Tag Archive: plants

Harvest!!!

OK, we waited a bit too long and the mâche had gone to seed, the radishes were too big and hard and the batavia had gone a bit bitter, but we had our first harvest last week.

It’s amazing what an explosion of growth follows a little heat and rain, giving us no time to plan when to dig up the plants from last winter. There was a bit of panic in trying to buy a push mower (with our new-found budget) and hack down the almost knee-high grass and get the plantings out before everything went to seed.

Our goal was to make room for our sponsored plants and seeds, find a place for the spring plantings to go in and turn the soil over, so we started digging. With each radish, there were small yelps of glee from various gardeners, that they had been there under the ground hiding all this time.

Earth Day

Our plant sale for Earth Day was a great success. We sold over 200 plants to the gardeners around the school and research labs as well as many sponsorships of plants and seeds that will be placed in Jardin pontanique for those without gardens.

We’ve already had visitors to the garden looking for their plants and asking how they can help take care of them. Wow, I hope we don’t we’ll be able to keep everything alive.

 

Art not agriculture

« A piece of cake » was how Jucai described turning over the soil and planting radishes, batavia, arugula and parsley yesterday.  Since he grew up on a farm in China working large plots, he thinks our tiny spot of earth is more art than agriculture. Probably true, I mean nature doesn’t really do triangles. But ours is beginning to show its angles in all their green glory.

 

When Life Gives You Stones

What we definitely have an abundance of is stones, so we’ve decided to make use of them. Steps, a stone garden, rocky walls, any excuse to pile them decoratively out of the way.

And we have a worm issue. After 10 days of digging, we’ve only found one. The others annoyed by the bulldozers have dug too deep to do any good. We’ve negociated the bar’s coffee grounds and are coming up with compostable material to create our own.

And yes, we really need a nearby space to store our tools and a wheelbarrow…

 

Grass and Flowers

Finally a bit of rain and the grass has sprouted. We absolutely needed something green for motivation, so we added some lavander, rosemary, thyme, lemon balm, rudbeckia and Japanese anemone. It is starting to look a bit like there might be a plan here.

Lancelot and the mysterious seeds

The garden’s first baby was born last night and we’ll soon be planting leeks in Lancelot’s honour. Not that he’ll be eating them in the spring, but perhaps he’ll come by and visit them, ripping them out by himself.

But today, Jucai planted lots of mysterious seeds from China. We could somewhat guess what they were to be from the pictures on the labels, even though they were airbrushed perfect veg, so it was hard to imagine such shiny items coming out of our plot. Jucai seemed to know what they all were, though he wasn’t actually confident they would all sprout in our fall soil. I, for one, am very interested to see what a really big green radish tastes like in case they do.

Juliette came by and made more little plant labels out of fruit crates and Thomas our latest convert to the cause found some mud boots his size and did some measurements and put some back work into turning over the second smaller triangle soil.

 

Chinese chives

Today, Jucai brought in a bag of Chinese chives that needed to be planted right away. They taste like a mixture of chives and garlic and are needed to make Chinese dumplings. He also had a couple of celeriac plants to go behind them.

We started planting in the corners and will work our way up from there.

The next step is planting grass around the edge of the plot to hold the soil in place.

Triangles!

A first glimpse at tracing our triangles. Our string wasn’t quite long enough, the weather was crap, there was a discrepancy with the math and we didn’t really have enough wicker, but I think our triangles are equilateral enough to get going and we are now officially the caretakers of this tiny plot.

In the beginning…

All gardens start with dirt and ours has already good smelly dark brown loam.

Now to the drawing board.