Category Archives: Gardening

My Pumpkin Vine Tried to Take Over the World

My pumpkin vine recently made a bid to take over the world, and it very nearly succeeded. When starting this garden I gave myself the freedom to experiment… aka to mess up big time. I didn’t want to be so worried about the outcome that I would be paralyzed to do anything. Our garden plot is large, so I divided it up into quadrants with a small hill for squash in the center. In the center most part of the squash hill I planted a seedling that Aiden had made from the Easter Festival in downtown Nanaimo. Dave and I call it the mystery pumpkin since neither one of us can remember what the seed was called at the festival.

Here is a picture of the mystery pumpkin seedling when we first planted it in the center hill of the garden. It is the tiny seedling in the top center of the photo.

Please note the small, unassuming mystery pumpkin seeding in the center of the garden.

Now here it is today…

The mystery pumpkin tries to take over the world, starting with the garden.

Where did my lovely paths into the garden go? Oh, yes… They are buried under pumpkin vines.

I started noticing an issue with the pumpkin vine when it got more and more difficult to place the arching sprinkler into my garden patch. The humungous leaves of the vine started blocking the water, so I began pinning leaves down under the sprinkler to give the rest of the garden a chance to get some water. Then I started noticing that half of the garden was disappearing under the ever-encroaching vines.

It was when I woke up one morning from a stress dream about my garden that I realized something needed to be done about the vines. Once again turning to the internet for a solution, I stumbled on the Pumpkin Nook. Using the Pumpkin Nook’s information I attacked the pumpkin vine with a loving vengeance. I pruned more pumpkin vine than I had realized even existed in the garden.

One of Little Man’s pumpkins.

Now that I’ve done some drastic cutting back of the pumpkin vine, it seems to still be trucking along healthily and Little Man daily goes out to check on the progress of his six pumpkins. I can’t wait to see how big they get. And I think I need to start doing a bit of internet research on uses for squash blossoms. What I failed to mention is that on the north side of the pumpkin mound I planted zucchini and on the south side I planted sun burst squash… Yes… Remember that I wanted to experiment? At least I don’t have to worry about not having any garden produce… 😉

Even if You Are a Killer of Plants, You Can Do This: A Planter of Salad Greens

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Until I moved to Indiana I thought of myself as a killer of plants. If anyone spoke of gardening I would back away horrified, explaining that my green thumb was black. I had left a trail of dead houseplants across three states, and I could only imagine that a garden would mean large scale plant destruction.

Then we moved to Indiana for my first “real” job as a university professor and we were living in a “real” house. Not a tiny apartment where you could literally hear your neighbor blow his nose in his kitchen while you were doing dishes, not a duplex, not a loft, a real house complete with a deck. Our backyard was a gloriously shady space perfect for matches of extreme bocce, but didn’t get enough sun for a garden. Our deck, on the other hand, was perfect for container gardening. So off I went to the local warehouse store for plastic gardening containers, and a local nursery for bags of soil, seeds and seedlings. And I didn’t kill anything. In fact, things grew like magic. The pictures I used here are all from my current two salad garden containers, both of which sit atop a deck railing, leaving more room for our deck set and bbq… and toddler play area.

This amazing assortment of lettuces all came from the same packet of seeds. I believe this was a “gourmet salad mix” and contains both green and red salad greens. My favorite is the Red Oak Lettuce that you see popping up on the left side of this image. Needless to say when I’m “thinning” my plants I tend to leave the Red Oak to grow taller and rip out everything around it to eat first.

The most magical of all the containers in my deck garden was the one for salad greens. This was the one that I had the least hopes for, and had simply filled it with dirt, drizzled some seeds over it, mixed my seeds through, watered it and moved on. It ended up being the most amazing of all the boxes. The greens grew like mad and were gorgeous to boot. The “moral of this story” is that this is one of the easiest ways to garden that you can do. Even if you have no space for a garden, maybe you have corner by your front door where you can stash a small garden pot or a window where you can hang a basket or but a box in, you can grow your own lettuce.

For this salad I used primarily the assorted greens “thinned” from my containers. That just means that there were too many seedlings going in the pot so they can’t all grow well. So I ripped out the seedlings that were growing too close to bigger plants, ripped off their roots, and created an amazing microgreens salad. I’ve done this for weeks. As my larger plants get enough room I’ll stop ripping them out and start simply snipping off a few leaves around the edges and keep going from there. This salad also had the flowering ends of some of my herbs, particularly the oregano.

