Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

Graduating students of the Peel Teaching Garden winter course averaged about 80 percent on questions similar to this year's Eclectic Gardener quiz.

If you don't do so well, have a look at www.teachinggarden.org and consider attending the free winter gardening classes. To all and everyone, have a happy and productive garden in 2011.

1. Regular gardening activity:
a. is an effective way to lose weight
b. will help improve overall fitness
c. reduces the need for calorie reduction
d. both a & b

2. Organic means:
a. contains no chemicals
b. more nutritious
c. pathogen free
d. none of the above

3. A 'Continental' climate tends to be:
a. hot & dry all year
b. warm & dry in winter, hot & rainy in summer
c. cold & dry in winter, hot & dry in summer
d. evenly warm & wet all year

4. Soil containing roughly equal parts coarse and fine sand, silt and clay is known as:
a. loam
b. tilth
c. mulm
d. muck

5. Kew Gardens, London, is famous for:
a. the world's largest collection of living plants
b. the 'Most Visited' garden in England
c. the world's largest herbarium collection
d. the world largest maze

6. For the highest yield, most home garden vegetables should be:
a. carbohydrate-dense root crops
b. grown in full sun
c. tall growing
d. heritage varieties

7. Growing leguminous plants in rotation:
a. increases levels of available soil nitrogen
b. decreases nematode activity
c. reduces the need for weeding
d. enhances manganese uptake

8. Canna and Dahlia tubers should be stored over winter in _______conditions:
a. warm humid
b. cold moist
c. cool dry
d. normal household

9. Secateurs should be:
a. lubricated once per hour of use
b. always locked shut between cuts
c. sharpened often with a 'Dremel' type grinder
d. both a & c

10. Dalea is:
a. named for physician Samuel Dale
b. a plant found in valley bottoms
c. a genus of flowering pea plants
d. both a & c

11. A non-native plant reproducing without human help is:
a. a hybrid introduction
b. an exotic species
c. a naturalized species
d. a heritage plant

12. Caffeine is:
a. a nontoxic stimulant
b. a systemic plant pesticide
c. an aid to weight loss
d. used as an organic fertilizer

13. Clostridium botulinum is:
a. a common soil-born organism
b. green pond scum
c. the origin of the most toxic substance know
d. both a & c

14. All Red, Alaska Sweetheart, German Butterball and Russet Burbank are:
a. Iris
b. roses
c. potatoes
d. tomatoes

15. One cubic metre contains approximately _____ cubic feet:
a. 10
b. 27
c. 35
d. 100

Answers: 1 b, 2 d, 3c, 4a, 5a, 6b, 7a, 8c, 9a, 10d, 11c, 12b, 13d, 14c, 15c

High Temperature:
Actual: -3°C mostly cloudy Wind NNW17km/h P.O.P.6%
Average: 0°C
Record: 14°C in 1949

Low Temperature:
Actual: -8°C partly cloudy Wind NNW22kmh P.O.P.7%
Average: -7°C
Record: -25°C in 1989

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

Nobody likes criticism, least of all me, and that is why I make a point of not reading Peel Teaching Garden course evaluations until the fall.

Months after the last class in April, when the exertions of teaching are a distant memory, I don't get so defensive about negative comments.

Not that there have really been many boo's to get all huffy about.

In practice, it's necessary to go to come lengths to get people to express any sort of dissatisfaction at all.

In their write-ups, students are told not to include their names or anything which might identify them, and the submitted originals are retyped so it is only the transcripts that I eventually get to see.

Because student satisfaction is fundamental to the survival of PTG, at the first class each year, attendees are told that they will be asked for a final evaluation and it's suggested that they make a few notes at the end of each session so they can remember: What they liked, what they didn't like, and what they wanted more of.

Since the first winter gardening course in 2004, each subsequent course has been shaped by the content of the previous year's reviews.

The one constant them, 'Give us more', has resulted in the original four, monthly two-hour classes from January to April, morphing into eight, two and a half hour semi-monthly, classes plus - as soon as the frost leaves the ground - an inserted outdoor group gardening session. See www.teachinggarden.org for the 2011 program.

Despite more than doubling the number of classes, what was requested again this year? More seminars because I don't want the education to stop."

Common themes are easy enough to accommodate but what to do when opinions differ?

"I really enjoy it when Alan goes off topic and takes us on a journey...."
"I wish Alan wouldn't go off on tangents - unless of course I'm the one who asked the question!"
"Alan should try to stay on one topic at a time."
"Alan has a way of surprising me in how he approaches his subjects that keeps me engaged."

Presentation style is one thing, but how might one reconcile: "My favourite class was the one on soil." with "....A lot of emphasis was put on soil...I think a handout with websites might suffice."

As any politician soon discovers, nobody really can please all of the people all of the time.

The best one can do is to stay true to some basic set of principles and objectives, and hope to engage, surprise, or at least amuse, most of the people most of the time.

PTG was conceived as a place where home gardeners of all degrees of experience could gain the knowledge which is almost never included in run-of-the-mill gardening books or magazines.

Publishers have a target audience for their products and editors leave out all the stuff that 'everybody knows' and that their readers are deemed 'too stupid to understand.'

In reality, everybody does not know the difference between a spade and a shovel or for what to use each took, and, if someone will only take the time to explain, most gardeners are quite capable of understanding why a PH of 7 is considered neutral.

From the evaluations, at least some students have clearly understood what the course was all about.

"This is where you learn what books cannot teach you."
"The money I have needlessly spent in my past gardening experiences gives me shudders of horror."
"If when I started out, someone had told me what I have learned at these classes, I'd have saved thirty years of expense and frustration."

Of course, anything laudatory is a good aid for self preening, but my all-time favourite comment is: "Like no other course I have ever taken."

Good, Bad, or indifferent it doesn't say, but it was clearly a memorable experience.

Gardening and learning about gardening should not be a chore so perhaps the last comment should go to the person who wrote: "I hope you enjoyed having us in class as much as I enjoyed being there."

I probably did, and I hope that those who came to learn gained even half as much knowledge as I gained by teaching.

High Temperature:
Actual: -7°C mostly cloudy Wind W24km/h P.O.P.10%
Average: 1°C
Record: 14°C in 1984

Low Temperature:
Actual: -13°C partly cloudy flurries .30cm Wind WSW22km/h P.O.P.10%
Average: -7°C
Record: -22°C in 1980

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

Long before there were gardens and gardeners tot tend them, it is as good as certain that there were people engaged in the most basic of gardening practices - weeding. When nomadic hunter/gatherers came upon edible vegetables or roots, or fruit-bearing shrubs or trees, they would rip out or trample down undesirable vegetation ether to gain access or to intentionally give the food plants room to spread.

Ten thousand or more years ago, as the tribes began to coalesce around the peculiarly domestic-able plants and animals to be found in the 'fertile crescent', the people were already proto gardeners, and their skills still echo in the earliest of myths. Adam was created as a gardener, and Eden was not a pioneer's farmstead.

In principle, gardening is not so much the practice of adding plants that are wanted, as it is one of removing plants that are not wanted. When a few wild rye plants spring up on a hillside, if all the nearby not-wild-rye plants are removed, year by year the patch of edible grain will get bigger. If the rye patch is surrounded by a barrier of thorny brush and sticks, wild animals will stay away and, voila, a rye garden.

With pulling out unwanted growth having so long a history and being the very essence of gardening, one might suppose that weeding would be held in high regard and that gardeners would be experts at the task. Sadly, the popular reality is exactly the opposite. Weeding is considered to be a backbreaking, boring, dumb-ass chore, to be avoided if possible and rushed through when avoidance is no longer an option.

For those with the good luck to have had a knowing teacher and for those who have learned by sheer dint of a lifetime of doing, weeding can be one of a gardener's most satisfying occupations
While the time between planting and the reward of flowers or crops must be measured in weeks or months, weeding skillfully done offers something close to instant gratification. Just as a gifted beautician can transform a tramp into Clark Gable (try George Clooney if you're not my age), so a long neglected border can be restored to a thing of beauty with a few hours of skilled and judicious weeding.

For most home gardeners, the idea of weeding for 'a few hours' is an horrendous prospect. The sheer physical pain of all the bending and crawling around likely will terminate the activity quite quickly. And, as if the aching is not enough, just to make it all more stressful there's the added anxiety of not knowing for sure which is the expensive cultivated plant and what are the unwanted volunteer offspring or adventitious weeds.

The association of weeding and discomfort is almost universal and with good reason. Most people don't have a clue how to weed and they grossly misuse their bodies.

Spinal columns evolved to be horizontal, to be suspended by a pair of legs at each end, and to be counter-balanced by a head and a tail. When primates got to standing vertically on their hind legs, the stresses changed from bending to compression and to support the new loads the bones in the structure took up a sort of woggly 'S' arrangement.

Given the way they started out, human spines are quite effective. We can run fast, we can see far and we can move heavy things, but what we can't do any more is carry our upper bodies horizontally. At least, we cannot stoop for any length of time and still remain comfortable.

A low wooden gardening bench - not a flimsy plastic thing that sinks into the soil when you sit on it - is an indispensable component in a gardener's tool kit.

Made from a scrap of 2x8 lumber and used with a small foam pad, a gardening bench transforms weeding and planting and trimming from drudgery to be eschewed into activities to be enjoyed and even lingered over.

Of course, saying that if you are going to weed you need a bench and a fork is like saying that if you are going to make a cake you need a bowl and a spoon. There is rather more to it than that.

Unfortunately, eight hundred words or fewer can only introduce the concept. For the meaty bits, see www.teachinggarden.org and enroll for the free winter gardening classes and for next summer's hands-on-in-garden skills coaching.

