Garden Wisdom Blog — partial-shade

In our relatively short growing season, we need to grow most food crops in a fairly intense way. We need to select crops that mature quickly. Some crops, like mescluns and salad greens grow so fast that we can take several harvests in a single season. Other plants, like pumpkins, use most of the growing season to produce masses of foliage, and then bloom and form fruits as autumn approaches. Whatever the case, the plants we cultivate in our food gardens take nutrients from the soil and energy of the sun in order to perform. Many crops require full sun...

Purple Tansy is the common name for one of the garden’s supreme workhorses, Phacelia tanacetifolia. Gardeners who have had trouble with fruit setting on squash, melons, or cucumbers need to learn how to improve pollination with Phacelia. Phacelia is a fast-growing annual that is very easy to manage, and it never gets weedy. Because it matures so quickly, it can be planted until the end of June. Its lacy foliage forms a rosette of leaves that produces from its centre a 100cm (36″) tall flower spike. Each of several inflorescences opens gradually over several days, revealing a series of nectar-rich,...

Back on Day 2 of our Twenty-one Days of Green, we talked about planting chives. We chose chives because they have to be among the very simplest of all herbs to grow from seed. They are extremely useful in the kitchen and compact in the patio (or windowsill) herb garden. And every time we don’t drive to the grocery store to buy a plastic clamshell box of fresh chives flown in from Mexico, we can reasonably claim that we have reduced our carbon footprint. So following that thinking, what are the other things we can grow easily to achieve the...