These scarlet runner beans are not mine. But I took this photo today. It’s a garden that I bike past often on my training rides. Yesterday, I noticed that their plants are loaded with beans, whereas mine are still just flowering. So I came back home to look more closely at mine.

And what I saw was numerous dead-end stems. What should happen is that, as each flower is pollinated, the red petals fall off and a bean pod grows there. But where my beans should be, there is nothing. The stem dead-ends. So my beans are not pollinating.

And that, of course, made me think about the bees. We’ve all heard about the global bee crisis. Populations are dropping worldwide. Although the experts have some ideas on possible causes, no one is exactly sure what is going on.

But one recent study has found that cell phone signals may disorient bees. Bees are sensitive to the electromagnetic fields of cell phones. The cell phone signals can confuse them, causing them to swarm unnecessarily, and all of that extra activity may be fatal to the bees.

[My beans: note the dead-end stems below the flowers, where earlier flowers used to be. This is where the bean pod is supposed to grow - but there is nothing.] –>

There are other likely causes to the bee declines, too, such as air pollution (which also can disorient them) and fungal infections. But in this case, the other garden is only 3 or 4 km from my home in straight-line distance, so something like pollution or infection seems less likely. However, that other garden is located just past the edge of town, in more rural country – so the homes are spaced much farther apart. Which means cell phones also would be farther away from the bees.

I have scarlet runner beans growing on my balcony garden too, and I noticed that, although most of them also have not pollinated, a handful of stalks are producing beans. I also have lots of flowers growing right beside the beans: petunias and nasturtiums. Flowers are great bee attractants – so I wonder if the flowers have pulled in the few bees that are around, and those bees then did the bean flowers while they were up there.

It’s hard to know for sure. But I do remember hearing people talking in Tofino last year, too, about their beans not pollinating, and blaming it on the bees. Well, not on the poor bees themselves – they already have enough to deal with. But on the bee decline – which is almost certainly our fault, even if we don’t know exactly what it is we did this time.

Over 70% of the world’s most important food crops are pollinated by bees. I’ve heard it said that, if bees go extinct, humankind will be starving within three years. I don’t know if that’s strictly true. But it’s true enough that, even if you don’t care about biodiversity and ecosystems, even if you only care about your own personal needs, you should still worry about the bees.

On a happier note: When I was in my garden afternoon to take the picture of my dead-end stems for this post, a bee alighted right in my frame. A bit out of focus, but here he is. So at least there is one out there!

It’s absolutely not intentional – but I find that so many of my blog posts have to do with gardening. I think that’s because the way that I think is in terms of connections (as opposed to objects, or things) and that gardening, especially vegetable gardening, represents the ultimate connection between humans and this planet we live on.

Growing my own food is really important to me. It is relaxing and meditative, a definite part of my personal mental-health program. It is also good exercise, it’s good for the environment, and it is definitely good for me: eating fresh, tasty, local, organic food.

A lot of people I know say “Well you’re lucky, Jackie. I don’t have a yard.” Well, I have not had a yard for the last two years (I was living in a townhouse in Tofino). And even now that I do have a yard with a productive little veggie garden in it, I still grow a lot of my food in pots on the balcony.

Here’s a little video of my balcony garden this year, just to give you an idea of what can be done with a very small space.

So I’m going to give a few tips here, for those of you who’d like to try:

First of all, remember that plants are people too. (Well, OK, not people exactly – but they are alive and responsive to the environment). You need to know your own climate and what you can and cannot grown there, and you also need to seed and transplant things at the right time of year. This is different for each plant type you grow. If you have never grown veggies before, there is a bit of a learning curve involved.

Out here on the west coast, West Coast Seeds is an amazing gardening resource. Their planting guide http://www.westcoastseeds.com/admin/files/2011PlantingChart.pdf is my planting bible – it tells when to seed, when to transplant, everything you need to know for each crop. If you live in a different climatic zone, your timing will be slightly different. You can find out what your own climate zone is (for Canada) by checking out these maps. (If you live elsewhere, you will have to Google the maps for your own country).

