A WELL time May vacation ended up allowing me a chance to visit my friends out in Golden BC AND to get a bunch completed in the garden.  All this great work. 

Hallelujah!  My haskap berries are coming back hard.  Holy smokes did they ever look dead to me.  It was hard to get a good shot of them cause they blended right in with the soil.  There are certainly some dead branches but consistent watering this spring has remedied the lack of leaves.  Lesson learned?  Have patience when shrubs appear died back!  I pulled out the ugliest, and deadest looking plant (a hydrangea) far too early and I’m worried it didn’t need to go when it did.

Behind the water barrel and between the garden bed and the berry bed, there sits a Lovage plant:

 Lovage is a herb that is very remenicent of celery in taste.  The leaves are dead ringers for celery but the stalks of celery are much tamer in taste and easier to chew.  Both having a niche in cooking really.    It will grow to be a 5-6 ft bush and crowd out the corners of the beds but it can be tamed with sheering (horray food for compost!).  It’s also hardy to Zone 2 which is still far north of us.  Right now, I think the watering has worn down some of the soil from around the edge of the plant and it needs a bit of building up as branches are starting to fall.  Beyond that you can see the garlic leaning towards the sun and lookin’ dang happy doing it.  Only expecting just over a dozen bulbs.  I planted, almost 24 so i hope that, at least the good bulbs came through.

A pepper plant that was busting up and all my basil have died.  Here they still have a few whifts of green on their lives but dang, they died completely.  I also had 3 melon transplants as well as a squash transplant.  This is what the plants look like dead: 

All of this is either died or dying.  I think the culprit is soil that has not been sufficiently warmed for those plants though it could just be the weather still.  It’s the first time I’ve tried to grow all those things except the basil.  It’s also, with the exception of the tomato issues from a couple year ago, the only thing that has died under my garden care. 

I’m surprised by how botherred I am by this though.  “They are dead plants”,  “Get over it,” say you.  Indeed, I should and I will.  Probably when I  buy another pepper and more basil plants as well as plant out some squash seeds and a melon transplant but for now I’m bummed. 

I’ve just found out there is a certified “Master Organic Gardenner” at my workplace.  Handy!  She informed me that ALL those plants that died (as well as my tomatoes), should have been planted in the ground AFTER JUNE 1 in Edmonton!  Well, my tomatoes are kickin’ it, hardcore green style but they seem to be the sole survivors.

The leeks, though still skinny, are definitely growing.  The spinach is ready for some grazing to begin and the onions are almost at the “eat as green onion” stage.

I just planted the corn seeds in the back bed last week and I finished planting the remainder of the beets, beans and (most of the) peas.  I consider it LATE to get the corn in so I will keep my fingers crossed and ground moist and hopefully get some tastey ears of corn.

I also just got the lawn aerated and then I SOAKED it today.  It feels a bit softer but apparently it needs soaking for the next week or two.  I hate wasting water on the lawn so i hope it rains a bunch (saturday sounds promising..maybe i’ll seed then….).

Plastic bag cloches?  Waste.  Not useable.

My pepper plant is officially ko’ed; pulled it out this morning.  My basil looks pretty deathly ill.  I’m realizing that “frost sensitive” really just means they don’t like cold at all.  We’ve been well away from frost for all but one day (I consider 2C well away as our yard is DEFINITELY not a frost pocket) but the basil certainly has some sad lookin’ discolouration.  I’ll take some pictures for the next post.

Tax dollars indicate frost warning:

http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/city/pages/ab-50_metric_e.html

Yurg.  No cloches.  Don’t feel like cutting the bottoms out of 10 milk jugs which, I was told, I could not then take in to recycling.  Have a tonne of plastic bags….

hmmm….

These are my frost sensitive plants covered for the night.  This process is about 4 minutes and there are 9 things covered.  I have melon cucumber, pepper, basil and tomato covered.  If I were more paranoid, I’d put 500ml water bottles with very warm water and leave them in the bags.

The process is thus: Take plastic bag.  Place it open side over the plant and on the ground.  Bury it, very informally with dirt around its edge. 
Pull the top middle of the bag to  create a peak in the middle of it.

