Peas! The peas are here!
The sugar snaps made their debut on my balcony veggie garden this week, and MY GOD, there is nothing better.
Also: lettuces, scallions, leeks, radishes, arugula, spinach, and herbs.
What are you harvesting?
You can see what others are harvesting now on Harvest Mondays, hosted by Daphne’s Dandelions.
Windowbox by Sunface13 on Flickr.
I remember the first time I saw window boxes worth coveting. I was 20 years old, backpacking through Europe. Although I wasn’t yet a gardener, I couldn’t help but fall in love with the perpetual, ageless villages with their cheery window boxes spilling over with geraniums. The window boxes were simple, but gorgeous, and I wanted to take them home.
Outside my window by James Jordan on Flickr.
In my mind, the best window boxes will always be European, best suited to crumbling brick or stucco apartment buildings. But right now the closest I will ever get to gardening in a European window box is vicariously.
Although I’m not in the market, I was curious to see what was out there in the way of window boxes, so I pulled together a few internet finds to share.
Sweet DIY succulent windowbox planter (made using an aluminum gutter) by Kalani Kordus on Flickr.
Simple teak wood planter from Jayson Home and Garden ($64-$115)
Inexpensive zinc rectangular rail planter from Crate and Barrel ($13.95-$19.95).
Modern terrazzolite windowbox from Jayson Home and Garden ($78-$160)
Galvanized metal planter box from Pottery Barn ($59).
Coir-lined traditional iron window box on Amazon.com ($165.96).
What the? Flowers in the road! Image via PeteDungey.com.
Look: pothole gardens! Not sure how I missed this unique guerrilla gardening/art concept when it first popped up on the interwebs several years ago, but it’s awesome.
It seems people plant potholes for various reasons. UK artist Pete Dungey planted a series of potholes across England to highlight “the problem of surface imperfections on Britain’s roads.” A group of California College of the Arts students greened a San Francisco intersection to provoke discussion around the “road-centricity of our urban setting.”
A sweet little pothole garden by Steve Wheen at ThePotholeGardener.com. Photo by Allison Moore.
Steve at ThePotholeGardener.com started potting up potholes to highlight the problem of bad local road conditions, and, as a landless gardener, to satisfy his urge to plant.
Planting a pothole. Photo by Allison Moore.
Marigolds bloom in Shannon Spanhake’s Garden of Convergence.
Shannon Spanhake created a project called The Garden of Convergence in Tijuana, inviting the community to take part. In an interview, she relates that “the most interesting response [from the community] has been the way vehicles carefully avoid this space, as if the lines on the street have changed – they turn slowly and the passengers peak their heads out to see what it is. And how when pedestrians walk past, they stop to look and ask each other questions. The pothole really changes how people move through the space and their actions while in it.”
Pothole gardeners recognize that their work is fleeting – even more so than most guerrilla gardens, which are often temporary. And while I would worry that planting in the middle of the road would cause serious driver distraction, pothole gardeners have a technique for that, too. They plant bright flowers, which act as a hazard sign, alerting drivers to the potholes.
I’ve decided to introduce a regular weekly feature on Heavy Petal called Now Harvesting. I hope to share with you what I’m eating out of the garden every week until winter, or until the garden is completely empty.
For my own sake, I think this will be a great way to look back on what I was harvesting at any given time, but also point out gaps in food production. That’ll give me the opportunity to adjust planting schedules for next year (yes, I have planting schedules). Gardening: it’s all trial and error, isn’t it?
This week is all about greens. The temperature spiked last week and my cool-season greens started to bolt, so we’re eating tons of arugula and spinach from the square foot garden. I still can’t get enough of arugula. I love how versatile it is – in pastas, salads, or on bruschetta. And I especially love that my two-year old likes it (bringing the Vegetables Lila Will Eat list up to three).
This week I’m also harvesting radishes, endive, and the last of the kale blossoms. What are you harvesting?
Tomorrow! Join us at the Cedar Cottage Community Garden for our annual Spring Fling event
• Plant sale
• Live music
• Kid’s activities
• Garden tours
• Workshops (including “What to plant now,” led by yours truly).
11am-2pm, Victoria Drive at Hull Street, Vancouver (map)
Part of Vancouver’s Green Streets program? These tips are for you.
Gardening at home, with easy access to seeds, tools, and water? Easy. Gardening several blocks from home? A bit more work. Gardening several blocks from home when you don’t have a car and your garden doesn’t have a tap? Call me lazy, but that sounds like a lot of work.
Having gardened at several locations not actually at my residence, I’ve become familiar with having to carry tools, seeds, and water to my various “away” gardens, and I thought I’d share a few tips to make it easier for you.
