gardening

Today I moved my plant seedlings into the great outdoors. Til now, it looked like the wildly growing little nasturtiums were pressing their faces up against the window – pining for a life outside. (So I liked to imagine…) Eight wee, light-seeking plants snaked their way to the window and grew big flat leaves...

Sorry but I just couldn’t resist that headline pun! This morning I walked past this mason bee house for the six-hundredth time and decided I want to make one and put it in the garden here at our co-op. There are 150 of these bee houses around Vancouver, tended by volunteer “bee stewards” who...

They sat on the sidewalk looking all scraggly with a little “free” sign propped up against them. I bent down for a closer look at the knarled clump of bulbs, then peered around to see if I could spot who had left them there. I wanted to take them home, but wasn’t sure how...

This drooping cluster of catkins is a culprit in your allergy suffering. I photographed this piece of a weeping birch tree in my parents’ yard in Marpole (which, in case you don’t know, is a neighbourhood in south Vancouver, B.C. near the Oak Street Bridge to Richmond). It took me a good bit of...

It’s pretty exciting to see the first bits of green in the peat pucks. After one week, the nasturtium seeds are sprouting, and I am pretty excited about it. I always feel skeptical when I plant seeds, so their growth seems like an exciting surprise. I keep going back and checking them, and it’s...

An excess of mouse, keyboard, and iPhone can lead to a nasty stiffness in the upper back and neck. I know this all too well. After a few days of build-up, I’ve got some kink action brewing in my trapezius and his neighbour pals. So I’m going to go outside into the sunny, windy...

Today I planted nasturtium and impatiens seeds into peat pots that I will transplant outside in four to six weeks. These are likely to do well in the shady spot I will offer them. This is the second year I’ve used peat pucks, which I bought for 12 cents each at Magnet Hardware on...

The Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival invites you to celebrate the beauty of the blossoms with your haiku. In case you don’t already know, a haiku is a 17-syllable poem that originated in Japan. It’s three lines in total, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third....