a coldframe stuffed with well hardened tomato plants, ready to be planted

I started planting the year’s tomatoes today. We’re putting in 54 ‘Latah’, 51 ‘Ropreco’, and a dozen or so of an unnamed Burmese variety. Next year we’ll be growing a greater variety of varieties, as our seed company, long dormant, has re-germinated and will require a wide assortment of tomatoes, particularly fast, tough determinate varieties. If anyone has any they’d like to see grown out and made more widely available, drop me a line.

our first shiitake, the delicious product of mycological neglect

Three years ago, when we had first moved to Quadra and were living in Open Bay, we inoculated some freshly cut alder logs with shiitake and oyster mushroom spawn. We watered them a few times that first summer, then forgot about them. When we moved to our current home, in February of 2011, we brought some of the inoculated logs with us. We stacked them in a shady place, and promptly forgot all about them again, not giving them periodic rehydration soaks, as is generally recommended, and generally paying them very little mind. Until two days ago, that is, when I happened to walk back to where they were piled to have a pee, and I spied a shiitake mushroom growing from one of the logs. I almost peed all over my leg! To make a short story long, we soaked the logs in our pond, and now have them positioned in a prominent place that we walk past several dozen times every day. I’ve been spending quality time with them twice daily, convinced I’m seeing little mushroom pins forming. This may or may not be in my imagination. Expect updates soon, as my interest in growing mushrooms on hardwood logs has been re-inoculated.

viewed from above, my first shiitake growing from a section of alder

we floated the inoculated logs in our pond for 24 hours to rehydrate them and hopefully stimulate fruiting

like a father who was never around then suddenly shows up and starts taking his teenage kids to baseball games and buying them designer jeans and whatnot, I now spend time with the logs every day and hope they don’t resent me or fail to live up to their potential out of spite

green and purple napa cabbage, protected from brassica pests by a insect net low tunnel

a clump of mache, the result of a thwarted attempt to save it’s seed in this bed last summer, grows through the fine leaf mulch under a planting of purple sprouting broccoli

overwintered cauliflower success: a ‘Galleon’ cauliflower, planted in early July, harvested in early May

the author with cauliflower in a doorway on a sunny afternoon in May

young rhubarb and friends in a shady corer of the field

still life of seeding and repotting on a piece of plywood

strawberry blossoms