jerusalem artichoke

Well, it's not from Jerusalem and it's not an artichoke.
It is from the sunflower family, but instead of a fibrous root system, it produces lumpy tubers that taste like a cross between a potato and a mushroom.  In some circles, it's been renamed "sunchoke".

The tubers can be harvested after the frost kills the tops, or they can be left in the ground all winter. They will still be as fresh and crisp in March as they are the previous November.

And the flowers are pretty, too.  They bloom quite late, after everything else is done.

It's November 22, just a few weeks later, and winter has hit PEI.  A heavy frost transformed those beautiful tall plants into dry sad sticks.

Last year, I waited too long to dig the tubers - the sticks had broken and blown away, and it was hard to know where to dig.  So this year, I decided to do the job while I could still see the sticks.  The first 6 inches of soil were frozen, but it was not too hard to dig through and find what I was looking for.

All in all, the 10 plants netted about 19 pounds of tubers.  Unlike my other root vegetables, there was no sign of wire worm damage or any other problems.  I think we need to make this unknown plant a whole lot more popular!

not so shrinking violet

Ahh - the violet.  So delicate, so ephemeral.
Well, that's what I thought before I accepted a donation from a gardening buddy down the street.  Now, a few years later, they have morphed into a huge, impenetrable mat that chokes out anything in its path.

I have let these invasives get out of hand.  I should have done away with them a long time ago, but now I'm in the mood for battle.  The mats are very firmly anchored to the soil, and I have had to pry up each clump using superhuman strength I didn't know I had.

These violets have spread in three different flower beds, so I have lots of work to do.

There is also a patch of lily of the valley that is an unsightly mess - that has to go as well.

Meyer lemons

This scaggy, almost leafless tree, barely a foot tall, is loaded with 6 nicely ripening Meyer lemons.
I'm surprised it's not buckling under their weight!

Last year, I ordered a lemon plant through mail-order, and before it arrived I saw some at Home Depot, and couldn't resist.  So there are actually two plants combined in this pot.  One has 2 fruit, and the other has 4.

The flowers of the lemon trees were amazingly pure white and very fragrant.  And the fruit is such a bonus.  I'm reluctant to pick and try them, because they have been such a long time coming.

turning from green to yellow - almost ripe

A few weeks later, I've been enjoying the lemons, and there are just three left.

here is some info from Wickapedia:

Citrus × meyeri, the Meyer lemon, is a citrus fruit native to China thought to be a cross between a true lemon and either a mandarin or common orange. It was introduced to the United States in 1908 by the agricultural explorer Frank Nicholas Meyer, an employee of the US Department of Agriculture who collected a sample of the plant on a trip to China.

The Meyer lemon is commonly grown in China in garden pots as an ornamental tree. 

Citrus × meyeri trees are 2 to 3 m tall at maturity, though they can be pruned smaller. Their leaves are dark green and shiny. The flowers are white with a purple base and fragrant.

The Meyer lemon fruit is yellow and rounder than a true lemon. The skin is fragrant, thin, and deep yellow with a slight orange tint when ripe. Meyer lemon fruits are sweeter, and less acidic than the more common Lisbon or Eureka supermarket lemon varieties. The pulp is a dark yellow and contains up to 10 seeds per fruit.

Meyer lemons are popular as ornamental plants due to their compact size, hardiness and productivity. They are highly decorative and suitable for container growing.Citrus × meyeri is reasonably hardy and grows well in warm climates. They are also fairly vigorous; a tree grown from seed usually begins fruiting in four years yielding thousands of lemons. While trees produce fruit throughout the year, the majority of the crop is harvest-ready in winter. Trees require adequate water, but less in the winter. For maximum yield, they should be fertilized during growing periods.

blight

My tomatoes started out beautifully.  Three different kinds - and such tender skin and buttery insides. And then leaves started to die, and before they ripened, their skin became scabby.

Blight!  What a shame.  Prince Edward Island has ideal conditions for growing a great crop of blight. Lots of rain, and lots of potatoes, which also support this fungus disease.

Blight is an air-borne disease, and without an arsenal of fungicides that the home gardener can't get hold of anyways, there is nothing you can spray that will stop its spread or cure a plant that has become infected.

There is only prevention.  I've heard of spraying leaves with baking soda and water, or milk.  It's supposed to change the pH of the leaf surface.

Good air circulation helps.  I planted two tomato plants across a 4-foot bed, which is too close .
Next year, I swear I will smarten up.  I will put just one row of plants in the bed, three feet apart, and I will nip off the lower branches and mulch the beds well. I promise.

It's important to get rid of infected plants and fruit, because the fungus gives off spores that can travel a long way and infect other crops in the same family, such as peppers, potatoes, and eggplant.
PEI potato farmers want us home gardeners to be mindful of the health of the millions of dollars worth of crops in our fields, and get rid of the offending infected vines and fruit as soon as possible.

I spent the afternoon pulling the plants and putting them in the garbage.

Growing tomatoes is not for the faint of heart.  All that work preparing the soil and growing the plants from seed, all wasted.  Oh well - there's always next year.