Garden Understories
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Saturday, March 15, 2025
Thursday, March 13, 2025
UPDATE: Salmo's Mini Food Forest Spring 2024
Remember this?
Here is the food forest three years later. From greens to onions to flowers to berries, there is always something to nibble on here. Currently the perennial plants are taking centre stage, but the garden will evolve as the shrubs grow and eventually dominate.
Thanks to the community for donating time, brain power, labour and plants during the design and installation back in 2021, and for continued engagement with the garden, ensuring the berries don't go to waste!
Thanks to the Salmo Valley Youth and Community Centre for not only welcoming the Mini Food Forest, but expanding the project, and for keeping monthly maintenance visits in the budget! Without consistent maintenance, these gardens would be a mess of weeds - there are "low maintenance" gardens, but there are no "no maintenance" gardens.
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perennial arugula |
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nodding onion about to bloom |
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wild strawberries - a forceful ground cover, they perfume the entire garden |
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Is your fruit tree stuck in the Bart-Lisa Simpson cycle of sibling rivalry?!?
It's early March, prime time to prune fruit trees. Here are some insights and tips to consider regarding water sprouts.
Water-sprouts (those fast growing, vertical shoots) are often a "panic" response to severe pruning. The tree is desperately trying to replace all the photosynthetic capacity it lost all at once. Vertical water sprouts do not produce fruit. Severe pruning is a two-fold waste of energy for the tree: firstly in the loss of all those leaves, and then again as it devotes resources towards replacing all of that growth (only to be cut off again).
Another analogy for this water sprout cycle is the Greek monster Hydra, with a head of snakes. If one snake was cut off, two more would regrow in its place.
There is a way to exit this unecessary cycle and return the tree to a more beautiful and natural form, with renewed reproductive growth, and without the Hydra effect. Renovating old, malpruned and neglected
trees is something I do often, and it usually takes 2-3 seasons/prunings
to bring the tree into a gentler "maintenance" state. An added bonus is that after the first couple seasons, pruning inputs (time and energy) become much less.
Ideally fruit trees are pruned every year, so that issues can be detected early and one is never having to make large, stressful cuts.
Finally, remember to water your fruit trees, even the mature ones that seem well established and self sufficient, during times of drought!
If you'd like to learn more about pruning, I highly suggest Chris Holt's tree pruning workshops through Selkirk College, which include many of the above insights and much more, as well as the book Cass Turnbull's Guide to Pruning.
You can learn more about Garden Understories' pruning services here
You can find Garden Understories contact info here
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
Sunday, September 5, 2021
Salmo's Mini Food Forest
What's Happening behind the SVYCC?
A Food Forest is an edible perennial garden that mimics the layers and patterns found in nature. It has many layers: groundcover, herbaceous perennials, shrubs, trees and vines.
This food forest will be full of berries, fruit, greens, herbs and more, all for the community to enjoy!
We Need Your Help!
We are looking for donations of:
manure and finished compost
rocks (gravel, river rock, beautiful rocks, boulders)
Birch logs and rounds (rotting is ok)
Plants
and People Power! Ideas, labour, connections, etc.
We are meeting every Wednesday at 5:30 behind the SVYCC (covid protocols in place)For more info, to get involved, or donate materials
contact gardenunderstories@gmail.com
or 250 505 4403
Thanks!
Wednesday, February 19, 2020
Imagine a vibrant garden, teeming with colourful life. Birds flitting to and fro. Fluttering butterflies. Busy, buzzy bees on the hunt for nectar. All shapes and shades of green leaves soaking up the sunlight, swaying in the breeze. Trees casting dancing, dappled shadows. Flowers opening themselves to the glory of it all. Worms, centipedes, beetles and myriad other creepie-crawlies burrowing into and emerging from the soil. And the less seen but equally vital world and work of fungi, bacteria and energy, interacting with and supporting every thing...
Would you close your eyes for a moment and enter this garden? Smell the moist earth, feel the sun warm your bare skin, merge the energy of your being with this living example of imperfect perfection...
I mean really, close your eyes for one moment and indulge us both...
And now, tell me, where would this belong in that glorious scene?
Before examining the science or even weighing the pros and cons, I feel my gut calling out its verdict loud and clear, "Covering the earth with woven or thermally bonded polypropylene and polyester, is wrong!" Practically speaking, the majority of the time landscape fabric is unnecessary, and its long term effects are counterproductive and otherwise detrimental.
Let me take you on a neighbourhood garden stroll, featuring landscape fabric in its myriad glories...
Notice here the newly installed beds blanketed in a perfect, fresh-off-the-roll black woven plastic, shining in the sun, the uniformity broken only by a few chosen ornamentals, neatly plunked through cutouts into the earth beneath. Everything looks so tidy, so under control.
Our wild grasses seem to delight in tightly entangling root and rhizome into the haven of nooks and crannies that the fabric provides.
Geotextiles are not only a barrier in relation to the garden ecosystem, but one to the gardener herself. In their presence, transplanting, fertilizing and weeding (yes, you will still end up having to weed) can morph from serene garden tasks to nightmares staved off by dread and procrastination. I'm not exaggerating.
Although careful design and planning helps minimize the need for transplanting, let's face it, there are many plants in our neighbourhood gardens needing to be moved due to light, water, soil or other unforeseen considerations (and that's ok - experiment and learn, people!) Have you ever tried to transplant someone who has been growing amidst landscape fabric for a few years? Below, see the root ball of a shaded out, crowded and deer eaten blueberry shrub needing a new home. A notoriously shallow rooted plant, this blueberry has entangled her roots right into the surrounding geotextile. How do I move her without losing half the root mass? Must I plant a cut-out of root-ridden plastic as well?
With their inks, glues and tape residues, not to mention fungicide sprays for some produce, cardboard boxes are not completely natural. However with a bit of selectivity you can procure a weed barrier that has many advantages over geotextiles: when layered properly, cardboard can effectively smother weeds; earthworms are inexplicably attracted to it; it's recycled, repurposed and free; it's relatively natural and biodegradable; and my favourite part, it will not create a long lasting barrier to the ecosystem (or the gardener), instead rapidly breaking down with adequate moisture, allowing natural garden interactions to reestablish themselves.
I have also experimented with smothering patches of weedy ground with black plastic lumber wrapping from lumberyards. This is a short term (1-2 years) application, not one buried under mulches and left to become a permanent fixture in the garden. Yes, it is plastic (and unfortunately it's of a quality that tends to degrade quickly and can leave shredded bits in the soil if left too long) but at least it's free and repurposed plastic. Lumber wrapping is far from ideal, but I'd give a "waste" item a second (and third) life before it goes to the landfill rather than buy a new product, any day.
While there are many respectable ways to ease the chore, I encourage you to get comfortable with weeding. It's part of gardening. It can be a quiet time to reflect or let the busy mind empty; a time to personally greet and observe each plant and nook in the garden, a time to listen to the birds and bask in the outdoors; a time to practice more of the postural mainstay of our ancestors: squatting; a time to harvest some minerally and medicinally dense greens; a time to marvel at the irrepressible vitality of life on this earth.