Quick note: I know this potentially frosty night will still have very calm air so I just peak the bag and bury the rim but if it were windy, those bags would be totally gone.

That’s it.  My next post is an inventory of my work in the garden so I’ll make a point of commenting on the success (or lack of) around the cloches.

Earlier in this blog, I wrote a fairly lengthy post on composting and how utterly radical it is: http://anotherbackyard.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/the-almighty-compost/.  Well, I’m happy to say that my composting set up is now finally a bit more permanent.

When I first set up a compost, I bought that very rigid black plastic perforated sheet with green sticks.  It would be absolutely IDEAL for holding leaves and letting them rot into the ground.  BUT, for heavier waste and kitchen waste, it was not rigid or strong enough.  So it would not be a permanent home.The plastic stuff (and the pile itself) ended up looking something like this:

Admitedly, uuuuuuuuugly!

The first year of our garden, we put that black plastic semicircle in the place where we were going to grow tomatoes the next year.  The thinking was that we’d get some GREAT leachate going through the compost pile into the soil and that we’d be able to fork some of the compost on the bottom into the soil after we moved it, making that soil “wicked awesome!”

I would STRONGLY recommend people do that!  I found that, with NO other real soil ammendments to speak of, the tomato plants did UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME!…. Right up until “The Blight” hit.  Something killed those plants in a matter of a couple weeks, six gorgeous, heavy laden plants were wilting, brown and gross.  For that reason, I would ALSO STRONGLY recommend that you put a GOOD mulch under your tomato plants (especially after having compost there the previous year).  There are so many microorganisms in the soil that are bound to cause you trouble that when rain splashes on the ground, they find a way to those bottom leaves and in no time, death.  So lesson there?  MULCH!  It so put me off tomatoes, I didn’t think I’d grow them in the garden again for at least 5 years (I was not happy).  Next year, I did the hanging tomatoes instead (last year’s posts discussed THAT success).

After the front corner that was the tomato home, I moved the compost to the back corner along the fence.  I had a Manitoba Maple (a tree that is an insidious weed) whose suckers I hoped to bury in gunk).  That only “kind of” worked.  Smothering the saplings with huge rhubarb leaves seemed to do much better, but even that was temporary.

As for that corner compost pile (still in that silly plastic thing), the plan was to put potatoes in that spot there the next year.  When completed, I found that the potato plants did absolutely NOTHING special that year.  Perhaps I wasn’t watering them frequently enough (a running theme it seems) but they actually seemed a bit gangly and unhappy looking.  The potato crop also wasn’t anything special to talk about (though I didn’t do any of that “building up” around the plant to increase the yields.

After the potato experiment, I figured it was time to give the compost a more permanent home.  I built a single bin last year openning into the garden.  It looked nice and functioned well but I didn’t turn it enough and didn’t think I was getting enough into my composter.  In it’s first, more permanent version, it looked like this:

So THIS year, I figured, the last change would be to put a second bin in so I would have stuff starting off and finishing up at the same time.  Now it’s settled and not moving any place.  I have two big ugly pieces of plywood to block out the look of the pile.  I plan to make a little painting on the boards so they look a bit more playful and far less “stark and dull”.

You see the pile of dead grass, leaves and straw beside that bin?  Well that is there for every time I toss a bucket of kitchen compost on the pile.  Into the pile goes about the equivalent weight of the dried stuff (realistically, probably only about 1/4 the weight but it appears to be enough.)  The blog post listed above provides a more thorough explanation of proper composting.

The first two years when I was more on top of my composting, it made some unbelievably great product.  It smelled like a mixture of earth with a hint of chocolate and fruit.  It was wonderful.  When spread on the garden, it did a wonderful job of getting nutrients to the soil.  I used (and continue to use) virtually no fertilizer past the first planting (when I put transplants in, I usually give one bath of a root stimulator and then that’s it).