High Temperature:
Actual: 0°C Cloudy Wind ESE27km/h P.O.P.50%
Average: 5°C
Record: 16°C in 2001

Low Temperature:
Actual: -6°C cloudy rain 7.10mm Wind SW22km/h P.O.P.68%
Average: -3°C
Record: -13°C in 2005

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman


I had often wondered how it was that someone who had gardened for decades could still not know the difference between a spade and a shovel, and far less know-how to use either tool.
The paradox was broken one sunny morning in August when a couple of volunteers and I were digging garlic in the Peel Teaching Garden nursery. We were talking about musicians and how their skills often develop to a plateau and then stick there for the remainder of their lives.
Among other things, when not pulling weeds and tending plants, my harvesting companion writes CD reviews. He said there are lots of artists who do well enough to make a living and sell a few records but, at the end of their careers, they were still limited by the same technical mistakes that they were making when they began.
Then he said: "When I am told that someone has 30 years' experience, I often find that they don't. What they actually have is one year's experience thirty times over."
Brilliant, absolutely brilliant!
Like so many insights, I'm sure this was not the first time that it has been stated - some Greek probably made the same observation two and a half thousand years ago - but this was the first time I had heard the phenomenon explained so succinctly.
It doesn't matter if you are an opera singer, an ice skate, a brain surgeon, a race car driver, or a horse thief, whatever skill set you have needs constant practice, constant stretching and constant criticism.
But, it is of no use practicing every day if every day you make the same mistakes. Petty criminals spend most of their lives in jail because, "every time they get out, they rob another 7-Eleven and omit to pull a stocking over their heads."
No sports team would consider operating without a competent coach, and there are likely a few leaders in any field who do not have personal trainers or coaches. Most successful companies make sure that their staff constantly upgrade their skills to keep them at the top of their game.
Considering that most home gardeners start out with no more training than what they vaguely remember their parents doing or what they pick up from watching the neighbour next door, it is not surprising that marketers find them such easy prey.
Having no knowledge of what comprises fertile soil, many people wonder why it is that, after years of paying for peat moss and additives to dump on their flower beds, their gardens still bake up like a brick in summer and crack open like old concrete.
When it comes to gardening tools, the big-box stores are a marketer's paradise. Most of the basic kit is poorly designed and cheaply built, and the rest of the shelves are filled with expensive gimmicks and gadgets that look good but often offer little if any practical benefit.
There must be hundreds of 'New and Improved' dandelion diggers that are no more effective than a good border-fork skillfully used.
With the help of advertisers, and sales people who may know more about margarine or deck stain than potash, most home owners stumble through their first gardening year, with greater or lesser success, and then repeat the same process season after season.
One of the pleasures of summer in the teaching garden is coaching individual gardeners as they abandon old habits and put into practice the knowledge they had picked up during the previous winter's gardening classes. (See www.teachinggarden.org for the upcoming 2011 gardening course). It is one thing to read or be told about something, but quite another to actually get out in the dirt and do it.
The sense of achievement that comes with learning new skills and techniques is not something which is age dependent. The pleasure is the same whether you are 27 or 72 bu the sooner the better. As one student wrote: "If when I started gardening someone had told me what I've learned at these classes, I'd have saved 30 years of expense and frustration."

High Temperature:
Actual: 14°C mostly sunny Wind NW28km/h P.O.P.8%
Average: 16°C
Record: 29°C in 1946

Low Temperature:
Actual: 2°C clear Wind WNW14km/h P.O.P.0%
Average: 6°C
Record: -7°C in 1964

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

Shopping from a distance has been around for as long as there has been a donkey to carry the goods. Now, with the advent of the Internet, the whole world has become one giant catalogue of stuff to be bought without moving an arm's length from a keyboard.

Gardeners were not slow to see the potential of mail order and, for sure, when Britain's 'penny post' was launched in 1840, some of the first letters would have contained otherwise unobtainable seeds speeding from grower to grower.

Despite the advances in technology and explosion of volume, there are two fundamentals of long distance purchasing that have never changed. First, the purchaser has to pay the freight, and second, the purchaser has to pay up-front but doesn't get to see the goods until the package arrives.

The prudent buyer will get the best value by ordering items which have a high cost related to their size and weight, thus minimizing postage, and by only dealing with vendors who have a first-class reputation and a money back guarantee.

One of my favourite examples of economical shipping is the Hope Diamond. In the 1950's, the stone was put in a box, wrapped in brown paper, and mailed from New York to the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington. The million dollar gem was delivered for $145, less than 0.02 per cent of the diamond's value. Not exactly mail order but the same principle.

Some seeds are, by weight, more costly than diamonds and some are likely even more rare than diamonds. So, given that just looking at a package of seed renders little information as to the chances of the seed actually germinating, there is more to be gained than lost by a long distance purchase.

From a supplier in Arizona, this year, I bought some Australian blue pumpkin seed and a few other varieties not easily found locally. No one would confuse pumpkin seed for jewelry, but the shipping price was quite modest.

While seeds are a pretty safe bet, and reputable suppliers ship growing plants in quite sophisticated packaging to ensure that they arrive in good condition, buying dormant tuberous roots can be something of a crap shoot.

Horticultural mail order companies usually don't grow all their own stock, and much of what they sell comes from domestic and overseas suppliers. Growers of plants like cannas and dahlias are careful to package the roots with the correct water content and to keep the temperature at a constant low level, but once the material gets into a shipping container, who knows what happens?

As the turgid roots are usually packaged in peat moss, or some other opaque substance, a visual inspection in the receiving warehouse might not pick up the initial signs of damage caused by heat or moisture in transit. By the time the material gets to the final customer though, the material may be either a tinder dry stick or rotted mush.

This spring, I ordered 15 cannas from one company and three from another. On delivery, every tuber had rotted to mush. Because both companies had an international reputation that they were anxious to preserve, my credit card was credited in full as soon as i emailed details of the shipments.

An occasional defective item is annoying, but losing two entire orders is worth at least some investigation. All crops are subject to the vagaries of weather, which make some years good and result in crop failures in other years.

There is a feeling in the horticultural industry that canna quality has been in general decline in recent years.

American growers were considered to be producing some of the best tubers in the world but, several have reportedly gone out of business.

Cannas are not the only crop to be having a quality problem.

People buying seed potatoes at retail this year needed to be particularly vigilant.

In the long run, whether the purchase is over the counter or over the ocean, dealing with a knowledgeable and reputable vendor and paying a fair price for a good quality product is usually a purchaser's best guarantee of satisfaction.

High Temperature:
Actual: 21°C feels 33°C partly sunny Wind NNE14km/h P.O.P.0%
Average: 27°C
Record: 37°C in 1995

Low Temperature:
Actual: 14°C partly cloudy Wind N6km/h P.O.P.0%
Average: 15°C
Record: 8°C in 1950

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

I usually buy toothpaste several tubes at a time so, when the supply ran out recently, I was back on my hands and knees in the pharmacy section of the grocery store. It's been years since I could read a newspaper from five feet away, and the unit prices on store tags are about the same size as the print this column uses; thus, the need for crawling around.

In case you hadn't noticed, on shelves at eye level, toothpaste is two to three dollars per 100ml but at mouse level, it's around a buck. I picked up a couple of 100ml tubes at $1.09 and then noticed some for $0.89. Although the boxes looked about the same size, the unit price was $1.19 per 100 ml. Turned out that the tube in the 'cheap' box contained only 75 ml, not 100 ml.

It happened that I was accompanied by someone who had worked part time at a pharmacy during high school. "Oh yes, " he said. "When we wanted to move product, we'd shelf it at eye level and put the price on yellow labels. Didn't matter what the price was, people bought it."

The effect of product size and placement is well known - eye-level and end-of-isle locations sell the fastest - and large boxes are assumed by careless purchasers to cost less per unit than small boxes, even though they are often priced higher. The attractiveness of the colour yellow to humans is something I hadn't consciously appreciated, but it is obvious once it is pointed out. Yellow just screams 'Buy me, buy ME!"

The really funny thing is that yellow is also the preferred colour for many annoying insects. Greenhouses are often festooned with yellow sticky strips covered with imprudent white flies, gnats and sundry flying pests.

As we approach the silly season for gardeners, it is as well to remember that garden centres and nurseries exist for the purpose of selling but, unlike grocery stores, they only have a few weeks to do a year's worth of business. Where grocery stores can boost profits a few cents here and a few cents there, seasonal enterprises can only survive by making money big and fast.

There are two ways for a business to increase sales: one is to get more customers and the other is to get the customers they already have to buy more product. The second tactic has worked so well for food retailers that 60% of shoppers are now overweight or obese.

Plant sellers do their bit by making sure that there are always lots of carts and trolleys close at hand, so that customers are not limited by what they can carry around, and the wagons are nice and big so that a flat of pansies and one rose bush will look really lonely.

In the warmth and shelter of a greenhouse, the season can be a month or more ahead of the surrounding area, so, for maximum impulse purchase appeal, it is possible to have spring flowering and summer flowering plants all in bloom by early May when most people start itching to plant something.

Of course, a prudent gardener would have bought the spring blooming perennials the previous fall, so they would bloom in the garden and not on the greenhouse bench, and the summer blooming perennials would have been planted as soon as the ground was workable, in April or late March while the plants were still dormant, but retailers make their profits by catering to the mass market, not to what knowledgeable gardeners would do.

Patenting and plant branding are becoming popular ways for plant breeders and marketers to profit from their activities. Most anything sold which carries a patent number or a brand name has a royalty built into the price.

On the one hand, it is reasonable that the sellers benefit from their years of plant breeding and the millions of dollars spent in advertising. On the other hand, a gardener needs to ask whether the newest latest patented pink pulmonaria, with a registered name and brand, will look that much different in the garden from a none-branded less expensive selection.

