It's planting time!

May long weekend is when you plant most of your garden in the Kootenays.  I don't know if I've mentioned this much before, but if you're just getting started you need to learn this things from the gardeners in your area.  When should you plant, what grows well in your area, what needs to be planted as a seedling and what can be sown directly as seeds...  All these things.  Ask anyone who gardens and they will usually loooove to share their knowledge with you.  Because gardeners are awesome.

The radishes and peas we planted earlier are growing well, we'll be eating radishes any day now!

I had picked up a couple plants at a plant sale earlier this month but we got the bulk of our bedding plants at our local Garden and Nature Fest on Saturday, just finishing up our purchases as is starting pelting down rain.  It poured overnight but there was a break in the clouds on Sunday afternoon and I took the girls outside to help me plant.  As per norm, Ria was a big help and Sunny mostly tried to destroy the garden or run away and visit the horses (giving me a heart attack).

This is the widest spot in our little garden.  I had previously planted some lettuce as seedlings.  My neighbour has lettuce reseed itself and pop up all over her garden, so she gave me some plants before they tilled their garden up.  I set up our bamboo tee-pee and planted beans around the lettuce.  My theory is that by the time the beans are big, any remaining lettuce will appreciate the shade.  I poked little holes with my finger and Ria carefully placed a bean in each one and tucked them into bed.

My aunt has a theory that you plant carrots by your peas so that when you pull the peas up, the carrots take over the spot and you use the space well.  This sounds like a plan, but was tricky to execute as my peas were already two feet tall.  I had to get clever with a chair carefully creep behind the peas to plant my carrots.  I also pulled up half of my violets, but I left the ones in front.  I like them, and it's my garden so I can let the violets take over if I want to!

Okay, so here's an overview of the side garden:
1) Cylindra Beets (they are long instead of round)
2) Rose bush
3) Mignon Carrots (organge, and apparently yummy for baby carrots)
4) Sugar Snap Peas
5) Dragon Carrots (purple I think, but yellow inside)
6) Chioggia Beets (they are rings of white and red when you cut them in half, I had to order them!)
7) Another rose bush
8) 6 little basil seedlings
9) Radishes
10) Vantes Blue Scots Curled Kale
11) Lettuce
12) Blue Lake Pole Beans

I bulk ordered seeds with my Mom and SIL and clearly my garden is the smallest but I feel the need to pack it all in somewhere.  I realized after that I missed the scarlet carrots so I'll plant them in when I pull up the radishes.  Also I have winter kale that will go in a new bed I'm putting in and something called Drunken Woman Lettuce, which sounds hilarious and thus will get put in a planted once I get another day without pouring rain.

Now for the back garden.  It's mostly tomatoes because it gets full sun.  That's what, sixteen hours of sunlight this time of year?  People think of Canada as colder, but our growing season is hot.  Short in months but long in hours.  We have to start our tomatoes inside but they loooove the sunshine we get all summer.  I dug a little hole and Ria put a handful of crushed eggshells in before the plant went in.  Then we watered them all with diluted bokashi tea.

1) Strawberries, plus a couple more I need to get in planters
2) Rosemary.  I hope it does well, I may have forgotten to water it enough at first.
3) The hen and chicks that Sunny mostly destroyed
4) Chives (that Sunny then sat on)
5) Black Cherry Tomato
6) Siberian Tomato
7) Gold Nugget Cherry Tomato
8) Parsley (comes up every year)
9) White Rabbit Cherry Tomato
10) Black Prince Tomato (small slicer)
11) San Marzeno Tomato (similar to a Roma)
12) Sara Goldstar Tomato (orange cherry)
13) Juanne Flamme Tomato
14) Cherry Fox Tomato
15) Hungarian Wax Pepper
16) Thai Hot Chili Pepper

Because really, who could pick just one tomato?  Diversity is beautiful and amazing my friends, and I'm so grateful for the growers who keep all these wonderful varieties of plants available to us.  I don't want to get preachy, but the lack of diversity in the supermarkets makes me want to cry.  It's so sad that our food is grown on the basis of how easy it is to ship and how uniform the fruit instead of how interesting and delicious it is.  My tomatoes will taste amazing this summer, and nobody has messed around with them in a lab.

And lastly, we have the garden bed that is yet to come.  I picked up two blueberry bushes and two raspberry.  My mom correctly pointed out that they will not give a great deal of fruit, but I think the girls will just love picking snacks as we play outside.  Maybe next year I'll expand it further, I do love berries.  I also have a little patty-pan squash.  Patty-pans are a cousin of zuchinni but look like little UFO's which is pretty awesome.  I have bad luck with squash though (and peppers for that matter) so here's hoping that the deer keep away from it!  The tea bush will probably go in with them.

So that's where we're at now!  How does your garden grow?

It's Bokashi time!

Worst photo ever?  It's possible.  Will I take a better one?  Unlikely as it is compost!

