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Our gardens in many lights

dimanche 26 juin 2011

In Strawberry Time...

Cet article en français.
Este artículo en español.

Helene's Strawberries


In the Quebec Province, this marvelous berry is linked intimately with the end of classes, the beginning of summer and St-John-the-Baptist Day, our national Holiday. Therefore, it evoques pleasure and joy ! We gave it some room in our gardens.

But instead of putting them in a raised bed or planting them in rows, in a traditional manner, we let the plants run everywhere, acting as an attractive ground cover. 

Cultivated strawberry plants are 6 to 12 inches high (15-30cm). They help to keep the soil moist, but don't form into a carpet thick enough to choke all weeds. Therefore, it's necessary reto weed occasionally and/or to spread a mulch between the plants, taking care not to bury the plants' crown, otherwise they could die (the crown is the place where the root system and the stems join together). Strawberry plants can reproduce by seeds (a strawberry forgotten on the ground will leave its seeds on the spot). In that case, the resulting plant will be genetically different from its' mother-plant. This is the way of propagating used by producers when they want to create new varieties. But strawberry plants reproduce mainly by sending runners (long stems "running" as much as a few feet from the mother-plant, and then producing a bud of new leaves that will take root in place). These new plants are genetically identical to the mother-plant. 


My strawberries grow very well all around
and under my daylilies.
Louise :  
During the years when I couldn't take care of my vegetable garden anymore, my strawberries left their designated spot to run in every direction, unchecked. Even the competing weeds, also unchecked, didn't deter them. After a few years, they came back to a wilder form, their fruits transforming to a smaller, tastier form.  I use dead leaves to mulch my plants, nowadays, but I wait until after the fructification before applying a new layer of leaves, to avoid attracting slugs and giving them a nice, moisty spring home, because they would then feast on the juicy berries. 
Matricarias are as high as the daylilies, 
and the strawberries need to keep their distance.











The strawberry plants established in the area of my former vegetable garden are a one season variety (they give all their fruits at once during a few weeks at the end of June).  They are happy to live among middle size and tall perennials or biennals, such as hostas or matricarias. In one of my perennial beds, they cohabit harmoniously with forget-me-nots (biennals giving lovely little blue-sky flowers in May and June, then usually dying and blackening in the process, leaving behind a profusion of small, black seeds). So, by Mid-June, I pull out the majority of Forget-me-not, giving more room and sun to the strawberries, at the moment in the season when they are ready to rippen their berries. I leave only the one-year-old Forget-me-nots, the very ones that will grow on and produce flowers next year. 


These strawberries run in an alley, making it difficult to walk there
at the moment, but as soon as they will stop producing berries, at the beginning of July,
I will pull them out or transplant them elsewhere. 

There are always a few volunteers bold enough to
venture under the rhubarb patch.

Strawberries love sunshine, but they don't necessarily need 8 hours of full sun to be happy and produce berries. Sure, they won't produce as much as their counterparts in a producer's fields, but on the other hand, I don't have to take care of them or to give away some space for them, because they don't need a place of their own. I leave them be and when a plant is in the way, I simply pull it out or transplant it elsewhere (after the harvest, preferably). 


Here's a part of this year's harvest, in pictures :
June 18th 2011 - 1st pick,
in a 1,5L basket

June 20th 2011 - 2nd pick


It sums up to around 7 litres of this red abundance ; the years before were similar in yield. When we think about it, it's still a pretty neat save on the grocery bill!




June 24th 2011 - 3rd pick

 I did no tilling (or plowing which is apparently not so good for a healthy soil, but we'll get back to this topic elsewhere), and no fertilizing whatsoever, if we except the decomposing mulch. I just had to weed and harvest. And of course, I didn't use any pesticide (chemical or natural). Not bad for my initial investment : half a dozen of strawberry plants bought about 18 years ago and left on their own ever since. 

30 juin 2011 - 4e cueillette

    
This year, I decided to expand my production and bought 12 plants of a "four seasons" variety, which will produce less berries at the same time, but will go on producing all summer long. I put 4 of them in hanged planters, to see how they will adapt, since it's a variety supposedly well suited to this kind of use. I put the 8 others in the ground, on the border of the house to facilitate harvest (another permaculture principle), and I intend to let them run, acting as ground cover just like my older plants. I didn't show you a map of my terrain yet, but to give you an idea, these new plants will border the house while the older plants are far in the backyard, so chances of cross-pollination are almost zero.  That's good, because I'd really like to keep each with their unique attributes!

Helene : For my part, the strawberries sitting in full afternoon sun do not perform as well as the ones protected from harsh afternoon sunrays. Their berries tend to rippen only on the exposed size, and they don't look as soft, as juicy and their seeds are darker.

340 grams every 2 days !
Another thing, cocoa shells mulch don't seem to be a good choice with strawberries : I put some under a plant and the berries that came in contact with the mulch rot on the spot.

But my crop is abondant. I started harvesting on June 12th and, like Louise, I can harvest every other day.

With a slice of angel cake and vanilla ice cream, our strawberries are delicious !

samedi 18 juin 2011

At last, it begins !

Cet article en français.
Este artículo en español.


Greetings !

