planting |

I haven’t been updating about all our garden preparations this year, but we have big plans, tons of seeds and things are already growing out there! Here’s a little summary of what the garden looks like at the moment:

Sunchokes and onions peeking through.

The front garden has been planted with tomatoes of different kinds among other things.

A new addition in the front are these two cedar boxes that I have stuffed with tomatillos and cucumbers.

Purple artichokes with leaves that look like they’ve outlived the dinosaurs.

The green zucchini is in full bloom

Our giant oregano bush survived the winter and is now trying to take over the garden.

Bleeding hearts in bloom

The Purple columbine is back for the third time.

Strawberries ripening.

New crop for this year – Fava beans with their huge leaves.

Giant garlic that was planted in the fall and some sugar peas peeking up behind them.

Yellow plum tomatoes that we bought pre-grown from the garden centre in order to have some early tomatoes.

Already when I was a little kid I loved growing things in the garden. I had my own planterbox full of radishes and planted peas and carrots in my sandbox when I lost interrest in making sand cakes. Last year was the first time I lived somewhere I could plant my own garden, and even though it got started quite late in the spring (we moved in April) we managed to get a decent harvest of peas, beets, potatoes, onions a few tomatoes and a huge amount of green beans. We were harvesting buckets of beans every week from just this little small plot you can see in the picture below.

I saved and dried both peas and beans from last year’s harvest that I just poked into the ground today, but this year we’re going all in with the tomatoes since Kelowna is supposed to be a really good climate for them. I will update later about which kinds we’re growing, but as you can see in the pictures, they’re already growing 37 plants strong :). I started by planting the seeds in old paper egg cartons and made little greenhouses from plastic egg cartons that I placed them inside. When it was time to transfer them to larger pots I simply broke off pieces of the egg carton and covered up with soil in the new pot. Great cheap way to nurse your plants!