The Seed to Sky Garden Club: Companion Planting with Karen J. Myskiw

 Planting radishes, carrots, chervil and nasturtiums in your three sisters garden will boost production and help you grow healthy pesticide-free food for you and the bees.

The Seed to Sky Garden Club is a grassroots organization that grew naturally in a Church basement and parking lot in East Vancouver. We meet the first Tuesday of every month. Last night we had a very useful and inspiring talk given by Karen J. Myskiw. Another prairie transplant from the fertile fields of Manitoba, Karen is a plantswoman, educator and foodie. She has a degree in landscape architecture and works in human ecology (aka home economics). Early April is a great time to learn about companion planting because it affects the way you plan you vegetable and flower gardens, interplanting plants in a buddy system, avoiding negative synergy in the garden and emphasizing positive synergy. Companion planting guidelines are result of centuries of folk wisdom along with scientific study. The best thing to do is memorize which groups of plants grow well in communities. West Coast Seeds has a companion chart you can hang on your wall, which is great for classrooms, porches and potting sheds. Companion planting helps bees because it helps gardeners avoid using any kind of pesticides in the garden, even the ones approved for organic farming. Karen gave us some great ideas on how to plan our gardens for peak performance.

Many of the best ideas for companion planting also helps bees by providing more forage for them. Letting your companion plants flower and go to seed helps deter pests and attracts bees and other beneficial insect buddies. Anything that you do not want to spread by seeding, particularly fennel can easily be managed by cutting back the seed heads after they flower and before they mature. I've been doing this for years and it really works. Some herbs to let flower include parsley, cilantro, chervil, and radishes. Of course, you want keep lettuce greens, basil, and perilla from flowering as long as possible, but at the end of the season, it doesn't hurt to let them flower, with the advantage of using the edible flowers to garnish your salads. Other companion plants with flowers for bees are the Mediterannean herbs: lavender, rosemary, sage, oregano and thyme. All these flowers are edible and can be sugared to decorate cakes and panna cotta. Don't forget to let your flowering alliums bloom for bees and let your brassicas bloom for bees and aphid-eating syrphid flies.

One of the surprises I too away from Karen's talk was how good radishes are for your garden. I had no idea! These little guys are fantastic sentinels for your three sisters garden. West Coast Seeds recommends planting three or four icicle radishes and leaving them to flower around each mound where you plant your squash to deter most squash and cucumber pests. Myskiw also directed us to a helpful web site called Golden Harvest Organics. This is where I discovered nasturtiums and chervils, which are companion plants in themselves, improve the flavor of radishes, so they are also buddies to plant in the three sisters garden. Radishes will act as decoy plants, attracting leaf miners so they leave your spinach alone. Golden Harvest Organics also reccomends you plant daikon and 'Snow Belle' radishes at 6-12 inch intervals among your broccoli to act as decoy plants for flea beetles. Letting the radishes go to seed helps your corn by deterring corn-borer beetles. One gardener in our club pointed out that you can alternate carrots and radishes in a row so that the radishes will mature faster than the carrots, loosen the soil for them and make a very efficient use of space in a crowded garden. Karen recommended planting one radish for every two carrots. I'm going to do that today!!!! Then at the end of the season, you can leave one or two carrots in the ground to overwinter and leave to flower next spring as an umbel the bees and other beneficials will love.

I also recommend planting the poached egg flower (Limnanthes douglasii) in the corners of your three sisters bed to boast the bee forage around your plants. Choosing scarlet runner beans will provide food for bumblebees and hummingbirds. Remember to purchase the pollen when buying sunflower seeds--avoid the Teddy Bear varieties. Corn requires a critical mass of plants as they are wind pollinated, so if you are passionate about growing corn you might want to share some seeds with your closest community plot neighbour.

I highly recommend taking one of Karen Myskiw's classes. Now every time I plant radishes I will think of her good advice!

Let's Plant Dill

 

It snowed on Seedy Saturday. It's happened before and it will probably happen again. Spring took two steps forward and one step back. I recently read that one of the first signs of Spring in Ukraine is when you see the dill sprouting. I have never planted dill as I've heard it's difficult to grow in Vancouver and my partner hates it with a passion. I have a nostalgic fondness for dill because it is an herb in my mother's garden and reminds me of her perogies, potato salad, borscht and dill pickles. I also love fresh dill fronds on gravlax and Swedish open face sandwiches made with shrimp and creme fraiche. This year I suggest we all plant dill to mark this spring as a painful time in Ukraine's history, but also as a sign of hope for the country's future. I will be bringing dill into the classrooms and getting the children to put the seeds in pots, to watch it grow as we watch how events unfold in the news. If you have a relative or a neighbour who grows the herb, make a point of asking for some seed to grow. You may be sowing seeds that were originally grown in Poland, Germany or Ukraine.

 Dill: (Anthemum graveolens)

Dill grows well with cucumbers and onions and attracts lacewings, hoverflies and wasps. It's also used as food by the swallowtail butterfly. Sprinkle dill leaves on your cucurbits to repel squash bugs. Plant them away from tomatoes as they attract tomato hornworms.

Dill is a good example of an herb that helps us to digest and absorb the food plants we grow in our garden. The herb is used as a digestive aid, food preservative and a cure for flatulence. It has traditionally been combined with chamomile to calm children, and in Holland dill and fennel were steeped in milk as a soporific drink. The word dill means "to calm or soothe", and it is a traditional remedy for cholic. Like fennel, dill helps stimulate breast milk. Dill was used as "meetinghouse seeds" for children to chew on to curb restlessness during long and tedious church services. Gladiators were fed dill for courage, to calm the swallowtails in their stomachs. It was so popular in England during the reign of Edward I that he imposed a dill tax to pay for repairs to London Bridge. It was also once used as a cure for the hiccups.

Dill was once considered a charm against evil and an aphrodisiac. German and Belgian brides used to sew a piece of dill to their wedding dress and recite a charm:

"I have you, mustard and dill,

Husband, when I speak,

you stay still!"

In German dill is called "Gerkenkraut" which must mean "(pickled) gherkin herb". It actually originates from southwestern Asia where there is a variety grown called Indian Dill (Anthemum sowa) which is used to make a dish called dhansak. As you can deduce from many Old World recipes, dill has naturalized over much of Europe. The basic chemical components of dill essential oil are Limonene, D-Carvone, Dillapiol, Eugenol, Terpinene, Phellandrene, and Myristicin. The name graveolens means "heavy odour" which is from the carvone, which gives it the carminative effect. Limonene and Phellandrene may cause photosensitivity to the skin, so wear gloves if handling the fresh plant in the hot sun or wait until dawn or dusk and wash hands afterwards.

Dill needs to be sown after danger of frost in a sunny spot in well-drained soil. It likes to be sown directly into the garden but I am going to experiment with transplanting small seedlings started inside. It will need to be watered during dry periods. It has a similar appearance to fennel, but dill seeds have a flat edge around the ridged seed and the stems are hollow rather than pithy. Dill takes 6-10 weeks to flower. I know bees love my fennel plant so it will be interesting to compare their interest in the dill.