Crushed velvet

I grew Morning Glory (Ipomoea purpurea 'Star of Yelta') and Black-eyed Susan (Thunbergia alata 'Blushing Susie') from seed this year with the aim of covering the trellis at the side of the house. The Morning Glory has just started to bloom. In the morning the flowers unfold like a new butterfly's wings.


The 'star' is very obvious once the flower fully opens.


In the evening the blooms fade, but they look lovely with the sunlight behind them.

Bolts into the earth

The geothermal drilling guys were back at work today and managed to drill three out of the five holes that we need for our system. The holes are 150 feet deep and progress on the drilling was pretty rapid - the rock beneath us is mostly shaley, rather than thick slabs of limestone, so they were pleased with how quickly their carbide drill got through it. In the video you can see how steadily the drill is descending.



Lucky we're not the type of people to worry about having a perfect lawn, I think.

Here's the piping that goes into the hole:
And here's the end piece, which the piping is attached to (not in this picture, but it was later) and which is weighed down with a long metal rod to ensure that it reaches the bottom of the hole:


The pipes are filled with water for the moment, which will be replaced with a glycol/water mix later. They've nearly finished for today, which is just as well because the satellite picture is showing a beefy line of thunderstorms heading our way (we're on the sticky-out bit of land between Peterborough and Kingston).

The sky is already looking a bit peculiar - rather the texture of a brain, I thought.


Ah, here it comes. Over and out.

Geothermal progress

There have been guys in the house on and off for a couple of weeks now, putting in the ducting for the geothermal system. Today the drilling rig turned up and started on the first of the five deep wells that will be needed to sink the pipes down into the rock (we don't have enough depth of soil to lay the pipes horizontally). They needed 300 gallons of water to do the drilling, which they took from our well. It's lucky they weren't trying to do this last year, as there wouldn't have been 300 gallons in there then.
Unfortunately the weather decided to bring a slow-moving thunderstorm to the Bay of Quinte area this morning, so they didn't get very far before deciding to give up for the day (being understandably reluctant to stand next to a tall metal post in such conditions). The Weather Network's satellite picture shows it pretty clearly:
Inside the house, conversely, the work is continuing apace - there are now grilles like the one below in the floors of the downstairs as well as vents in the ceilings of the upper floor (those look a bit like smoke alarms). In the picture below you can see through to the window in the basement, but they're busily connecting all the grilles up to ducting and the geothermal unit in the basement, so that won't be the case for long.


Here's the view in the basement. Very shiny. The big silver box in the lower middle of the shot is the geothermal unit.

Great Spangled Fritillary

Isn't that a great name for a butterfly? I went up to the hayfield this afternoon to see whether we had any Monarch caterpillars on the milkweed plants up there. In late August last year they were being chewed to stalks by them. I saw this fritillary instead:


We have seen fewer Monarch butterflies than we had this time last year - but that might be down to the dampish nature of the last six weeks. When I found the patch of milkweeds they looked completely unscathed:


But on my way back home a Monarch appeared and posed for me in the clump of trees next to the pond, as if to reassure me that they haven't deserted the farm completely.

Post-holiday harvest

It seems to be customary among vegetable-gardening bloggers to post images of the heaps of vegetables they've harvested after a break from their gardens. I feel compelled to join in with my contribution - here's today's swag:



The sharp-eyed reader may notice that there are some tomatoes in amongst the bounty. There may not be many more, unfortunately, as the majority of the tomato plants have not recovered from their earlier dowsing and are now dead or dying. The weather has not been kind: more rain fell while we were away and the lower vegetable garden is still under water. I had to throw all my Florence fennel plants onto the compost heap as they had rotted and died (shame they weren't Venetian fennel, eh?). The peppers are clinging on to life, but only just, and even the rhubarb is looking a bit sad. The contrast with last summer's drought is so extreme that I feel it is deliberate. Maybe next year we'll be shown the happy medium.

No, I don't think so either.

There were the usual overgrown gherkins and zucchini (is it OK if I just call them zucchini now? Calling them courgettes/zucchini is cumbersome.) and lots of beans. Before we went away I'd been picking the yellow wax ones, but now we've got the (green) Blue Lake bush beans and the first runner beans (Wisley Magic), too. All the beans went into the freezer this afternoon, except for a few of the Blue Lake ones which went (with cucumber and tomatoes) into a Salade Niçoise for supper.

