I love this time of year so much. Things are starting to ripen in my garden and whatever I’m not growing, I can readily find at the farmer’s market. In my mind, berries are best enjoyed when they’re in season, but if you want to preserve those sweet flavours for the rest of the year, you can freeze them or turn them into preserves—or even popsicles! Here, I’ve gathered a few berry recipes together that will hopefully inspire you to preserve your own harvest.
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Savvy summer gardening tips to keep your gardens in top shape
By mid-summer, perennial gardens can start to look overgrown, annual flowers begin to fade, and bugs may be munching on your vegetables. Savvy Gardening is here to help! We thought we’d share some of our top summer gardening tips for revitalizing your flower gardens and keeping those veggies in high production all summer long.
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Bolting lettuce: when good lettuce goes bad
Ah lettuce; the most popular of the salad greens, offering a long season of sweet, crispy leaves. It’s one of my favourite veggies and I plant at least two dozen varieties each year, enjoying the variation of leaf textures and colours. For us, the lettuce harvest begins in our cold frames in early spring, followed by the open garden from late spring through early summer. And, just when I think the lettuce harvest will never end, the summer heat kicks in and I’m surrounded by beds of bolting lettuce.
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Deadheading basics
A few days ago, a non-gardening friend asked me how to keep her container gardens in top shape all summer long. Of course I mentioned the usual tasks: proper watering, regular fertilizing, and deadheading, at which point she looked at me blankly. I explained that deadheading was the removal of the spent flowers and pinching off these dead blooms would allow the plant to put energy into fresh growth and more flowers, instead of seed production.
Resilience, thy name is goutweed
Confession – I have a goutweed problem. Like many gardeners, I wrestle annually with this invasive perennial, but I don’t think I’m winning. In fact, I probably didn’t take it quite as seriously as I should have when I first noticed it growing in a corner of the garden about four years ago. It took mere weeks for that tiny patch to double in size and it’s now conquered three areas of my yard. After watching its steady progression in my garden, I realized last summer, that I needed to get serious about getting rid of it.
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Vegetables for shade: Niki’s top picks!
In a perfect world, we’d all have an ideal spot for our veggie gardens with deep, rich soil, protection from strong winds, and at least 8 to 10 hours of sunlight per day. I don’t know about you, but that certainly doesn’t describe my own garden, and each year, nearby trees cast more and more shade over several of my veggie beds. Yet, with a little planning and proper crop selection, I’ve learned that there are plenty of vegetables for shade and that a low light site can produce as generously as one with full sun.
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