I started posting some gardening articles on the web

In the spirit of spreading the gospel of expert nourishment for plants, I started posting some articles on other sites on the web. They were kind enough to classify me as an expert and sent me this certification:





Check out what I wrote. I'm also taking some final photos of Sara's garden and harvesting the last of my vegetables, before the frost hits. I know I'm crazy, talking about frost, when the afternoon temperature today will probably hit 20 degrees Celsius!

But being a realist (sometimes) I am painfully aware of what's to come. Hedgehog and Jim are still running around in shorts and T-shirts, but I reach for my fleece vest after the sun goes down. At sunrise, I've been known to go out to greet our celestial furnace and shiver as I marvel at the bright pink sky!

Look for some new pictures in the next week or so! Until then, I'll leave you with one word of advice. Whether you're growing in soil or in hydro, use Iguana!

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!

Where have all the Orcas gone? Garden winding down.

Haven’t had time to blog in the last little while, since the September rush has taken hold of my family. Jim is in school this year, so there was the whole hullabaloo connected with buying a new wardrobe, a new knapsack, a lunch container, and a water bottle for him.

In fact, we bought water bottles for the entire family. I told Sara that I was sick and tired of buying bottled water and having the empty plastic bottles to deal with afterwards.

Then this past week the family went on our annual Whale Watch to Telegraph Cove. We were especially concerned this year, because there was the incident of a barge capsizing in the area where the whales hang out. A whole bunch of diesel oil spilled into the ocean and no one knows what the repercussions are for the whales.

Sure enough, we didn’t see any Orcas this year (as opposed to up to 40 of them in previous years). We did see a Humpback Whale with its calf, and the calf breached a couple of times, so Hedgehog was able to get a few good shots with her digital camera. We also saw a whole bunch of Dolphins and Porpoises, though, as well as a Bald Eagle.

The garden is winding down, with a number of bushes turning fall colors. Sara’s roses are blooming in a last hurrah effort, and the vegetables have either already been harvested or are almost ready to be picked.

We managed to grow a few huge Zucchinis and Hedgehog--true to tradition--came back from the local fair with a first place ribbon in the Zucchni Races! Jim was too busy popping balloons on the midway to bother about entering the race.

We’ve stopped fertilizing for the last few weeks, giving the garden nothing but pure water. Since we’re using Iguana Juice Grow and Bloom, which is a 100% organic fish-based fertilizer, we’re not using Final Phase to flush our vegetables, but we could if we wanted to.

Many of our friends that we’ve told about Advanced Nutrients go on the company’s website and report back that most of their products are classified as “hydroponic plant food.” We’re eager to inform them that most AN products are equally effective when used in soil.

AN might have to change their product descriptions and labels if they want to appeal to more soil gardeners, such as ourselves. Sara and I can testify that they make by far the best plant nutrients available anywhere, and it would be a shame if some soil gardeners were to miss out on account of incomplete information on the product labels.

I won’t blog regularly for the next few weeks, since we’re caught up in the fall energy surge. This time of year our chores seem to have multiplied exponentially and the sudden drop in temperatures has caused more than our share of sore throats and coughs.

Hedgehog has developed a sudden interest in Martial Arts and Jim is hoping to join the school's Soccer team, so Sara will be driving them around to extra-curricular activities and I have a backlog of free-lance work to complete.

See you in a few weeks!