The wet weather may have been lethal for some vegetables, but it has been great for the cucurbit family. I never used to like cucumbers much, but the Telegraph Improved variety that I've been harvesting taste wonderful - much sweeter and more flavourful than anything I've ever bought from a store. I always thought that the 'home-grown tastes so much better than shop-bought' hype was a bit over-stated, but it really is true with cucumbers.

The winter squash shown here are Small Wonder spaghetti squash (on the left) and two Winter Luxury pie pumpkins. I'm really proud of those (my first-ever winter squash) and am particularly pleased with them because they don't need processing immediately, unlike nearly everything else. The plants are enormous and look like something from outer space, the way they're spreading over the upper vegetable garden. Getting through them to pick the runner beans is a precision exercise.

Olympic wanderings

We've been in Montreal for the last week. I was at a conference and the family came along for the ride. There has been much museum-visiting, walking of city streets and dodging of hefty Montreal showers. I'm not a huge fan of cities, but if I had to live in one I think Montreal might get my vote. Today we went out to the site of the 1976 Olympics (I had actually forgotten that the current Olympic Games started today). The Biodôme is a conversion of the 1976 Olympic velodrome into an indoor zoo with four ecosystems. It was very busy (probably due to the damp weather today) and overrun with kids from various camps who really made the experience quite grim. On a quiet day I think it would be a good excursion, but today was not that day.

To the north of the Olympic park are the city's Botanical Gardens, which were wonderful. I didn't see as much of them as I would have liked (having the children along limits the distance I can walk), but the vegetable gardens were great. We learnt in the Musée d'archéologie et d'histoire that 70% of Montreal's land was given over to vegetable gardening in 1720, so it was good to see this tradition continued in the Botanical Gardens. We also saw the First Nations garden, which comprises native plants in three distinct zones. The leaves in the picture belong to a sugar maple in the hardwood forest section.

Sweet'n'Sour

The Striata d'Italia courgettes/zucchini have been doing brilliantly, necessitating the testing of new dishes as ways of using them up. Over Friday and Saturday I made Rick Stein's piccalilli recipe (except replacing runner beans with the yellow wax beans that are also being prolific at the moment). I gave them a final boil in my home canner to be on the safe side, although the recipe didn't call for it. Reading North American books on home-preserving has made me a bit paranoid about botulism!


Despite dubious noises from Mike about the idea of cakes made from courgettes, I gave a Zucchini Muffin recipe a try this morning (except that I replaced the canola oil with melted butter - yes, I'm incapable of just following a recipe). By the time I came to take a photo of the finished muffins there were only these four left, so looks like they were popular (I told the children only that they were 'cinnamon muffins').


I don't know how the piccalilli tastes yet, though it looks OK. I did the bottling part before I had anything to eat yesterday morning - I don't recommend this, as the smell of hot vinegar on an empty stomach is a bit overpowering.

Hornworm again (warning: bad language)

Just the one, but I was amazed and affronted to find it tucking into one of my still-droopy and pathetic-looking waterlogged tomato plants. As I had the camera handy, I thought I'd make a video of me picking it off the plant, to show just how disgusting the procedure is. Unfortunately it doesn't really work as a demonstration of how the caterpillar reacts to being removed, as my response to its spirited defence ruined the carefully-scripted piece.



It squirted green, er, stuff all over my camera too. Everyone's a critic...

Great Blue Heron

We see a heron up at the pond quite often, but it always flies off as we approach and I've never managed to get a satisfactory picture of it. Last night (as if to underline how wet the vegetable garden still is) it visited the barnyard. We were sitting outside, so it didn't stay around for long when it realised that it had company, but it was just long enough for me to run off and get the camera for this snap.

Please don't take a picture

It's been a bad day for the poor tomatoes and peppers. The soil is still waterlogged after Saturday's ridiculous quantity of rain and these plants are suffering from a serious deficiency of oxygen to their roots. I noticed one plant looking a bit droopy yesterday, but today they all look like they're going to die. Not even the tomato hornworms would fancy them now.