One only has to skim through a nursery catalogue to realize that the real money is to be made not in selling plants but in selling 'accessories'.

Fertilizers and soil conditioners are the gifts to garden centres which just keep on giving. If the soil in a flower bed is regularly dressed with household compost, if it is well mulched and if care has been taken to get the mechanical properties of the soil correct, then it is unlikely that additional nutrients will ever be needed.

The soil certainly won't need bales of peat moss, shredded coconut husk, bags of clay buster or any of the other expensive 'amendments' that people are induced to dump on their gardens every year.

For most home gardeners, a basic tool kit would be a good border fork, an inexpensive spade and shovel, and perhaps a decent spring-back rake. As a treat, add a hi-end bypass-pruner, with a belt holster to put it in, and a diamond hone to keep it sharp.

The problem is that once the basic kit has been acquired, it will last a lifetime and there is no more profit for anyone to make. Thus we have all the gimmicky weed puller, the odd looking hoes and hooks and trowels and seed planters and self-watering devices and on and on. All pretty much useless, but great 'as seen on TV' sellers. For demonstration at the teaching garden classes, we have a collection of useless but expensive gardening gimmicks, and the number grows every year as people donate their latest 'looks like a good idea' purchases that turned out to be more trouble than they were worth.

High Temperature:
Actual: 20°C partly sunny Wind E9km/h P.O.P.2%
Average: 21°C
Record: 33°C in 1987

Low Temperature:
Actual: 12°C partly cloudy Wind N6km/h P.O.P.26%
Average: 9°C
Record: -1°C in 1949

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

Jim Wilson's name may be familiar to readers as a result of his association with the long-running PBS-TV series 'The Victory Garden'.

Over his long career as an agronomist and horticulturist, Jim had gardened in nine states, coast to coast, and written fourteen gardening books. He says he was enjoying a blissful retirement - or was as retired as a real gardener ever gets - in Columbia, Missouri, when the current upsurge in interest in homegrown vegetable gardening began.

Born in 1925, growing up in the lean mean 1930's, and well remembering an era when backyard food plots were the norm and when today’s so called ‘organic’ farming was nothing more than good agricultural practice, Jim decided to return to the scriptorium and to write something to serve as a surrogate mentor for a new generation of vegetable gardeners.

Friend and colleague, Walter Chandoha, a few years Jim’s junior - a mere kid in his seventies - is an accomplished photographer and author. With a lifetime portfolio of over 200,000 plant and animal pictures, and many books written and/or illustrated, Walter is also ‘retired’. He lives on a 46 acre farm in northwest New Jersey, where he tends and photographs his extensive flower and vegetable gardens.

Between them, Jim and Walter can credibly claim more than a hundred years of gardening experience and, together, they have produced: ‘Homegrown Vegetables, Fruits, and Herbs’ published by Creative Homeowner, ISBN 978-1-58011-471-4, 191 pages for C$20.95.

When their book landed on my desk for review, things got off to a good start. Even before you can read the title, the cover illustration tells you what the book is all about. At 81/2" by 11" the book is large enough for decent sized print and meaningful pictures, and the pages lay flat and stay open. Also, at 10.969 cents-per-page, it sort of obeys my long-standing rule of not paying more than 10 cents-a-page for a book - ‘more than’ would be 11 cents!

A riffle through the pages, back to front, only reinforced the first impression. Excellent photography, well lighted, and composed with an artist’s eye. The broccoli shot just jumped off the page, but that might be because I’m envious, having never managed to grow a decent head of broccoli. When, on page 79, a picture showed rows of raised beds and, on page 44, several wooden pallets were tied together to make compost bins, all like those we have created at Peel Teaching Garden, I knew that Wilson and Chandoha had produced a very different kind of gardening book.

In the Acknowledgments, Jim says that the genesis of the book was a syllabus which he wrote for Advanced Master Gardening and a manual for coordinators of community gardens. He also adds that during the process of turning the course into a book, he learned as much as he contributed.

When I read that, I felt a little like Charles Darwin must have felt when he received Wallace’s manuscript concerning the evolution of species by means of natural selection. In my computer I have the beginnings of a transcription of my teaching-garden course notes to book-form and the rest is either in my head or yet to be learned.

I’ve been beaten to the post by several years, but fortunately, writing garden books is not a pissing match. Doubly fortunate really, as when three old men are competing, a pissing match is unlikely to be very exciting!

There is so much to like about Homegrown Vegetables and the philosophy behind it. Wilson and Chandoha do not pander to commercial interests or to ‘common knowledge’.

For instance, regarding tillers they write: "Not everyone - particularly manufacturers of tillers - will agree that yearly preparation of soil by pulverizing it with a tiller is not sound practice." "Tillage," they note, "destroys the complex, interdependent colonies of soil organisms known as micro and macrobiota." They do allow that once in the lifetime of a vegetable garden - when it is first being cultivated and a large amount of soil amendment is being worked in - a tiller can be useful. They advise: "Small tillers are not up to the job ...." "Thus, for that first and only time, rent a big tiller of at least 8 hp; then return it when the job is done."

To those who espouse ‘organic’ gardening, Wilson comments "I respect their right to garden in any way they please, but ask that they spare me the evangelistic fervor." "Organic gardeners like to maintain that theirs is the "natural" way to garden. No garden is natural: all are imposed upon the landscape. Our challenge is to manage our food gardens in such a way that little or no damage is done to the environment ..."

Of course, as in any book, there is the occasional gaff. For instance, a picture purportedly showing samples of sand, loam and clay, looks to me more like sand, ground peat moss and possibly a dollop of black muck from the bottom of a pond. Elsewhere we are instructed to dry herbs "... in a warm, dark, well-ventilated spot such as the one pictured below." The ‘picture below’ shows herbs hanging in front of a brilliantly sunny, closed, window. So much for the dark, well-ventilated bit.

From cover to cover, I thoroughly enjoyed ‘Homegrown Vegetables, Fruits, and Herbs’, although I have to say that, for my taste at least, the illustrations contain far too many cutesy rug rats and too few companion dogs!

High Temperature:
Actual: 9°C mostly sunny Wind NW20km/h P.O.P.0%
Average: 6°C
Record: 18°C in 1963

Low Temperature:
Actual: -8°C mostly clear Wind W16km/h P.O.P.0%
Average: -3°C
Record: -18°C in 1940

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

It was an item in a 2010 seed catalogue for one potted short-season sweet potato for
$8.30, that got it all started.

The listing promised a harvest of 2 to 5 kilos per plant, so, with sweet potatoes costing $2,84 a kilo at Fortino's, it didn't seem much of a money maker, and who grows sweet potatoes in Canada anyway?

There is an old saying "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise."

After seven decades, I should have known better and just turned the page, but no, I had to go poking around on the internet to see what this sweet potato thing was all about.

It didn't take long to discover the Weldon, NB based Mapple Farm website, www.mapplefarm.com, and the answers to all the questions someone who knows nothing about sweet potatoes might ask.

To quote from the website introduction, "For the adventurous gardener with a 100-day frost-free season, shor tseason sweet potatoes are certainly worth a try. At Mapple Farm (Zone 5) we consider them to be an easy and dependable crop."

The introduction also notes "We are proud to be the first and longest serving mail order sweet potato stock supplier in Canada."

Although there isn't a history of sustained commercial production, in 'good' years at least, sweet potatoes certainly can be grown successfully in southern Ontario.

A rule of thumb might be that if a location will produce a decent crop of mid-season tomatoes, it likely can produce a worthwhile yield of sweet potatoes.

Unlike regular potatoes, sweet potatoes are not grown from the tubers but from rooted sprouts taken from the tubers in spring.

From a mail order point of view this is a real advantage because slips weigh bery little and consequently shipping costs are relatively small.

As well as being economical to ship, sweet potato slips in small quantities are about $1.25 each.

Assuming even a minimum of two kilos per plant, $0.63/kg home-grown versus store-bought at $2.84/kg is looking good.

At the other extreme, if you can get five kilos per plant, the cost is a quarter per kilo and you can go to Bermuda on the savings.

But wait, as they say on the worst TV channels, there's more.

Because properly cured sweet potatoes store for months at ordinary household temperatures, it is practical for home gardeners to produce their own slips.

Having started with good commercial stock and raised a first crop, it should be possible to select small tubers from the most productive plants and to sprout those the following year.

I can almost feel the sun and smell the salt in the air.

Mapple has seven different cultivars on offer.

As well as the copper-skinned orange-fleshed types familiar in the grocery store, there are cultivars with burgundy skins and cream-coloured flesh, others with red or pink skins, and 'Frazier White' - no prize for guessing the colour of that one, but it is described as being very sweet.

Now, it just happens that Peel Teaching Garden has a nice, sloping, south-facing plot, sheltered from the wind and seemingly ideal for sweet potatoes.

Just one problem: last year it was planted to tomatoes and, when late blight swept the area and destroyed the vines, the soil likely became a huge reservoir of fungal spores.

Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are not in the same family as tomatoes and potatoes, but are they susceptible to late blight?

An e-mail from Greg Wingate, proprietor of Mapple Farms, was quite categorical; no, sweet potatoes are not affected by the fungus.

In fact, being a tropical plant - grocery store produce comes from Honduras, among other places - Ipomoea's native predators can't survive the winters here and the plant is relatively pest free.

As the whole purpose of a teaching garden is to teach, Mapple got an order for 60 slips, some of each cultivar, for a demonstration project.

If this is a 'good' year, and if we get things right, there should be enough crop to supply the volunteers and to send a couple of hundred kilos to the food bank.

