Results are in!

You can tell where the sunny patch is...

 I noticed this morning on the kitchen table a print out from AgroEnviroLab, and Josh mentioned that Claude came by with the results of our soil test. The analysis rates each component on a scale from very poor-poor-average-average good- good - rich and very rich. It covers pH balance, organic matter, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, aluminum, zinc, copper, manganese, and few other items which I will verify with my son who is writing a French language exam on chemistry and may recognize the terms en français better than I do.
On most items we scored very rich plus, and are only poor in aluminum (my guess is this is probably not such a bad thing). I am pleased that the odd can top that ended up mixed in with my compost did not add excessive aluminum to the soil. I will have to check with Claude if we should be happy or concerned about low levels of aluminum. We also got a high level good in phosphorus, but not quite rich. At first I am very excited, but then I read the fine

That's a decorative mushroom in case you couldn't tell

print at the bottom. It seems I have too much calcium, copper and zinc in the soil, which can blockages in phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, boron, iron and manganese. That can't be good. Claude told me last summer that I did not have enough manganese which was why my broccoli was all stem and not much flower. It also says our Ph is a bit high, which reduces the availability of boron, manganese, zinc and copper to plants. I wonder if it also makes plants tastier for slugs.

Josh asked Claude about what to do next. He said that we should not worry, better to have our type of results than have deficiencies.

Josh also mentioned that he has to buy some spray paint. Why? To spray paint our pots white, because Claude warned him that when it gets sunny and hot (like today, 30 degrees), the roots will bake in the pots. One more strange thing on my shopping list.

By the way, the pink bleeding heart which I featured in the photos on May 5th is still in bloom. Wow! I have been cutting the scapes off the garlics as they make a full circle, and eating them in our dinner the past few days. My irises are blooming one by one, the roses are coming out, and the lilies are almost ready to bloom. The pale pink peonies opened yesterday and look overripe already. We have strawberries going full tilt, but nothing on Iulia's patch which is producing a bucket a day.

Bar's open again

I have a rose blooming. So far, there is just one but it is a beautiful hot pink colour. I realized that when I took the cutting from my friend Laure, who told me it is a hardy and easy to care for climbing rose, I did not even bother to ask what colour it was.

A lady walked by my house a few weeks back with 4 kids in tow, and stopped to look at my garden. Naomi was with me, and started to chat with her, and then pointed to me and said that it was actually my garden, not hers. I love how my friends have become so much a part of my home and garden that strangers can't tell which of us actually live here. The lady said that all I was missing was roses and hibiscus, and with a smile I pointed to my baby roses and my tiny Bluebird Rose of Sharon bush (which is a blue variety of hibiscus), and told her that we think alike.

The tiny little poppy which Josh planted put out a miniscule orange flower. It's a start. My garlics sprouted scapes this weekend, which are their flower buds, and I need to cut them off or it will affect the development of the bulbs. Josh mentioned that if left alone, they produce nice purple flowers, which taste good too. I have decided to leave one flower just to see what it does.

I have been seeing baby slugs here and there and so many snails, so Josh bought a bottle of beer and we will be getting a load of discount slug-be-gone from Claude. I put out small cups of cheap beer all over, and yesterday morning I saw lots of little underage slugs od'ed on booze. It may be less effective than the slug-be-gone, but it is a mini census to give me an idea of how big a problem I have. My pansies have been munched to a mere skeleton, and there are holes in my violets and potatoes by it is not nearly as bad as last year at this time. It is hard to know if it is a result of rain, temperature, or my efforts to counter the effects of hay and lilacs which are ideal breeding grounds for slugs and snails respectively. It may take years for me to really know. Still, having listened to my avid gardener colleagues and volunteers at work complaining about how backbreaking it is to turn their earth, I am willing to fight the gastropods to keep the hay.

