kalegrower

Strathcona community garden at dusk

Yesterday evening I accepted my friend’s invitation to visit Strathcona Community Garden. This is the third year that she has had a plot at the garden, and her space contains more food than my garden does. She has a green thumb which she takes for granted, having inherited it from her farming family.

Great picture of my friend standing next to her verdant garden. You can see that her thumb really isn’t green. From this picture you can get a sense of how large the collards actually are. The giant tomatoes are not visible in this picture.

A close up of buckwheat (with the white flowers) and wheat. In the background are her neighbour’s purple beans and kale.

Seriously inspiring: chickpeas. I might try to grow some next year as well. The chickpeas grow in individual pods, unlike peas and beans.

The aforementioned super-gigantic collards, enough to feed a family of eight…for about a month. You can use the leaves as taco shells if you are a raw foodie.

These artichokes were blooming on someone else’s plot, but were so pretty I had to take a picture.

The Strathcona community garden has a wild feel and even though it was still light, there were few other people around. The space is unexpectedly large, especially at the south end where the arbor and huge orchard are located. We admired how gardeners’ style is reflected in their choice of vegetation and how they maintain their space; some really try to maximize the vegetable yields and have fig trees and grapes. Others balance it out with flowers. A great evening, right at the peak of summer.

More info: strathconagardens.ca/

A green bean advisory has been issued for the lower mainland. To help mitigate the risks of vegetable abundance, residents are advised to pick all beans and zucchinis as early and as small as possible and to consume immediately. Residents are advised to consult online resources for innovative ways to deal with vegetables including freezing, sautéing, baking, boiling and blanching. Raw consumption is discouraged except for those with particularly robust digestive systems.

With the hot dry weather, the risk of a mild kalenado persists. However, the threat of zucchinocalypse has passed. Authorities would like to thank all those who helped to relocate all oversized zucchinis.

The next vegetable advisory announcement is expected later this week.

Umberto Pasti published an essay about gardening a few weeks ago in T magazine and also on the NYT blog.

The line that resonated most with me is this: “The only piece of advice that, after two decades of gardening, I feel I should give to those just starting out is the following: Think long and hard before eliminating any form of vegetable life.”

Read the whole essay online here and see the photos:

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/umberto-pasti-gardening-advice/?_r=0

Also take a few minutes to read some of the comments. Some were thoughtful, others made me laugh.

We are in the raspberry days of summer and have been picking a huge bowl every second day. Many don’t even make it into the bowl – they just go from branch to hand to mouth to stomach. Some days we just eat them straight up, and on other days I have been making raspberry ice cream.

I can’t get enough of poppies. Currently two types of red ones are growing next to my driveway – regular red poppies and super-red poppies. I was going to select for the super-red poppies by pulling up  the regular ones, but haven’t had the heart to pull up anything so beautiful.

I take pictures of poppies everywhere. A few more pictures from a past road trip. These were taken somewhere between the medieval town of Valderrobes and Horta Sant Joan  in Spain.

A few months ago I wrote about how The Man was going to convert some of our existing lawn to “meadow” as a way to save on water and to hopefully prevent another chaffer beetle infestation. At this point in time, I am happy to report that the experiment seems to be a success….

This is the upper lawn area, seeded with wildflower seeds.

These small flowers are in the lower lawn area – this was planted with a “grass alternative” from West Coast Seeds. Small flowers…very pretty.

This is another part of the lower lawn. Lots of small daisies….i hope that some of these end up self-seeding for next year.

Nav holding one of the frames while Bryn inspects the hive.

My friend Nav came over this Saturday to meet all 40,000 of our pet bees and to participate in the biweekly hive inspection. After putting on the super fashionable bee hat, she helped Bryn by gently smoking the hive to make the bees go inside and very calmly held onto the frames while Bryn was moved everything around.

Both hives are thriving. Bryn was able to identify new larvae in each of the hives, and found the Hawaiian queen in hive 1. He gently reached into the bees with his bare hands, grabbed the queen, and marked her with a small spot of blue marker (see below). We saw some frames with honey, and others with pollen. A few had mostly babies and had capped honey around the edges. Overall, the bees in both hives are quite docile; even though there are lots of bees in the hives, they don’t make too much of a fuss when the hive is opened and things get moved around.

