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The beauty that is found in the garden is so abundant and brings us so much joy. The fact that the blooms and leaves of these amazing plants not only please the eye, but also provide nourishment and healing for our bodies and minds is awe-inspiring!

We had a blast hemming and hawing over which herbs and flowers to add to our freshly made lemonade. Borage, Lemon Balm + Mint, and Raspberries graced our juice and added beauty and a new depth of flavour to each jar.

An unexpected joy was watching the borage flowers turn from deep bluish purple to a vibrant fuscia. There must be some sort of chemical reaction with the lemon going on there…

We’ll definitely be offering up some of these flavors at our next lemonade stand! What are your favourites?

Lemon balm causes the heart and mind to become merry. – Serapio Tweet This

This post is part of a seasonal community sharing series, Grow Together Tuesday. You’ll find posts from myself, and award winning gardener Monika Thiessen, of Prairie Girl Pottery.  I love seeing what others are doing in their gardens, and since most of us aren’t neighbors, let’s peek over each other’s virtual fences, be inspired, and learn from one another!  Post a link to your weekly garden notes, updates, photos, and more in the comments – any time this week!

Saving Summer
Monika Thiessen

I’m sure you’ll agree that nothing can quite compare to the amazingness of biting into a vine ripened, still warm from the summer sun garden tomato. If only we could enjoy that taste and warmth all year, especially in this cold climate. Well, we can!

This is the perfect time to squirrel away some of that fresh garden goodness to enjoy throughout the year. Mike and I are still enjoying a very small amount of sun-dried tomatoes (in oil) and various herbs for tea and spices from 2013.

Bergamot is the perfect oregano substitute!

If you’re new to this whole gardening thing, start simply. Harvest and dry some chamomile flowers for tea or collect and dry some herbs to season your winter soups.

Freshly harvested chamomile and calendula blossoms ready for the drying screens.

Our wonderful and much used dehydrator speeding up the drying process.

If you’re lucky enough to have berries, freezing is a super simple option.

Nothing beats freshly picked and quickly frozen berries for fall and winter treats.

Grapes are perfect for juice or jelly. Little jars of garden goodness also make gorgeous little gifts.

If you’ve got a tonne of hardy greens, chop and freeze these for quick additions to soups, sauces, frittata’s, omelettes, etc. Kale is great to sow again later in the growing season as it can deal well with frost. One of the best late (and very early) season greens for our climate.

If you don’t have your own garden but would love to save some of that summer goodness, sign up with Fruit Share!  They are are wonderful organization and it’s just such a great 3-way split (you get 1/3, homeowner gets 1/3 and 1/3 is donated)! Mmm, and nothing gets that chill out of your bones quite like an apple rhubarb crisp on a cold winter day. 🙂

Canning, freezing, dehydrating, fermenting…the options are endless!

I’d LOVE to hear some of your tips, tricks and of course, favourite recipes! How do you eat ‘fresh from the garden’ throughout the year.

Monika Thiessen is a potter, permaculture designer, urban homesteader and all around prairie plant girl. She’s happiest with the sun on her back and her hands in the soil.  To check out Monika’s pottery, visit Prairie Girl Pottery. 

This post is part of a seasonal community sharing series, Grow Together Tuesday. You’ll find posts from myself, and award winning gardener Monika Thiessen, of Prairie Girl Pottery.  I love seeing what others are doing in their gardens, and since most of us aren’t neighbors, let’s peek over each other’s virtual fences, be inspired, and learn from one another!  Post a link to your weekly garden notes, updates, photos, and more in the comments – any time this week!

This Week in the Garden…
Kris Antonius

We’ve been away from our garden for weeks at a time, and it’s always a joy to come home to see how it’s grown and changed, and what new treasure it has produced for us, for the bees, and for the critters who share our community. Photos taken with the iPhone, excuse the poor quality!

The borage has grown crazy huge with dozen of blooms. We used some to make borage lemonade the other day and it was delicious (post to come). The bees can’t get enough of the borage blossoms -there are a half dozen bees on each plant almost all the time!

We’ve harvested borage leaves, nettle leaves, and chickweed, and dehydrated them. These days each work period in the garden will end in something being dried or fermented!

The borage is planted in a  sort of companion group or guild, with tomatoes, basil, and chard, with cucumbers growing up some trellis here and there.

As the season progresses, I’ve been looking for blank palettes to sow more seeds into – I find little spaces here and there, and add some beets or fast growing greens like tat soi or lettuce.

