Nigella damascena, also dramatically referred to as’Love in a Mist’, has become one my favourite annual flowers for interplanting with vegetables. It’s delicate structure lends itself well to growing up through neighbouring plants without casting too much shade, and both it’s flowers and seedpods are strikingly beautiful. I’ve found that early sowings tend to work [...]
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Tagged: Plants
Unrelated to the photograph at right, if anyone feels like making one of these, I’d like to borrow it for a couple of months next summer. Please paint it blue (to match my eyes).
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Tagged: Plants
We didn’t grow very many beans this year, which has been an interesting experience, as in previous gardens we’ve always planted far too many. Pictured at right is a teepee of an ‘Italian’ pole bean I whose seeds I picked up at the inaugural North Vancouver Seedy Saturday in March. The foliage is somewhat yellow, [...]
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On July 24th I posted this picture of a recently-sown bed of buckwheat: This is what it looks like today, eleven days later:
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Tagged: Cover Crops, Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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 [...]
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Tagged: Plants
Glorious red Crocosmia have appeared in the grassland, reminders that we aren’t the first people to have gardens here, and won’t be the last.
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Tagged: Plants
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 [...]
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I suppose this was to be expected. Everything is terrible sometimes.
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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 [...]
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Pictured at right is Jessica’s patch of sweet peas, in full bloom. We both fretted over the plants in March and April, as the resident slugs repeatedly mowed them down. In May our concerns vanished, and in June they started blooming. They have already been cut a number of times for use in bouquets, and [...]
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Tagged: Plants
Pictured at right is a client’s mixed flower-and-vegetable garden. Jessica and I have really enjoyed working in this garden, and find it to be ax excellent example of a planting style that comes with its share of difficulties. Selection of appropriate perennials, namely those that like to live with annual vegetables, and interplanting with annual [...]
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Pulling weeds today, pulling more weeds tomorrow. I’ve had a lot of time to think lately, while pulling weeds for money, about what to do next year. Jessica and I have decided to offer at somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten gardening workshops here at the farm next year, between February and September. In addition [...]
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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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I may or may not resume blogging on an almost-daily basis now, as the internet connectivity of the property is being re-engineered. Internet connections on rural properties can be surprisingly complicated. Right now I am blogging from Jessica’s laptop in the garden shed, next to sacks of alfalfa meal and lime, as our yurt is [...]
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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.
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
Borage starts blooming/ It takes up way too much space/ Next year I’ll plant more
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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 .
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One way to put land back into crops, pictured in-progress at right: Mound some turf and weeds, stripped from adjacent beds, atop some undisturbed, still-growing turf and weeds. Add a thin layer of composted manure (in this case, about half a wheelbarrow over the 33-feet long by 3-feet wide bed). Cover the mound with newsprint, [...]
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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 [...]
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
Pictured at right is the slow motion struggle currently occurring in section 1B between chinese cabbage and borage. I expect salvation will come for the borage when the chinese cabbage is chopped down to meet a grisly end in the wok. It doesn’t yet know this will happen, and thinks it is winning.
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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 [...]
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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 [...]
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Pictured at right is this year’s planting of barley. Each year since 2006 I have increased the amount of garden space dedicated to this crop. While I am still planting a relatively small area, about thirty square feet this year, in a couple of years I expect to be growing considerably more, for use as [...]
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I’ve been growing barley every year since 2006. Each year I increase the area I devote to it by one or two square feet. I’m working toward producing a large enough quantity of it to use it as food, rather than just growing enough to saving and distribute it’s seed. For the first couple of [...]
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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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, [...]
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One of the benefits of coarse mulch is the increased variety of fungal life it encourages in gardens. Pictured at right is a clump of mushrooms growing out of some straw atop a sheet-mulched potato bed.
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Allergy season has arrived, my eyes itch and my nose is leaking. Plants are malevolent, cruel lifeforms. I don’t really mean that, but at times during May and June I feel that way. The whole allergy thing is ironic, as I rather enjoy plants and try to spend as much time as possible surrounded by [...]
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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 [...]
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
We were given an abandoned McDonalds drink cooler to use as a coldframe. It has a curved piece of glass on the front, and removable glass shelves inside and on top. While it was certainly not engineered to be a coldframe, it is designed perfectly for it’s new use. It currently protects 63 tomato plants [...]
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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 [...]
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
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Tagged: Plants
The first section of field to be converted back into beds is now complete. One thousand square feet in ten beds, dug, sheet-mulched, and planted. The next section, which will total about one thousand three hundred square feet, is almost half finished. In three years the whole field will be brought back into productivity, at [...]
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Pictured at right is the year’s first sowing of Tall Telephone peas. They were planted mid-March, and took their time coming up through the cool, wet soil. The new bed in which they grow is sprouting a wide assortment of weeds alongside the peas, which is to be expected with land recently brought back into [...]
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Today I prepared the first of ten fifty-foot beds in the newly cleared section of field. For the past sixteen years I’ve longed for a fifty foot row of sugar snap peas, and today that row was planted. At some point in July or August I am going to stand next to the bed and [...]
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On May 14th Jessica and I will be leading our first gardening workshop on Quadra, in our new field. We will demonstrate and discuss some of the methods we use to turn fallow, weedy land into fertile garden beds, and how to begin establishing and feeding the soil food web. These topics were chosen in [...]
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Tagged: Plants