Excerpt from The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe

It took a long time for one of my parents to embrace my choice of an agrarian career. A nice bit of old advice that floats past you when you are least able to use it is "If you do something you love, you'll never have to work a day in your life." That's how I feel about farm labour. I love it. I love the challenge and I love the end result. While reading The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deepe, I found this lovely paragraph about gardening that really resonated with me:

"I think accumulating money, working at ordinary jobs, collecting stamps, cars, marbles, or anything else, and shopping are all sublimations of our basic hunting and gathering drive. But many of us don't find those substitutes fully satisfying. We enjoy more direct hunting and gathering. Hunting, fishing, and gardening-- these are so satisfying that we will do them for "free"-- even when we don't really need the food. In fact, we will often pay a good bit to do them. [...] A big part of what we are after is just the joy that comes from that simple, purposeful, productive labor. We want to work for our food. Part of our essential nature is that we are hunters and gatherers. We want to hunt and gather. We create gardens so as to have a place that is an ideally rewarding place to hunt and gather."

As the snow settles over the garden, I am already longing to return to work next season. Maybe there is something to what Carol Deppe has reasoned.

As Usual, There Were Mistakes From Which to Learn

Every time I look at how things are going, the mistakes I have made jump out far more brightly than the successes. 

As the weather begins to cool, plans for the next growing season are already cementing in my mind. First is to maximize the amount of land available in my village lot. This season, I worked with 25 foot beds that cross my property. The reason was mainly that short beds were easier to add one at a time and it was visually appealing. However it has been clear to me since very early on that fewer long beds would be able to produce far more than many short beds. The reason? Fewer beds = fewer paths. Fewer paths = more growing space. Obvious, I know, but these are the things you overlook when you go from a kitchen garden to a market garden.

Second, I have a whole new garden in my backyard! The 30'x30' space beyond the shed was completely overrun by incredibly invasive Japanese Knotweed. While I planned to have the space cleared of this weed by July, the plant proved so aggressive that we are still pulling it out to this day. However, each new generation is weaker than the last and I am prepared to plant this area of the garden next spring. This increases the growing space hugely!

Luna, enjoying a romp in the perennials that make up the wildlife garden.

Third, when I only have 7 long beds, setting up the entire area with drip tape will be much easier and more cost effective. Being able to irrigate without hopping between rows with a sprinkler all day to water the whole garden will mean I can water more often in dry spells. With more water I can get certain crops to maturity earlier, and increase production from other crops. Water results in more food with less space. Perfect!


Fourth, I purchased another 'greenhouse'. Really, it's a carport that I'm going to buy greenhouse plastic to cover, but what's the difference between friends? My 20'x13' greenhouse produced beautiful tomatoes and cucumbers. With a second one, I can dedicate one to just producing tomatoes, and in the second grow peppers, aubergine, and cucumbers. While reading a book about greenhouse production it also dawned on me how stupid I had been with my greenhouse rows. Instead of 4 single rows, I should have grown 3 double rows! More food, less space. I am thrilled that I have the chance to make these mistakes while I still have the safety of an off-farm income!

Finally I am delighted that the orchard will finally have access to water! In the spring, I will bite the bullet and get financing to drill a well and purchase some major irrigation equipment so that my investment of fruit trees and asparagus may finally produce a crop. There is still a large section of field at the bottom of the slope where I plan to have a large plantation of haskaps (after buying the initial 30 plants, I am propagating new plants from cuttings until I can fill the field). This is where I will expand the annual vegetable production next year. Long season crops that do not require picking several times per week will be planted here. Winter squash, garlic, melons, brussel sprouts etc. 

That's the plan! With my financial goal reached for 2018, my goal for 2019 is to double that amount. Maybe by 2020, I will be able to pay myself for the labour I put in! Wouldn't that be novel?

Happy planning!

Summer of Market, Photo Diary

Nobody got into farming because they liked record keeping. One short-cut form of record keeping is taking photographs. These photographs serve to remind me when certain items came in season, and remind me visually what I had on offer on the weeks when I had the highest, and lowest sales. 

Here is some of Eden's Rise first year at the market, in easily digestible form. There are three weeks left, come to Metcalfe Farmer's Market Saturdays 9-1 to say hello!

July 28

August 11

August 25

September 1

September 8

September 22

Summer solstice

Urban farm inspired

Greenhouse tomatoes and cucumbers

Flowering lilies

Currants ripening on the bush

Yellow pear tomatoes in development

Allowing wild flowers in my front yard to encourage insect life

Milkweed flowers and leaves provide food and nectar.

