The garden continues to do pretty well, and benefit from the mix of sun and rain that we've had. Some of then Chinook wheat lodged (fell over) pretty badly, and the Utrecht Blue had started to do the same; Brian has the sense that these varieties may have gotten more water than they needed, which made them too 'leggy'. To compensate, we decided not to use the overhead sprinklers but to flood the channels between the beds, a traditional means of irrigating, so we could water just between the flax beds and not the wheat, since there's rain the forecast for this weekend.
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| The heads of the Utrecht Blue wheat have really, really long hairs |
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| The flax is coming along very nicely |
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Our garden visitors this evening helped us prevent further lodging by loosely tying the crops into 'living stooks' --
here is their very tidy work on the Utrecht Blue. |
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Going to the beach, then having a picnic dinner at the garden, has become an
enjoyable new tradition for my family and me.
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| The volunteer tomato has started to bear fruit -- can't wait to be adding these to our picnic dinner salads! |
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These are oregon grape berries -- Mahonia aquifolium . This bush back of the garden
produced prolific clusters of big berries. I eat them -- they're very tart -- but this time I
picked them to use in a solar dye jar. |
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I took most of them home to dry, so we can use them later in the season for our solar dyeing night August 20.
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| Oliver packs berries into the top of a jar of wool fleece in a solution of alum in tap water... |
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... and then enjoys squishing the berries to release the rich purple colour.
What will the final colour be? |
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| Brian teaches our garden visitors some traditional wheat weaving. |
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