FarmCity Food Garden Construction

FarmCity Closed

2015-03-09T18:22:17-07:00

We announce with great regret that FarmCity Food Gardens is no longer in business. We have met so many wonderful people and aspiring gardeners, and have enjoyed immensely the opportunity to serve Vancouver gardeners.

For continued great service with your food gardening needs, please contact our longterm collaborator and garden expert, Elvira, at CompanionGardens. With 20 years of experience in organic gardening - three years with FarmCity - she has the comprehensive know-how to help you with all your concerns and requests.

Contact: companiongardens@gmail.com or 604 363 4853

www.companiongardens.ca

In the meantime, please continue to enjoy our blog: lots of information about growing food on the West Coast!

A plan for the new year? Turn your lawn into an organic food garden!

2015-01-06T16:52:28-08:00

Get fresh, organic food from your landscaping dollar! If you’re already paying a landscaping service to come mow your lawn, why not spend the money on a food garden service instead? We can convert your lawn (back, front, or both) into a food garden and then grow the fruit and vegetables for you! If you always meant to start growing food, but don’t feel you have the time or expertise to manage it, this is a solution. Even the tiniest spaces bear great opportunities for growing edible plants.

We offer a professional, reliable service for $35/hour, plus the cost of materials like seeds or organic fertilizer. For a garden with 3 or 4 beds, we’d usually spend about 3 hours a week and provide you with a continuous harvest for 9-10 months of the year. We are also happy to show what we’re doing as we go, so that you can slowly take over the gardening yourself, if that’s your ultimate goal. Whatever your needs are, get in contact with us, we´ll find a solution!

Planning My Garden III - More about Planting

2014-05-17T07:22:00-07:00

In our previous post, we set out the basics of where to plant what in your vegetable garden The main issues, as you would expect, are what you want to eat, how much space and light the plants need, and when they should be planted.

But as you work with your garden from year to year, you will integrate many other ideas about where and when to plant things, without even realizing it. You may start to work more effectively with the principles of companion planting - the idea that some plants seem to support the growth and health of some other plants, while still others may actually inhibit growth.

For instance, common wisdom is that peas don't like onions, garlic and other alliums, so don't plant them side-by-side. I don't know for sure that this is true, but still, I tend to keep the two kinds of plants separated. Likewise, as we've probably mentioned elsewhere, tomatoes, parsley and basil tend to like to grow together.

You can also consider planting for pest control: many of the herbs are thought to help repel garden pests, and so they can be useful scattered throughout a garden to lend overall pest resistance. There are certainly various flowers for pest control that we routinely plant in our vegetable gardens: for instance, in one of our clients' raspberry beds, there's a terrible earwig problem, so we'll be planting lots of allysum to try to reduce the problem. (Actually, common wisdom suggests that allysum is a good plant against various surface- and soil-based pests). Likewise, we plant nasturtiums (left), marigolds, geraniums and calendula, for similar reasons.

You can also plant flowers to draw pollinators - especially the really fragrant flowers such as sweet peas (our favourite!), or the kinds of flowers often used to draw hummingbirds.

You may also make planting decisions based on soil conditions: most berry crops tend to prefer a somewhat or fairly acid soil (especially blueberries), so don't plant them next to your chard patch (which really needs a neutral soil to thrive). Potatoes also like a somewhat acid soil, and shouldn't be planted in a bed that's just been limed - and they also do better in a soil with a fair bit of sand, which loosens soil texture and makes it easier for the potatoes themselves to develop.

Similarly, to prevent your broccoli from growing hollow stems, you need less nitrogen in the soil than many other crops prefer - so plant them in an area that hasn't just had a big load of compost added. And since garlic really doesn't like manure - which promotes garlic rust - it should be planted in a soil that's been fertilized with garden compost instead.

Soil depth is also relevant: most vegetables do fine with about 9 inches of soil, but of course postatoes need to be in much deeper beds - about 18 inches. The larger carrot varieties, parsnips and asparagus also need deep soil.

Finally, I also make a lot of planting decisions for aesthetic reasons: the curly kale just looks so great against the deep red cabbage, or the delicate carrot fronds against the pale green of golden marjoram. In the photo above, a broccoli plant is surrounded by young arugula.

Planting is a creative activity - so rather than fretting over it, enjoy the opportunity!

Planning My Garden III: How Should I Plant It?

