FarmCity Food Garden Construction

FarmCity Featured on Local Food Blog & Other News...

FarmCity is the latest feature on Landwaterfork, a Vancouver blog by Justin Faubert, a chef and the owner of LWF Food Service Consulting.  He blogs about anything to do with local food - from amazing recipes, to ... uh ... pork bellies (really!), to discussions about raw milk.  His blog offers great photos and great content.  Now he's started a series on local urban farming, and we were up first!

Also, we recently completed a really nice little balcony package: two planters of beautiful tongue-and-groove cedar, plus a balcony compost (see below) and a great watering hose that attaches to your sink faucet.  We used an organic soil with lots of bark mulch and perlite in it, for a lightweight but nutritious soil that won't be too heavy on the balcony.

The composter is a rolling drum design - meaning no need to turn the compost with a shovel; just roll the drum once in awhile, and voila: your compost is mixed!  The composter also has a reservoir beneath, so there's no weird run-off onto your balcony - and there's a spigot that allows you to empty the reservoir and use the collected compost tea as fertilizer on your garden!  The bin is made in Canada of recycled plastic.

The only drawback with balcony composts is their lack of contact with the soil - hence, no WORMS!  What's wrong with that, you might ask?? Well, ya gotta have da worms for da compost to work!  However, as a courtesy to wormless clients, I provide them for you when I install your composter (no charge!).

Some of Our Recent Work

We've recently built a great little balcony package: a very simple potting table, a three-tiered planter, and a matching shelf on which to put more pots.  Made of finely sanded cedar, the table was finished with varnish to protect it from weathering (not yet done in this photo), while our clients decided to leave the planter and shelves to the elements: they'll weather to a lovely silvery grey.  We photographed the combination in our own yard, but it was custom built to fit a balcony approximately 5-1/2 x 13 feet, with room to spare for people and cats alike!

We also recently built a lovely kitchen garden over on West 15th Avenue.  The small yard of one half of a duplex, it had a perfectly nice lawn, but our clients, Will & Nina, didn't use it at all.  So instead, they put in a series of four raised beds - enough to grow a substantial part of their diet over the seasons!  And in order for our clients not to have to mow between the beds, we also installed river rock paths between.  Check out the link just above for a fuller description and more photos. 

Will & Nina are brand new gardeners, but just jumped right in - within a couple weeks of our building the garden beds, I got an email from Will: their spinach is coming up already, and there're other crops on the way!  Not only that, but Will has started a blog about the progress of their garden.  Check it out!  www.veggardenexperiment.wordpress.com

Tomatoes - Already!

Most of us who grow tomatoes probably use nursery-grown seedlings, which we plant out in mid-May or so.  But really, the tomato-growing season has already begun!  In the Lower Mainland climate, tomatoes actually have to be started indoors several months before we can safely plant these heat-loving beasties outdoors!  If you can't wait to get out in the garden, you can start indoors now!

We choose to start them indoors ourselves because, while many nurseries are stocking more varieties of tomato seedlings than ever before, we still prefer the wider range of choice (and the economy) that we can get out of the seed catalogue.  From West Coast Seeds (http://www.westcoastseeds.com), we ordered seeds - many of them organic - for romas (great for sauces), several heirloom tomato varieties, and a couple different kinds of cherry tomatoes - as well as a few of the standard kinds (beefsteak tomatoes, for instance).  One of our favourites is the Green Zebra, which we grew last year: a gorgeous striped green when ripe, it is slightly tart but also sweet, and really juicy and firm - and it ripens early, so it works fine in places that don't quite get full sun.

These are our tomato sprouts after ten days (above) and after about 3-1/2 weeks (below).

The system we use to sprout the seeds involves these plastic trays and covers.  We cut holes in the covers to insert fluorescent tube lights.  (We have only very small south-facing window sills, so unfortunately, we can't use natural light - also a fine way to go).  Art Knapp's in downtown Vancouver - carries the trays and lights (http://www.artknapps.ca).  But beware!  The trays have holes in the bottom, so unless you put the tray in a tray - or water the tray over the sink - it will leak!  (We learned the hard way!)

We also started some artichokes at the same time (below).

Ever Consider Growing Mushrooms?

 

Winter is the time to dream up plans for the spring - and one of mine is the idea of growing mushrooms for the first time.  I figure mushrooms are a great way to use the shadiest parts of the yard to grow good, nutritious food - and to save money, considering the cost of some of the tastiest mushrooms!  

To that end, I recently ran across this great book on mushrooms, wild and cultivated:

Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets

Be warned: Paul Stamets is a true fanatic: he argues that mushrooms can save the world, no less! Personally, I have a wide tolerance for fanatics, and to his credit, Stamets offers some pretty good arguments about how mushrooms can be used to remediate badly polluted soils and water, and how they have huge potential as a source of undiscovered medicines.  And he offers a LOT of really good information on the cultivation of mushrooms.  

If you're already growing mushrooms in your yard, let me know how it's going!  I think it has great potential!

(PS: The photo is a stock photo from Coniac Publishing)

Recommended Links for Vancouver Gardeners

A couple of local websites to check out! 

Probably most of you know about the City Farmer News (http://www.cityfarmer.info): they provide dozens of good news stories every month about urban agriculture within Vancouver and around the world.  They must have the most incredible list of contacts who feed them this info - there's nothing like it.  It's truly inspirational!

And then, there is: Growing Edibles in Vancouver, British Columbia: Vegetables in the Front Yard (http://growingedibles.blogspot.com/), a blog by Janice Kreider, a retired librarian who obviously goes for a lot of walks!  She takes note (and often pictures) of front yard food gardens, commenting on what she saw and how it was done.  A really good resource for ideas about how to design and expand your food garden. (What ARE tomatillos, anyway?  They sound great).

Enjoy!

Great Animated Video

I just ran across this really sweet and enthusiastic animation by The Juki Museum, about local food! 

    

 Home is Where the Food is from The Juki Museum on Vimeo.