Happy June! It’s hard to believe we have been gardening for a month now! Let me show you around the yard throughout the month of June!
“Weeds are nature’s graffiti.”
— Janice Maeditere
June 6
It’s been very hot and muggy this week. Most days are between +27C to +32C (80F to 89F) with very little rain so we have been watering nearly every night or every second night. Let’s start in the backyard!
The potatoes are mostly doing quite good. We will be hilling them again this week.
Here are the Queen Anne potatoes:
Here’s the Red Apple:
Here’s the Cerisa potatoes:
Here’s the Bintje potatoes:
Here’s the Yukon Gold potatoes. Time to re-hill them!
Here’s the Red Emmalie potatoes:
Here’s the corn, pok choi and dill – which we need to re-plant a lot of it.
Here’s the blueberry – it’s a North Blue variety.
Here’s the gooseberry bush – there’s fruit on it! Yay! I love gooseberries and used to eat them like crazy when I was a kid at gramma’s!
Here’s the cherry tree – it’s doing so well! I’m so excited! Last year we didn’t get much but this year it’s so much better!
Here’s the saskatoon shrub. It’s a Northline variety. No berries yet but it’s growing nicely.
Here are the cucumbers. We have Tasty Green which is an eating variety and pickling cucumbers.
Here’s the jalapeno pepper, tamale pepper, candy cane red sweet pepper and the pear tomato:
Here’s the flowers and mint:
Here’s the flower pots around the backyard. We decided to plant pansies and violas.
Here’s the rutabaga, beets and celery. The beets and celery are not doing much yet.
Here’s the different lettuces.
Here’s the onion.
Here’s the parsnips and carrots.
And here’s the peas — they’re doing really well!
We just planted the asparagus roots and spring garlic. I need to add a bit more dirt. The asparagus will take three years to grow. We might be able to harvest a bit next year, but mostly likely the year after.
Here’s the pumpkins:
And here is the watermelon. Yay!! We’re so glad they’re growing!
Here’s the cantaloupe! We can’t believe the plant is up! Hopefully we’ll get a melon.
Here’s more spring garlic that we planted by the onions.
Here’s the radishes, turnip and pak choi:
Here’s the honeyberries:
Here’s the whole backyard today. We did quite a bit of work back here today with the help of my brother. We will be putting fresh mulch down in the next few weeks, pulling the rest of the weeds and filling up the last half of the garden bed at the back. Still lots of work, but it is coming along nicely.
Let me show you around the front yard now!
Here’s the plum tree – plums are growing nicely!
Here are the raspberries — they have berries on the plants which is awesome! And they’re sending canes! Yay!!
Front yard honeyberries are doing so good! They have a lot of berries on which is so exciting!
The chokecherry is doing well too — looks like there’ll be lots of chokecherries to pick this fall!
Here’s the blueberry shrubs — we have some nice sized blueberries on the shrubs and they’re slowly ripening.
Here are the peppers which are all doing well. There’s peppers and blossoms on all of the plants!!
June 12 the plum tree’s one branch (the opata variety) started to turn red like its fall time. We have had some cooler temperatures at night (all the way down to +2C/35F) so perhaps this variety is sensitive to cold.
June 13 we had a storm blow over with some pea-sized hail. The hail bruised the tomatoes, rhubarb and pepper plants, but they still seem fine.
June 15 we headed out to my folks’ — we checked on the garden which is overtaken by weeds!! Since it is Sunday, we will not be weeding today, but will be weeding it in the upcoming days. Can you find anything growing in there!?! The garlic my aunt sent my dad is growing great! I can hardly wait to try the 100 year old garlic from Romania!
It rained like crazy this afternoon. Once we got home, we saw all the ripe honeyberries, so we stopped to pick them. They’re a bit sour but sweet at the same time, a typical honeyberry taste! They’re so plump which is great because typically they’re a lot smaller.
June 17
Here’s the onions, garlic and beans. The beans are not sprouting yet but we just planted them and some garlic is starting to sprout. So far the onions are doing good and we have been enjoying eating the greens.
Here’s the radishes, turnip and pok choi. We’ll have to thin them out once they grow a bit more.
Here’s the spinach, peas and dill. Growing really well actually!!
Here’s the two kinds of rutabaga and beets…and of course we need to pick the weeds!!
