Organic Food Gardening

This site is focused on bringing you real-life, practical information on how to grow food organically. While I will be mainly writing about growing vegetables, fruit and nuts, I may well take some diversions into small livestock like poultry or rabbits, which can be quite easy to integrate into a garden and have a great deal to contribute.

Here’s something about me, so you know who’s talking to you…

I’ve been growing food seriously for over 20 years, and I come from a long line of gardeners. My mother, at nearly 80, is still growing a small but packed-full garden in the UK, and planted an apple tree in memory of my father only this spring (2009). As a child I absorbed gardening knowledge without even realising it, so when I began gardening myself in earnest in my 20’s I discovered I knew how to do things without knowing how I knew!

My garden is in coastal British Columbia, on the Canadian west coast. We get wet, cool winters that sometimes drop to -15 °C (5 °F), episodes of snow (a few days to a few weeks), but very little frezing of the ground, enever below a few inches. Long, cool, wet springs, warm dry summers (temps in the 80’s °F, and usually a couple of months in July-Sep with no rain), and a long cool wet fall. Last frost date is about Apr 30th.

My soil is sandy loam on top of pure sand about a foot down, with a hardpan about 3 feet down. The soil dries quickly in summer but in the winter I can get standing water if we get a lot of rain at once and it can’t drain quickly enough through the hardpan. I have a long skinny property (215 ft x 40 ft) with the house set a long way back from the road, so my backyard is about 40 ft square and the front yard is about 110ft long. As a result, a lot of things get planted in the front – luckily my neighbours think food gardens are a good thing and I don’t get complaints when I rip out more grass!

I garden organically in raised, sideless beds with mulched paths between them, have a 26ft x 12ft home-built plastic hoophouse (polytunnel), a mini-tiller (a Mantis) which I use to prepare brand new beds and dig large planting holes, and a triple-bay compost bin built from old wood pallets. My most-used tool is a spading fork. I grow almost everything from seed (one year I started about 2000 transplants, when I was into selling them at the market) and save seeds of an increasing number of vegetables. I love flowers and do grow them too, but my main focus is vegetables and fruit.

I belong to the local Farmers Institute and chair the Seedy Saturday organising committee, which organises a very successful seed-swapping event each March.

Want to contact me? Use the form on the Contact page or comment on any post – I’d love to hear from you.

Kevin