Farming Strathcona

Poking around a back alley in Strathcona, we met a woman who asked me about one of Arnt Arntzen's "totems" (see penultimate photo in linked post). I couldn't explain it; maybe Arnt can. But we got talking. She has recently moved to Strathcona, and has fallen in love with the area. The art! The quirkiness! The houses! And most of all, the gardens!

"The gardens! The gardens! ..." she repeated, at a loss for words to describe them.

I think she could have used "exuberant". Or maybe, "uninhibited".

These gardens are not necessarily beautiful, or fashionable; they don't limit themselves to the decorative plants, the shrubbery and carefully tended flower beds, although those do appear here and there. The plants range from wildflowers to exotics, from flowers to fruit and vegetables. And every spare bit of space is used. See:

Cucumber in a front garden

Food plants grow in landscaped front gardens,

Bush beans, snap peas, nasturtiums.

in back gardens,

Pole beans and other veggies

Between the sidewalk and the curb,

Corn

On front decks,

Tomatoes, Swiss chard

Up to the roof.

Grapes

Where there is no ground for them, any container will do ...

Orderly rows of seedlings in storage bins

Greens in a styrofoam packing crate. Warm feet! Behind them, there's a pot of chives, then strawberries behind the hydrangea.

More beans and corn, and big zucchini plants between the sidewalk and the top of the sunken garden, at the level of the lane below.

Zucchini, flowers and ripe squash.

A pair of raised beds in a driveway. Plants outrank cars.

And these surprised me: in MacLean Park, which is mostly grass and play area, they have added a landscaped flower and shrub garden at the southwest corner. There are roses, blue teasels, exotic evergreens, lilies and ferns. And veggies:

I think these are globe artichokes.

The plants are over 6 feet tall, the flower a good 4 or 5 inches across.

And the strangest garden of all is this; in the mix of gravel, pavement oozings, and hardpan at the edge of an alley, rows of lettuce are somehow surviving.

Salad fixings, and weeds.

And somehow, I missed the balconies and roofs; that will have to be another day.

The gardens! The gardens!

Not long now

My green thumb is itching.

A relapse of spring fever

It's November already. Winter. This isn't supposed to be growing out in the open:

Young green pepper, unprotected, and doing fine.

I was expecting, when I walked into the Strathcona Community Gardens this week, to find desolate plots of dead vegetable remains, rotting leaves, and silence. Instead, I found gardeners setting out new plants, bird song, and fresh flowers.

White dahlia

There must be a pocket of warmth, some quirk of the air currents, maybe, that postpones winter in this corner of the city. There were still some raspberries on the canes, even. A gardener gave me a chayote, a mid-summer squash, to take home for supper. I met another, on his knees in a freshly-planted bed of garlic; he was squeezing the last few lettuce seedlings around the edge. He expects to be harvesting until the snow comes.

Salad fixings; arugula, I think.

Fennel. A hand-written sign says, "90 days to maturity".

The brassicas will last right through the winter. I saw chard, kale, winter cabbage, Brussels sprouts, bok choi, and more.

Some kind of brassica. I don't recognize it.

Borage flower. A nice addition to a salad. It tastes somewhat like cucumber.

A willow-branch fence around a plot grows as happily as the veggies.

Yellow squash, waiting to be taken home for supper.

An allium head, tied to a stake for the seeds to dry.

The gardeners were busy, some planting, some cleaning. One man had tied up his bare grape vines, and was busy taking down the dried bean vines, leaving the stakes for the next season. A woman trundled a wheelbarrow of stalks for the compost along the path.

Each plot has its own style of fence (or no fence); some are tangles of sticks, others recycled metal grids. Rocks, bricks, logs, boards, even broken pots do the job. This neat rose garden has a new front.

At the back, beside the chain-link fence, a shiny new plastic compost bin is hard at work. I noticed many of these, all through the gardens. Several of the plots, the ones cleaned off for the season, have been dug over and covered with a fresh, black layer of compost.

The people aren't the only workers:

Dozens of crows picked over the recently-turned soil, breaking apart lumps to get at seeds and bugs.

The sentinel.

Following a spate of birdsong, I took the trail on the south-east corner, leading to the main composting area. It skirted a small remainder of the wetlands that formerly covered the whole lot.

Behind a tangle of vines and weeds, a small flock of birds were bathing. There were a pair of robins, at least one junco, and several others.

I think these two are juvenile redwing blackbirds. The little white lines on the photo (full size) are bathwater spray.

And the bees, wasps, and bee mimics are buzzing around the marigolds.

It's a hive of activity, even in November.


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Westham Island Herb Farm

Second in the Westham Island Herb Farm series.

The Ellis family has been farming at this location in Delta since 1916. The on-site outlet for their produce, WIHF, is snuggled up against the farm proper; a complex of sheds and a farmhouse, surrounded by extensive fields.

At this time of the year, most of the fields are resting; the store will close for the winter in two weeks. But the owner, Sharon Ellis, ends the year with a bash and a blaze of Hallowe'en colour and fun.

