Today [I actually wrote this yesterday, Saturday, evening] was a day of mixed tasks. We’ve got about an acre of quack grass, quite besides what creeps into our veggie gardens. It’s been here since before we moved onto the property. And we generally keep it trimmed, so to the casual observer it seems like extensive [...]
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Recently, I’ve planted some sections of our larger vegetable garden with fall rye, a cover crop. These are areas where I had potatoes and garlic growing this year, and I’ve harvested those. The rye is coming up a beautiful bristly green. Fall rye competes well with weeds (and I’d rototilled the area before seeding), so [...]
Filed under: General Practices, Organic Gardening, Soil Management | 3 Comments »
I’m like all organic gardeners in that I regard the soil in my garden plots as something more than an inert material for holding moisture and anchoring the roots of plants. I see soil as a living system, involving minerals, humus and organic materials, air, water, visible organisms such as earthworms, and micro-organisms such as [...]
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After planting is finished, by some point in late spring, it seems that the main tasks are watering and weed control. We pull out loads of weeds by hand-digging each year. Thankfully, this activity is soon joined by the harvesting of radishes, early greens, and early edible-pod peas (not to mention strawberries, by June). With [...]
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At friends’ place for dinner this summer, we discovered a scrumptious hors d’oeuvre or snack that we hadn’t dreamed existed: kale chips. Maybe the first thing that struck us was how what we’d thought of as a hardy, easy-to-grow, nutritious but unversatile leafy veggie could be eaten in another way – previously, we’d felt it [...]
Filed under: Food, Vegetable Gardening | 10 Comments »
Why do we try to suppress, or work to remove, weeds? In general, they compete with our intended garden crops – both in terms of their roots competing for soil moisture and nutrients (“choking out the ‘good’ plants”), and possibly in terms of shading our crop plants from the sunlight they may need. You could [...]
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Given this year’s weather, fall seems to be coming early… a lot of things are sort of condensed, in a way. It all seems to be happening at once. But it’s simply a variation on the nature of autumn. As the apples ripen on our trees, we’re taking down and putting away our shade-cloth sun [...]
Filed under: Food, General Practices, Harvest Lessons | 2 Comments »
Some years ago, when there were not too many grape varieties being sold at the local nurseries, I bought a Steuben grape plant. The nursery considered it suitable for our Slocan Valley situation – cool-to-cold winter with snow covered ground, a growing season that often could not be counted on for more than 150-165 frost-free [...]
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“Perennials” are plants that, once properly set-in and adjusted to their location, can continue to live, produce or maintain foliage, and in some cases produce flowers year after year. Often (but not always) the term perennial is applied to plants that produce weather-resistant woody stems. We’re not talking about trees, here. And usually the term [...]
Filed under: Decorative Gardening, Soil Management, Tips & Tricks | 5 Comments »
It was at a couple of dinners at friends’ places last year that we really became aware of “fingerling” or “banana” potatoes. Good flavour, buttery smooth texture, a thin nicely edible skin – a complete delight to eat. I know we’d previously had them, but didn’t really know what they were. But when you’re eating [...]
Filed under: Food, Harvest Lessons, Vegetable Gardening | 7 Comments »