Cucumber

Blueberries on the bush

Maximizing space for the urban farmer

Red currants

Haskaps

Growing Orchard

Changing the pH of the soil is slow business, but the blueberries continue the fight. Enough flowers this spring to feed my hungry face with blueberries this summer! Maybe next year the soil+age of the plants will = surplus available for sale!

Grapes have been unimpressive in my poor soil, but this year their roots finally seem to have established some dominance against the stubborn grass. After two years, we see some top growth. (Grape plants have since been weeded)

The orchard will produce its first grapes!

The lonesome Kiwi survives. Two of her sisters and her mate have died. Without a male, these plants cannot produce fruit.

One of five blueberry varieties in the orchard.

There will be a huge amount of currants coming my way! I am excited to have a crop to harvest. Growing perennials is a game of patience, seeing results is a gift. One of 50+ currant bushes at the orchard...yum!

A few Haskap/honeyberries have already ripened. Unfortunately the 30 plants I planted last spring have produced collectively 8 berries. Here's hoping next spring will prove more rewarding. In the meantime, I have planted a further 25 haskap plants this spring and continue to propagate new plants from cuttings.

Saskatoons ripening in the sun. I purchased two varieties of Saskatoon. Lee 8 (pictured here) is producing fruit on every plant. The Martin variety has not produced a single berry.

Starting a Market Garden Shopping List

Propagation equipment

• Seeding cells
• Seeding trays
• Growing medium/potting soil mix
• Heating mats (ideally)
• Light (ideally)
• Seeds
• Labels
• Permanent marker
• Notebook for keeping notes and consulting crop plan

Fertility equipment (my soil is very coarse sand)

• Compost
• Horse Manure (lowest quality manure, but available for free)
• Soil
• Peat moss
• Pelletized chicken manure or blood meal (ideally)
• Truck (rent or borrow)

Season Extension equipment

• Floating rowcovers
• low tunnel/unheated greenhouse
• Transplants

Irrigation equipment

• 150 feet of hose
• Sprinkler
• Timer for watering 
• Drip irrigation for greenhouse crops

Harvest equipment

• Pulp berry baskets of varying sizes
• Stackable perforated harvest bins for picking and delivery to market
• Unperforated bins for washing root vegetables
• Elastic bands for Asparagus and other bunching vegetables
• Harvest cart
• Hose nozzle for cleaning
• Cold room (ideally)

Market supplies

• Signs
• Labels
• Tent shelter
• Folding table
• Table cloths
• Cashbox
• Cash & change

As I hinted to a few posts ago, I am starting my own market gardening business. My orchard will begin producing small quantities of fruit this year and I will grow annual vegetables. I have started selling houseplants in a local store already and preparing for a busy season as a market gardener. This is all made possible by maintaining a part time job 20 hours per week. Income from the first year can be disappointing as mistakes are made but these are how we learn.

The above is my shopping list for what I need to start my business. This list continues to grow as I remember other indispensable items (feel free to comment anything I have forgotten). I have already purchased many of these items, and am still looking/shopping around for others. Those with "ideally" in brackets are items which I might not get around to purchasing this year.

Risk is inevitable in business. Nothing comes for free, and making a living self-employed requires investment. The returns will hopefully exceed what you can expect as an employee but putting in a few years of hard work is as inevitable as spending some money.

Deadlines

There are deadlines in all lines of work. In agriculture deadlines come in the form of weather forecasts, lambing season, ripeness of fruit, moisture content of crops, inspector visits, customer orders, and availability of labour.

One thing I have learned about myself in the year and a half since planting my orchard is that I am fundamentally a lazy person. If I don't have to do it this week, I put it off until next week. I have a huge to do list and more often than not when I cross something off it is usually because I have finally admitted to myself that particular item was simultaneously ambitious and completely pointless. 

This is surprising to me since every time I work for someone else, I give my all. Yet when left to my own devices I struggle to move on things. My to do list could be completely crossed off in two full days of work, but I procrastinate and procrastinate.

Except when there is a deadline. 

In the winter I plan my tree order for the spring and when the trees arrive it is a race to get them in the ground. Now, in the fall, I received two hundred flower bulbs (I want to experiment with bulb propagation) and as the weather forecast promised a week full of rain I spent a couple hours of my Saturday preparing beds, amending the terribly sandy soil I have at my home, and planting my bulbs in tidy rows. 

