Therapeutic Rain

Saturday is my favorite day of the week. I think it's the day I am able to be most happy in my own skin. It's often I day where I get to do what I love to do and today was no exception. I spent the morning cleaning and making homemade granola with coconut oil, brown sugar, oatmeal, flax, poppy seeds, pumpkin seeds and hazelnuts. I am already just about tired of strawberries so I had my granola with fresh cubes of mangos.

Next, I tackled a corner of my garden that really irks me. This is was the dumping site of an invasive plant called lamium. Ground zero. It's full of old bramble sticks that end up grinding into some part of my tender skin and pull at my hair. It's dark and tangled and working in it makes my glasses fog up so I'm like a half-crazed mole slashing at the undergrowth. This task required patience and stamina. I realized that given the plant has shallow roots, the hand shovel is the best tool for the job. I rooted out the demon weed and created clarity where there was chaos. It was most satisfying. I even grew to like the rank menthol odor of the broken stems.

After a quick lunch I headed to the school garden at City Hall to do some clean-up. A university age student smiled at me with a big mouth of braces. "I don't mind this rain," she said. "It's almost therapeutic." She was right. It was a soft, warm rain. The kind of rain that embraces you gently and leaves you better off for it.

I picked a few strawberries and pulled out the spent borage plants, generally tidying up the garden and deadheading the cornflowers, violets and calendula so they will bloom again. I noticed honeybees foraging in the rain at the nepeta and bumble bees at the borage and lavender. A couple came by to admire their young collard greens. They had to order the seeds from the States, doncha know. These Canadians don't appreciate collard greens. A family came by and gave me some garlic chives to try in my salad. I sat in a corner of the garden under a yew tree and let the rain perform its therapy on the city.

Twilight Blues

The Joy of Compost at City Hall Community Garden

Compost: Oh joy, oh bliss. I must admit I really need reminding how wonderful compost is, especially when it involves a hella good composter which needs to be completely and utterly vermin proof, not to mention lots of back breaking labor and chemistry. Sigh. Compost is really important to the future of the planet, but let's face it, it's not the most glamorous part of gardening. That's why it's better to compost and dig out troublesome weeds (see above) with friends.

This Sunday folks at Evergreen held a compost-themed work party and workshop at the City Hall Community Garden. We needed to fortify the bottom of the three-stage compost bins just in case we had unwanted visitors. Max had the plans, the tools, the engineering know-how and we provided the muscle.

This is the all-important brown matter one must layer in between the green matter which has been cut into small pieces and watered to keep moist.

Straw and leaves only please and thanks.

Here's some stage 2 and 3. Stage two being somewhat broken down and stage three being the nice rich compost that you sieve and put on your garden. We had to empty all the bins to do the carpentry and then put it back into the appropriate bins.


In the meantime, I watered the school garden and picked us a wee snack to supplement the nosh put out by Evergreen.

The baby zukes are growing.

There was a nice little crop of snow peas.

Our borage was a big hit with the volunteers and the bees. I was a bit alarmed at how big the plant has become, overshadowing the strawberry plants. I'll have to trim it back or move the berry plants.

Borage does like to sprawl out and make itself at home. On the other side of the garden is a plant called Cerinthe which the bees also love and soon there will be some sunflower heads for our buzzy friends, (fingers crossed). Thanks to Helen and Max at Evergreen for a fun and informative compost hoe down.

Fall Flowers at City Hall

Captain Vancouver looks over the community garden and gives out healthy eating tips.

Meanwhile, we are harvesting some zucchinis which will be raffled off at our school tonight.

Many plants have powdery mildew now, but the lupins don't seem bothered by it.

As I was pulling out the rotting tomato plants the chickadees kept flying to the sunflowers and plucking out seeds. Can you spot the chickadee in this photo?

These tall plants are mullein in the Aboriginal healing garden.

The amaranth is such a rich color.

A very soggy bumble bee is drying out in the sun in a cosmo.

Even the syrphid flies are a bit slow this morning.

The white garden is one of my favorite spots at city hall. Let's hope the sun sticks around and creates dry conditions for seed saving.