Happy August!! It’s hard to believe it’s already August!! I thought I’d show you a little of our garden throughout August! Part of our mission at Our City Homestead is to share all about our city homestead, and what we are doing. Just because we are in the city, doesn’t mean we can’t grow some of our own food. Even if all you can do is have a few garden pots, that’s an excellent place to start! It took us years to get to the point we’re at now.
A few years ago, we just had garden pots and a small garden bed. Then we got a few more garden pots and my girls built themselves a couple small garden boxes and planted herbs and lettuce. And then we got a spot at our local community garden which was great! And then in time we left that community garden and got our own garden beds when we moved. It’s a work in progress and that’s totally ok. We keep improving as we go along and learn what works and what doesn’t.
Let me show you our garden throughout the month. There’s been a lot of change!
Let’s get to it!
August 2
Time to pick more plums! Some are falling off the tree, so they’re definitely ripe! The Bounty plums are so sweet, whereas the Opata plums are tart. But they’re both delicious!
Here’s the Bounty plums.
Here’s the Opata plums.
Chokecherries are ready!! They’re exactly what the Jane implies!! The chokecherries dry your mouth out, are tart and
Here’s the tomatoes — we picked all the red ones! The plants are mostly finished. Once we pick the tomatoes we’ll toss them except the nice green one – that one is doing better because we planted it.
We picked a bunch of peppers as well.
The pumpkins are growing good — we have so many pumpkins on the vine! Yay! If the weather stays nice into fall, we’ll be able to harvest a bunch.
I finally saw our visitor!! We noticed a bunch of seeds dropped in the garden box and sunflowers starting to grow so we knew we had a birdie friend! He flew out of the pumpkins and right to the feeder! It was so nice to watch him for a bit.
August 3
We finally got some much needed rain! After a week of hot temperatures (+29C/84F to +33C/91F) and even hotter in the backyard (+40C/104F to +55C/131F) it cooled off a bit and rained. We had some thunder and lightning and it was windy so the rain was really blowing across the street. We have been watering the garden, but nothing beats the rain!
August 5
We have started to harvest our plots at my folks’ — the mice and moles are eating a lot of the root veggies, so it’s time to pick them!
Here’s the garlic. It’s starting to mold, so time to pick it! The heads are actually quite large.
The corn has cobs now which is awesome!! If the weather holds out, we’ll have corn to eat this fall!
We picked about 4 hills of potatoes and a few carrots. We also picked the remaining beets.
The sunsets are spectacular and the grain in the farmer’s fields are more golden now.
August 7
It’s cool and rainy after more heat. Today is +15C/65F and the cloud cover is much needed. Here’s how the garden looks today.
First stop at a look around the garden — the potatoes. Once the plants start dying off, and turn all brown, the growing season is over and can be completely harvested – plants can be removed and potatoes picked. Since we planted in early May, the potatoes are nearly done. Some were planted later in the season so they’ll be a few weeks yet before browning.
Red Emmalie
Melody
Queen Anne
The front yard tomato is excellent and I’ve been enjoying tomatoes all summer from this particular plant.
Red Apple
Cerisa
Bintje (pronounced BIN-gee) which is a baking potato variety
Corn and Yukon Gold
Corn and Black Currant
Corn and Dill
The corn just might start growing cobs soon! This is called the tassel.
Did you know…. the frilly tassel top is the male part of the corn stalk and will release pollen into the wind. That pollen will attach to the stigma in the corn silk which is the female part of the plant — and then cobs will form and the corn will develop.
Here’s the onions. They’re still quite small. Next to the onions are the beans. The garlic has not done much yet either.
Here’s the radish and turnips. The radish has not produced anything to eat and went straight to seed, probably because of the heat. We will be pulling them soon once they’re not producing anything.
The radish flowers are pretty though!
Here are the peas which have fallen over. Initially I thought they were just starting to flower, but there’s already peas on the plant, but not quite ready to pick yet.
Here’s the dill. These will be perfect to pick to preserve! I’ll be freezing and drying the dill.
The rutabagas are growing well. We thinned them out a bit so the root vegetable can grow larger.
Here’s the lettuce. We have started to pull the entire lettuce plant to eat since the lettuce is at the end of its growing season. The slugs have also been feasting on the lettuce.
Parsnips and carrots.
Peas are ready to pick! We have also left a bunch of peas on the plant to turn to seed. Once the peas are yellow and dried, they’re ready for seed — they’re just starting to yellow now.
Here’s the garlic, beans, carrots and beets. These asparagus is hidden under the potatoes.
Here’s the pumpkins! They’re growing amazingly well! The yellow pumpkins are no good so we pluck those off the vine – they’ll just rot anyways.
The watermelon and cantaloupe are doing good and have teeny tiny melons on them!