My to do list still has many items on it, with deadlines as far away as next spring. Some items, like protecting my tree trunks with wire cages, have more urgent deadlines. Realistically, having now begun to understand my relationship with my own self motivation, I now know I will likely get the cages onto the trees a few days before the first snowfall is forecast. 

Why should I be so surprised? This is how we were trained! Study the night before a test, do your homework the day before it's due. Deadlines got me this far, soon an orchard full of different fruits with different fertility, pruning, and harvesting deadlines will be managing my life and keeping me moving. For now, let's just do what needs to be done today.

Benjamin Franklin — 'Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today.'

Eden Valadez — 'For now, let's just do what needs to be done today.'

The Us Versus Them Bias

At lunch break my colleague expressed sorrow for the people who saved up money for a holiday and had to come home early because of hurricane Irma. Another colleague said yes, but they were lucky because she knows that some people weren't even able to book another flight-- they had to stay for the storm.
I frowned over my lunch and quietly said "yes, it is a shame for the rich people* who have gone on vacation. I think it's probably worse for the people who actually live there."
They immediately agreed, but it hit on a theme I had been thinking of for a few months. 

I remember in middle school we learned about the rainforest in science class. The ongoing destruction of this delicate forest for more farmland. What they didn't teach us was that this farmland was used to grow crops that would feed livestock and that by eating meat we were contributing to the destruction of forest ecosystems. They also didn't teach us that Canada's forests are also continuously being cut down and burned for agriculture. Instead, they taught me that people in these almost imaginary far off lands were less educated than our class of 12 year olds. They were cutting down these precious forests because they didn't know any better. 

By that age I knew enough about Canadian history to know that all the farmland around my school had once been a mature forest. It seemed that if we cut down forests in the past, that was okay, but people cutting down forests now was bad. And since all our forests were cut down a long time ago, we can no longer take any of the blame for ongoing climate change.

Last year I worked as an organic farm inspector. Before I go on, I want to point out that I do believe in organic farming and that all farming should be organic by default. Pouring poison directly on our shared planet and directly on the plants that feed us is frankly horrifying. But here is something problematic I discovered during the course of my work.

In order to avoid the three year transition phase for a conventional field to produce organic food** farmers were clearing forested land in order to plant their organic crop and earn certification in their first year. Because this land had never been farmed conventionally there was no need for a transition period. 

This is the problem when ethics clash with capitalism. Farmers are business people. They want more money for the business. That forest is not generating any income, we need to downsize the parts of the business that do not generate income and expand into new product lines that do. Hence, cut down the forest to produce organic buckwheat, hemp, corn, soybeans. Of course, this goes against the philosophy of organics, but it is hugely wound in our society's way of perceiving money as Good above all else. We worship the thing that makes us slaves.

Blaming people across the world for practices we ourselves perform, and then feeling sympathy for our own when natural disasters (exacerbated by our thirst for carbon and our destruction of perennial vegetation) is all part of the same problem. We see Us as something different than Them.  We are all humans that share one planet. If we could do away with borders, maybe we could see that more clearly. What affects one person in our global community affects us all. 

It can be overwhelming as an individual to realize our way of life is being attacked by capitalism and climate change from all directions, and yet we do have power to change things. Want to fight back against capitalism? Stop consuming more than what you need. Want to reduce your impact on the earth? Stop participating in practices that are known to contribute to climate change. In the meantime, we need to stop blaming the Other and start holding ourselves and our neighbours and our communities accountable for what we have the power to change.


*I know that not everyone who goes on holiday is rich from the lens of someone who lives in Canada. Compared to their neighbours they may not consider themselves rich, but compared to the global community, they are.

**Farmers want to avoid this transition period as the first years of transition have lower yields and as the crop is still considered conventional, they cannot demand the higher prices that make organic production competitive.

Wet Noodles in the Garden

Weeding my asparagus patch this weekend was a joy. Weed a foot, celebrate with a spear, weed another foot, munch some more. Have you ever had asparagus fresh from the ground; raw, crunchy, juicy, and sweet? It was a discovery for me that asparagus could be so delicious. It was more reminiscent of fresh ‘mange-tout’ sweet peas than it was of the steamed spears traditionally laid out sparingly and artistically next to a fancy piece of animal flesh. I ate a dozen out there in the field, slowly burning the skin on the back of my neck.

Once these weeds are out of the way, this asparagus spear is my reward!