It was a super-fun morning. Nav was super-calm and thanks to Bryn for showing us the hive and for answering all our questions!

Bryn marking the queen.

The queen is in the centre of the frame (see blue dot).

Bryn showing us a frame that has bee larvae in the centre of the frame and cells of capped honey around the outside of the frame.

This is a picture of Nav smoking. Ha ha. Smoking bees. Ha ha ha. No seriously, Nav is smoking the bees so that they will retreat and let Bryn take out the frames with his bare hands.

Bees patiently waiting on the peas until Bryn and Nav are finished.

Tree canopy at the UBC Botanical Garden

On the weekend we decided to take a break from working in our own garden to visit the nearby UBC Botanical Garden. That garden is always a source of inspiration and every time I am there I notice something new. Here are a few of the things I like the best about UBC Botanical Garden:

1. A variety of different environments

The garden includes rainforests (above), water gardens, a formally planted herb garden and arid areas (among others). The mix is nice, and doesn’t get tiring.

2. A food garden

The UBC Botanical Garden has a productive and visually pleasing food garden. Vegetables growing in beds, surrounded by kiwis, grapes and espalier applies. The best part? All the food grown in the garden is given to to charity.

A view of the UBC Botanical Garden veggie garden

Another view, with poppies in the foreground.

 3. Making great use of what you have.

The Man was looking for xeroscaping alternatives so we spent a lot of time in the alpine garden. This is positioned in an exposed dry spot, which is perfect for these little plants, but probably not for anything else.

4. Mystery features

The garden has a small amphitheater at the north end which includes a truly bizarre “champagne glass” fountain. I haven’t heard of this being used for anything like plays or performances. One great feature (and possible source of inspiration) was the wall. Although the amphitheater is obviously new and thoroughly modern, the wall was built with striated concrete (including a few layers of small rocks) to give it a kind of “ancient feel”. Love that.

Amphitheater at the UBC Botanical Garden. Notice the champagne glass fountain on the right.

This wall is in the top centre of the picture above. Notice the striations and layers of rock.

Overall rating: top marks for interest, variability and emptiness. Mid-day Sunday and there were few people there.

I love peas, but normally don’t have much luck growing them. This  year I planted Oregon peas from West Coast Seeds. Every day I have been harvesting a huge handful of snap peas which we’ve been eating raw with hummus or lightly steamed. I planted them in two big batches so now the first batch is almost gone, the second batch is starting. One to remember for next year….

One of the first raspberries of 2015

Raspberries are my absolute favorite fruit. I devote more time and effort into caring for my raspberry bushes than any thing else in the garden. The first raspberries started to ripen earlier this week, but I didn’t see my first red one until today (someone else was eating them). It’s been a very hot, dry month and the bushes are full of flowers, bees and immature berries, so I am hoping for an abundant crop this year.

This has also been an incredibly busy month with the garden and with life in general. As one of my friends said “May is the new June!”, so I have had no time to write about all the hive updates. Several weeks ago Art and Bryn brought over a hive with a new queen bee that had just been imported from Hawaii. They removed the frames from the old hive, knocked the bees into the grass and put the half-finished frames into the new hive. The rationale is that most of the bees will make it back to the new hive except the worker layer, who in the queen’s absence, had been laying multiple eggs in each cell in the queens absence. Although we didn’t see the queen, within a week we could see the new larvae so we know she is active.  In the picture below you can see the honey.

Last weekend Art dropped off a new hive that had been fertilizing Fraser Valley blueberries. This is a SUPER FEISTY hive and every time I walk past it, I get hit by bees and get bees in my hair. Here is a picture of the new hive and a panorama of the back garden showing the relative locations of the hives.

Everything is now growing fast and every day we get to eat spinach, chard, lettuce or kale every day. Over a week ago I planted pole beans, basil, zucchini and cucumber seeds which are being eaten as fast as they spout. One morning I counted 14 cucumber sprouts, and by the next day they were all gone.

Busy weekend ahead of watering, weeding and re-planting ahead….enjoy the sun everyone!