Yes. But I love plants, too.

<–[Garden harvest a couple days ago]

I’ve been the self-proclaimed founder (and so far sole member) of the RSPCP* for years – on th lookout for withered, mistreated plants at supermarkets and reporting to the produce manager that their plants outside need watering, or rescuing (and occasionally confiscating) abused plants from my friends.

To me, it’s not so much about animals vs. plants. I eat both. It’s about not being disrespectful of their lives: ensuring them good quality of life while they are alive, and not being wasteful with them.

I do eat meat. But I am very careful about where I source it from. I avoid anything that is industrially raised. Anyone who claims to be an animal-lover, yet will eat standard that supermarket chicken or beef packed on a styrofoam tray is living a lie. Sorry – get informed, and live consistently with what you say. Either that, or stop claiming to be an animal-lover.

So I will eat deer or seal or wild duck – animals that I know had a good and natural life until, literally, the final seconds. (Not to mention are not pumped full of hormones or antibiotics that are bad for both me and the environment).

[Watch it, Bambi. Just cuz I grow my own veggies - doesn't mean I'm a vegetarian!]

I eat some small-farm raised chicken, turkey, beef or lamb – but I always try to source small-scale local producers, where I can be sure that the animals truly did have a reasonably good quality of life.

Unfortunately, this whole thing about “certified organic” has become big industry. Once animals are being raised on large industrial farms, organic or not, their quality of life is sacrificed. They are herded around in buildings, they are not permitted to graze on real plants, they live in their own shit. I don’t want to know that animals are being forced to live such horrible lives for my meals.

And “certified organic” has kind of lost its meaning anyway – industry has a lobbyists who push for products and chemicals that would surprise many people to find that they are permitted in the so-called organic products they buy. Here’s ine example – of Anheuser-Busch pushing the USDA to allow them to make so-called “organic beer” from hops grown with chemical fertilizers and sprayed with pesticides!

To me, it is not the act of killing an animal for food that is wrong. It is that the animal lead a pathetic, unhappy, and often tortured life up to that final moment. And the same goes for plants.

The other aspect of respecting our food sources – the plants and animals that die for us – is reducing waste. Here in North America, the average person throws out 110 kg of food per year. (Source: Wikipedia) That is nearly a pound of food wasted a day! Add to that the amount of food wasted in the production and retail stages, and we are talking a total of 650 kg of food wasted per person each year. That is not only disrespectful – it is stupid.

I think that one reason that I do respect plant lives every bit as much as animal lives is that I am a gardener. I nurture my little tomatoes, my lettuces, my beans, from seed. I treat them well – both so they will have good quality life, and also so they will produce well for me in return.

My greatest eye-opener, though, has come from my attempts to grow rice here on Vancouver Island. I did actually manage to produce 19 grains… although, when I planted them this spring, only three of them turned out have a real rice kernel in them.

<–[My rice plants, grown on the outer coast of Vancouver Island!, about to seed.]

But rice is something most of us think of as cheap bulk food – along the lines of pasta. We don’t see rice plants here, and it is easy to forget that rice is a seed: every grain of rice has the potential to become a plant that, itself, will produce another handful of rice. Now, I am careful to scoop every grain of rice out of the pot, to eat every grain of rice in my bowl, so that none of that potential ends up in the garbage.

Because, to me, it’s about respect.

*Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants

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?

<–[my spinach]

The sun is beaming in my office window here and, when I finish writing this post, I am going to head outside and plunge my hands into the earth. I have eggplants that I want to plant today. And I expect that the beans that I sowed last week will just be curling up from under the earth. I need to go out to protect them from the blue jays, who love to pull them up just as they emerge.

[my first little broccoli of the year]–>

Gardening – producing my own food, is a way of connecting myself to this planet: by the direct connection of my hands in the soil, and also by the food that I eat. (It’s barely June – but in the last week I have harvested asparagus, spinach, arugula, lettuce, bok choy, and more… the earth in my yard literally becomes me!)

Gardening is also a connection to the seasons, this perpetual cycle of change that repeats as a result of our planet whirling about the sun. I’ve been growing veggies since I was a kid – I learned both from my mother and by trial and error. There is a time for each plant, and I need to be connected to it.

<–[promise of tomatoes to come]

When I moved into a ground-floor apartment in Perth, Australia, nearly twenty years ago now, I started a new veggie garden at my front doorway. It was March – autumn in Australia. Not ideal timing to seed veggies. But, I thought, Canadian summer is about the same temperature as Australian winter. I’ll plant them anyway. They’ll just think they are in Canada!

Ha, no fooling those plants. The seeds sprouted, but as soon as they emerged to see daylight, they noticed that the day-length was decreasing. They might not have known that they were in Australia – but they sure knew it wasn’t spring! They stayed on hold through the Australian winter, right through to the spring, when they finally started to grow.

Even when I was not connected to the seasons (or tried not to be), I was forced back. The plants knew.

