A taste of Wendell Berry for you.....

The Man Born to Farming

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water descending in the dark?

Do you ever feel like this when working in the garden? Blissful...


our good friend kamran on a field trip to the garden - he really enjoyed his gardening experience!

remeber the picture of the cute zucchini and celery a couple of posts ago? look at this - do you see any celery? us neither... (mental note - zucchini takes up LOTS of space!)

but I must say, the flowers are beautiful indeed...and delicious too!

we have already begun the process of saving seeds for next year. this is teomi and zlatko tying mesh bags to catch the seeds on the flowering greens.

we finally have some labels on the vegetables! we've planted 7 different kinds of tomatoes in total, so it will be important to know which is which!


but not all is peaches and cream in the garden....
just as we suspected, rats had been crawling under our composter (an unfortunate reality of urban gardening).

so many thanks to beng's hard work installing this 1/2 " wire mesh beneath (thanks again our neighbourhood Canadian Tire for donating this!) and we moved the compost bin and set up another bin for leaf storage (thanks to our friends in Engineering).

also, the composted horse manure that seems so promising in the beginning, has seemed to stall the efforts of these little plants to fulfill their destiny. i'm afraid lois might be right - we may need to just cover this and begin again...the good news is, not only have we learned something new, our winter seeds have arrived and now we have somewhere to plant them!


NEXT SUNDAY'S MEETING WILL BEGIN ONE HOUR EARLIER, AT 9 AM.

After much activity lately, there is not much to update on, we continue to enjoy harvesting radishes, spinach, mesclun, lettuce, and basil from our garden, and are (already!) thinking about what to plant for the winter garden, blessed as we are here in Vancouver....

this is the new bed we created, which was inspired by a backyard garden I saw over the weekend. The wooden posts were scavenged from a back alley and cut down. In it, we planted some green zebra and orange tomatoes (seeds collected from last year's plants), and will plant marigolds next week to keep them company.

Our square foot garden, now beginning succession. We have harvested all the radishes from one of the squares, and have planted bush beans in its place.

We will be in the garden again next Sunday, as always, all gardeners are welcome, regardless of age or experience.

good times at city square

it's always great fun planting with little ones, playing 'name that plant' and feeling their enthusiam and curiosity about gardening, plants, and food in general. We planted most of what was planned, and it was a lot of fun...

here are a few pics from our planting with the kids from the City Hall Childcare Society -

celery with our zucchini

the kids with their radishes (which they promised me they'd try...)

planting corn! we have faith it will work....



this is a picture I found that Teomi took of our bean teepee...impressive....

there was still lots to do on Sunday -

check it out - white picket fences!

Lois doing some much needed maintenance to the kids bench

the sunny spot in the garden, the envy of all the plants...

our new gardeners, cherry and amir planting cucumbers

mmmmm, yet another delicious harvest!

it looks like it will be another beautiful week, we'll be in the garden next Sunday morning at 10, come join the fun!

sunny sunday

last Sunday was a quiet day in the garden, nothing planted just general maintenance, observation, and a little more delicious harvest

here are some photo updates -

our square foot plot - may 17
a teepee just waiting for beans!

the north half of the garden

our duke blueberry is blooming!

amish deer tongue lettuce, samich spinach, and mesclun
yummmmm

anneke and zlatko comparing radishes



we look forward to planting with the kids from the City Hall Childcare Society next Friday!
We hope to plant corn, pole beans, bush beans, green zebra tomatoes, orange tomatoes, eggplants, marigolds, celery, natursium, cucumbers, green onions

be careful what you wish for....

... because it might come true!!

