I've started hardening off my transplants, so in a week or so, they'll be ready to go in the ground. I'll probably wait a bit longer to plant my beans, for the soil to warm up a bit more. I still have to build a little fence (the materials were donated by my parents) :) to keep Casey out - I just can't get her to understand that I want her to stay off the garden. She's already half-squashed my chives. :) The fence may also keep bunnies from eating all my lettuce - but I hear they can be pretty determined, so we'll see. Frankly, I'd just be really excited to see the bunnies up close and personal. :D

BeanDreams: Lettuce!

Turned over enough of the garden to plant my Romaine lettuce today! Along with a couple of potatoes and onions that had sprouted in the veggie bin in the kitchen, just for fun. The potatoes might grow, and the onions will provide tasty greens for awhile. I'm SO glad to be able to get some gardening done, I really was going to explode if I didn't get to do some soon! And Dave's mom brought me some well-rotted chicken manure from her and her man-friend's chicken coup, so I'll mix that in soon. Right now there's a huge thunder and lightning storm, with lots of rain, which will be great for my little garden!

BeanDreams: I couldn't stand it anymore! I had to plant SOMETHING!!

With the good weather overload we had today, I spend a great amount of time outdoors, turning over and de-weeding the garden, and getting some plant pots filled with soil, ready for seeding. It's still a bit early here, Nova Scotians really traditionally don't do anything garden-related until Victoria Day weekend (the second last Monday in May, in honour of Queen Victoria). That's the weekend that everyone goes out and buys their transplants, etc. But everything seems to be a couple of weeks ahead of schedule (like unusually warm spring temperatures, & pretty wildflowers we don't usually see till June are already here), so after supper, I just couldn't resist the temptation to plant my nasturtiums and poppies. I'm so excited!:) Now it's jut a matter of watering and waiting!

BeanDreams - Outside Prep

It's been a highly unusual winter, so it should come as no surprise that even though we should still have snow on the ground here in Nova Scotia, it's actually warm enough outside to get started on prepping the garden. The current garden situation is like this: we are very fortunate to have a family member come every snow storm and plow out our driveway. God love him, he has saved us more trouble than I can say. However, the garden plot happens to be located at the end of the driveway, and he was not aware of this, as there were no markings, etc. showing where it was. So now the garden has, unfortunately, quite a bit of gravel in it that has to be sifted out.






Here's some pics showing the view from the front (it looks worse than it is) and from the back (it looks better than it is). :) The log you see in the second shot is going to be used as one side of a "holder" for the raised bed (Dave's mom didn't have anything like that there before, but I think it would be a good idea to have some borders put in place).



But just in case you ever need to sift some rocks from some dirt, here's how I'm doing it (and best of all, it's free!).

First off, you get hold of metal mesh of some kind (this one we just had hanging around the house from some long-forgotten other project). Bend it up into a sort of bowl shape.


Next, shovel on some dirt with rocks in it (not too much though). Shake it somewhat vigorously, to separate the dirt from the rocks (you can sift it over a bucket, or right over the garden). Wear gloves, that metal's sharp!


And now you've got some metal mesh with rocks in it - just give 'em a toss back in the driveway and you're all set!



Of course, it might cost you a couple bucks to get some mesh if you didn't have some already. You want it to be fine enough to catch most gravel, but not too fine or else the sifting will take forever.

It might take me a little while to finish it, but the garden plot isn't actually that big, it'll be easier to see once I figure out where the borders will be, etc. Time marches on, and before you know it, it'll be planting time!

BeanDreams - Transplant Day!

I've transplanted my little seedlings into their peat pots. They seem to be doing well now, although there were some mistakes (I forgot to soak the soil of the first pot of seedlings, and as careful as I was, the soil was so dry and lumpy that I ripped off some of the root system. The rest of the seedlings I soaked with water first, and the earth fell off the roots nicely).

I'm SO glad that this little image was on the packaging for the peat pots, or else I think I would have totally freaked out if I started to see roots growing out through the pots! I assume that it's actually normal peat pot procedure. :)

BeanDreams mini-update

Picked up some peat pots (very nifty little things, you put your transplants in them when they're very small, and when it's time to plant them in the garden, you put them in, pot and all - this means no transplant shock, and the peat dissolves into a nice healthy addition to your garden soil), my new watering can and a bag of dirt. Tomorrow I'll have to re-pot some of my tomato plants, they're way ahead of the others and need their own little pot to grow in. :)

BeanDreams

Added Epsom salts to the water for 3 of my four pots of tomatoes, as they seem to be yellowing, which might be a result of too little magnesium. The fourth pot has no yellowing, and its really accelerating in growth! It's got many true leaves already, and I hope that the others plants will catch up now that they have proper nutrients (I'm trying to be careful to strike a balance between over-fertilizing (which will cause the plants to cease growing) and too little (which will result in sickly plants)). It was funny, as I was detangling a couple of tomato seedlings from each other, I caught a whiff of them, and they smelled like tomato plants! Its a very distinct smell, my parents have grown tomatoes for years so I have lots of experience smelling them (not that I snort them or anything, it's just something you notice) :D, and already they smell like full-grown plants! Its great, it makes me feel like things are really coming along! :)

The sage, BTW, is doing magnificently well, no troublesome issues at all, and have true leaves set out already! Hooray!

