Garden Update: August 2024

What a difference one month makes!

In the last monthly update, I wrote about how this year is not a good year for the garden. May and June were very cool and rainy and by the time I was writing up my July update, things looked like they do in early June.

Pretty much right after that post, the weather turned and became much more like a normal summer. We get occasional rain—more than we get some summers—but the days are now hot and sunny, which the garden loves.

Everything looks so lush. This is one of my favourite times of year for looking at our house. We’re not the only ones on the block that garden, and we’re not the only ones with front yard gardens, but when it comes to the scale of what we do, we stand out.

When someone comes to our house in the summer for the first time, I tell them the house number but then say “look for the garden, you’ll understand when you see it.”

Growth progress

A lot of things have come up quite rapidly. Tomatoes and peppers are still quite small and struggling, though the tide is slowly turning and things are looking vibrant, but the rest of the garden…

Potatoes and garlic are the tallest we’ve ever seen them. Strawberries are more prolific than we’ve ever had. Carrots and beets are looking lush too.

One of the surprises this year has been chamomile. We’ve tried growing it from seed a couple times and gotten nowhere, but this year I found a few seedlings at the greenhouse and scooped them up.

We only have three plants but they are heavy with flowers, and it’s the flowers that are harvested for chamomile tea.

To harvest chamomile, you pluck off the flowers, with as little stem as possible, and you set it to air dry for 10-14 days. I’ve got a good system going where I harvest every weekend and I have two baking dishes filled with flowers to help keep straight which flowers were picked when.

To make tea from dried flowers, it’s about 1 teaspoon of flowers per cup of tea.

Homegrown chamomile tea is much stronger than the store-bought stuff in tea bags. It’s likely because it’s so fresh and hasn’t been on a shelf for weeks or months.

The first time I had a mug of home-grown chamomile tea, I was soon stumbling around like I was drunk because the sedative effect was so strong. I’ve had a couple cups since then, and while I haven’t had as strong a reaction, I can definitely feel it trying to conk me out.

The mushroom beds

We planted mushroom beds under our cedar trees a little while back. Mushrooms need cooler temps, in the 15-20 degrees Celsius range, to fruit (to grow mushrooms), so it’s been too hot for that. I suspect right now it’s doing a lot of the underground work and growth.

However, despite the slightly-too-warm weather, it looks like the white oysters have attempted fruiting.

Unfortunately, the day after I took this pic, the temperature jumped to over 30 degrees Celsius and stayed there for a few days. These mushrooms stopped growing and dried out. However, once the cooler temperatures come in the fall, we should start seeing action here again.

In the meantime, I need to start looking at how to preserve mushrooms; in the fall we should be harvesting mushrooms faster than we can eat them.

A lot of mushrooms can be dried, such as the king oysters we have growing in the back patch, and that’ll likely be what I do for the others we’re growing. However, from what I’ve read, regular oyster mushrooms like these generally don’t do well with drying. The dehydrate just fine, but when you try to rehydrate them, they either don’t rehydrate well and remain tough or they take in too much water and then they become mushy. (A friend gave us a bag of dehydrated oyster mushrooms last night, so I’ll be able to test how well they do or don’t rehydrate!)

Oyster mushrooms can be frozen, though, but they have to be blanched first. (According to one site I’m reading, if you don’t blanch them first, frozen oyster mushrooms that are then thawed become a mushy mess.)

The fruit tree harvest

We don’t have fruit trees on our property, but we know some folks that do, so every year we head over there a few times throughout the summer to raid their cherry tree and their apple trees.

From one cherry tree, we managed a harvest of over 40 pounds of cherries, which is about double what we harvested last year. It’s not necessarily that there were more cherries this year, but rather we were more thorough in taking as much as we could, stripping the tree of everything except the impossible-to-reach cherries.

These cherries will be juiced and turned into wine, though I did try canning some cherries so we have them for eating later or to use as garnish in mixed drinks.

We went back a few weeks later to do the first of what will likely be two apple picking visits. From one tree, we managed to get 142 pounds of apples. They have a second tree that might need another month or so before the apples are ready, so we will be heading back to get more. However, I’ve been told the second tree (it’s in the back and I didn’t see it) did not produce as many apples as in the past. So, we may not quite reach last year’s haul of 285 pounds of apples, but we’re going to try!

Looking ahead, we need to figure out what to do about fruit trees.

Their cherry tree is slowly dying. They keep telling us each year that the next year might be the last year, yet the tree keeps going, but one day it will actually be that final year.

There’s a similar fear with the apple trees, that one of them might die. And, oddly, this year one of their three apple trees didn’t produce a single apple.

While we will continue to harvest cherries and apples as long as their trees bear fruit, we are starting to explore options for expanding our harvest. We’ll start inquiring if friends or friends-of-friends have fruit trees in their yards. There’s a neighbour across the street that has a cherry tree and an apple tree, so we’re looking for the right opportunity to strike up that conversation with them. And we’re also exploring the idea of planting trees in our neighbour’s yard; they’ve asked us to do more garden stuff in their back yard, and some fruit trees would be an easy way to do things without adding a ton of garden maintenance time to our routines.

The annual rhubarb harvest

We don’t have rhubarb, but both our neighbours do, and neither wants any of it, so we take it all for ourselves. This year we harvested 115 pounds / 52 kilos of rhubarb, which is our largest harvest ever!

We’ve chopped, washed, bagged, and frozen the entire harvest. My mom’s basement freezer is stuffed to the brim with rhubarb.

We usually don’t do a whole lot with rhubarb. I make a big batch of rhubarb wine and maybe a batch or two or rhubarb ginger gin, but that really only uses a fraction of our harvest. My step-dad will often make rhubarb crumble and rhubarb pie, but even he has his limits to how much he can use.

This year, since we likely won’t get as many apples as we normally do—which means we won’t get as much apple juice as we normally do—we’re thinking of juicing some of this rhubarb and working that into our weekly rotation of juices. This would use up some of the rhubarb and would help make the apple juice last all year since we’re drinking less of it.

Foraging ahead

I happened to find a mention somewhere that wild hazelnut trees grow in Manitoba, and this piqued my curiosity. Around the same time I learned that wild cranberry bushes also grow in Manitoba. After doing some research and asking around, I may have found a couple spots where these plants exist, so in August (for hazelnuts) and September (for cranberries), I’ll be heading out to see if I can find them and forage them. (In Manitoba, it is legal to forage nuts and berries from provincially-owned land.)

I’m really hoping the foraging adventure is successful because I’m already researching how to preserve these things and what to make with them. I’m mostly eyeing hazelnut butter and cranberry juice.

I’d like to learn more about foraging and how to do it in or surrounding the city. I remember from visiting the family cottage when I was younger that there were wild blueberry and strawberry plants to pick food from, but that was out in the woods immediately surrounding the cottage. Doing something like that here in the city or in a place I have to drive to feels monumentally impossible—the first task is finding these things when they’re not part of my immediate vicinity. It sort of feels like looking for a needle in a haystack. I could pick some random place to forage stuff, but it’s a total shot in the dark if anything is there.

But, like with anything else I do food related, I’ll do some research, I’ll ask around, and I’ll figure out how to get it done.