My little Honeycrisp apple tree outdid itself this year, producing so many apples its branches were drooping from the weight. The early heat and warm fall meant that all of my apples ripened early, by a couple of weeks or more! Normally, I would pick the apples and put them in the root cellar to eat or deal with later, but this year it hasn’t been an option, since it has been unseasonably warm – my root cellar is not cold at all! So I had to find other ways to deal with all those apples. We picked three very (!) heaping grocery baskets of nice apples, plus a bunch of pecked, hail-damaged, and ..read more

We have a number of apple trees here are our acreage, and several of them are producing apples each year. Unfortunately, we don’t know what all of the varieties are, and even if we did, the hot weather is messing with our apples’ usual ripening times. Given that different apple varieties can ripen anywhere from late July right into November (in climates that allow it), it can be a real challenge to figure out when to harvest your tree. While apples will ripen a bit once they are picked, it is much better to wait until they are ripe or just about ripe, in order to get the best flavor. So how do ..read more

I really love sweet potatoes. Before we ever moved to the country, I had a lot of favorite recipes that called for sweet potatoes, and ate them a lot. They were cheap, filling, and delicious. Even when my oldest was a baby, we still ate sweet potatoes a lot, and he loved them, too. It stood to reason that we should try to grow our own. The problem is, sweet potatoes really don’t like our climate. The season is too short, and too cool. You can grow them here, if you are determined, but it means starting slips super-early, then planting them out under warming plastic row covers, or in a greenhou ..read more

“I’ll only have a few chips” “I’ll get school supplies early this year” “I’ll thin those apples later this week” “I’ll totally remember what variety of apple this is” So I have this apple tree. We call it the FrankenApple now, because after seven years of nothing at all, followed by three years of it flowering but not setting fruit, I decided it wasn’t a good apple for our location, and used it to experiment with grafting techniques. I grafted over somewhere between a third and half of the branches, all with different things. Of course, this year, the original tree decided to make apples. The ..read more

I was so excited when I first discovered that there are hardy pear trees for zone 3! Pears are one of my favorite fruits, so I immediately went out and ordered a couple. Unfortunately, pears tend to take a long time to bear, and, on top of that, tend to grow in an overly vertical, bushy form that discourages early fruiting, as well. In addition, I’ve been told that pear pollen is not favored by various pollenators, so even if you have a couple of mature trees, you may or may not get much fruit, depending on how much the bees were enticed to come to the tree. Image by analogicus from Pixabay We ..read more

We grow a lot of squash. Our first couple of years here, we discovered that squash seems to like our particular climate, and is happy to grow here without a lot of fuss, as long as we pick a type that will mature in our very short season. Even so, we often find ourselves picking our squash before it is fully ripe, or sometimes even completely green, in order to avoid a hard frost. A lot of types of squash will store at cool room temperatures for a very long time, which makes it doubly attractive, as it doesn’t need to take up space in the root cellar or freezer. However, in order for it to las ..read more

This weekend, I started experimenting with canning with glass lids on my Gem jars. In Canada, especially Western Canada, we have a unique size of canning jar, with a 78mm mouth. They were produced up until the late 1990’s or early 2000’s, and were sold under a variety of brand names, including Gem, Jewel, and Crown. Originally, these jars used a glass lid, with a rubber gasket underneath to allow a seal to form; however, when the metal lids became available, most home canners switched over to those. This blog has an interesting article on the history of 78mm mouth jars and lids in Canada. I h ..read more

It’s that time of year again, where we are drowning under the weight of the vegetables we planted in a ridiculous burst of optimism in the spring. Tomatoes, onions, garlic, and zucchini all need dealing with, and dealing with *right now*. Produce is not patient. The big winner this year has been the wax beans. This is mostly because our cold, wet, spring led to germination issues, and over and over, we just shrugged and planted beans in those rows, thinking that at least beans can produce in the 60-75 day window we had left before frost. We did not keep track of how many rows this happened to ..read more

Asparagus is a big favorite in my family. In the beginning, it was just me who really loved it, but the more I tried to keep it all for myself, the more the kids wanted a share. Go figure. Asparagus is very hardy, and easy to grow here in zone 2/3. We have a substantial amount of the stuff, spread over three different patches. We’re currently harvesting from maybe 35 – 40 plants, and this spring, we were getting around 1.5 to 2 pounds, every second or third day. It still isn’t enough! An asparagus row in my garden. We did plant 10 more roots last year, and another 10 this year, so hopefully ..read more

This spring, I have been working hard to put in a large-ish bee and butterfly garden, to give the pollenators a little oasis in our big sea of surrounding commercial crop fields, which are heavily sprayed. I’m sure I’m not the only one doing this – there has been a lot of media attention on pollenators, recently. However, at the same time, I am seeing a ton of posts on social media of people looking for ways to get rid of caterpillars on their plants and trees. I think people are forgetting something important: caterpillars are baby butterflies! My pollenator garden is going to have caterpilla ..read more