If the weather is not cooperative and if we get things all screwed up, there is just as much to be learned - perhaps even more - from failure.

Although the web information was pretty comprehensive, Mapple offered a book on the subject written by one Ken Allan of Kingston.
A quick Google search produced Ken Allan's web site and a postal address, so I put a twenty dollar bill in an envelope and a few days later; 'Sweet Potatoes for the Home Garden with Special Techniques for Northern Growers'showed up in my letterbox.
The 204 page book, self-published in 1998, is a definitive treatment of subject, and it is well worth the price, even if the reader ends up deciding not to attempt growing sweet potatoes.

There are no secret techniques, no magic formulas and no cutting-edge technologies, not even any miracle fertilizers.

Sweet potatoes will make do with clay or with sandy soils, they'll put up with drought and floods, and they will get by with high or low levels of nutrition.

The only thing sweets demand is that their roots be kept warm and toasty, and that can be achieved with nothing more hi-tech than a sheet of clear plastic stretched tightly over the soil.

High Temperature:
Actual: -6°C cloudy flurries Wind NNW30km/h P.O.P.70%
Average: 1°C
Record: 11°C in 2000

Low Temperature:
Actual: -14°C cloudy flurries 6.10cm Wind NNW25km/h P.O.p.40%
Average: -8°C
Record: -23°C in 1940

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

Oh well, at least Peel Teaching Garden didn't crash into the moon. If NASA can dump hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hardware into the Atlantic Ocean and land a spacecraft with a disintegrating thump on some distant planet - all for want of a period, or because of one misplaced hyphen, in perhaps millions of lines of computer code - I suppose it was only a matter of time before something similar happended closer to home.

For 2009, one mention in this column, in October 2008, that registration was open at the Peel Teaching Garden, was enough to fill the winter garden classes. For this year's classes though, applications were really slow coming. By the week of the first class only 14 applications had arrived.

It was not until someone realized that almost all of the applications received had resulted from word-of-mouth recommendations from previous students, and that, in two months, nothing had come via the PTG website - www.teachinggarden.org, that we suspected NASAitus.

Sure enough, there was a glitch in the coding for sending class registrations. Nothing was forgotten; but, somehow, an instruction had been duplicated. Instead of saying 'mail to: teachinggarden....' it said 'mailto: mailto:teachinggarden...'

Computers are like spouses; don't nag them. Tell 'em once and they might do what you ask. Tell 'em twice and they'll do damn all.

The bug was fixed on Monday and by the class, on Saturday, three new applications had arrived using the web form.

It is not that 17 people is a shabby showing, especially as they were mostly encouraged to come by previous attendees; but, over the two months that the registration process was screwed up, there must have been at least a few other people who tried to register and couldn't get through.

Because the first class is so important - it sets the whole foundation for what is to come - it has always been PTG policy not to accept any late registrations. However, in this case, policy, schmolicy.

There was room for another ten or fifteen people so registrations were accepted, on a first come first served basis, fifteen max, so long as the emails arrived before the next class on Jan 23.

First classes are almost invariably something of a trial for all concerned. Everyone is new and in a strange place.

They don't know quite what to expect, except that it will likely involve a lot of formality and 'introductions', and they'd rather skip the whole thing and start with the 'real stuff'.

Well, I'm often glad that PTG is usually the only occupant of the building because, when even a half class starts laughing, they make a lot of noise. From outside the room, it must sound like a bunch of drunks on a Saturday night than a bunch of gardeners on a Saturday afternoon.

Actually, the analogy is more true than it might at first seem, because it is the 'bunch' not the booze which sets the tone.

A solitary drunk, after all, is usually a miserable creature.

Human bodies are quite good at making their own opiates and endorphins, so put together a bunch of compatible bodies, and they'll get a nice buzz going even without the gin.

The last half hour of each session is given over to questions, and someone asked if it was OK to reuse potting soil.

I offered the opinion that, although it likely wasn't a good idea, if push comes to shove and if you got anything else, you would probably have to be quite unlucky for reused soil to cause fatal damage.

And then, for no reason, I thre in, "It's like marrying your cousin. They don't usually come out with two heads."

When you write it down it really doesn't look that funny; but, as they say in show biz, timing is everything.

A throwaway line can bring down the house,just as readily as a stray bullet can blow up a barrel of gunpowder.

Of course, the afternoon wasn't all merriment and mirth.

When discussing the meaning of 'natural', I put forward the proposition that a nuclear power station is just as natural as an anthill.

Ants take natural sand and natural spit and use them to modify the environment for the benefit of their species.

Humans take natural sand and natural pebbles and natural limestone, to make conrete buildings; they take natural iron and natural carbon to make steel structures, and they take natural uranium tomake fuel, all to further the cause of the human species.

Anthill technology is just as cutting edge to the ant species as a nuclear power-station is to the human species. The difference, such as it might be, is one of degree, not one of kind.

Both the anthill and the power station are made of natural stuff dug out of the ground and processed. If the power-station is deemed to be not natural, then it can only be because the humans who made it are not natural. And that poses the question: "When did humans cease to be natural creatures?"

So what do anthills and power-stations have to do with gardening?

The immediate object of the proposition was to show the importance of saying what you actually mean. Dont use unnatural if what you really mean is man-made.

How an individual explores and resolves the deeper implications of the proposition, will influence how all sorts of decisions are made, both in and out of the garden.

High Temperature:
Actual: -6°C cloudy flurries .50cm Wind W16km/h P.O.P.59%
Average: -1°C
Record: 9°C in 1991

Low Temperature:
Actual: -12°C mostly cloudy Wind WNW17km/h P.O.P.20%
Average: -10°C
Record: -25°C in 1955

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

It's year end quiz time again. The following questions have been mostly taken from this year's columns so, if you can get the answers correct you must have been paying attention. If you don't do so well, have a look at www.teachinggarden.org and consider coming to the free winter gardening classes. Have a happy and productive garden in 2010.

1. Regular gardening activity:
a. is an excellent way to lose weight
b. will help improve cardiovascular function
c. increases blood pressure and resting heart rate
d. both a & b

2. Organic means:
a. chemical free
b. more nutritional
c. carbon based
d. both a & b

3. A 'Mediterranean' climate tends to be:
a. hot & dry all year
b. warm & dry in winter, hot & rainy in summer
c. cool & wet in winter, warm & dry in summer
d. evenly warm & wet all year

4. Loam soil is:
a. roughly equal parts course and fine sand, silt and clay
b. 20% peat moss, 20% black dirt, 60% top soil
c. 25% peat moss, 25% bog peat, 50% compost
d. both b & c

5. Sissinghurst Castle is famous for:
a. the execution of Vita Sackville-West
b. the 'Most Visited' garden in England
c. the world's largest herbarium collection
d. the Sussex Arboretum

6. To be cost effective, home grown eatables should be:
a. carbohydrate dense root crops
b. expensive to harvest and ship e.g. cane berries
c. low in volume and high in value e.g. herbs
d. both b & c

7. Seed germination may be affected by:
a. soil fertility levels
b. light intensity, soil moisture, soil temperature
c. atmospheric carbon dioxide
d. both a & b

8. When buying canna tubers, select packages containing:
a. lots of root growth
b. signs of moisture inside the plastic
c. tubers with barely developed eyes
d. tuber with 'wrinkled, dark skin'

9. The moving (sharp)blade of pruners should:
a. face away from the plant's stem
b. face the plant's stem
c. cut from the top of the branch
d. be lightly lubricated

10. Onoclea sensibilis is:
a. an eye disease caused by seed dust
b. a carnivorous plant
c. a Mexican flowering shrub
d. a native Ontario fern

11. A naturalized plant is:
a. a government certified import
b. one that produces no seeds
c. a non-native reproducing without human help
d. a heritage species

12. Solar LED fixtures are useful for:
a. tall trees and buildings
b. pathways and low shrubs
c. general floodlighting
d. underwater pond lighting

13. Phytophthora infestans is:
a. a fungal disease of tomatoes and potatoes
b. pond scum
c. Dutch elm disease
d. of litle concern to home gardeners

14. Alaska Sweetheart, Yukon Gold, Russian Blue and Pacific Burbank are:
a. iris
b. roses
c. potatoes
d. tomatoes

15. Generally, dry fallen leaves are:
a. mostly air
b. high in toxic juglone
c. very low in caron content
d. of no horticultural value

16. Compostable kitchen waste is:
a. high in potassium
b. polluted by heavy metals
c. mostly water
d. attractive to vermin

17. Newly planted trees should be staked for:
a. not more than one year
b. at least two winters
c. enough time for first flower or fruit
d. half a meter of new growth on the leader

18. On a lawn 12ft x 18ft, 1 inch of water would require:
a. 12 cubic feet
b. 18 cubic feet
c. 24 cubic feet
d. 36 cubic feet

19. Epsom salt is:
a. magnesium sulphate
b. a good source of potassium
c. used for preserving salted beans
d. derived from processed stable manure

20. Plants of the same family:
a. tend to have common pest populations
b. have the same shaped leaves
c. require the same cultural conditions
d. both a and c

Answers 1b, 2c, 3c, 4a, 5b,6d, 7b, 8c, 9a, 10d,
11c, 12b, 13a, 14c, 15a, 16c, 17a, 18b, 19a, 20a.

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

It was more than a decade ago that the City decided to add my street to the list of those visited annually by the great roaring leaf sucker. I always made sure that I got all my leaves shredded and away from the curb before the vacuum machine arrived so at least I kept my own resources, but all the bags of leaves I used to collect ceased to be. Even some of the people who had previously looked after their own leaves started raking them out to the road for collection.

