gabriola garden

Wednesday, June 03, 2009








Organic Nutrients for Bigger Flowers

God save us from uneducated flower thieves! Last summer, we woke up one day to find that someone had cut the seed pods off of all our red poppy plants. Obviously, someone who does not know that the red poppies that are legal to grow in our gardens are only a distant cousin of the opium poppies that grow in countries like Turkey and Afghanistan, and have no hallucinatory properties whatsoever.


Well, our perennial poppy plants somehow survived this onslaught, and once again we have beautiful, huge, red poppies growing in our garden. But on closer inspection, I noticed that three or four of the buds (not the seed pods, but the buds before the flowers had a chanced to open!) were carefully cut and removed. Now this shows even more ignorance. By cutting the buds, all they did was deprive us and the neighborhood of three or four additional flowers. Good luck trying to get high on these buds!


People who don’t know anything about horticulture, should stay out of gardens, especially our garden! Sara worked really hard to create a beautiful space where the heavenly scent of lilacs mingles with the magnificence of flowers in bloom.


The tulips have said goodbye, while the catmint, forget-me-nots, and lilacs are just coming into their own. In fact, the forget-me-nots have taken over a whole section of Sara’s garden, having started with only a few plants some years back.


My vegetables are getting started. The snow peas are coming up along the netting on the fence, and lettuce, sorel, spinach, and broccoli are thriving. In fact, the sorel is as tall as I am and even though it’s in bloom, the leaves are still as tasty as ever. No bitterness there. I recall my mother making sorel puree when I was a youngster. She always added a spoonful of sugar. I prefer them raw, with a sprinkle of honey on them, to complement the sour taste.


Hedgehog is a Wii Fit fanatic and she prefers the coolness of our basement rec room to the heat of the sun midday. She beat the hula hoop record by twisting her pelvis over 800 times in energetic succession. The next day she groaned a bit from sore muscles but now she’s back at it again. Jim prefers the Nintendo DS but he also rides his bike a lot and is thinking of getting a newspaper delivery job in the fall.


Our supply of Iguana Juice is getting low, so I must order some more from Advanced Nutrients. I’ll add some Humic Acid and Fulvic Acid to the order, in order to perpetuate the dark, humus-like soil that Sara manages to create for her flower beds each year, using organic fertilizer and composted horse manure.

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posted by Tim at 1:51 PM | 2 comments