From the Living Soil

delicious beets

Pictured at right is a triple row of beets, two rows of ‘Cylindra’ and one row of ‘Early Wonder’. June plantings of beets are always very satisfying, as they tend to grow very quickly and healthily in the long days of summer. The beets in the photo were sown the first week of June. I also planted two rows of ‘Lutz Winterkeeper’ on the 30th of june – Those I hope to lift in late October and store over the winter in a clamp. That topic will be covered in a later post. I love everything about beets, including the excretory colour changes they induce, which were actually the reason I got interested in them in the first place, as a very young lad.

Tagged: Plants

borage and kale

I broadcast lots of borage seed into some of the beds this spring, and it has really made it’s presence known. Pictured at right is a block of kale with borage sprawling all over everything. When it starts to flop over and look less delightful I will cut the plants down at the base  use the chopped-up leaves and stalks to mulch the kale plants.

Tagged: Plants

peas and phacelia

In early May, I interplanted bush peas with phacelia and millet. The peas promptly swallowed both the phacelia and the millet, and for a number of weeks I was certain both were lost. Fortunately, the phacelia persevered, and is now in full bloom throughout the pea bed. The millet wasn’t so lucky, and, while it is still alive, the plants are totally encased in pea vines, and are receiving almost no sun. I value all such partially-successful interplanting experiments, as they teach important lessons about timing and inter-species compatibility. Next year I hope to find some suitable companions for millet.

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Jessica erects tomato supports with twine and wood

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sheet mulched potatoes, and other crops

Pictured at right is a planting of potatoes growing in a sheet-mulched, no-dig turf mound. We’ve started harvesting them, and the tubers are enormous. No soil amendments were used, aside from newspaper and old stable clearings. Once all the potatoes have been harvested, the bed will be limed and planted to buckwheat.

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'Beira Tronchuda' Portugese Kale

I’m visiting Vancouver for the next five days, after which Jessica and I will be temporarily moving out of our home. It is possible that this blog may lie dormant for the next week or so, but I promise I’ll be posting again in early July, at the very latest.

Tagged: Plants

hairy borage buds/In three days they will open/Sky blue for summer

Borage starts blooming/

It takes up way too much space/

Next year I’ll plant more

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the leaning tower of peas

An old variety, Tall Telephone peas are tremendously satisfying to grow. Aside from the inconvenience of having to engineer a structure at least ten feet tall for them to climb up, and the minor difficulties involved in picking peas that grow so far off the ground, they are tolerant, beautiful, and highly productive .

Tall Telephone peas in full bloom

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'Aladdin' semi-leafless peas

Of course they still have leaves, but this sort of pea has been bred to have unusually long tendrils, with which they hold themselves and their neighbours up off the ground. As they are much shorter than most pea varieties, I generally grow these sorts of pas without much in the way of stakes or support, aside from a single post-and-string setup around the outside of the bed, to prevent them from flopping onto the pathways.

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one of the year's first potato flowers

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the first handfull of dill

Dill is the greatest herb of them all, and my life is enriched far beyond measure by it’s fragrant green glory. I harvested the first little handful today, carefully snipping one leaf off each little plant. In the kitchen, the cut dill entered into culinary matrimony with some potatoes, though I won’t divulge further intimate details. I will report that the results were dillicious.

Tagged: Plants

delicious little beets, the result of my thinning a 50-foot double row

I’m a pretty big fan of this blog, and was looking at some of the things I have posted recently, and realized to my horror that my posts on June 1st and June 4th were very repetitive. I have been known to repeat myself. I apoligize. I have been known to repeat myself. I just realized that my posts on June 1st and June 4th were very similar. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Here is a picture of some beets.

Tagged: Plants

flax seedling

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a handful of baby bok choy, the result of my thinning a closely-planted row

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Bok Choi

Early spring glides past in slow motion, March and April sowings sprouting and growing slowly, slugs and snails enjoying their share of the year’s first tender seedlings. At some point in late May everything always speeds up, in preparation for the tremendous growth spurts of June and July. Bok Choi, more than any other crop, lets me know when the slow growth of early spring is ending. I know things are about get interesting when the delicate little bok choi adolescents start doubling in size every week. This doubling began over the past week. We’ll have a busy wok soon.

a double-row of peas, not yet netted, with single rows of bok choi on either side. The bok choi will be harvested long before the peas begin to mature

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barley

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redwood violet

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several weeks after tillage, a bed of beets grows a healthy crop of weeds

Sometimes I till, and sometimes I don’t. For a while, roughly between early 2006 and some point in 2008, I was fairly certain that no-dig gardening would solve all my problems and that, with enough mulch, I’d reach weedless enlightenment. Eventually I realized that abstaining from soil disturbance and the use of permanent mulches is not without drawbacks, particularly in our cool, wet, sluggy springs. These days, when it comes to digging, I subscribe to multiple contradictory ideologies. At times,I sheet-mulch and avoid all tillage. At times I single-dig, gently working amendments in with a fork. At times I double-dig. Different crops, and different situations, call for different techniques. I believe that understanding this has been one of the most important lessons in my growth as a gardener.

beets and weeds emerge together. In foreground, annual weeds. In background, a clump of perennial clover and grasses.

When soil is disturbed, weed seeds are brought to the surface, where they encounter the conditions they require to sprout and grow. Prior to the soil being disturbed, most of these seeds were happy to stay out of trouble lodged within the soil strata, socializing with earthworms and thinking about how good it would feel to germinate. The newly-disturbed garden quickly grows a great crop of weeds. The timely use of a sharp hoe can prevent this from becoming a major disaster, and more complex techniques, like stale seed beds, coupled with timely applications of mulch, can be employed to keep weed problems in check. For now, I hoe, and later I’ll cover cover crops and mulches and the transition between dig and don’t.

Tagged: Plants

solomon's seal

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a crowded planting of peas, ready to be thinned and hoed

I tend to sow peas thickly, to ensure I’ll have plenty of pea shoots for an early spring harvest. Pea shoots are a delicacy like nothing else I know, the culinary equivalent of accidentally stumbling upon Osama Bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, then killing him with a frying pan and collecting a huge secret reward from the American government, who go on to say it was them who killed him and no, no you can’t see the pictures. Roughly one month after sowing, I thin the plants by harvesting some of them with scissors, giving the lucky survivors room to spread their roots and grow. Mine is not a culinary blog, so I will not go into great detail regarding my methods of pea shoot preparation, though I will say they involve a cast-iron wok, peanut oil heated to a very high temperature, and a minimal amount of time. I will not post any pictures of the finished dish.

a thinned bed of peas, after hoeing out the first batch of weeds

a bowl of pea shoots, ready for the wok

Tagged: Plants