When, earlier this year, notice came from the City that my street would no longer get leaf ‘service’, it was like the promise of an early Christmas. After the first leaf fall, the adage ‘less is more’ certainly proved to be a truism.

On the eve of the big day - the night before the Region’s regular garbage pickup - all the bulging brown leaf-bags were deployed at the roadside and lined up in groups; ten here, fifteen there, a dozen across the street, arranged like honour guards for a president.

The pickings were so easy. My van will take 14 bags at a time, and, in half-a-dozen trips and not much more than half-an-hour, I picked up 85 bags to empty into my backyard. For no better reason than 100 being a round number, I collected a few more bags the following morning.

It should be noted that all the properties on my end for the street are essentially identical: 1,000 square feet, one-and-a-half stories, on 50 by 130 foot lots. A few, like mine, have very large mature trees, most just have leaves that blow in from some place else. The point is that all the lots are amply big enough to look after their own leaves, and to compost all the garden debris plus the kitchen waste associated with the residence.

Watching people rake leaves is instructive. Some nonchalantly flip leaves into smallish piles and bag each pile. Others push and shove all the leaves into one ginormous heap and then start bagging. Most people seem to be resigned to raking and treat it like doing the washing up. For others, leaves are the spawn of Satan. I can clearly picture the look of malicious hatred on the face of one woman as she bashed and dragged leaves out to the street.

Some people even go an extra step and, after raking the leaves into a pile, they shred them and then put the shreds into bags to throw away. It’s worth remembering which bags have the shreddies because, with no more work, they can be tipped directly onto perennial beds as a perfect winter mulch.

It’s not just townies who seem to have no idea of the value of the resources that nature provides. On the way to the Teaching Garden, I came upon a platoon of about 40 bags all lined up in column of route and ready to go. A volunteer and I cleared them, for use in the garden’s perennial beds, and the following day I realized where the leaves were coming from.

A good distance away, someone was in the middle of what I guess was about a six acre lot, raking up leaves, putting them in bags, dragging the filled bags uphill to the house, and then down a long driveway and across the road for collection. All told, I picked up almost five dozen bags from that location. Soon after, I noticed that the area that had been raked had now been given the once over with a riding mower.

How can anyone be so wasteful and so ignorant? If the mower had just been run over the leaves where they had fallen in the grass, that would have been the end of the matter.

Before leaves fall, the tree draws out almost all the liquid so that what lands on the ground is mostly air surrounded by very thin cell walls. Rub a dry fallen leaf between your hands and it will collapse into dust. A bag of dry leaves weighs almost nothing and, even if the leaves are shredded and compacted, it is likely still possible for someone to pick up the bag with one hand.

At the teaching garden we took a 12' length of wire fence, tied the ends together to form a 4' diameter tube, and filled it with leaves. With a bit of jumping up and down, that one ‘leaf clamp’ took 35 bags of leaves to fill. 35 bags is 2 to 3 times the number that anyone on my street can produce and it is all contained in a volume four feet in diameter by four feet high. The 55 bags from the country lot, plus at least as many again, went into a clamp about 8' long by about 5' wide. Come spring, when the leaves have settled and start to rot a bit, both containers will be half empty.

All the raking, and bagging and hauling and sweating, really achieves nothing more than having large heavy trucks move a lot of bags of air around the municipality at no inconsiderable cost to tax payers.

Several years ago, the Region stopped picking up the grass clippings that foolish people had raked off their lawns. There was a lot of hollering but the world didn’t come to an end, and today, people who still remove clippings after mowing are looked at as if they are close to certifiable.

It is now high time for the Region to stop wasting tax money and to stop picking up leaves altogether from areas where residential lots are big enough to easily accommodate composting on site. If councilors don’t have the stomach for the inevitable shrieking, then, as an interim measure, bagged leaves should only be picked up if they carry a pre-paid sticker. $5.00 a tag should be about right.

If you want to learn how to avoid the cost and waste of gardening practices which are counter productive, consider attending the free, 2010, Peel Teaching Garden winter classes. See www.teachinggarden.org for details.

High Temperature:
Actual: 1°C rain showers .50mm Windy Wind NNW24km/h P.O.P.40%
Average: 5°C
Record: 19°C in 1990

Low Temperature:
Actual: -5°C mostly cloudy Wind WNW27km/h P.O.P.42%
Average: -3°C
Record: -12°C in 1951

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

Literacy groups have long lamented the sad state of English comprehension in Canada. A recent document which rated adult literacy on a scale of one to five - three being the minimum level needed for effectively navigating in a 21st Century age of information - reported the average for Canadian adults as 2.5. That was the average, so half of the adult population falls below that.

To put the numbers into perspective, a person with a score of one would have difficulty figuring out how much of a drug to take based on information on the container. One only has to read the comments which follow news stories on the Internet to see the effect of having more than half the population operating at less than optimum comprehension levels. Regarding the flu vaccination program, posts range from the demented - GlaxoSmithKline is going to kill everyone with an untested vaccine and take over the world - to the plaintive whine, "I can't make up my mind."

Posters who claim that the pandemic is a hoax because only a few people have died, clearly don't know the definition of pandemic: 'Occuring over a wide geographic area and affecting a high proportion of the population.'

Nothing there about killing anyone. I suppose there's an ailment some-where that results in a big red nose. If there was a pandemic of that, nobody would die, they'd just all look like Bozo the clown.

As it happens, I'm in the statistically least-vulnerable group for getting the H1N1 flu virus. I'm too old, too healthy, and probably too obnoxious.

Until last year I'd never had a flu shot and the one I did get was more-or-less by accident. I went to my docotr's office to renew a prescription and they asked if I wanted the vaccine.

"Not really," I said.
"You should," they said, so I did.

It seemed like less effort than debating the issue.

This year, a few days before the seasonal vaccine was available, I was on the same renewal errand and I observed that, since many people who die from flu are actually taken off by pneumonia, wouldn't it make sense to be immunized against pneumococcus.

Two minutes later - squirt. At this writing, I've had the seasonal shot and I'll get the H1N1 when someone phones to say it's available. Why did I bother to reduce my likelihood of getting influenza, from the projected one chance in three, to something approaching the of winning a lottery?

Sheer malice I suppose.

And besides, starting in January, I've got a gardening course to teach and I'd rather not do it all achy and feverish.

So, apart from a rather tenuous seque, what have literacy and flu shots got to do with gardening? Well, gardening is not something that is seperate and isolated from the rest of life. Gardening is part of the whole fabric of living and lessons learned in the garden carry over to all sorts of seemingly unrelated activities.

The very first class of the Peel Teaching Garden winter course deals in large part with words and how they are used. It is very difficult to make sense of the climate-change debate if you don't know the difference between climate and weather. And, natural, naturalized and native; what do they actually mean? Most home gardeners don't really know the difference between annuals and perennials: turning to mush at minus 10 degrees Celsius has nothing to do with it.

How can something have a very high temperature and very little heat? Toxicity and hazard: how come the least toxic substance kills far more people than the most deadly poison?

Who would have thought that the most toxic material known was organic?

It is ironic that people will refuse what might be a life-saving, no cost, inoculation - because they think it might not work - and yet they will collectively pay millions of dollars for garden gimmicks and gadgets with no more guarantee of efficacy than the word of some sharp TV advertising.

The second PTG class deals with tools. Most home gardeners need just four: two of them are cheap and as common as Brampton clay; the other two are more expensive but buy them once and keep them for a lifetime.

Compared to the cost of the pile of iron-mongery to be found in many garages and garden sheds, the PTG suggested kit is a gift.

I've yet to meet a group of home gardeners who could, with any certainty, tell a spade from a shovel, far less what to do with which.

Most people can tell a spade from a fork, but I have been asked what a garden fork is used for. Although it is easy to poke fun at people's ignorance, one has to ask who teaches this stuff anymore?

The basis of the PTG course is knowledge that my grandparents - and other people's great-great-grandparents - knew almost instinctively.

No gardener of their generation would have attempted to use a shovel to cultivate a flower bed, and they certainly wouldn't have paid money for peat moss because their soil was cold, wet and heavy in spring.

Our ancestors may not have had the science to explain why what they did worked, but they knew how to husband the land and how to feed themselves.

By applying the same basic gardening principles, students from the 2009 garden course produced almost a ton of produce to share with a local food - bank and kitchen and that, despite losing the entire tomato crop to blight.

For more about Peel Teaching Garden and free 2010 winter classes see www.teachinggarden.org.

High Temperature:
Actual: 2°C partly sunny Wind NW22km/h P.O.P.40%
Average: 10°C
Record: 25°C in 1961

Low Temperature:
Actual: -4°C partly cloudy Wind WNW17km/h P.O.P.0%
Average: 1°C
Record: -7°C in 1951

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

Since fall was made official recently, a hush has fallen over the fields, the woodlots and the wild places to the north of the city. Walking the dogs along a trail in the valley of the Credit River onthe weekend, the silence was palpable. The fallen leaves were slightly damp and didn't even rustle under foot; the trees in the windless air made neither movement nor sound and even the river water seemed to slip inaudibly around the rocks and driftwood.

The first frost had blackened the aptly named Onoclea sensibilis, the sensitive fern, and most all of the other ferns at least in some part brown. Throughout the woods, the plants have lost most of their foliage, and suddenly the trail is no longer a leafy tunnel through the unseen but has reconnected with the forest trees. To left and right though, nothing seems to stir.

To romantics, after the hi jinx of summer, the quiet of early fall in the countryside equates to peace and repose; but, inactivity is not in the nature of nature. On the forest floor, a nip of frost and a rain shower, and decaying tree stumps suddenly sprout white fungi to ripen and flood the air with spores. High in the trees, squirrels rip open cones and stuff themselves on the oily seeds.