Balance is restored

 Chloe is visiting, and after my awful start to the day yesterday with the crushed poppy (and two iris patches knocked down as well I noticed later), she and Josh took matters into their own hands. They put up a small fence in the most vulnerable patch of my garden bordering the sidewalk and bought and planted two new poppy plants of unknown colour. I have promises of seed pods from my friend Pat at work as well, who patiently heard my rant. The remaining piece of the poppy which was affected appears to be viable, but I lost the flower about to bloom. Otherwise, all is well in the garden world.

Photos: upper right, sunflowers. Below, my first peony.

Occupy your lawn: guest post from Alex

My friend and garden guru Alex Zieba recenty wrote a piece called Occupy the lawn- with food! which I requested permission to reprint. Alex teaches philosophy and history, and as his PhD thesis, he lived sustainably in a house of his own construction, growing his own food and creating his own solar and wind energy, and wrote about the experience. Needless to say, he is one of my mentors and inspirations. He has the most remarkable garden, using organic techniques and heritage seeds, and has been generous with advice, seeds and plants along with friendship. He wrote about an angle of gardening which is one I have not touched on nearly enough which is the approach of growing your own food as an act of political protest against the destructive practices of the large food producing corporations which impact on our daily lives and the future of our planet.

Occupy the Lawn-With Food!

By Alex Zieba

As the weather warms, widespread occupation of publicly-owned but privately dominated spaces is rekindling.  And gardens are starting.


Some have tried to dismiss this massive mobilization of community power as the unfocused discontent of the unemployed-because those of us who are still employed have relied on our neighbours to represent us at the occupations, and yes, many of our neighbours are unemployed, underemployed, homeless, disabled, retired, students, parents and children.  A community is more than a labour force.

Many of us understand the hold that major corporations have on governments around the world.  Citizens occupy public places to regain democratic control of our nations and resources.  The fact that the top 10 contributors to the U.S. Republican and Democratic campaigns alike are the same corporations shows that this is not a right-wing or left-wing question, that there is little to choose between in these administrations, and trying to understand it as if it were a philosophical difference just divides us and draws our attention away from corruption.  We occupy, because we have no representatives on our ballot.

Occupying your lawn with food turns out to be a powerful political act.  To the extent that we produce food for ourselves instead of grass clippings, we will be withdrawing financial support from major corporations (from the chemicals and GMO's in farming, to commercial processing, to retail, to the companies who serve grass-clipping production).  We would also be diminishing our dependency on unstable job markets to eat, so there is no way to lose individually by participating: you'll at least have some healthy fresh food you did not need money for.

We have to be conscientious about our target here, and not remove financial support from the local organic farmers who are already occupying their land in a way that gives us real choices.

Alpine strawberries

 So growing vegetables instead of grass-clippings is a good idea, particularly if we were going to buy processed food products instead. Even though it is your lawn, occupying the lawn intrudes deeper into corporate profitability and so corporate domination if we begin growing the field crops that dominate conventional farming and the GMO market: corn, soy beans, and wheat primarily, then oats, rye, buckwheat, other beans, etc.  Corn, Soy and Wheat are bulk staple foods, the vast majority of which are fed to livestock or processed into oils and processed, packaged foods.

Garlic and basil

  Many traditional varieties of wheat, corn and soy are already actually illegal to grow in Canada and the U.S., or illegal to market, or to thresh, because they are perceived as a threat to GMO's.
The difficulty with producing our own grains is that they need to be milled and ground.  One solution is to grow other kinds of grains which do not need milling, like Amaranth, but this means changing our diet too.  If you have a little more space, you could occupy your lawn with a few chickens, let them eat the grass and bugs already in the lawn, or eat the unprocessed grain you (or a neighbour) grows, to make eggs and meat.

However, every town and city has hundreds, even thousands of people who are good with their hands, with tools and metals, who can make small milling equipment and serve their community from their garage or workshop.  Information for all of this is online. Gardeners and Tradespeople will need to cooperate, and every little bit helps, even if none of us can do it all perfectly.

