Patience, Yoga and Gardening

     
     The garden is doing extremely well this year and all of my hard work from the last few years is really showing this summer. I had an interesting realization recently, that being my garden is almost in perfect alignment with where I am at in my yoga practice. The thing about a garden and yoga is that patience is key. Your garden might look like crap one year with tiny seedlings and pile of dirt and by the following year it transforms if by magic into an oasis. Just like doing poses in yoga where one practice your poses are a sagging mess but with patience and persistence your poses can blossom into something beautiful.

My beautiful escape from the heat and bustle of the city.

The kitchen garden.

         
     Another example of garden patience has been my wisteria.The wisteria I planted two years ago has really taken hold but is still without any blooms. I feel I have patiently waited for two years to see its gorgeous, purple blossoms. After some asking around (thanks Nick)I was told that it can take up to five years to bloom and needs both summer and winter pruning to encourage it to flower! At first I was pissed that I invested in something that didn't produce immediately for me. I felt like ripping it out. I could barely look at it for weeks. Then one evening I was having drinks on the patio (nothing like a martini to put something in perspective) I started to look at it  more closely and noticed it had such interesting foliage and made such a lovely sound when the wind went through its leaves. My whole perspective changed when I looked at it in a different way.I decided that I was happy with it even if it isn't flowering even if it never flowers. I appreciate it for what it is able to give at this time. In yoga as well, my body may not be able to do what I am willing it to do but accepting and loving my body for what it can do gives me a real sense of freedom.

Wisteria.

       The kitchen gardens are doing really well with only a few failures this year and did not try my patience at all. I will start first with the successes....lettuce and peas! I literally have not had to buy lettuce in a month and a half and it is so tender and delicious. It will be so hard to go back to the grocery store franken- produce in the winter.

One of the many salads we enjoyed.

    The butter crunch, heirloom romaine, red planet and mizuna grew like crazy! I have enjoyed many a salad this summer. The lettuce that actually produced the earliest was the container lettuce I grew. It even froze after one surprise frost and came back better than ever. I will for sure do more of these next year!

       Nobody likes to admit failure, especially in the garden. You start to ask yourself "What did I do wrong?" "Could I have done more?" Next you start to blame others "It was totally the bad weather." "I bet the dog got into the garden." But then I remember my yoga practice, take a few deep cleansing breathes and accept that it is what it is.  That I will try again next year. One of these garden fails was my pumpkins. They shriveled up and just disappeared...dust in the wind.. My pattypan squash...sigh..it keeps flowering and flowering and with each flower I hope to see a fruit yet each flower just closes up and drops off. With pattypan squash you need the male and the female flowers to open and pollinate at the same time (you know how this works people) but mine just haven't found their mojo yet. 

My gorgeous pattypan flowers.

    I am so happy it is only July and I still have so much garden time left. Looking forward to the tomatoes, cukes and zucchini of August. Hopefully they will be be great successes but if not I always have yoga.

Seeds, Seedlings and My Inner Martha Stewart

Sometimes I dream of living in a warmer climate where I can garden all year round. Especially during a cold spring like this one! My lettuce is the only thing out so far and only in a container at that! It is looking very small and pathetic at this point but to give it some credit it has survived snow and several frosts so I am sure it will be much lusher in a couple of weeks.

Inspiration container lettuce...ahhhh...ooooo!

My actual container lettuce...boo..cry.

I am hopeful that the weather will warm up soon. In the meantime, I have been hard at work getting all my seeds started indoors. I was lucky enough to have been asked to be a "Seed Tester" by Sage Garden Herbs in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They have an amazing online seed catalogue( at www.herbs.mb.ca ) which I could spend hours of time perusing and shopping online. This year I will be growing Red Planet Salad Mix, Mizuna a kind of Japanese green, Arugula Romaine, Mache, Galilee Spinach and Orach a kind of heirloom spinach. Yes, I love having lots of greeens and they grow so well here so why not? Last year I didn't grow any tomatoes because of the amount of space they took up but I missed their tomatoey goodness at the end of the summer. This year I am growing some beautiful heirloom varities such as Earlianna, Cheeseman, Yellowpear and Rose.Also being the wild and crazy gal that I am, I am going to grow zucchini  cucumbers, pumpkins and squash. Now being my garden space is tiny, where am I going to fit these climbers? Well with the help of my hub unit's construction skills we are going vertical this year.

An old swing set converted into a trellis.

Great trellis for limited space.

 The great thing about gardening is that you learn so much every year. Last year, I spent way too much money on seed starting kits and garden label sticks etc. This year I decided to harness my inner Martha Stewart and come up with creative and inexpensive do-it-yourself projects. Some worked well, while others....not so much. So let's go over the good, the bad and the ugly. First thing was to organize my massive seed collection. This project was genius. I took an old photo album from the 80's, which you can still get at the dollar stores, and slipped the seed packets into the pockets. It worked perfectly!

The next project was a cool idea and fun for kids but in reality didn't work really well. I started some of my seeds in old eggshells.

Now it looks really cute but the carton got very soggy. The seedlings needed to be transferred soon after they sprouted as the eggshells provided very little space. So I will pass on this idea for next year. But what did work very well was what I transferred these seedlings into...milk cartons. Milk cartons are very deep and provided lots of room for the growing seedlings. Just get friends to donate some cartons and voila!

Milk carton grow op.

Going to finish up with one more great idea. Using clothes pins as garden markers. So easy and cheap! Why didn't I think of it sooner.

So hopefully these ideas will inspire the inner Martha in you and hopefully in a couple of weeks the planting will begin. Honestly, that can't come too soon as my seedlings are taking over my house :)

Growing an Heirloom Garden

      I know it is early but I ordered seeds for my garden today just to have something to live for. February in Nova Scotia sucks. Even though it is snowy and cold outside the search for seeds online made me feel excited for the coming spring. Looking through all the vibrant and delicious looking pics of the vast varieties of fruit and veggies to grow felt like looking through the Sears Christmas Wishbook as a child. What to pick? Where to order from? So much to choose from, I could barely decide

I want this to be my pantry by the end of the summer!

     I settled on the "where" question first. After a lot of looking, I settled on two amazing Canadian online seed distributors. Both had easy to use web sites (important for me) and a colossal amount of seeds to choose from. The first one is called Sage Gardens http://www.herbs.mb.ca/ and the second one is The Cottage Gardner http://www.cottagegardener.com/. 

Cool heirloom seeds.

       Feeling confident about and a little cocky about my successful garden last year, I decided I needed a bit of a challenge when it came to the "What" question.  This challenge came to me in the form of heirloom gardening. What is heirloom gardening? Basically it is retro gardening. The heirlooms are varieties that have been introduced before 1951. Many of them are 50-100 years old or even older. The seeds have been saved and passed down through the generations. No hybrids.Therefore, they look and taste like their parent plant. A tomato actually tastes like a tomato! How novel! The challenge comes in the form of growing these puppies. Apparently the seeds are slow to start, need lots of attention and can grow in strange ways. But I feel I am up for it. So I am saying....so long hybrids and hello heirlooms! We'll see how it goes!

Strange heirloom

I hope I grow one of these!