Each plant has specific needs regarding the soil, nutrients, moisture, and timing. There are many good gardening books out there – but again, West Coast Seeds has the equivalent of a planting textbook on line for free.  These planting instructions, for almost every type of food plant, would apply to most climates.

For setting up a garden on a balcony or a deck, the main things you need to provide your plants with are sun, water and nutrients. A balcony that faces east, south or west will usually get enough sun for most crops. A north-facing balcony can present a bit more of a challenge, but you will still probably be able to grow cool-weather crops. If your balcony is exposed to strong winds, you might need to erect a transparent barrier to protect the plants a bit. As for the water, well… that’s just up to your remembering! Regarding nutrients, plants growing in pots require more fertilizer than those grown in the garden – pretty much any liquid fertilizer will do, used according to the instructions.

Certain plants do very well in pots, while others really need more space for their roots. Things that do not do so well in pots are root crops (such as carrots and beets) and plants that require a lot of space, like zucchinis and other squash.

Cool-weather plants that do great in pots are most leafy crops (especially those with smaller root systems) like lettuce, chard and kale. I like to plant four or five lettuces in a row in those long narrow flower planters. You can harvest the whole head when it is mature (some small new leaves will grow back from the stump) or just harvest leaves as you need them.

Hot-weather plants that do well in pots include tomatoes, eggplants and peppers. There are so many varieties of tomatoes out there; try to get one of the easier-to-grow varieties. Some of the most fail-safe cherries are Tumbler (my all-time container favourite) and Golden Nugget. Of the large cherries, Early Cascade and Early Girl are two of the best. The beefsteak varieties are toughest to grow, so I would avoid them when growing in containers.

Tomatoes need large pots for their root systems, and lots of water while the fruit is swelling. It is also critical that you follow instructions for growing the tomato plants when they are young, or you may not get much fruit. Keep them indoors in the spring when the plants are young and tender, then gradually acclimatize them to the sunshine (they will get sunburnt and lose all of their leaves if you just one day thrust them out into the sunshine, just like us!) You can put them outside permanently in late May or early June.

Scarlet runner beans are extremely productive and grow great from pots. Seed them only when the weather gets warm, in late May or June, directly into the pots that you will grow them in (they don’t like transplanting very much). You need to place a trellis or strings for them to wind around and grow. They like to grow up, but if you pay attention to them you can force them to go sideways along balcony edges. They get beautiful red flowers in early summer, and big tender green beans in late summer.

Herbs and strawberries are other treats that are easy to grow from pots – and they are lovely to have just a few steps away from the kitchen. Rosemary, oregan, marjoram and sage will survive winters if they are not too harsh. You will need to start other crops, such as thyme and cilantro (coriander), fresh each year.

What about you? How does you balcony garden grow? Do you have any advice or questions?

Well, it was a technical success. My harvest (pictured) wouldn’t have quite sustained me through the winter. Yup, that’s the whole thing.

But at least I got a harvest! I wonder if this is perhaps the first rice ever grown on Vancouver Island (I actually haven’t even heard of it being grown in British Columbia – although someone must have tried). I am quite sure it’s the first rice ever grown and harvested in Tofino!

So, for those of you have been following along, you’ll remember that I had rice growing in shallower and deeper containers. (For those of you who weren’t, you can check out my previous reports May 25 2009, September 5 2009, and November 27 2009). For some reason, the plants in the shallower plastic container flowered more. However, many of the flowering stalks did not produce rice grains – the little things that look like rice are actually empty (e.g. the one at the left of the photo is empty, compared to the full ones at the right).

So I guess they did not pollinate – but I am not sure why. (I am actually surprised any of them pollinated at all – by the time they were flowering, it was mid-winter and I had them growing inside, on my bedroom windowsill. No insects around, no breeze). I had pretty much given up on them – tried to keep them as wet as I had been before, but I was no longer expecting much from them. (They are very pretty though!)

