Rainfall map to Aug.10

This is astonishing to me. We are in the "extremely high" area at the tip of Lake Ontario. (Click on map to see it larger.)

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

The challenges of supplying local organic fruit

There's a lot of talk and much written these days about "food miles" and eating locally-grown, and preferably organic, produce. Here in southern Ontario, this a real challenge because typical summer weather and climate conditions aren't ideal.

The following is a real eye-opener from Plan B, one of our local organic growers. In their newsletter to customers this week, they addressed the question: "Why is there so little fruit being grown organically in Ontario?"

While the climate in Southern Ontario is warm enough to grow tender fruit crops, the high humidity in summer leads to a high incidence and spreading of fungal diseases on tender fruit crops. To combat these fungal diseases on conventional farms tender fruit crops are sprayed with chemical fungicides as many as 15 times or more each season to keep these diseases at bay and ensure a crop for the farmer. These sprays are why we at Plan B feel the need to provide an organic alternative, but for that alternative to also be local is a bigger challenge.

Most of the certified organic tender fruits you have been getting in your fruit share are grown in arid, semi-desert zones in California where disease pressures are much lower and it is more conducive to organic growing. The cooler and drier weather in more northern parts of the province where we get our organic apples from is also helps lower disease and pest pressures for the farmers there. We also feel that very few local growers are in the position to risk losing their crops as there is little or no financial security in making significant changes to the food system, unless people are guaranteeing their costs and a living wage. Things most of us take for granted, but that's not how it is for farmers in our society.

Why can't we get more farmers in Ontario to grow their fruit organically? We at Plan B Organic Farm began offering the fruit share with hopes that having a good market for local organic fruit would help convince some local growers to convert to organic production. So far we have only been able to find a few farmers who have taken this step, we hope to find more in the future. Our goal is to have everything we handle be local and organic, but this is a goal for us when it comes to fruit, not the reality of where organic agriculture is at right now in Ontario. We want to build this system for the future, if you know of anyone with a fruit farm that's not being used or is retiring please let us know and we will contact them with info about organic production.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

When it rains, it pours

We got 2 more inches of rain yesterday. That's on top of an inch which fell earlier in the week. And right now, it's pouring again.

I was at friend's house for dinner last night, and they got a phone call
around 9:30 from their daughter, whose house was struck by lightning, which left a basketball-sized hole in their roof. Fortunately, they were at the other grandparents' at the time. They had only just moved here from Ottawa and had been in their house for about three and a half weeks.

The radar picture at noon today
I don't know where this exceptionally wet weather is coming from because it's been cool, not hot and humid. We appear to have a big upper-level low spinning over southern Ontario, and it's not going anywhere fast. There was flooding at our creek again overnight, but it was gone by morning. My neighbor, who owns two 18-hole golf courses across the road from us is not happy this summer.

This week's newsletter from the organic growers we get our vegetables from had this to report:

One of our best-known and shareholder favourite items had a crop failure due to heavy storms and hail, that we thought did more damage to the onions, actually hurt the peas more. We figure on about a $40-$50,000 loss in farm income just for the peas, not including the onions, two spinach fields flooded out and other crops which are yielding less. It's no wonder the average income on Ontario farms last year was negative $15,000, AVERAGE! Our farmers are in a worse state than during the great depression.

Says my husband: "If you had a choice, you would not take up a job in a field in which the vicissitudes of the weather play a part."

I'm so glad I'm a gardener and not a farmer. In the late '90s, I tried being a garden designer for several years and I'm glad I abandoned that. Landscaping is almost as bad as farming. Writing about it is more fun anyway.

You have to feel for all the people whose livelihoods are affected by the weather, drought in 2007, deluge in 2008.

PS: We got another half inch of rain this afternoon, bringing the week's total to 3.5 inches.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

With my favorite toy

The Country Gardener up in the barn loft
Photo: Margaret Grant
The view from the barn's loft
(Click on picture to see bigger)
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Not quite biblical, but close

While my husband is off on a holiday attending a summer music school (furthering his violin-playing hobby), we email each other daily. I was telling him how lush and green the lawn is and that I have to mow every four or five days. This is unheard in a normal August, not to mention during the kind of drought we had last summer when we hardly mowed at all.

This was his response:

Now you don't water, you mow. Such is the life of Eve tending to Paradise. -Adam

Here's what the rainfall map from Agriculture Canada looks like now:

In just a month, we have gone from "very low" to "very high"
(Click on map to view bigger)
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Today's garden critters

I don't often try to photograph insects. For flowers and garden shots, I tend to use a tripod, and so I'm rather tied to shooting with it - kind of like my security blanket.

But to get the butterflies, you need to shoot handheld. The trouble is that my longest zoom lens doesn't have image stabilization so camera shake is a problem. I suppose if I practiced more shooting handheld, I'd get better at it.

Yesterday, spurred on by Eve, who comments here faithfully, I gave it a shot and managed to capture these characters.

American painted lady

Monarch butterfly
Hummingbird moth - quite a challenge,
never in one place for more than a couple of seconds
In the evening, using my tripod again, I found this praying mantis,
(it's probably a katydid, see comments)
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Mid-summer blooms in profusion

These pictures are of a large flower bed that we call the well bed because that's where our well is - right beside the blue spruce, but hidden from view.

Beyond the well bed in a low area there is our pond, and behind that in the second picture you can see a huge flower bed. It's more than 150 feet long and 20 feet wide. We used to call it the Oudolf bed, after Dutch garden guru Piet Oudolf, whose ideas inspired that planting style.

For the past three years, I've treated this bed as a wild garden or meadow, doing minimal weeding and maintenance, allowing lots of self-seeding. It's largely populated with North American native perennials - most of which we grew from seed - plus ornamental grasses.

It still looks wonderful, even though I decided to abandon it to cut our work load down. I'll write more about this bed in a future post.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Floral magic - Tiny dancer

Hold me closer tiny dancer (Photo: Y.Cunnington)
I'm dating myself here: Whenever I take photos of prairie coneflowers (Ratibida pinnata), Elton John's song Tiny Dancer plays in my head. It's because these flowers start dancing in the slightest breeze.

The chorus goes like this:

Ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand
And now she's in me, always with me, tiny dancer in my hand

Looked it up on Wikipedia: the song is from the album Madman Across the Water, released in 1971.

Good lord, that's almost 40 years ago! No wonder the young man who cashed me out at the grocery store today, kept calling me "Ma'am." He must have Ma'am'ed me half a dozen times in five minutes. He said it so often that I actually suggested that he not call woman my age (early 50s) "Ma'am" because it makes us feel old. That prompted a knowing smile from a gal my age over in the next aisle. She knew exactly what I was going on about.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

What a rainy month July has been!

In June I was concerned that we would have another dry summer. We didn't get enough rain through April and May, and that was exactly how last year's severe drought started.

Well, what a difference a few weeks makes! The lawn is growing as fast and as lush as it should have done in the spring. At that time, it was so dry that the grass didn't need as much cutting as it usually does.

Mowing tends to slow down in mid-summer, but now we're cutting the grass every four days. That's never happened at this time of year before. The grass is thriving, but my tomato plants (all four of them, what's left of my veggie-growing career) appear to be sulking. The rest of the garden looks very happy, and, of course, the weed population is exploding, and that's keeping us busy.

Here is the Agriculture Canada rainfall map up to the end of July. We are now in the "high" precipitation zone, and for once I can say that we've had more than enough rain.

Click on map to see larger
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Today's guest photo: Ratibida pinnata

Ratibida - Photo by Aija Straumanis For more information about this plant, click on PDF fact sheet from the USDA.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener