Garden Wisdom Blog — category: Organic Growing

The arrival of third week in June brings us the last day of spring and the first day of summer. This year, it will occur at 3:07am (PST on the west coast, or 10:07am GMT) on Thursday, June 21, but only in the Earth’s northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, it’s the winter solstice. But how can we be so precise? How can we know that it occurs at 3:07am? The trick is in understanding a bit more about the summer solstice in terms of our planet’s orbit around the sun. As we travel around the sun, Earth is spinning...

No matter where you live, growing food in containers can be accomplished if you learn some basics. While some types of vegetables are simply better suited to growing with their roots in the ground, the determined gardener can grow almost any kind of food plant in containers. It is the nature of all plants that some require more root space than others. Lettuce, for instance, has a relatively small root system that grows shallowly, near the surface of the soil. By comparison, some squash plants have roots that will have an eventual diameter of thirty feet if they’re allowed to...

The much maligned dandelion actually has a lot to offer. It has been vilified in our culture as the invader of lawn spaces, thrusting its dazzling yellow colour into an otherwise tranquil field of green. Homeowners pour millions of gallons of weed control chemicals into their lawns each year in a vain attempt to vanquish this foe. So what is it about dandelions that most homeowners hate so much? There is a degree of old fashioned thinking of lawns as symbols of wealth and status. This historical memory seems to harken back to England in the 17th Century, when tightly...

Crop rotation is the practice of not growing plants where similar plants grew the previous year. This practice prevents the build up of pests and diseases and optimizes the use of soil nutrients. Plants from different “families” need different amounts of nutrients and their root systems also penetrate the soil to different levels. To simplify, we try to alternate between leaf crops and root crops. Leaf crops tend to be heavy nitrogen feeders with fairly shallow root systems. Root crops usually require more phosphorus and potassium and need deep soils in order to grow properly. Different plant families also prefer...