Garden 2025 Update #5: Pictorial Garden Tour and a Triple Garden Mystery!

Welcome to my fun pictorial garden tour. 🌿I hope this blesses, inspires and encourages you in some wonderful way. 😊

The best of the garden from April 14th through May 20th.  This is spring in southern Ontario, zone 6a: 

Both of these guys think they're my garden assistants. 

Noobies on the left, and Ed on the right.

Both of them follow me around while I work in the garden.  😍

Early spring solar lighting accents in the very empty garden. 

Ed in complete control of the garlic/pepper bed. 

Hardneck garlic on the edge of the pepper bed. 

Mama Robin moved 3 of these eggs and left the fourth one. 😢

While I began the hardening off process for my tomatoes and peppers, my foyer almost looked like walking into an indoor nursery. 😄

Plsease allow me to introduce you to Thinking Harry. My youngest daughter found him and immediately decided he needed a home in our garden. Harry will live in the blackberry bed for now.

The lovely bloom of the Italian Prune tree.  💖

Beautiful welded dragonflies by my youngest in her last year of high school shop class. 💖

 

Three different colors of Forget Me Nots, all in one lovely bunch. These volunteer all over my back garden just about everywhere you look. 💖

Mr. Possum tried sneaking out early but I saw him & he slowly waddled back under the deck.  

My first strawberry bloom 

Seeing all the new growth on the grapevines just makes me so happy 😍

The chamomile I winter sowed and it's doing just fantastic. 

I find these little metallic stars in random places in my yard. Some gold, some silver. It's wild!

The view from the lawn swing. I love my tiny little garden. 

First sauce tomato of 2025

All the peppers are doing fantastic

The view from the deck May 16th

Help me solve a TRIPLE garden mystery 🌿🔎

What kind of bug is this on the peppermint?

Likewise... what kind of bug is this, on another peppermint plant?

What kind of plant is this? This is a volunteer & I've never seen it before. 

Thanks for stopping by.  I hope you're encouraged by what you've read here, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions please feel welcome to leave a comment. 😊

Garden 2025 Update #4: Oh Hello, Fake Spring

Right on cue for "Fake Spring" the weather here runs the gamut from frozen wasteland to mild & sunny and then back again... then it starts all over again for the next 6 weeks or so. 😁 This is our normal. 

Thankfully, Fake Spring includes a few days here and there to really spend a good part of the day working outside to get the garden ready so I've been taking advantage of it as much as possible! Here's the run down of how it's looking this first week of April:

OUTSIDE update: Showing beautiful signs of life so far this spring is my garlic, lemon balm, rhubarb, strawberries & tons of new of elderberry buds on my two bushes.  

My last surviving apple tree (Honey) and prune tree (Harry) both got a wee wine goblet shaped prune just to remove any inward or crossing branches & to give the new growth this year plenty of room for proper growth & air circulation. 

Also, yes, I've named my fruit trees. 🍎 It made more sense a few years ago when I had many fruit trees but it was a fun habit that just stuck.  I hope to have many more fruit trees in the future so I'll just keep naming them. My Italian Prune tree is named after my grandfather Harry, because he had one he planted in his back garden that we all enjoyed for many, many years. 

My last surviving apple tree is Honey, just because it's a Honey Crisp apple. Honey produced quite well last year but Harry hasn't yet, so I'm hoping this is a good year for them both. I'm very much looking forward to sweet, deep purple Italian prunes this year.  

INDOOR seedling update: onions, peppers, tomatoes and ground cherries. This is my 2nd year of attempting ground cherry seedlings indoors and sadly my 2nd year of 100% failure. 

My onions, peppers and tomatoes have done above and beyond my expectations.  Ground cherries were sadly a 100% germination fail so... I won't be attempting them indoors again but I will attempt an outdoor sow this spring and hope for the best! 

One new seedling this year that's really made an impression is the sturdiness of the stalks of the Tomato plant Tiny Tim.  I'm already very impressed with how well it's doing. Instead of being thin and leggy (the usual process for me with indoor seedlings) this one is far more thick and stout. I grow all my cherry tomatoes in 10-12" pots on the deck, so I'll be eager to see how it does up-planted come time to move it outside. 

Speaking of up-planting, I've already had to do that with one Roma tomato plant and have at least two more that will require it before they're ready to be planted outside. The growing conditions in my laundry room-turned-grow room are so good, my seedlings just tend to grow like mad. Not a problem I'm complaining about at all. I'm incredibly thankful for it and keep trying to plan my seedling starts around it. 

WINTER SOWING UPDATE:  a process that was brand new to me this year. I'm not sure how I'd never heard about it, but once I did I knew it was something I needed to at least try, for my very short growing season. 

I sowed Purple Coneflower (Echinacea), Chamomile, Milkweed, Sunflowers & Yarrow back in January and by the end of the first week of  April what's germinated and come up is Sunflower, Chamomile and a wee bit of Yarrow from last fall's saved seed.  None of the purple coneflower or milkweed. I'm not clear on why that didn't work out, so I'll just be buying some plants this year from my local nursery to make up for it and get planted in my wee garden for returning attractions year after year. 😍 

I've discovered I didn't create nearly enough holes for rain/snow to get in and/or enough holes for drainage in each container. But that aside, there are Sunflowers, Yarrow and Chamomile so I'm calling it a win, just for those! I'll fine tune all the water intake holes and water drainage holes and try this again next year for sure! This is really a wonderful type of "hands off" sowing, since the seeds just know when it's time to germinate and come forward. 

