Two tomato plants

The deer and the bears and the crows and ravens eat out of our compost pile. You'd think we'd try to do something about that. We did. For years we tried various containers and covers and bins and the like. A lot of containers and covers and bins got trashed. Bears are strong. We tried putting the compost up against the house. We ended up with bears up against the house. Enough. We said uncle. Now we just build an open pile in the far corner of the property. It's a long trek, especially in winter, but at least we don't have large ursine creatures hanging out on our deck in the evenings.

All this means that we don't produce a whole lot of compost. This spring I got only enough for two and a half of our raised beds. Sophie's bed and Fiona's bed got a full helping of compost. Noah's (made next) got the leftovers. Mine, the final bed, got none at all. I planted anyway.

Guess which one is Sophie's tomato plant, and which one is mine? What an amazing illustration of the value of natural soil enrichment! I am stoked about compost! Go chickens, go, poop for all you're worth!

Of quack grass and garden magic

Here is what we've built in the garden. In the bottom corner of the nearest raised bed are Edward, Joe and Mimi, who are Noah's tomato plants. Fiona's bed, with the green sign, was constructed first, and is showing the more growth than anyone else's right now. Sophie, our radish expert, has bits of green showing in her bed, the farthest one. My bed is lower right, and is the one without all the compost, sand and peat in it, so is a bit of a throwaway. Ditto for the bean beds. Due to Abominable Dog mayhem our gardening got set back a bit this year. But still, we're proud. Why? Well, here's the photo of the other half (okay, three quarters) of the garden...

Now you can see that I wasn't exaggerating when I mentioned "overgrown with weeds." Go ahead, click on the photo. Even enlarged, I dare you to find a square centimetre free of quack grass. This is what we started with before we put our raised beds in. There, aren't you proud of us?

This year's garden is teeny tiny compared to anything we've planted in the past, but it feels really good. It has an energy it's never had before, thanks to my kids' magic touch. I started the GRUBS club a couple of years ago in an effort to give my kids experience gardening, since they didn't seem into it at home, and they've been agreeable enough about it, but never really caught the bug. But now, when I least expected it (isn't that always the way?) there is interest taking root at home. Today when the chicks escaped from the chicken corral, the kids' first worry was that they might have got into the garden!

New beginnings in the garden

Since Fiona was born, the vegetable garden has really gone to weed. Really, really. I've half-heartedly thrown some seeds in a couple of springs, but most of my limited gardening time and energy has gone into the GRUBS garden. The soil is clayish and nutritionally depleted. The deer and crows and dog and bears were eating all our compost. My worm bin got destroyed by the dog. The garden fence got wrecked by a bear and then the dog made herself at home inside, digging and doing all the abominable things that Abominable Dogs do. The dog chewed up most of the low-flow irrigation system I'd been gradually investing in and installing. I really assumed that this year would be the same. Fiona wanted to plant a little garden and I figured I'd make up a little plot for her, do a little tending of the perennials, and leave it at that.

But against all odds some momentum is building. In tearing apart the old chicken shed I salvaged enough boards to build Fiona a Square Foot Garden style raised bed. Then Sophie wanted one. Then Noah. I found some side-cuts in the forest and built three more beds. I used the wood chips the hydro crew had dumped beside our driveway last year when clearing trees from near the hydro wires as mulch for the pathways. I reconstructed the main parts of our bean trellis.

In mucking out the old chicken shed, I came up with four wheelbarrow-fulls of half-rotted chicken manure. I mixed it in with what was left of the winter's compostable food scraps and a bunch of yard waste. Within three weeks the pile was rife with red wigglers. Things are really busy in there! We'll have tons more compost in another month or two. And the compost pile from two years previously proved fully composted, yielding about 10 cubic feet of black gold. I added sand, peat, greensand and bloodmeal and created some pretty awesome soil for the raised beds. I replaced the fence the Abominable Dog wrecked. I pieced together enough hose that the A.D. hadn't chewed to be able to water at least the raised bed area.