As a last method of composting, I will be giving “composting tea” a try this year.  To make compost tea, you need a shovel full of almost all done compost; a pale (though I may use a wheelbarrow), a burlap sack or nylon.  Basically, you brew the stuff like you would tea (but you don’t heat it); just let it sit in there, and give it a VIGOROUS stir a couple times a day (this allows the microorganisms that are breaking down the soil and stuff to remain active and keeps the tea from becoming “anaerobic” (no oxygen) which makes it stink.  In lieu of a stir, I hope I can find someone with an unused fish bubbler that I can use for a few days.  I will post about that process (with some pictures) in about a month.  I’m excited for that because compost tea seems to be the most concentrated version of acommercial grade fertilizer you can make with completely organic gardenning.

The most important thing to note about composting is that it feeds dirt NOT plants.  The great thing about that is, if you have good dirt, you have good plants.  Fertilizers feed plants not dirt.  That does not improve the quality of your soil.  That makes fertilizer good for production but a terribly longer term solution to the problem of poor soils.

So did compost help my garden?  Absolutely yes.  But it helps it in slow and subtle ways; it creates a longer lasting (and deeper) cycle of life.  My FAVOURITE thing gardenning has taught me is the skills of delayed satisfaction.  Nothing wonderful happens right away and it all takes work.  Compost takes that to a new level.  Because it happens slowly and, while you know it IS good for the garden, you can never put your finger on EXACTLY how good.  You just have to trust that all those bacteria are doing the things that they were intended to do.

So I went to a local community farm to pick up some brilliant aged manure for the garden.  What a fantastic place!  20$ for enough manure to take care of all of my backyard beds and gardens.  HORRAY!  Of course, that ends up being a lot of lifting and carrying.  But, it’s sooooo good!  I also picked up some peat moss.  For a long time i thought it didn’t seem right to buy peat as it was denuding a nonrenewable resource, then I realized I’m still using it for a noble purpose and so i bought 2 bags….(heavier than I remember as a kid that’s for sure).

I also finished up our paving stone seating area under the pine tree.  Unfortunately, I forgot the colour of the original stones and I ended up getting grey stones instead of the white ones.  So, after taking some of my extra stones from other places, I’ve managed to arrange them so that it looks okay.

It looks pretty good but I’m wondering about why the grey stones were made 1/2 inch shorter and narrower.  Oh well.  There is now a cross shaped gap which will be filled in with some good earth and a creeping ground cover.  I wanted some green somewhere on that patio and now I guess I get it!

After mixing some of the manure in, the strawberries went into their new home.  Strawberries are not to finnicky regarding soil quality but they do like a lot of organic matter (hence, the manure but no peat moss).

Strawberries propagate like mad and i expect at LEAST twice as many plants by next year.

My Haskup berries…poor things.  I clearly under watered them and now, only in the most barest of ways are they surviving.  I’m gonna have to take better care of them this year if I want to see ANY berries this year OR next.

I’m pretty sure most of those branches are dead and I think I’ll have to cut them all out.  YARG!  They are covered with bark chips to conserve moisture… now, step two is making sure moisture gets down to the roots.

Lastly, my most prized thing.  A couple weeks ago, I doubled my compost bin.  I’m so happy with that.  I have some fantastic looking stuff going on and I can’t wait to huck it into the garden. Those plywood boards are a pretty intense yellow.  My intention is to paint a lovely little scene on those…but that may be later in the summer anyways.  We now have a pile of dry “browns” stacked next to the compost bin.  So when we empty out our kitchen compost, we toss a few handfuls of dried stuff on it.  Kitchen waste is considered the “greens” and the dead dried stuff are the “browns” and you want, by weight, equal amounts of both.  So, I’ll keep turning it over and by the end of the summer, I’ve have some fantastic stuff to put over the garden to eat next year.

Needless to say, there were some action packed days that culminated in waking up with quite a sore back.  So I’m just relaxing now.  I can’t wait for the middle of may to begin the next big round of planting stuff!!!  See you then I’m sure!

The little depression in the garden there is where I planted the leek.  As they get bigger, you cover them with soil which will make the white bits of leek longer and makes the leek themselves bigger.

So you don’t want to visit the library to get a garden book?  Well, I can tell you when i’ll be planting stuff outside. 

