Year 3

Drunken Woman lettuce.

Our third year of growing food saw a renewed focus on the health and fertility of our soil. During the fall and winter Sarah and I collected maple leaves from the local park (with invitations to rake yards from passing pedestrians) and seaweed from the shore. We dug both into our beds for them to decompose over the winter. Along with a couple of truck-loads of well-composted horse manure spread in the spring, our soil was primed for planting. We had a decent growing season this year, marred slightly by a cool spring.

Radishes were our first crop of the year. This year we stuck with a favourite variety, Pink Beauty, and ate large, fleshy, moderately spicy radishes.

Healthy stalks of garlic.

The final product.

One major focus this year was on Allium species. We devoted an entire bed to garlic and a new crop for us, onion. We planted a couple of onion varieties, Walla Walla and Yellow, which produced mostly small but solid specimens. French shallots weren't a great success. We devoted a large section of the backyard bed to potatoes. We planted Yukon Gold, Russet Burbank and Red Pontiac, and had a better crop than the previous year when we experimented with tyres. We mounded up diligently, but didn't feel our crop yield matched our efforts. The soil in the back bed was some of the poorest on the property - very sandy - but our improvements should have made more difference to the quantity of potatoes yielded.

Spuds.

Beets, beans and peas were all great successes this year. Three types of beet seed were sowed, a cylindrical variety, a Golden Beet and Detroit Red, a popular cultivar. After last year's beet debacle, we were happy to get a bumper crop. Sliced beetrot on the barbie and roasted beets from the oven (perfect tossed with goat cheese and splashes of olive oil and balsamic vinegar) have been a dose of natural sugars through the summer and fall. Most of our cylinder beets are still in the ground: we haven't decided if we'll pickle them or eat them through the rest of the fall into winter. Three varieties of pea flourished this spring. Sugar Snap were best straight off the vine. Carouby de Musane snow peas added colour and texture to stir-fries. Usui is a snow pea grown specifically for its tender pea shoots, great for salads and Asian dishes. Our only problem with peas this year was spacing. It's hard to visualize the mature crop when you're laying out rows. We ended up with a solid block of pea vines, which limited our yield. Four varieties of pole beans (the climbers) and one of Maxibel bush beans were sown this year. We built a solid trellis for the climbers and a couple of the varieties - Fortex and Purple Peacock - were especially prolific.

Sowing beet seeds with worm castings and kelp meal. Pea shoots are on the move.

Two months later.

Booming block of peas. Tomatoes and beans are yet to peak.

One of many bean harvests.

Carrots were more productive. We planted three varieties: Nantes, Berlicumer - cylindrical carrots with less of a taper than more commercial varieties - and Round Romeo, a whimsical bite-sized sphere of orange. Leafy greens enjoyed the cooler spring. Drunken Woman lettuce, an Italian heirloom butterhead variety, flourished, along with arugula, and two types of chard (NZ trans: silverbeet), Fordhook and Yellow.

We delayed the planting of our tomato seedlings as a result of the cool spring, and their progress was about a month behind schedule. We produced a tonne of tomatoes but most were picked green and ripened indoors as the summer waned. Ribbed and meaty Costoluto Fiorentino were prolific, as were our cherry tomatoes, Black Cherry and Snow White. The tomato plants were dark green and lush, thanks in part to a new technique we used this year. We chopped into chunks freezer-burnt salmon from our neighbours as well as the heads and entrails of fish we caught off Hornby this year and buried them in the soil, placing a tomato seedling over each chunk. The nitrogen released by decomposition boosted plant growth. We've sauced a good proportion of our tomatoes, roasting them in the oven with multiple cloves of garlic and healthy glugs of olive oil.

Spring salmon, Ford's Cove, Hornby Island.

After being overwhelmed by Cucurbitaceae (zucchinis, squash and cucumbers) the last couple of years, we set aside less space on some of our more marginal soil for them. We planted pattypan squash and yellow zucchinis and a couple of varieties of cucumber, a pickler and an eater. They didn't get as much love from us as in the past, but we still had enough zukes for barbecues and cukes for tsukemono (made with a Japanese pickling mix of miso and beer).

Mixed crop, with pattypan squash prominent.

We're behind schedule for fall planting, but have good intentions to get garlic in the ground for harvest next year. Plenty of seaweed has been tossed ashore with the Pacific frontals that have hit the island the past week and the maples are shedding - time again to replenish our soil and prepare for another spring.