The celery has not sprouted yet and we had a bunch of weird things growing here so we left it to see what it was.
My daughter transplanted the large lettuce growing here from another garden box because we needed to top up the dirt. She planted it in the mint box until these garden beds were ready and she replanted it again since these garden beds get more shade. It’s growing great! It grew from last year. What I like about lettuce and spinach is if it is left until seed stage, it’ll replant itself! Not always in the right area, but it’ll still grow!
Time to pick lettuce!
Here’s the other lettuce. We have buttercrunch which isn’t growing too much yet. Then we have iceberg and bibb.
Here’s the parsnips and different carrots.
Here’s the peas and the Red Emmalie potatoes.
Beside the Red Emmalie potatoes, we have asparagus roots and spring garlic. I’m so happy we can plant in this part of the back garden bed!
Here’s are the potatoes. They’re growing really well with all this rain and heat.
Here are the corn, dill, pok choi and asparagus seed which has not yet sprouted. A lot here hasn’t really grown yet but we’ll wait another week and then replant if need be. I imagine the asparagus will take a while since the roots take a while to grow.
Heres the pumpkin, watermelon and cantaloupe.
Here’s the cucumbers, peppers and tomato.
Here’s the saskatoon, blueberry bush, gooseberry and cherry tree.
Here’s the mint and flowers. The mint is doing amazing!!
I am so excited to finally pick lettuce and green onions!! This is my favorite part of summer!
Now to the front yard!
Here’s the honeyberry and raspberry. There’s so many berries!! We can pick more honeyberries now! Yay! And they’re huge! There’s always so many thistles to pick around the raspberries!
Here are the peppers — we have cayenne, sweet pepper, jalapeno and candy cane chocolate cherry pepper. We are trying the jalapeno pepper now!
Here’s the herb bed — it’s all doing so good! We have two parsley plants, two chives, Greek basil, and garlic chives. We cut down the other chives that came back from last year. I cut it up and placed those chives in a jar in the freezer. Once it grows again, I’ll do the same.
Here’s some plums on the plum tree.
Here’s the two blueberries. The smaller blueberry plant (Perpetua) finally has blueberries!! We have had this shrub a couple years now and it’s never produced berries. We removed the other small blueberry (Chippewan) and planted that my folks’ and planted the same blueberry that we have in the backyard (North Blue) near it this year, and both plants are doing really well!!
Here’s the chokecherry. I’m looking forward to all the chokecherries! Not ripening yet but they continue to grow which is good!
The apple tree is unfortunately being weird – I think it’s from the early spring where the apple tree was covered in blossoms because it was so hot, but then the weather got really cold and perhaps froze all the blossoms. The apples have appeared to stop growing and are turning red — I hope the apples continue to grow.
Here’s the rhubarb, mint (which is not doing well), sorrel and tomato.
The geese and their babies…aren’t they so cute? We have a man-made lake (which is more like a swamp) in our neighborhood, that the ducks, loons and geese love to be.
June 23
My dad built us a strawberry bed for the strawberries!! The front yard gets sunshine and shade whereas the backyard is nearly full sun and gets quite hot and we found that the strawberries simply do not do well in the hot backyard.
Now we just have to fill it with dirt!
Here’s the cherry tree — the cherries are looking good and starting to turn red. These cherries are rather tart.
June 24
We have been busy hauling dirt for the last garden bed! This garden bed is about 33 foot long and holds a lot of dirt!
‘L’s garden bed did not grow anything, so we shoveled a bunch of dirt into the back garden bed that was mostly empty and refilled her garden bed as well as almost finishing the back garden bed.
We filled the strawberry garden bed with dirt! Now we can plant.
We bought another tomato plant that was on sale.
Here’s the disaster in the backyard! We are picking weeds near the shrubs, and a lot of the weeds in the rocks I doused with homemade-weed-be-gone which shriveled nicely in the hot sun. I’m looking forward to sprucing up this part of the yard!
The lettuce is doing great!! We can pick enough for a salad or to put in sandwiches!! Yay! Nothing beats homegrown lettuce! I’m relieved too because store-bought lettuce is simply too expensive.