For Edmonton, our AVERAGE last frost date is May 7.  Our 90% last frost date is May Long weekend.  That is the reason why it’s so common to see people puttering about in the garden on a brilliant vacation day. 

But wait!  Why wait til then?  There are tonnes of seeds you can get into the garden far earlier than either of those dates.

Dill, garlic, shallots, leeks, peas, and onions are among the earliest seeds you can put in the ground.  In fact, I put garlic in last November.  It will be ready in later July.  Yum yum!  In my experience, spinach can get into the ground before all of those.  This year, about 2 weeks after I was able to fork the garden and not his any ice sheets, I planted the spinach (first week of April).  As it tends to have a very short growing season (my variety will bolt in about 60 days).  Once spinach is gone, it will be replaced by the delicious, feathery tall Florence Fennel.  I hope to be able to tell you about successional gardenning in July August.

I’m growing all the list but the shallots.  Everything but the dill is already in the ground.  I had saved dill seeds from last year…now I need to find them.  Somewhat unfortunately,  the leeks I planted transplants and needed some intense insulation last weekend.  They are small  BUT still green!!!

Root crops: It’s getting to be about time their time to hit the dirt.  We have seed potatoes, beets and radishes to huck in the ground.  But it looks like every root crop can go in (not counting peanuts or sweet potatoes).

Lettuce seeds can be planted in the garden now.  I have transplants for the garden so i’m just going to wait a couple weeks and put those out.

I do want to say that I’m a bit of a risk taker and i’m prepared to emergency mulch AND create a few little cloches for seedlings  that go in at the same time root crops (broccohli, cabbage, swiss chard.  Cloches are little enclosers you can put over plants to protect them from frosts.  I’ll be using milk jugs with the bottom cut out as emergency cloches. 

Incidentally, I get my actual frost free dates, and huge swaths of any garden information on this blog, from the book “The Organic Home Garden” by Patrick Lima.  I have read MANY gardenning books ffrom the library and this book has stood hands above for its  mixture of information, ease of reading and great gardenning ideas.  I have checked it out of our local library several times…then just figured I’d buy it.  I’d encourage you to do the same.  There are quite a few books out there that COULD be a great book for you, but there is also one that will be perfect.

It seems weird that I’m deciding to post this now and not, say, when I started this tiny project.  I mean, motivation for any activity is a good thing to understand.

So, why do I garden?

It passes my mind that it may be my latent hippy days coming through as some kind of bond to the earth. Perhaps it’s a skill set I want to be proficient at in the case of a post apocalyptic survival scenario.  It’s frequently crossed my mind that I simply love being in touch with dirt and earth and life; microscopic and unseen.

For better or worse, these are all contributors to the odd reasons I love gardening.  Thankfully, there are still others that aren’t quite so “quirky”. 

It’s a nice make work activity and is better than sitting watching tv by a dang site.  The smell of good compost, a garden after rain, or lilacs are each enough to sustain me.  It’s great that you can grow your own food; both for taste, and a sense of accomplishment.

One of the great healing aspects of gardening, in my opinion, is that it demands your “here and nowness”.  You need to be paying attention and thinking about what you’re doing to do a decent job.  But with that said, it is not some terribly taxing mental escapade.  The expectations are simple “Looks like those two leeks need a bit more water; I better grab that dandelion; couple more days and we should be able to pick those beans”.  .  It’s like a mental/spiritual massage in it’s simplicity.  Great for anxiety and stress too!

Another reason.  Well, frankly, if I didn’t do anything, I’d have to look off my deck at this:

I didn’t get a good “before” picture last year.  But here it is… the leaf pile not yet moved from the middle of the veggie bed.  The compost bin, still single.  The melon teepee bare.  Garlic patch still mulched.  Hay bales stacked.  Paths not yet bricked or covered.  Nothing delcious to be seen.  Let’s check back in in a few months see if that looks better.

Lastly, I garden because it honestly blows my mind some times that you put some stuff in the ground, give it water and stand back and somehow FOOD appears….FOOD…that you eat.  Out of nothin’!