And now things are beginning to grow. That's Fiona's lettuce up above. So far we've planted onions, potatoes, carrots, two kinds of pole beans, peas, several varieties of tomatoes, peppers, luffa, morning glory, marigold, several lettuce varieties, eggplant, hubbard squash, cucumbers and radish. And probably a few things I don't know about that Fiona planted.

Even my much neglected perennials are doing encouraging things. I harvested only two lonely stalks from the overgrown asparagus bed this year, but look at the lovely ferny hedge they're about to leaf out for me. The raspberries' supports rotted through and fell over last winter, but they're growing everywhere and just need someone to make them toe the line. They'll then spend this year pouring out vegetative growth and next year we'll reap the bounty. The strawberries and the rhubarb persist despite my neglect. Batch 4 of rhubarb muffins is on the slate for tonight. And the herbs! They're taking over the lawn, much to my delight. Parsley, chives, lovage, peppermint, spearmint, lemon balm, oregano and thyme are all giddily battling each other for supremacy in the little kitchen garden, eagerly sending brave colonial delegations out onto the lawn, where walking and mowing result in a heavenly scent.

Feral herb garden and perennials discounted, we have only cultivated and planted a scant 100 square feet this year. And so I believe that we'll avoid the mistake we've made so many times, of getting ambitious beyond the realm of practicality. For the first time in many years, it feels as if the gardening is going to be sustainable and will move over months and years towards more productivity. Can you tell how excited I am about all those red wigglers?

Back to GRUB-bing

The Science Club kids (a.k.a. the homeschooled core of the GRUBS club) got busy planting for spring today. We planted five flats of seedlings with great gusto.

Oddly enough Fiona was most interested in planting sweet peppers; she refuses to eat them, so I can't imagine what possessed her to fixate on planting them. I think she really liked the photo on the seed packet. Noah and his friend B. planted a flat full of quirky choices like different varieties of chili peppers. Sophie and her friend A. planted lots of herbs, marigolds, tomatoes and peppers.

We are lucky enough to have an excellent relationship with the local school. The science room of the school has a huge solarium window, complete with grow lights on a timer, that is almost never used, so the GRUBS, as an inclusive club that welcomes all interested families with children, are able to make use of the space for our seedlings. They'll be installed there after March Break and will, we hope, merrily grow away until sometime around our last frost date in the 3rd week of May.

GRUBS is organizing the second annual local seed exchange in next weekend. We're gradually accumulating, and sharing, dozens of unique seed varieties. I love that our packets of traded and gifted seeds have names like "Jenny's Pretty Striped Tomatoes" and "Rosalie's Prize Drying Tomatoes." They connect us to other people and other gardens in the community. This year we decided we're going to participate in the Canadian Tomato Project, growing, observing and reporting on several recognized Canadian tomato varieties. There was some discussion today amongst the GRUBS about factory farming and the loss of genetic diversity that results; interestingly, the DVD "The Fight for True Farming" is sitting in our Zip.ca pile right now awaiting viewing.

We decided that our big GRUBS project for this year should be a shed. We would so dearly love to be able to leave tools, equipment and supplies safely at the garden, rather than carting them back and forth from home every week. We are looking at this Lee Valley bracket kit that would give us a simple starting point; hopefully we'll get a fair bit of salvaged and/or donated lumber and sheathing.

Harvest Festival

The GRUBS held their 2nd annual Harvest Festival last weekend. It was a chance to celebrate another successful growing year, to have a feast, to have fun together and to thank the community at large for its support. We churned butter, made herbed garlic butter which we slathered on French bread and warmed beside the bonfire, we prepared a massive harvest soup, we laid out samples of our sweet and dill pickles, our sundried tomatoes and dried prune-plums, our fresh tomatoes and fresh carrots and beans. We made herb tea. We demonstrated our new fruit press by producing a yummy pear/apple/grape juice that everyone tried. And we gave tours of the garden which now sports the foundation of a nature plantscape marsh garden (the digging, lining and backfilling are complete). The weather was beautiful.


That's me in the front with the turquoise butterfly shirt on. Fiona is standing on my right in the stripey pink getup. Noah is in the "22" shirt behind us. Sophie is two to Noah's right in the light green shirt. Erin is back row left in the navy, with the willow-and-flowers crown.