The cherry tree is done producing cherries and is showing new growth!
We did not get much for gooseberries but the plant has grown a lot which is great!
The cucumbers are flowering and we have one cucumber that’s a good size. In a couple weeks we should have enough to make a jar of pickles!
Here’s the spaghetti squash.
Here’s the mint – it’s completely overtaken everything!
Here’s the jostaberry.
And the saskatoon shrub.
Here’s the peppers and tomato mixed up in the cucumbers!
Here’s the backyard.
Now, onto the front yard!
Here’s the herb bed — we have chives & garlic chives, parsley and basil. Time to trim everything again!
Here’s the peppers, the seed we tossed into the dirt that had fallen in our seed bin — turned out it was chives, tomato and lettuce. And our rhubarb that had just been going to seed and not really producing any rhubarb which is quite odd. I’ve never had rhubarb do this before.
We picked the beautiful head of lettuce!
Here’s the chokecherry.
Here are the blueberries.
Here’s the other garden bed with the three rhubarb plants, sorrel and tomato.
We picked the garlic at my folks’ because it was starting to rot with all the rain. I tied them, attached the name of it and we hung it up in the basement where it’s cold.
We used one head of garlic and the cloves are huge! They’re quite robust and have great flavor. They taste so different than store garlic.
Take a tour of the garden with us. Watch here.
August 10
We finally picked a strawberry from the strawberry bed! Yay!
August 11
We picked some potatoes at our garden at my folks’. We also picked the rest of the beets since the moles are ruining them all. We picked a bunch of carrots and pulled all of our beans. We ended up with a huge bowl full of green beans. There’s clover growing in the dill which is so pretty! The flower of a garlic scape contains bulbils, which are small, immature garlic bulbs, and potentially garlic seeds. Neat!
Such a beautiful sunset this evening!
August 13
I spent half the day doing potatoes! When we picked them the dirt was wet, so I let them dry and wiped as much dirt off as I could.
The potatoes that didn’t dry as much and stayed muddy, or have a bit of blight or something of the sort went into the sink to get washed. The potatoes I washed will get cooked.
So far we have almost 22 pounds of potatoes ready to cure so we can have them for the winter and almost 12 pounds to cook. So far this summer we have eaten 10 pounds of potatoes. You can read all about harvesting potatoes for the winter here.
August 14
We took a look at the corn at my folks’ and all the corn stalks now have corn cobs. Yay! Now hopefully the weather stays beautiful until late fall so we can harvest some corn!!
Most of the corn that is growing cobs is the corn seed we harvested last year! The corn seed we bought from the store this year is not producing anything – in fact, the plant hardly grew!
The potatoes are growing well. We have dig up a couple hills but a lot of the potatoes are still quite small.
“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”
— Elizabeth Lawrence
August 20
It has been raining this week. Tonight a beautiful double rainbow appeared!
The apples are growing well. They turned red early summer and I didn’t think the apples would grow much, but they actually did which is great!
The blueberries are starting to turn color already.
August 21
We picked crabapples at my folks’ since they’re now ready. There’s so many! They’re such beautiful apples — sweet and tasty — so much better this year than other years!
Look at all those gorgeous apples!
We also picked other apples as well. I’m not sure of the variety since the tree was grafted with an other kind several years ago. These apples are larger than crabapples.
We picked chokecherries as well. I’ll be turning them into jelly!
Here’s what we picked — not a lot but it’s a good start! I decided to freeze the chokecherries for now.
The raspberries we picked were turned into raspberry fruit and jelly. It’ll be delicious in the middle of winter!
August 22
Here’s the strawberry bed. We are getting a few strawberries which is fantastic!
Time to pick peas!! We have two sections of peas that we went through and picked all the nice pods.
There’s pumpkins growing and some are just starting while others are getting quite big already!
The spaghetti squash is spreading and there’s actually a few spaghetti squash growing! This is the first year that this type of squash is growing – it seems to never work for us but I’m ecstatic that it is this year!
The melon is starting to grow too! Yay! We’ve never had our melons actually grow! So cute!
Here’s the blueberry.
Here’s a few goodies we picked today from the garden.
Here’s the apples on our tree.
The apples began falling off the tree, so they’re ready to pick! These apples are a bit tart and quite crunchy, but such a refreshing apple to eat!
And then we noticed these gross cherry slugs still we removed them off the chokecherry and plum tree.
“A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible.”
— Welsh Proverb
August 23
There’s still so many crabapples and apples, so we helped my mom pick them. We picked about 45 pounds of apples and crabapples this evening.
August 24
Here’s the backyard garden. It’s still doing well!
Here’s are the onions. I think the onions didn’t get enough sunshine so they have not grown a lot.