Taking wheat as an example, a community may in this way provide flour for a local bakery, whose role in the community is therefore improved rather than eliminated.  We will discover that some companies perceive the new machines we've made and a free and independent organization of our food as crime.  Once two neighbours decide to mill some flour in one of their garages, we might find bi-law officers investigating them according to rules meant for commercial operations, just as we saw an Ontario neighbour facing jail time for "running an illegal abattoir" because he and two friends shared a pig.  We will have to be clean about ourselves of course, and aware that, since growing our own food really is a political act, some will use whatever laws exist to prevent our success.

It would be an appropriate gesture, and a true measure of success, if we were able to feed the occupation by bringing bread, tortillas, tofu, eggs, turkey., to those who will have been occupying public spaces all summer.  We have already demonstrated the ability to organize food for these events.  By October (Thanksgiving?), foods that had been grown in place of grass-clippings will already have been the object of media attention and an obvious change to the look of neighbourhoods that occupy their lawns, boulevards, flower boxes, vacant lots, park corners, and so on.  The occupation will have been feeding itself little by little already, occupying corporate profitability.

Feeding the occupation will bring together those who occupied their lawns with food, and those who occupied their garages and workshops with local processing, and those who occupied public spaces, and anyone else who would like to occupy themselves.

Occupying your Lawn and Feeding the Occupation therefore mean more than withdrawal of our financial support from the corporations involved.  It means that we as a community were able to organize ourselves and achieve our goals without them, maybe better.  It means we learned independence and team work.  Instead of giving-in to a politics of division, we turn to each other and cooperate in occupying our community, and to that extent genuinely take back democratic control.

Video Links:

The Corporation - a 2003 Canadian documentary about how corporations acquired the rights of citizens, and how they have exercised their citizenship.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+corporation+documentary+full&oq=the+corpo&aq=1&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_l=youtube.1.1.0l10.49267.51704.0.54496.5.5.0.0.0.0.97.462.5.5.0...0.0.

The World According to Monsanto:  http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+world+according+to+monsanto&oq=the+world+accor&aq=0&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_l=youtube.1.0.0l10.192571.194238.0.196615.11.8.0.3.3.0.117.569.6j2.8.0...0.0.

Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ancient+futures+learning+from+ladakh&oq=ancient+futures&aq=0&aqi=g4&aql=&gs_l=youtube.1.0.0l4.70116.72417.0.74349.15.9.0.6.6.1.183.935.6j3.9.0...0.0.

Nasty orcs!

I just went outside to see what was up in the garden. After weeding out some of the tomato sprouts, I went to see how the flowers in the front of the house were doing, and discovered that some inconsiderate oaf had stomped all over my about-to-bloom poppy and crushed it completely. At this moment I would like to stomp the perpetrator and let him/her know what it feels like. I doubt it will recover. I am pissed. Josh and I are considering a low token fence. It is not the first time this happened, two years ago some idiot tied his bike up to the stop sign on the side of my property crushing a patch of black eyed susans.

I will be open to any donations of poppy plants to recover this loss. A moment of silence.

Now I am drowning in tomatoes

Now that most of the tomato sprouts I still have in cups have been rescued from near death, I spent time over the last weekend trying to find space to fit in whatever was still unplanted. I found homes for the sedem and lavender plants from Kate and Maya in the front of the lawn with the lilies, cosmos and irises. Ollie sent over some marsh mallows which he believes can survive without full sun (one can hope), and a variation of the green ground cover plant which is darker than the type that came with the house. I hope it will add a nice accent. I moved some evening primroses away from the day lilies which had covered them up completely. I shoved basil and hot peppers and tomatoes wherever I could find a spot. I replaced some tomato or basil plants that looked runty with a stronger sprouts still waiting for planting. Three varieties of iris, and one of my peonies are blooming, and one more of each are due to open anytime now. The columbines are huge and still in full flower. The one I bought from Alan's plant sale last year is actually two plants intertwined, so some of the flowers are violet and some are pale pink/white. It looks beautiful. One of the plants I got from Laure is a yellow anemone which surprised me because it looked like a big buttercup plant. I did some research and discovered that buttercups are a variation of anemone. It is growing next to my patch of milkweeds so it has a nice wildflower feel.