In our search for soil to fill the beds, we had asked the City for a donation of compost. In the meantime, some of the beds had been filled with soil from the Canadian Tire donation, so when the truck came last week and dumped over four cubic metres (i.e. a HUGE pile) of compost for us, we were filling almost every nook and cranny in the garden! Lots of work, but the garden looks GREAT!

our square foot plot - May 10

If you look closely, you can see the circle of radishes sprouting. inside that one is a ring of beets, then a ring of carrots, and a bunch of alyssum in the middle. who ever said you have to garden in rows??

this is Beng, tending to the tomatoes. note the trellis made of salvaged chain link fence in the background

Another bed of tomatoes - we've planted basil and cilantro in this as companions

this is anneke planting a pumpkin - hard to believe such a small creature will soon grow so big! (that goes for both kid and plant :)


Teomi showing off our first radish harvest! (We also harvested our first batch of mesclun, enough for about 6 gardeners to make a meal)

some had already been nibbled on before we even took them out! must look for the culprit...

and yes, even teomi tried one! she didn't like it (despite it's relatively mild flavour), but hey, it's a start!

In all, this week we planted: zucchini, marigolds, tomatoes (cheesmani, ciudad victoria, and russian rose), pumpkin (orange and ghost), broccoli, chard (thanks SPEC!), potatos (russian blue and regular), basil, wildflowers, coriander, parsnips, and yet more kale.

We look forward to doing some planting with the children from the daycare next week, let's hope the weather cooperates!!

see you next Sunday in the garden!

now we're happenin'

We've been on a quest for soil to fill our beds and have had success at different places. This is another lasagna bed that was created last week -

First newspaper to provide some barrier against weeds (and hopefully nematodes!)

Here is some straw mixed with fresh horse manure and chicken manure. Fresh manure can burn roots, so we put a thin layer on the bottom so that by the time the roots reach it, they should be OK.

Then we added a layer of leaves that are partially decomposed because they've been protecting our beds since last fall.

Then we covered with a layer of 1 yr old composted horse manure mixed with sand and woodchips. We removed big pieces of bark because it would steal nitrogen from our plants to use in its decomposition.

Then covered with a thin layer of worm castings we had left over from last year....

and look what we found - two worms making a coccoon!! The bands line up and they knot up and slime up (for lack of propoer terminology) and a little coccoon is produced that between 4 and 20 worms will come out of.

We planted aylssum, carrots, radishes, kale, baby bok choy and kale in this bed. Most things were already coming up this week!

We are still waiting for the City to deliver compost to fill the remaining beds, but in the meantime,

A BIG THANK YOU TO NATHAN AND CANADIAN TIRE FOR DONATING SOIL, MANURE AND TOOLS!!

Thanks to this we were able to fill 3 more beds and start planting our tomatoes. It's nice to have good neighbours....

In other news....

....our strawberries are blooming.....finally!

mmmm.....mesclun, we will harvest this next week and plant tomatoes in its place.

a special visit to our garden today!

Tomato planting - this is yellow plum and we also planted tasmanian yellow tomatoes and a few yellow mini peppers (can you guess the colour of the day?)

We had some very flexible vines that we were able to weave in our teepee to give more support for the beans we will eventually plant.

square foot bed - April 26

square foot bed - May 2 (isn't it INCREDIBLE?? - what a great week we had last week...)

For next week, we hope to arrange the compost delivery (wed), and fill more beds to plant! We will also try to arrange a planting day with the daycare to get them involved.

come join us, next Sunday, 10am !

Stepping into Spring

Wow, there is just so much going on with regards to growing food, saving farms and creating new gardens. Its been a while since I posted some of my photos. Here is a brief look at what's been going on this Spring.

Carole and I giving our 'Introduction to Food Production' workshop to the BCGEU.

Ilse and I gave a workshop on 'Square Foot Food Gardens' at the Fraser Basin Youth Congress.

Betsy Mae and I felt very fortunate to participate in the UBC Farm Trek.
It was such an amazing event!


Meet Catriona - she is our School's Project coordinator.

Here are some of her containers in preparation for the students to arrive.

Betsy Mae worked hard to help us prepare the pots for planting.

Renovations to improve the safety of the SPEC roof deck are almost done.
Carole and I were pretty happy that we manged to put together our new shed.

The SPEC building in Spring.

Happy planting:)
Cheers,
Tara