So the little rice that was there matured as I let the plants dry up, around March. So it took nearly a year to grow the plants from seed right through to “harvest” – longer than it’s supposed to take (around 200 days), but no surprise in Tofino’s cool damp climate.

I didn’t get around to seeding rice this year – it was a very busy spring for me – but I will try to do some next year. Hopefully I’ll be able to source some varieties better suited to our climate (these ones were just standard Product of California brown rice seeds from the supermarket).

Anyone else have any rice-growing stories to share?

I brought them inside at the end of summer – you can read about them up to that point in my September 5th blog entry.  I thought that was that – a “technical success” in that I had plants, but no actual rice.  But the plants were just too beautiful to throw out, so I brought them inside, to the south-facing window in my bedroom.

I didn’t think that the plants were doing much there, but now looking back to those September photos I can see that they have definitely bushed out.  Interestingly, I left one bucket of plants downstairs, on my heated tile floor at my front entrance: more heat, much less light.  Those plants have died.  So clearly the light is what they really need.

I haven’t paid a real lot of attention to them – not even watering them to the point of keeping them always saturated like before (I wonder if that is what has stressed them to bloom?).  But they’ve been looking great…  And then, this morning, I went for a closer look and noticed that two of the plants (of a total of  12) have little blooms coming out – and it looks like  few more will bloom soon.

So, the Tofino rice experiment is not yet over!  I don’t anticipate getting more than a tablespoon or so of rice – but even if I can start to select for a line that is more cold-tolerant and faster-maturing, well… that will be a good start.

Next year I will do two things differently:

1.  I will try to get a seed that is already from a colder climate (these were from California; I’ll see if I can get some from Japan).

2.  And now that I have a garden in sunny Port Alberni, I will move some of my plants out there to see how they do.

And you know what is the most interesting thing about this?  On this blog, I can check the stats, to find out what search terms people are using to find my site.  And you know what the most common search term that leads people here is?  “Growing rice in Canada”.  So, even though this is not being talked about a lot in the media, it is pretty clear that it is on a lot of people’s minds.

I’ll keep you posted on what happens, so be sure to check back!

I’m pretty pleased – that’s a November vegetable harvest from my garden in Port Alberni!

In this photo you’ll see freshly picked celery, brussels sprouts and swiss chard.  I picked the peppers and tomatoes (green) about a month ago, and have been letting them ripen slowly inside.

OK, I know that you can’t be doing this right across Canada – our Vancouver Island climate is a bit milder.  But still, there is a lot that you can harvest even into the first frosts – most of the cabbage family (especially kale, usually one of my standards, but I did not have access to the garden in Port Alberni until July, which is too late to seed it) as well as cabbages and brussels sprouts.  Many of these can take quite a hard frost – in fact, they get even more tender and flavourful after a good frost -  so you can be harvesting them until late autumn or early winter, even in the snow.

I also just picked my last lettuces a week ago, too.  So really, there is a lot we can do up here.

A hint with the tomatoes: if you live in places that get hot summers, you can probably ripen them up just fine on the vines.  But, if you live in a place where it doesn’t get that hot (like here in Tofino) or if you start the plants too late (like I did in Port Alberni this year), if you pick the fruits green, you can ripen them indoors over a period of months – I mean it, I’ll still be eating fresh home-grown tomatoes until the end of November!

The tricks for ripening them inside are:

1.  Pick them before the weather gets too cold and wet, and definitely before your first frost – otherwise they may get blight or other fungus.  Indoors, that fungus will grow and spread faster than the tomatoes can ripen (so if any of your fruit are showing signs of it, get rid of them right away – they have no hope).

2.  But leave them on the vine as long as you safely can before picking.  The bright green ones that have not reached full size yet have more trouble ripening – they met rot or just wither up before ripening.  But if they have reached fullsize (you can kind of tell both by size and by colour, they become more of a yellowish green) they will likely ripen up if you follow steps 3 and 4.

3.  Make sure they get good air circulation, so they don’t rot or mould.  I find they work better spread out or stacked very slightly on a tray, than in a bowl.  They may ripen slightly faster in a bowl, but you really have to keep an eye on the ones further down.  Remove any that show signs of rot or mould immediately.

