I thought it seemed appropriate that I would use an image of my globe thistle for this post. Two years ago I started this plant from seed. Last year, as most perennials do, didn’t flower but gave out lots of lovely green, spiky, and slightly-ominous looking foliage.

This year, it grew to a height of five feet, and sent out five heads that would take an eye out if I didn’t watch where I was going poking around in the garden. The flowers unopened look more like a medieval torture device than a flower, but after a few weeks of those scary looking heads imposing over the garden, each spike produces a delicate little pale lavender flower. They’re beautiful plants, a mixture of thorn-like buds that would put even the most gnarly rose bush to shame, and soft small blooms that the bees and butterflies damned near fight over to get to.

I watched this plant very closely as it grew, knowing that it’d take two years to get to the point where I would see the fruits of my labour (so to speak). Caring, fertilizing, weeding, and taking general care of this flower just to see it produce five flower heads. I thought about taking it with me when I leave my place (as I’m doing with several other plants) but the thing about globe thistle is that it doesn’t like to be moved, there’s a good chance of killing it no matter how careful you are. Globe thistle likes to be left alone.

So, I’d rather leave it to the next occupant of this house so they can (hopefully) enjoy it as much as I did. And hey, as it turns out I’ll have lots of garden room and new adventures ahead, and I’m sure more globe thistle will be started in a few months.

I’d rather know it’s living happily, than risk bringing it with me. I hope its new caretaker will appreciate it as much as I did.

Well, I have to finally admit it, the garden’s been a bit of a bust this year.

Mostly due to the fact that in just under two weeks I’ll be gone, and have barely harvested a thing from it (besides the beans and greens – lots of those). It was so warm early in spring, but then it turned rainy and cold up until mid-June. The plants (especially the tomatoes) were stunted, delaying everything. I’m just now getting the first ‘Stupice’ off the vine, and the ‘Chocolate Stripes’ and ‘Silvery Fir Tree’ are just starting to show the earliest signs of blushing.

Sigh.

Oh well. Upwards and onwards so they say. I’m so excited about moving back to Victoria that it only breaks my heart a little bit to be leaving before I get the large portion of my garden bounty this year. There’s next year to set my sights on, which will come all the more earlier than my gardening season here in the Kootenays has been. That’s something to look forward to. I still have about a month and a half after I move before it gets too miserable in Victoria to do any gardening either, so that will take up a good portion of my time and ease my regret of not getting to see my garden through for this year. It’ll still be chugging along, and someone will be caring for it, and sending me my seeds. All is not lost. It’s rather bittersweet; I’m excited to get the hell out of dodge, but I’ll miss the garden at the same time.

The good news is I will get to do some of my own seed saving this year. My ‘Stupice’ will be harvested for seeds imminently, and my Slocan Snow Peas and ‘Sparkler’ radish are already being processed. I might even get to harvest a few of the ‘Irish Conners’ beans I’ve been shepherding this year.

As the house slowly transforms into a stack of boxes before my eyes (I lie, it hasn’t been “before my eyes” at all, in fact it’s been about as much fun as you’d expect packing a house up and moving it 750km can be), I am so ready to be gone. I’m ready to be done with the packing and get this show on the road.

I’m looking forward to new gardening adventures. Hell, we might even end up getting chickens, which are legal to have in your back yard in Victoria. It’s something we wanted to do for a while, but weren’t able to due to the fact it’s illegal here in Nelson. It will be nice to live in a place that puts its money where its mouth is regarding sustainability.

You know, for somebody who isn’t crazy about arachnids, I sure do talk about them on my blog a lot. I’m not crazy about them, but I do absolutely respect them and their place in the eco-system.

Daddy Long Legs (AKA Harvestmen or Granddaddy Long Legs) are not technically spiders, but often get lumped in with them. While they do have eight legs, their abdomens and cephalothorax (the two body parts you see on spiders) are joined, making them distinct from spiders. These guys are in the order of Opiliones, and date back about 400 million years, and have changed little since then (I love a living fossil). Just to add to confusion however, there is a species of spider called Daddy Long Legs (or cellar spiders) that do have separated abdomens and cephalothoraxes (cephalothoraxi? Not too sure on that one to tell you the truth). However, the little critter pictured above is not a spider.