RAISED BED update:  I knew it would happen sooner or later but the first 8'x4' raised bed I ever built 3 years ago, is starting to fall apart at one of the joints. I used what I could at the time and that was untreated lumber so I'm calling it a win that it lasted 3 growing seasons before any issues came to light. I've patched the damaged area and will still use it this year but will hope to replace this bed at the end of the growing season, Lord willing. 😊

I avoided "treated lumber" on both of my current 4'x8' beds, mostly due to outdated advice at the time. I've since done some research this MicroPro Sienna treated lumber appears to be rated for safe garden beds. So I'll be using this for 2 of my 3 new raised beds for 2025.  

I've already bought some untreated lumber, so that will be my new strawberry bed for a few years, before I have to eventually replace that with the same treated lumber I'll be using for my other beds.

Thanks for stopping by.  I hope you're encouraged by what you've read here, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions please feel welcome to leave a comment. 😊

The Family Table: Recipe - Easy Pulled Pork Cowboy Candy Pizza

This is a "new" and  delicious variation of my BBQ Chicken Jalapeno Pizza recipe from years gone by. A simple build-your-own pizza method using whatever meat & veggie blend you have on hand. I made this new version for the first time today and I'm delighted to report it was a 100% hit with the whole family. 😊

In this recipe I used leftover pulled pork from this recipe, and canned cowboy candy from last summer from this recipe. You can use any pulled pork recipe you prefer, and any sort of pickled or candied pepper relish you like. 

Almost any recipe I've ever used to make pulled pork there is so much left over after pulled pork sandwiches, so I like to find simple recipes that incorporate it easily (soups, stew & chili all work really well!), and this pizza recipe works perfectly.  This recipe is so versatile, that you can easily substitute any cooked & prepared meat with a veggie combo for whatever you have on your pantry or freezer shelves. For an easy example, prepared taco meat plus diced tomatoes & onions make a fantastic taco style pizza, with some added sour cream, guacamole or taco sauce/salsa on the side for toppings.  

This recipe is for 2 medium, thin crust pizzas.

2 prepared medium sized pizza crusts

1/2 c. pizza sauce (divided)

1 lb. pulled pork (or any prepared meat - divided)

1/2 cup Cowboy Candy (divided)

1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese (divided)

1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese (divided)

Pre-heat oven to 450 or whatever your pizza crusts indicate.

PULLED PORK COWBOY CANDY HOMEMADE PIZZA

Prepare each crust with 1/4 cup each of pizza sauce, applying in a spiral fashion and smoothing all the sauce into an even layer over the crust. Layer on half the pulled pork followed by half of the Cowboy Candy in an even layer. Top with 1/4 cup shredded cheddar and 1/4 cup shredded mozzerella for each crust. 

Bake each pizza for 10-12 minutes. 

Thanks for stopping by. 😊 I'd love to hear from you if you've tried this recipe. 

Please feel welcome to leave your thoughts in a comment. 

The Family Table: Keep a Running Jar of Onions

When I was a little girl and heard the phrase "running jar of onions" I was pretty sure I had no idea what it meant, it was just something the older folks said. In my imagination of course I pictured a jar of onions running away from someone chasing it. 😂  

In thinking about it now, it's probably what inspired me later in life to turn fruits and vegetables into cartoons.

I grew up in the 1960's with grand parents in my daily life that used language that many of us don't use today.  Their language developed out of how they did things in their day. Long before the days of rushing off to the grocery store for this or that, and even into the days of the Great Depression when you had to learn to "make do", if you hadn't already been making do.

As it turns out, keeping a running jar of onions means exactly what it sounds like.  It means saving every little scrap of onion, green onion tops, onion skins & onion ends, and letting them dry out either naturally, in a warm oven or with a dehydrator. Doing this every time you use fresh onions & sticking the odds & ends pieces into a jar until it's full.  Once it's full, they're ground down to powder either using a mortar and pestle or any type of modern appliance like a little Bullet blender. 

Voila - fresh, home dried onion powder to be used in all sorts of recipes to add a savory, deep level of umami flavor to any dish without having access to fresh onions. I use one single jar for all onion scraps (red, yellow, sweet, etc.) so my onion powder has an amazing flavor that store bought onion powder can't even come close to. I discovered the joy of making my own seasoning blends several years ago and onion powder is a staple ingredient so I make my own quite often. I've even been known to buy extra onions at the local market, just to make my own onion powder. 

It's not lost on me that if I were writing this 100 years ago in 1925, most folks would think I'd lost my marbles since this was a completely normal, every day thing many wives and mothers and grandmothers were doing already. It would be along the same lines as writing a step by step article telling folks how to brush their hair, or tie their shoes.  

Over the years society has traded "making do" with convenience and simple things like drying your own veggies and herbs became a thing of the past for most people.   

I have a lot of little things like this I do these days that started out as a simple challenge for me to try, to see if I could actually make do & save on the grocery budget the way they used to.  Some of those things became so enjoyable to me that they're just now a part of the way my kitchen is run. 

Thanks for stopping by. I sure hope this has blessed you in some way. 😊 Please feel welcome to leave a comment or question.