Renee Belisle

I'm just going to keep answering this because there is so much in the food forest to be excited about.  

Remember these potato seeds that look like little tomatoes that grow on your potato plants? Well, we planted some of the seeds from inside them last spring and finally harvested the potatoes today.  Here they are!  Some pretty blush ones and maybe some with fingerling qualities.  We will save the big ones to replant next spring and maybe eventually get our own strain of Greenstone potatoes growing.  We are definitely trying this again next year, it's like opening up a surprise gift from Nature ❤️

I know, I already posted, but I almost forgot about this too....
I'm excited about everything we grow, new and old, but one surprise this year is acorn squash.  I had been collecting and saving seeds from various grocery store squash, and my boyfriend spread them on our compost heap this spring and wow along with gigantic spaghetti squash, we have acorn squash.  I'm so excited!  We always peel away a generous portion of skin from any produce we buy at the store because of spraying, but it sure is a treat to not worry about that and be able to benefit from the nutrition that a lot of skins offer.  

Is this wild ginger?  

We have some wild ginger growing but our plants are still too immature to harvest.

The favourite thing we planted this year was Matt's Wild Cherry Tomato from the Incredible Seed Company.   They are flavour bombs when picked ripe, THE best tasting fresh tomato I've ever had - although I haven't had many.  They were 10.5 on the brix scale.  

We are in zone 1b-2a in NW Ontario Canada.  We started the seeds indoors in early May and transplanted out to our greenhouse in early June.  

This is definitely a variety that we'll grow again next year, I just have to stop eating them all so we can collect seeds.

Have you ever had success with row covers blocking the moth?  Is Bok Choi the most effective sacrificial crop that you've tried? I'm going to take note of this and definitely give some of these methods a go next spring, thanks, I have hope again.

Cool!  We have a small pond and have many frogs and toads and snakes around.  I imagine it takes nature a few years to rebalance itself once an area has been disturbed by man. I just hate the idea of picking slugs and getting rid of them somehow, just seems so unnatural and unfair to the slug that was probably living there first.  

We are in NW Ontario zone 1b-2a and have the same slug issues and worm issues on brassicas as you do.  We attempted row covers in this new cabbage bed along with white dutch clover as a living mulch.  The worms made their way in the row cover and eventually populated most of our 12 cabbage plants, but the damage seemed minimal and gave me hope that the plant would become strong enough to still provide a decent harvest.  There is also dwarf curled kale growing among them and they have very little damage if any from the bugs compared to the cabbage.  We decided to remove the cover a week or two ago since it seemed the damage was already done, but some cabbage have really been chomped on over the last week by what we assume are mostly slugs.  I am getting worried.  I've been away for a week and the damage is getting bad (see the last pictures below).  All I can think to do is hand pick the slugs in the morning.  Can we feed them to our neighbours chickens?  Maybe there is a kind of bird that loves them that we can encourage to hang around?  It seems really hopeless, I often wonder why so few talk about it.  Where can you grow cabbage successfully without pesticides?  Maybe we're doing something really wrong.  

A quick walk around our land today in Geraldton, Ontario, Canada zone 2a showing all the flowers in bloom.  I have about six more pictures but i've reaches the limit of 24 pictures.  This place is just buzzing with action.  Not pictured: borage which self-seeded this year, different monardas, lilies, daffodils, mallow, dandelions, nasturtiums, echinacea, hostas, soapwort, and I can probably go on.  It's as though everything blooms eventually.

We have two sister golden retrievers, Marzipan and Penguin who are around 9 years old. We'll often see both of them grazing around our gardens eating grass, dandelion buds (i pick the small tender ones deep in the leaves for them), dandelion flowers, wild strawberries and who knows what else.

As far as veggies and fruit, we do try to feed them veggies of some sort with their kibble, or add some whole foods such as baked potato or rice and give less kibble.  They would do anything for baked sweet potato.  They LOVE fresh veg and berries picked from the garden right in front of them.  They sure are hound dogs!  Favourites are asparagus and peas, strawberries, they will take a sour sorel leaf but politely spit it out haha, blueberries, raspberries, haskap, they probably eat better than us.  They get a daily chunk of apple, maybe some orange or melon.  In winter, i chop up carrots and other root veg, they love cabbage (stinky poot poots!), tomato, peppers.  I suppose I could have just said they love it all!

One thing i've started giving them is a piece of dried nori (toasted seaweed) every day and they absolutely love that gross fishy taste.