As I pulled the weeds up through the mulch I was surprised at the number of earthworms at work in there. When I was digging the holes for my new plants this spring I saw very few earthworms, yet here beneath an inch of grass they were having a huge party on the surface of the earth.

Everyone knows worms are meant to be a sign of a healthy soil. I wanted to take a moment of your time to talk about what it is these fleshy noodles actually do.

Worms live in the ground, of course. Like rodents, they like to keep a door to the outside world in their domicile. From this hole they reach out and grab at decaying organic matter. You can see evidence of this in fields where debris is left in the fall. It looks like many consecutive circles, each circle being the territory around a worm’s hole.

They eat this organic matter and defecate in their hole, deeper in the soil. This way nutrients are spread throughout the soil profile. This organic matter, now worm casts, contains nutrients that are more easily available to the plants thanks to Mr. Worm’s digestion.

The tunnels created by the worms also have positive effects. They aerate the soil, and create conditions for better drainage and water infiltration.  The channels also provide an easy avenue in which plant roots can travel deeper in the soil to find further sources of water. Even their wee, noble bodies decompose and provide nitrogen for the plants. A healthy population of earthworms can actually build topsoil, by how much seems to vary from one study to another. This is excellent news for me on my site, where the topsoil is a mere foot before reaching pure bedrock.

I will end on a darker note. The earthworm is not native to Canada. It appears its presence

is having a drastic impact on the ecology of our old growth forests. National parks advise people to avoid dumping left over earthworms from fishing trips in the forest. Take them home, feed them to your dog, just don’t empty that container (even if it is just dirt, they might have laid eggs in there!) in our forests.

Flowering Chum!

Have a lovely week, I wish you good health and happiness!

Restoration Agriculture

When I started planning my orchard, I had never heard of Restoration Agriculture, or Mark Shepard.  During the course of the summer when I worked as an organic farm inspector, the words Restoration Agriculture and Mark Shepard kept popping up at the most interesting farms I visited. My personal interests make this a biased ‘most interesting farms’. I love perennial crops. Fruit trees, asparagus, perennial herbs, nuts, and perennial veggies. You get the picture.

What is Restoration Agriculture?

Restoration Agriculture is a way of farming that has the ability to produce many human staple food crops on fields that are unusable to, or have been depleted by annual crop production. It is a way of farming that aims to restore or improve the health of soils, microbiology, wildlife habitats, and waterways that are connected to the production site. How? It relies heavily on imitating the natural ecosystems that were in place before modern man changed the face of the planet. By imitating the indigenous ecosystem of a region, the hope is that we can choose crops that function well in a climate without needing constant attention and coddling.

How do you imitate the natural ecosystem to create a farm? Mark Shepard mainly focuses on the oak savannah at his own farm. To oversimplify things, he has rows of perennial crops with space for cattle to graze beneath. He can grow oak, apple, currants, raspberries, pears, grapes, hazelnuts, and animal flesh and eggs on a hill that if it was under conventional management would be useless for growing corn and could only support a handful of grazing animals. He argues that despite the individual crop yield being lower per acre than a conventional farm, the overall yield if you add the crops together will bring a higher caloric yield than a field equivalent in size that grows corn or soy.

All the while, this system uses no sprays. Animals graze down the grass that competes with the trees and pests are controlled by tree frogs, bats, and ‘good’ insects. Pruning trees is performed by cattle and wild deer. The apples do not all end up looking like the ones in the pyramid display at your local supermarket. The best ones are sold for fresh eating, the rest can be juiced to make delicious cider.

Maybe you’ve started to notice similarities between me and Mark Shepard? Mmm, cider.

Corn needs to be planted, sprayed, weeded, and stalks plowed under every year (despite no-till getting more and more interest). Vegetable crops need to be covered by row covers, hand weeded, or chemically sprayed, protected from insect, frost, wind, and rain damage.  Agriculture is an awful lot of WORK and the returns are not often what anyone would call ‘profitable’. There is one chapter in his book that Mark Shepard begins with the sentence “On the whole, unless someone has special circumstances, nobody is really making any money in agriculture”. He has a few examples of farmers operating at huge losses until they go out of business.  

I don’t want to use sprays on Eden’s Rise, or get too obsessed about things being perfect. I do want it to be an Eden for humans and animals alike. The most exciting moments this summer were when I either got to eat a berry or discovered an amazing new bug or animal in the field.

