Sharing (Sunflower Seeds) is Caring

Posted on April 14, 2014 by

Spring is convincingly here, and many plants are picking up steam, budding and leafing out and stretching and flowering.  I spent some time over the last few days planting and pruning and preparing, and it’s good to be out in the garden again, though it looks to be a very hot and very dry season.

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Seeds arrived in the mail the other day, these from my friend Alan (@cogdog), who gardens in Strawberry, AZ. He sent sunflower seeds he saved from plants grown from seeds sent to him by Jason (@draggin), who gardens in East Vancouver, BC, from seeds given to him by Harry (at the time a BC gardener), who got the seeds from The Harmony Garden Harmony Garden on the Capilano Reserve.

Squirrels ate my sunflowers last season, and I didn’t have any seeds to share, so this year I’m starting them in the nursery for protection.  I’ll move them out to the garden in a couple of weeks when they’re big and strong, and if they survive, I’ll put some in the FLC Seed Library, send some to Kate (she of Bootjack Garden fame, and an inspiring gardener besides), and share the rest forward (and backward)!

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Early Spring Seeding

Posted on March 12, 2014 by

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It’s been rather warm here over the last few days, and although we’ve had some rain, totals for the year remain quite low.  I was able to take advantage of recent rains, and scattered some seeds out in the various food forest plots – white and red clover, some carrots, and various herbs.  In other seeding news, I spent some time over the weekend starting some things in 4″ pots.  Mostly herbs – lovage, mint seeds collected from Lassen National Park, hyssop, sage, San Juan tobacco, and pimpinella, but also henbane and meadowsweet, potential ingredients for gruit, a mixture for bittering and flavoring beer that predates hopping.  I don’t brew beer myself, but I do have friends that do, and they’ve expressed interest in collaborating on some old-fashioned concoctions, such as this pilsenkraut recipe.

I also recently planted a 6-in-1 espaliered apple (I can’t quite remember the varieties), and a honeycrisp, both of which I plan to keep pruned very short, inspired by the low apple fences at the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research, which every gardener and plant enthusiast should make a point of visiting!  I hope to spend the upcoming weekend in the garden – an early spring is making for lots of early prep work…

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Wild Food

Posted on February 8, 2014 by

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Last weekend, I attended a class taught by Alicia Funk, co-author of Living Wild:  Gardening, Cooking and Healing with Native Plants of California and founder of the Living Wild Project.  I was impressed with the book and the speaker, and had the opportunity to sample a variety of wild foods, Including oak nuts (acorns), elderberry syrup, and toyon and manzanita ciders, and to take a walking tour of Soil Born Farms, an organic farm complex in Rancho Cordova, CA.

I left the class with a renewed appreciation for all of the food and medicinal plants that I am fortunate to already have growing in my food forest, including manzanita, yarrow, madrone, pine, various oaks, bay, bear clover, and gooseberry, and with a renewed commitment to planting drought-tolerant natives, especially toyon, holly leaf cherry, and sugar bush.  Though it’s been raining steadily for the last few days, we’ve got a long way to go…

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Winter – You’re Doing it Wrong

Posted on January 27, 2014 by

Despite some early snow, this has been one of the driest winters in memory, and warm besides.  What this probably means in my garden is that fruit yields will be considerably down this year.  Lots of things are starting to bud – the almond, nectarine and peach trees, the Felix Gillet quince, and the Lonicera caerulea (pictured above) – and though you wouldn’t know it from walking outside, I’m pretty sure that at some point – probably mid February – there will once again be freezing temperatures and probably snow as well, spoiling the flowers that are beginning to emerge.

This early-flowers-getting-ruined cycle happens fairly regularly, but never have I seen the plum tree in full flower in late January:

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Communal Blueberry Cuttings

Posted on January 9, 2014 by

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Spent some time this afternoon pruning and puttering and watering (!) in the garden this afternoon.  After thinning out the blueberries, I selected 30+ cuttings and potted them up in these communal pots.  In the spring, once they (hopefully) show growth – blueberries root fairly readily from cuttings, at least in my garden – I’ll tease them apart and pot them up individually in 1 gallon pots, and then plant them out in the fourth food forest plot the following spring.  The snow from a few weeks ago is long gone, and it’s been very dry and relatively warm since.  Crossing my fingers that the light rain in the forecast will arrive in the next couple of days…

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Winter In The Garden

Posted on December 15, 2013 by

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Winter is finally upon us, with freezing temps and a fairly substantial (for here) first snow. Above is the mandarin, which lived through its first winter, and which, with the appropriate babying, will hopefully live through its second.

Spent the day pruning and puttering in the garden, and dug up and transplanted into the food forest a robust, young cherry tree. There’s a mature cherry tree on the property, and this is one of its children, either a sucker or from seed – I’m not sure which. In any case, I’ve been training it and another for a few years, and this one has developed a nice low v-shaped scaffolding. I dug it up and moved it to one of the new food forest plots, where it will occupy the low tree layer, along with a plum, a hackberry, and a few figs.