I've pulled the water-conserving mulch (which seemed like such a good idea back in June) away from the stems to try and get more air to the roots and to assist in the drying-out process, but apart from that I don't think there's much I can do. The forecast for the rest of the rest of the week is for hot sunny days, so the soil might have a chance of drying out. Has anyone had tomato plants recover from this kind of situation, or should I start looking up green tomato recipes now?

Destructive, determined and disgusting

This is the larval form of the Five Spotted Hawkmoth (Manduca quinquemaculata), known as the Tomato Hornworm due to its habit of eating tomato leaves and fruit.

They're quite hard to spot as their camouflage is so excellent. Once spotted they are equally hard to remove. They have a quite revolting texture - if you can imagine trying to pick up a wriggly green jelly baby which is clinging grimly on to the tomato plant you might come close to the way it feels to try and pick off one of these caterpillars. They grow pretty big, too - here's the caterpillar with my hand for comparison. This one is pretty much fully grown. There were two feasting on the tomato plants this morning.


Sorry about those pictures. Here's a completely unrelated one of the cattails (Typha latifolia) up at the pond to take the taste away.

Nor any drop to drink.

Here are the figures for rainfall over the last twelve months from our weather station. This July has been unusual in its wetness, particularly compared to June. Yesterday we recorded two inches (50mm) of rain: more than we had in the whole of the previous month. There were two huge thunderstorms and the power was out for four hours. As we need electricity to pump it, we had no water inside the house, despite every cistern and tank being full (something that would have seemed incredible this time last year).

The vegetable garden looked like it did back in early May:

And the poor little pak choi seedlings I transplanted on Friday were completely submerged:

But the frogs seemed to be enjoying the weather; they were all over the place.

Gardener's tan

Does anyone else have the distinctive gardener's tan that I'm sporting this summer? I'm pretty good at putting sunscreen on my limbs and my face (Setting a Good Example for the Children), but never think to put it on my lower back, which is under clothing. However, as I'm bending over the vegetable garden to weed it, my tops usually ride up a bit, leaving my lower back exposed to the full force of the sun. I've not noticed it burn at all, but the gradual build-up of this exposure over the summer has left me with a very brown stripe over just that part of my back (I will spare you a photograph of the same - this is not THAT sort of blog). So I think I need to start wearing men's t-shirts (or maybe a kaftan*) - or begin a campaign for women's tops to be of a sensible, gardener-friendly length.


*Mike did accuse me of looking like Margot Leadbetter today (I was wafting around harvesting the vegetables in a smart dress for once), so maybe that's the style I should cultivate.

Red and green should never be seen

Well I think that's only true if you're sailing at night and there's a danger of being rammed by a ship that's coming straight at you. In the garden it's a good colour combination.



The first (and only) fruit from the 'Meteor' sour cherry tree that we planted in the spring. Tart, but tasty.



This is scarlet kale: looking more green than scarlet right now, but due to get redder as it gets colder.



The pathetic little Ping Tung eggplants that I featured back in June have bucked up a bit and are looking quite statuesque now, though no sign of any flowers yet.



The Hungarian hot wax chillies haven't turned red yet, but I love the way they're standing to attention.



Runner bean flowers:

Blue Lettuce

The delicate looks of this flower are misleading, as it can thrive in inhospitable spots: the first one I noticed was growing in a crack in a city street. My extensive internet research this afternoon has suggested the name Blue Lettuce (Lactuca tatarica). There's a subspecies called Lactuca tatarica pulchella (which sounds even more like an exotic dancer than the first one), but I'm not sure what the differences between the two are.

It was only when I came to upload the photo that I realised how beautiful the disc florets in the centre of the flower head are: like mini ionic columns.

Raindrops on ...

... well I don't have any roses yet (and that would be far too clichéed), so will have to celebrate the rain we've had today with some other plants.

French marigold:

Asparagus ferns:

Broccoli leaf:

Corn silks (this is a bi-coloured variety - I didn't realise that the silks would be bi-coloured too!):


I thought the broccoli leaf was my favourite, but the corn silks look so completely wanton (especially after having read the posts by the Matron and Amy earlier today), that I think I've changed my mind.

