May Day and Beltane Blossoms

It's blossom time again on Beltane  with our newly planted cherries taking the lead.

The annual garden continues to flourish.  Starting from the left, we have the brassicas (kale, brocolli, collards) that we keep picking and that we will let go to flower for the bees.  To the right are a few extra sprouting garlic bulbs followed by the hoop house that will be covered with plastic to grow peppers.  To the right of that there are a few perennial walking Egyptian onions followed by 260 annual onions that have started to sprout.  To that far right is the interplanted raspberry and strawberry bed that has really taken off.

We have finished expanding the annual garden beds below and all that remains is to hang the wire fence on the T-bars that we have pounded into the ground.

 

 We have built a funky gate using cedar boards that were given to us by Peter Sitzler from his sawmill on Texada Island.  Thanks Peter!

 On April Fools day we inter-planted 50 asparagus crowns in the orchard between the fruit trees.  Going back 10,000 years to the neolithic this was called "coltora promiscua" (i.e. mixed cultivation), before the "permavultures" claimed to have invented and marketed it themselves.  Here are the asparagus crowns as they come shipped from West Coast Seeds.

Each asparagus crown is planted on a mound of composted manure and then covered up with three inches of soil.

One month later, the first asparagus plants begins to emerge.  But we will have to wait until next spring to start harvesting them.  By then they should be growing in profusion!

Next to the the asparagus bed, we are planting some strawberry starts that we bought at the community garden stand next to the Sointula Resource Centre.  These should start producing in June.  In the fall, we will also transplant more of our strawberry runners from the bed where they are interplanted with raspberries.

The blueberry bushes are starting to bud and flower too.

And the Gravenstein apple is putting on a show of pink blossoms!

Fuzzy, the wild Norwegian/Siberian Forest Cat, followed us deep into the forest behind the cabin, where we picked spruce tips that we will soak in vinegar to extract the huge concentration of Vitamin C.

Heartfire the Nettle Queen from Texada Island sent the following comment and picture of her sheet mulching:

"Aloha Petr,

We have now fenced the garden and borage has seeded itself on many beds, what a gift.  The beds are blessed with compost former soil sifted,seaweed, nettle, and chicken manure.  We did a garden blessing with drumming and chanting.  I am listening to see what I should plant.  My potatoes purple and white are in barrels outside the garden. 

Garden blessings

Heartfire the nettle queen"