Category: Linda Gilkeson

If your tomatoes are slow to ripen, you are not alone! Many people are wondering about it, but this cooler summer is the way our ‘normal’ summers used to be: for those that have forgotten how long it used to take tomatoes to ripen outdoors, this is a reminder. On the other hand, many other crops are doing particularly well this year with more rainfall and fewer hours of high temperatures that slow the growth of cool season crops.

Now I know how large radishes can get when you leave town for 3 weeks…and also that grapevines cannot be trusted to stay in their own lane when no one is home to keep order! Anyway, I am back home just in time for an important planting window.

Carry right on planting anything that tolerates or thrives in cool weather: cabbage/mustard family plants, onions and leeks, lettuces and leafy greens, peas, broadbeans, carrots, beets, parsnips. A note about parsnips: make sure you sow fresh seed (packaged for this year).

Spring certainly went sproing into nearly summer-like weather last week! Given how long it took the snow to melt from my yard I thought the soil would stay cold longer than usual, meaning no rush to dig up overwintered root crops. At the rate the soil is now warming, however, carrots, beets and other roots should be dug up by the end of March/early April as usual. If left in the garden, they start to grow, using up the sugars stored in their roots to produce a flower stalk. The roots lose flavour and crispness and grow lots of strange little side roots.

This chilly weather is certainly dragging on, but if you have good growing conditions for seedlings indoors, it should cheer you up to be starting seeds. I wait until now to sow leeks, onions, celeriac and celery as I have found they grow into plants that are just as productive as ones started earlier in February.

Right now the forecast after Sunday shows a period of colder weather than we have had so far this winter. Forecasts are for overnight lows of -5 to -8C (18 to 23F) for much of the south coastal region. It could be colder than that in gardens in frost pockets and low-lying inland areas.

Well, I don’t know if there will be a winter this year or not, but other than windstorms, there hasn’t been much winter in evidence. As I started to write this, it was sunny and unusually warm outdoors and I suddenly remembered that early warm weather makes trees bloom early….I leaped up and shot out the door to start pruning my trees and grapes.

Just a quick note that the first cold weather of the year is forecast for this week, with night time lows by Wednesday and Thursday forecast to drop well below freezing in some parts of the region. That’s the signal to finish mulching everything if you haven’t done so already. Now is the time to add mulch right up over the tops of carrots, beets and other roots to make sure the shoulders of the roots don’t get nipped by frost.