Garden Wisdom Blog — radicchio

The first average frost date for Lower Mainland BC is November 2. This date is reflected pretty closely from the Sunshine Coast and Gulf Islands, coastal Vancouver Island, Puget Sound, and down to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. That means we have approximately eleven weeks of growing time before we can reasonably expect the cold to impact unprotected crops. With even minimal crop protection, we can extend the season even further, but this time of year is critical for planting fall and winter harvest vegetables, and for getting some cover crops started to improve the soil over winter. Here’s my...

CSAs represent one of the ways that small organic farmers are changing the way we think about food, the way we access food, and how we, as consumers, participate with food production. CSA stands for Community-Supported Agriculture, and we’ve talked about this before. The basic idea is that a farm sells shares in its produce early in the season. The shareholders are guaranteed boxes of fresh produce from the farm to be picked up at regular (usually weekly) intervals. Sometimes the farmer arranges to have the shares delivered to central pickup spots like farmers’ markets. Farm Box Pickup   The...

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...