Snow Covers Our Garden Once Again

We did manage to get a white Christmas after all. The radio kept insisting that while the rest of Canada will have lots of snow, the British Columbia coast will be stuck with its characteristic rain. As so often happens, the prognosticators were proven wrong!

Hedgehog found an inflatable sled under the Christmas tree, while Jim was overjoyed by a K’nex speedway—a construction toy for racing marbles. Sara received a new, stainless steel trowel, while I got my favorite pumpkin soup, from one of our home grown pumpkins that have survived intact on the courtyard table.

Sara uses turmeric, curry powder, garlic, onion, and chopped cilantro to make the soup spicy in a subtle kind of way, and the mostly mushy pumpkin flesh still had enough crunchy bits to make it interesting, even after its stint in the blender.

It was a great reminder that a garden keeps on giving, even in winter. In olden days, when every garden had a few fruit trees as well, pioneers on the west coast would make preserves enough to last all winter.

Sara did make some raspberry and strawberry jam last summer, but we went through these quite fast so now we’re back to the store bought kind. Some of our beans are still in packets in the large freezer, as are our snow peas. Periodically, we use them to enhance a stir-fry or a soup.

Garden and food are interconnected and we still have a few large zucchini squash left to eat in January. All the kale, cucumbers, and hot chilli peppers are long gone, as is the broccoli, which Hedgehog started to like in the fall, after years of avoiding it.

I mentioned that our tomato harvest this year was miniscule, compared to the previous summer, when the huge beefsteak tomatoes graced our salads for quite a few months.

The large pumpkins, squash, and cucumbers are a direct result of the 100% organic diet we feed them. Advanced Nutrients Iguana Juice Grow and Bloom provide them with a fish-based cocktail of alfalfa, krill, and yucca extract, as well as kelp meal, volcanic ash, and earthworm castings.

Advanced Nutrients supplies the ever-growing hydroponics market with the world’s best-ever plant foods, but Sara and I can attest to the fact that most of their products work equally well growing flowers and vegetables in soil.

Happy New Year to all readers of this blog!