Last Ditch

The weather has warmed significantly here in Vancouver and I have finally turned my focus back to the garden. Trying to garden in the middle of a city with limited space can really bum me out sometimes. Between giant rats, nosy landlords, and neighbors that dump their unwanted items by my pots, some years it is harder than others to get motivated. This week was a reminder that we have what we have and we must work outward from there.

I started with taking inventory. I had a number of pots kind of falling apart so I took the soil from those and put it into my large grow bags. A container is a container but having half falling apart plant pots does not inspire me to garden. I left a good deal of prunings and leaf matter in my containers as bug habitat so I’ve been dogging some of that into the soil and discarding the rest. Now that things have sprung to life, I’ve been planting out peas and radishes, so I needed access to the soil.

I have already harvested some very tasty asparagus stalks and nasturtiums have even started to appear. I’ve begun amending the soil in the rest of the pots and topping them up in anticipation for planting out my tomato and pepper seedlings. The pea shoots are happy and doing their thing and all of my raspberries and strawberries have come back in full vigour. To my earlier point about working with what we’ve got, I took a bunch of mint cuttings and planted them around the dead beds at the front of my building. There’s really no where for the mint to spread to or invade so I decided to work with what I had: space with poor soil, poor drainage, enclosed, and not hospitable to much. At the sunniest end a peppermint plant has been thriving, so it has become the mothership for the others. I’ll keep you posted!

With warmer weather and things growing, I will have lots more updates soon. I’m working on a soon to be updated page for courses, and I’ve added quite a few resources to the Get Involved page.

More later!