You are currently browsing the Gardening category
Yesterday I was talking to one of my mother’s old cronies and she was telling me about her cruise. As she was waiting in a wheelchair to leave the ship, she started talking to the gentleman in the wheelchair next to her. He said, “A year ago I was blind. Do you want to know why I can see again?” She was intrigued and said of course. He replied, “Kale.” Nothing else had changed. He could see again.
My mother used to cook kale. Kale is a form of cabbage with green or purple leaves where the central leaves don’t form a head. It’s a super vegetable.
According to the Choose Healthy Food website:
Kale’s benefits:
- Strengthens bones
- Combats cancer
- Protects your eyesight
- Aids in weight loss
- Boosts immune system
Kale is rich in calcium, lutein, iron, and Vitamins A, C, and K. Lutein has been known to prevent cataracts.
You can buy kale seeds from Heritage Harvest Seeds (my favourite seed company) and grow this amazing vegetable yourself.
This is the time of year where you begin to save seeds from your vegetables for next year. This year, I grew quite a few varieties of tomatoes. I remove the seeds and dry them on paper towels. The basement is cool and dry and I leave them there until next year when I start them under grow lights. You can do the same thing with pole beans. In fact, when I lived next door to a Portuguese family in Toronto, she had three tepee-like set-ups for the plants to grow on. Two were for picking and eating and the third she just left for the plants to mature and go to seed. That was her next year’s seeds for planting.
If you haven’t grown vegetables this year, you can ask friends and neighbours if you can dry some seeds from their vegetables so you can grow them next year.
In the photo, I have Arbuznyi Red and Olga’s Round Yellow Chicken tomatoes. The yellow tomato is the mellowest, most delicious tomato I have ever grown. It doesn’t crack or split and each tomato looks perfect. You can buy these heritage tomato seeds from Heritage Harvest Seed company. I tend to buy the seeds that have the strangest names. Save the seeds after you grow them.
Urban foraging
A few years ago while I was visiting my brother in Florida, I asked his neighbour if I could pick some of the oranges and grapefruits off their trees. He was delighted to have someone enjoy them and we made fresh juice every morning during my stay.
In Portland, Oregon, they have created Urban Edibles. According to their website:
“This project aims to make more available the natural food sources throughout the city that go undiscovered each year. Nut trees, berry patches, unsprayed fields of dandelion roots are all welcome. We invite you to share the sources you already know of, search for new ones with your friends, and participate in our official scouting days.”
There are ethics to the whole thing - ask permission before picking, just pick what you need, don’t overpick and some other considerations that they mention on their site. This is a good way for people to share their harvest.
In Los Angeles, they have a Fallen Fruit website. In New York City, there is Wildman Steve Brill.
Here in Niagara Falls, one of the public parks has blackberries and the residents are free to pick them. I would be happy to let anyone pick all of my mint because it just keeps growing and growing.
Just ensure that you ask permission first and don’t overpick.
I went to the garden centre yesterday. I was stunned by some of the prices even at this time of year. Sedums (a leafy succulent) were $19.99 for a big plant. There are loads of varieties of this plant. It is so easy to transplant.
Snip off a cutting from a big plant. Ask your neighbour for a piece. Make a hole in the soil with a pencil and plunk the cutting in. Water it. Within months you’ll have a very large plant (valued, it seems, at $19.99). If you do this six times, well, you do the math. These plants are low maintenance and don’t need a lot of water. They can survive terrible conditions. Mine turn a lovely shade of pink in the fall.
(Before)
(After)
Thanks to my brother, Phil, for filling in for the last four days on the blog here.
On our mini-vacation in the Finger Lakes, we came upon rose hips.
Rose hips are the seed pods of roses. They are the berry-like fruits of the rose bush left behind after the bloom has died. They can be used fresh, dried or preserved. All roses should produce hips, although rugosa roses are said to have the best tasting hips. These are also generally the largest and most abundant.
I want to grow one of these plants.
They are high in Vitamin C and bioflavinoids. According to Essortment.com, in addition to vitamins C, E, and K, rose hips contain calcium, citric acid, iron, niacin, phosphorus, tannin, vitamin A, B1, B2, and P. As a natural stimulant it gently allows movement of the bowels, as diuretic rose hips cleanse the urinary system, as a pectoral hips are a remedy for pulmonary and other lung diseases, and as a tonic the rose hips strengthen organs. As a matter of fact, rose hips provide innumerable health benefits from skin, to the immune system, to the bladder. Studies have even shown that rose hips can help prevent the development of kidney stones and prevent diarrhea. Additional studies have proven rose hips are helpful to the circulatory system, respiratory system, the thymus gland and as a blood cleanser.