BeanDreams and weird new underwater life!

BeanDreams - Sage Update

Hey! My sage sprouted! So, it wasn't so slow after all! :D

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Weird new underwater life!

You gotta read this story! They found a new lobster-like creature that is so unusual they had to create a new family and genus to accommodate it! It's blind, blonde and hairy! WEIRD!!

BeanDreams - Monday is fertilizer day

It's the tomatoes' first watering/fertilizing! Here's a distance shot of how everything's laid out. The background shows the tomatoes reaching for the light, and the foreground shows my sage, which was planted last Thursday and hasn't sprouted yet (I understand it's a very slow starter).

It's funny about the sage, I've been looking for over a year for sage leaves in the grocery store, I had run out and loved to use them on chicken, in meatloaf, etc. I prefer the leaves to the powdered form. But for some reason locally they had stopped carrying it. Then it struck me, *duh* grow your own! Then you can have all the leaves you want!

Here's a closeup of how the tomatoes are progressing. Their first leaves are getting very large, & I see the barest beginnings of their first "true leaves" peeking out. So, BeanDreams is coming along well! It'll be another month and a half or so before the ground outside will be thawed enough to start giving it a poke and seeing if it can be worked, so BeanDreams will be mainly focused on the indoor transplants for the next little while. I'll keep you all posted!

BeanDreams update

Well, so far, so good! The tomato seeds have all sprouted, and aside from some unexpected leggyness (they are like TOTALLY pressed up against the light, and they're STILL leggy) *sigh* everything is going well. I've set up a page to put photos, etc. in a calendar format - BeanDreams-at-a-glance, for those who are interested in the gardening process.

http://www.annmorash.com/blog/beandreams.html

Of course, stick to this blog for regular updates too, I just wanted to have an alternate place where people could see just the garden stuff. :)

I've got lots of great pictures of the little birds in the area, I'll be posting them shortly!

BeanDreams...oops!

*duh* I thought I had a bag of dirt still...apparently it's been a while since I looked, and I'm all out! :D Oops. So, I'll have to get out to Home Hardware and get some soil-less growing medium, or some soil, depending on what they have.

So, slight delay in the BeanDreams...I'll keep you posted!

BeanDreams

WOW!!! I ordered my stuff from Vesey's on Sunday, and today it arrived!! Already!!!! I was really pleased, especially since it was such a large order (I ordered for myself, my mother in law and my mother, so we could save on shipping). It was a heavy box, and a lot of fun to open up and sort through! :D

So, tomorrow I get to get my tomatoes planted and set up some place warm, bright and sunny! Yay! Stay tuned for more info as it comes!

BeanDreams, continued...

Due to budget constraints, and some last minute replacements (Vesey's was sold out of my preferred tomato - it's an exclusive they carry, very popular!), my garden plans now consist of the following:

- Pilgrim Tomato
- Gold Rush Bean, untreated
- Green Forest (Romaine) Lettuce

- Ladybird Poppy
- Empress of India Nasturtium

- Gardener's Dream Fish Fertilizer (Non-deodorized)

The order is in, and now it's just the waiting! This gives me a chance to get everything set up - where I'll keep my seedlings as they grow, awaiting transplant. Gotta have lotsa heat (to start), lotsa light, and be safe from the cats! The tomato has to be started right away, they need to be of a good size when it's time to transplant them outside. But come to think of it, the beans and lettuce are direct sow (as in, they work best if you don't transplant them - some plants don't react well to that). Hmmm...and the nasturtiums don't usually bloom till July, so that's plenty of time for them to grow outside, and poppies are another plant that don't react well to transplanting. So, I just have to start the tomatoes indoors! Cool! Our last frost date is May 6th, but it's traditional around these parts to start gardening in earnest on the long weekend (Victoria Day), around the 21st of May. We'll see how the weather is, I'll probably turn the garden ground over in early May.

So, stay tuned for more info on BeanDreams as it happens! :)

My cat is defective. I can hear him upstairs, rolling a potato around on the floor. Normal cats should not play with potatoes. What a weirdo. :)