Daddy Long Legs quite often can be found everywhere in the garden, and should be encouraged to stay. While some might scavenge on things like lizard and small bird carcasses (fact!), more often then not they are found feasting on things like mites and aphids in the garden. I’m a huge fan of a predatory insect – meaning they actively seek out prey, by hunting them down or ambushing them, rather then letting their prey come to them via a web. Daddy Long Legs mostly exhibit this behaviour, which is why when you’re out picking your dinner for that evening’s meal, you’ll often have to brush them off of your harvest.

There is a most unfortunate urban legend associated with these guys, as well as their spider name sakes. It goes along the lines that they are, in fact, the world’s most venomous spider (wrong), but they can’t hurt humans because their fangs are too short to penetrate human skin (also wrong). Fact is, they don’t contain venom glands at all, and their “fangs” are actually extremely small grasping claws, used for shovelling food into their mouths. Same goes for the spiders of the same name. But, if you’re a fan of Mythbusters, you probably already know this.

A few more interesting facts about these guys:

The number of ways these species have learnt to keep themselves from being eaten by their predators is fascinating to me. It’s examples like daddy long legs, with their sheer longevity of existence, and the perfect ways they’ve evolved to live, eat, and evade being eaten, is what gives me awe. While some people need to find that in the spiritual or religious (not that I’m knocking it, go for it if it floats your boat), for me it’s examples like these guys that show me the beautiful complexity of the world around us. Which, quite frankly, I find awe-inspiring enough.

The garden is slow this year. Very, very slow. A cool and wet spring saw to that. Just now things are really starting to take off, hell, I’ve only just harvested the pods I was saving for seeds from my Slocan Snow Peas this morning! Granted these snow peas actually do quite well in heat, so they had an extended life over most snow peas, but still, they are in fact snow peas.

This time last year I was harvesting tomatoes already. This year my first tomato (a ‘Tiny Tim’) is just on the verge of finally ripening.

You know what? I’m really, really glad to be getting back to a climate where things don’t only start ripening in August.

But back to the Slocan Snow Peas.

Generally I like to let pods go fully dry on the vine before I harvest for seeds (goes for beans, radishes, etc. as well), but there’s a mountain of rain and storms coming our way this weekend, and I want to avoid these guys going all mildewy. Most of them are almost there, some of them still have a good amount of moisture in them, but they’re all past the point of being fully ripened, so germination won’t suffer next year.

I wrote some more on the history of these seeds here at the Populuxe Seed Bank’s website. These will be available (not in huge quantity, but available) through the seed bank later this year or early 2011.

The past few weeks have been crazy. Insane. And they’re about to get crazier. As I battle to save my sanity unfortunately this blog has fallen by the wayside. The above image is not a symbol for the setting sun of this blog or any ridiculous thing like that. It’s just a photo I snapped a day or two ago during some particularly bad smoke hanging above our town.

And it got me thinking of the things I won’t and will miss about where I currently live, as opposed to where I’m moving in, oh, three and a half weeks (shit! I have so much left to pack!).

I definitely won’t miss the smoke that hangs in the air as it blows in from the west and the south of us from the raging forest fires that occur every year. While it does give some awe inspiring sunsets, when it gets really bad it makes those with even the healthiest of lungs pant like a female dog in heat.

In a strange weird way, despite the fact I bitch and complain about the heat here (where it routinely gets to the mid to high 30C range, higher sometimes with the humidex), I will sort-of miss it. Not for myself, but for my tomatoes and peppers, which love it. It’s taken me several years to suss out which varieties thrive in the kind of heat and humidity (coupled with water rationing) we have, and besides passing that information on to friends that still live here, I won’t need that information anymore. I’ll be starting a-new, testing which tomatoes like the temperate, mild climate of Victoria (although I suspect it’ll be a lot less of a problem to weasel out the ones that don’t do well in those conditions then it has been here). Having lived in Vancouver for years previously already has left me with some of that knowledge, so I won’t be starting over from scratch like I did here.

I’m looking forward to the next gardening adventures I’m to have on the west coast, my brain is already flying with what I’m going to plant. Especially since we’re this close to ensuring a nice little house with a nice little yard that can easily be converted to garden rather then lawn space.

