Mini garden update

One of the neighbourhood cats has discovered my garden. I'll see him amble towards it in the morning when I'm sitting on my back step drinking my morning coffee. Fearless, he is. I'll have to make sure that I keep some sort of screening down over any open areas lest he start using the garden as his personal litter box.

I'd planted some black heirloom bush beans almost three weeks ago (I'm bad with dates and need to check my gardening notebook), and they've been coming up over the past 2-3 days. So have the beets and chard I planted in-between the bean rows. I have heirloom wax bush beans beside them that I planted a little later and they should be coming up soon, as well. Between rain, overtime and the yard being occupied by neighbours, I haven't finished off as much of the garden as I'd like, yet. I still need to pull sooooo much lemon balm and sow some more greens. It's hard to believe that it's past mid-June already; it still feels as if May was right behind me, all spring-like and promise-filled. I have a few jalapeno peppers just barely starting to grow and my potted zucchini has a couple of blossoms.

I'll have to remember to jot down the names of the heirloom veggies I'm growing to post them here.

Wanna start an organic farm?

The Center for Rural Affairs' June 2008 newsletter has a short piece on starting an organic farm (or transitioning to organic farming). There are great resource links at the bottom of the article. The Magdoff book mentioned can be found online for free here; if you want to learn anything about building soil, it's invaluable to anyone who grows food on any scale. Also, the Rodale Institute's website offers a free 15-hour online course on transitioning to organic farming.

A couple of things I'm reading up on

My iMac is in a coma at home, so my 'net access has become tricky and will continue to be so until I can get my creaky little laptop online.

In the interim, here are a few things that I'd been reading up on before the ''big sleep''.

Vegan organic and veganic gardening. Basically, it has a lot to do with minimizing use of animals products in organic gardening (e.g. using plant-based compost rather than animal fertilizers). The UK's Vegan Society has a lot of info on it here.

A friend got me interested in Seeds of Diversity, a ''Canadian charitable organization dedicated to the conservation, documentation and use of public-domain non-hybrid plants of Canadian significance'' (kinda scary when we now have to start referring to certain plants as ''public domain''). They have a great website that includes a searchable database of 19,000 cultivars of Canadian garden vegetables, fruits, etc. -- I'm sure that most of it applies to the US, as well.

The garden

So far, I've got three heirloom Brandywines, three organic plums, one cherry and two ground cherry tomato plants in. I've also got a jalapeno pepper and a zucchini seedling (potted, for now). All of these are flowering. This Saturday, I plan to add a couple of bell seedlings, another couple of jalapeno, a cayenne (if I can find one), and at least another three plums.

I have the first sowing of organic leaf lettuce and organic dwarf carrots coming up, as well as my first sowing (15 square feet?) of yellow organic bush beans just breaking ground. Tonight, I planted a 4' row of beets and a 4' row of chard and my second sowing of organic bush beans (these, a drying type -- I'll have to dig out the envelope to post the names). The beets and chard are in between the bush bean rows. I added some thyme seed to my old winter-worn thyme plant (it's seven years old and I'll get another to grow alongside it before I pull this one out of the ground -- it was the first thing I ever planted in my garden). I also scattered some organic spicy mixed greens seed in with the lettuce and carrots coming up around my heirloom tomatoes.

I harvested some rhubarb yesterday. I should have separated some of it early in the spring. It's sort of scrunched together and scraggly. If I play my cards right, though, I should be able to get at least a couple dozen jars of chutney or jam out of it, and some frozen to boot. Right now, I need to figure out what to do with the 50 square feet or so of lemon balm that's spread across part of the garden over the past summers. Do I just pull it and compost it? I have some young burdock coming up, too, in a corner, and need to figure out when to pull it to get to try out the roots.

I'll definitely take some photos this weekend after I get some more seedlings in.

Peak Oil gardening-oriented discussion forums?

If anyone's aware of some good (and active) organic (or biointensive, even) gardening discussion forums on any peak oil oriented sites and wants to share a link, I'd be grateful.

Seed: From biotech giants' patents and lobbying, to my thankfulness for local organic growers

According to Forbes, Monsanto spent $1.3M on lobbying, just in the first quarter of this year. They lobbied ''Congress, (the) White House, (the) US Trade Representative's office, (the) Federal Trade Commission'' and the ''Agriculture Department'' on ''farm bill provisions and biotechnology'' as well as ''organic standards, patent reform, theft of agricultural seeds, endangered species, timber, greenhouse gas emissions legislation, international trade, ethanol production'' and other things. The crazy thing is that $1.3M to them is spare change.

In other news... It seems the rush is now on for companies to patent plant genes for crops that are tolerant of climate change. As biotech giants continue to buy up more and more seed companies, and farmers' and gardeners' GMO-free options become increasingly scarce, somebody's going to be making a whole heap of money, and it's not gonna be farmers. The time to start saving organic seed is now; I'm putting it on my list of things I need to try out this season.


On a related note, I popped by my local organic health food store, True Food Organics, yesterday and noticed for the first time that they were selling seed. They were kinda buried behind some dried shiitake mushrooms at the back of the far end of the counter, so I'd never noticed them before. That sucks, since there were tomato, basil and pepper seeds I would have loved to have sown, but it's too late in the year now to start from scratch for those. So I picked up some lettuce seed (arugula, Jericho and Black Seeded Simpson) and beans (Contender green beans) from Hope Seeds, as well as some wax beans from Mapple Farms. I couldn't help but bemoan the small selection available; I sure as heck hope to have more luck at the Farmer's Market tomorrow. I wish I knew more local vegetable gardeners.

Suburban Permaculture w/ Janet Barocco and Richard Heinberg

Peak Moment Television visits the suburban residence of Peak Oil author and educator Richard Heinberg and his partner Janet Barocco, to take a gander at all that can be done on less than an acre to make your home and yard as sustainable as possible. Too neat! There are so many great ideas in this, especially with regards to gardening.