I wish you all a new year filled with growing pleasures. May your gardens shine with an abundance of vibrant foliage, flowers, and food. May you be refreshed and invigorated with the health-giving exercise involved in planting and tending a garden.
What will the new year bring? More food price increases, apparently. It is estimated that families will be paying around $500 more to eat this year. Food production has been adversely impacted by droughts, fires, heavy downpours, and reduced access to fresh water — extremes that come with climate change and global warming.
Hotter temperatures have also been a factor in bacterial outbreaks such as E. coli contamination of some crops. We can all probably remember recalls from stores of contaminated romaine lettuce in recent years.
Produce prices are bound to continue rising. What to do? Consider gathering the family together and making a plan to grow some, or more, of your own food. Where finances are a pressing issue, itemize vegetables that the family enjoys most and plan to grow as many as possible of the ones that are most costly to buy.
Space for growing food is often an issue in these days of small-lot, condo, town house and apartment living. Where in-garden space is limited, plan to grow vining food plants vertically on trellising, or on wire fencing or netting held in place by sturdy metal or wood posts. Cucumbers, staking tomatoes, runner and pole beans, and climbing zucchini (Tromboncino, West Coast Seeds) take up minimal space when grown straight up.
A condo-dwelling friend grows beans, tomatoes, raspberries, green leafy vegetables, carrots, and compact varieties of cucumber and zucchini, all in containers on a deck.
Containers suitable for vegetable plantings can often be found for little money at garage sales. People who are moving to downsize often don’t take such items with them. Even bought new, the lightweight terracotta lookalike containers that I favour are not expensive.
Call-out to clubs. Several notices of garden events for the new year already rest in my files, ready to be added to the Garden Events portion of these columns. The first Seedy Saturday of the year is among them.
Thanks to all the garden-related organizations that sent along information on their meetings and special events in 2019. I regard these notices as an important community service part of the columns.
Again this year, I invite gardening groups throughout Vancouver Island and on the Gulf Islands to send along details of their activities and programs. If your group has finalized plans for a flower show, plant sale, meetings or other events, please send details to hchesnut@bcsupernet.com. Please note there is no “t” in the middle of Chesnut.
To be sure your event makes it into a column, send the information well ahead of its date. To allow for assorted life glitches I submit columns to the paper around 10 days ahead of publication dates, sometimes more if I need a little time off.
Include a description of the meeting or other event with the location, time, cost of admission (if any) and points of interest. Please do provide both the day of the week and the date. It’s easy enough to type in a wrong number, and a check between day and date allows me to pick up conflicts that sometimes occur between them. A phone number is helpful. If the group has a website, include that too.
Please place the information in the body of the email rather than in attachments. Thanks again. I look forward to hearing from you.
GARDEN EVENTS
VRS meeting. Victoria Rhododendron Society meets Monday, 7:30 p.m., at the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific, 505 Quayle Rd. in Saanich. Doors open at 7. Bernie Dinter of Dinter Nursery in Duncan will speak about Spring Bulbs.
Seedy in Saanich. Saanich and the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific present Saanich Seedy Saturday on Jan. 11, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at HCP, 505 Quayle Rd. It will feature 31 vendors selling organic seeds, plants, produce and more. There will be a children’s table and a community seed swap. Dan Jason of Salt Spring Seeds will speak about his book, Changing the Climate with the Seeds we Grow, 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults, free for children under 12.