Crazy.

Ahhhh……

Like a breath of fresh air on a first day of spring, today was….well, that.  The last two days have been closer to the 0C mark but the end of winter certainly approaches.  I will have next week Mon-Wed off.  I can’t wait to be getting some things into the ground!    Spinach are definitely going in and I’ve just indoor seeded some leeks for transplant in a few weeks.

Some things are sitting there raring to go.  I have two bales of hay waiting there to be spread as a nice soft mulch.  They are resting beside my extended rain barrel.  In the front corner, I got a leaf holding plastic “cage” composting container.  I just filled it half way with a bunch of leaves and left it there.  Once I prepare that bed, the remainder of the leaves is going over to the corn bed to be mixed in.  I’m hoping that at least some nutrients leached into the ground right there.

In the far corner, you can see my tiny garlic patch covered up by a layer of all of the decaying nasturtium plants from last year.  I checked out underneath the webby mess and I only saw two tiny little sprouts (compared to a solid dozen last year….though I am several weeks earlier).

Beside the compost pile, there is a black tarp.  A bike and sundry other odds and ends are back there.  Numerous stake and teepee rigging are leaning up against the compost bin as well.  That is all going to change.  I will be putting a second compost bin in where all these things are leaning.  All of the rigging and stakes will be employed out in the garden.

The little circle patch used to be a spot for a choke cherry.  But that bush was gangly and the fruit inedible.  So I ripped it out and last year, we had our Pea-Tee-pee set up there.  It was virtually, the perfect spot.  The plan is to make it a bit more hospitable underneath so that our little one will climb in and eat peas from the inside while playing in the shelter.

I am curious as to which rhubarb will emerge as I’m fairly certain I may have ripped both of them out by mistake (oops!).

In addition to a little planting out, I intend to redo the edging of the entire garden with 2×6 cedar planking.  I’ll let y’all have a gander when I’m done.

As obvious as the hay bales are in this picture, it’s the subtle brown colour along the fence where most of this action is gonna be seen.  Amongst those wood chips is our “Haskup Berry” plants.  We got two (you need one pollenizer) and only one of which really seems to be taking off as should be expected.  This year, they will both get more water (something that I’m pretty sure was lacking last year).  In ADDITION to that though, the far right of the bed will be a little strawberry patch.  The wood chips will be gone and the straw will take it’s place.  I figure I’ll probably put about 10 plants in.  Garden strawberries are pretty outstanding and I look forward to eating a lot next year!  The little bubble that is extending off of our deck; well that’s going to be a herb bed.  No set herbs have been selected for this bed yet (though I’m fairly certain that mint will make an appearance). I expect some lavendar and rosemary but for the most part, that is a team decision

We grew nasturtiums at the base of the deck last year and, while it looked good, I think I’d like to see a bit more variety this year.  Last year’s nasturtiums were the HUGE domes of leaves with only a few flowers poking out at the end.  I’m attributing this to my choice of using a high nitrogen fertilizer near the start and not following up with a great phosphate/potash content afterwards.

I think I may also be creating some beds around the new seating area my friend just help me put in at the tail end of last year (we were, sadly, 5 cement pads too short to get the job done).  I expect that in the next month, that will be done.

Lastly, I treated myself to something radical.  Two years ago, I bought a gardening spade for 30$ at Canadian Tire.  Nothing fancy, but I certainly figured it would do the job.  And it did for a season and a half.  Now it’s a scrap tool; used only as back up.  In addition, I bought a very nice edging spade last year; Nice until I tried it and realized how terribly weak the blade was.  So, I went to Lee Valley and picked up a stupendous shovel and garden fork pair.  These two feel like Sherman tanks; solid and strong enough to get what I need done.  I won’t mind using our old garden spade but really only in a dirt moving capacity.  I’m glad I now have a digging tool.  My great comfort in this is that I now know that I’ve bought high quality tools that I should not have to replace for YEARS.

Also got a bag for my reel mower.  No big deal…but will be able to do better with composting grass cutting, for sure.

Let’s all join hands….and go get ‘em dirty!!!!