As mentioned in my previous post, I was away for most of last summer and it was a difficult year over all for the Laneway Garden. But it wasn't without its successes and even the unsuccessful parts gave us an opportunity to learn and as elsewhere in our lives, pivot!
The year started out well, we had a mild March and as we were all in lockdown, it was a welcome distraction to get out in the garden early, especially since being outside allowed us to social distance but still enjoy each other's company. We were delighted to see how many things survived the winter and each new appearance was cause for celebration. The Gladiator bed was particularly inspiring since not only did we have mint,chives and lovage returning, the ramp tubors I planted the previous spring began to send up new leaves which thrilled us!
Our garlic had emerged on schedule and we were excited to have a number of new varieties including some I had purchased last minute the previous Oct. All of the Fedge inhabitants survived the winter as well and quickly began to fill out with leaves. First up was rhubarb and strawberries, even the ones we left in the eavestroughs overwinter. We also added some salad greens and radish seeds to the troughs. In the greens bed we decided to get a jump on things and covered it with plastic sheeting to warm the soil. This made it possible to get rapini, radish and peas in the ground even earlier than the previous year! In the root and perennial veggie bed we noticed that the tree roots were back in full force so we came up with a plan to replace some of the soil with small square buckets with drainage holes. Those were planted with beets, carrots, salsify and some mustard greens once things warmed up a bit more.
So we were feeling hopeful and well ahead of previous years and since we have wonderful light before the trees leaf out everything was growing great. Until Mother Nature threw us a curveball and sent weeks of unseasonably cold weather through most of April and a hard freeze in May just as our Juliette cherry blossoms emerged. The cool weather seedlings did survive but their growth was so stunted that they never grew past the seedling stage. The peas survived but waited until mid June to actually grow. We covered our cherry shrub with a bin for the coldest days and the blossoms did survive but of course there were no insects to help pollinate so the blossoms shriveled and fell off with no fruit left behind.
Thankfully the haskaps did not fare the same and we had a decent amount of berries from both the earlier ripening Cinderella variety and the later Borealis. The star of the fedge this year was the black raspberries- after being dragged around in various gardens and buckets it finally has a permanent home and showed its appreciation by producing a bumper crop!
We finally planted the tomato and pepper seedling out in early June. Although most of them were still quite small we hoped they'd soon catch up once in the ground. Sadly this was our worst tomato year ever. The seedlings refused to grow, whether due to last of rain, soil nutrients or competing with tree roots, we had no answers. Alexey watered by hand faithfully every day, hauling gallons of water from the house using our wagon. We purchased chicken manure and added it to the beds which seemed to help a little but it was too little too late. None of our tomatoes grew taller than the cages and produced almost no fruit.
To add to the misery, our garlic in the same bed which had been looking so healthy, was attacked by some kind of pest, possibly thrips. The greens were fine one day and eaten through the next. We harvested what we could but it was too early and the bulbs were tiny. I blame the last minute garlic I purchased for bringing the pest home and hope it didn't survive to affect this years garlic. Our squash, zucchini and watermelon suffered the same fate as the tomatoes. Most were direct seeded with a few seedlings grown indoors and all of them failed to thrive. I had been very excited to grow Honey Nut squash and bought two seed packets worth from different sources. I sent Colette home with a few seeds and she had 4 lush pants in containers on her deck that produced multiple squash. I started several of each package indoors and ended up with 1 seedling which failed to thrive as did all of the varieties I direct sowed.
We had better success with a few varieties of mustard and chicory and endive seeds that Janis discovered. They were excellent fall crops and quite a few of them overwintered under plastic!My favourite is the Italian dandelion which is form of chicory. I'm all about the bitter greens.
The other things that did fine last year were all of the perennials - lovage, sorrel, asparagus, and herbs among others We've been researching other perennial edibles and there's a surprising large number of edible plants that can be grown in our climate. This is something we plan to expand on for the coming year.
We made some headway in our infrastructual plans as well. The pollinator bed got some edging finally and more native plants added including foxglove, snakeroot and more asters. In late summer it was buzzing with pollinators, so lovely to see!
We also are working on a shade garden to utilize the dead space under the trees. By building a wattle fence we were able to fill and level the soil and add a few native shade loving varieties like ferns and trilliums. Bonus that the ferns are ostrich so hopefully will provide fiddleheads eventually.
