Big shout-out to my friend Thanu for helping do some gardening on World Bee Day! Looking forward to hosting her on our new virtual garden series called The Gardens of our Lives. Stay tuned for details!
In order to help our volunteers weed our plots, we are mapping out what is planted in each bed. Many of our butterfly garden plants given to us by the David Suzuki Foundation are in the first plot. This is the first bed, with kinnikinnik (left) and oceanspray (right) on the west end by the blueberries. We'll talk more about these plants over the next part of our residency, but for now we just need to get them in the ground and water them well to help them get established. We're also dealing with some very vigorous weeds, particularly horsetail and bindweed.
In the same bed, we have two asters on the north side, a wild strawberry (lower left) and sea thrift with the pink flowers (lower right). If we keep the weeds away from those strawberries the runners that they are setting out will be able to take hold in the soil and spread as a lovely ground cover.
In Bed 2 we've got goldenrod from the David Suzuki Foundation on the left (southeast side) and marigolds (top right) and calendula (bottom right). The marigold flowers will be used in handmade paper and the calendula flowers will be used to make salves.
Further West on Bed 2 we've got more marigolds on the bottom left (south side), a kenikir plant in the centre and more calendula on the right. The kenikir has orange flowers which will be used to dye paper and cloth.
Bed three has nodding onion and camas. The camas are very delicate and just past their season, so the green parts have died back and will remain as tiny bulbs under the ground. We'll have to be very careful with that bed.
Beds three and four have a mishmash of plants! We've cleaned them up and top-dressed them. There's kale and mustard. There's more marigold and calendula planted around the edges of beds.
We've planted some ground cherries, that will be used in our cooking workshops. One of those plants is not like the others. Can you find it? There's a dragonhead plant in there!
Bed five has a row of lettuce in it and we planted more dragonhead and ground cherries beside it. There's a cilantro plant in there between the two ground cherry plants.
Bed five has nasturtiums growing at the west end, then dragonhead, which is a tea plant in the mint family and ground cherries.
The east side of bed five has mustard greens (the big brown leaves) and lettuce growing in it. I'm waiting until the lettuce gets a bit bigger to weed out the other stuff.
Bed six had things planted in it already--those bulbs, which are maybe gladiolas--we're not sure and potatoes. The red flowers are crimson clover which is a great cover crop that bees love. We also planted other cover crops for the bees, including Phacelia tanacetifolia, which is growing west of the bulbs. This garden does NOT need much weeding because it would be tricky to separate the weeds from the cover crop--apart from the obvious weeds like horsetail and bindweed.
We also planted some Hopi dye sunflowers in bed six which will be used to dye cloth.
The larger plants on the left are the sunflowers.
So this is all a work in progress as you can see and we are super grateful for our volunteer Barry who is helping us out during these extraordinary times!
No comments:
Post a Comment