If the easy factor isn’t convincing you to try this, lettuce is also one of the more expensive vegetables to buy in the grocery store, as well as being one of the most chemical treated if you can’t afford the organic varieties. If grown conventionally (with pesticides, etc.), lettuce is nearly impossible to truly clean, meaning that with your salads you are eating traces of whatever chemicals, fertilizers, and insecticides they sprayed on the fields. If you grow your lettuce at home you control what is sprayed onto the leaves, how long it sits in storage, etc. It’s a win, win.

This particular salad day coincided with the blooming of my first nasturtium blossoms (yes, they are edible) and the fact that my basil plants were trying to bloom so I pinched off the blooming tips and into the salad bowl they went.

If you are willing to give this a try, here’s what you do…

Fill your container with dirt and sprinkle the lettuce seeds more or less evenly over the surface. Gently stir your fingers over the dirt to barely cover the seeds with soil.
Water your seeds and keep the soil moist as you wait for the magic to begin.
As your lettuce grows and starts to fill the container you can start thinning your plants. On the packet of seeds it will tell you how much spacing between plants you should have, which will likely be a couple of inches. As your plants grow start pulling those that are too close together, tearing off their roots, and washing them up nicely to eat with your dinner. Your “thinning” of the extra seeds ends up being a series of amazing microgreen salads.

There is something amazing about having a still sun-warmed salad with your dinner on the sun-bathed deck. Give it a try and happy gardening!

The Sheep Are Out… Again

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This is not what I meant to post tonight, but then I left for yoga. I was balancing yoga mat, water bottle, purse, all being held in an unintentionally awkward way. As I stepped up to the car, purse now open while I fished out the keys, I glanced to my left towards my garden and stopped stunned. Not quite understanding what I was seeing. Was there truly a herd of sheep on my sidewalk? And were they supposed to be there? Then I noticed our farmer-landlord running towards me, summer dress flapping and sheep feed bucket waving towards the errant flock. It then took me a moment to grab my phone from the awkwardly held purse and snap the pictures before shoeing the sheep along.

This is when I started feeling like I was back in Turkey. I was “hut! hutting!” like the village shepard, moving the sheep toward their pasture, though I think the flapping yoga mat would stand out a bit on the Turkish prairies.

What made that moment so perfect, was that exactly one year ago tonight… almost to the exact hour and minute… Dave, Little Man and I were just sitting down with Dave’s parents, Ruth and Joe, for dinner when Joe looked out the window and said “The sheep are out…” That simple phrase ended up inspiring this blog and forever keeps me laughing even a year later… and especially when a year later the same situation is happening. To read that original post, click here.

We’ve now officially lived in Canada for one year. Not too bad, eh?

Magic Garden Songs, First Strawberries and Kids in the Garden

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A week into our gardening season and I haven’t killed anything yet. Yet. I count that as a success.

As a professor that studies food politics and who has worked with community supported agricuture (CSAs in the States) and small farmers for years, it is funny to be on this end of the food production scale. This is the first place that we’ve lived where I have been able to have real garden space, not just containers. I am also, however, surrounded by gardens tended by expert gardeners who have been at it for years. I am relying heavily on their knowledge, picking their brains about everything from how to prune tomato plants to the best time to water plants and which plants grow better in compost versus manure-based soils.

I also find myself comparing my funky garden to their amazing plots. Due to the construction of our garden space, I didn’t get my seeds planted until a bit late in the season, and most were seeds sown into the ground rather than seedlings. So my neighbors have a few weeks of a head start on me, and their gardens look like magic. They look like a sort of Magician’s Apprentice version of gardening. These staid Canadians must go out to their gardens in the cool morning mist, and sing a song conjuring their plants to rise as they slowly lift their arms. Green shoots obligingly spring from the earth at their command, quickly growing into full fledged fruiting plants. Or so it seems.

I find myself greedily staring at the dark brown soil every morning, looking for new green shoots that will hopefully provide my table with gorgeous (or at least delicious) veges in the not too distant future. Little Man’s favorite thing to do in the evenings before dinner is to go to the green house and play with the strawberries. He moves from plant to plant, carefully holding each berry in his little hand before moving on to the next.

The other day the first strawberry was finally ripe, and I plucked it from the plant to share it with him. I took a bite of one of the warmest, sweetest strawberries I’ve ever had and held the other half out to Little Man to sample. I thought this would be a wonderful moment, sharing with him the first fruit of the season. He, on the other hand, looked at me in horror that I would eat one of his small red toys that just happened to be growing on a plant in the greenhouse. At that moment I thought of all the blogs, web pages, farmers market people, etc. who talk about how meaningful it can be for little kids to grow their own food, how for many kids this helps them start eating more vegetables, and how angels sing whenever a young child helps tend a garden. Apparently we are going to need a bit more help in this area…

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