Garden Post - April 2011

Even after a cold and wet and cloudy March, everything starts happening in April.

By April 2, the flats of tomatoes were mostly germinated and pushing out of the starter soil. I had been worried about the vigour of my saved seeds from last-year’s tomatoes. Mostly I was concerned over the method I had used to save and store the seeds. I have read instructions that call for much more elaborate methods, but I opted to simply choose ripe tomatoes (the riper the better – without allowing it to rot or become mouldy), and then cutting it open and smearing the seeds onto a piece of paper towel, or paper from a paper bag. Then I labelled the paper and left it out on my table for a handful of days until all of the moisture had evaporated. When it had dried sufficiently, I folded the paper and added it to my bag of stored seeds.

This year’s germination rate of all the varieties appears to be close to 100%, so I can vouch for the effectiveness of this method. Even the tomatoes that weren’t as ripe as I wanted for seed saving, have germinated well. I know that many gardeners have told me that I need a proper grow light, set very low near the tiny starts or the tomatoes will become leggy and weak. And yes, this concerned me. At the same time, I know that it wasn’t so long ago that the majority of gardeners in this area did not have electricity and grow lights.
My thoughts in these situations are to absorb information from all of those people around me, because almost all of them have much more growing experience than I do. And many of them have found their way around pest and climate conditions without the use of chemical sprays or other high-tech solutions. However, ultimately I have to be the one who makes the decisions as to what is possible or not for me, in this location, in this climate, with these goals or desires that I have.
When the tomatoes first germinated in the open flats, most of them were indeed leggy and weak looking. Especially in my location – facing East and South, the daylight hours are shorter than optimum. However, to compensate for these less optimum conditions, I decided to start the plants early, and then at each transplant, I stripped off the lower leaves and buried most of the small stock into the new soil.
By mid April, I had transplanted all of the spindly starts into 3” pots. It became obvious at that time how much I had overplanted. At that point I was able to select only the healthiest ones, choosing 4 or 5 of each of the 25 varieties I had saved from last year. Still ending up with a lot of tomato starts. By burying the main stock into the pots, the new starts became much stronger and thicker than they would have been otherwise.
Around the end of the month, I moved this stock from the indoor growing window, into the new greenhouse that I had just completed. I did this to slow some of the upward growth and to begin hardening the tomatoes before they are planted in late May.
By the end of April –with the addition of a few different varieties from Jonathon and Jenna - I had 30 tomato varieties growing. Each variety has its own strengths. Some are early producers. Others keep well through the winter months, and others might be best for drying or canning. In a later post I will make a list of all types. I plan to save seeds from all of those that do well, and in this way develop a good inventory of plants tailored specifically to these light and soil conditions, as well as to my needs and tastes.


In the outdoor gardens, I planted out many of the greens I’d started in the greenhouse or indoors. In this forested property, there are a lot of insects and slugs that eat up the tiniest starts if I sow the seeds directly into the soil. By starting in flats, the survival ratio is much higher.
By mid April I had planted into the beds many broccoli starts, along with lettuce, Chinese greens, cabbage and spinach. In another plot, I planted out the first batch of beet, turnip, rutabaga and kohlrabi starts. Later in the month, I directed seeded rows of carrots, along with fennel and celery starts. Being as it was still very wet and quite cold at nights. I used cedar lumber and rolls of thin plexiglass that someone had given me a few years ago to build a number of 3’x5’ windows that I could lean together to make cold frame tunnels over the various garden patches.

Also, in mid April, I built a new climbing lattice, using branches from a fallen alder tree. Near the end of the month I moved the climbing pea starts from the greenhouse and planted them out around the lattice. Since it was still cold and wet, especially during the nights, I leaned some of the new cold-frame windows against the lattice to help give a slightly better climate for them to survive. Once again, most people will direct-seed their peas, but on this property, it helps to transplant the starts.
Meanwhile, plenty of kale and chicory and other greens from last fall and winter were all exploding with new leaves and later with florets that were delicious and plentiful while waiting for the new greens to become established. This year, my plan is to focus more attention on growing a great winter garden. As well, certain plants can be planted in late summer so that they are almost mature by the time winter sets in. Then, in the first warmth of the new spring, they will suddenly finish their cycle with plenty of new growth, leaves and florets, during the late winter and early spring, just as we are craving fresh produce.

A Garden Post: February - March, 2011

I’ll admit that I’m not much of a blogger. I don’t write and post my daily moment-by-moment thoughts, nor do I update my status throughout the day. I just don’t understand how people can do that, and still get their non-blog life accomplished in any meaningful way. It’s impressive, but baffling.
Another factor is that I don’t appreciate posted work that is so raw as to be endlessly repetitive and confused. So I do at least one edit before posting. However, as any gardener/farmer/writer knows, by the time someone is finished settling an idea as a written piece, there is already a line-up of projects to do – and to write about. And so I often convince myself to delay the writing until that next stage of the garden or construction is complete before putting down in words. Another month goes by with nothing written, again and again.

So this will be an attempt to catch up on a few of my own notes. It’s raining lightly this afternoon, just enough to keep me from pulling out my carpentry tools and continue building the small cottage for my brother and his wife on their neighbouring property.

I’ll go back a few months and when this year’s summer garden began.

