January 30th seed meeting

Dear Gardeners,

In lieu of our usual garden work party, there was a fun meeting at Beacon House on Saturday morning, January 30th, at 10 a.m. for everyone who wished to participate in selecting seeds for this year's garden.

We looked over Westcoast and Saltspring seed catalogues, companion planting books and U.K. gardening books from our DIGS library, and had a look through the seed packets left over from last year, to determine what we need to order.

This invitation will be repeated for next week, when we finalize our seed selection. All meetings are open to communal gardeners, allotments gardeners, and any interested islanders. The more, the merrier.
Some of the cool ideas that came up today:

- folks wanted a blank plot plan to fill in. Here it is on P.I. email group files page. Print it out and fill it in as many times as you like.

- an upcoming viewing of the Canadian documentary about Monsanto seed companies and why we might want to not use them (ie: Stokes seeds owned by Monsanto now.)

- crop rotation; how to make an easy to use method for our garden's crop cycle, so that the dirt is always fresh :>) See the next on easy-to-rotate method Jim came up with (Every Woman Has Good Fingers.....short movie in next post on this.)

- our AGM guest speaker, Connie, will be speaking on Feb. 21st on the topic of healthy organic soil, and will also visit our garden that morning prior to the AGM at 1 pm. Anyone who wishes to help rake, clean up and tidy the garden prior to the big visit day is welcome to do so. Let's show off our February garden!

- everyone wrote down their three fave veg on slips of paper, and BEETS came up alot, as did beans. There was lots of discussion on various kinds of beans that people like (pole and bush) and several people remarked on the variety called ROMANO that makes a great tasting small green (string) bean.

- comments on tomato varieties that taste best: yellow tomato that was in the little diggers bed was prolific and delicious. We still have seeds for this Golden Girl.
Early Girl is also well liked.

- ideas were shared for handling all the calendars of planting and lists of plants, and seeding times. These will be followed up next week same place, same time.

- what did I forget? Let me know, and I'll add it here.

Please send your comments, ideas and thoughts.
You can send them to me at my P.I. email and I'll print them on this blog.

Best and thanks for the fun meeting! Jen.