We live in a gated community with no personal land, so in 2010 I signed up for our first community garden plot. We added a second plot a couple of years later. Four hundred square feet can produce an astonishing amount of fresh organic vegetables, satisfying the deep need to be personally responsible for at least some of our food supply. With retirement approaching I longed for another small piece of land with less restrictions and more possibilities. Out of that yearning grew the miracle. Just before my retirement, a co-worker put me in touch with a small farm owner who had some private growing space to rent. We started gardening there in 2019. At first we kept all the plots, but gardening allotments in two different locations was overwhelming, as was the amount of food we were producing. At the end of the growing season in 2022, we released our original plots and settled down to grow food on the private farm only. Now we have 560 square feet to work with, which seems just about right. Growing, eating, sharing, and putting by our own fresh vegetables and herbs fills my life with joy.
This page serves to collect all my posts in the gardening category of this website, with the newest being at the top of the page. Hopefully the post dates make that clear. From 2011 to 2013, I kept a WordPress site of my early gardening experiences at the original community garden. If you’d like, you can look through those at https://bushgarden.wordpress.com/ A few of those earlier posts are also reproduced here because the memories of gardening with my granddaughters are so precious.
Urban Food Growing Books
These sun scarce months give us time to dream and plan next year’s gardens. Do you have even a pocket of land you’d like to convert to growing food? To help you turn small spaces into food gardens, here is a shortlist of books I highly recommend.
Seed Saving Skills
For most of my gardening life, I’ve merrily gone along browsing instore seed racks and pouring over seed catalogs to plan my food growing. I never gave seed supply a second thought. But … what if one day there weren’t enough seeds to go around?
Chard Not Cabbage Rolls
A few years ago, as often happens at the garden, I was chatting with a stranger. When I told her I had no use for Swiss chard and didn’t grow it, she was shocked. “It makes the very best cabbage rolls,” she told me. Turns out she was right.
Peace Tea Garden
In pain? Jittery? Anxious? Restless? Out of sorts? There’s a plant for that!
I have discovered many plants with known soothing properties that are easy to grow in a small space. This might be the time to consider creating a peace tea garden.
Saving Seeds
Food security. What can we do to make sure we’re not completely dependent on business systems to provide our food? Growing some our own vegetables brings us a little closer to the goal. Saving seeds is the next step to additional self-sufficiency.
Starting Seeds Indoors
Do you want to maximize your garden space and grow even more fresh food? Do you want to grow varieties you can’t find as bedding plants? Start seeds indoors to get the most out of your vegetable garden and the local growing season.
Drought and Sunshine
Posts to my blog have been scarce during the summer of 2021. I found my concerns over the drought, heat wave, forest fires and pandemic sapped a lot of my creative energy. And the abundant harvest demanded so much of my time. Ironic?
Grill Bolting Buttercrunch
Abundant lettuce meets unseasonably hot, sunny weather. The lettuce is stressed so instead of forming a nice leafy heads, it bolts. I hated to pull them. How about grilled bolting buttercrunch?
Searching for Seeds
Are seed shortages a concern again in 2021? Maybe I should sort my inventory and place my vegetable garden order early this year. So here I am searching for seeds in mid-January.
Pepper Production 2020
Today, just in time for National Pepper Month and National Hot Sauce Day, here is a detailed report of our pepper production from Jim’s garden this year. As a result of his almost fanatical zeal for hot peppers, we have fresh peppers, frozen peppers, dried peppers,...
End of June Garden II
The Secret Garden The gated community where we live is a dream come true. Mature trees, gardens, ponds, beautiful views, wonderful neighbours, great strata council. The only thing that we both really miss is personal land to grow food, make compost, and experiment...
End of June Garden
The spring planting scramble is a thing of the past and we are starting to enjoy the first fruits of our labour. It occurred to me that a look at what’s been keeping me busy (and tired) might be of interest, especially to all my urban gardening friends. We live in a...
Too Much Zucchini?
There Is No Such Thing as Too Much Zucchini My growing space is small, so when people see that I have two hills of summer squash, both zucchini, they're sure I must be a beginner gardener who doesn't have a clue about how much those hills are going to produce....
Yes, Virginia …
... that really is a zucchini. And now we see what happens when we don't check carefully under all the leaves!
Jack and the Beanstalk
When our family came to visit the garden, the granddaughters were delighted with everything. They each got to pull a carrot. How magical to see that perfect orange vegetable appear out of the dirt. Felicity, age three, was almost defeated by her carrot's...
Fall Seed Bed
Technically, my fall planting was probably too late in the season, but it just might produce because of the unusually warm and dry weather we've had this year. Still no rain in over two months. That is setting records for our west coast rain forest climate. We still...
Fall Harvest
We went to the garden on Sunday with our two oldest granddaughters to get supplies for our Thanksgiving feast. They were delighted to each harvest a big butternut squash. Picking basil was more of a challenge since the plants are pretty bedraggled. We thought they'd...
Squash on a Trellis
This is a first for us. It's fun to see spaghetti squash hanging two feet off the ground. Our trellis has six well-formed squashes on it so far. Jim assures me that nothing will take down this trellis. It's made from metal electrical conduit piping anchored with rebar...
Killdeer
I can't help thinking of these adorable birds as clowns. They call out their name, "Killdeer, killdeer," to get your attention, and then run away, staying just out of reach. They never get so far ahead that you'll be discouraged from following them, or close enough...
One Week into July
Finally, this is looking like the garden we dreamed of. Some squares of the grid have been harvested already, some are in production, and some are well on their way. The east side, on the left, shows a hill of butternut squash, one spaghetti squash, the unfinished...
Lamb’s-Quarters
Okay, so everybody has their little hobbies. One of mine just happens to be edible weeds. I know, it's a little weird. But I have good authority for it, no less than Euell Gibbons, beloved guru of the nature-loving sixties, and our thoroughly reliable National Museum...
Water
The soil is so moist that there's no real need to water the newly sown seeds. But we knew what the sign said: Sow Weed Water Wait We'd supplied ourselves with watering cans, so we couldn't dream of leaving until we did the watering step. Jim and the girls made the...
Sow
We smoothed out the soil and Abby searched through all the seed packets to find the radishes. Then she had a sixty-second lesson on square-foot-gardening. We were planting two squares, thirty-two radishes. I marked out the grid and her nimble fingers did a great job...
Sow Weed Water Wait
Garden Rules Sow Weed Water Wait Abby read out this sign in the greenhouse as we selected our equipment to load up in the wheelbarrow and take over to our plot. We introduced our two oldest granddaughters to the community garden on Sunday. As I expected, they were...
Learning to Love the Earth
I feel pretty passionate about teaching children to cherish God's creation. The earth gives us so many gifts. It's important to receive them with gratitude and respect. Food growing from a tiny seed? Well, all I can say is that it's a miracle – one every child should...
A Thing of Beauty
Jim spent most of yesterday afternoon crafting the rest of the framework for our grid garden. He used four 2"x8"x10' spruce boards for the length and one 1"x8"x8' spruce board cut into four 2-foot pieces for the joiners. The ends are screwed to the outside frame with...
This Weekend in Plot 99
The next step in the preparation of our new garden plot is to frame the centre path. Our garden is 10'x20' and the beds will be 4'x20' so that leaves a path about two feet wide, minus the thickness of the lumber. diagram My job on Saturday was to clear out the soil...
Vermiculite
We began stage two today. While Jim rototilled in the first layer of mushroom compost, I purchased the vermiculite and peat moss. From what I've read on the Square Foot Gardening forums, it seems that vermiculite is hard to find, so I was happy to get it from a local...