Greens

After a busy (but successful!) final exams season, followed by one delightful week in Mallorca, I am BACK! I am on summer vacation and plan on enjoying a huge amount of time in my greenhouse, my garden and at the creativity table.

We have been so busy on the greenhouse project that all the so-called flowerbeds, as well as both the terraces are totally overgrown with weeds. So the cleanup of these is definitely high up on my to-do list. Thankfully, things are going very well now in the greenhouse. My very nice neighboor took really good care of it in our absence (and fed my cats!). I was delighted to see how much everything had grown in just one week! (the plants, not the cats)

Greenhouse is really getting green!

Some 8 varieties of tomatoes, 2 varieties of cucumbers, Apache chilies, jalapenoes, bell peppers, sweet peppers, a few different sorts of herbs (including a lot of basil, green and red) and a few more things are all doing really great! I've eaten my first mini-cucumbers, some red juicy strawberries and beautiful lettuce already.

Inuksuk found its home!

Pick-and-eat lettuce and strawberry leveled pot. 

I don't have many flowers, but can definitely see that I will be looking more into that next year.

Meanwhile, the vegetable garden is also picking up in pace. I've tried sweet corn again this year and it seems to be doing much better than last year. I started it in paper pots and carefully tranplanted them a few weeks ago, trying not to disturb the roots. 

The red kuri squash and pumpkin plants took a while to "feel home" on the veggie patch, but also seem to be growing now. 

The romaine lettuce is beautiful, as are the onions!  Today, I finally transplanted a zuchini plant, some interesting kinds of beans I received from my good friend and some peas, which I all had started a few weeks ago and just never had time to transplant. 

Veggie garden. Corn, beans, squashes, onions, lettuce, peas. 

If you guys remember well, last year, my husband and I built a compost bin. I have been using some of the resulting compost to enrich the soil on the patch, which came from the hole we dug for the greehouse, so wasn't the very best soil for a garden. This seems to especially have made a difference with the corn. It went from a pale green to a nice healthy green, and more than doubled in size since I added compost around the plants. :D

Following advice from the experienced, I started covering the soil with cut grass to help retain some humidity. The only problem is that our lawn mower is specially made to cut grass in tiny tiny pieces so that we don't have to pick it up, and it feeds the lawn at the same time. (it is called Bio-cut). So it makes it difficult to find enough grass to cover the whole garden patch. I have to go along the bicycle trail behind our lot! 

That's it for now.... happy summer everyone!