Archive for the 'Community Garden' Category
When I went to de-blight the tomatoes at the community garden plot this morning, I noticed a carrot top & greens of what was most likely one of my prized multicoloured carrots (pulled and eaten by a yet another vegetable thief) which made me think, “Hey, my carrots are ready!” While the greens sure didn’t look like much, I decided to pull them anyway and to my delight, beautiful red, purple, white, and orange carrot with no sign of carrot rust fly damage. Booya!
Back in April I pulled up my winter carrots and sadly, I lost the battle to that wily carrot rust fly. This year I planted a summer crop, planted each seed individually spaced (painstakingly), mixed lots of sand in the soil and watered well. Oh, and the most important thing: full sun. My home garden is so crowded and lush that there just isn’t the sun there is at my new garden plot. This, I’ve noticed, had made all the difference in the world to my vegetable gardening. 6-8 hours of direct sun just isn’t enough.
So here they are, some lovely purple carrot sticks, without a rusty track to be seen. Take that, carrot rust fly.
Me: 1 ; Carrot Rust Fly: 1
August 14 2010 | Community Garden and Growing Food and Harvest | 12 Comments »
This month my neighbours and I have more growing than we can harvest and eat so there is quite a bit of food sharing going around. Almost daily I get a delivery of somthing, like a giant bowl of fresh figs, that I turn into some lucious creation. I have also now organized a farm fresh egg delivery in my city neighbourhood and been out picking wild berries – all making for a crazy first few weeks in August.
I’m currently harvesting the following veg from my home garden and the community garden plot:
Beans: Purple Peacock, French Filet
Peas: MammothMelting Snow Peas
Tomatoes: Black Russian, Siletz, Sweetheart Grape, Gold Nugget Cherry, Sungold Cherry, Isis Candy Cherry, Red Zebra, Tumbler
Sema Fino Florence Fennel
Beets: Detroit Supreme, Red Ace, Chioggia, and Golden
Chard: Rainbow, Fordhook Giant, Rhubarb
Peppers: Filius Blue, Garden Salsa
Basil: Organic Sweet Basil, Thai Basil
Squash: one Gold Nugget was ready at the community garden
Potatoes: Red Chief, French Fingerlings
All this has made for some interesting recipes like carmelized figs, fig ginger jam, walnut pesto, and mixed veggies ragu. I’ll be sure to share very soon. If I can get out of the kitchen long enough. help.
August 09 2010 | Community Garden and Gardening and Growing Food and Harvest and Photography | 8 Comments »
Hey everyone, if you’re in Vancouver and have some seeds or need some seeds, the Environmental Youth Alliance is hosting Seedy Saturday at the Strathcona Community Gardens today from 10am-1 pm. Come on by!
April 17 2010 | Community Garden and Vancouver | 4 Comments »
It’s been a year now that I have taken on the new adventure of growing purple cauliflower. I started the seeds indoors in March 2009 and tenderly cared for them until they could be hardened off. I grew a bunch, maybe twelve, so I put two in my back garden beds, took six more to the community garden and gave the final ones away. The ones in my back garden grew and grew and grew into monstrous proportions and finally started to rot and stink over winter so I composted them. That was hard to do after ten months of anticipation for a purple crown of deliciousness but the backyard patio area smelling like rotten cabbage was a strong motivator.
The ones at the community garden were basically in shade because my plot—unbeknownst to me when we took the plot in the late winter of 2009—was totally shaded by a huge tree until 2PM every day. Not the best spot for growing veg. Nonetheless, four of those plants seemed to be staying healthy albeit quite small so I potted them up and brought them home and forgot about them. One day I had a bare spot in the front garden so I put four of them in the ground and a year later to my great surprise I have purple cauliflower!
Each plant is looking a little different today. Two have golf-ball sized crowns, one has melon sized crown and one, in this photo, has started to set a bunch of florets instead of a crown.
Cauliflower Gardeners out there: what should I now do with my purple cauliflower? I couldn’t imagine after the treacherous life these plants have had that they would provide me with something edible, but they have, and now I wonder if I should harvest them or let them grow larger. Could it be that each one could become it’s own crown?
This certainly is no ordinary tale of planting a growing cauliflower, and I would not recommend it, but this sort of chaos is to be expected as I try new things and stray from the traditional ways of doing things (like gardening in rows – for shame!) I’m sorry to those experienced gardeners with dedicated vegetable plots that are carefully organized and planned that I am making cringe with my tale but for me any experiment that ends with a tasty meal is a success. And I’m hoping for a tasty meal soon.
March 04 2010 | Community Garden and Gardening and Growing Food and Harvest | 5 Comments »
I know, I know, I’ve been lacking in actual blog content. Posting a few pictures just doesn’t do justice to all that has been happening this fall. After a very long trip East for family matters and a road trip through New England, I have much to report but also much recovery. I’m working towards some posts on my travels including the amazing chevre making course I took there and some reports on the 250-year-old sourdough starter I’ve been working with, as well as some notes on my adventures with quince from the community garden. But for now I’m being kind to my body and letting it rest, just as I have done with the garden. So photos it must be until then…
October 21 2009 | Community Garden and Gardening | No Comments »
At my community garden, there is an organic heritage orchard with a number of large apple, pear, quince, and Asian pear trees. There is also a bunch of rows of espalier apple trees. The heritage apple varieties on the espaliers are so unique that I thought it would be fun to pick up the fallen apples and make an applesauce with the 40 or so different flavours. I was right, it was fun. Cutting open the apples, fearing a worm, but finding crisp white or golden or even pink flesh was a thrill. The flavour? Well, the richness and zing they provide to the final applesauce is magnificent. I’ve posted the recipe here so that no more poor fallen apples will ever have to go uneaten.
