Yep, I’m behind. As always. No new story here. It is November 15 and I am yet to plant my garlic. I have been here before. In fact, there was that year that I didn’t get garlic in at all.
As I write this, there is a total of six cloves in the ground. That’s not six full bulbs. No I mean, a mere six cloves. One, two, three, four, five, six. I put them in at lunchtime, which was about six minutes ago.
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The theme for this week is fruit. Fruit as a plant part as opposed to fruits such as strawberries and bananas, although you’ll notice some of those, too. It seems that fruit — some edible and some not — is forming in every corner of the garden. Flower diversity is still high, it’s just that many of the flowers are there in the service of forming fruit and are not there to be pretty in their own right.
The Scorched Earth. This is also the first week that marked significant loss and suffering as a result of the intense heat and drought we are experiencing. There are going to be some significant holes in the garden by the time the summer is out. I don’t think I am going to have extra ‘Hahms Gelbe Topftomate’ seeds as a result. I inexplicably gave all of my seedlings away but one and that one was in a pot that was cooked during this week’s heat emergency. Drat. The plant went from green and lush to yellow within the span of a single day. It is holding on and could recover if things stay as cooled off as they are now. It’s amazing what one bad day can bring. It’s a good lesson and reminder in how much we should respect our farmers who are at the mercy of whatever insanity the season brings. Amazingly, all of my other tomatoes are perfectly fine.
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This morning I took advantage of the mild weather to get some chores done in the garden. As I kneeled on the ground planting garlic I thought about my recent trip to Georgia. I arrived in Atlanta the day before the State was set to execute Troy Davis. I’d been following the case through online news outlets, but it wasn’t until the morning of my talk that I realized that the time was set to correspond with the moment I got up to speak at the botanical garden.
This threw me into a tailspin. Should I recognize the moment? In my personal life I would. Yes, people around the world die every minute of everyday, but State sanctioned murder is not the same. Here I was in the place where it was about to happen and at that very moment. Not saying anything felt like intentional avoidance or denial, yet at the same time I was a guest from another country — people had come out to hear me speak about growing food and I did not want to send them home feeling badly, or worse still, judged.
Over the last month or so there had been some online chatter about the role of garden writers. Several people said that garden writers should stick to plants and pretty things and that there is no place for politics. I have already stated my opinion on this topic and find it interesting that it was only a short time later that I was in a position in which it was tested. Where is the line between our personal and professional lives? For me it is very fuzzy and I would not have it any other way.
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It was an insanely busy working weekend. Come Monday morning and I was desperate to unwind from the weekend, not the other way around. I still managed to get some time in most of the gardens, with the exception of the street garden, which is taking care of itself these days. Thankfully we got some much needed rain.
First up, the community plot and a confession: I am not always efficient about sacrificing invasive plants to the compost pile. Intellectually, I know what has to go for the betterment of other crops and the overall design of the garden, but I find it hard to let some plants go. As a result, the plot was turning into Giant Borage Land — I spent a good hour scratching my arms to hell culling the plants that were no longer holding themselves up. I brought a bunch of the flowers and foliage home for eating.
Davin harvested some gooseberries from his bush in our community garden plot. I planted the bush in 2007 and it’s really starting to produce a good crop. That said, I’ve referred to it as his bush because while I like the idea of gooseberries, and I certainly enjoy photographing them, I don’t love eating them. Currants I am all over. Gooseberries… meh.
I dug up a baker’s dozen of garlic from my community garden plot. It’s a pretty good haul considering I don’t remember planting it. Chances are I planted at least half of it and the rest is accidental. There are certain gardening activities I have done so many times, I don’t always recall specific instances. Planting bulbs is the best example of this since you do it so many months before the plants make an appearance. It’s either that or the early onset Alzheimer’s, which believe me is no joke. This is one of the things that keeps me up at night. I can be incomprehensibly forgetful at times and I’d swear it’s only getting worse.
Blackberries are coming.
And over at the yardshare garden…. Because I’ve neglected to properly introduce it, the yardshare is quite literally a portion of a large backyard that a neighbour has generously offered up to a few locals to grow a collective garden in. They’ve been growing there for a few years now, and I was invited to join this spring. It came just in time since I was pining for a larger garden space but have been unable to get a plot at the High Park allotments. Waiting lists for community gardens and allotments are getting longer by the year, and yardshares are a new way to find garden space in densely populated urban centres like Toronto.
We have a lot of tomatoes growing there, which is another saving grace since I decided to give the soil a rest at the community garden, and had to pull back on the roof to make space for plants and projects needed for my next book. So between the extras I started at the greenhouse, and another friend who was a bit heavy-handed while sowing tomatoes seeds back in February, we are coming into quite a crop. This is ‘Black Krim’ developing on a vine. I can’t wait! ‘Black Krim’ is still in my top 10, if not my top 5, but I haven’t had a chance to grow it in a few years.
With more available growing space, I decided to grow some larger ornamental edibles. This is ‘Joseph’s Coat’ amaranth. I’ve grown it on the roof but never in the ground. It’s shape kind of reminds me of older poinsettia plants growing in the Caribbean. It develops more into that look as it matures.
Another plant I am growing for the first time this year is Spigarello, an heirloom broccoli rabe that produces edible leaves and few florets. This plant wasn’t in my plan for the year but when I saw the seedlings for sale at Urban Harvest this spring, I knew I had to make space for one, or as it turns out, four. I put one in at the yardshare, one into the community garden plot, and there are two plants in pots on the roof. I bought so many because of the marked variation in the leaves. The plant you see here has very thick foliage and looks more like a typical broccoli, but I have two others that are very thin-leaved and fern-like. I will post some pictures for comparison soon. The young leaves are tender enough to munch on raw. As you can see here the plant is doing very well at the yardshare — between this and the monster kale also growing there, we’re covered for cooking greens. And a friend just gave us a big bag full of Swiss chard. Thankfully I did not plant any of THAT this year.
p.s. The image at the top of the page is roasted elephant garlic (Allium ampeloprasum var. ampeloprasum).
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Let us turn our minds back four months (almost to the day by coincidence) to April of this year. Way back then, in a season that felt not so much unlike this one in many ways, what with the rain and the fact that I was wearing rain boots and long sleeved shirts, and it wasn’t winter but it wasn’t exactly hot either (I spit on you Summer 2009), I happened to mention that for various reasons this would be a year of garlic experimentation.
To recap:
This brings us to today, or rather, yesterday to be precise. Most of the garlic growing at my community garden plot has died back and it’s time to start harvesting. I pulled up the “accidental” garlic and low and behold this is the result:
Despite growing very closing together, all of the cloves seem to have produced bulbs. It definitely looks like ‘Music’. If memory serves, they are smaller, but not much smaller than bulbs of the same variety I pulled up in late summer 2008. Now, if I were to leave one of these bulbs in the ground and come back at this time next year, I’d predict that they would be even smaller. And so on, and so on. However, for a completely accidental crop, I’m calling it a happy success.
Hooray for screwing up and missing a bulb while harvesting! Let’s do this again.
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