Pumpkins, of course. Starting next week, there will be carved pumpkin faces everywhere, lit up each night until Hallowe'en. And there are costumed figures, smiling "scary" masks, a haunted house for the little ones (billed as "Terror in the Jungle" and housed inside a quonset greenhouse.) I was tempted to pretend to be a kid just to go in and see what they've cooked up.

Is that a wicked grin, or just insane? Uncle Herb, inviting us into his "Jungle".

But there's more to be seen. On the far side of the pumpkin festival, there's a tiny, old-timey general store, carrying everything from home-made jams and jellies to soap and buckets.


Through that back door, a little lawn overshadowed by a hard-working kiwi vine, still producing in spite of the chilly weather:


Vintage farm tools and farmhouse dishes decorate outside walls.


The flower is made of parts of machinery. And does anyone know what that wheel would have been used for?

Down a path past a battery of wheelbarrows, there is a henhouse and stable. The henhouse was empty, but this birdhouse had some pretty tenants:

Birdhouse. No birds.

Wasps, instead. With a spider web as curtain across the door.

The only chicken we saw.

One of the residents of the stable

Clematis climbing the chickenwire

Back around the front, we went in to see what veggies were available still. We bought newly-dug potatoes and carrots. (Try to remember the smell of a fresh-pulled carrot -- worth the stop all on its own!) Some of the carrots were a pale yellow; I had never seen any like them. I got a few onions, too, and garlic heads. And apples, of course.

Mouth-watering

Crookneck squash

The owner (I think it was) chatted with us as she cleaned veggies by the back door. Did you know that potatoes keep better if they're not washed? I didn't. I bought the washed ones, anyhow; I would use them in a couple of days.

Back out to the car with our loot, stopping on the way to invade Miss Pumpkin's privacy in the bath:

Rubber duckie and all

Of course, if she hadn't planted herself in the flower/herb/squash bed right by the driveway, she would have reason for complaint. As it was, she seemed completely unperturbed by our swarming around.

Missus Pumpkin's tractor was bogged down; ...


... she was still by the roadside when we left. She waved goodbye.


Bye! See you again in the spring!
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Greening the dump

Downtown Vancouver is shaped like the belly of a seahorse, with Stanley Park being the head. It swims between Burrard Inlet and English Bay; False Creek bathes the lower back.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the water continued down and around the tail as tidal flats. A dam was built at Main Street, the "land" was deeded to the CPR (who later gave some of it back, as unusable) and the wetlands were slowly drained and filled. What is left now, is a large, barren area, partly wasteland, partly scarred by railway lines and warehouses. I have marked it on the map in pale brown.


On the north side of this blot, a small bright green V marks the Strathcona Community Garden. This was originally part of the tide flats; over the better part of half a century, the city has been gradually filling it with soil, garbage and gravel. In spots, the water still surfaces.

The flats have seen varied activity over the decades: railway parking, industrial landfill, city garbage dump, "Hobo Village" during the Depression years, and later on, the site of the main city firehall and mixed industrial use. All of this, of course, was laced together with the irrepressible blackberry thickets.

Since the end of the 1970s, residents of the area have been working towards creating a shared garden on the dump. It has not been easy; between the difficulties of the terrain, the encroachment of the city, conflicts with other worthwhile projects, and the on-again, off-again battles with the city government, it took ten years to formalize a temporary lease on the property, in 1985.

The garden at first covered 3.5 acres; in 1993, it was expanded to include the Cottonwood, along the street to the southeast, and the Environmental Youth Alliance garden (on a blackberry-infested garbage heap), bringing the total area under cultivation up to 7 acres.

Enough stats; on to the photos. Follow our footsteps:


The sign on Hawks Avenue does not encourage visitors; it doesn't even mark an entry-way. Up at the corner of Prior, a narrow wood-chip trail cuts through the blackberries and bindweed.


This wild border serves a useful purpose or two: it insulates the garden from the smoke and racket of Prior Street, and provides a safe habitat for birds and other wildlife. Besides, it disguises the garden, discouraging non-garden-oriented visitors. It almost discouraged us; we passed the corner several times before we noticed the trail.

Around a gentle curve, the garden dozes in its sunny enclosure. At first, we wander among the expected allotment fare.

Lettuces and other salad greens.


Big blue cabbages.


Herbs in containers.


Nasturtiums and dillweed. With a chair for the weary weeder.


With the occasional decorative element thrown in. Here, crab shells on poles.

The plots go on and on, and we went around and around, up and down the rows. A few gardeners worked quietly on their squares of land; a woman showed us her neighbour's grape vines, woven together with flowering purple clematis, white bindweed, and laden with green grapes.

Heading for the garden shed, for another tool, perhaps. Scarlet runner beans bloom overhead.

The plots petered out. We passed a row of tall boxes; beds raised to waist height.


I learned later that these beds were built for the use of disabled gardeners, who would not be able to handle the stooping and lifting that most ground-level gardening entails. (Oh, my aching back!)

A few picnic tables under fruit trees, and this round "dining suite" in a sunny spot. And just beyond, the orchard; apple, pear, and crabapple trees.


And across the orchard, the beehives, housing the pollinating crews.

Doing the map dance.

To be continued: water features, solar panels ...
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