Where to start

Wow where do i start its been a long time, ive learned a lot and have done a lot regarding gardening.

Well instead of spending the entire night catching up ill just talk about todays gardening events.

I walked through a wild brushy field and noticed that scotch broom is flowering. Scotch Broom is what i classify as a class three herb, which usually flowers in early summer. I have noticed that a lot of plants that flower in spring and early summer may flower a second time in the fall. For example there is a camelia on victoria north of hastings which is on the north side of a building. Camelia are the species which green tea and black tea come from, the difference in the teas is that black tea is fermented.

I bought a camera this year and took some photos but it wasnt until september. Through out the spring, summer and autumn so far ive managed to make 50 percent of my diet out of wild crafted and food from my garden. Also i should mention along with that ive gained weight while doing so.

I have moved recently and near my new house there are hazelnut trees, blackberries around them, with chocolate mint at the front of them and grapes growing over both trees and thicket.

Well not a lot to say about the urban thicket. The owner is my ex-girlfriend, her outdoor tap is busted and the co-op wont fix it. So its only been watered three times in the last two months, that was me watering it by bucket. She bought an attatchment for her sink so she can run the hose and now that my cat isnt taring things up theres a chance some life may begin to flourish. I didnt get a whole pile of pictues cause im off to my garden plot, which i only have pictures of on my phone cause i as of yet do not own a digital camera. My phone takes horrible shots to which i to ba cause my plot turned out well andtheres always lots of butterflies, bees and foliage.

Considering the lack of care the urban thicket has had i spent some time reorganizing and crushing up last years pruned rose switches and pilling them on as a mulch.

Sadly despite hw many snap dragon seeds i let go onto the ground last year none of them came up and the only one there is one that lived through out the winter, which ifi get the chance im going to chop it into little cuttings and fill in the area near itas even its eeds didnt sprout, though they may need hot weather and a lot of water i do not know.

Any ways photos of the thicket below. Im off to plot number 19.

Went to my garden to give it a nice heavy watering. Wow it was happy with that, by the time i left everything had grown a little.

Exciting times, 5 new lettuces bringing the total up to 7, though their likely to bolt, im not actually sure why they would sprout now instead of months ago when it was cooler as lettuce likes cool soil to germinate... supposedly.

It will be a while before i get pictures as i dont have a camera right now. but my garden is almost filled in nicely at this rate in a month i will have to be taking leaves and branches off plants to make room for stuff.

Some one has stolen multiple plants form me. It is really sad, most of my plants i have started without budget, by seed collected, cutting, or a small chunk of rhizome. The ones stolen had all been growing for 2 years to get to the point that they were.

Made a crazy noodle soup today. Check this out; Instant noodles (not the kind that comes with flavouring in a single portion package what a waste and they have msg in flavouring), kale (from the garden), chive flowers (from the garden), calendula leaves (fg), fennel seeds (fg last years), green onion (from urban thicket), beet leaves (fg), lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, some plant i dont know the name of (from jills garden, she gave it to me), green beans, 2 eggs, red pepper, soy sauce and some hoison sauce.

Well ill be getting my camera around the 20th then i will post back with pics and stuff. Also i will be working more on my herbology compendium once i get the camera.

I made it to my garden yesterday. Sadly the batteries died on my camera before i got all the pictures i wanted. I did get some though.

Went to my garden today, awesome and exciting. So much going on. I've decided to move my honeysuckle out of the house tomorrow and into the urban thicket. I am worried at the consequence, i have been working at hardening it off, but i've heard that it is vital for them to have a nice cool winter, that it is has not had for the last 3 months.

It turns out Garden City Vancouver is the name of a book Dannie Mcarthur and Marge Meikle. I did not know this.

I chose this name because i grew in Bella Coola B.C. which has vast amounts of wilderness. When i moved to vancouver in 2001 i really didn't want to do the whole 9-5 thing and i wanted to be an entrepreneur. After a few months of idea after idea, i came up with roof top gardening as a business idea. Being an angry/ depressed young goth/punk metal musician who did things like put safety pins through my eye brows didn't exactly make me some one people wanted to invest in. I also new very little about gardening at the time. I chose the lifestyle and stuck with it for years. But what also stuck with me was the ideas i had that we should be utilizing all of our space, reduce pollution ( i've always had issues with the air quality),. Though what i didnt realize was that what a large part of it was is that i have a deep spiritaul connection with nature and i saw that was lacking in vancouver, for me at least.

I dont talk about it so much in here as its become more of an update place, but the philosophy has remained and developed much, much more.

So with all of that said i think i will be looking for a new name for this blog.

Regarding wildcrafting.

When i talk about wild crafting i some times forget some people may view it as stealing. To clarify; I would never go onto someones property to take a plant, but if it hangs out onto the side walk i may take a cutting, as an example i took suckers off of an apple tree last year.#1 Rule of Wild crafting, when harvesting never take more then ten percent of what is there. Also learn how to take effective cuttings, hard wood, soft wood, rhizome. Remember that the plants you craft from you and other people will hopefully be utilizing for years to come. Another thing i've learned, as i don't have a lot of money (infact try for zero budget), don't take more then you have the space for. If all of your cuttings by chance take and you don't have the room for them it is very sad.

