Garden Wisdom Blog

Harvesting seeds from your garden for planting in the future is a great idea for all kinds of reasons. Most obviously, it’s an economical way to keep your garden going from year to year without having to constantly purchase new seeds. Seed saving allows you to share (and trade!) with your friends and neighbours, and it keeps the gene pool of food plants alive and healthy. The actual process is not difficult, although there’s a little more to it than can be fully explored in this article. A number of excellent books on the subject exist, as noted below. While...

Blossom end rot is one of the most common complaints for tomato growers, particularly on plants grown in containers. It’s a complex problem that results from calcium not being available to the plants as the ovary at the base of the flower is fertilized and begins to develop into a tomato. It is very typical in plants that are in soil that is alternately dry and then wet. That fluctuation means that even if calcium is present, it is not consistently available to the plant. Another contributing factor is the use of high nitrogen fertilizers, which cause rapid growth, placing...

Save The Rusty-Patched Bumble Bee West Coast Seeds recently launched the hashtag #savetherustypatchbumblebee across our social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We have been encouraging our followers to re-share our post and tag a friend in an effort to attract awareness to this endangered pollinator. An Endangered Species The rusty-patched bumblebee was officially declared endangered in the United States in March 2017. Now on the brink of extinction, this beloved pollinator’s population has dissipated by nearly 90% over the past twenty years. Pesticides, loss of habitat and climate change are just some of the threatening factors which are...

Whether the goal is to harvest tender, immature “new potatoes,” or to harvest fully mature potatoes for storage and use over the fall and winter, it’s helpful to follow some basic guidelines on how and when to harvest potatoes. Our Certified Organic seed potatoes ship in March. Order now for next spring! New Potatoes All potato varieties can be harvested as new potatoes — dug up before the plant reaches maturity, while its tubers are still small. By the time that the plants have begun to flower, most of them will have developed at least some immature tubers ready for...

How do you know when to harvest garlic bulbs and if they have matured to the right point for harvest? Each leaf on the above-ground garlic plant represents one potential papery wrapper around the mature bulb. Having well developed, fully intact wrapper layers means that your garlic will store longer and keep its wonderful aroma and flavour. The trick is to let the plants begin to die back, but harvest before all the leaves have turned brown. The top-most, green leaves extend down, into the soil, into the heart of each garlic bulb. When the lower two thirds of leaves have...