1. When looking for a community garden to join or a yard to share, think about how convenient its location is. In the summer, you’ll need to visit your plot almost daily, so make sure it’s close to home or on your route, otherwise, you may find yourself resenting or neglecting your plot. Guerrilla gardens, which usually have little or no available resources (such as water access or shared tools), can be even harder to maintain, so at least make getting there easy.
2. Invest in an all-purpose hand tool. The two most common garden tasks are planting seed(ling)s and weeding. You want a tool that can do both, eliminating the need to carry multiple tools. I like the CobraHead (buy it here). Of course, for larger jobs, you’ll still need heavy duty tools, but for everyday jobs, something like the CobraHead does just the trick.
3. Package all your seeds together, so that they’re ready to grab and go. This is especially handy when you’ve got more than one away garden. I use resealable sandwich bags labelled “community garden,” “balcony,” “patio,” and “townhouse bed” to keep the seeds for my various gardens separate and easy to find.
4. Consider keeping a portable garden kit handy, containing your tools, seeds, gloves, a jug of water, and other necessities. Just grab and go.
5. If there’s no water source available at your garden (which is pretty common for guerrilla gardens), save water in large, empty plastic bottles, such as a 2- or 4L (qt) milk jug with a handle. Punch several holes in the lid to act as a convenient watering can if you don’t plan on carrying the jugs in a backpack. Wagons and bike trailers or carriers are good for transporting large amounts of water without a car.
6. Consider sharing the work (and fun!) with a friend. Take shifts, or set up a watering schedule.
7. Plant lower-maintenance edibles such as perennial veggies, potatoes, and herbs, so your harvest won’t be a wash-out if you can’t visit your garden for a week.
Have any great tips for “away” gardening? Share them in the comments!
In March, I wrote about the creation of my newest garden space, a raised bed planted using the square-foot method (of planting in 1′ squares). I’m happy to report that the garden, so far, is a success – turning out early producers spinach, radishes, and arugula.
Left to right, top to bottom: ‘Easter Egg II’ radish, ‘Sugar Loaf’ radicchio, ‘Tyee’ spinach, ‘Red Sails’ lettuce, ‘Tyee’ spinach, arugula, ‘Garden Babies’ butterhead lettuce, arugula, and ‘Amish Deer Tongue’.
Obviously, the lettuces and radicchio, planted later, are further behind. But what’s funny to me about this photo is that it shows what happens when you let a toddler sow seeds. There’s no careful, one-at-a-time seed placement. Handfuls: that’s Lila’s strategy.
What I’m loving right now is the arugula. Forget salads: cook up some orzo or capellini, and toss in a few handfuls of arugula after draining. Add olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and grated Parmesan. Toss until the arugula is wilted. Simple, and lovely.
For Lila’s second birthday, we had a garden-themed party. Of course. What two-year-old doesn’t prefer gardening to Dora or dinosaurs? (Actually, Lila is way more familiar with turning the compost (she loves worms. Parenting success!) and picking greens than she is with cartoon figures. She still refers to her preferred (Dora-branded) toothpaste as the one with “that girl” on it. (Another parenting success!).)
But seriously, until she has a strong enough opinion on such things, I get to choose. And so she’ll go out for Halloween dressed as a beneficial insect, and her loot bags will include soil.
Yep. I gave a bunch of kids dirt.
Here’s the close-up, and a recipe for a garden-themed “loot bag”:
1 small container (we used biodegradeable Fiskar’s Eco Pots, which come in really nice, muted colours.)
2 children’s gardening tools (we bought a couple sets of five tools from Lee Valley and broke them up. These are great kid’s tools – plastic, but really sturdy.)
1 bag of container soil (packaged in a plain, 1lb coffee bean bag – ask your local coffee shop for some.)
1 packet of seed (we used purple bush beans – easy and fun to grow – and packaged them in pretty paper envelopes made using a template found online.)
1 wood tongue depressor, stamped with child’s name.
The cupcakes were fun to make too. I love to bake, but rarely get beyond my basics: cookies, scones, muffins, and biscuits. Birthday parties offer a nice change, and a challenge. I made simple chocolate cupcakes topped with vanilla buttercream or chocolate frosting, then topped them with fondant flowers.
Now, I am not the type of person to casually whip up a batch of fondant. In fact, fondant – which is basically really, really stiff icing that can be rolled out or molded like plasticine – has always seemed out of reach for a kitchen novice like myself. It’s supposed to be difficult. Tempermental. But I have a two year old, I thought. I can work with that.
Now, if only I could master child-rearing in an evening.
We held the party at Little Nest, an awesome child-friendly cafe in our neighbourhood.
A good time was had by all.
Happy birthday, sweetheart.
Thanks, Naise, for the photos.
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