Fall is also a perfect time to plant garlic here in Toronto. My friend scored a community garden plot (they are serious business here in Toronto with long waiting lists) and having not gardened since she was a child in her parents yard asked for some tips and tricks. I said I'd be happy to try my best, share my seeds and tools provided I could get a bit of space in a corner as my yard is full up. After reading this great article in the Globe and Mail we decided to plant some garlic now for harvest next fall and I set about finding us a variety of heirloom hard-necked varieties.
I chose about 6 varieties from the farmers market in Peterborough over Canadian Thanksgiving but stupidly threw them all in the same brown bag and promptly wasn't able to remember which type was which. Whoops! I suppose it will be a nice guessing game next year when we harvest.
Here are the gorgeous Garrison Creek Community Gardens, a great use of hydro corridors to create a community space. I can't wait to help out there and get to know the other gardeners.
Here is Katharine's little plot, you'll see it's close in style to the ones I built for our yard.
Splitting up our garlic bulbs into cloves for planting. I can guess the middle one is the Red Russian variety!
In other news, remember when I bought a tiny 3-inch tall $2.49 artichoke plant and tucked it into my perennial herb garden in the front yard? This is it a few weeks ago looking like something from Little Shop of Horrors. I kept waiting for something to happen with it but besides looking like something from a prehistoric world nothing ever did. I was going to hack it down but Halloween was coming and well Hubs said I should leave it in as "it's pretty scary looking". Nice.
Also notice the fantastically huge pineapple sage in full red flower to the right of the beast. It also smells wonderful, exactly like a pineapple.
Anyway I left the artichoke in the yard another month and was just about to chop it down and add it to the compost heap when I noticed this:
And then this little baby artichoke hiding in the leaves:
In the end here is the big harvest from my man eating monster plant, 3 artichokes which I'll be steaming tomorrow:
I will certainly appreciate the jars of artichoke hearts I use to make hot artichoke and cheese dip with a whole lot more now! Wow what a lot of work for so little pay off. But it was still an interesting experiment and only cost me $2.49 and the disapproving glances of my traditional neighbours who thought I'd lost my mind with my somewhat unconventional landscape design.
Now I've got a few months to research and plan for my gardens next year and pore over seed catalogues and websites.
What are you doing to prepare your gardens for fall? Planting anything now for next year? What's the weirdest thing you've ever grown? Let me know in the comments area below!
