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!

     

Fall Inspiration: The Last Entry of 2012

                   Fall has arrived and gardening inspiration is in the air. As I stand in my now decaying garden, I feel surrounded by all the possibilities of what kind of garden I will create for next spring! Maybe I will grow a small garden for herbs alone, I would love to focus more on heirloom seeds and grow vegetables I haven't tried before, maybe I will devote a whole section to just tomatoes  or maybe I could build one of those old English countryside rock walls! Who knows, but I am super excited planning for it.

Nothing like tomatoes.

Beautiful heirloom vegetables, my new passion!

       But first thing is first. In order to be able to grow a successful garden in the spring, you must do a lot of fall prep for it. Some people consider these chores but I love doing it. The first thing I needed to do was to empty and take inside any container pots I have. So after arguing with the hub-unit about how the pots are NOT going to ruin the ambiance of the garage, a.k.a. the man cave, a male concept I will never understand, we moved them inside to prevent them freezing and thawing and thus cracking.

Getting the pots emptied.

Watch your back!

The potted soil is full of great nitrates for the garden so I try to strategically dump it and move it around and mix it with the fallen leaves so that it preps my garden soil so its rich and organic for next year. My dog also likes to help me!

I bet you don't look this good gardening ;)

White dog plus dirt equals bath.

The next thing is to take in any last vegetables that you are still able to harvest. I was surprised at how much I was able to harvest in November in Nova Scotia! Onions, kale, tons of parsley, beets and mint. I am actually thinking the kale might last through the winter, which would be great!

Harvesting in November!

The last thing I need to do are remove any structures. In my garden I put up bamboo trellis for the beans and these need to be taken in or they will rot.

Takin her down.

OK this was a little bit tedious.

How easy was that! The garden is now ready for next year! Although I am sad my gardening season is over, I will have all winter to dream, plan and sketch my ideas about how the garden will unfold next year. One of the greatest joys about gardening is the possibilities are endless, no two years will be the same in a garden and therefore I never get bored. Thanks to everyone who read my blog, commented and shared it. It was amazeballs to write it and ever more amazeballs that people actually read it! I look forward to the spring season 2013!

The Organic Harvest...hhhmmm.

    

     When I read about about organic gardening in books and magazines, images of healthy hippies gathering veggies from the backyards of their homestead farms for a communal feast of food, wine and song pop into my head. I yearn to be one of them free, growing my own food, raising chickens and frolicking with my rambunctious cows. But alas I live in the city, in a most unhomesteady house without a hippie around for miles, unless you count the urban hipsters but they are a whole different breed.

Look how happy those hippies are!

An urban hipster...just not the same attitude.

   

        I kept the hippie dream in my heart when I started my own garden this year. Therefore upon the first sign of harvest I ran out to my backyard with kitchen shears in my hand. I proudly took photos of what I had grown and paraded the food into my kitchen. As I began to prepare my feast, I started by excited washing my greens when I noticed something in the bowl crawling around and there it was.... an earwig. I tried not to freak out but I was totally freaked out. I quickly washed it down the drain and put it out of my mind. But how in the frig could I get it out of my mind when I proceeded to find 2 more earwigs and several bugs I couldn't even name! At that moment my hippie dream faded just a little,I began to understand that organic gardening came with its own baggage...that being critters. I did enjoy my veggie feast that night but I ate a little more slowly and carefully than I normally would. Just in case.....

My excitedly taken photos of kale, romaine, basil and green onions.  Pre-earwig of course.

The beans were very safe. I love the purple ones. They are green when you bite into them.

Look at them beans.

Broccoli Rabe As The Garden Grows

         The garden season is well underway and I am learning so much. Everyday is a new beautiful discovery and I can't wait to get out to the garden in the mornings with a mug of coffee to see what's new that day. Surprisingly a garden can change so much in one day! Which is why....lesson one...you should use garden signs! Apparently those little markers that gardeners use are not just to make the garden look cute. I did not use these when I transplanted my seedlings. I thought with my super genius powers I would just remember what I planted and where.......ummm no.

Surprisingly Important!

Using my Super Genius Powers of Remembering.

                                                                                                                                                                              

After a couple of weeks I had no idea what was a weed, herb or vegetable. I then proceeded to have to taste every seedling or supposed seedling, glad I didn't get poisoned,  and by process of elimination, identify each plant. I managed to figure it out after a lot of bitter tastings (I discovered martinis help this process a lot) The only plant which really stumped me was the broccoli rabe. I had never seen it before let alone tasted it! I am still not sure how to pronounce it either? Of course I always speak it with a thick Italian accent and therefore no one questions me about my pronunciation.

      Turns out broccoli rabe is delicious! I didn't know when to harvest it or how to cook it but after a little research I discovered some important tips. The first is, you must harvest the small heads before they flower. If it flowers it becomes very bitter and unpalatable. So timing is crucial to the harvest.

Look closely can you see the small heads? Now is the time to pick.

Don't eat it now! Just cut off the flowers and new baby edible heads will come up.

I cooked them in a little butter and yum!  It also grows like a weed and produces daily so it has a very good garden return.

     I think when you have a small urban garden like mine, maximizing returns from you garden is crucial.  This means planting things that will give you a big harvest in a small space for a good chunk of the summer. I think it will vary from garden to garden so it is best done by trial and error. In my garden, the radishes, kale, romaine, butter crunch, sweet peas and beans are all super performers.

Look at all the sweet peas.

Try not to stare at my massive kale bush!

 While the swiss chard, beets and herbs have either not grown or barely grown.

Tiny beet plant.

                                       
 Not maximum returners. That's Okay though. I have learned to not plant these next summer and to stick with what grows well in my small space.








  
                    

Love in the Time of Gardening

  

 I am pretty sure that my husband thinks I am having an affair. There are my unexplained absences, unaccounted for money spent and the evening trips to "the store" for milk and bread that take a little too long and never result in any milk or bread. Where were you? What were you doing? he asks. My responses are always vague. 

  I am having an affair of sorts. It is just a lame and embarrassing affair with my local garden center. But I just can't help myself. I enjoy the little thrill I get by sneaking out to the garden store this way. Nobody knowing where I am, the anonymity of it. Some people take baths or watch T.V. to de-stress but visiting my garden center, to me, is pure relaxation. When I am pursuing through the various fruit trees I long to buy, spotting the newest hydrangea hybrid, striking up a casual conversation with a fellow garden enthusiast over what the perfect shade plant is, I feel my troubles melting away. Oh and the smells roses, lilacs, basil...heaven. I swear there is more oxygen there as well and I immediately feel more energetic. 

     I am at the garden center so much that I sometimes think the staff may think I am a bit of a lurker or maybe an escapee from some kind of institution but I don't care. My pure pleasure over rides any sort of odd looks from the staff. Maybe one day I will tell my husband where I am, but just not today.