This blog will be used to chronicle our mutual experiences toward sustainability, mostly by ways of gardening. To achieve that goal we will follow 2 gardens (and later on, a third one) that have very different key aspects. First off, we are not in a region from where a lot of first hand gardening testimonies can be found on the web. We hear a lot about gardens in the U.S. – California and the likes – but more rarely from Canada. We will present you our respective gardens on You Tube through short videos but it would be worthwhile to mention their key features here, on our blog, as well as to present and explain ourselves.

Why a blog ?

Because the idea simply thrilled us.

What will it feature ?

We will write and talk about various subjects : vegetable gardening, compost, herbs, bulbs, perennials (most common and rarer), fruiting trees and bushes, flowering seasons in our area, winning combinations of plants, recycling, DIY gardening projects, edible weeds and perennials, recipes, links to some very skilled gardeners’ blogs and... permaculture !

This last subject includes in itself an endless list of subjects, discussions and experimentations. Ever heard of a forest garden ? Or of a polyculture vegetable bed ? What about zoning your garden or making a guild to support a fruiting tree ?

We’re avid gardeners and we always agreed on gardening ecologically. Recently, we fell on this relatively new concept of permaculture. For most of us gardeners, this is a very new topic, based on sound principles, allowing to plan and build (or modify) a garden which can really work with nature. 



For those of you who aren’t familiar with permaculture, it’s a way of gardening promoting lots of diversity to the point that a balanced ecological system may occur. This implies intelligent design by using as many species of plants as possible while promoting the adage of “one plant, multiple benefits”. It also implies that you invite bugs and birds, other living things and even some weeds in your garden and it distances itself from conventional rows of a single plant in sterile soil approach. It’s more than gardening ecologically. It’s trying to mimic nature itself in its functioning and to make it do most of the work for you.

This new approach encompasses so many principles that seem logical, ecological and sound to us, and it meets our own philosophy so well that we felt compelled to integrate it in our current gardening practices. The principles in permaculture can also apply to other areas of life besides gardening, but we’ll attack this exploration from the angle of the vegetal world.

In short, the raison d’être of this blog and its related channel is really to follow each garden through the seasons and through our experimenting of permaculture. We also have loads of projects regarding sustainability that go further than just gardening. But we are not experts. We will never promote ourselves as such. We are only three women from the North, passionate about gardening, and trying to find ways to make our living in a more sustainable way.
We’re really looking forward to sharing our experiences - both successes and failures - with you, for the pleasure of it, but also in the hopes that it will inspire you.


Now, let’s present ourselves and our gardens !

Three women, each with their personal gardening interests.

Three very different gardens in diverse conditions, making it all the more interesting to share our experiences with each other as well as with you.






Helene has been gardening for a few years already. Her first garden was nothing more than a few dozen square feet. Maybe that’s why she made a special place in her heart for herbs and berries, small plants that have so much to offer us. She loves to explore the many uses of a plant, especially its culinary and medicinal properties.

In our trio, she’s the one who always get the books on unusual subjects and after her readings, acquainting us with new plants (ever heard of Russian Olives?), making us taste new recipes and showing us new techniques (from dehydrating her crops to making her own herbal shampoo).






 
Helene’s garden is in the suburb of Montreal, it’s a tiny place on less than a ¼ acre lot. Tiny at least for her gardening ambitions. It has little shade other than the one generated by the house and it’s situated in Canadian zone 5a. When she moved in, in 2008, it was mainly populated by hostas and daylilies.





















Louise started gardening almost 30 years ago. Finding that conventional vegetable gardening was really time consuming, she turned to perennial flowering plants. For many years, she pursued the quest of obtaining blooms from April to killing frosts (around October). And she attained it. She’s currently coming back to food gardening with loads of enthusiasm, intending to mix flowers, vegetables, greens, berries, fruit and nut trees in the usual vegetal riot she loves. She also started to explore Windowfarming (www.windowfarms.org) this winter.

Louise’s garden is on a bigger yard (6/10 of an acre). It surrounds an old Victorian house located in the heart of a village, shaded by mature trees in Canadian zone 4. The maple trees provides the household with all the maple syrup they need and Louise recently discovered that her collection of over 150 different cultivars of daylilies is also her first crop of the spring, providing delicious and abundant greens in April. In her quest towards continuous blooms, she populated her garden with over a hundred different species of perennials, achieving accidentally the conditions favoring the natural occurrence of a small ecological system. Wild life naturally found its way to this small heaven : bats, tree frogs, toads, hummingbirds and all kinds of wild pollinating insects, the seasonal ground hog, and so forth.
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Marie-Claire has some experience and studies in farming (dairy farm and vineyard) and knows how to handle a hammer or to replace faucets, but gardening is relatively new to her. She loves all living things (in her childhood, she dreamed of having her own live giraffe), is mysteriously attracted to weird plants, such as Cannibal Tomatoes, cooks her own healthy dog food (among other goodies) and is currently striving to eliminate plastic from her home, both for her health and for environment.






Marie-Claire’s garden will be the tinniest of all three: roughly 250 square feet facing South in front of her new apartment, garden that she plans to build almost from scratch starting next July. The location is hot and windy and over half of this surface is covered with asphalt. Plus, she’ll need to protect her crops from her two very affectionate and very clumsy, hungry dogs as well as a vegetarian cat in love with Quinoa greens. So, her project will include intensive gardening in raised boxes, erecting fences and other vertical structures and dealing with irrigation issues. A lot of work in perspective !