The largest and best tomato plants in the entire neighborhood!

Sara has been diligently nurturing our vegetables (tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, snap peas, lettuce--of five different kinds, dill, oregano, red bell peppers, yellow Hungarian banana peppers, beans, pumpkins,  and the best damn home-grown carrots you can imagine.) They are growing in a flower bed circumscribed by a wooden enclosure in the front, or in another bed made of composted kitchen scraps and shredded fallen leaves, in the back of our house.

Our summer weather is nothing to write home about, but we managed to get enough sunny days, between rainy and overcast ones, to enable the Advanced Nutrients organic Iguana Juice to work its magic. The lady from the local garden club came by and told Sara that she has the biggest and most fertile tomato plants in the entire neighborhood!

As usual, Sara's flowers are twice the size of what they should be (a three-foot Phlox is now a six-foot super Phlox!). Sara does take good care of her soil, to be sure, but I suspect it's the regular application of the Iguana formulation that causes the growth spurt. As well as the prolific number of Roses on one of her prize bushes.

She started growing Dahlias in semi-hydroponic plastic containers. You have to fill up the reservoir at the bottom of the container and the soil and the roots get moisture through capillary action from below. Sara also has a network of soaker-hoses intertwined with her plants, and buried near their root systems to keep them well watered during the hot, summer days.

It's a lot of work, Sara's style of gardening. She is redesigning the main flower bed and has bought some very nice rocks to build a rock wall around it. Prior to this, the soil in this particular bed was contained by select pieces of driftwood, which are slowly rotting away and are even growing mushrooms!

The huge Lilies dominate one portion of her garden, not just by their sheer size and beauty, but also by the wonderful fragrance they emit, causing each passer-by to comment very favorably!

I wish I had more time to document Sara's garden, but this will give you a taste of what it's like living near this small Paradise surrounding our home--and created by my wife.

BTW, that muddy gardener is our new puppy, Cooper!

 

Coral Sunset Peonies and William Shakespeare Roses

Sara has been doing quite a bit of landscaping and gardening at another property here on the Gulf Islands. She prepared the soil with fertilizer and mulch and built stone walls to contain her flower beds. She planted all her favorite plants and worked very hard conceptualizing, as well as carrying out her plans. Many a wheelbarrow full of new soil, compost, and broken rocks was pushed up the inclines in order to replenish some already existing beds and some new ones.

Her peonies were magnificent and many other blooms graced the sizable property throughout the spring and summer. The different kinds of peonies she favors are Coral Sunset, Bowl of Beauty, and Do Tell, as well as one called Madame Emile Debatene. There is a Gertrude Jekyll rose, and a brilliant red camellia, that looks somewhat like a rose. She also took some William Shakespeare roses from her Gabriola garden to her landscaping project.

Her future projects include the installation of a waterfalls and fully utilizing an irrigation pond to save on water usage. There is a fully automated underground irrigation system and many a flagstone pathway was created by Sara in order to save the wear and tear on the lawn.

Please enjoy the pictures of her "other" garden, and know that many hours of hard work have gone into creating this little paradise away from the urban rush. As is the case with our home garden, Sara used Advanced Nutrients Iguana Juice Grow and Bloom, as well as Bud Factor X and Rhino Skin to ensure vigorous, healthy plants, resistant to pests and diseases.

Easy Hydroponics--Organic Nirvana



Discover more about Nirvana by clicking here!

Organic Gardening Pays Off With Gigantic Flowers

Six-feet-tall Campanula! Seven-foot-tall Foxglove! Even taller Delphiniums! Sara’s garden hasn’t seen flowers this high ever! Last summer her blooms were spectacular, but she’s been building up the soil of her flower beds consistently ever since. She uses composted horse manure, composted kitchen parings, Mother Earth Super Tea Grow and Bloom, and grass clippings as a form of mulch. All this, in addition to our super-growth-inducing primary 100% organic fertilizer—Iguana Juice Grow and Bloom**.

