Over at the You Grow Girl forums, some of the members have begun to talk about their 2010 grow lists. I’ve never officially made a grow list. I always have a few plants that I consider to be absolute must-haves in the garden, but I like to keep things loose and just buy and plant whatever seems appealing at the time. Of course, this gets me into trouble on occasion.

Outdoor seeds sown, May 2007.

This year, I’ve decided to start and maintain a grow list. I will be amending this post as I go, so I’ll pin it to the sidebar for the season!

So far:

The Tribe of Tomatoes

Black Plum
Green Zebr
Kellogg’s Breakfast
Red Grape

The Pack of Peppers

Quadrato D’Asti Giallo
Mini Chocolate Bell

Glorious Greens

Lettuce, Red Salad Bowl (courtesy of McKenzie Seeds)

The Squash Family

Black Beauty Zucchini
Butternut Squash
Squash Moonbeam (a pattypan squash, courtesy of McKenzie Seeds)

Others

Black Beauty Eggplant

Do you have a grow list yet?

Another gardening-related contest arrived in my inbox today!

5 people will win tomato seeds by leaving a “nice” comment on one of the posts on Cynthia Sandberg’s beautiful blog, Grow Better Veggies. Five people will be chosen at random to with a three-pack of rare tomato seeds from TomatoFest.com.

As Cynthia says in her latest e-mail newsletter, TomatoFest.com is

a fabulous on-line resource for over 600 different types of heirloom tomato seeds.

Sounds like a great contest to enter!

Oh, dear, it’s been over a MONTH since I posted here! I can’t believe it. My only excuse is that I’ve been busy gestating. Our baby is now officially three days overdue, actually.

There hasn’t been much action out in the garden since early autumn. My husband, Graham, helped me out a lot this year in getting things cleaned up out back. We actually managed to clip back all of the perennials and he helped me pull the finished plants from the vegetable garden after we harvested the tomatoes.

This year we didn’t keep all of our harvest to ourselves, preferring to keep things simple and give a lot of it away to friends and family members. (Although we did, of course, manage to roast several big baskets of tomatoes and froze four large ziplock bags of roasted tomato sauce.) Our next-door-neighbour traded us some nice little potatoes that he grew for some of our tomatoes, too.

Baskets of homegrown tomatoes, peppers and eggplant for our friends and family.

That little veggie trade had me thinking, actually, that since there are three of us now in a row on my street who grow vegetables, we should try to co-ordinate a little bit, and share our harvest.  We could collectively grow more food than we could individually.  I’ll have to give this some thought over the winter!

But now here it is, late November, and it’s been an unseasonably mild autumn this year, for which I’m grateful. Now there is the potential for snow flurries this coming week, the same week our new family member is expected to arrive (we have an induction scheduled for Monday).

I hope that although we’ll be busy with the new baby, I’ll have more time in general to devote to writing online over the coming year. We’ll be sure to post when the baby comes!

Graham and I went to the Orono Fall Fair yesterday afternoon with our friends, Andy and Kelly and their daughter Sophie.  It was a beautiful early autumn afternoon, and since it was Friday afternoon, there weren’t too many people on the fairgrounds, yet.  There were a lot of school groups there, though, with little kids learning about how to milk cows and all about tractors and growing crops.

Pumpkins at the entrance to the agricultural exhibits.  The big white squash on the right was the winner!

One of my favourite things to do at any autumn fair is look at the agricultural displays, including the vegetables that are grown locally and entered for prizes.  There seems to be a real fascination with vegetables that are either freakishly large or just…freakish.

Look at the size of these beets!  They were each about a foot long.

This tomato won a prize for Most Oddly Shaped Vegetable.  It looks a little like a purple calabash tomato to me, a variety that does grow in very strange, “lumpy” ways. (See my purple calabash harvest from a few years ago.)

And finally, here is everyone’s very favourite large vegetable, the giant zucchinis.

To give you some perspective, you can see the giant beets in the background.

I’ve always wanted to enter some home grown tomatoes into the fall fair, but have never committed to it.  Maybe next year!

I bought several varieties of peppers for the garden this year, and of course when it came time to harvest them, I didn’t remember which ones I planted where. This isn’t usually a problem because although peppers are similar, at maturity they are different enough to be able to identify. However, I think I bought mild AND hot banana peppers which was just silly of me. You know what this means, don’t you? Yes, we had to taste the pepper in order to know which one was ready for harvesting first. I was the guinea pig. And yes, these are hot!

Graham and I threw one on the barbeque to roast it and mellow out its flavours, chopped it up and ate it on some nachos we had for dinner that night.

On Saturday my dad and my step-mom came over to help me weed the vegetable garden.  The weeds were getting out of control and the job was getting to be way too much of me and my belly to get done ourselves.  I’ve finally learned one of the rules of pregnancy: It’s okay to ask for help!  This applies in the garden as much as anywhere else.  It took the three of us about two hours to get it done.

I wanted to show you the vegetable garden while it’s relatively weed-free.  It won’t stay like this for long, I’m sure.  (Click on photo to view large-sized image.)

As I sit in my living room this early morning drinking my coffee, I can see the vegetable patch out the back windows of our house.  One of the most prominent features of the garden right now are the brightly coloured blooms on the zucchini plants.