Two planters on either side of our front door hold some lovely herbs – here are Asian Cilantro (i think that’s what it was called), and Basil.

The raspberries are still going strong, and the strawberries are prepping for round two of fruiting.

A lovely xeriscape plant gifted by a friend. Does anyone know what it is? Is it a type of straw flower?

The purple striations in Dragon Tongue pole beans are really beautiful. These beans are best eaten while small, as they do get stringy and tough as they get larger.

Some kale and golden beets keeping each other company.

The potatoes and peas are getting along nicely.

A three sisters garden with corn supporting the beans, and some squash growing below. The squash might not make it, as they weren’t quite growing enough by the time the other plants shaded them out. There are also beets planted around the border of this grouping. You can see the bean tipi in the background – a late addition, but the kids are still loving it even as they watch just the beginnings of the beans curling their way up the poles and twine.

As we’re gone for stretches here and there, a lot of what we do when we are there is weeding! We have a couple huge weed piles around the yard…

This post is part of a seasonal community sharing series, Grow Together Tuesday. You’ll find posts from myself, and award winning gardener Monika Thiessen, of Prairie Girl Pottery.  I love seeing what others are doing in their gardens, and since most of us aren’t neighbors, let’s peek over each other’s virtual fences, be inspired, and learn from one another!  Post a link to your weekly garden notes, updates, photos, and more in the comments – any time this week!

Sit Back and Enjoy!
Monika Thiessen

It’s that time of summer when the planting is pretty much done (though we’re still seeding a few greens now and then) and the blooms and food production starts ramping up. If you’re like me, you ignore the fact that weeds are also still growing (they’ll get shaded out by everything else anyway, right?) and just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labour.

So, this week I’ve just decided to post some pics of our yarden. We’ve been making notes of when certain things ripen, what’s doing well or not so well and keeping track of what we’d like to change for next year. Oh and we spend a lot of time slowly meandering through the yarden, smelling the blooms, taste-testing the greens and berries and eagerly anticipating a massive harvest of tomatoes and peppers.

To save our cherries we put up some holographic scare tape. Seems to be working so far.

Indigo rose tomatoes. These little beauties are absolutely delicious!

Black raspberries. Well, the ripe black ones were already eaten. Overheated, droopy lettuce (below).

Tiny little cuc.

Last years carrot going to seed.

Although I got the seeds in really late, the beans are coming along.

Highbush cranberry starting to turn red.

Saskatoons (above).  Spinach bolting in the heat of summer (below).

Squash trellis (made with last years tall sunflower stalks) and baby squash (below)

Liatris just about ready to open

Giant hyssop (above) Leadplant (below)

Shade bed (above) and Sea holly peeking through a mass of raspberries (below)

Cucumber trellis

Freshly chopped (and dropped elsewhere) comfrey.

Chamomile (above). Calendula (below)

Bees absolutely LOVE borage!

Mass of backyard blooms.

I hope you all have a lovely week and are able to get out into that warm sunshine and enjoy your gardens.

Monika Thiessen is a potter, permaculture designer, urban homesteader and all around prairie plant girl. She’s happiest with the sun on her back and her hands in the soil.  To check out Monika’s pottery, visit Prairie Girl Pottery. 

This post is part of a seasonal community sharing series, Grow Together Tuesday. You’ll find posts from myself, and award winning gardener Monika Thiessen, of Prairie Girl Pottery.  I love seeing what others are doing in their gardens, and since most of us aren’t neighbors, let’s peek over each other’s virtual fences, be inspired, and learn from one another!  Post a link to your weekly garden notes, updates, photos, and more in the comments – any time this week!

Summer Pruning
Monika Thiessen

After what started out as beautifully hot growing weather following intense rains it suddenly cooled off again. Thankfully the possibility of hail didn’t touch us, hopefully your gardens were spared too. The hot weather really did get things growing though, some a little too much! Our young cherry trees were starting to block our sidewalk along the side of our house and I thought it was only going . I don’t have much pruning experience and I didn’t want to damage the trees, so a little research was in order.

Pruning back the cherry tree

Apparently you can trim back up to 25% of new growth from stone fruits (it differs somewhat depending on what you’re working on) during the summer without harming the tree. This pruning encourages the tree to put more energy into its fruit and slow down its (branch) growth. Perfect!

So I trimmed back our Romance Series Cherries, one of our Nanking Cherries and our little plum tree.

We can now walk down our sidewalk without brushing past all those young, whippy, cherry branches.

