Who doesn’t love daisies? Almost anything with a daisy-like flower I will fall head over heels for, but the classic white shasta daisy will always have a home in my garden, wherever that garden may be (and in a few months it’ll be located somewhere in Victoria, BC).

Unlike most pretty flowers people have in their gardens, shasta daisies stink to high heaven. Have you ever taken a really good sniff of a flower? Cat pee. That’s what they smell like to me. Maybe that’s the reason that the plot I planted these in never have neighbourhood cats come and dig in it (but that’s just my theory).

Shasta daisies are a favourite plant in almost any garden because they’re extremely hardy, are very attractive to bees, hoverflies, and other pollinators, and are about as easy-care as you can get. Drop them in the ground and walk away, and they’ll continue to double in size every year. Hell, I don’t even fertilize mine.

The classic shasta makes me smile every time I see it. No matter what my mood, it could be a no good, very bad day, but when I see those big white flowers, I smile. The stink is well worth it.

These are one of my absolute, hands down, favourite potato varieties of all time to grow.

Sure, Warba isn’t the fanciest or freakiest variety of potato I’ve ever grown, they’re of small size, they’re a regular old white colour.

But they are amazing.

They are a very early variety, usually ready buy about mid-August (or sooner, if you have a longer growing season then I do), and baby potatoes can be harvested, well, now as indicated by the photo (by the way, they were delicious).

Warba was bred in Minnesota in 1927, and it is an amazing grower. These guys will give you more harvest, earlier then any other variety out there. And they seriously produce. They store really well, they’re excellent for baking and boiling. During the drought of 1936 they were the only crop of potatoes that readily produced any kind of harvest, which is a godsend in a climate like mine that frequently has water rationing and extremely hot, dry summers.

Every time somebody asks me “what kind of potatoes do you think I should grow?” I immediately tell them Warba.

I am a sucker for an heirloom. I’m more of a sucker for an heirloom with a good story. But I’m at my most suckering (yes, I said it) when it’s a local heirloom with a good story.

So when I came upon the seeds at my town’s yearly Seedy Saturday I jumped on them.

Now, I am not a pea person. I actually don’t like peas. I do like snow peas on the rare occasion, but I don’t grow them every year, nor do I go out of my way to purchase them when they are in season. But the story of these suckered me in. I have more information up on the Populuxe Seed Bank’s site here.

The quick and dirty version of their history is that they were brought to the area in the 1940′s by, what the lady who sold them to me called, “Japanese immigrants”. My suspicion is, however, considering it was the 40′s, and considering there was a large Japanese Internment Camp in the area, that these were actually brought by prisoners when they were rounded up and taken from their homes.

I’m very excited about these peas, mostly because, like I said, I’m a sucker for a story, but mostly because I do like snow peas on the rare occasion, and anything you grow yourself always tastes better then something that you bought.

These peas were slow to get going. We had a tough spring, quite chilly, with weird spurts of high heat. I was positive my peas would be doomed, especially considering a few weeks ago the temperatures started going up and my peas were still just tiny. I mean, snow peas are, in theory, a cool weather crop.

But, much to my surprise, the second it got hot, these “snow” peas absolutely took off. When we started hitting the 30C mark, they (finally) started flowering these big, beautiful white blooms you see in the picture above. The plants have got to be growing at least an inch a day now. I was told when I bought them as well that these monster vines grow up to 7ft.

These peas seem insanely heat-tolerant, which isn’t too surprising since they are a local heirloom, and we have hot, hot temperatures here in the Kootenays. But, then again, the whole idea of a snow pea is that they do best in cool weather. These snow peas seem to be a contradiction in and of themselves.

Not that I’m complaining mind you, I’m very excited to see what these peas will do. If they’ll keep producing through a hot, dry summer, and if they will actually get up to that 7 ft mark.

While I know I will enjoy eating these when the pods are finally ready to be devoured, what I am most excited about is, however, spreading them around to anybody else interested in growing them. Especially because I seem to have hit the jack pot with the snow pea that is highly heat tolerant.

I told myself I wouldn’t start going through the tomatoes on the Weekly Flora until I could see them ripening on the vine.

Then I totally went back on that promise to myself, because it was a silly thing to think I could do in the first place.

But that’s okay I forgive me.

This tomato is the first to form fruit for me this season, and thusly, will be the first eaten when it finished ripening. I am so looking forward to fresh-of-the-vine tomatoes. Soon I’ll be swimming in almost more then I can eat (since I have about 40 different plants currently growing). But for now, I have just this one, little guy, chugging along, ripening at his own rate.

I’ve never grown Tiny Tim before, but it’s always been on my “to-grow” list. I love tomatoes that are, you know, “weird”. Dwarf plants, heavily pleated fruit, bi-coloured (or tri-coloured!), white tomatoes (that one freaks people out). If it’s “weird”, I’ll have a go at it.

While ‘Tiny Tim’ might not be the weirdest one ever, it is an early dwarf variety, and it fits very nicely into a one-gallon container, letting me but my bigger tomatoes into the 5- and 10- gallon containers.

