I’m back from sunny Cuba, and unlike my last trip it was a rather mediocre vacation, mainly due to the family choice of hotels. Travel tip – if you’re going to Varadero don’t stay at the tip of the peninsula. The marshy and boggy land spawns mosquitoes like Manitoba’s forests do, and no amount of spraying they do can diminish their staggering numbers. Also the beaches suck.  But days were still sunny and beautiful, we saw our friends and got the customary sunburn so of course it wasn’t all bad.  

While I was gone Iceland exploded in a truly cool and expensive eruption and I wanted to share a link to the coolest photos of the volcano I’ve seen to date. Here. Nothing drives home the power of nature better than events like this and it’s impossible to see the photos without appreciating just how powerful the planet is and how insignificant we are.

The garden is feeling neglected, so my to do list this week includes deeply watering my trees since we are in a drought and they could use a long soak, repotting my tomatoes into tall containers – likely pop and milk jugs one more time before they go outside, and planting peas. Since we’ve had such a warm spring I could’ve done this already, but I procrastinated so in they go now, along with lettuce. Since we’re still a month away from last frost I should still be good for time. This year I’m planting an heirloom variety that happens to be a bush pea since they climbed too well last year and were flattened by the winds into a messy jungle. I also need to rake the grass somewhere in there… busy time spring is.

P-p-p-peas

I also need to sort out a solution to hardening off my tomato seedlings. It was a pain in the butt when I only had nine plants, but this year I’ve got triple that amount and hauling them up and down the stairs is a dangerous and time consuming proposition. I’m contemplating rigging up some sort of permanent like shelter a week or so before they go outside. Anyone have any solutions to this problem? This seems like the most PITA part of the whole seed starting process.  If my interest in growing food continues (and I have a feeling it will), I may simply have to get a greenhouse and save myself the headache.

My cats rule and I love all three of them in very different ways, but the depths of my white deaf boy’s weird behavior know no bounds. He’s recently learned a new trick – locking himself in the bathroom and hollering on top of his lungs to be let out. His process is as follows: he goes into the bathroom and sniffs around for a few minutes. Then he backs into the bathroom door butt first until it closes. Then he turns around and starts yelling at it indignantly. If we’re not careful and leave a wedge of some sort he’ll spend the whole day locked up in there alternating between screaming and sleeping until we get home and let him out. He’s so special it hurts.

Anyhow it’ll be a busy week and I’m thrilled that summer feels around the corner.

I’m back. Literally and figuratively. Since working non-stop since mid-December, celebrating a birthday and taking a quick week off to jaunt over to a slightly warmer but much prettier British Columbia, I am finally easing back into my slightly boring but predictable schedule. Over the last few weeks I ate a ton of food, skied a ton of slopes, ate some very expensive jam (which I will tell you about in due course), read some great books, and in general kept myself all too occupied, which happens to be one of my least favorite things to do. I enjoy my downtime and go out of my way to plan a life where I have plenty of it.

But in the meantime I was looking at this picture of a bunny I took some weeks ago, and pondering the huge abundance of wildlife that shares with us this land called Canada. It’s kind of hard for people here to understand, but this is one of the very few places in the world where animals and humans share any kind of space voluntarily. In most countries the only birds you see are pigeons and the only animals the stray cats and dogs skulking in the streets. The rest are scarce to the point of extreme rareness and reticence.

Many people that move here cannot believe that rabbits and deer are frequent visitors within the city, fearlessly venturing on our lawns and hopping our fences. That squirrels are not only common, but cheeky, and that folks routinely name the chipmunks that drop by to pilfer bird feeders. They are astounded to hear coyotes howling at night, and see huge elk crossing the highways, never mind the foxes, ducks, geese and many other denizens of any average Canadian neighborhood. Certainly no bears have ever entered their hospitals like they did here a while back, and no animal crossings are built so that critters can cross the highways safely.

The reason animals shy away from people in most of the world is because they are prey there, and feel it keenly. The plump ducks, geese and rabbits would quickly be poached by families thankful for a free dinner, deer would be poached too, never mind the season, fish would be caught until there’s none left, and the predators would simply be exterminated. Not that North America doesn’t have those tendencies from time to time, but overall animals fare much better here than elsewhere.

It’s funny to me how we mourn the animals that have to be shot due to posing a hazard to people and whose numbers drop as we take over their habitat, but as soon as an enterprising species acclimatizes itself to living around us we call them a nuisance, like the unfortunate seagulls, pigeons and gophers. Methinks we’d be better off celebrating their adaptable natures that ensure their survival and take the occasional inconvenience they pose with humor if not grace.

Since the spring got predictably delayed by our stellar climate, all my seedlings have sprouted into a veritable jungle. All the tomatoes are approaching a foot tall, with lush, green and fragrant leaves.

Fragrant forest

The pepper has glossy deep green leaves, with supremely cool purple lines running up the stem.

Shiny pepper

Purple stem

The basil no longer looks so oddly lopsided – and he now has a friend.