4.  Do not put them in the sun!  Sure, you can put nearly-ripe red ones there – but if you put green ones there they will probably dehydrate before they ripen.  Don’t let them get too cold or too warm – just room temperature works fine.

So there you go – still eating mostly local here in Canada in the last weeks before winter.  Here’s my lunch today:  my home-grown celery stir-fried up with the local sockeye salmon I canned up in the fall and brown rice (OK, not local, I am still working on that), with those tender little sprouts steamed on top.

Still, it’s been a pretty interesting exercise.  I learned a lot from it, and I want to try it again next year.  As you can see from the photos, the plants actually grew really well.  They are healthy, very sturdy, and each plant has between 4 and 7 tillers (the individual branching stems that come out of the plant’s base).  According to the rice-growing manual, plants can have anywhere from 3 to 33, depending upon how closely the plants are spaced and amount of nitrogen.

Considering that I am growing them out here in Tofino – not known for its heat! – they’ve done really well.  We had some unusally warm weather here in July (for us, that means sunny most of the day and temperatures in the mid-20s).  But we’ve still had lots of days when there was fog for most or all of the day, especially in August (we call it Foggust).  I wish I had taken some of them to Port Alberni, where normal summer temperatures are in the 30s, and there is sunshine almost every day, all day.  Next year…

OK, I am going to bring the plants inside now.  My upstairs bedroom window is south-facing and gets quite a bit of sun.  I think it’s probably too late for them to flower at this stage, but I’ll put them up there anyway and see what happens.  I’m trying to figure out, from that rice-growing manual, what the panicle looks like (that is the part that develops into the flowers and produces the rice grains).  It says that the panicle becomes visible when it is about 1 mm long, at which size “the young panicle has many fine, white, hairy structures at the tip.”  I think that my plants have formed these little panicles (see photo to the right) – those little hairy things have been on the plants for at least a month now.  But with all of the fog and rain we’ve had the last month, the plants and the panicles have not really grown much – in fact, some of them seem to be degrading and turning brown.

I’m still excited by the whole thing, though – just the fact that I grew rice plants here at all!  If anything significant happens with the plants inside, I’ll definitely update here.  Otherwise, check back next year for news of my 2010 rice crop.

Here are some things that I have learned, and will try to work on for next year:

1.  Rice takes from 90 to 200 days to mature, depending upon the actual variety.  Apparently Louisiana rice matures the quickest (mine was a short-grain from California), so I will see if I can find some of that for next year.

2.  I started mine indoors in early May (on a heated tile floor for the first 6 weeks).  I’d actually started a long-grain bulk-bin variety in April – I don’t know where it was from, but presumably it was a more tropical one.  Anyway, they sprouted into feeble little plants that eventually moulded and died, so that’s when I started the Californian seeds.  Next year I’ll start these ones in late March or April, to give them a better head start than they got this year.

3.  The plants definitely need heat.  For June and the first half of July I moved them out to my back sundeck by day and then inside most nights.  That’s a lot of work, and not reasonable if you are actually trying to grow a useable quantity – so I don’t think you could grow rice with any practical results (i.e. significant quanity) in a climate like this, with our cool nights.

4.  You can see from the photos that I planted them in a variety of containers.  The ones in the clay container are, for some reason, the healthiest and sturdiest-looking.  One thing I learned is to plant them in a shallow container (like my white plastic one), with the soil level about 1-2 cm below the container brim – that way when it rains, the plants do not get too flooded.

5.  Mosquitos lay eggs in your little rice paddies!  What I’d most like to do is try them out in one of those shallow black garden pond-containers you can buy at garden centres (in sunny Port Alberni, not here!) and make it a little ecosystem with some fish in it to eat the mosquito larvae.  Otherwise, in the buckets, I just poured off the water every now and then – so the plants were in muddy soil but with no standing water for a day or two – to kill off the mosquito larvae.

