Posted on April 26th, 2011 by Joel Russ
Pear buds are quite swollen, and apple buds just a bit behind. I’m glad I’ve got my pruning done. Actually, today I spent time pruning our grape vine – which is not budded-out yet, though in cutting any of the larger vine branchings the vine will bleed a fair bit. No matter, it seems. I’ve [...]
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Posted on April 4th, 2011 by Joel Russ
Brian Minter – a media celeb and one of BC’s great gardening gurus – said recently on CBC Radio that gardening conditions in the province as a whole are running three weeks late. (And his impressions may be skewed by the conditions of the BC Coast!) A lot of Kootenay people are lookin’ hang-dog over [...]
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Posted on March 23rd, 2011 by Joel Russ
Not sure which is the more exciting facet of spring here at the moment… I’ve got young ‘plant starts’ showing themselves, and I’ve also tapped a maple tree and am boiling-down some maple sap as I write this. Well, first of all, very satisfying to see the little sprouts and leaves in our seedling-start trays [...]
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Posted on March 10th, 2011 by Joel Russ
It’s a fine time of the year when – despite crusty snow and winter’s heavy skies hanging on – I can feel the approach of the upcoming gardening season. What makes feeling this approach all the more vivid is that I’m now involved with propagating the seedlings that we’ll be using for plants we’ll grow [...]
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Posted on February 26th, 2011 by Joel Russ
Our late-winter seed organization has come along nicely. Seed selection proceeds from the point of knowing which vegetables you want your garden to provide for you, to the selection of actual varieties – based on considerations of how many frost-free growing days you’ll likely have, the general temperature regime of your site, the garden’s soil [...]
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Posted on February 16th, 2011 by Joel Russ
Now is about the time when Kootenay food gardeners start thinking seriously about seeds – about acquiring them, and maybe getting ready to plant seedling “starts” indoors. When planning a garden for annual food crops, you need to decide what veggies you want to grow – cabbage, radishes, lettuce, peas, carrots, kale? Particularly for newer [...]
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Posted on October 19th, 2010 by Joel Russ
Well, we’ve had two real frosts, the second one (two nights ago) definitely qualifying as a “killing frost.” Back about three weeks ago, I worked up a swath of ground for planting garlic. It goes in as cloves the the fall, overwinters, then in the spring the cloves send up green shoots and begin to [...]
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Posted on September 26th, 2010 by Joel Russ
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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Posted on September 19th, 2010 by Joel Russ
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 [...]
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Posted on September 16th, 2010 by Joel Russ
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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