Bushy basil

Baby basil sidekick

But the it’s the cucumber that stole the show, as if to rebel against the death of his comrade, and opened up a delicate flower in a glorious flush of yellow. I was as proud as a parent whose child takes a first step. I think I spoke baby talk to it. The other two cukes are budding, and I’m sure will soon explode into bloom of their own. I absolutely cannot believe that these short little plants that grew from tiny little seeds are actually growing and thriving.

First bloom!

(She seems to have no interest in eating it – unlike Alfie)

I’m sure the tomatoes cukes and peppers as the veterans in this garden would love nothing more than to see the light of day, so this week will be the week of hardening them off.   The most excellent guide I found was online and here is the link for your pleasure. 

Happy Gardening!

Speedy little plants!

All the seedlings are doing well. They’re healthy and happy and sturdy and BIG. They’re growing WAY faster than I expected, and it’s becoming a little rainforest in the room. They are quickly approaching their recommended transplant height of 6 or so inches, and since we’re in Zone 3A here in Calgary with a last frost date of May 23 so I have no idea how tall they’ll get in three weeks or so before they go outside.  The cukes seem tiny and undeveloped in contrast, but they’re sturdy and healthy so I guess they’re okay.  All are heavy drinkers, and now I find myself watering pretty much every day or two. Every two weeks I feed everyone with the 1/3 diluted fish and kelp fertilizers, and that seems to be working.

Fuzzy tomatoes

Tomato canopy

Lopsided basil

 

Cuke and pepper

 

 

What is not working is the light situation. This spring has been rather crappy in the cool, cloudy kind of way – we even got some snow in the last two weeks, and the awesome T5 fluorescent strips I got are simply not enough anymore. All the plants are twisting towards it, just about hugging the bulb, and now that they’re BIG and LEAFY it’s just not enough light. Bravely navigating the world of grow lights I found a Hydrofarm 125 watt Grow Light that’s supposed to be adequate for a 9 X 9 area. Of course it wasn’t cheap, but at least it will last a good decade, and it was still WAY cheaper than the proper plant set ups with the tiers and the sodium/metal halide lamps. Since I’ve been enjoying myself immensely with this seedling operation I figure I’ll likely grow something or another every spring. That’s the story anyhow.

 

This past weekend I also started a bunch of alpine strawberries – about 20 plants or so. I have no idea if that’s enough or too few, but that’s about the amount of plants I want to take care of, so seemed okay to me. Strawberries are perennials and apparently don’t produce much their first year, so this is more of a long term plan anyhow. And they take a hundred days to mature, so it’ll be a while before I see any berries. What they will need though, is a straw mulch (hence the name – learn something new every day J) and I have no idea where to get a small amount of straw around here. I mean, this is the prairie and there are monstrous hay bales not two minutes from my house, but I’d need something akin to a few garbage bags, just enough for a 2 inch layer of mulch. The mulch is there to keep the roots at an even temperature and to prevent the leaves and berries from touching the soil, as I guess they’re quite susceptible to soil borne diseases. I’m googling strawberry mulches as I type this, and it seems that pine needles make an excellent mulch as well. They’re slightly acid which strawberries like, and more inclined to lay flat which gives more access for suns’ rays.  Thanks to http://leslieland.com/blog for this one. Now pine needles are beyond plentiful here, you could call them abundant, so at least supply won’t be an issue.

 

Now it’s mostly a waiting game. It’s supposed to rain for the next few days, shocker, I know, so we’ll begin building the 4 X 8 raised bed that we just picked up the materials for. And by me, I mean my significant other who’s quite handy with tools and not liable to kill himself. On a different note, we ordered a cubic yard of compost for the newly cleaned up garden beds (post coming) to be delivered by the very helpful Western Canada compost. They’ll be driving up with some garden soil and compost on Monday, which will mean quite a workout to haul it into the bed. Check out http://www.westerncanadacompost.com/first.htm if you need a large quantity delivered and don’t feel like shoveling all day to fill your topper covered truck and making multiple trips. We’re nothing if not lazy around here. A big thanks to http://www.calgarygardencoach.typepad.com/  for lots of local knowledge and tips.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My seedlings have miraculously survived and thrived despite my tender loving care so far. They are getting their first and second sets of leaves and their roots were spreading way past the peat pods and intertwining in the vermiculite below. I figured it was time to start thinning them and repotting into bigger pots. I had a dozen or so peat pots and several plastic pots for plants that I was giving away to friends and family. Provided they all lived of course. I don’t have extreme faith in my gardening skillz given my past history.

For this project I mixed very roughly 1/3 seed starting mix, 1/3 vermiculite and 1/3 potting mix. Why? No reason other than I had all three items on hand. I mixed them all in a huge mixing bowl by hand, moistening loosely as I went. Note to self: mix all dry matter first THEN add water.

Then it was just a matter of filling up the pots about half full, inserting the peat podded seedling inside, handling very gently so as not to damage the fragile stems, fill up with more mix and water very gently. I screwed up at least two plants – one by tearing off a very long root when I was lifting it from home base, and a couple by repotting them too early – they still had only the cotyledons up, not any true leaves. However, their roots were escaping the pods and entangling with other roots so I figured they’re better off getting their own pots, but both books are silent on this subject so I can’t begin to guess. If they make it it’ll be a miracle.