Good fun! It's been a pretty good GRUBS year. We were disappointed that it turned out to be a terrible year for fruit and so our fruit press has been of limited use. Bears by the dozen turned up in our little town of 600 by the end of July because there were no huckleberries up in the alpine areas for whatever reason, and because reproductive rates over the last 2 or 3 years seem to have been higher than normal. Seven bears were shot by wildlife officers in early September, but the fruit was pretty much picked clean of the trees in July and August, long long before it was ripe and ready for the press. Normally the bears show up in late September and timely harvesting is (excuse the pun) fruitful. This year was weird. So the press has only been used 6 times, three times by us and three by other community members. Ah well, it's sure to get more use in future years.

First GRUBS salad

Here is Fiona enjoying her first garden salad of the year. It was just a perfect "Fiona-sized salad", made up of 6 or 8 shoots of fresh chive, a few snippets of fresh parsley, the first harvest of garden cress, planted 2 weeks ago, the tiny slices of the radish thinnings from her garden plot and two chive flowers as garnish. Served up with Fiona's favourite ranch salad dressing it was a fitting way to celebrate a round out a busy gardening day.

The GRUBS had a wonderful afternoon together. First we planted out about half of the seedlings that we had started in early April. There was a bumper crop of pickling cucumbers and basil, healthy numbers of lettuces and assorted other things, many of which had been labelled under conditions of relative chaos and were clearly not what they said they were, but could not be identified. So a number of mystery plants.

Then we went for a tour at the home of a "friend of the GRUBS". R. is a real-life acquaintance of mine, and an on-line friend. We live just a few kilometers apart, read each other's blogs religiously and exchange ideas and inspiration but rarely meet in person. But she invited the GRUBS up to tour her luscious garden paradise amidst the rocky scree of her mountainside homestead and baited us with some magnificent seedlings of pepper and tomato varieties I'd been lusting after. The kids (and adults) also pored over her birds nest collection.

Then we headed back to the garden to transplant the new seedlings and finish planting out the innumerable basil sprouts in any vacant nooks and crannies we could find. We noticed that the post holes I had dug a mere 24" deep a couple of weeks ago had water in the bottoms of them. And the amazing thing was that they were not wet from rain or irrigation but from the rising lake level. Our garden is less than 24" from being flooded out completely! The water is very very high and levels here are uncontrolled (i.e. the lake and river are undammed). However, the lake is massive, and we are optimistic.

I came home with a few dozen baby basils. Somewhere amidst the weeds in the fallow garden beds at home I will find a place for them.

A GRUBS Day

Today was a typical GRUBS meeting and I thought I'd write a little about how the sessions operate, since we've kind of evolved into an approach that works.

Donna (the other main organizer) and I both had things to bring and pick up on the way to the meeting. I stopped with the kids to pick up the first garbage can of donated compost from a lovely older lady who's moving later this month. We had to do some problem-solving to heave the garbage can, now weighing well over 100 lbs., into the van. Some 2x4's as a ramp did the trick.

We arrived at the garden at 10 am and for a while we were the only family there. I started working on adding mounting cross-pieces to the bat-house pole with the power drill, some 2x4 bits and some lag bolts. My kids drifted off the to the lakeshore. Noah had brought his rockhounding 'kit' (some equipment he's cobbled together himself) and so he began chipping away at rocks on the beach. Free play on the beach is wonderful, but we've decided to ban it during actual GRUBS meetings since we can't properly supervise the non-swimmers there and we can easily lose all the momentum of the meeting. So it's fair game to play there before and after, but not during meetings.