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Fallen apples from the Community Garden’s Heritage Orchard
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A motley crew of apples
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This amazing apple was not much to look at but when I cut it open…PINK!
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Cooking the apples to make one delicious sauce
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The final product – Fallen Applesauce
Fallen Applesauce Recipe
- 1 crate fallen apples
- apple cider
- water
- 1-2 cups sugar (many of my apples were sweet, so I used less than a cup of sugar. Plus I like it to taste true to the apples).
- cinnamon sticks, ground cloves, ground nutmeg
Directions:
- Wash, core and peel the apples (cut out worms or any bruising) only use what you would eat fresh. No need to peel the apples!
- Cook the apples, sugar, cinnamon sticks and spices slowly in a cup of cider and a cup of water. Add more liquid, sugar and/or spices as you cook to get the flavour and consistency you like. Personal taste is the only rule here!
- When apples are tender, remove cinnamon sticks and set aside. Blend apples with an immersion blender until smooth. You can add the cinnamon back in now if you’d like.
- Continue to add liquid and cook the apples, until you get the consistency and flavour you like.
- Ladle into sterile jars leaving 1/4 inch of headspace.
- Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes (adjust for altitude if necessary). The applesauce can also be frozen if you prefer.
September 18 2009 | Canning and Community Garden and Growing Food and Harvest and Photography and Recipes | No Comments »
One of the reasons I got into gardening, was because of the community. Gardeners share gardening tips and plants and harvests, they create beauty in their front yards for the enjoyment of passersby, and they may even sneak onto your property and share in the labour. One day, I asked a man at the Community Garden how he was growing his potatoes. He shared with me his 200-year old technique as passed down by his Irish grandmother. He told me to dig a deep trench (about 2 ft deep) and put sprouted seed potatoes in there, sprouts up, then cover the potatoes with a little dirt just so that they had just a light blanket of soil, spouts showing through.
So, I went to my plot (which was about 100 meters from his) and dug my trench. He came over to inspect my work and pleased with my trench, he took my seed potatoes from me and poured them out on the garden edge. He took his 60-year-old gardening knife he started hacking at them (hey, wait a minute!): he cut some of the seed potatoes in half (Aaa! My potatoes!), and then made deep gouges into the other ones (this isn’t what it said on the package!). Yet despite my alarms I gave into his help and guidance and made an effort to trust this man, his 200-year old method, and his grandmother. I planted these scarred and bleeding potatoes in my newly dug trench, tucked them in for the night with some soil, and put some sticks on them to prevent the birds from snacking. Every few days or so, I was to come back and mound the soil up over the first few leaves of the plant. My new friend said he would “bring me some sand from his beach” to improve my soil and he picked off any large sticks or bark in my soil and swore at them. He then brought me a handful of worms and said, “My grandmother always told me that if you give someone worms for their potatoes, they will have a bountiful crop.” I was so very touched as I accepted the worms and set them free into my new potato trench.
A week later, my potatoes had grown a little so I added a bit more soil and some sand I had collected from the beach. Another week when I went to top up the soil again, I found leaf mould around the edges of the bed. And another week there were chunks of burned wood scattered around the plants. Now, a month or so later, my trench has turned into a hill with huge healthy potato plants above and I suppose about 500lbs of potatoes growing below. I have not seen this man since he taught me to plant potatoes, but he has been at my garden plot watering my potatoes, mounding the soil, and adding his own special brand of magic. It is this sense of community that I love about gardening: that a man I’ve only met once parents me and my plants while teaching me so much more than just how to grow potatoes.
August 17 2009 | Community Garden and Growing Food | 2 Comments »
It’s mid-June. Mid-gardening season. And I’ve posted a few things already so I’ll introduce myself here in the middle. But I’m sure it won’t be the middle for long.
Six years ago I bought a house in Vancouver, BC, with a yard that was a weedy, mucky mess. I started with just a few plants which grew and bloomed and created so much life to our outdoor space that I realized why people loved their gardens so much. I was hooked. I would daydream about what I could dig up next and what more I could plant.
Since I’m not one to enter into any new project from the shallow end, lucky for me I found a great project in need of help: this wonderful organization which gives jobs to people living with addiction in the Downtown Eastside. They needed a place to grow perennials and, as luck might have it, I had a sunny front yard I was willing to donate. I’m now hosting 400 perennial plants in my front yard. I designed the layout, broke my back digging beds (well, it FELT like it was broken), and planted, and planted, and planted. I was given these unlabeled little green things that I was to care for and I had no idea what they were until they flowered or sprung a distintive leaf. I poured through endless books and websites searching for them. I spent a year with them. And now, years later, I know them intimately. I went from having almost no gardening knowledge, to learning how much there is to know. I have gained great respect for Master Gardeners and farmers and all those garden sages out there (not the herb).
I am no master. I am, however, a quick study and someone who is passionate about learning new things. I took on perennials first, then chased the ever elusive year-round blooming garden, grew an herb garden, wrestled with a veggie garden, and started sprouting in the winter. This year, I’m espalier-ing a 4-Pear tree, I have over 100 varieties of food which I grow as a potager garden in the front of the house and in the back beds, and I have a plot at one of the local community gardens where I meet the most fabulous people. I love to take photos and report snippets that I learn along the way, so here I am, beginning in the middle, reporting on the past, present and future of my wonderful gardening world.
The Zen Garden under the deck provides an great view of the back garden.
June 19 2009 | Community Garden and Flowers and Gardening and Growing Food and Vancouver | No Comments »