To help them deal with any shock to the system I left the blind slats open but down to give them a more filtered light than the full beams, but it turned out it doesn’t matter as it’s cloudy and snowing today anyhow. Calgary rocks.

While I was replanting the seedlings, I thinned all the pods (all tomatoes) where all three seeds germinated. Steve Solomon suggests that when a plant has a set of true leaves thin the seedlings down to two, and when they get two sets of leaves leave only one plant. You want to choose the healthiest survivor – the one that’s the most vigorous and bushy. I just used scissors to chop off the stalk at the base and let me tell ya, it felt like murder. I had no idea how protective I felt of each little plant and to thin felt so cruel. They made it! They grew! To snip the tiny little stem was incredibly hard, and the only thing that allowed me to do it was Steve Solomon’s admonition that in order to do right by each plant you cannot have them competing for resources in any way. That stresses the plant and affects it’s future health and productivity. Nature does the same thing he says, only more so. A wild plant will produce thousands of seeds to compensate for all the ones that won’t make it whether eaten by birds or scattered in a hostile environment. When humans signed on to growing plants we made them a deal: you grow what we need, i.e. bigger roots, tops and fruits, sweeter and more fragile produce, longer harvest, and we will ensure that you will grow stress and competition free. So in order to hold my end of the bargain I sighed and thinned.

·         Cucumbers: 2-4 plants

·         Peas: lots – spaced three inches apart go for at least a six foot row

·         Tomatoes: estimates vary from 2 to 8 plants

·         Peppers, sweet: 2-4 plants

·         Zucchini: 1-2 plants

·         Carrots: at least one 4 foot row

·         Herbs: one healthy plant should suffice

That covered the bulk of what I wanted to grow. I’d probably plant half as many radishes as carrots, and I had a rough idea that about a sixth of the bed would be entirely lettuce. I’d plant a succession of green onions and since they’re compatible with most veggies I’ll intersperse them here and there.

One thing I was sure of is that I wanted to grow heirloom seeds.  Most veggies today are bred for qualities other than taste, like shipping endurance and shelf-life and often taste like cardboard bought from the supermarket out of season. Wanting to enjoy the old-school taste of vine-ripened produce picked at the peak of quality, I turned to heirloom varieties sold by our very own Salt Spring Seeds.

Seduced by delicious sounding descriptions I ordered oh so many seeds, and at least five varieties of tomatoes. My little pouches arrived promptly, and planting began.  According to the seed packets most of my seeds should be started 8-10 weeks before last frost, which in Calgary is May 23.  So last Thursday the 26^th was planting day.

I share a home with three curious cats, so leaving seedlings in a cat-reachable area was out of the question. The only cat-proof room in the house is the office which does not get great sunlight, never mind the fact that nothing in Calgary gets great sunlight this time of year. Therefore a grow lamp was in order. I bought a long fluorescent full spectrum tube for about thirty dollars from the garden centre, and a large seed tray with a tall plastic lid that has an indent on each side. Once the seedlings germinate, you can cut out the indented parts and stick the tube right through the lid giving the new plants abundant light at about the right height. Without plentiful light the seedlings will get ‘leggy’ – tall and thin as they try to stretch toward light and that weakens them so they may not survive. Most veggies require a long-light day – 14 to 18 hrs so a light is pretty much mandatory in this region.

For optimum growing conditions and to avoid diseases, you want to start your seedlings in a soilless growing mix, not in garden soil.  An easy way to grow seedlings is to use the little Jiffy Peat Pellets available at any garden centre as well as Canadian Tire. From my extensive reading I found out that overwatering is a common problem with seedlings, and ideally they should be bottom watered – absorbing all the water they need by osmosis rather than from the top. This ensures a steady sufficient water supply and prevents the force of the water falling on the pot from disturbing the fragile seedling. Many companies recommend a watering mat which holds water that the pellets can draw from, which is a great idea, except for the fact that they’re expensive and not readily available. My solution is to pour a good layer of vermiculite on the bottom of the pot – about a half inch which is also very good at absorbing water and holding it for plants to use.

I set the Jiffy pots on top of vermiculite, added warm water until they all expanded fully (they should at least quadruple), planted two to three seeds in each pot, estimating the suggested depth on each packet, covered them with their dome to help hold moisture and warmth, and stuck them in the office. That was five days ago, and not one seedling has come up yet. I feel like a hovering mother hen waiting for her egg to hatch.

seedling in tray

 So I’ve survived just fine for twenty nine years without the slightest urge to grow anything, and killing the odd houseplant here and there. Until this year. For some inexplicable reason I’ve wanted a garden since Christmastime and decided to plant one. Now, I’m not talking about pretty plants here, although the way this is going I may find myself planting petunias before too long, but a veggie garden with maybe some strawberries thrown in, because let’s face it – if you can’t eat it, it hardly seems worth the effort. This is a chronicle of what I’m learning as we get closer to spring.