Without human intervention, life is very much in business; it is just not shouting about it.

Althought the first frost hit the gardens at the Brampton Fairgrounds a couple of weeks ago, just minus one degree, but enought ot scorchsquash and pumpkin leaves; in town, it will likely be another week or two before we wake up to find the lawns and rooftops turned white overnight.

It seems so perverse. Looking through my study window today, trees are still green , the pelargoniums are in full bloom, and the fuchsias are covered in pink and purple and red ballerinas, dancing in the breeze. After all the effort to get the garden going, its finaly looking half decent and so soon, poof, all gone.

A couple of times already I've been asked what am I going to do now that gardening is over. Sorry, but I hadn't noticed that gardeneing was over.

At Peel Teaching Garden, there are crops to be harvested, potatoes to be dug, onions to be pulled. There is garlic to be planted and spring flowering bylbs to be added to the display areas. There are dahlias to be lifted and stored, and pelargoniums to be taken up and potted as stock platns for next year. There are beds to be remade, beds to be newly built, cold frames to be constructed, grass to be cut, pots and trays to be sorted for winter seeding and there is mulch to be laid and ditches to be dug.

True, the teaching garden is now a fair size for a volunteer operation - maybe 17,000 square feet under cultivation in the nursery area alone - but even in a condo patch, there is work to be done. Fall is the time for reorganizing, for building raised beds and for adding sand and compost to herbaceous borders.

It is a time for installing new compost bins and for emptying existing composters so that there is plenty of capacity for a winters' worth of frozen kitchen waste.

If you have lawn, it is cool enough to work and the grass is growing, so get a half inch of course sand lightly raked in as a top dressing. The sand, grass clippings and any shredded leaves will combine over winter to give the grass a boost in the spring.

Despite all the activity, even in the city, fall and the cool weather bring a degree of quiet. The shrieking kids, the blaring radios and the yapping dogs go away, the clattering lawn mowers go hide in the backs of garages and, for a few weeks, an urban gardener can enjoy in peace such fleeting hours of sunshine as there may be.

"So when are you last in the garden?"

"December, maybe, and garden classes start again on Jan. 9."


High Temperature:
Actual: 1°C mainly cloudy Wind NE17km/h P.O.P.5%
Average: 14°C
Record: 27°C in 1962

Low Temperature:
Actual: -7°C mostly cloudy Wind NNE16km/h P.O.P.4%
Average: 4°C
Record: -4°C in 1940

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

While all the concern has been focused on the H1N1 flu bug, another organism, one which has recieved scant media attention, has been quietly gathering strength and taking its toll on basic food crops across eastern North America.

Phytophthora infestans likely means nothing to most readers; but, it is the organism which causes'late blight' of potatoes and tomatoes, and which triggered the Irish potato famine in the 1840/50's.

As a life-form, P. infestans belongs in that microscopic netherworld between animals and plants, not properly being one thing nor the other.

Now technically classified as Oomycetes, P. infestans was traditionally considered to be a fungus and it does respond to control by fungicides.

Like most disease and pestilence explosions, the makings for late blight outbreaks have been around since forever - suitable weather, plus infectious organism, plus, of course, politics.

The cool wet Irish climate was as close to perfection as any moisture-loving animalcule could dream of.

Add a nineteenth century population living in abject poverty, dependent almost solely on a single crop for food, and impose a political system offering no support, relief or hope, and it is only surprising that just one million died.

In the northeastern states and provinces, 2009 is being called 'the year without a summer'.

The overall low temperatures and the dewy predawn hours have been, if not exactly Irish, at least very conducive to happy molds, funguses and sundry other lovers of damp and humidity.

The sociopolitical connection to the current outbreak of disease results from what can only be described as a growing swell of paranoia related to things governmental and scientific.

When numbers of people refuse to let their children hear a school broadcast, because they believe that the President of the United States is going to indoctrinate the kids with communism, what other word is there but paranoia; viz. a tendency on the part of individuals and groups toward suspicousness and distrustfulness of others that is based not on objective reality.

A probable upsurge of late blight had been predicted by the various state-government departments of agriculture and by OMAFRA (Ontario Ministry of Agriculture Food and Rural Affairs), and warning had been served to growers that "applying effective fungicides is extremely important".

For the most part, fungicides work as a prophylactic; they need to be applied before the organism has taken hold.

Once plants show signs of infection, it is too late and the infected plants can only be culled.

The first reports of late blight in Ontairo came in early July and, since then, throughout the province a substantial acreage has been lost to the disease.

Peel Teaching Garden, tucked away in a back corner of the Brampton fairgrounds and far away from any large commercial potato or tomato operations, managed to dodge the bullet for quite awhile.

The potatoes came through mostly unscathed; but, a couple of weeks ago, the wind-borne spores had settled in and, in a matter of two or three days, the entire crop of large tomatoes had been destroyed.

The recent demand by some consumers for vegetables grown using so called 'chemical free' methods, and the outright banning of chemical pest-control products in some jurisdictions, has left large and small pockets of unprotected crops throughout North America.

As P. infestans is highly contagious and, under favourable wind conditions, can travel tens of kilometres in just a few hours, the degree to which these unprotected areas have exacerbated the spread of crop damage is open for debate.

For the future, OMAFRA is now advising farmers: "Fields should be selected away from potential sources of the disease such as backyard gardens where tomatoes and potatoes grow without the use of fungicides."

Home gardens have now become significant reservoirs for disease and pests.

In the greater scheme of things, a few thousand acres of lost production in Ontario won't create a famine - we can always import a few more tons of produce from Mexico - and Peel Teaching Garden's 900 square feed of tomatoes doesn't amount to so much as a burp in a hurricane.

On a local scale though, the picture is quite different.

Last year, the garden volunteers harvested 100 kilos of tomatoes, and, in 2007 , 200 kilos of tomatoes, for the Knight's Table kitchen and food bank; so this year's total crop-loss will put a major dent in the garden's contribution to the less fortunate in this City.

When faced with the threat of swine flu, you can wash your hands and get a flu shot and at least have the illusion of doing something.

Thanks to the influence that science-challenged pressure groups now exert on all levels of government, if you are a home gardener facing pest or disease problems, you can just wash your hands and go buy your produce at a grocery store.


RE: The Eclectic Gardener by Alan Hickman.
Response to this article from Bette-Ann Goldstein

As a backyard gardener in Brampton who avoids using fungicides, pesticides, and herbicides, I was very disturbed by you blaming me in your Sept. 23 column for the loss of your tomato crop to phytophthora infestans.

I didn’t have any sign of this disease in my tomatoes this season, nor did any of my friends and neighbours in Brampton and Caledon (none of whom use fungicides etc.) have it in their potatoes or tomatoes.

My research on the Internet says that it is usually spread by the use of potato culls from previous harvests, rather than spores blowing in the wind.

It’s puzzling that your potatoes escaped, while the entire tomato crop collapsed.

You have my sympathies— but such are the joys and disappointments of gardening.

High Temperature:
Actual: 22°C sun and cloud rain 2.3mm Wind WSW20km/h P.O.P.24%
Average: 19°C
Record: 31°C in 1959

Low Temperature:
Actual: 12°C mainly clear Wind NW16km/h P.O.P.20%
Average: 8°C
Record: -1°C in 1974

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

When one has lived long enought to cross that dividing line, between sleeping soundly all night long and waking up at 2 a.m. in the morning to go for a pee, a whole new garden world opens up. Despite the below seasonal daytime temperatures we've had this year, after sundown the soft summer air has been warm enough to invite one to stroll through the garden at most any hour of the night.
In town it is seldom really dark at night. If there are any clouds in the sky, they cast back the glow of the now vast urban area and, when the moon is full, its silvery rays provide ample light for nocturnal peregrinations. Only on those quite rare occasions when the sky is clear, the moon is not risen and stars shine like pinholes in a leaky roof, is there an actual utilitarian need for auxiliary illumination.
Garden lighting is certainly nothing new.
From the earliest of times, on festive occasions, landed gentry lit the environs of their castles and manors with flaming resin-dipped torches. Millennia later, whale-oil lamps hung prettily from tree branches and lined the driveways of great country houses. Later still, with the coming of coal gas to the cities, public gardens and parks as well as the streets were lit year round by guttering yellow flames burning in the cast iron and blown glass lamps of the Victorian era.
Over the course of the 20th century, outdoor electric lighting evolved from cumbersome arc installations, through low voltage DIY kits, to today's individual solar powered spots and floodlights.
Where once breaking the darkness was the preserve of only the very rich and powerful, today's average home gardener can afford to incorporate into the landscape most any of teh ways of past centuries as well as the most recent developments in lighting technology.
Like all things horticultural, landscape lighting should both serve a purpose and please the senses.
Unfortunately, too many installations end up looking kitchy, tacky and rather pointless. Dotting the garden with cheap solar-powered LED lights on spikes, available for a couple of bucks in discount stores, can result in much the same effect that pink plastic flamingos had not many years ago.
When used effectively, solar powered lighting is ideal for basic garden illumination. When the sun goes down, the light comes on and it stays on till dawn or the batteries empty - and there is no need for a nagging conscience about creating nuclear waste or burning coal in power stations.
Because they can be located and relocated easily, and the lights lend themselves to both the diffuse lighting of pathways and for locally accentuating the textures of masonry, wood and plant foliage.
While solar power is quite reliable, the installations might not be entirely maintenance free. After a winter of working through rain, snow and ice, my own system started to fade away.
Cleaning the corrosion from the battery terminals fixed that problem and the application of dielectric grease - obtainable from automotive parts suppliers - might help prevent a reccurence.
Also, as leads from solar panels to fixtures tend to be very easily cut - or chewed if you happen to be a squirrel - occasional outages might be expected.
While solar-powered LED fixtures are ideal for making a garden safe and inviting for an impulse nighttime stroll, for social gatherings only a gardener's imagination limits how a property is lit.
As nobody wants to have a spotlight shining in their eyes, in most cases it is only the light that should be seen - not the light source. An exception to that rule is the use of candle light.
A few months back I was in a hotel lounge which featured dozens of tea lights in glasses. Sometime later in a recycle store, I came upon a number of old ruby wineglasses and thought that they would work as dandy garden accents for an upcoming soiree.
A tea light in a glass might work indoors but in the garden the merest zephyr set the flame to guttering. The solution was to adapt Sir Humphry Davie's idea for a miner's safety lamp.
The candle was enclosed in a tube of metal window screen and a mesh disc was dropped on top. The modification let in oxygen for teh flame and kept the wind out. In anything like party weather, the candles burned bright and steady for four or five hours.
If a large vertical area needs to be evenly illuminated, rather than using a number of floodlights, a rope light can offer a practical and economical solution. Rope lights come in a variety of lengths and can be connected together up to some maximum distance - perhaps 300 feet, depending on the manufacturer's instructions.
The caveat, to keep the light source hidden, applies with rope lights; otherwise the effect will be more in keeping with a circus than a garden.
The object of garden lighting is to augment and enhance what is already available - be that summer moonlight or city lights reflecting off storm clouds onto a snow covered landscape - and if that is kept in mind, the effect should be both pleasing and practical.