Finally the other families began to arrive. When we had what seemed to be a quorum, we summoned the beach-dwellers with the 'gong' (two pieces of scrap metal found on the beach). First we looked at the difference in growth in the veggies in the heavily-manured areas vs. the untreated beds. There was up to a five-fold difference in growth. We discussed the soil macronutrients and what was likely missing from the untreated soil and what we ought to do to improve the soil. Our solutions: side-dressing previously planted untreated beds with compost, and planting fallow areas with a green manure cover crop. We had about 7 jobs to get done, besides the standard weeding and watering of the kids' own individual garden plots, so I wrote them on the white board and we picked three to start with. We split into three groups. One weeded the corn 'field', one unloaded the compost and one cultivated and then planted alfalfa as a cover crop on a hitherto fallow area. Then we switched to the next three jobs on the list: levelling and mulching a new raised bed to encourage composting of the turned-over sod it's been made from, weeding the herb garden and starting work on the worm bin. I took two 6yo boys to the adjacent hospital for shredded paper for the worm bin; as there was little in the bag, we had the thrilling (to them) job of running a few hundred sheets of recyclables through the shredder.

Someone had brought a watermelon and was sharing slices out. D__, another GRUB, arrived, fresh from a family reunion weekend with three of her cousins. Her little plot had been growing like crazy while she was away last week, so we all had fun looking at the size of her peas and radishes and showing her cousins around. The kids got busy weeding and watering their individual plots. And the final job was a big cherry picking party. A number of nearby feral cherry trees were laden with fruit, so the kids picked and ate and we ended up with a couple of litres of surplus cherries to take home and throw in the freezer to be made into ice cream topping for this fall's Harvest Festival.

We noticed that the transplanted plum tree that we thought was completely dead had sprouted some lovely new green leaves around its trunk. There was general wonder and rejoicing.

Then we had a final circle time. The GRUBS had been invited to go on a garden tour this evening with the local adult-oriented garden society, so we discussed etiquette and appropriate behaviour for anyone who decided to come. We talked about plans for next week (solar oven cookies, a talk and demonstration from a local vermicomposting expert, and possibly raising the bat-house pole) and asked the kids if they had any other activity ideas for GRUBS. Noah mentioned his idea for a "museum," which is I think what in a classroom might be called a "nature table." He wants a place to display interesting specimens found around the site ... rocks, bones, shells, etc.. There seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for this idea so we agreed to pursue it further in the weeks to come. The kids were encouraged to harvest their Romaine lettuce this week and take it home for big salads.

We cleared the white board and wrote down the date and time of our next meeting, leaving a space for anyone who shows up later this week to water or weed to mark down their visit. And then we packed up the tools we'd brought, put away the buckets and garden cart and other tools and headed home for lunch.

With D__'s cousins we had about 23 people there this morning. Normal total is about 18 or 19. It's a wonderful group of curious, respectful, motivated kids. It doesn't always seem like we've accomplished much (though today did feel productive) but I look at the garden and think about all the activities we've done and I realize it's all really adding up. There's a wealth of experience accumulating amongst those attending, and the garden is gradually transforming from a wasteland of rocks & roots into a vibrant, vital place.

This afternoon I did some more teacup birdfeeder glueing with Sophie. We're making a couple of dozen of these things to sell as GRUBS fundraisers. We epoxy a thrift shop cup to its matching saucer, then glue on an inexpensive stainless steel spoon. Once that's dry we turn the thing upside down and glue a copper pipe end cap onto the bottom. Then we cut a length of copper pipe, push it into the ground and friction-fit the teacup onto the top. The teacups will be labelled with instructions and some info about GRUBS and filled with a starter-baggie of wild bird seed. They look very sweet in amongst perennials in the garden. The spoon acts as a perch. I hope they'll sell quickly at the local outdoor market. They'll increase the club's visibility in the community too I think.

This evening we went on the garden tour. The local landscaper, who had created the garden, and who is president of the garden society, led us around. The place was amazing -- it had all been carved out of the forest within the last year. The boulders used to define the raised beds and retain soil on slopes were apparently about 50 truckloads worth (at $400/load, we were told) and that obviously wasn't where most of the money had gone either. This residential garden was estimated by those in the know to have cost somewhere around $80 - 100,000. There were two large natural-looking deep ponds fed by a waterfall forming almost a moat at the front of the house and expansive views of the lake and the wilderness park of mountain peaks on the far side. The property is off the electrical grid, but they have built their own power plant on the creek and don't seem to want for wattage. Quite the experience visiting it. The kids were wonderfully behaved and enjoyed themselves a lot.