[two generations of lettuce]–>

Gardening comes so easy to me – instinctive – but I think that is because I have been doing it so long that it becomes second nature. I know which month to seed my tomatoes or my kale; I know which plants to seed indoors (for the warmth) and which will become palid and lanky inside and need the cold (the cabbage family, such as kale and broccoli and bok choy).

<–[my kale is ready!]

It is funny, sometimes, seeing people who are new to gardening but who have no sense of this connection – no sense of the specific needs of each type of plant. They seem to think that the act of placing a seed in the soil is enough. They may sow everything at once, or when they have time rather when it is the right season, or everything indoors or everything outdoors. But it is sad to see that, too, because those people probably get disheartened about gardening, when their plants don’t produce for them. Gardening, and growing your own food, is such a joy.

Gardening is me – literally. I am made of the food that I grow.

Sure, I invest a fair bit of time into my vegetable garden. But I value that time, my hands plunged into the rich earth and the sunlight streaming on my shoulders in order to create my food – rather than hunched over my computer earning money that will pay for my food. I reinforce my connection to our planet, to my ancestors, and to how produce is meant to be: crisp lettuce, tender broccoli, sweet crunchy peas, and tomatoes with a flavour that, sadly, so many people no longer know.

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?

Yesterday, Merry Bewick down on Chestermans Beach called me up and asked if I would come over and sign a copy of one of my books, that she had purchased as a gift.

I’ve been carefully tending my tomato seedlings since March. I’ve done a great job, I must say – some are approaching a foot in height, and a few even have buds on them.

So imagine my surprise when I saw Merry with a window-full of full-size tomato plants, many of them laden with fruit!

The challenge growing tomatoes here in Tofino is that we are on a skinny peninsula, surrounded by the North Pacific. Although we get a good deal of sun most summers, we just don’t get the heat that you need to ripen tomatoes. The plants grow; they even look great. And you can usually manage to get some hard little green tomatoes by September. But to get them to ripen before the winter starts to set in again (usually the second week of October; we don’t have fall), you really have to grow the fastest-ripening varieties. I have had the best luck with cherries: Tumbler and Golden Nugget. In the full-size varieties, Early Girl, Early Cascade and Alicante work best.

So I asked Merry what variety they were. “Oh, you know, stolen seeds,” she said. “Tomatoes from the store, that I ate and took the seeds out of.”

June tomatoes, I thought… no bugs around in winter, when they’re blooming. “Did you pollinate them yourself?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she said, holding up a little blue paint-brush (see photo, above). “This is the bee!”

Merry said that some of the tomatoes were plants that she seeded about a year ago, and others she had grown from cuttings. “I just lop the tops off and thrown them in there,” she said, pointing to a bucket on the floor.

Well, you just keep on learning, don’t you? I am surprised that the tomatoes continued to grow through the short days of winter. But then again, I kept a green pepper plant alive and growing at a south-facing window a few winters ago, using a Q-tip as my bee, and getting some early spring green peppers too. I think the secret is two-fold: lots of light, and also that the plants don’t chill down at night, as they would in a greenhouse.

Thanks for the tips, Merry! And especially thanks for the tomato, which I enjoyed with my fresh home-grown Port Alberni lettuce (transported that same day from Port by bike!) in an extremely tasty and environmentally-friendly salad last night.

“Yup,” I smile. Damp is good. Damp means that the temperature is still above freezing.

The last week or two has been warm even for Tofino. My witch hazel bloomed a couple of weeks ago. Which is normal; it usually blooms the first week of January. But riding my bike around town yesterday, I noticed there are actually a lot of flowers in bloom right now.

So I got back on the bike today, camera in hand. These are no amazing photos – I only took my point-and-shoot out – but I was sure surprised, once I started looking. Remember, this is Canada, in the middle of January!

In a short little lap around town, I came across dozens of different types of flowers in bloom! I didn’t even photograph every single one, and there were four that I did not know the names of, either. But, of what I could recognize, I found: witch hazel; pink, blue, yellow and white primroses; pink and white heather; rhododendrons; azaleas; viburnum; geranium; three types of daisy; lavatera; pansies; violets; periwinkle; fuschia; California lilac; lobelia; calendula and hellebore – even one red rose and some mums trying hard. Oh yes, and strawberries (on my own back deck!).

Counting the four I didn’t know the name of, that is 26 different flowers in bloom here in Tofino right now.

Amazing what you see, once you start paying attention. Hope you enjoy the pix.

[One day later] Oh, I just couldn’t help myself, I had to go out and take more flower pictures again today. So here is instalment two of the Tofino Flowers in January photo essay. I found crocuses and even blackberries in bloom! Counting them, as well as Scotch broom (oh no, invasive but pretty), two more types that I don’t know the name of, and the snap dragon that I forgot to mention yesterday, that makes a total of 31 different types of flowers in bloom in Tofino right now! Enjoy…