I always grow zucchini in my garden as I find it one of the most rewarding vegetable plants to grow.  In a very wet growing season, some plants can be lost to rotting, but generally the plants require little fussing and produce more fruit than I know what to do with.  I’ve made zucchini pickles zucchini soup, stuffed zucchini, zucchini bread and my favourite zucchini recipe so far, zucchini fritters.

Staying on top of the harvest is the trick to keeping my husband (and myself) from getting totally sick of zucchini.  I try to pick the fruit when it is still small and sweet and at its tastiest.  I throw chunks of it into salads, curries, pastas and soups.

What throws a wrench into this plan is that every year around this time, I take an annual trip to meet my blogging friends at the BlogHer conference, which is taking place in Chicago again this year.  This is what I found when I returned from that trip two summers ago:

Lots of big, impressive-looking fruit with very little flavour and not of much use other than as a door stop (or perhaps entering a contest in the county fair).

So this morning, after my coffee is done I’ll be harvesting the zucchini that’s ready to be picked. I’ve had to add “harvest zucchini” to my list of pre-conference tasks so that when I return on Sunday, I won’t be plagued with monster zucchini that I’ll have to pawn off on neighbours and friends!

A Senior Engineer/Scientist/Tech Officer for Ontario Power Generation recently sent out a call for participants in what I think is a very cool program:

Do You Grow Fruits, Vegetables or Use Well Water?

If you live within 10 km of the Darlington or Pickering sites and grow fruits, vegetables or use well water as a drinking source, then our Environment Programs Department is looking for your support.

As part of the Radiological Environmental Monitoring Program (REMP), samples of air, rain water, drinking water, soil, fruits, vegetables and fish are taken in the communities around the Pickering and Darlington stations. These samples and their analyses are used to assess the dose impact to the public resulting from operations of our stations (which is quite low and well below regulatory limits).

Since the inception of this program, we have relied on the support of local residents to provide the above mentioned samples. Over the years, there have been new subdivisions built in previously uninhabited areas and therefore additional sample locations are desired to better represent these areas. Also, due to the mobility of local community members we are always looking for new participants to replace those who have moved out of the areas.

To that end, we are seeking participants who live within 10 km of Darlington or Pickering Station and can provide us with:

• Annual samples of fruits and/or vegetables grown from their own garden, and/or
• Monthly samples of well water that are used as a drinking source—sample bottle will be provided.

All samples will be collected by an OPG Health Physics Laboratory technologist during working hours with advanced arrangement of pick-up times.

The results are published every April 30 in an annual REMP report to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC). All names, addresses and contact information are confidential and will not be published. Participants will receive a letter every June summarizing the public dose impact in your area and a small token of appreciation.

I contacted the name provided, indicating an interest in participating, since I live within the desired radius at about 6 km from the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station. I haven’t really thought too much about the impact living near a nuclear generating station has on the food that is grown and eaten in this region, but participating in this program is likely to bring about some awareness on that front. I’ll be sure to share my findings here!

The first time I really got down into the dirt to do some planting this season, I realized that gardening while pregnant was going to be a bit of a challenge. I have all of these nerves and muscles and ligaments that I’m not used to having to consider, and I found that after a few minutes of bending down to plant vegetables, I had some aches and pains I wasn’t anticipating. I realized I was going to have to slow down my usual pace and do a little bit at a time.

I finally managed to get the rest of the vegetable garden potted up recently, much to my relief. In the first planting session I put in tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, basil, cabbage and broccoli. In the second session, I put in the rest of the tomatoes, more basil and a ton of marigolds. (I’m hoping the marigolds will continue to help keep the rabbits at bay, since I found last year that the rabbits tended to avoid the plants surrounded by marigolds.) I did all of this quite slowly, being careful not to squat anymore than was absolutely necessary and by taking occasional mini-breaks. Now that everything is actually planted I feel very relieved. Maintaining the plants for the rest of the season should be fine, especially once the plants get larger. Just like me.

Tiny vegetable plants interplated with marigolds.

Last summer a local resident of my town responded to an ad I placed on Freecycle looking for a rhubarb cutting.  This year the plant is doing spectacularly, and although I didn’t harvest any rhubarb this season, the dramatic plant is a welcome addition to my vegetable garden.

Something unexpected has happened, however: the plant has bloomed!

My instinct is to cut the bloom off, but I thought I’d consult some of my trusted gardening books to see what should be done.

How to Grow Vegetables & Fruits by the Organic Method (1961, edited by J.I. Rodale and Staff, page 500): “Flower stalks should be removed as soon as they develop.  They are unlikely to develop seeds, but if they do, they will take more of the plant’s vigor than the dubious offspring are worth.”   Dubious offspring!

Grow Vegetables (2008, Alan Buckingham, page 270): “Cut off any stems that go to flower and any leaves that turn yellow and die.”

The Cook’s Garden (2003, edited by Liz Primeau, page 30): “The flower stalks are striking additions to vegetable plots or perennial beds.  But for tender rhubarb, remove flower stalks as they appear.”

That settles it.  Now where are my garden clippers?

(Do you consider rhubarb to be a fruit or a vegetable?)