Catching Up

This year’s garlic

Well, summer is almost over (someone had to say it) and here I am finally with the first post of the season.  A serious case of writer’s block was to blame combined with the kind of procrastination stress you suffer when you haven’t called up a friend in a long time (the longer you wait, the more awkward and difficult it gets).  But whatever, time to catch up!

The Garden

As gardeners everywhere will acknowledge, each year yields success, failure and surprise, which is part of what makes the process so enjoyable. On the success front, the garlic harvest has been wonderful. Planting the cloves last year where beans (nitrogen fixers) grew the previous season seems to have paid off. The bulbs are big, meaty and flavourful. Some of the healthiest specimens will be set aside to plant this fall for next year’s crop.

The big failure of the year was a preliminary attempt to grow hops, an aromatic vine-growing flower that is used as a flavouring and bittering agent in beer.  A friend who is a chemist by day and a home brewer by night suggested that hops would be good to grow.  We could use them to make a quality home brew of our own and there was the potential to sell them to local home brew stores and perhaps even micro-breweries.  Intrigued, I ordered a hop rhizome on-line back in May for an extortionate price and planted it along a fence line. Checking on it the next day,  I found that something had dug it up and enjoyed chewing it into a sodden mass. Not surprisingly, attempts at replanting it were not successful. However, we’ll be back for more next year though this time with some planting protection.

The surprise of the year was a sole black currant bush on the property which I’d given up for dead but offered up a scant cup of precious currants. There should be just enough of them to make one (very) small jar of jam – a treat to open one winter Sunday morning.

precious few…

Bird Life

For the first time this year I stopped putting feed out for wild birds during the late spring and summer months. Knowing no one was going to go hungry with the abundance of natural food, I was curious to see how the absence of the feeder would affect the local population. And while one summer’s observation can’t be called statistically valid, it does seem there’s been a significant increase in the diversity of species around the farm this year. In the previous summer, we were inundated with a large flock of pretty, though aggressive goldfinches that appeared to intimidate more passive songbird species from appearing. However, birds I hadn’t seen here before, including Eastern Phoebes and Song Sparrows are now a common sight (or sound).

Another new avian visitor this year is the Catbird. Though not uncommon in this area, they have a reputation for being elusive and shy of people. However, the individual in this video has been practically haunting me over the past week when I sit outdoors or work in the garden!