FarmCity Food Garden Construction

Edible Flowers

2013-05-06T14:46:39-07:00

We've had an extraordinarily sunny and warm spring here on the West Coast, and while we've raved daily and with great gratitude about the weather, one effect has also been to make our winter kale bolt to flowers a lot sooner than usual. Some of the flowers we keep for the sake of saving seed, but we also EAT the kale flowers!

They can either be eaten as little green florets, like sprouting broccoli heads, or else you can eat the fully-developed flowers - a mildly sweet taste in a salad, or as a garnish. Or just pluck the flowers and eat them for a mini-snack while working in the garden!

A few other edible flowers:

Calendula (right, and below left), related to the veggie-garden favourite, marigolds, have the same pest-repelling properties as marigolds. And like marigolds, the flowers are also edible, the petals making a tangy flavour in your next salad.

Growing to about 18" tall, the flowers add a colourful touch to your vegetable garden, and come in an array of orange and yellow shades:

Squash flowers (above right) are also a well-known culinary flower, often served stuffed with cheese (and maybe some crab!) and sauted to a golden brown.You have to catch them quickly, though: squash flowers, especially the male ones that you want to eat (save the female ones for making the actual squashes!), don't last for more than a day or two on the vine. You can tell the male ones because they come out earliest on the vine, maybe a day ahead of the female ones.

Finally, we thought we'd re-publish the photo of one of our first edible walls, in which we planted both marigolds and violets - both of which can also be eaten - amongst the sage, thyme, lettuce, endive and other greens:

A Gem of a Food Garden - Planning a Veggie Garden

2013-04-19T17:04:00-07:00

One of the great creative joys of helping people build food gardens, is the opportunity to design the garden from start to finish! So when a couple on the North Shore contacted us with their wish to have a food garden, we started by coming up with several designs.

The first focusses on a central lozenge-shaped bed, with a perennial herb garden in the middle. The paths will be made of 1" river rock for a casual, organic feel, and several existing fences provide both shelter from the weather and in-built growing frames for tomatoes, beans, peas and squashes.

The shade-loving plants will go on the south side (on the right, in the diagram), while the sun-loving plants will be gathered on the north, away from the shading fence.

It's a small, compact garden, but there's room for lots of food! Not shown in the drawing is all the additional small plants - lettuces, parsley, onions, garlic and so on - that can be interplanted amongst the tomatoes and other plants. The result will be a densely planted and highly productive food garden!

The second plan is a little less formal, but equally productive - and features all the same details of fences, river rock paths and planting plan. Here, little alcoves of plants allow for an easy work flow: just park yourself in one spot and a good part of the garden is in easy reach - before you move on to the next spot.

The bed on the north (left) side can be twice as wide as the one on the south (left), because the little yard opens into a larger space on the north - so the bed can be worked from both sides. This plan puts more plants in the fullest sun areas.

Specialty Care for Tomato Seedlings

2013-04-15T20:44:12-07:00

If you're among the avid gardeners who start their tomatoes indoors, you probably have some tall thin seedlings about now that look as if they'd fall over if nothing more than a fruit fly flew by too fast!

But - and I know it's counter intuitive - if you pinch off your seedlings, they'll slow top growth long enough to focus on broadening and strengthening the stem, and on setting really solid roots. What you do is wait until the seedlings are sprouting their fourth REAL leaf (so, not counting the very first two mini-leafs they put out just after sprouting). Pinch off this fourth leaf to just above the stem of the third.

(In the above photo, these seedlings are growing their third leaf, but not the fourth quite yet).

You'll think you've ruined your plants - nothing happens for a solid week - but then you'll find that your plants resume growing, much strengthened by their mini-sabbatical!

Once they resume growth after the hiatus, they will probably need repotting in 4-inch pots. Plant them deep into the soil - right up to just below the first leaf. They'll grow roots off the buried stem - a unique talent of theirs - and again, they'll grow to be much sturdier above ground, and incredibly well-supplied with nutrients from the roots below ground.

FYI: We've published other posts on sprouting tomatoes.

High Beds for the Sore-of-Back

2013-04-12T22:37:00-07:00

We have been getting a lot of requests for raised beds and balcony planters that are high enough for people with sore or aging backs to use comfortably.

One of the easiest solutions is the double-high raised bed, which at about 20" puts a lot of soil a lot closer to reach.

(For wheelchair gardeners, planters on legs - so that your own legs can fit underneath, allowing you to get closer to the planter - are an option that we also offer).

Don't be fooled by Eric's posture in the photo: he's close kin to a giraffe, so he makes everything around him look small! For us ordinary mortals, the double-high bed makes a real difference. Eric's planting various root crops - parsnips, carrots and beets.

Behind and beside him, the white fabric covers beds newly seeded with various greens for a spring harvest (it's late March in the photo). The fabric protects the seeds from birds, while also preventing the incursion of various soil-based pests, such as the carrot rust fly. And it protects the newly sprouted plants from heavy rains, until they've had a few weeks to grow. The water gets through, but without beating the little guys down!

A later photo of the same bed, with part of our new watering system in the background (the pipe, with the soaker hose attached) :

Scallions - Spring Planting

2013-04-05T22:37:19-07:00

For the container gardener, scallions are an easy and tasty crop to grow. They can be direct seeded in early spring, a few weeks before the last frost - or grown indoors and then transplanted outdoors in clumps. They can also be seeded outdoors in September to be harvested in winter or spring.

They need a well-drained soil and plenty of light, and need to be kept moist, especially during germination and their early weeks of growth. Gently pull any weeds around them to protect their delicate roots, and fertilize them weekly - thinned out liquid fish fertilizer is good - especially if they seem to be struggling.

Take care, though! Sue, our vegetable gardening expert, says that onions shouldn't be fertilized with manure, as that can lead to rust - an orangy fungus that grows on garlic, onions and leeks. She also notes that onions and garlic don't grow well with the legumes - beans or peas - so keep them well apart. (Peas and beans don't like garlic and onions, either, so at least the feelings are mutual!) On the other hand, plants in the onion family do well with carrots, beets and lettuces: a lovely combination for your next salad!

For a mild taste, take care to harvest scallions when they reach about 6 inches high. You can sow repeated "flights" of scallions, every three weeks, to keep a steady supply going just about all year.

These scallions, above, have been grown as perennials, which we divide once a year to form new clumps. On the West Coast, they grow year round, while in colder areas, they should be mulched with a good 10 or 12 inches of hay over the winter.