Of course something that’s still up in the air and weighing on my mind are my seeds. My tomatoes are all setting fruit now, and I doubt most of them (if any) will be ready for harvesting in the few weeks we have left. Fortunately, a friend can be relied upon for harvesting, fermenting, and saving my numerous tomato varieties and then sending them down to the coast for me to put in my seed bank. All that bothers me is the fact that I’m not doing it myself, and being the control-freak I am at times, that gets under my skin a bit. But I’ll get over it, I’m sure.

Hopefully I’ll post here a few more times before we leave. I’ll be digging up a few choice plants I’ve grown to love, and couldn’t bear to part with (my globe thistle I started from seed, my lemon bee balm, my ornamental bee balm, and my crazy green echinacea that cost me way too much money for me to leave behind). I’m bringing a few tomatoes and peppers I have in pots with me as well, and I’m worried about how they’ll fare, stuck in a hot moving truck for a day until we get to our new home. But if I don’t try, I’ll kick myself for leaving them behind.

I must apologize for the lack of updates lately. Mostly to myself then anybody else quite frankly, as I greatly enjoy writing in the ol’ blog. But life has been hectic. Moving, job offers, taking a new job in a new town, having to get a license and a car for said job within the span of a few weeks, moving to a new city where we don’t have a place to life worked out yet.

See, I’m generally not very comfortable with uncertainty. I like the illusion of complete control over my life (I say illusion, because as we all know, it’s impossible to have complete control). But that illusion keeps me sane sometimes. So when I feel like I have very little control over the previous three weeks and the forthcoming six weeks of my life, it rattles me quite a bit.

How appropriate for this post that I’m including an image of a surprise lettuce cross-pollination that come out of the garden. This is something that I can’t always control, what pollinates what, despite all effort to the contrary. But gardening as well is quite often about the illusion of control rather then actual control.

Lack of control in the garden I’m a lot more comfortable with then seeming lack of 100% control in my life. I find an unexpected cross in the garden and I’m excited about the possibility it brings. I know that if the cross turns out to taste bad or grow poorly it’s not the end of the world.

Somehow I need to translate that into the rest of my life at times.

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.

… They are a comin’.

The past week and a half has been a complete whorl wind (hence the lack of updates here). A whorl wind in a good and a bad way.

I work for a small, daily community paper. Or rather, I should say worked (in a few weeks). I like my job, it’s not the dream job, but it’s a job that gave me some level of fulfilment, and my co-workers were fabulous.

On July 2nd we found out a competing paper bought us.

On July 5th we found out they were shutting us down.

On July 9th we found out they’re shutting us down as of July 16th.

That puts about 30-odd employees completely out of a job, not to mention the casual and part time staff that are now out the extra income. Not even including the 110+ carriers we employ (many of which were adults).

In a town of just under 10,000 people, that’s a big blow.

There’s no one person to blame (not even the company that bought us), but a large and long line of things that maybe could have been done, but weren’t. But it’s in the past, nothing can be done about it now.

Me, personally, I’m fine. I don’t have kids, or car payments, or a mortgage to worry about. Life will move on, and I’m positive there are bigger and better things ahead of me. In fact, things are looking hopeful with me getting a position at one of the other papers in another market that the company that bought us out operate in.

Which, of course, brings me to my next whorl wind event.

We’re moving. Me, B., and the dog are all picking up and moving on. And we’re moving on in a few months. To Victoria, in fact, a city that I’ve lived in before and quite enjoyed. Victoria is warm, it rarely snows, and it has the best gardening weather in Canada.

Nelson doesn’t hold much for any of us anymore, and it’ll be nice to be closer to family.

Of course this now means I have to orchestrate the moving of the seed bank. I’m excited with the prospects of having the seed bank in a much more highly populated area, especially one that is renowned for its gardens and gardeners. I smell good things in the future.

I did say this was a good and bad whorl wind. It’s mostly bad because I feel for my wonderful co-workers who are here in Nelson, who do have the car payments and the kids and are now out a rather good job. I also feel bad for a paper that’s been running for 109 years and is now being shut down, no longer to be a part of the history of this town (or, I guess rather, relegated completely to history).

But it’s mostly a good whorl wind. I’m excited, I’ve been itching to move for a while, and this is a good kick in the ass to do it. As I said, I feel good and wonderful things in the future. Scratch that, it’s not just a good feeling, I know there are good things lined up for the future.

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.