2006 - October - winterizing step 1

For the last couple of nights we have had a bit of frost. That is our hint that winter is not far away and we should be starting the clean up and winterizing of our container garden.

The first major task was to remove the tomato plants and harvest what we can. We picked three containers of tomatoes (photo 1). The removal of the tomato plants and cleanup is a semi-dirty job. If you have a pair of work gloves I would recommend that you use them or you will be having fun cleaning the green stain from your hands afterwards. The rootballs were quite small and it took only minimal effort to remove from the planters, it also helped that this year we mixed a lot of peat moss in the soil mix too.




The yard is now starting to look a bit bare with our 'jungle' removed. Next year we will not be putting in tomatoes again. As much as we like them the space they take up can be used for a lot of other plants and/or herbs/spices.


This is the first step we take to prepare our planters for winter. The next step later on is to physically move all of the planters to the east side wall (along the fence in the last two photos) and then cover them up for the winter. A future blog will be written (with photos) to show what we do to protect our plants from the effects of an Ottawa Winter.

2006 - Photos part 2

I am finally getting around to indexing all of my photos for the year and putting them into the proper folder. The biggest part is naming all of the photos and then going into GIMP to edit/crop the ones that I really like. I leave the original shots alone so that I have something to go back to if I totally mess up the new image.


The first image is Emily beside the tomato plants holding some of the Roma tomatoes. To give you an idea of scale she stands 130 cm (4 foot 3) in height. She is also holding about 6 tomatoes.






The next shot is me holding some of the tomatoes. The plant is now slowing down in its production. Since August I have been harvesting at a minimum of one dozen tomatoes per day. There are still a large number of green tomatoes that are on the plant (picture 3).

2006 - Photos

I have finally gotten around to looking at some of my digital photos and re-editing to fit here. Many of the shots really are not of much interest, I took them to document the garden.

Photo 1 (384x480, 186K) is a shot of the north side of the yard. If you go back to my earlier diagram you can see the arrangements of all my pots.
















Photo 2 (600 x 480, 246K) is a continuation of the first, but, showing the east side fence. The large mass of green on the right hand side is two tomato plants. The one at the back is the roma tomato. The one in the front is a regular tomato plant.










Photo 3 (600 x 480, 115K) is a shot of the Yellow Mexican Hat. This was a good as it got all year.












As I get more shots up that look half-decent I will post them so you can see what the plants actually look like along with reading how they actually did here in Ottawa.

I didn't get very fancy for the camera. It is one my wife gave me several years ago and is a 1.3 megapixel Centrios. It is simple and easy to use and almost idiot proof. All of the images are stored on a 'smart media' card and I have a number of these. I have two options for getting the photos onto my computer. I can plug the camera in and Linux will detect the camera and offer to download the images for me. The second one is to take out the card and use my 'smart media' reader (again using Linux) and download the photos. The nice thing is that I don't need Windows to do this and Linux makes it look like another hard drive that I can read from (and write too).

I did a bit of retouching on the photos only in that I resized the pictures to fit on the screen to a maximum size of 640x480. This keeps the image size down as not everyone has high speed internet. FYI, Photo 1 was originally 630K, Photo 2 was 511K and Photo 3 was 473K and all were 1280x1024 in dimension.