Our almost daily harvest from our greenhouse (often picked by my six-year-old niece) includes a selection of heirloom tomatoes including ‘Galina Yellow’ cherry, ‘Red Grape’, ‘Memorial’ Polish paste, ‘Black Russian’, ‘Black Krim’, ‘Valencia’ and ‘Tigerella’, plus some ‘Sweet Banana’ peppers, tomatilloes, basil, eggplants and more!

Carol leaps to culinary action when her beets start to bolt

When my beets started to bolt in the August heat, it was out with them! We quickly picked them all and put them to good use.

The beets—a collection of many colours as we grew them from West Coast Seeds’ “Beet Blend” mix—were beautiful steamed and served with dinner. Meanwhile, all the fresh organic tops were chopped and served raw with a honey-mustard dressing, with any that looked a little rough being tossed into the soup stock pot.

We’ve started more beets now for our fall/winter garden—and these should hopefully be bolt-free in the cooler fall weather.

Bolting? Get them out quick!	Soup's on!

Carol discovers a floating garden of Eden docked in Gibsons

Sometimes people tell me with regret that they just don’t have the space for a good garden, and I encourage them to remember that even a small patio or the tiniest of lots can become an inviting retreat with the addition of container plantings and vertical growing.

And one very fine example of that has to be this floating-home garden in Gibsons, where there is literally not a speck of land to be had.

Featured some time ago in GardenWise magazine, it has since grown—both up and out—so when I took a recent “day-cation” that started with breakfast at Molly’s Reach in Gibsons, I wandered down the dock below to admire the sight.

Obviously someone’s personal space, I didn’t step aboard, but like several other awe-struck tourists on the dock, I couldn’t help but snap a few shots.

Kudos to this boat owner for making this the most beautiful and interesting dock on the Sunshine Coast.

VIEW THE PHOTO SLIDESHOW >>

Not yours to munch, deer!

All gardeners in deer country know to never say “deer-proof” – we always use the more cautionary deer-resistant because just when you make the promise to another gardener that a plant is definitely deer-proof, chances are you will wake up the next morning to find it eaten to the ground.

But I am going to be cocky and say that here is a quick container combo that is definitely deer-proof. In my 20 years of growing gardens in deer country, the sage, rosemary and bronze carex in my beds and containers – including varying cultivars of each – has had nary a nibble.

This combo of three spotted at a nursery this past weekend is a simple and effective idea for a garden accent for a sunny spot, deer or not.

Presto pesto!

Inspired by garden-to-kitchen wizard Sharon Hanna’s suggestion (in GardenWise magazine’s new summer issue) that we all make garlic-scape pesto, I decided to whip some up for dinner. I didn’t have the lime juice Sharon suggested for her recipe, so I plodded ahead with my own adaptation.

A garlic scape perfect for pesto.

Chopped for the food processor.

We added the leaves from four of our greenhouse-grown "basil bins."

Great Scape Pesto

Ingredients

Everything was tossed into the blender a bit at a time, and the result was a very large bowl of delicious pesto sauce – enough for several dinners.

The trick I find with pesto sauce is to never heat it – just toss with fresh hot pasta noodles and then add a good sprinkling of grated Parmesan or Asiago cheese along with a few pine nuts and basil leaves if you have them on hand. This recipe received unanimous thumbs-up from my family.

Tips on using garlic scapes

Used while they are still new and curly, garlic scapes – the stem that leads to newly developing seedhead – can also be snipped or snapped off for salads, sautés, stirfries, soups, omelettes or any other dish that would benefit from a tasty, mildly garlic-flavoured green. Once your scapes have straightened out, it’s too late to harvest them so pluck them fast when they have formed just one loop or two.

Here's a photo of my scape harvest – some of these were snapped off later farther up the stem to ensure only the soft parts were puréed. The harder portions were frozen for future use in the soup stock pot (along with the tough parts of kale, chard, parsley and celery stems – virtually all the greens from our garden not tender enough to eat are boiled into soup stock).

Family fun in the garden

A retired tilesetter, my dad has been eyeing his galvanized-steel Target washtub—once one of the tools of his trade—as a possible planter for the past couple years. The holdup has been that he has been unsure of what flowers to plant in his front yard where the deer continually feast.

This year, for Father’s Day, I thought it would be fun for us to tackle this project together. Check out the slideshow of the “making of” >>

It’s that busy time of year. Between editing GardenWise and getting the garden in, there isn’t much time to blog…

Still, there’s lots of planting going on in our family garden and greenhouse and I wanted to share a bit of it with you. We still haven’t got the zucchini in, because we need some warm weather for it to germinate and it just won’t stop raining—but on the bright side, the spinach, chard, beets, lettuce and kale are a "growing" concern!

Kale

I’ve got to give it to kale—this plant just won’t quit. We tossed seeds into a deep-root tray of soil and it was spilling over with leaves just three weeks later. We started these under a fluorescent grow light inside and they were so excited by it that they came out a bit leggy, so we planted them with the stems immersed about an inch deep in the soil. Problem solved—our kale has all been growing happily ever since.

Spinach

A little fish fertilizer has given these spinach starts a glossy green.

Swiss chard

The Swiss chard seedlings were leggy, too, so like the kale we planted them with about an inch of the stem below the soil line.

Just getting started

There's a lot more! Check out more photos of my garden here >>>

Carol gets the best Mother's Day gift of all: raised beds and free labour

Speaking of Mother’s Day, look at what I’m getting this year! As you might recall, last year I received a “mother load” of lama manure, worth its weight in gold for gardeners. This year, my husband, Cliff, is working on whipping up a new raised bed as his gift to me. He’s also offering to do the grunt work and top it up with soil—all that remains for me to do is pop in my plants of choice…

And what will those be, do you ask? Check my next posts!

Spanish lavender adds a pop of purple to sunny garden plots

Instead of cut flowers for Mother’s Day this year, how about some gorgeous Spanish lavender (Lavandula stoechas) plants like these for mom to pop into her garden?

These beauties grow like mad in a sunny garden, providing a sea of dark-purple pineapple-like blooms, plus they are drought resistant, propagate easily and are 100 percent deer proof, something I don’t say very often!

(In zones colder than 6, you may want to overwinter in a greenhouse, or root some cuttings for back-up plants in the event of winter kill.)

Organic gardener and GardenWise columnist Sheena Adams to blog about yoga for gardeners

Many of you are familiar with Sheena Adams as a longtime GardenWise magazine columnist focused on the health benefits of organic gardening. What you may not know is that in addition to her strong background in horticulture, Sheena is also a yoga teacher and Ayurvedic counsellor.

Currently she is back at university working on a biology degree at the University of Fraser Valley, and she also has several very cool projects in the works, including an upcoming internship in an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka!

Recently I asked Sheena if she would be interested in sharing her expertise on yoga with her readers. Yoga is a fantastic way to get in shape for the gardening season, plus—like gardening—it calms the spirit and puts the world right when you are overwhelmed by the wear and tear of modern-day life.

As Sheena demonstrates—above, the “tree pose” on a mountain perch and, below doing the “downward dog” on a trip to Desolation Sound—yoga is very portable and fun to do wherever you may wander.

Check out Sheena’s yoga moves and tips, featured in GardenWise Online's Rhizome community blog. Here's her first post...

The “downward dog” is an excellent hip opener and side stretch.