June 27
Yesterday in the storm that blew over, we got a bit of pea-sized hail and 1” of rain in 30 minutes. The hail didn’t damage much thankfully and quite a few veggies like carrots look flattened but I’m sure will come back nicely.
We dumped the last of the dirt. The back garden bed is finally done!! Woohoo!! All the garden beds are completed and full of dirt…FINALLY!
I planted Melody potatoes. There’s still plenty of summer left that these potatoes should grow in time! I place the potatoes on the dirt, then push them in some and cover them with dirt, hilling them at the same time.
Potatoes are starting to flower which means in a few weeks, we should have potatoes to eat!
We continued picking the weeds because with the heat and rain, the weeds multiplied!! My brother came to help us with yard work. We began mulching the backyard today with cedar mulch. Some of the backyard did not have enough mulch, so it’s easy for the weeds to come through and other parts did not have any landscaping cloth which also created a disaster for weeds! The old mulch though we just did in 2023, doesn’t look nice anymore, sunk into the ground as it settled and there’s huge pieces which are definitely a tripping hazard! I’m looking forward to mulching again.
After 10 minutes we had a good start! Doesn’t it look so much different already!?!
After two hours, we had along the back garden box done, part way down the other side and up to the honeyberry here on the southern side of the yard. We needed more landscaping cloth, so I had to quickly run and get some so we could continue here. There’s so many weeds in this section, we need to put barrier down before we mulch! In this area, there was not previously any barrier put down because we ran out! I’m not doing that again!!
Here’s the yard from another angle – I am standing by the cucumbers. Still a lot of mulch to do!
It was getting cloudier, but most of the day was sunny and quite hot. The temperature in the backyard read +40C/104F.
After two more hours, here’s what we got done. Not too bad actually!!
My daughter ‘H’ fixed up this middle part of the large garden box. Initially I thought this would be just the pumpkin patch, but the pumpkins do well in the north garden bed so we plant potatoes, corn and other veggies here instead. We put brown mulch in the centre so we can walk, a bird bath and these footsteps that my dad made when I was a little kid! My dad loved gardening when I was young and he made these footsteps so we could walk on these when we watered the garden or picked weeds, instead of stepping straight into the dirt or mud. So much fun. I think it looks pretty good…and it has a little nostalgia!
Here’s where we finished the yard for the evening. The clouds rolling in were quite dark so we tidied up in case it began to storm.
The lettuce and spaghetti squash in ‘L’s garden bed are the only things that grew. So we replaced half the dirt, added fresh dirt and she re-planted everything now. Hopefully it’ll do much better.
Here’s the cucumbers, peppers and tomato — all doing good.
There were a few blueberries ready to be picked in the front yard — so I picked them and we gobbled them up! They were a bit sour but some were so sweet!
June 28
It rained yesterday evening, so my girls and I decided to finish the backyard today.
We placed the landscaping cloth down and used an entire 100’ roll!! It was tricky to lay it flat because the wind decided to pick up a bit. Once we started getting a bit more mulch down, it was a lot easier!
But within 45 minutes, we completely finished the backyard! That was 5 yards, about 1500 pounds of mulch which cost us $386 CDN including delivery and tax. I can’t believe we hauled all that to the backyard!! That was a lot of work, but I think it is worth it.
It looks so much better! And feels more welcoming and relaxing too.
Here’s the blueberry – it has lots of berries on!
Here’s the gooseberry.
Here’s the cherry tree — more cherries are turning red now.
Here’s the mint and flowers. The mint basically has taken over this mini garden bed!
Here’s the saskatoon shrub.
Here’s the large garden bed.
Here’s the garden boxes around the yard. The pumpkins, watermelon and cantaloupe are growing good. We planted Melody potatoes. We accidentally left seeds out yesterday and they got rained on, so we planted the beets and carrot seeds as well as the beans that were left in the rain! Oops!! The spring garlic is growing really well considering we didn’t plant them that long ago! We added more dirt to the asparagus roots. The Red Emmalie potatoes are growing great! The lettuces, carrots and rutabaga are growing really good now as is the onions. It’s amazing to see just how much the garden grew this month!
It feels nice to finally have the backyard done. That was a lot of work in the hot sun and under gloomy clouds and crackling thunder, that we can now enjoy.
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours“Gardening is the work of a lifetime: you never finish.”
— Oscar de la Renta