2014-05-14T21:06:41-07:00

As you might expect, there are quite a few things to consider in planning how to plant your garden - but let's start with the most important question: what do you like to eat?

Where to Start: Make a list of the foods you'd most like to eat fresh from the garden - then look them up on the internet (or here on the FarmCity site!), or in you favourite veggie gardening book. Start by looking at only three kinds of information about each type of plant. Don't look at anything else for now, or it just gets too overwhelming. Make note of:

1) How much space do my plants need to grow in - that is, how many plants can I grow?

2) How much light do the plants need?

3) When should they be planted - and how long until they're harvested?

A lot of this information can also be provided on the stick labels in bedding plants, or on seed packets.

How Many Plants Can I Grow? From this information, you can begin to create a planting diagram, drawn to scale, of your gardening space. I draw the basic plan of the space in ink, then make several of copies of it, so I can do successive diagrams as my ideas shift as I go. Or sometimes I even make scaled cut-outs of the various plants, which I can move around on top of the plan as much as I need.

Once you begin adding the plants to the diagram, you'll quickly be able to see how much room you may or may not have for the various plants you are hoping to grow. Adjust your list accordingly: "12 tomato plants, not 15 - but I bet I could squeeze a row of radishes in behind the cabbages over there."

Light: From the start, you will also be considering which part of your garden gets the most sun, which the least - and of course this crucially affects where to put the various plants. The basic rule of thumb, as we've noted before, is: whatever you grow for "the fruit or the root" needs full sun; whatever you grow for the leaf, does better in less sun. So tomatoes, squash or eggplants need full sun, while chard or lettuce does better in half sun or even less.

My experience with root crops has been that they can deal with some shade - especially if it's dappled shade rather than dense. I also find, despite the conventional information, that most herbs (like the marjoram, above) can deal with part-shade as well. The exception here is basil (right), which needs lots of heat and light!

So, I try to locate the largest sunny plants at the "back" of the bed (ie: away from the sun), so they don't shade the ones in front. These would include squash, cucumber or beans grown up a trellis, as well as "indeterminant" tomatoes (the ones that grow tall and need a lot of staking up).

In front of the tallest plants, I locate the next smaller plants, then in front of those, the smaller yet - and so on. For obvious reasons, I almost inevitably end up with a row of strawberries right along the front edge of the bed!

In the shade of the sun-loving plants, I squeeze in some of the shade-tolerant plants - parsley, slipped in behind the tomatoes, or of course, that row of radishes behind the cabbages!

Timing: The other thing to consider is when the various crops can be planted, and how long they'll last - because this will allow you to plant - and harvest - more food over the season than it might seem at first glance. For instance, you can plant peas in March, and expect them not to grow past late June - so the trellis on which you've planned peas will also house the beans you want. Plant the beans at the feet of the peas in early June, and let the beans take over as the peas fade.

Or if it's early April, you can grow a couple rows of greens for a quick spring harvest, in the same place where you'll be planting your summer tomatoes in late May. By the same token, be sure to take into account the spots that will need to become seed beds for your winter garden: for instance, don't plant the potatoes, which you won't harvest until September, in the same spot where, in July, you'll be starting the brussels sprouts to transplant out for the winter garden.

Complicated? Yep, it can be - but the two things to recall are:

1) There is no perfect plan, so don't worry about trying to achieve it. One decision may mean a slightly different balance to the garden than another decision may have. You can't really go wrong - just a bit better than your previous time around.

2) A garden is always a dynamic and changing thing - so a planting diagram is only ever provisional: things change over the season, and should definitely change from one year to the next as you rotate crops to keep pests and diseases at a minimum. So the plan you have for this year can't be set in stone; it is just a good basis on which to make further decisions - which call for still other decisions.

More about your planting plan in the next post: Planting Plans Part II

Outdoor woodwork

2014-03-29T16:15:21-07:00

As part of our specialty in outdoor woodcraft, we recently built some custom gates, privacy screens, and a front handrail for a gorgeous house renovation run by Howard Vera Design. The overall theme is West Coast modern, with warm cedar and fir elements, river rock and (soon to come) an innovative planting plan of decorative grasses and native BC plants and trees.

For our part, we built some privacy screens for the back deck and barbeque area, new gates, and the front handrailing. The design focus is high craft, clean lines, and beautiful, oiled wood (using a very "green" penetrating oil).