A Sad, Frosty End to my Garden

August and September have been terribly cold, cloudy and wet so my garden went from thriving and flourishing in July to stalled in August. And then last night, there was a killer frost overnight and when I woke up, my garden looked like this:

My pumpkin and cucumbers that I planted had grown like weeds and were almost taking over the backyard but after one night of frost, they just wilted and died. And because there wasn't enough sunlight and heat after July to ripen anything, they had dozens of flowers on them but no fruit. OK, one fruit, a little tiny 2 inch pumpkin:

And my beautiful Roma tomatoes also never had the chance to ripen:

But we did get a lovely harvest of carrots, peas and beets so it wasn't a total write off. And, there's always next year!

And, on another topic, I got all 400 of my I Spy squares back in the mail (I ended up joining 2 swaps this summer) and I've been busy sorting and arranging them into all sorts of fun quilts. Here's a small peek at what I've been up to:

Garden Update

Well, some of my plants are doing really great and others...not so much. I think I must have transplanted some of my seedlings into my hothouse too soon because 3 of them died almost immediately. I guess they were just too small to take the change in temperature.

The two bigger transplants (I'm still not sure if they're pumpkin or cucumber - I really should have labelled them!) are thriving and I planted some new seeds beside the dead seedlings just for the heck of it so we'll see if I can get anything from them before the frost hits in September.

But my peas are doing really awesome, I'm so excited! Every single year that I plant a garden, I always always plant peas. They are my very favourite vegetable to eat fresh from the garden, probably because of childhood memories I have of picking bowlfuls of peas from my great aunt's garden on Seal Island, Nova Scotia, and sitting on her porch, shelling peas and feeding the shells to the sheep and eating the delicious fresh peas. BUT, I have never had any success with them. This is frustrating because they seem like they'd be such an easy plant to grow but they usually grow a foot or two and then wither and die and maybe produce a few anemic peapods. But this year, they just shot up and they're showing no sign of slowing down.

They seem to grow a few inches a day! I'm not going to get bowlfuls of peas but maybe if I figure out how to grow them successfully, I'll plant more next year...

My Garden

I added another square foot garden to my backyard this week so now I'm up to 1 4x8 garden and 2 4x4's. This is the most ambitious garden I've ever attempted but so far I'm loving it! I've never had a ton of success growing things but slowly but surely, I'm learning and improving and I love the anticipation as I watch my little plants grow.

Those are peas at the front - I made the trellis out of some pvc pipes and a blue broom handle I found in the shed - at first they were just pushed down in the dirt but then Hudson decided to pull them out and play with them so now they're screwed to the sides of the garden. I planted the peas, along with the carrots (just little still), the beets and the spinach in mid-April but they haven't grown very fast: I blame our ridiculously cold and wet spring. Hopefully June will improve soon.

The next box is strawberries - I've never grown strawberries before but these ones have flowers on them now so they're doing well! I ordered the strawberries as small plants from www.veseys.com. They shipped them here from P.E.I. - amazing that they can survive such a long trip through the mail!

And the last box is my most ambitious: I'm attempting to grow Roma tomatoes, cucumbers and mini pumpkins. I've tried pumpkins before and never gotten any fruit and I've never tried cucumbers. But considering that my backyard is west facing with some giant pine trees, I really don't have enough sun to grow these - so that's why I pulled out my father-in-law's handy dandy Garden Hothouse. I've never tried it before and it's really designed for a slightly larger space but I figured that if I didn't maximize what little sunlight my backyard gets, there was no way I would succeed with these plants.

First, you cover the soil with black plastic and then you fill a black plastic tube up with water and lay it around the plants.

Then, you put in a metal frame and cover the whole thing with clear plastic:

Wish me luck!