During the course of my farm inspections I visited a few blueberry farms. One had netting over their entire crop. The farmer explained to me how they had just come up with a new way to set up the netting that took half the time (still several days of labour for the whole team, and that doesn’t include taking it down again), and also complained about being organic because they had to spend 30 hours squishing caterpillars that were ravaging the crop. By contrast, another blueberry farm I visited had no nets, and apparently no pest problems. The farmer said he couldn’t be bothered with the nets, his harvest was able to pay all the bills, and his personal thoughts were that birds prefer protein over sugar. The birds were probably eating as many bugs out of the blueberry plants as they were eating blueberries. When labour is a huge cost in your business, cutting out a useless practice like this could save you a lot of money. Sure, you probably will get a smaller harvest. But a smaller harvest with fewer expenses might actually lead to greater profits.

Mark Shepard also talks about a process of selection whereby he plants a lot of seedling trees and lets the ones who want to die, die, and the resulting trees are strong and capable of surviving his unique environment. Eden’s Rise is only one acre, and I don’t have the capital to get crazy planting thousands of trees and hoping 5 of them will be incredible performers. What I did was similar, albeit I let other people do the work of selecting varieties for me. I planted a wide range of different fruits, and different varieties of the same fruits in order to discover who does well on a shallow, heavy site. I will see what survived the first year and be able to start a second shopping list of the crops and varieties that I will be planting more of in 2018.

If you have any intersecting interest between agriculture and conservation, or an interest in permaculture, I would recommend watching a couple Mark Shepard talks on YouTube. He can be pretty condescending, self-aggrandising, and evasive on the certain subjects, but what I enjoy the most about him is that is stirs in you a new permission to dream up your own way of solving the ‘problems’ of your site without relying on the usual Big Ag expensive ways of ‘fixing’ what doesn’t work for a specific crop.

Have a lovely week!

Seven

Fall is a time to take stock. I tried a few things this year and learned a few lessons that will allow me to move forward into more focused plantings.

1.     Asparagus loves my site/soil/climate. Now I am trying to decide how much more to plant next year,  whether I should invest in roots or start plants from seed, and how to prepare the soil in advance for a massive planting.

Asparagus in July. Next spring it will be possible to harvest two spears per plant.

Dwarf cherry, the leaves slowly died
 back until there was only this little
 tuft left. It lives, for now.

2.       Cherries and miniature kiwis are not suited to my site. While the plants still cling to life, the amount of trouble they are having surviving does not bode well. In the spring I will replant these plants in a different area and plant more worthwhile plants in their place. There is no point leaving the prime top-of-the-hill real estate to a group of plants that won’t bear fruit. Better to fill the space with fruit trees that have been doing well.

3.       Plums and apricots are fantastic. More of these will be planted. I love them- they are tough and not many local producers have these crops which means should I ever take them to the farmer’s market I won’t have competition.

4.       Strawberries are delicious, and I am still harvesting in October. There are a lot of strawberry producers in the area, though, so I will keep my production for personal consumption only.

5.       Praying mantises live in Canada! They, along with snakes, love my bit of land and I expect this has to do with leaving tall grasses. I will keep the areas directly below my trees tidy in the future, but will leave wild areas for biodiversity. This will also help wild pollinator species as I want to introduce more species of flowers to those areas.

This red currant produced
DELICIOUS and sweet berries!

6.       Some red currant varieties are delicious and sweet. They bear fruit the second year. I will plant more. Saskatoons taste good and bear the first year, but the skin breaks upon picking. This destroys their potential for even short term storage.

7.       Since the field has no irrigation, there is no point in preparing a vegetable garden with non-drought tolerant crops. Most of my vegetables did not grow. 

I love my project. I love that I can make mistakes and learn and always keep dreaming of potential futures the project could have. I was afraid of taking this risk, but it is the most worthwhile risk I have ever taken.

Have a lovely week.

Apricots have beautiful red tinted foliage all summer long.

Munching on grape leaves, this is one fat caterpillar.

Hidden gifts

The past few weeks have been wild, both for the garden and for myself. After days of pain I went to the hospital where they kept me for a week and eventually let me leave having confiscated my gallbladder. They said I'd be back at full activity within a week, but no digging or strenuous exercise for two weeks. 

My 300 flower bulbs arrived in the mail the day I went in to the hospital. Poor Eden's Rise, I thought, but lucky me to live in an age where such a surgery can occur so quickly and the wounds can heal and be forgotten almost immediately. It only took four days for walking to become natural again, and I went to see how Eden's Rise fared with my two week absence.