The slugs are back, as well as a big population of snails. The pansies I got from Iulia have been totally devoured. We put down more slug-b-gone. I see holes in my violets, peppers, and lettuce which I recognize. I found two slugs under a patch of hay when I checked. I am going to buy some beer. Some cheap stuff for the slugs, maybe some good stuff for me.

I did some weeding in the back yard too on Sunday, and starting finding all the volunteers and surprises which popped out of my layer of compost.

Wood sorrel, potatoes and raspberries

I discovered six potato plants which I transplanted into their own section between the raspberries and the cucumber pagoda. I found some savory growing in the bathtub too (I did not think it was a perennial, maybe some seeds were left behind?)  I also found huge patches of tiny plants which looked suspiciously familiar. I looked close and found that I have tomato sprouts popping up in huge clusters. I realized that when we ground the tomatoes up last fall for sauce, I dumped the seeds and skins into the compost. We chopped up around 1000 tomatoes. That makes for a lot of seeds. Apparently, many of them did not break down in the compost over the winter. Next year I think I will boil the tomato seeds before composting them. I am leaving them grow for a bit, and then  I need to decide what to do with them. They are everywhere! I still have 30 or so sprouts in cups which I have no space for. I have donated sprouts to the garden boxes of both of the day centres where I work, and to any friends and neighbours who said they wanted basil or tomatoes. Any of my readers in Montreal who would like some wonderful tomato plants, let me know! Josh doesn't recommend eating the sprouts (they are nightshades, after all), which is my favorite method of ridding ourselves of excess sunflower and basil sprouts. I am still getting over my aversion to ripping out weeds. I feel dedicated to my tomatoes and just awkward about tomato-cide. Sigh.

Garlic scapes and mushrooms

Three mushrooms came up in the middle of my periwinkle. He thinks that they are agaricus augustus. Anyways, he promised me that they were edible. Two were too mature to eat, and I popped them back under patches of hay to make more mushrooms next year. One became the main ingredient in Orianne's mushroom omelet for dinner. I checked with Josh twice just to be sure I would not poison my youngest child. She said it was delicious and seems to be unharmed by her dinner. I have since had a few more pop up, which Josh said I picked too early (can't win!) which are pictured on the right. We did not plant these, they just popped up.  I tossed some baby arugula (super potent), orpine leaves, wood sorrel, baby oak lettuce, basil leaves and lamb's quarters into tonight's salad. It was an explosion of flavours! I know I never made good my promise to share recipes in one of my winter posts, so I will try to sneak some in as I go.

Yellow iris from Jack and Amy

Claude finally made it over with a huge bottle of hydrogen peroxide to spray on all our peppers and tomatoes to rid them of the bacteria problem. Now that my entire crop of last year's infected tomatoes sprouted without the benefit of my dipping the seeds in hydrogen peroxide, I am pleased to be able to give my garden "the cure". It won't harm anything but the bacteria, according to Claude. He also promised to help us access a cheaper source of slug-b-gone, which he says is the most effective,

Some variety of tiny irises from Alex Z's garden

affordable and non-destructive way to deal with the slimy buggers. My father-in-law suggests catching them and marketing them as "escargot de campagne" (I suspect the first person to market escargot in garlic butter was a frustrated gardener). I suppose he also gave Josh the results of the soil samples, but I forgot to ask, so I will have to post about that another day. I have not had time to take photos, but will get to the irises and peonies soon so there will be photos added to this post soon. (Done!)

Oh, I had a reply from Chloe about the spiky blue flowers. She says they are called centaurea, and Olga was right in her suggestion that they are related to thistles and cornflowers according to my internet search. They are thriving quite happily with minimal sun despite the internet recommendation of full sun. I see a future with many patches of these guys because they seem to want to spread. Chloe says if I cut them after they bloom they will come back for a second run. I am game to try. My forget-me-nots are going to seed, I will try to spread the seeds where I want them as per Ollie's suggestion, unless I get too busy and forget.