Here’s the beans. I think they could use a bit more sunshine as well. This garden bed gets a lot of shade which I wasn’t expecting.
Here’s the turnips.
Here’s the peas which fell over and the dill.
Here’s some weeds which we thought were something we had planted along with lettuce, parsnips, carrots and peas.
Here are the Red Emmalie potatoes which have spread a lot! Under the potato branches is asparagus, spring garlic and beans.
Next to the beans are carrots and beets which do not seem to be doing much.
Here’s the Melody potatoes and the pumpkins. You can hardly see the cherry tree!! The pumpkins are doing quite well and are spreading like crazy! We did not clip the vines. Often, you clip the vines so the pumpkin can divert its energy into growing larger pumpkins instead of the plant or producing flowers. We wanted to simply leave it this year.
Here’s the pumpkins from the other side of the yard and the cantaloupe and watermelon too.
Here are the potatoes. They’re drying up which is what we are looking for. Once the potatoes have completely dried up, the potatoes are no longer growing and are ready to harvest.
I have heard an old wives tale to leave them until the first frost and then harvest – this is supposed to make them more hardy and last longer on the shelf. I have never tried this so I’m not sure if it’s true.
Here’s my daughter ‘L’s garden bed — she has potatoes, beans, carrot and beets, peas and spaghetti squash. The squash has taken over!
Here’s the same garden bed from another angle – you can also see the mint and cucumbers.
Here’s the cucumber.
And here’s the tomato. And hiding in there are the peppers.
Here are the honeyberries.
And the other fruit shrubs – the Saskatoon, Josta Berry, & Gooseberry.
Onto the front yard!
Here are the strawberries.
Here’s the raspberries – they’re growing so well!
Here are the honeyberries.
Here’s the chokecherry.
Here are the blueberry shrubs.
Here’s the burning bush.
Here are the herbs.
This tomato is the best tomato we have – it’s been producing all summer long and I’ve been eating as much as I like, and there’s still tomatoes to eat!
Here’s our rhubarb. We have Canada Red and Victoria.
August 27
It was a hot +32C/89F today, so this morning we watered the garden. At 930am it was +25C/77F so while it was still shady in the early morning, we made sure to soak everything!! With this heat, the pumpkins, squash, cucumbers and tomatoes will do spectacularly!!
The spaghetti squash is nearly ready! I find homegrown varieties don’t seem to yellow as much as store bought squash. The spaghetti squash will be glossy and a whitish to a yellowish color once ripe.
The cucumbers and tomato plants are doing really well! The cucumbers are ready to pick and the tomato is flowering.
The pumpkin is doing really well and has spread throughout the yard!! They’re growing good too!
The watermelon and cantaloupe are finally growing!
The rutabaga is growing good and we’ll be picking it this week.
The potatoes that we planted in May are drying out and are ready to be harvested. This upcoming week will be quite busy with harvesting and canning. This is my favorite part of summer!! The potatoes we planted later in June are still green, so we’ll leave those for a week or two.
Here’s the dill and corn. The corn is producing cobs but I’m not sure they’ll amount to much.
Here’s around the backyard at the various veggies. So much is ready to harvest now! The peas we are leaving for seed.
The backyard honeyberries did not produce much this summer. The jostaberry we just planted this summer, so there were no berries to be had and the saskatoon will take a few years before it produces any berries. The blueberry did well this summer and the leaves are already turning red! The gooseberry shrub grew lots but only produced a few berries.
The other tomatoes are still growing and haven’t produced anything.
The peppers are doing really well this year — must’ve been all the heat!
The herbs are doing really good and I’ll be trimming it all back this week to dry.
The strawberries are producing — we finally have strawberry bed and it took most of the summer for the plants to root and begin to flower. They’re going well now and we have a handful of strawberries we can now enjoy.
The raspberries are producing more berries!!
August 28
The bees have been pollinating the pumpkin flowers and it’s just so cute!
We pulled the rutabagas and nearly all of them had either worms or had been eaten by the slugs. We sliced into the biggest one and half was not good but the other half was excellent — I did peel and chop it up and cooked it.
We picked the carrots too and discovered so many slugs! It was so gross! But the carrots look great!
August 29
I am so grateful that the spaghetti squash did so well – especially since this is just one plant! We picked a couple squash after we discovered a vole rooting around in the squash!
I’m was so surprised when there were a bunch of cucumbers! Yay!
There are so many pumpkins! Most are small, but that’s the sugar pie pumpkins – they’re smaller and sweeter than a Jack-o-lantern pumpkin. They’re starting to turn orange now! Woohoo!! The hot weather is definitely helping.
And that’s the garden this month!! So much has changed! I’m looking forward to September and harvesting the garden! How’s your garden? I’d love to hear about it.
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours“A garden is a friend you can visit anytime.”
— Unknown