High Temperature:
Actual: 18°C sunny Wind E11km/h P.O.P.0%
Average: 23°C
Record: 32°C in 1945

Low Temperature:
Actual: 9°C clear Wind N8km/h P.O.P.0%
Average: 11°C
Record: 3°C in 1938

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

I was never a 'fan' of Michael Jackson. I never bought any of his records, I would never have gone to a live performance, and I never watched his recently televised send-off; but, with his untimely passing, even my universe is a little less bright. As a star, Michael was quite brilliant; but his orbit was notably eccentric.

Unlike the British, with their tradition of cherishing eccentrics as national treasure, on this side of the Atlantic, being rather less than certifiable but being definitely a bit of a nutter can result in a pretty debilitating existence.

A generation ago, Howard Hushes was perhaps the most famous of American eccentrics. From a very early age Hughes exhibited traits which augured the life of achievement to come.

At age 11 he built the first radio transmitter in his hometown of Houston, Texas, and a year later, he had constructed a 'motorized bicycle', using bits taken from a steam engine.

Later, as an accomplished aircraft designer and aviator, he held many records including a world cirumnavigation.

Hughes conceived the H1'Hercules' flying boat, which has the distinction of havingthe largest wingspan of any aircraft built to this day; fondly known as the 'Spruce Goose', even though the airframe was mostly made of laminated birch-wood. Hughes was at the controls on the only flight the aircraft ever made - a distance of about one mile, some seventy feet above the water off Long Beach, California.

With the passing of years Hughes' lifestyle became progressively more bizarre.

At one point, he spent more than four months in a darkened screening room watching one movie after another. He became obsessed with germs and his descent into reclusion left many thinking that he was actually dead.

By the time he did die, drug use and malnutrition had reduced his 6foot 4 inch frame to just 90 pounds.

Canada has been a little more kind to its eccentrics. On and off, William Lyon Mackenzie King managed to be prime minister through war and peace for almost 22 years.

He gave the nation unemployment insurance and old age pensions; he also had earnest conversations with his long-dead mother and with equally long-dead prime ministers such as Wilfred Laurier and John A. McDonald.

Glen Gould, as a child, was a gifted pianist. With maturity, he developed a technical prowess which elevated him to world renown as a musician and, especially, as an interpreter of the works of J.S. Bach. But Gould's particular genius came at a price.

For instance, he had a seemingly uncontrollable propensity tosing along as he played - a habit which drove recording engineers to distration.

By the time he died, aged only 50, Gould had accumulated enough quirks to become, by any standard, a fully accredited eccentric.

He reportedly was once arrested, apparently for vagrancy, whilst sitting on a park bench in Florida wearing his usual year round out-door attire of heavy coat, winter hat and mittens.

Happily, it is not a required fate for eccentrics to lead short, tortured lives.
The marriage in 1913 of Vita Sackville-West, daughter of the third Baron Sackville, and Harold Nicolson, son of the 1st Baron Carnock, resulted in two sons and a devoted relationship which lasted until Vita died at the age of 70, almost 50 years later.

In the 1930s, the Nicolsons' purchased the ruinous and uninhabited Sissinghurst Castle where they spent the rest of their lives restoring the buildings and creating what has become the most visited garden in England. Broadly, Harold designed and supervised the structural elements and Vita looked to the planting.

It is due to the Nicolsons' sense of design and balance that we now tend to look at landscaping in terms of a series of 'garden rooms', and the world- famous 'Sissinghurst White Garden' became the exemplar for all the subsequent single-colour or single-theme gardens.

So, what was so eccentric about this respectable upper-class family? Well, there was that much written about romance between Vita and Virginia Wolf, and her lesser known affairs with Violet Trefusis and with Rosemund Grosvenor and with... and ... and and, and and. Not to mention that Harold had his own series of male relationships.

Agreed, open marriages were not and are not, of themselves, particularly unusual; but these were not tawdry, furtive, behind the barn at the fairgrounds, affairs.

Vita's and Harold's liasons, were acknowledged celebrations of sensuality, and their elan and longevity must surely warrant the Nicolsons' inclusion, at least as honorary deities, in the pantheon of eccentrics.

On the wall of their London house, there is a commemorative plaque which reads: "HAROLD NICOLSON 1886-1968 VITA NICOLSON 1886-1962 Writers and Gardeners lived here."

And there you have it: entertainers, billionaires, prime ministers, piano players, writers and gardeners; they're an odd lot.

High Temperature:
Actual: 21°C sun and cloud Wind SSW11km/h P.O.P.50%
Average: 26°C
Record: 36°C in 1975

Low Temperature:
Actual: 8°C mainly clear Wind NW9km/h P.O.P.5%
Average: 14°C
Record: 7°C in 1965

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

The swing towards vegetable growing in home gardens was strongly highlighted by the latest survey funded by the Garden Writers Association. According to the 2009 Late Spring Gardening Trends Report, "44 per cent of American households with a yard or garden plan to add or expand a vegetable garden in their yard this spring or summer."

Compared to 2008, the survey findings represent an increase of mor than one third in the number of households creating or expanding vegetable patches. The number of home gardeners who say they plan to add culinary herbs increased by almost three-quarters.

When the survey responders were asked what motivated them to garden, a little more than a third opted for some combination of "better mental health, nutrition or fitness." Rather smaller groups said that they gardened to "increase curb appeal and property value", or "for a better home environment" and the rest went for the ever popular "other".

As usual, the 926 randomly selected households upon which the conclusions are based were all located in the continental United States, but there is no reason to suppose that a similar survey north of the border would produce grossly different results.

Like most surveys, what the data means depends on who is doing the interpretation. During the runup to elections, the answers given to Tory pollsters can usually be spun to project a Tory victory - likewise Liberal polling results and the prognostications of anyone else who can pay for the opinions of a thousand eligible voters - so please don't expect an entirely unbiased commentary from me about alleged gardening trends.

Locally, Peel Teaching Garden (www.teachinggarden.org) has been following the perceived North American trend since its inception in 2004. The first year the entire nursery garden area, then about 900 sq ft of land, was planted to spring flowering bulbs for growing on. This year with some 16,000 sq ft now under cultivation, volunteers will plant rather more than half the area to vegetables.

As volunteers will get to take home such produce as they want for their own use, and by far the longer part of the resulting crop will go for distribution to the needy, the whole operation can be spun to look like an exemplar for the feel-good 'eat-local' movement.

Looking a little deeper reveals a very different picture. Over the past couple of years there has been a rough correlation between the total number of in-garden hours volunteered and the amount of fresh produce deliverd to a local community restaurant. Using manual labour and low-input gardening practices, about one hour of volunteer time results in one pound of produce.

Considering that the garden crops are ready when the commercial market supply is at its cheapest, the economics make no sense at all. Volunteer time is not without value and even at a nominal five bucks an hour, ten pounds of PTG grown potatoes would cost $50.

Fortunately Peel Teaching Garden is not in the food production business. PTG is in the knowled sharing business. The potatoes and tomatoes and onion and the beets and the carrots, are just by products of teaching students how to garden.

Spending the winter months in classes, hearing about how to create a workable loam soil, how to windup aa garden line or how to properly use secateurs, is useful; but there is no substitute for actually doing, seeing and being in the garden. Once someone has personally confronted an infestation of Colorado beetles, in even a few hundred square feet of potatoe plants, they can have a basis for a valid opinion regarding methods of pest control.

The group of survey responders who cited mental health as a motivation for their horticultural efforts are how much their well-being depends on the quality of their surroundings.

Gardening is all about pleasure; about pleasing the senses and about feeling good. Something as basic as a well built flower bed pleases the eye even if it is empty. Recently, at the end of a shift, someone looked at what he had spent the afternoon doing and remarked; "That bed didn't come out bad. I'm rather proud of that." As a teacher, I too felt pretty damn good.

The fitness angle is axiomatic: if you garden, you are active; and, if you are active, you get more fit - or maybe just less unfit, depending - but, unfortunately, people confuse exercise with weight loss and they end up disappointed and frustrated. It's true, that since the gardening season started, I've dropped from 150 pounds to my desired 143 pound weight: but getting into the garden also gets me away from food so I've eaten less.

