Past updates: Summer 2007 Autumn 2007 January 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008

Around the second week of June, I started eating the first of the year's strawberries, and the harvest has been much greater than expected. I anticipated that the high slug and snail populations I've been maintaining in my gardens would greatly reduce the number of un-damaged strawberries that make it into my digestive tract. Fortunately, the damage has been fairly minimal. Some losses are incurred, but the majority of the berries ripen unmolested. Children passing-by the public section of the garden have proven to be a far great nuisance than slugs ever could hope to be. This type of damage is certainly not a surprise, however, as children tend to not understand the concept of sweat equity. Unfortunately, many adults don't either.

The tomatoes that were set-out in May are now in full-bloom, enjoying the fresh air and sunshine. The first of their little fruits appeared mid-month, a hard, green promise of sauces and soups to come. I keep myself busy with the removal of suckers from the indeterminate varieties, which are trained up stakes. This year, I've employed a variety of methods for supporting determinate varieties: Sturdy types ("Kootenai", this year) are either left to their own devices, or tied loosely to sticks. Less sturdy types have crude supports of hemp twine and sticks lashed together around them, or are merely left to sprawl along the straw mulch below. Though many gardeners are wary of allowing tomato plants to grow along the ground, I've found that they still produce very well when left to take their natural form, though harvesting is a bit trickier, and some of the fruits that come in contact with the soil are lost slugs, snails, and various types of rot. Such losses are minimal, however, and mulch seems to go a long way towards mitigating the damage.

Though the much anticipated pea harvest is several weeks late this year, the first pods finally ripened around the third week of the month. I spend far less time actually getting things done in the garden when there are ripe peas to be had. I find I can spend hours just standing around the vines, slowly consuming their fruit. Sometimes, when people walk by, I crouch down and pretend I'm weeding, to appear industrious. As the weather heats up, and the crops begin to ripen, more and more of my visits to the garden involve quiet contemplation and eating.

June is a good month to begin the summer-pruning of grape vines, I task I learnt all about while being sprayed with dangerous chemicals in the vineyards of the Naramata bench several years ago. Grapes have a tendency to put-on far more growth than they need in our relatively short growing season. Here on the coast, we barely have enough heat during an average summer to ripen any grapes at all, let alone the masses and masses that a happy vine will gladly produce. The trick is the remove the vine's secondary and tertiary sets of flowers before or during bloom. The first set of flowers, formed closer to the vine's main framework, are allowed to ripen, but the fruiting shoots are shortened, and secondary flowers removed. This has the dual benefit of allowing the vine to utilize it's energy resources to ripening a smaller amount of fruit, and allows more sunlight to reach the desired fruit clusters. Don't worry about shortening the vegetative shoots of grapes in summer - It's a very worthwhile thing to do, and won't harm the plants at all.

Towards the end of June, I generally begin sowing crops for fall and winter eating: Kale, Collards, Parsley, Carrots, and Beets call all be planted at this time of year. I keep sowing these crops until mid-July. Planting at this time of year affords the plants enough growing season to produce a crop, which stands in the field and is harvested through the off-season. The trick to sowing seeds during the heat of summer is to keep them moist as they germinate. This often requires daily misting when the weather is hot, but the extra effort is long forgotten by mid-winter, when fresh greens from the garden are a welcome bit of summer hidden beneath the snow and ice.