This week's mistakes

I discovered on Wednesday that the Riesentraube tomatoes I'd been thinking were a bush-type plant, were not, and that I should have been taking out the side shoots all this time. So I spent a good hour this afternoon thinning them back to their main stems - discovering a chilli plant and an eggplant that had been taken over by them in the meantime. The tomato plants look a lot better now - they were getting terribly congested before and I was worried that they'd be susceptible to blight.

The two Parisian Pickling plants still seemed to be only sporting immature cucumbers. Then I noticed that they had somehow produced fruit underneath the layer of mulch. So instead of the mini gherkins/cornichons I was expecting I had three monster cucumbers (the zucchini (Striata d'Italia) on the left are five inches long):

I'll be watching them much more closely from now on. Anyone got a good recipe for using up overgrown gherkins?

Meteorological meanings

I'm confused about the long-term weather forecast from the Weather Network. I understand that we might be seeing storms on Friday and on Saturday. But what struck me as odd was the distinction between a thunderstorm and a thunder-shower (and the necessity for a hyphen in one but not the other). It seems that the former is used for a more severe storm, although the US National Weather Service explains (slightly disdainfully, I think) that technically there is no difference and that:

In fact, in order to avoid confusion, we in the National Weather Service do not use the term "thundershower". If a shower is strong enough to produce lightning, even just one single bolt, it's called a thunderstorm.

The difference between a risk and a chance of seeing one or the other is more puzzling. You might think that a 60% probability of precipitation (P.O.P.) compared to 40% might explain the difference in terminology, but apparently not, as today's forecast talks about chance at both percentages:


So I think it must come down to a difference in perceived levels of danger - thunderstorms being something inherently risky, while thundershowers are less so? Maybe I'm spending far too much time worrying about this...

Red wiggly livestock

Warning: this entry features tales of mass-murder by neglect and ravenous rodents and scenes of decomposition.


Posts by fellow bloggers Gayla and Rach have inspired me to get around to re-stocking the wormery that I bought in England four or five years ago. This gadget has had a rather chequered history. My first batch of worms tried their hardest to escape and had to be collected regularly from the floor of the garage and returned to their new home. They must have had forebodings of the dreadful calamity that befell them a few months later, when the tap on the base of the wormery got blocked and the worms, which had all fallen through to the lower section, drowned in their own nutritious 'worm tea'.

I kept the wormery outside for the second batch and it worked better - I covered the bottom of the lowest layer with some carpet to stop the worms falling through into the base and covered the tap to stop it from getting blocked again. All went well and the worms did their thing, producing lovely vermicompost and worm tea for the garden. So, with my vermicultural credentials established, I ordered more worms to go into my garden compost bin. That worked well too, until one day I noticed that all the worms had gone. Then I started to find rat-droppings near the compost bin and realised that we had a new resident. I'll never forget the piercing squeal that the rat gave when we evicted it (Mike thought it was me screaming at the sight of the rat. I still haven't quite forgiven him for thinking that.). Chicken wire underneath the compost bin stopped the rat coming back.

I couldn't bring the surviving worms with me when we moved to Canada, as customs officials are a bit fussy about soil crossing international boundaries. I had to thoroughly disinfect the wormery (and all my garden tools) so that there was no trace of English earth on anything. I stank of Jeyes Fluid for a week after that! Since we got to Canada the wormery has been sitting empty in the garage, so it was about time that I did something about it.


The Can-O-Worms wormery comes with three layers for the worms to live in. You start off using just two: in the bottom layer goes bedding material for the worms. This time I've put a lining of fly-screen netting over the bottom of this layer to stop the worms falling into the base, which is where the moisture collects. On top of the netting is partially-composted kitchen waste from the rotating composter that's out in the garden (which we've finally got the hang of - it needs a lot more water than a regular compost bin).



Then the half-pound of worms went in with the shredded paper and soil that they had arrived in. I only ordered them two days before: I still think it's a bit strange that you can send live worms through the post.


The next layer went on top, ready to be filled with green kitchen waste. As the worms finish up the food in the lower layer, they'll move up to feast on the gently rotting waste in this layer. As that gets filled, you can add the final layer and eventually use the compost in the bottom layer, which the worms will have left and which will be fully decomposed and wonderful for the garden.