This plant is Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus). Have you heard of it? There’s quite a tradition behind Good King Henry in England and Europe, as you might guess from some of its common names. Wikipedia says it’s also known as Poor-man’s Asparagus, Perennial Goosefoot, Lincolnshire Spinach or Markery. Temperate Climate Permaculture says of Good [...]
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I blogged about gardening in straw bales a while back, and wondered how that would work on Gabriola. Today that topic is on my mind again, thanks to this NYT article: Grasping at Straw. It’s got photos and everything, and this method does seem awfully easy. It was Mr. Karsten’s clever notion to condition the [...]
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I know, I know. I’m forever finding ideas for libraries, and wondering how they’d work on Gabriola. Here’s a fun one from NPR: How To Save A Public Library: Make It A Seed Bank.
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From StrawBaleGardens.com: Straw Bale Gardening is simply a different type of container gardening. The main difference is that the container is the straw bale itself and is held together with two or three strings. Once the straw inside the bale begins to decay the straw becomes conditioned compost that creates an extraordinary plant rooting environment. [...]
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I know there are plants you can get that are supposed to bloom at this time of year. But what’s blooming now in my garden? A few intrepid summer flowers that have somehow soldiered on. One is this purple thing, a malva sylvestris called Zebrina. It was amazing all summer long, and it shows no [...]
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From Focus Forward at Vimeo: Focus Forward is an unprecedented new series of 30 three-minute stories about innovative people who are reshaping the world through act or invention, directed by the world’s most celebrated documentary filmmakers. I haven’t had time to watch very many yet, but they are beautifully filmed and the subject matter is [...]
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These tomatoes are at the honour stand on North Road near Colleen Road – that stand seems to be a new one. If you grow tomatoes on the island, what varieties do you like? This year we grew Kastalia, Sugary, and Sasha’s Altai, which is a short-season variety from Siberia. A few weeks ago I [...]
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If you’re growing veggies, you need to water them regularly, right? Maybe, but it turns out that it is possible to grow crops without adding water. From grist: Farming without water. David Little of Little Organic Farm has had to adapt to water scarcity in California’s Marin and Sonoma counties, where most farmers and ranchers [...]
While you tend to your tomatoes, gardeners in the Gabriola woods are tending a different sort of crop altogether. And some of them do surprisingly well at it! This is one of the plants we found in the woods the other day in a carefully-arranged hidden garden. Although the gardeners who planted here are getting [...]
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I’ve not seen this yellow flower before, but this year it’s showing up all over the place in various garden beds. Is it at your place, too? Do you know what it is?
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From MedicalDaily.com: Scientists Confirm that Plants Talk and Listen To Each Other, Communication Crucial for Survival. When a South African botanist Lyall Watson claimed in 1973 that plants had emotions that could be recorded on a lie detector test, he was dismissed by many in the scientific community. However, new research, published in the journal [...]
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If you’re reading this site, you probably have a computer. And if you live on our island, chances are you’ve got some interest in growing things. (Have you seen how busy the Agi Hall parking lot is when the Gabriola Gardening Club has meetings there? You’d better not be late if you want to get [...]
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When we moved to Gabriola, we had a bare patch of earth where the soil had been disturbed in order to put in the septic system. It was pretty ugly. Since then it’s been returning to a managed bit of wild. I yank up trees that won’t work there, but encourage native ferns and flowers. [...]
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Last spring a mystery plant appeared in my garden. It grew some leaves, then sets of delicate white flowers, and then dark berries. I knew it wasn’t any of the berry plants native to Gabriola, but what could it be? I meant to find out, especially because I thought about eating those berries. But I [...]
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This thing appeared in my garden, and I haven’t a clue what it is. Do you know?
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There are an awful lot of daffodils around Gabriola, thanks to a plant them everywhere scheme a few years ago. We’ve got daffodils along the roadside, daffodils overlooking beaches, and on and on. The ordinary daffs don’t do much for me – I like the unusual ones. I’ve got fragrant daffs, summer-blooming daffs, daffodils that [...]
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This scarecrow was the only one around when I stopped by the community garden at the Gabriola Commons the other day. Most days I see a variety of gardeners here, planting and tending their crops. If you live on Gabriola and want to garden at the Commons, stop by the gardens and look for the [...]
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Well! I didn’t think anybody was using fire for meadow management anymore, but look at this from the Bella Coola blog: Burnt. One of the seasonal annual rites of passage in the Bella Coola Valley is the ‘burning of the grass’. I’m not sure which culture brought this long practiced tradition, but it’s been practiced [...]
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