In early February, I took the Ferry to Comox and met with Larry from Denman Apples. He had come from his orchard on Denman Island, bringing a selection of 16 apple, plum and pear trees (some 1 –year whips, others that were 2 or 3 years old with a nice branching pattern already established). These were all bare-root stock, so I had to get to work digging holes, mixing in a certain amount of compost and fracturing the surrounding walls of the hole with a pick, before putting all of them in the ground.
On the open area of this property, we now have about 50 fruit and nut trees growing, with about 2/3s of that, mature enough to produce a good amount of fruit each year. The others will be 1–4 years from producing much fruit – depending on their age, and on the type of root-stock selected to grow on. Few things feel better to me than planting a fruit or nut tree, or some sort of perennial producer such as blueberry bushes or asparagus, knowing that they are now in the ground and soon will be giving us fresh and wonderful food. Many of them will be doing this for the rest of my life. Plenty of reason to start planting today.



Here, on the so-called Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, garden season can continue all throughout the year -even without a green-house or cold frames, although they will definitely add a large amount of production and variety to the garden harvest during the winter months. That said, work on the summer gardens usually picks up energy during March or April, depending on the climate patterns during that particular year. This year has been a particularly cool and cloudy and somewhat wetter spring season, with many flowers, trees and plants hesitating before showing themselves. Without a greenhouse or cold-frames to help out, many gardens have been 3 or 4 weeks behind the average season.

After last year’s experience, I realize that growing food is a lot easier if I exercise a little more patience rather than eagerly getting the seeds started indoors and then hoping (usually in vain) that this year the heat and sunshine will come earlier than normal. That said, I still planted many seeds, (peas, tomatoes, kales, scallions, broccoli, herbs, etc.) indoors in late March. Another few weeks delay would have been wise, but I just can’t wait that long. I usually start them by on a table in front of a large window in the house. The room is warm and cozy with the woodstove burning for heat.
March is a mostly a good month to be planning the garden,, sorting through the big bag of saved seeds to check inventory, and working compost and manure (as much as you can gather) into the beds. Last fall I seeded many of the plots with fall rye and legumes. These should be turned into the soil to break down. Usually it takes 4-6 weeks to break down to the optimum level for planting new vegetables
By the end of the month, I had about 8 flats of seeded containers resting in my warmest and brightest window. Since my house is an off-grid location (ie. I have no power hook-up to BC Hydro) I do not use grow lights, and the heat comes from the woodstove in my small house.

New Gardens

New Gardens

This year we’ve expanded the gardens by two or three times of what we had last year. Yet it’s still just a start of what we hope to build.
It is only mid-May, and I have to admit that I let my enthusiasm get away on me a couple of times, so that I wasted a certain amount of effort by starting seeds weeks ahead of the season, and transplanting some starts outside too early as well. It just means that I had to start over again. The garden is teaching me patience and peace of mind.

The land here has a wide mix of growing conditions. The back garden has some decent soil mixed with clay. All of that garden area holds on to good moisture, even during long, hot dry stretches. In some sections I have mixed in extra sand and/or peat to loosen the soil and improve drainage. At present I have started garlic, artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes, climbing peas, kale, chicory, leeks, potatoes, carrots, blueberries, gooseberries, red currants, strawberries, broccoli, brussel sprouts and various herbs. By the end of the month we will transplant various squash, cucumbers, melons, cabbage, bush beans and tomatillos into this area.
The front gardens are a series of winding raised beds. We plan to add to this garden since it gets the best sun exposure on the property. We have built up most of the soil in this section, mixing topsoil, sand, peat, compost, manure, seaweed, etc.. In the less exposed beds lettuce, kohlrabi, turnips, various Chinese greens, radishes, parsley, spinach, garden cress, carrots, broccoli, brussel sprouts and chard are growing. In other beds there are more climbing and bush peas, many herbs, broccoli, arrugula, kale and sunflowers. Within the next couple weeks we will transplant about a dozen varieties of tomatoes that are now growing in the small green house.

By planting small amounts in various areas, I hope to discover this year what plants work best in each area, and under what soil conditions.
The new and large area that will be opened up after building the new driveway, will have less than full sun exposure(depending on how many trees we decide to cut), and is almost completely sand and sandy clay in some areas. In other words, even if we bring in extra soil to build beds or plant trees, the area will be ‘extremely’ well-drained. That said, there should be plenty of water for moderate but consistent irrigation.

** If experienced gardeners/farmers have suggestions concerning what to plant in this area, I would appreciate their advice. *** We plan to seed native grasses over the entire area as well so as to be able to raise small animals (poultry, rabbits, ducks??) starting next year – for meat, eggs, and manure.

Beyond all of these gardens, the property has about a 10 or 11 mature apple and plum trees, along with another dozen young plum and apple varieties donated to me by gardening friends in Victoria.
I am waiting for the machine-work to complete the new driveway and landscape terraces by early June so that I can plant 14 more potted fruit trees (7 types of cherries, and the rest are pears, plums and apples) into the ground, as well as a number of fig trees and other berry bushes.

After three weeks of sunshine and almost no precipitation, it has started to rain steady and beautiful this afternoon. I’ll have a mess of black slugs to deal with, but the gardens will love the moisture.