Bread

As part of this blog, I am going to examine all aspects of self-reliance. Now, obviously bread cannot be made without such ingredients as flour, which is a food stuff that I do not grow, but the making of bread is still an important step in self-reliance for me, so that I do not rely on mass-manufactured bread that contain all sorts of ingredients.

This bread was created following a recipe from a book that was recently bought for me for Christmas. The River Cottage Bread Handbook is a very easy to read, easy to follow recipe book that shows how to make all sorts of bread, e.g. ciabatta, flatbreads, etc. as well as biscuits and so on. I have only so far done the basic bread recipe (two pages long after approximately 30-40 pages of detailed instructions), but as can be seen above it appears to have been very successful and from now on I can start exploring how to create different types of breads, as well as variations on the basic recipe.

Frost Dates

Hmmm...I am very disappointed to learn that Victoria's frost dates mean that the growing season is less than it was over in Port Coquitlam. According to most of the sources I have seen Victoria's dates are April 19 for the last frost date and the first frost date is 5th November. Oh well, it is still a pretty damn decent length.

My New Backyard

This is a picture of my new backyard, or to be precise the back of my yard. the house is to one side of the lot and so there is a bit of garden to one side, but this used to be a driveway to a workshop. we are not going to use the workshop per se, so this driveway is open to be developed for a veg garden. I am currently thinking that I will install two 4ftx20ft beds eventually, but that is a lot of gravel to move so baby steps.

This is to the one side of the driveway. There is a shed and some kind of extension that I think can be used as a greenhouse, especially if I install another window. I may also add some kind of coldhouse at the bottom of the windows. This area gets Sun all year round, so it'll be a good area to develop for crops like tomatoes, I think.

This is to the side of the house. It will receive Sun during the Summer but I do not know when the Sun will be high enough to get over the roof of the house. I won't be developing this area this year, but will keep an eye on the situation over the year so that I can make a plan for next year.

New Year's Resolution

Since I last posted back in the Summer I have moved to a place called Victoria, which is on Vancouver Island in BC. Unfortunately, the area for my vegetable patch is a lot smaller than in my previous house but, on the plus side, the climate is warmer and therefore the growing season is slightly longer.

On a bigger issue, the area that I am considering for my vegetable patch needs a lot of work as it is currently covering in gravel. sounds like fun. I need to work out my plan and see what can be done and grown this year. Pictures coming soon.

Second round of peas

As predicted, I haven't been keeping up with the blog. Since my last post back in June the garden has been growing nicely and I have harvested quite a bit. Radishes and lettuce mostly, with a fair amount of zucchini.

We have harvested all of the peas located in the first raised garden, and today I sowed a second round in the same position. I am hoping that it doesn't exhaust the soil too much, but I did put in some more compost and some fertilizer (organic, naturally). I wonder what the outcome will be.

I will be putting a second round of lettuce and mesclun mix in soon, but I fear that the weather is still a little too warm, as it is in the high twenties.

Harvest!

Today I am very excited as I have harvested my first crop. I pulled approximately 10 radishes from the ground, leaving a couple in to grow for a bit longer. This is pretty early (for me) and I am very excited as it means that the earlier hard work appears to be paying off. They tasted very good, but I feel that I probably left them in the ground a bit too long. Never mind.

Radishes are a very easy crop to grow, which tempers my excitement slightly, but everything else in the garden is looking pretty darn good, with peas beginning to grow, as well as apples and pears. Can't wait to start harvesting the lettuces and the mesclun mix, which looks to be next.

Showers in May

May so far has been pretty rainy, which is a good thing, I suppose, as April was fairly dry and keeping the new seedlings moist was pretty tedious work. Anyway, the garden now looks a little bit like this:

The netting is mainly there in order to keep the cats out otherwise they think that I have provided them with the biggest cat litter tray in the world.

