Welcome to Northwest Ontario!

So what do you do with your sourdough starter besides bread? How about sourdough pancakes or sourdough bagels? For pancake day – try some sourdough pancakes.

Straight-eight cucumbers are a small dual-purpose cucumber commonly grown throughout the region. These heirloom cucumber plants get their names from the continuous harvest of eight-inch straight cucumbers which make great slicing cucumbers. They also make an excellent pickling cucumber when picked earlier.

This is a modified recipe which I have been experimenting with for a few weeks now. Utilizing the overnight first rise, as mentioned in a previous article allows for an easier and shorter day when making this bread as well.

Bush beans come in yellow and greens, and a few other exciting colours, grow very fast and can provide large yields in smaller spaces. The plants only grow a foot or so high, unlike their vining pole bean cousins.

Eastern Butterwax beans are a common variety of yellow bush bean. Bush beans require very little attention, grow very fast and provide good yields of four to five-inch tasty yellow pods. With some prep work and a few tricks, it is quite possible to produce two crops of bush beans in a season, even here.

Time to start planting those seeds inside for a June outside transplant. The seeds planted now are the ones needing longer mature times including tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, giant pumpkins and some of the larger squashes (Hubbard). Some plants that you may desire an earlier crop like cucumbers and summer squash (zucchini) can also be planted indoors now to allow a 6-10 week sooner harvest.