Simple Suggestion #202... Plan a garden... start small!

This idea comes from my Ministry of the Arts Calendar last week... (its image, "A Dao of Gardening" which is a quilted piece by by Karel K. Hendee is to the right). Garden planning is what I'm doing today. This morning my seed order arrived, and yesterday I planted my lettuces and spinach -- they're cold crops and can survive spring's cooler temperatures. It was great to feel the dirt in my hands. Winter has been long enough -- and it's been harder than ever to wait for gardening season!

But planning a garden is the first step. The mistake that many gardeners make right off the bat is that their dreams are bigger than they realize, and a big gardening dream requires more effort than they might be able to offer as "unseasoned" gardeners.

Fortunately for me, when I first started testing my green thumb, there wasn't much for garden space, and that may be what saved my ambitious gardener's soul. Too many wanna-be-gardeners start too big and end up overwhelmed. But I had small kids, and very little time for big dreams, so I planted two tomato plants that first year, and they did just fine because they were about all that I had time to look after. The next year, I had four tomato plants, and a little row of carrots around the edge of the tomato bed. The year after that, I got my hubby to dig up a little bit of the lawn, and we had a few more carrots, tomatoes and a couple of cukes with a wee bit of lettuce. By then, my girls were playing together in the yard, and sometimes helping me with their own little shovels and watering cans.

Twenty years later, I've got a good-sized garden, but I still make mistakes when it comes to planting... too many leeks last year, not enough cucumbers. I guess the trick is to be realistic, and the best way to determine what works is always to start small, no matter what I'm planting.

So, today's challenge is to come up with a simple plan to grow something edible. For some, it might be a pot of herbs on the window sill, or a few strawberries in a balcony flower box. Start with some good soil, and new seeds. The only real challenges are to actually get the planting done, and develop the habit of watering (and fertilizing, if need be) regularly. Hopefully, the joy of watching things grow strengthens the desire to keep at it. And if, somehow, things don't work out -- well, it's not like it was a huge cost or a ton of effort -- and there's always next year!

Happy Garden Planning!

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It's that time again!

A couple of years ago, my hubby built me a little "green room" in the hobby shack in our back yard. The original owner was a carpenter and built the little house as his workshop (it has eleven electrical outlets!), but it's our garden shed now.

The greenroom is painted green inside and out except for the sliding door, is well insulated so it holds heat (it's 26 degrees Celcius in there right now -- that's 79 Fahrenheit), and is a lovely little space for starting seedlings when the warm March sun comes in the low south window.

Our dream is to convert the shack into a three-season greenhouse complete with clear roof and heat retaining back wall, but for now, it's sufficing as our early planting space.

The blue bin below is planted with early lettuce and chicory for salad, and a few Brandywine heirloom tomato seedlings should come up, too.

Leeks are on the windowsill, 

and tomatoes are in the 4x4 pots. Italians, Oxhearts, Li'l Rubes, bush beefsteak, and my favourite heirloom varieties -- Golden Russian, Moscow and Golden cherries. I also planted a few Blushing beauty peppers, and some jalapenos. 

The sun gets warmer by the day, and it will soon be time to plant outdoors. But please, God, we could use a little more moisture first! It's been a dry winter, and the little snow we had is almost gone already. The kids have their bikes and skateboards out, and the gardening season will soon be upon us -- I'll plant some lettuce in the cold frame against our shack in a couple of weeks. And then it will be tulip time -- can't wait! Happiness is dreaming about gardening, at least for me!

If you're a gardener type in Edmonton, don't forget Seedy Sunday is this Sunday, March 18th, from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Alberta Avenue Community Hall, 9210 118 Avenue. I wish I didn't have to sing at noon Mass that day -- the speakers they've lined up sound absolutely great! See http://www.edmontonseedysunday.com/speakers.html. And have a good weekend!

Garden like God does... or #3 of 100 Simple Suggestions

Yesterday I spent four hours working in my front yard. It's not your typical front yard, as we've gotten rid of a good portion of the lawn. Last spring, we got a couple of yards of soil and compost, begged newspapers from all our neighbours, and embarked upon a lasagna gardening adventure.

In case you're not familiar with lasagna gardening, it means that we spread a fairly thick layer of newspaper all over the grass monoculture that we no longer wanted to mow, fertilize and water, then put on a thick layer of compost mixed with soil, and planted a few seeds in it. The grass under the newspaper, soil and compost layers decomposed, and above it we had lovely cosmos, bachelor buttons, poppies, marigolds, zinnias and lavatera, as well as two zucchini plants. The stuff that the jackrabbits didn't eat looked quite lovely by the end of the summer.

Our boring-lawn-monoculture-turned-to-garden has become something of a conversation piece in the neighbourhood. People stop to ask me about what's growing or tell stories about their own gardening. Not one person ever stopped to comment on our lawn! We also see a lot more birds, bees and rabbits -- one jack has a favourite cool hollow under a spirea shrub, and he'll sit there in the shade with an eye open just a crack -- as long as I putter at a distance. The closest I've come is about four feet. He scared the wits our of me that day because I hadn't noticed him before he sprang out of his hiding place.

We have a large-ish oak tree that drops at least a million leaves every fall, so last October I decided to garden like God does. Instead of bagging all those leaves, I raked them over our lasagna garden, watered them down, and waited for winter, refusing to behave like the suburbanite tribes in the conversation between God and St. Francis. Those leaves stayed put under two feet of snow, and protected my perennials. In the past few days, I've loosened them up a little, and yesterday I decided it was time to plant a few annual seeds in the soil underneath. I could just imagine those happy little seeds under the leaf mulch, taking root, absorbing all those marvelous leaf nutrients, and poking up through the mulch in a few weeks' time.

Just one problem. For the past 24 hours, it has been extremely windy... so my newly loosened leaves have been blowing away. I cringe when I look to some of my neighbours' yards, yards that are usually perfect but now have leaves strewn across them, but then I tell myself that I'm just generously sharing organic material. Even worse is my lasagna garden, now missing at least half of its top leaf-mulch layer (which also prevents our neighbourhood Dutch Elm trees' seeds from taking root by the millions). I'm guessing God is chuckling away as She and He listens to my muttering about how there's no point in raking it all back onto the garden when the wind is still gusting between 40 and 60 km/h. Oh well, it's a setback, is all, and I'm going to keep on trying to garden like God. I just have to remember that God's way is not manicured or unmessy. God seems to be a very laid-back gardener who loves a little dandelion chaos rather than those strict, green rectangle monocultures that don't allow for any weeds to feed His and Her early bees.

So what does all of this have to do with Simple Suggestion #3? The suggestion is simply to plant a seed. God is doing it all the time, abundantly.

The view from our front step, July 31, 2010.

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