‘Tiny Tim’ is a commercial heirloom variety; it was bred for commercial purposes, but is older then 50 years (it was actually bred in 1945 by the University of New Hampshire). This year I plan to try growing it under lights during the winter. I go through serious fresh tomato withdrawal for months at a time, but I’m positive there is a tomato out there that will grow well under my fluorescent lights. I mean, it just has to work, right? RIGHT?

Lord help me I can’t eat those cardboard-tasting things the grocery store calls tomatoes that they trucked in from California.

That’s the problem with gardening – it totally makes you into a tomato snob.

Sage is one of those things it seems everybody has. I’m not talking about your crazy showy Salvia varieties that are ornamental rather then edible. I’m talking about your regular old, run of the mill, common sage.

It’s also known as Garden Sage, which I think sounds much nicer, elevating it from its “common” status. But regardless of how I prefer the sound of garden sage, I still aways refer to it as common sage.

It is one of those plants like basil, or columbine, or irises. Everybody has those in their garden somewhere and in some form. But unlike the high-heralded status of basil or the big showy flowers for irises, or even the usefulness of the near-forgotten columbine as a shade plant, sage I think is quite often overlooked.

Sage is delicious. My significant other (that’s what we’re calling them nowadays, right?) constantly says he doesn’t like the taste of it. Little does he know how often I put it in our food. It lends a wonderful earthy flavour to almost anything, and is one of the best companions to oregano. My favourite is to put it in chili. It is delicious in chili. Just a dab will give your chili a richer flavour.

Sage is also one of those things it’s easy to go overboard with, which is why I think so many people say they don’t like it. It’s not that they don’t like sage, per se, it’s that whoever was using it used way too much, causing it to choke out the other flavours in the dish. Moderation is the key when using sage with anything.

But besides the culinary uses there’s it’s usefulness as an ornamental (if you are one of the bunch who really swears they don’t like sage). Yes, even the “common” every day sage is a gorgeous ornamental. It’s big beautiful flat textured leaves, and it’s bright multitudes of purple flowers. The bees and butterflies love them, and I’ve even seen the occasional hummingbird feasting on my plant.

Common sage does extremely well in hot, dry conditions. It happily lives in my front yard garden that receives 8-12 hours of full sun a day. It survives on little water, making it excellent for xeriscaping as well. They also get huge extremely quickly. By about year two to year three, they will grow up to about one metre (that’s three feet) in diameter, and if allowed, they will get bigger.

I love basil. I’ve yet to find a gardener that doesn’t like basil. If I ever found that gardener… well, I’d eat my own hat I suppose. In fact, I’d go farther to say I’d eat my entire wardrobe, because I highly doubt that gardener exists. Basil is one of the staples in everybody’s garden. The variety, the colours, the multitude of uses, the ease with which it grows. There’s almost nothing that you can say that’s bad about it, except maybe the fact that sometimes it can be an aphid magnet.

I love Red Rubin because of it’s colour and it’s flavour, and the bonus of it is that it’s one of the easier non-green varieties to find growing in any local nursery. It’s delicious and spicy, and with more sun it seems to get more flavour.

Because of it’s stronger flavour, I love adding chopped up leaves to salads, and it makes an amazing purple (and strong) home made pesto. This year I’m really looking forward to making Gayla’s basil jelly that she included in her latest book, Grow Great Grub with it.

It also looks beautiful grown in a container with several other basils, as the purple truly catches the eye.

So I’m starting a new thing this week. The thing is on every Wednesday, I’m going to wander about the garden (which I already do anyway) and pick a plant that strikes my fancy and write a little bit up about it here. Simple enough, yes?

For the inaugural entry I decided to talk about my Romaine Lettuce ‘Freckles’ that I just happened upon a month or so ago. A pack of six starts called my name from across the street, and when I saw the $2.50 price tag I knew I had to have them.

While it’s name is the slightly twee ‘Freckles’ due to the red speckles that are dominant on this variety, in my home we’ve taken to referring to it at “Zombie Lettuce”.

Anybody who knows me is well aware of my deep-seeded and slightly obsessive love of zombies. Zombie movies, zombie comic books, zombie books… I even have little zombie finger puppets that glow in the dark (oh yes).

So when I saw this lettuce of course the first thing that came to my mind was not “oh, look, this lettuce has little freckles!”, but rather “holy crap, it looks like this lettuce has blood splatters on it”. And in my mind, blood spatters equates to zombie battle. You’re getting a frightening look into my psyche now, aren’t you?

Needless to say, I snapped it up immediately, and since purchasing these six starts it’s been a staple in my almost daily fresh-from-the-garden salad. I love how this lettuce looks. Is it the sweetest, most delicious lettuce ever? Truthfully: no. But it’s not bad or horribly bland either. It has a hint of bitterness to it as many fresh red lettuces do, but it’s predominantly a light sweetness.

It’s an open-pollinated variety, although I have seen it designated as an “heirloom”. But, then again, people also designate the tomato ‘Green Zebra’ as an heirloom, so I’m always a little hesitant to just believe that something is heirloom because somebody somewhere on the internetz says it is. Either way, I can save my own seed and I’m happy. If this is an heirloom I’d love to learn the history of it, but unfortunately I’ve yet to uncover that information.