Interesting news: the deer have found the field! Ends of branches have been nibbled off, and entire branches were shaved clean of leaves. Oh what a pickle. 

Having gone through a near death (and if not 'near death', then 'near to wishing for death') experience calms and places things in proportion. 

"The deer had a little to eat, okay, but this year was all about promoting root growth anyway. All those leaves that were eaten weren't important," I tell myself and hope that it is true. "If anything this will be good for the plants as it will encourage them to grow taller branches next year to get out of reach of the deer."

This positive thinking is no reason for inaction, however. I returned home, washed my hair (and let's face it, with my gut still covered in bandages and changing clothes being challenging, washing my hair was somewhat overdue anyway), and then I cut my hair. I placed the cut hair into a bag. Then I brushed my cat's long luxurious coat and collected her fur too. Then I was tired so I had a nap.

Fast forward a bit, now all the trees that had been nibbled in Eden's Rise have a few strands of hair hanging from each branch. 

I am not a hippy!

The smell of soap is a known deer deterrent, as is the smell of humans. I am not sure my cat's fur will deter deer, but who knows, maybe the mice will think twice about gnawing at the bark. 

My two weeks mandatory digging-free rest were over on Saturday, and I planted two thirds of my flower bulbs. On Sunday we had a gentle rain. 

What a glorious time to be alive and healthy. I wish the same to all of you. 

Better when it's free

Varieties are important. Apples are a famous example that just because what you planted was a McIntosh seed, doesn't necessarily mean a McIntosh apple tree will grow. In fact, apple seeds are so variable you could plant ten seeds from the same apple tree and get different colours, flavours, and textures from each of the offspring.

Genetics are important in this respect. I do not want to spend time and money caring for a plum tree whose yields might be poor, disease prone, or bitter. I pay a premium to make sure that the genetic stock I have purchased will really be the legendary plumcot and not a random mutation.

However, there are times when genetics are less important. There are some flower species I have been keeping my eye on because they are very attractive for bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, etc. I do not want to grow them for profit, rather I want to grow them because I think Eden's Rise should be about more than pure food production (see previous post), it should also improve the condition of the soil it is on and provide refuge for wildlife displaced by the constant expansion of lawns and car parks. 

Some of the flower species I was looking into buying were already growing in my mother's garden. I noticed from their growth pattern that they propagated underground, a root from the mother plant travelled beneath the surface of the earth and pushed out a fresh plant a few inches away. I asked my mother if in the fall I could dig up some of the baby plants to transplant them in my garden and she happily agreed- some of these plants spread aggressively and need thinning out anyway. A single root from these plants cost $15 in Vesey's catalogue. 

When the phlox flowers died back they revealed dried out seed pods, and when I picked one and tipped it upside down 15 tiny seeds tumbled out. I did a quick google search and found that propagating from seed is not recommended for phlox as the seedling will likely revert to its more wild form- the colour would not be the same as the mother plant. As it happens, that is not important to me in this case! If the bees still love it, the wilder, the better! I folded a sheet of paper that was destined for recycling, taped the edges shut, went back outside and shook each group of seed pods so their seeds rained down into the recycled paper envelop. 

Amazing that a single root would have cost $15 and now I have what must be at least 100,000 seeds! 

Now I am addicted. I love all the lilies in my mom's garden so I have been collecting those seeds too- I might even make little Christmas gifts with them! 

I was up North this week and saw a beautiful flower growing out of the crack in a sidewalk. It happened to have some dried seed pods on one branch. I did some seed sorting in my motel room! 

As I walked past a mature asparagus stand, well, I snagged some ripe berries from a female plant to see if I can propagate some from seed.

When I told my best friend about my new found hobby of stealing the genetic offspring of flowers she told me her mother is way ahead of me. Apparently she would go as far as carrying pruning shears and a small hand saw with her when they visited friends' homes. If she saw a plant she wanted she didn't just take seeds that have genetic variation- she took a genetic copy!

I hope I inspire you to look in the flower beds of your neighbourhood and embrace the possibility that it doesn't take any money to garden. In fact, you don't even need your own yard. Take some seeds from one place and guerrilla garden some forgotten corner of your neighbourhood. If you can harvest 10,000 seeds from one plant, even just broadcasting them over depleted soil  runs the chance that one of those unique seeds has the genetic make-up to grow, survive, and breed on that bit of ground. And you have taken a small action toward beautifying and re-naturalising an unloved space.

Have a lovely day

A small weekly harvest from the day neutral strawberries