Complementing the Campanula, Foxglove, and Delphiniums, Sara grows about a dozen different kinds of Roses. The Hybrid Tea Roses Brandy, Blue Girl, Sunflare, and Intrigue are especially beautiful this time of year, and the Cecile Brunner Rose is particularly prolific, with it’s delicate blooms popping up all over the place and the plant reaching heights of five or six feet.

Sara’s Catmint plants are especially beautiful this year with their purple flower-covered branches bursting forth from the centre into all directions. Her Lilacs have bloomed in late spring with their lovely scent and she is growing three kinds of Peonies, all of which are still very much active.

Hedgehog’s barrel has reddish Lilies this year, along with an assortment of colourful annuals and Sara’s Honeysuckle is attracting hummingbirds to its prolific array of flowers. The sweet nectar of this plant is like a magnet to these tiny birds with their wings flapping a mile a minute.

The upside down tomatoes are flourishing. Out of the ten buckets, only one pepper plant died, soon to be replaced by a fledgling tomato plant. It’s a challenge watering the buckets, but if we aim the hose just right, the arc of the water enters from the top. Some of the buckets are open at the top with annual flowers gracing the opening, some still have lids on them with only a two inch hole for the water to enter.

Sara and I get a great deal of pleasure working in our respective organic gardens. My vegetables this year include Sweet and Hot Peppers, Cherry and Beefsteak Tomatoes, Kale (which Sara prepares with olive oil, garlic, and slivered almonds), Spinach, Cucumbers, Zucchini, Squash, and four kinds of Lettuce, from Butter Lettuce to Crinkly Leaved Red and Green Varieties.

With the contamination of the commercial tomato crop, it’s nice to have a safe source of tomatoes within a few yards of our home. Sara and I have been talking about setting up a hydroponic grow space in our basement, so we could grow vegetables year round. A great way to reduce our carbon footprint! Not to mention cutting down on our car trips to the store and reducing the amount of money we spend on the outrageously high priced gasoline.

**Iguana Juice Grow and Bloom are beginning to be known in our neighbourhood as “that magic plant food that Sara uses.” A number of our local gardeners have written the name down and have gone to the Advanced Nutrients website to check out this product, as well as Humic Acid, Fulvic Acid, and that other Grandma Enggy organic wonder product, Seaweed Extract. The most avid gardener (next to Sara) has actually purchased Iguana Juice (both varieties) at a hydroponics store in Victoria.

Six-Foot High, Saucer-Sized Poppies

Sara’s poppies have outdone themselves this year, due no doubt to the huge containers of compost and composted horse manure that she trucked in during the winter months, prior to spring planting season. These poppies are the cousins of the opium poppies of the Middle East, but the seeds are not narcotic. This year she has blood red, bright orange, and pinkish cream colored flowers and being that they are so high and huge, many of our neighbors have come to admire them.

Due credit should be paid to the 100% organic Iguana Juice Grow and Bloom that we use to feed all of our flowers and vegetables. It is truly the magic ingredient in our super sized blooms and veggies. Advanced Nutrients mixes the finest organic ingredients (fish based, alfalfa, krill, yucca extract, kelp meal, and earthworm castings) that not only cause lush, vegetative growth, but also promote prolific flower and fruit development.

Our first rose of the season has opened! In spite of the rainy weather, we do get occasional glimpses of the sun, which is as much appreciated by the flowers as by us. Walking our Golden Retriever Max through the neighbourhood every morning, I am amazed at the variety and resurgence of the flora all around us. This is truly an amazing season and no matter what the weather, it should inspire us to value Nature and all of its bounty.

Tulips Thrive on Organic Nutrients

Sara's flower garden is looking more lush and luscious every day. Although the daffodils have had their day, there are still some around, but it's the tulips that are spectacular. This month I am having trouble capturing them in all their magnificence. Also, I am not able to write much, since the demands of my job are such that blogging has become a luxury.

I hope to report in depth on Sara's flower garden and my vegetable patch in future postings. Just be conscious of the fact that Advanced Nutrients 100% Organic Iguana Juice is the main reason that both of our gardens tend to prosper and at times they become the talk of the neighborhood.