The individual beds are as follows with the plants embedded in them described:

This bed contains a zucchini (there are two in the middle but one will be thinned), lettuce to the left-hand side which will grow in the space to be taken over by the zucchini, leeks in the two bottom right-hand squares, lettuce in the two squares above that, onions in the top middle right square (to the right of the lettuce) and mesclun mix in the two remaining squares.


Moving left to right and top to bottom, in column one we have spinach, turnips (just planted when this was taken), beets and turnips; in column two we have eggplant (under cloche for protection); column three is beans, and column four is peas.


This bed looks a bit messy, but that is due to the green manure currently rotting on the top. Anyway, this bed consists of corn and I have planted peas around the corn to wind up it as they grow, and also two pumpkin plants which will smother weeds with their leaves when they grow. Well, that's the plan.


Ok, this bed consists of basil in the bottom left-hand corner, with onions, scallions and swiss chard completing that row. Above the swiss chard we have (in ascending order) kale (just planted), lettuce and carrots, and on the top row we have two squares of radishes. These are a temporary planting to use the space that the zucchini (in the middle) will eventually grow in to.


This bed is a bit of a jumble at the moment as it will eventually be one of my tomato beds (when the plants are ready to move out). In the meantime there is garlic on the left-hand side and an assortment of other spare plants in the middle. I will pot these out over the coming days.

Garden Update

This week the weather has been beautiful in the evenings and so I have had the opportunity to do some more gardening, especially with the long evenings stretching out before us. On Monday (April 13th) I transplanted my garlic from the pots in the plastic greenhouse to one of the newly-created raised beds. The bed was intended to have tomatoes in, but they are suffering quite badly at the moment, so I am sure that I can utilize the space for garlic. So far only one of the eight that I transplanted appears to be suffering from the move but I will keep an eye on them.

On Wednesday I put a fence around the garlic bed to ensure that the cats stay out as far as possible, and I planted a lot more seeds. This included a mild mesclun mix, a spicy mesclun mix, bedfordshire champion onions (the early planted seeds are not really working), two squares of leeks (one Scottish Leek and the other Durabel), and two squares of lettuce (both Marvel of Four Seasons I believe).

So far all of the seeds that I have sown in the garden are making an appearance with the exception of the spinach that I planted some time ago. I have, therefore, made another sowing of Bloomsdale spinach in the pre-existing square, and today I transplanted my beans to one of the beds. Having not quite enough transplants to fill the required space, I planted about 6 more Maxibel Filet beans to make up the difference.

I have also moved the sweetcorn that I planted a couple of weeks ago into the plastic greenhouse as we are having some good weather at the moment, and I think that the earlier I get them out there then the easier they will be able to handle the variations in the weather. We'll see.

Garlic

Today I planted, or rather transplanted, garlic into one of the beds, notably one of the beds for tomatoes. I am not too sure about the success of this as I have heard that garlic is not agreeable to being transplanted. I guess I will just have to cross my fingers and hope.

In other news, the corn that I planted appears to have shot up very well, and the pumpkin sprung up very quickly indeed. I have moved it into the plastic greeenhouse as I am not expecting any frosts over the next couple of weeks. Tomorrow I will plant some beans and peas.

Some More Beds Finished

Today I finally managed to finish off two more beds, meaning that I now have four raised beds finished. I have now got two beds left to finish but, unfortunately, that consists of completely building the beds, including the digging and the sifting of stones which is the most tedious.

We are coming up to the last frost date, which is pretty exciting. On April 1st it snowed, although it didn't really settle. This week has been pretty hot, and I think that I killed off a lot of my seedlings, which is unfortunate. I have discovered that I am extremely impatient, which is something that I need to start working on. Having said that, a lot of my plants are happily staying in the plastic greenhouse overnight and have done for nearly a week, meaning that they should be hardy. I will start to plant some of the seedings out, especially the garlic and the beans.

Today, I planted some more onions as the other onions have really been massacred. On top of this I planted some sweetcorn and a couple of pumpkins seeds hoping to get them off to a good start. Last year I planted the sweetcorn in June and they didn't really have enough time to mature, but this year I am going to get them in the ground earlier and see what happens.