After Cyclone Arthur – Weeding the Garden

We just finished up 3 days of heavy rain, which was the first since the post-tropical cyclone Arthur 10 days ago. The garden really needed watering and both the plants and weeds ka-boomed!

So yesterday because it was cooler and the weeds pulled easily, I went out in the light rain, wind, sun, cloud, rain and weeded like crazy and finally mulched everything to keep the moisture in and the weeds down. I have to share these before and after shots.

I have 4 kinds of climbing beans: Blue Lake Runners, Scarlet Runners, Purple climbers, and Cranberry Beans which will produce a dry bean for winter.  I’ll blanche and freeze the others.

All my climbing beans are from seeds I saved from last year’s heritage beans. In the case of the Blue Lake Runners, I’ve been saving seeds from every planting for the last 6 years and they were given to me by my friend Pamela who had done the same for the previous 10 years. They are well adapted to this soil and our weather! We will put up some stronger tee-pee supports.

It looks like vegetables growing in a lawn 😉 and you can find snow peas, a few Chinese cabbage, lettuce, cucumber, tomato plants, broccoli and garlic.

After the weeding, I had enough space to plant a final row of bush beans. They’ll be so welcome as they’ll produce at the very end of the season.

I had some manure piles delivered a while ago so I planted my Winter Luxury Pumpkin seeds from Hope Seeds directly in the pile. Oh, the striped cucumber beetles have been prolific and persistent this year, but hopefully, the plants are now able to develop in spite of the bugs.  They are so wily…they can fly, drop off the leaf and burrow into the soil. And they are fast movers!

This is more garden with zucchini, more bush beans, soy beans and some kale.

These are onions and leeks

I love common orange day lilies and how they bend and stretch. And those purple hosta flowers are sweet too.

 

And while I’ve gardened, Larry’s worked hard in the studio making signs. I love this one that he designed and hand-lettered for our favourite little bistro in Bear River, Magoo’s Bistro.

They are right on the river…you can watch for the friendly river monster too.

 

 

 

Berries, Signs, Painting, Swimming, & Supermoon

Today I picked my first raspberries out of our garden. It’s taken 3 years for the canes to mature. I can’t believe it that we’re eating berries from our own plantings! And the single red currant bush (in memory of my grandmother) is also producing like mad.

I was back in the garden today starting a new painting of orange lilies.

Larry is busy making lots of signs for a local project.

We’ve been having hot, hot days here….not really like Nova Scotia, more like Ontario. So at 5 pm I dragged Larry out of the studio to go to our local swimming hole. We had it all to ourselves and it was heavenly. I love this spot for the fragrance, the constantly moving water and the feeling of being in a sacred earth space.

We didn’t stay too long because Larry is on a deadline with to-be-revealed sign work.

We came home and I picked our first zucchini and some broccoli and made us a very tasty quiche.

It’s so nice to be post-tropical cylone. (Our power, internet and water was ‘out’ for 4 days). But more on that in the next post.

And here is my photo of yesterday’s supermoon. 😉