If I was still stuffing my chops like I did in January, I would still be dragging my arse along the Bruce Trail like I did all winter.

The key to successful home gardening is to get out and actually do it, and, if you must grow vegetables, grow high value, low volume, specialty produce. Fresh culinary herbs are always expensive and fancy small tomatoes are ridiculously priced in stores even at the height of the season.

Carrots come in all sorts of colours and shapes that would cost a small fortune in a classy restaurant, and novelty radishes grow fast and easily in any sunny open soil.

High Temperature:
Actual: 15°C mostly cloudy, rain Wind ESE17km/h P.O.P.0%
Average: 24°C
Record: 34°C in 1957

Low Temperature:
Actual: 9°C cloudy rain Wind NNW14km/h P.O.P.64%
Average: 12°C
Record: 2°C in 1980

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

With the Obamas digging up a patch of teh White House south lawn for a vegetable patch and with noticeably reviving interest on the part of home-gardeners in the growing of edibles, the latest batch of books from Lone Pine Publishing will likely prove to be good sellers.

The three books presented for review: The Canadian Edible Garden, by Alison Beck, The Canadian Garden Cookbook, by Jennifer Sayers Bajger and James Darcy, and Fruit & Berry Gardening for Canada, by Louise Donnelly and Alison Beck, all share the general features of teh garden-related series of titles being released by Lone Pine. Compact size, durable soft covers and lavish, high quality and colourful illustrations on every page, make these books hard to resist as impulse purchases.

For once, I am not going to bleat about arranging plants by grocery store names. These are books about plants which produce food so I have no problem with filing tomatoes under "T" and not under "L" for Lycopersicon.

The text headings carry both a vernacular name and the plant genus, and the indexes for both plant books are much improved on some of the previous volumes in the series, being indexed by both food an dbotanical names. Knowing which plants belong to what genus is important for a grower because closely-related plants tend to share common pests and diseases.

In hindsight, it might have been a good idea to include the family of each of the plants because the genus may not tell the whole story.

For instance, the general reader would have no indication that potatoes and tomatoes are closely related - in the family Solanaceae. They might be surprised if they follow potatoes with tomatoes, in a crop rotation and the tomatoes get infested with overwintered potato beetles.

Had there been some foresight, the Hardiness Zone and Frost Free Days maps, identical in both plant books, could have been made at least somewhat useful. About 90 per cent of the maps areas are in zones 0 to 2a. The remaining map area, with all the major population centres, is so small that it serves no practical purpose at all.

The introduction to Edible Garden offers a quick scan of general gardening practice but, when it comes to pests and disease, it simply panders to the current phobia of effective control methods.

This is not a book about cosmetics, it is about being able to put food on the table and, in real life, the choice is often quite stark: use effective pest controls or don't eat.

Integrated pest management is basic good horticultural practice. Siting appropriate plants in appropriate places and keeping them healthy makes perfectly good sense; however, if a useful sized patch of potatoes is planted and if it starts to be defoliated by Colorado beetles - as it likely will be - all the IPM will count for nothing if the last step, effective chemical control, is not available. Imagine what would happen if hospitals abandoned all their 'toxic' drugs and then told patients to just wash their hands, eat 'good' food, and eschew living in a slum.

The introduction to Fruit and Berry Gardening contains a generally practical overview of tree planting and maintenance.

"One year of staking is sufficient for almost all trees, and staking should be removed at that time." As a sentence, it sucks; but, the writermeans well and, after one growing season, most trees will certainly benefit from standing free on their own roots.

In the pruning section, the authors make a point of describing the correct way to use secateurs. " .....orient the secateurs or loppers so the blades are to the plant side of the cut and the hook is to the side of the branch or cane being removed." It may have been just good luck but the accompanying photograph shows exactly that. If anyone cares to look, the illustration on page 135 of Edible Garden is of secateurs being used backwards.

Thumbing through the Garden Cookbook 'Parsnip Breakfast Hash', with parsnips, sweet potato, red pepper and green onions, looked simple and appetizing. I substituted turkey kielbasa for back bacon - I don't eat mammals - added a couple of poached eggs and it served as a respectable supper dish.

On the following page, 'Pea and Ricotta Crostini' looked like an interesting crunchy side dish to go with the hash and I even had some basil seedlings off which I could snip a few leaves for the topping.

Halfway through the list of ingredients was "lemon oil (see p.31)" and that is where things started to unravel. Page 31 is 'Lemon Shortbread - topped Blackberry Cobbler'. There is no mention of lemon oil, and neither 'lemon oil' nor 'oil, lemon' is listed in the index.

In the introduction, the author explains that "....we've organized the recipes alphabetically by what is grown in the garden....". It sounds like a nice idea but would 'Fava Bean Risotto with Morels and Pea Vines' be arranged as F, B, M, P or V? As that particular recipe is preceded by 'Ginger Pickled Green Beans' and followed by 'Halibut with Hot and Sour Beet Relish', it seems that B, for bean and beet, was the magic letter.

If the physical arrangement of the recipes results in jarring juxtapositions, the index is both incomplete and incomprehensible.

If you want a soup recipe, don't bother looking under S: try C for Chilled or Cabbage or A for Asparagus.

All in all, the authors expertise and knowledge seem to have been subordinated to other considerations.

One is left feeling that all these books have been designed more for selling, than for using.

Day +19 sun and cloud light late afternoon drizzle Wind SW20km/h P.O.P.40%
Night +6 partly cloudy Wind WSW12km/h P.O.P.29%

Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

The front page lead headline in the Star "Green bin waste trucked to N.Y." is really not what I want to read in a newspaper; but at least it put the subject of composting front and centre.

The gist of the story was that, as a result of the expanding green bin program, the increasing tonnage of compostable materials picked up has outstripped the province’s capacity to process it. From 2005 to 2007 the collection of kitchen and garden waste rose from about 115,000 tonnes to more than a quarter-million tonnes and that total will soon be greatly exceeded. Over the coming sixteen months, as Toronto includes more and more apartment buildings in the program, that city alone expects to increase its total compostable organic collection by some 65,000 tonnes.

Although new facilities have come on stream to process the material, some of the older plants have shut down. Peel has operated an organics processing plant for years without incident, on the site of the old Caledon dump - sorry, Sanitary Landfill - but the finishing half of the process is presently not operational while it is being rebuilt to both increase capacity and to install upgraded technology.

The increasing rate of separation and diversion of compostable organics from the urban waste stream is a clearly desirable trend, and the progressive inclusion of apartment buildings in the municipal collection scheme is an absolute necessity; but, there needs to be some serious thought given to the whole purpose of composting and to its effects on the environment.

There are any number of groups and gurus promoting the purchase of ‘locally grown’ foodstuffs and supporting ‘local’ farmers - local being defined variously as my garden, my village, my city, my county, my province, or maybe just, my country - but I’ve yet to hear much noise in favour of disposing locally.

For most restaurants and food manufacturers, processing and recycling food waste on site is not usually a practical proposition, and there are only so many orange peels and banana skins that an apartment dweller can feed to a bunch of worms in a plastic box under the bed. For everyone else though, anyone who has any sort of garden, there should be bylaws requiring the installation and use of some sort of facility for composting kitchen and garden waste.

As it is, no dwelling may be occupied that does not have a functioning bathroom and no garden equipt dwelling should be occupied which does not have a functioning composter. Composting is not rocket science. It takes about as much ingenuity to dispose of potato peels in a composter as it does to flush the toilet. (I know, I know, there are people who can’t even flush consistently, but there’re limits to everything.)

Because organic waste is mostly water, even a pocket handkerchief of a backyard, with an almost thimble-sized composter, can digest and absorb pretty much all the material left over from a family’s food preparation. The water either drains into the soil under the composter or evaporates into the air, and, so long as it is not frozen, even a small container will process a quite amazing weight of material.

The optimum size for a domestic compost container is four feet high by four feet wide, give or take a few inches, by as long as you like. Alternatively, the container could be four feet square by as tall as you care to make it. The four foot dimension is determined by the distance from the centre of the pile to the outside of the pile through which air will freely travel. If the centre of the pile is greater than a couple of feet from an outside surface, then the material in the middle will likely decompose anaerobically and off-odours are a possible outcome.

Containers can be made of whatever can be found cheap. Stacked used building blocks or bricks, logs, turf, or off-cuts of dimensional lumber will all do. Twelve feet of farm fencing, with the ends hooked together to form a tube, is probably the easiest to make of any design and, if you have to buy the materials, a bit of fencing likely makes the cheapest container as well.

If you have never composted, get out in the garden - as soon as it’s warm enough that you don’t freeze your butt off - organize some sort of container and start depositing kitchen waste. As spring cleaning progresses, throw in all the garden rakings and clippings and anything else that seems likely rotable - don’t fret, if it doesn’t rot, you can always put it in the trash later.

Just keep piling stuff in as it comes along. There’s no need to turn or stir or to add magic accelerators or water or do anything else; just conscientiously add stuff, and if the neighbour doesn’t compost, then add their stuff too.

Come October or November, build a second composter beside the first. Take the top, most recent, layers off the first composter and drop them into the bottom of the new one and follow that with the rest of the accumulated material from the first composter. Now forget about the new composter and start re-filling the first, now empty, one. The following fall, empty the second composter into a pile - for use in the garden - move the contents of the first composter into the second and repeat the process forever.

If home gardeners conscientiously looked after their own composting, as gardeners all once did, there would be plenty of industrial capacity available to compost the material generated by the garden-deprived occupants of apartment buildings and by food processors.

Day +2 sun and cloud rain in pm Wind SE11km/h P.O.P.11%
Night -5 rain Wind NW14km/h P.O.P.78%