Perhaps it’s just that time of year, but I think all that trimming helped with ripening 🙂

Mike did a great job of trimming the tomato plants last year, so I left that job to the pro. You want to make sure you cut out the middle growth to encourage good fruit growth.

Before pruning

As far as grapes go, this is a good time of year to expose the bunches to some sunlight. This is as simple as tearing a couple of leaves around the bunches off. You want to leave a little coverage so they don’t get baked by the sun, but you want to remove enough to allow for good air circulation. If you see the little extra tendrils with grapes, cut those off too so the main bunch will get bigger and sweeter. Mike and I spent a season on a little family owned vineyard in New Zealand years ago…I don’t think there’s a better place to learn.

And just because I’m excited for fresh, garden zucchini and bergamot blooms, I had to throw in a couple of extra photos.

Monika Thiessen is a potter, permaculture designer, urban homesteader and all around prairie plant girl. She’s happiest with the sun on her back and her hands in the soil.  To check out Monika’s pottery, visit Prairie Girl Pottery. 

Last week for night snack we made some impromptu Strawberry Haskap Chia Jam, after a modest harvest from the gardens. After rinsing the berries, de-hulling, and measuring the other ingredients, we simply blended everything together in the blender for a few seconds. So simple. Incredibly delicious.

Recipe

/ 1 cup berries

/ 1 tablespoon honey

/ 1 tablespoon chia (more if you like thicker jam)

/ 1 teaspoon vanilla

/ 1 taste-tester

We would have added lemon juice, but we were out, and the results were still enjoyed by the whole crew. It’s nice to be able to just whip up a small batch of jam with these harvests every now and then, rather than waiting for a large haul of fruit – and without having to have a supply of whey for fermenting, or pamona’s for canning, even though we enjoy those other methods as well.

This post was shared as a part of Simply Natural Saturdays, Thank Goodness It’s Monday and Fat Tuesday.

Homeschoolers often worry that they aren’t doing enough, that they’re doing too much, or that they aren’t doing the right things, whether too little or too much! We’re faced with pressure from society, family, and friends and sometimes feel like we should go big, or go home (or rather, back to school).

Even within the context of learning in nature, it’s easy to feel like we should be embarking on grandiose adventures, visiting distant wild areas, learning from knowledgable nature interpreters, and more. A visit we had at our neighborhood park last week turns that notion on its head. This is a natural area less than one full block from our home. It’s a space that we are becoming intimately familiar with, as some weeks we might visit three times for picnics, sketching, tree-climbing, and foraging for healing plants.

On this particular visit, we spread out our blanket, and said hello to our favourite grandfather tree that stretches his arms out over us, providing shade in the sweltering heat of summer.

The kids took off to visit their evergreen climbing trees, only to find that the lower ‘rungs of the ladders’ had been cut off, which would sadly mean no climbing. However, the sting of the loss was momentary; because of the trim, running out of the trees was a sticky sap to engage with. The kids marveled at, touched the tree sap. Milo even tasted it, and wasn’t impressed with his findings. While observing so close to the bark, they found sapsucker holes, and even what Cohen called a “nature spile” on one tree’s trunk.

Breann spotted both a bird and a swallowtail butterfly in the trees and prompted us all to be still and quiet in order to observe and capture the moments in photographs.

Excitement grew as we watched the busy work of bees on creeping charlie and dandelions and also shared in the joy of said dandelions by spreading their seeds through human-powered wind dispersal.

While searching for healing plants unsuccessfully in the freshly mowed areas around the trees, we were joined by a cat, who enjoyed prowling through the forest undergrowth, to pop out for visits now and then.  In previous years, we have found an abundance of chickweed and plantain in these areas that are now mowed. We did find a small patch of chickweed, and decided to leave it unpicked so that it would have a chance to flourish. Hopefully the park staff won’t be regularly mowing these areas!

Not ready to go home empty handed, the kids diligently harvested the smallest spruce tips from several of the trees, and we took them home and turned them into Spruce Tip Tea, and Spruce Tip Shortbread for Father’s Day gifts.

Each of us found a natural item to bring back to the blanket and we sketched for a while, had our lunch, and then went to explore the flower garden at the nearby museum. Throughout our time there, the kids visited with several park goers and their dogs. They also approached a staff member at the museum, and inquired about volunteer opportunities.

Next time someone asks me what I did for school with the kids, I won’t be ashamed to say that we just hung out at the neighborhood park.

This post was shared as a part of Thank Goodness It’s Monday.