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The other cherry – also a child of the big tree – produced fruit this past spring for the first time. Not much, but enough for me to hope and believe that it will continue to. I may eventually move that one as well, though it’s not in a bad spot, and I’ve been using it to hone my pruning technique over the years. Both trees produce lots of root suckers, so they’re ideal for the food forest, where some day they’ll ideally produce cherry thickets.

After I transplanted the tree, I dug up one of these root suckers and potted it up in the nursery – it’s the tall one in the foreground.  If I can get ahold of some scion wood, I’ll stick it onto one of these rootstocks (assuming it roots and lives), and I may pot up a few more for bonsai.

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Pomegranate Harvest, Blueberry Defenses

Posted on October 27, 2013 by

Spent the weekend putting the summer garden to bed – coiling up hoses, deconstructing tomato structures, pulling old plants, and harvesting green tomatoes, the few remaining peppers and purple tomatillos, and the last of this year’s pomegranates.  Biggest pomegranate harvest so far, with perhaps seven full-sized fruits and three or four smaller ones. This particular pomegranate tree has been on a predictable fruiting trajectory, each year producing more flowers and more fruit.  If it maintains its pace, there should be a dozen or more pomegranates next year.

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I also transplanted four blueberries from the nursery to the fourth of the food forest plots. In this fourth plot, I’ve planted hackberry for the canopy layer, figs as understory trees, and now blueberries in the shrub layer, plus some assorted herbs (sorrel, yarrow, cress, and others I can’t quite remember) and also garlic, shallots, elephant garlic and horseradish.  The hackberry and figs have their own individual protective cages.  To protect the blueberries from hungry deer, at least until the plants are established, I constructed this pen from t-posts, scraps of wire fencing and an old garden gate.

UntitledUnsightly, but functional!

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Five Figs and Five Hibaku Seedlings

Posted on October 5, 2013 by

Spent part of the day taking down the summer garden, and preparing rows for this year’s garlic, shallots and leeks, while gathering and snacking on stray fruits and vegetables – a few tomatoes here, a tomatillo there, a bit of a cucumber, and these figs:

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I plan to broil them on toast, topped with some delicious cheese.  The pomegranate tree really put in a good effort this season, producing three or four market-sized fruits.  I’ve got about a dozen other pomegranates around, some in the first and second food forest plots, some in the garden proper.  In six or seven years I hope to be bathing daily in pomegranate juice.

In other news, all five of the hibaku (A-bombed trees – you can read about them here) seedlings lived through the summer.  Three are hackberry, two gingko, and all will eventually be planted out in the forest.

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Fall really arrived in a definitive way this year, and so I’m hurrying to get all of the end-of-season chores done before the weather turns wet and cold.  Steve the chimney sweep is quite sure that this will be an epic winter, and I have no reason to doubt him!

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Wild Fruit, Maligned

Posted on August 6, 2013 by

IMG_3537Solanum nigrum, a small, weedy relative of the tomato and its kin, has volunteered in the garden proper, and some of the fruits are ripe. Small and seedy, it has a pleasant, lemony sort of tomato sweetness.  It’s a much maligned plant, often confused, at least in the literature, with the poisonous deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna). In Nature’s Garden, author Samuel Thayer provides a well-researched and in-depth discussion of the topic, and lands squarely in the “eat it” – after positive ID, of course – camp.  Incidentally, Nature’s Garden is a really wonderful book, as is The Forager’s Harvest by the same author, and both are a source of inspiration.  I have come to trust Thayer, and have sampled the nightshade fruits and collected black nightshade seeds to spread in various parts of the food forest.

IMG_3539The wild gooseberries that are found throughout the property, and that planted the idea of the food forest in my mind years ago are fruiting, and these too I’ve collected in order to save and germinate seeds.  I’m toying with the idea of grafting other gooseberry cultivars onto these native plants, which seem to thrive even in some of the hottest parts of the property, without care or supplemental water.  In other news, a cutting of Laurus nobilis, the Grecian Bay Laurel I planted years ago in the garden proper, has rooted!  I plan to transplant this tree as a pioneer species in a new food forest plot in the southeast corner of the property, perhaps in the fall.

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Shallot Harvest

Posted on July 4, 2013 by

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I love shallots, and their relatives – garlic, onions, leeks and elephant garlic – and this year’s harvest was the best I’ve had. I pulled the garlic a week or two ago, saving the best twenty heads (5 cloves each), for planting in October. The balance, perhaps 80 heads or so, make wonderful eating, and will probably be gone by December.

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As for the shallots, for each cluster, I’ll save one (the biggest) for planting in the garden proper, one (the smallest) for planting out in the food forest, and the rest for eating. Shallot tops make great green onions, and I’m planning to grill some up this very evening!

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