Archive for The Organic Corner
My Organic Garden – The Garlic Decision
Posted by: | CommentsHello fellow green living gardeners. I am writing today as I find myself at an impasse. The summer is coming to an end and as 
the harvest approaches my quandary is this; should I plant garlic in the fall? We all know that garlic is delicious and an integral component to any Italian dish, but did you know of its health benefits? Garlic is an antioxidant like the blueberry which tends to garner all the attention.
As you may (or may not) have read, antioxidants are believed to help ward off heart disease, cancer and even prevent premature aging. Apparently garlic can do all that plus help lower your bad cholesterol, is good for diabetics and can help those with a blood pressure problem. That’s a whole lot of goodness packed into that clove.
When adding garlic into your diet you should know a few simple facts:
- The smaller garlic is chopped or diced the more pungent it is
- Store unpeeled garlic in an open container in a cool, dry place away from other foods
- Whole unpeeled cloves should never be refrigerated or frozen because moisture is a natural enemy to the garlic clove. There is a loophole to this fridge rule though. To save time you can store peeled cloves in a sealed airtight container in the fridge, this helps when cooking in a hurry during the week (say for Meatless Monday). However, garlic should not be store in the fridge for long periods of time. I would say no longer than a week to ten days.
My Organic Garden: The Life and Times of an Arbour
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Greetings fellow organic garden enthusiasts. Well this has been both the best of times and the worst of times for my arbour project - actually for the season on the whole but that’s for a future blog. For those that have not been reading my organic garden reports, here’s a Reader’s Digest recap. The garden center where I purchased my plants mislabeled the seedlings so I accidentally bought Sicilian zucchini planets instead of the everyday garden variety zucchini. Not a good mistake if you’ve never grown them before as I’ve learned (and written about). I am sure that the Sicilian zucchini’s are incredible fare but you need some sort of degree to grow them as they started to take over my garden in almost a maniacal fashion. After trying the suggestions from my research (that included a call to Martha Stewart’s radio show) I decided to build an arbour for it to grow in/on. That pretty much catches us up to where we are now and, I am sad to report, that my arbour has been in trouble.
The bamboo I decided to reuse from the teepee experiment slowly fell off the arbour one by one. I was trying my best to make this a zero waste project but I’ve had to store them for use in a future project. I had to use more scrap wood along the top but luckily the very handy person who helped me construct the arbour had plenty on hand. I have no idea why or how scrap wood becomes so plentiful but I’ve learned it certainly comes in handy - waste not, want not. Unfortunately (the worse of times), I lost a few of the tentacles of the Sicilian zucchini plant. They had created a basket like weave through the slats of my fence and sadly the trauma of being moved killed them. Luckily (the best of times), the move did not kill all of the plants as I first thought as some tentacles thrived and continued to grow up the sides of the arbour.
My Organic Garden – It was the Best of Times, It was the Worst of Times
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Swiss Chard
Greetings fellow organic gardening enthusiasts! I’m taking a break from the arbor/Sicilian zucchini drama this week to discuss other garden news like the uprising of the brussel sprouts. I didn’t think it was possible but they have somehow gotten even larger and leafier since I last mentioned it. The brussel sprouts have completely taken over the poor unsuspecting basil and I fear that we will need to mediate the upcoming turf wars. On the bright side, I have red tomatoes! Yes, slowly (and I do mean at a snail’s pace), the tomatoes are turning red. With the amount of sun and extremely hot weather we have had this summer in Southern Ontario it confounds me. I have no idea why they are taking so long - over the course of a week they barely turn from dark green to a slightly lighter dark green. At this rate my tomatoes should be red in or around November.
Also, I have planted the largest cherry tomatoes on record. I thought I was growing little cherry tomatoes as I do every year, but the labeling skills at the nursery left much to be desired and my cherry tomatoes are the size of plums. That’s right, plums. They are very sweet though and are the perfect topping to a pizza with a little tomato sauce, fresh basil (from the garden) and a smattering of mozzarella cheese so I’m not complaining. There is nothing like picking something out of your garden and then eating it right away. Unfortunately that’s not happening as much as I would like this season but I digress.
I was given an heirloom tomato plant, and was excited to see what became of it as the seeds were apparently very old. This plant has grown to an impressive four and half feet tall and it is leafy, full and I prune it lovingly. Do you know that all this tender love and care has yielded me? One tomato! That right, one tomato is all it has grown. Now that I have picked that one tomato, it has grown two flowers so there is still hope. Maybe it’ll decide to give me another tomato before frost comes.
My Organic Garden - An Arbor is Born
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Hello my fellow organic gardeners, I have some interesting news to share. As you might remember from my last garden post, my Sicilian zucchini plant was bent on total garden domination. Luckily the good people at Martha Stewart’s Sirius radio show gave me some advice on how to deal with this situation. Their advice was to build teepee like structures out of bamboo to give the plant a structure to grow into. I went to the local garden center and found a package of thin bamboo stakes that were only four feet tall. I decided to be industrious (and frugal) and purchase this large (and cheap) package of bamboo and just attach them together with some duct tape to get the proper height. What a mistake that was. I built three teepees for my two zucchini plants that quickly started to bow under the weight of the plants. This was when I started doing some more research on my teepee options.
I knew buying the proper bamboo would be quite costly so I figured I needed to think about it more before I delved headfirst and (potentially) wasted more money. While watching a gardening show, I noticed that they had an arbour with various squash and zucchini growing on it. That was when the idea hit me - I would build an arbour. I quickly realized I had some scrap wood from a previous project and could enlist the help of a very handy person. The design was simple - it was really just four posts with a box-like structure on the top that had polls going across for the plants to grow over. I set out to tackle my project and in an afternoon, my little arbour was born and taking care of business. I am happy to report that the tentacles of the octopus-like zucchini plant have been tamed and now stick to their own area in the arbour. The nature of the structure allows for more polls to be attached to the open sides (if need be) and I fear if we get more rain I will be attaching more poles.