6.  I kept one rice plant inside in my sunny bedroom window the whole while.  It has grown taller than the others, but has not developed tillers like the outdoor plants – it is really just one tall and slender main stem with one very weak and scrawny tiller off the side.  It does have the little white hairy things that I think are panicles, though.  So outdoors seems to be the better option for them.

I’ll keep the comments open on this entry – if anyone else has tried growing rice in this type of climate, or has any idea where to purchase brown rice from Louisiana, I’d love to hear from you!

I moved from a beautiful house in the rainforest, with a small sunny yard mostly taken up by a big and productive veggie garden, to a townhouse last autumn.  I can’t say I was 100% self-sufficient in my veggies – but, over summer, I sure did not buy much at all.  Even in the winter, by having root crops such as carrots and potatoes in the ground or stored, and growing some of the greens such kale, chard, and sprouting broccoli, that grow year-round in our mild coastal climate (yes, here in Canada!), I was able to provide a fair bit of my winter food too.

Now, my first spring in the townhouse, I am working hard to get some food growing in a few pots on my small but sunny deck.  I have lots of herbs, four varieties of strawberries, a few greens such as kale and chard, and tomatoes seedlings that are springing up higher daily.

But the new crop that I am experimenting with is rice!  Yes, I am working towards a Canadian rice crop.

I don’t know if it will work.  But I do seriously fear the coming food shortages – which could be caused by any number of things including:
- long-term climate change as well as short-term catastrophic events (storms and floods) related to climate change
- blight and diseases of crops as we continue to focus on a few varieties and lose the genetic diversity of different species
- contamination of traditional crop varieties with genetically modified versions
- diversion of food crops for use as biofuels, so we can feed cars instead of people!
- bulldozing productive agricultural land to make more houses and shopping malls

All of these things are already happening.  Each one threatens our food supply – and, as farmland shrinks and the world’s population grows, the only end result is that some people are going to run out of food.  Even China became a net food importer in cash terms last year!  That should worry you – it worries me.

I’ve been gardening in Tofino for ten years now.  In each place I’ve lived (Ontario, eastern Australia, western Australia, and now coastal BC) I have had to relearn how to grow veggies.  Back in Australia I lived on tomatoes, eggplants and basil – three crops which I have to coddle, creating warm and sunny micro-environments for, here in Tofino.  But here, I can grow lush greens: lettuces, chard, and kale, pretty much year-round.

Even though I don’t have much garden space where I live now, I know what grows here and how to grow it; if I need to, I can get my food production up-to-speed pretty quickly.

The one thing that really is a challenge here, though, is the carbs.  Sure, we can grow potatoes til they are coming out our ears – but if the food supply really gets cut off, potatoes 365 days a year could get pretty dull.

So, that’s why I am experimenting with rice.  I know it is a more tropical to sub-tropical crop – but, with our very wet environment here (4 m of rain per year!), I think I will have more luck with it than with wheat, which would just rot.  I’ve researched it on the net – there is a great free rice-growing manual out there – and found out a fair bit.  

Depending upon the variety, rice takes from 90 to 200 days to mature.  Apparently the Louisiana varieties are the fastest-maturing.  I tried growing some rice from the bulk bins at the grocery store in April (brown rice of course, white rice won’t sprout).  It sprouted well, and after two days I planted the sprouted seeds in a tub of saturated potting soil, and kept it on my heated tile floor.  The seedlings started to grow but then, one by one, they withered and died.

So, a few weeks ago I started again – this time with a short-grained brown rice from California (hoping that Californian rice, like the Louisianan varieties, is some of the faster-maturing stuff).  So far they are doing great.

It’s all a big experiment – seeing if I can keep them warm enough to get a crop out of them.  I don’t have enough plants to expect much yield.  This is just a test, to see whether it is possible and, if so, to learn what I need to know.  Some day this might be life-saving information – and I don’t want to be figuring this stuff out once things really start to hit the fan.

(For updates on 2009′s rice-growing efforts, see my blog entries Sept. 5 and Nov. 27)