You can make rose hip tea, jams and jellies and many other recipes.
Last time I was at the garden centre, hostas were $4.99 for these tiny, pathetic plants. The bigger, more developed ones were almost double that price.
I was at a friend’s on the weekend and she was showing me her back garden. She had about five varieties of hostas. I oohed and aahed because they were rare varieties and asked if I could, at some point, divide a piece off for my back garden. Right away, she grabbed a shovel and headed over to the plants. I wasn’t even ready and she was going to get some for me. She had other perennials that I was welcome to take a chunk of home.
Make friends with your neighbours. Often their perennials are growing way out of control and they are happy to share them with you.
Last year, I took cuttings of sedums and plunked them directly into the soil and they have now formed a border on a hill for me. I did have to water them for about a week until they rooted. The folks that I got the cuttings from still ask me if I want more.
Last year, my husband was at Home Depot at the end of the season - September. They were selling off the rosebushes at blow-out prices. One dollar per plant. He couldn’t resist. I have given about four or five of them away as gifts because we just didn’t need that many plants.
The photos show only a few of the varieties we have. Check out garden centres and places like Home Depot late in the summer for their end-of-season plants. You can save a bundle.
This year, we grew beans, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers, strawberries and about five varieties of tomatoes. The dill, oregano and chives just come up on their own. I saved seeds from the tomatoes and beans last year. I just dried them on a plate and stored them in a piece of paper towel in a small paper bag. We start the seeds in late March in the basement under grow lights. Sometimes the seeds grow, sometimes they don’t.
I get a big thrill out of seeing the first veggies growing. Yesterday I could see teeny zucchini, baby tomatoes and peppers. We’ve tried lettuce and other vegetables but found that they attracted chewing varmints.
I asked my florist sister-in-law which cut flowers last longer and is there anything you can do to make those flowers last longer? Her response:
This is a huge subject but here are a few tips.
Lilies can be inexpensive to very expensive. The inexpensive lilies such as Asiatic lilies will get papery and start dying in about 2 to 3 days. The more expensive lilies such as the Oriental or Casablanca lilies can last for about a week. It can be more economical in the long run to pay for the better quality.
The same is true for certain kinds of roses. First of all, when buying roses, squeeze them at the base of the bulb. The more firm it is, the fresher it is and should last longer. Sometimes the look of them can fool you. Certain colours of roses can give you an indication of how long they last. Generally speaking, the longest lasting roses are the red, pink and green roses (green lasting longer by far) and pastel colours like peach and purple lasting usually only a few days.
Tropical flowers such as orchids and bird of paradise usually last for a very long time.
My best tip of the day though is how to keep your fresh cut flowers lasting the longest possible – drum-roll please – instead of putting your flowers in plain water, immerse the stems in Sprite or Seven-up! Sounds crazy but it has been tested time and again to be true. Your fresh cut flowers will last quite a bit longer soaking in a lemon-lime soda. A fresh cut of the stems every couple of days with some Sprite will do the trick.
I have grow lights in the basement and so that we can start our flowers and vegetables in March. In an effort to be optimistic and think there will be an end to this long and cold winter, I am in the process of buying seeds. I have saved some seeds from the tomatoes and beans from last year’s crop. Last year we grew tomatoes (Olga Yellow, Mule Team and Purple Russian), peppers, green beans, cucumbers and eggplant. I already had dill and oregano growing like weeds from the year before. My advice on the herbs is to grow them in a pot or you’ll have them overtake the garden after the first season and you will curse them each time you go to the garden.
This year, I want to grow tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, green beans, yellow beans and cucumbers. The eggplant looked like a brain in the fall and I tended to forget it was there. Lettuce gets eaten by some sort of chewing varmints so we don’t bother any more.
I used the Heritage Harvest Seed catalogue. They have great heirloom seeds. I bought the seeds with the best stories.
Heirloom vegetables sound fancy but are simply the kinds of vegetables everyone ate before the days of mass-produced produce. Heirloom seeds essentially are seeds that come from plant varieties introduced at least 50 years ago.
I will start the seeds in four-inch pots. Last year, I tried those teeny-weeny little peat pots. Then I had to transplant and many plants didn’t make it. I’ll keep you posted on our progress.
« Older Entries