My cats breath smells like worms

Wow i love this time of year. Wait and wait all winter then all of a sudden theres things sprouting everywhere. Over winter cuttings are showing signs on if they made it to root. Im resisting the urge to weed as there is so much coming up and im growing a lot of plants this year that i've never tried before. Sometime next week i will be taking pictures hopefully what has sprouted now will have true leaves so i can weed. Though i must say i feel a little dissapointed, the urban thicket (my ex-girlfriends balcony) doesn't get a lot of sun, if im lucky noon to three then a little bit around 5 or 6, so things aren't doing as well as my garden at cotton woods community gardens. Also my cat is terrorising the garden. He eats worms which means hes constantly pouncing across the bed and scratching at the surface. Dispersed areas totalling about 6 feet squared as been dug up and is barren. The tulips are almost all broken and have stopped growing, though ones starting to send up a flower. My ex doesn't mind so much, as long as it makes artemis (my cat) happy. Plus Artemis and i will be moving out soon and i am going to spread wild flowers over the not filled in spaces so hopefully it will be fine.

april 8th 2009,

This year i've decided (impulsively) to break my zero budget gardening pattern. I went out and bought about $50 worth of seeds. My reasoning is that i would like to see if i can do this once and continue supplying myself with my own seeds for the fallowing years, if not for the rest of my life. I will continue my wild crafting habits but there are some seeds out there that would be very rare to find without stealing from someone. Though last year i did know of a broccoli plant that was growing near clark and pender, saddly it was picked before it seeded, well not so sad i guess, someone likely enjoyed it.

Next week i will be taking more photos of the gardens as seeds are now sprouting.

I do a lot of composting at the urban thicket, about a 4 liter ice cream tub every 2 or 3 days. Therefore i research different ideas of composting. One thing i was reading recently was about an organic farm that does hot composting. The theory the composter had was that the corrugated cardboard allowed for oxygen to remain in the pile. Also i was thinking that if you allow the corrugated cardboard to be at the the sides of the compost it allows air flow into the pile, ultimately speeding up the process.

Im going to be making vermiculture shake boxes over the next week to put in the deep shade area of the balcony which sits empty and un-used all year.

I opened a flickr account today. So far theres only photos from the Urban Thicket, one set from jan 20th 2009 and one from march 5th 2009. Though most of the excitement is at my garden plot i haent gotten around to organizing photos of it will post a link at later date.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/36361576@N06/

Plants i am currently trying to find a home for.

If i cant find a plot to work on and throw these in or find anyone who wants them they are likely to end up planted in an abandoned lot. The list is likely to eventually get quite long this year.


Chives
Evening primrose
Oregano
Lemon Balm
kale

tulips, crocus, and new growth

At what i call the Urban thicket

My tulips are all about 6 inches tall now, none of them were dug up last year. The few crocus' and galanthus are flowering. Strawberries, jacobs ladder, bleeding hearts, roses, iris', dragon snaps, garlic, dianthus and a bulb which im not sure what it is until it flowers(thinking hyacinth) have all started new growth.

The Urban thicket doesn't get a lot of light as it is trapped between buildings facing north, west. The only sun it gets at this time of year is for about 1.5 hours midday and only half of the area gets that sun. Though it seems to be a little bit warmer due to being so close to buildings. The soil isn't in that great of shape so throughout winter i have been composting all of the residents compostables in the plot. This likely means i will have to pull out lots of vegetables when they sprout as they either wont get enough sun or be killed by midday scorching. The extra volunteers will likely go to a guerrilla garden somewhere in the neighborhood. Also the resident doesn't want to eat anything out of the plot due to when she dog sat for 6 months the dog used it as a bathroom.

UPDATE: Vancouver b.c. is currently about 4 or 5 degrees colder then the average temperature. The forecast says we will be getting around 0 at night on the weekend. I would like to make note that in some places the defrosted ground turned to mud, others it seemed to hae remained fluffed up and looser. My guess is its related to the amount of moisture in the groundwhen it freezes. Will spend time researching this, possibly there is a way to use this as a winter aeration process, possibly nature already does.

The Farmers Almanac states that the last frost for Vancouver b.c. will be march 28. To be on the safe side i will aim to have things sprouting for the 30th. The Farmers Almanac also states that we should have about 221 growing days this year, which is the longest estimated growing season out of the major cities in Canada this year.

This year i've actually gone out and bought seeds, normally i wouldn't do that but last year i wasn't looked apon to well by everyone by the state of my garden. All my garden beds accept one will remain treated as Permaculture beds. The one is to sandy and i will be ammending it with composted materials.

On Sunday march 9th i will be planting a rows of lettuce. The fallowing week i will plant a second row the normal spacing between rows plus half. As the first row sprouts i will be thinning them out and about 6 inches south (deeper into the shade) of where i removed the young ones from the first row i will plant another row. Hopefully planting in succesion deeper into the shade each time i may be able to pull off having lettuce that doesn't bolt mid summer, if it does oh well i like seeds.

urban thicket 2009

2009

So far plants sprouting/ growing are;
Dianthus (multiple varieties)
2x Honey suckle (yellow flowering I think)(one has been grown indoors all winter and is now being hardened off)
Garlic
Tulips (not sure on varietys)
Jacobs ladder
Rose (small pink flowers that turn white before they die)
Spearmint
Hen and chicks
corsican mint
fox glove (purple digitalis)
Dragon snaps
Sage ( A culinary variety)
Green onions
plantain lilly
Bleeding hearts
Strawberries
crocus
galanthus
irises
cat grass
6 varieties i don't know the names of

In my girlfriends house

So i moved all my indoor plants to my girlfriends until i find a suitable place to move into.
Yes it is looking like a small rain forest in here.
The list.

Ginger
2x majesty palms
Honey suckle
Variegated spider plant
spider plant
Christmas cactuses ( a lot of little ones starting all over the place)
Purple margined dracanea
yellow margined dracanea
3x Rex begonia escargot
2x Tradescantia Pallida
3x oak tree saplings ( just started growing one day, i love re-using dirt and getting surprises)
Spathyphylum (the larger peace lilly variety)
2x oxalis
oak leaf ivy
3 that i dont know the names of