Dear Gardeners,
A couple of interesting items from
West Coast Seeds newsletter that just came in today:
A year in (easy & interesting) Mason Bee KeepingAlso, an interesting article on planning for what you and your family wish to eat from your garden, here is:
Garden Planning 101Planning a new garden is one of the most satisfying of winter endeavors.
We recommend garden planning by three criteria:
1. What do you like to eat?
2. How much space do you have?
3. What is the return you can expect compared to the demands of each vegetable variety?
The first one is easy for most people, depending on their personal tastes. Even novice gardeners with limited space can grow a surprising amount of food. It's helpful to make a list of all your favourite vegetables to begin with, and a fun project to do with kids. Some vegetables will be extremely easy to grow, while others will prove more demanding. Some can be harvested over and over throughout a long season, and others will have a short harvest window.
The issue of space is a practical matter, and will help to shorten your initial list. All plants require room to grow. Read your seed catalogues, seed packets, or gardening books and take the advice on seed spacing seriously. Measure your growing area and make a drawing of it to approximate scale. Graph paper is quite handy for this purpose.
Say you have a 4 x 8 foot raised bed to plant in. The soil is good, and it's situated in a bright spot that receives direct sunlight for much of the day, so it's perfect for growing a productive salad garden.
Many lettuce varieties, for instance will grow up 8-12 inches wide, if allowed to mature, so one option is to plan for growing a single plant per square foot in your raised bed: 32 mature heads of lettuce can be expected in this space.
Now consider planting your raised bed lettuces in 8 rows that are each 4 feet long. With an early start, and by sowing a new row of seeds every two weeks, you can stagger the harvest time. Most lettuces mature in about 8 weeks, and they can be directly sown from the beginning of April to the end of August in most years. So by the time you're planting the fourth row, the first will be ready to harvest - you pull or cut out the first row, and plant a second crop. By this method, in the same space, you can expect to harvest 80 or more mature heads of lettuce, which is an ample and constant supply for most families.
This example is simply for the sake of argument. It's actually much better to rotate crops, and plant different varieties after each harvest, in order to discourage pests and make better use of the soil.
So it is fairly obvious why making a map of the garden space is a useful exercise. The more varieties of vegetables involved, the more complicated this equation tends to be.
The third criteria from above is perhaps the most useful to consider when planting a garden. And it calls for realistic consideration of what you hope to achieve in your growing area. At West Coast Seeds, we talk to a lot of new gardeners every day about how to make the most out of their often-limited growing spaces.
Pumpkins are really fun to grow, and they offer an outstanding opportunity to teach young people about gardening. But they grow on enormous plants. A single pumpkin plant, if it's allowed to sprawl, can be 30 feet across by the end of the season. Not much can grow around it, beneath the huge leaves that it holds off the ground. So pumpkins are a poor choice if your growing area is limited.
Corn, when freshly picked and put straight into the cooking pot, does not have time to convert its sugars back into starches. The result is a food experience you will feel privileged to enjoy - the flavour of fresh picked corn is simply amazing, and no store-bought corn can compare. But corn plants are also large. To assure good pollination and cob development, you need to a fair number of plants, which takes up a lot of space. Corn is usually ripe and ready to pick over a very short couple of weeks, and this is in late summer. In fact, it's ready to pick just as the markets are saturated with very good quality, fresh, often organically grown corn from local farms.
The same space, devoted to salad greens, beets, carrots, and potatoes, can produce vastly greater quantities of food over a much longer period. Instead of one or two big corn feasts in late summer, you can enjoy fresh, tasty vegetables from late spring right into winter.
If you're growing from seed, remember that many vegetable varieties must be started indoors: the Brassicas all benefit from an early start indoors, but artichokes, eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes absolutely require it. Most perennial flowers and many herbs also require an early start indoors. Setting up an indoor seed growing area is not practical in all homes, and can be avoided by purchasing seedlings at the garden centre, and focusing on buying seeds for varieties that do better from direct sowing.
One final bit of garden planning advice has to do with growing space that was formerly lawn. Especially for urban gardeners, this is a serious consideration. We hear from gardeners all year long about the challenges of converting tiresome, demanding lawn space into useful, economical vegetable beds. (No bias here!)
------------------end slightly shortened/edited article from
West Coast Seed NewsletterAlso, if you've read previously about G.E. Seeds, and don't know much about the issue, then here's another West Coast Seeds article from the newsletter:
What are Genetically Engineered Seeds?
ATTENTION GARDENERS: There will be a meeting this Saturday April 10 at 10:00 in 
