SPRING Season

Woohoo…Spring has Sprung and we are busy preparing the EDIBLE PERENNIAL PLANT NURSERY for our first open house of the spring season.

• First date is SATURDAY March 12, 2016 from 10am -2pm
• The next is SUNDAY March 20 from 10am – 2pm (On Saturday March 19th, Gord is speaking at the BC Fruit Testers meeting…details below)
• Then every Saturday for the rest of Spring.

Gord and Dug (Nina behind Gord)

As usual, come on out to visit and say hi, walk around the gardens, look at chickens, cuddle Dug the dog/duck, cuddle Nina the dog, (cuddle Gord the bull in the china shop),checkout many examples of raised garden beds, and look at the house and outbuildings (outside only – no inside tours).  If you come to just look around, please park at the bottom of the hill or on the road.  If you are buying plants, please drive on up.

Plant list is here and more plants will be arriving throughout the spring.  Note that our prices INCLUDE the GST, and all of our repotted plants contain really good soil, bone meal and mycorhizal innoculants.  We have a limited supply of Apricots and Almonds trees for sale.  Anyone like garlic?  We have WAY too much.  6 for $5.  Also have some OCA tubers,  (20 small tubers for $10), and some OCA plants ($4 for small pot).

Tour through food forest (Photo by Jason Guille)

Our Food Forest is in it’s 3rd year and really starting to mature…Come on by and walk through the pathways.  Lots of new plant signs too.

Micro climate in zone 1 right outside the front door

Raised Garden Beds:  We took out the “monster” of a rose bush that was right in the front of the house…it was a love hate relationship where my Dad had faithfully pruned it 5 times per year so it wouldn’t take over the house.  He bled many times on that plant.  Anyways, this is prime zone 1 garden space right on the south wall of the cob house…what an incredible micro-climate.  We are going to install more raised garden beds (the curvy beds) and plant more lemons and maybe even a mexican avocado.  Stay tuned…we may even do a 1-day workshop of raised garden beds.

New galvalume garden beds

Annual beds:  8 years ago when we lived in the trailers, we terraced the hillside with cedar raised garden beds…and yup, they are now falling apart…after about two years of brainstorming solutions that would last our lifetime, be affordable, and make it easier to garden as we get old, we came up with the GALVALUME beds.  This is a very heavy gage  material that we get pressed on the mainland, AND is water potable certified (will not leach lead or cadmium.)  We have now installed three of these…one 4ft round, one 5 ft round and one rectangular 10ft x 4ft bed that can have a cold frame/greenhouse cover easily installed.  We will have one round 4ft bed (2 ft deep) for sale this week at $190.

Building the terraces for our annual garden

BC Fruit Testers yearly meeting ($10 membership required):  Saturday morning on March 19.  Link.  Gord will be there and speaking on the topic of UNCONVENTIONAL AGRICULTURE .  He is also picking up his pre-ordered 150 root stocks for grafting…he is going to be a busy beaver the following week.  These grafted fruit trees will be for sale the following year.  Gord’s talk is at 11:30am.  see this link:  

Water display: Composting toilets, rain water harvesting, grey water reuse.

Composting toilets and Grey Water Policy in British Columbia:  Draft regulations are now published and open for comment until April 19th.  Gord was part of the group writing this document for the Ministry of Health.

Eco-Sense video of the week:  Here is a very short video (filmed by School of Permaculture in the US) on our garden veggie washing station that combines worm composting, compost tea, and convenience.

The Baird Council Initiative of the week:  Gord has written and put forward a resolution for AVICC (Vancouver Island municipalities)…if approved it will go forward to UBCM (All BC municipalities).  It is a request for the BC Government to create a safe soils bylaw – clean and free of invasive species.  This policy would have broad reaching implications as it would mean that people can request safe certified soil materials AND municipalities could implement a clean soils policy requiring all materials moved to be free of invasive species.   

Links:

• By the way, the climate hit a milestone on Thursday March 3 where the average temperature of the northern hemisphere hit 2 degC higher than pre industrial levels for a brief moment. This on top of Jan 2016 blowing all the records out of the water for the warmest month on record…and then followed by Feb 2016 which blew by Jan 2016 records by a huge amount.  Here are some short articles…anyone hear of this in the mainstream media?  March 3rd record:  Here   Jan 2016 record: Here  Feb 2016 record: Here
• Dr. James Hanson speaks to melting ice and sea level rise…It could be many meters…by mid century…Let that sink in.  3 minute video here
• Here’s an article by Hanson on the same: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…/multi-meter-sea-level… His study (written with 16 other scientists) is here: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2015/20150704_IceMelt.pdf Study has not yet been peer reviewed.
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