I think I’ll have a great crop of radishes in a few weeks with this warm sunny weather we have been having and my wonderful umbrella greenhouses. I planted these just a few weeks ago and I already have to thin my seedlings.
The lettuce and peas I’m growing under the other greenhouses are also doing really well. I can’t wait for spring salad season!
February 18 2010 | Gardening and Growing Food | 1 Comment »
What I find most interesting about the garden this month is how beat up all the plants are, especially the flowers, which is very much how I feel after braving winter’s cold days and long nights. The blooms, like me, have clearly struggled to make it through the colder months but regardless have pushed on to respond to the balmy weather and send out colourful, fragrant flowers even if they have a few chewed edges and some dirt on them. These early spring flowers are so different than in summer, who stand tall and strong in the warm sun and look and feel their very best. The spring blooms look just as vibrant as those in summer but it’s a found energy, one that has been regenerating for a few months and then with all the strength one can muster, has shot up to brave a new season. A beginning of a new year. A new set of challenges. A new set of opportunities. Spring is here.
February 16 2010 | Flowers and Gardening and Photography | 5 Comments »
My blooming flowers out front are wide open to the sun today making it BEE CITY out there! I’m so excited to have lots of little workers all over the garden buzzing away and being so industrious. This is a good sign.
February 09 2010 | Gardening | 3 Comments »
Outdoors I’ve sown lettuce, radishes and peas in wine barrels. These great clear umbrellas make great pop up greenhouses!
February 07 2010 | Gardening | 9 Comments »
I’m pretty freaking excited that it’s so warm here and everything is growing (sorry to those who are still under snow or that terrible Cali rain). I feel all the excitement of a new gardening year ahead. But when asked about my favourite season, I wasn’t sure I could choose.
Perhaps early spring is my favourite. The excitement of season’s change, the new growth, the possibilities. Each seed carries enough energy in it to burst into a new plant and it feels like that energy is rumbling beneath the earth ready to explode into eggplants and coneflowers and sage.
Then again in late spring it’s a joy to have so much lettuce that I’m forced to eat a 10:30 salad daily, and drop off bags of spring greens on the doorsteps of neighbours.
In early summer it’s wonderful to get my big seedlings out to their forever homes in the garden beds while the lush green foliage of perennials are filling up every corner of the garden.
And then in mid summer there’s the wonderful days spent resting in the hammock chair under my deck while the bees and plants do all the hard work to fruit and flower.
In late summer there are the new recipes I’m forced to create to use the masses of veggies that are ripe to be picked.
In fall there is the sound of canning lids popping in a chorus that sings about the freshness captured in each jar to be enjoyed in the colder months.
And in winter rest in the garden gives way to bustling emotions around family and change.
I can’t choose. I love them all. So what is your favourite season? I’d love to know.
January 28 2010 | Garden Therapy and Gardening | 8 Comments »
January 27 2010 | Flowers and Gardening and Photography | 10 Comments »
January 20 2010 | Gardening and Photography | 5 Comments »
I think that I finally have a solution to my camera needs. Last year (well, really only a few months ago) I wrote about my quest for a new camera and over the holidays I found the solution: a basic point a shoot for my purse and a new macro lens for my DSLR. So far I’m happy with this solution. The point and shoot is just a little Canon Powershot SD1200IS that I chose after trying a few different basic slim cameras. I liked this one best because it’s small, it’s fast, and it takes good pictures. The photo of the VanDusen Festival of Lights was taken with this camera with no tripod – not bad!
The much more exciting addition to the camera family is the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro Lens I got for Christmas. While I really didn’t want to have to switch lenses for different shots, the quality I get with this macro is just so much better for close up shots of the garden. I used it for today’s Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day shots after our rainstorms cleared and the sun popped out for a brief visit this afternoon.
The theme for this month’s photos is “The Old and The New”. I’ve used my old Digital Rebel with my new macro lens to take photos of the evergreens, overwintering veggies, and spent foliage that keep my winter garden interesting as well as the mighty new growth that is already pushing the leaf mulch aside. Spring may not be here yet, but it already feels like the dark of winter is behind us. The new growth is emerging from the soil and it can also be felt in the air. That combined with the building excitement for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics is making these short days full of promise. So without further ado, here is “The Old and The New”.
January 15 2010 | Flowers and Gardening and Photography | 8 Comments »
I wasn’t into gardening in the 70’s (unless you count eating dirt while running around my yard in diapers) but those of my friends who were a bit older then, remember growing their own sprouts in a jar or a basket, forgetting about them on a windowsill and that memorable odour of neglected, fuzzy sprouts.
Well if that’s how you remember sprouting, then welcome to the new millennium. For Christmas / Chanukah last year, I was the lucky recipient of an automatic sprouter. This lovely contraption has a water basin below a tray for your seeds and sprinklers that automatically turns on and off at some random intervals that I have yet to figure out. All you need to do is change the water in the basin daily, find a nice spot with some indirect light and in 4-6 days you’ll be eating crunchy fresh greens right from your tabletop.
Sprouts are nutritious little mini-plants full digestible energy, bioavailable vitamins, amino acids, minerals, enzymes, proteins and photochemicals. All that good stuff is locked up within the seeds just waiting for you to give it the start needed to create a plant. For more information on sprouting go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprouting.
Needless to say, many of us in cold climates are lacking nutrients in the winter. Fresh vegetables aren’t growing in our gardens anymore, our pantry and freezers are emptying of the previous year’s harvest and we are resorting (ugh!) to buying our fresh produce shipped in from warmer climates. That combined with the gardening itch that starts ramping up after Christmas for me, got me into sprouting.
{From left: sprouting spelt berries, sunflower seeds, and alfalfa / radish / red clover mix; the Fresh Life Automatic Sprouter; the whirling sprinker is a hit with the under 4 crowd.}
As I was organizing all of my packets of seeds for the garden this coming season, I started feeling overwhelmed with the idea that I could very possibly be a garden hoarder! Not really, but I do have a lot more seeds than I can possibly grow this year, or any year for that matter. It seems reasonable then to sprout the suckers now and eat them before I have to call A&E and register for the show. PS: My sprouter and my seeds come from West Coast Seeds.
January 09 2010 | Gardening and Growing Food | 2 Comments »
Yesterday we were preparing for a treacherous morning rush hour as the weather predicted an overnight snowfall of 20-30cm. This may seem like a dusting to those in parts of the country who regularly get snow but Vancouver has hilly terrain, temperatures that hover around freezing (making the snow into mucky icy slush), and a lack of city snow removal equipment. This means that driving can be a real a mess. The good news is that the temperature stayed above freezing so the snow turned to rain and has kept everything relatively clear. The bad news is that when it’s dark with rainclouds above I just can’t get photos of the garden.
But…I’ve lived here for over 15 years so I’ve learned to take a sunny day when I get it. And I’ve had plenty to choose from this month. Most every day has been cold but bright with the sun shining for the few hours we get it in winter. So on December 10, a particularly lovely day, I headed out to see what I could take photos of. I’ve been working slowly at adding evergreens and winter-interest plants to the garden. Most of them are young so from a far the garden has limited appeal but up close I found lots of little gems that while they aren’t technically blooms, they are so lovely that they still make it onto my Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day for December, 2009.
December 15 2009 | Flowers and Gardening and Photography | 14 Comments »
