Garden Wisdom Blog

Why limit your garden’s production to just the summer? There are still lots of seeds to start in July, particularly in regions with mild winters. Many of these varieties can be enjoyed as mature plants for fall and winter harvests, but lots of them can be eaten as immature baby vegetables while they are tender and sweet. Arugula (harvest mid-August to late September) Beans, Bush & Pole (harvest September) Beets (harvest late September to December) Broccoli (start indoors, transplant in August for fall harvest) Sprouting Broccoli (start indoors, tranpslant in August for winter & spring harvests) Brussels Sprouts (direct sow...

Some types of crops take an awfully long time to mature. To harvest leeks in the summer, the seeds have to be started indoors way back in late winter — leeks just take that long to grow. With preparation and planning, home gardeners can grow excellent leeks for summer use. There are some crops that take even longer to mature. Gardeners in relatively mild climates can take advantage of the long winter months with a kind of gardening called overwintering. This involves the same degree of planning for summer leeks. These crops are planted in the summer and fall and...

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...

Through April and May we enjoyed a very robust display of lupins planted around our farmhouse and over the septic berm. The blue and purple flowers were visible from the nearby overpass and painted a streak of colour across the property. These perennial flowers begin to bloom just after the last frost date, and usually finish just before the end of spring. Lupin flowers are rich in nectar, so they’re great for feeding domestic and wild bees. Like other members of the family Fabaceae, they fix atmospheric nitrogen in the soil that will feed other plants, including food crops. Some...