Okay, moving on from the photo.  I am a bad composter.  I pretty much just huck things in a bin.  I don't turn it or anything and I mostly forget to use it.  I went out and made (asked) Craig to turn it for me this spring and found that it mostly wasn't doing anything.  Especially the eggshells which I later learned don't really break down for like...years.  Sadly I didn't realize this at the time or I would have used the compost, as it was I thought it needed longer and stirred it all up and now it's just a mess again.

Hanna=lazy bad composter

So then I decided to get a more complicated method of composting.  This might sound counter-intuitive, but my theory is that if I can't ignore it, I'll do a better job!  Right?  Right!  I'm using a bokashi system.  You might be wondering:

What is Bokashi?
Well, my friends, bokashi is an indoor composting system.  It is from Japan and uses efficient microbes to ferment your compost.  It pretty much pickles it.  Crazy, I know.

Why is Bokashi Awesome?
- Unlike conventional composting methods, bokashi lets you compost cooked foods, dairy, and meat.
- It doesn't stink.  It smells a bit pickley when you open it, but not nasty.  And it's in a sealed bin so you shouldn't smell anything.
- It's amazing for your garden.  Apparently even better than normal compost because the fermentation makes the nutrients more accessible to the plants.

How do you do Bokashi?
- First you need a bucket that seals, preferably one with a spigot so you can drain the liquid out.  You also need some bokashi bran.  I bought a bag of bran and a bottle of the liquid so that I can make my own bran in the future.
- Every day I collect my food scraps in a bowl in the kitchen, then at the end of the day I add it to the bucket with a handful of bran and squish it all down with a plate (so that I don't have to touch the old food).
- Every 2-3 days I drain off the liquid (bokashi tea).  It smells a bit like apple cider vinegar and I dilute it and feed it to my plants.
- Once the bucket is full I will transfer it to another bucket (because I only have one nice bucket with a spigot and all) and let it pickle for two weeks.
- After two weeks you can bury it in the ground.  It will still look like food, but won't attract animals and can be added to your garden in a trench.  Or you can add it to your outdoor compost to finish turning into soil.  Or you can leave it all winter in a bucket in the basement and use it in the spring as compost.  Or you can feed it to a worm bin.  There's some options.  I will probably feed the tea to my plants and compost the rest in my bin for a while.

A Bonus Reason why Bokashi is Awesome!
I've been mixing the bran in Finnegan's kitty litter and it barely smells at all.  You don't walk in and think "there's a cat in here somewhere"  because you can't smell the box, even a week later!  A week of cleaning it, obviously, but with the same litter.  I would buy the bran just for this, it's so great.  And Finnegan was sniffing it as soon as I brought it home, he really seems to like it :)

Bokashi.  It's cool!  I'm not an expert but I'm pretty excited about it.  How do you compost?

Project 365 - Week 20

We ran away for a few days!  Off to visit my family on the farm. That's my excuse for no posting last week :)  That and gardening, it's May long weekend and around here that's planting time! 

So, starting from the top we have:

- One of my hostas out front.  

- Sunny met some puppies at my aunt's and took quite a while to warm up to them (it was pretty funny, her cousins were all over them and she just stared).  

- Ria and Sunny playing peek-a-boo in my bedroom curtains.

- My mom out with Sunny and her cousin, Aspen.  The girls loved that little car.

- Trampoline time with the amazing cousin Micah.

- Back home, Sunny fell in the kiddie pool.  It had an inch of rain water and she had been leaning too far to splash it.

- And Ria forcing everyone to wear hats.  Because it's fun! 

And below we have a bonus photo from Craig, he took Ria out for a little hike and they found a bunch of suntanning turtles :)

Project 365 - Week 19

It was a hot week in the Kootenays!  Kiddie pools and popsicles aren't our regular May activities, but we went with it.  We went hiking and the girls skyped with Gramma and their little cousin.  Ria got her first ever wasp sting and broke out into hives all over her body!  We got to spend waiting in the ER to be seen.  She was such a great little girl, even an hour past her bedtime.  Looks like she's allergic :(  I put wasp traps and those fake hives that are supposed to scare them off all over the yard, not sure if it's working.  Any wasp tips?

Happy Mother's Day

I have to say that being a mommy has made me appreciate my own mom like crazy.  It's hard work!  I woke up at 5:30 today (as per norm) and they both refused to nap (not normal, a special present for me today).  What I'm trying to say is that I feel it today, it's hard to be a good mom.

When I was little my mom wrote a bunch of poetry about me and motherhood.  I read them and realize that it wasn't a picnic for her either, but all I remember is love.  It gives me hope that even though I'm not perfect, I can still give my kids what they need.  Love.

She taught me to bake bread, to can, to cook and she's still teaching me how to garden.  She inspires me with her love of local food and all her hard work.

Love you mom.

PS, we have no photos together these days, we should fix that!