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!

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!