As noted in a previous post, my parents stayed with us shortly after the twins were born in order to help us manage the first few weeks.
In addition to helping with the babies, they also helped out around the house including planting our garden for us.
For the fifth year in a row, we’ve had an excellent growing season, in fact, this year was the best I can remember with 5 weeks worth of heat warnings in Calgary, unheard of as far as I can remember.
Between the work my parents did planting the garden, the maintenance that we did throughout the year, and the excellent conditions we made out pretty well!
We have enjoyed lots of tomatoes, radishes, snow peas, beans, arugula, kale, lettuce and herbs throughout the summer.
We had an incredible abundance of basil and arugula so I have been steadily making and freezing pesto. At this point I’m sure we have enough to last us through the winter.
Calgary is also subject to pretty frequent serious hailstorms so I have been working on jerry-rigging a frame over which we can drape polyurethane in the event of hail, and it can also double as a greenhouse to buy us a few more weeks towards the end of the growing season, we also ended up using it to help support different climbing plants.
Click in images to enlarge.
The greenhouse worked really well and definitely bought us a couple of weeks to help vine ripen our tomatoes, and today it protected what’s left of our garden from a serious winter blizzard with 60-90km/hour winds and 15cm of snow. There is a low of -5C tonight so hopefully it will keep everything warm enough until it starts warming up again tomorrow.
Sean stopped by this afternoon to help me repair some places where the wind had pulled the seams apart, with a little luck it ought to hold for the rest of the season presuming this crazy wind dies down and I can refine the poly next year.
Not pictured is all the crab apple liqueur, jelly, juice, sauce and butter we made, the pesto, blanched beans, rhubarb, tomato basil pasta sauce, and tomato basil soup in the freezer. Even with all that we have harvested we still have lots of kale, arugula, and beans that should continue to produce presuming the garden survives the -5C tonight.
That’s my baby!
Snow?!
My goodness.
I’m impressed with all the garden produced for you guys.
Yeah, snow in early October or even in September is not unusual in Calgary. Being so close to the mountains and also so far from moderating bodies of water makes for some very unstable weather. The up shot of course is that it can be 20 degrees above zero in January and unsurprisingly it’s expected to get back into the 20s (celsius) by the end of the week.