Sara and Hedgehog are visiting friends on nearby Salt Spring Island, while Jim and I are guarding the home front and eating a lot of hamburgers. It's a long story. The ladies being vegetarians, we do them the courtesy of not chomping on meat in front of them. We usually go off together to enjoy our carnivore desires.

Daffodils galore, Perennials popping up!

Our crocuses are already in decline, while our daffodils are numerous and swaying in the (still chilly) winds. Some blossom trees have ignored the generally low temperatures, and have burst forth their buds. Spring has arrived on Gabriola, although we all wish that warmer temperatures were here, as well.

Sara and the kids went to Vancouver by ferry over the Easter weekend and took in the latest Hannah Montana 3-D concert movie. The best of both worlds is the promo line used to advertise this show, which is about a country bumpkin brunette who puts on a blonde wig and becomes a superstar. In the movie, she performs both as Hannah, and as herself, Miley Cyrus.

Hedgehog loves the TV show and she was thrilled by the movie. They also went on a big Easter egg hunt at a community centre. I was left at home to complete my week’s freelance assignments and take care of our coterie of pets.

Sara has carted in many barrels worth of horse manure and compost over the first two months of the year, so now we have a very thick layer of fertile, organic humus for our flowers and vegetables. We also treated the soil with Advanced Nutrients Iguana Juice Grow initially, and now that our bulbs are in flower, we fed them with Iguana Juice Bloom.

This 100% organic fertilizer can be used effectively in both soil and hydroponics grows, indoors or out. If you’re contemplating using it for your indoor garden, rest assured that it doesn’t clog up your system, like some organic ferts do. Friends who have indoor grows on the island are raving about how smoothly this refined plant food works in their hydroponics systems.

I’m also spraying our roses with Scorpion Juice and watering them with a Barricade mixture to impart acquired systemic resistance (SAR) and thicken their cell walls, so they can repel pathogens and pests much more easily. Prevention is the key behind these excellent Advanced Nutrients products.

It’s a bit too early to plant peas and beans, but Sara has been to our local garden centre and has returned with some annual flowers for our flower boxes, as well as seeds for more flowers and vegetables. On top of that, she’s got a whole number of plants growing in big, green barrels for transplanting at a later date. She really enjoys digging in the dirt and sometimes I have to take her supper out to her, because she wants to stay out and stay dirty until there is even a hint of daylight left.

Sorry about not blogging regularly anymore, but the demands of my job have become such that I don’t have as much free time as I used to have. I’ll try to keep a photo journal of our garden, though—hope you enjoy looking at the pictures.

Sara’s flower garden and my vegetable patch are mostly history. An incredibly cold Arctic air mass has descended on British Columbia, so our poor plants look frail and frozen. The ones that we haven’t yet cut or pulled out, that is.

Last Sunday I spent a good two hours cutting teeth onto some bottomless plastic pots which Sara immediately turned upside down and placed atop some of her precious perennials (delphiniums, especially) that she doesn’t want the slugs to eat in the spring. I must have done 15-20 pots.

I started off cutting them with broad strokes making them look like crowns, but I was instructed to do many more, sharper teeth in order to skewer the slugs if they ever dare climb these plastic cylinders.

Last week our All Ablaze Rose burst forth with a bunch of buds and one open Rose, but we had to cut them and take them indoors in order to salvage the salvageable. Of our kittens, Dusty has grown to be a big cat, distrustful of anyone, except me. He loves to get his belly rubbed!

The Halloween pumpkins projected a final grin each before melting into a rotten pile on top of the compost heap. Hedgehog ended up dressing as Bloom, a character from a TV show, a female superhero of sorts.

Sara made about half a dozen trips to a nearby schoolyard where they were giving away compost. We picked or cut all of our vegetables and she filled up my vegetable patch with rich, black, organic compost!

Given such a fertile growing medium, coupled with the Advanced Nutrients 100% organic plant food that we always give our plants, we’ll be sure to grow incredibly large, sweet, and robust vegetables come next season!

Speaking of seasons, tomorrow is December 1st. Do I hear sleigh bells? The festive season is upon us. We’ll try to blog once more before the bearded guy comes down the chimney, but we can’t promise.

Happy December, everybody!