Free Salad & Open Yard July 31 from 4.30-8pm

Come to a fun, informational evening at our urban farm and pick your salad for your dinner too!

Want to know:
why our backyard looks so different from most yards
what a food forest is
ways to support native pollinators
different hives to keep honeybees in
what a food forest is
what plants are growing in our yard
how to construct an herb spiral
what a swale is
how to make self-watering planters for less than $2
what a wicking bed is
what the most unique plant we have growing
why plant cover crops
how to make and maintain a worm composting bin
why we grow nearly all edible plants


If you feel inspired to make some changes to your landscaping to include edible plants, permaculture designer Ted Bahr, owner of Prairie Sage Permaculture will be available for questions or to set up a consultation with him.  

Bring your kids, friends, container or bag for salad, and something to take notes on.  


Hope to see you July 31 anytime between 4.30-8pm!

Our address: 4503-37 ST. SW, Calgary

New bed for 2012 planted with potatoes--determined we will get a better crop this year than last.  Here they are already coming up

 Thanks to the honey and bumblebees for helping to pollinate our crops this year.  Here is one of the honeybees.

Greenhouse emptied of seedlings but still have basil, tomatoes, peppers and okra in global buckets.

Planter in front of the greenhouse with sweet peas, nasturtium & lily bulb.  Remember that nasturtium flowers and leaves are edible and spicy.   

 Our cover crop this year is field peas.  The reason for cover crop is to reduce water loss due to evaporation, add biomass to the soil (like direct composting on the ground), and add nutrients to the soil.  Our peas will add nitrogen and give us tasty pea tendrils to add to salads.

Our other cover crop is white clover (sold as Eco Lawn at Sunnyside Greenhouse) will also add nitrogen to the soil, add stability to steep slopes, are great bee food, and slug food.  Hopefully they will get full on the plants that I was planning on cutting down before they get to the tomatoes and squash!

June garden growth

Who's ready for some wine??  In a few years we hope that these newly planted grapes will produce some tasty fruit.  

 Newly planted food forest with blueberry, honeyberry, gooseberry, evans & juliet cherry, strawberry, mint, & bulbs

We have over 40 tomato plants in various beds and global buckets, which are interplanted with lots of different edible plants to aid with slug and insect control.   A polyculture is a very resilient and more natural way of growing food on a large or small scale.

Check back to see the growth in the next month of rain, warm weather, and long summer days!

2012 Seedlings

Tim and I learned to garden in Oregon 5 years ago.   When we started I did all the seed ordering, planting, and directed what we did in the garden every year--except this year.  Having several jobs, including being the owner of Apple Tree Sustainables and co-founding Puzzle Permaculture, Inc. with my business partner Chrissy,  I was unable to even think about planning the garden.

With pride, Tim took on buying, planting, and tending the seeds.  As you can see, he did a GREAT job of raising them this year:

He *only* planted 42 tomato plants, beans, chard, kale, peas, squash, cucumbers, peppers, okra, thyme, sorrel, parsley, hollyhock, sweet pea, marigold, borage and likely others that I have not even noticed.  

If you need some cucumbers or tomatoes for your garden, bring something by to trade us for them.  None of our zucchini seeds sprouted, so we would love some of those!   All plants have been organically raised, some are saved seeds and most are heirloom varieties.  

5,000+ new pets

Since learning about beekeeping from our friend in Oregon, we have been fascinated with them and fanatics about using honey in every way we can.  When my friend Chrissy gave me the opportunity to bee-sit her hive this season, I jumped at the chance.  But first we had to move it off an office building rooftop...

This is the point at which you hope the duct tape is on securely!

 Here they are in their new location in our yard.  

A few days after the move they were bringing in lots of pollen as you can see on their legs.  

It took the bees a couple of days before they calmed down from the traumatic move, but now they are calm and happy.  We like to enjoy our coffee next to our beehive in the morning to watch them take their first flights of the day.

The benefits of ripping apart our old, unsightly deck continues to have benefits...like the raised beds that we were able to build last weekend with the wood that we saved.  Here I am sitting on the edge of our new 3x10' bed along the north side of our property.  In this space

The bed was lined with mattress protector as a barrier to the treated wood, then lined with landscape fabric to hold the soil in and wick up water that typically settles near that section of the fence.  

 In the space in front of our shed, we had a difficult time getting anything to grow there in the past 2 years perhaps from the spruce tree roots.  We built another raised bed here, lined with mattress protector, added compost, sprouted potatoes from a friend, and topped it off with leaves that we rescued from a neighbours trash pile.

The finished product as of May 19, 2012

                        There is Juliet cherry tree to the left and strawberries in front of the planter.

DIY Free mini greenhouses

If you have walked by, looked over the fence, or driven past you have likely noticed the large plastic sheets over 2 of our 4 beds.  What you were seeing is thick clear mattress protector that we got free from a nearby mattress store stretched over the beds held up from the inside by tomato cages and on the bottom edge with scrap wood.

The 2 beds were covered over in late February and were completely thawed before the other 2 showed any signs of thawing.  They were planted with spinich, chard, garlic, lettuce and various other seeds by the first week of March and within 2 weeks of planting, here is what it looked like inside the tunnels:

Even though many days have not been too warm this season yet, our greenhouse regularly gets over 35 degrees C by 10am.  With proper ventilation early in the day, we prevent the plants from getting stressed.  There are TONS of seedlings of all types from beans to okra in there just waiting for another 2-3 weeks to be planted!

The Jungle gets a new roof

When we bought the Concrete Jungle, we were told by our property inspector that we had 3 years of life left on the roof.  Over the past 2 years we have been interviewing roofing companies and researching different types of roof materials.  FINALLY we found Claw Roofing that had competitive prices, great customer service, and they even recycled the shingles at ECCOpave.

We are VERY happy with the outcome of our new roof and the quality of the job they did.  No money was collected until we were completely satisfied with the job they did.  If you need a new roof, please tell them we sent you!

End of 2011 gardening season

We had such a productive summer in transforming our garden and getting a high yield of tasty veggies.  

A snapshot of what was harvested in one day in September.  

 Teaching our friends how to can and pickle.  After all, your harvest is only as good as your preservation methods!  

After the first major frost in October.  What a long ways the garden has come in 2 seasons!  We grew all of the veggies that we needed from July-October.  Tons of great salads, dried herbs for cooking and tea, frozen rhubarb, dehydrated and canned tomatoes, and preserves.  

Growth on the RV pad

All of our work finally started to pay off in late July when we were able to see some growth and harvest some greens. Here is our attempt at protecting our food from hail damage.

Growth of the herb spiral--lots of harvesting and drying has been done to these herbs.
Strawberries, red currants, and rhubarb--which made an amazing jam when honey was added :)
Crookneck squash--not nearly as productive as the zucchini, but a fun addition to the garden anyhow.

Zucchini plants, 2 blueberries, and a relocated gooseberry near the concrete.

One of 6 zucchini plants

Tree spinach 2 months after planting, it grew to over 5 feet tall by the end of the season!

Siberian Honeyberry bush that we bought in Claresholm, AB early July. It will grow to about 1 meter tall and wide.

The volunteer sunflowers grew much hardier than those I planted, but the bees did not seem to mind one way or another.

Harvest Time coming up next!

Kijiji Queen Wood Mulch

I do not take my nickname of "Kijiji Queen" lightly. I take a lot of pride on being able to get items inexpensively or free if they are reasonable driving distance from our house. Additionally, I LOVE to get rid of things on the site as well (remember all of the wood from our deck removals??). To add carbon matter and ground cover to our future food forest and beef up our outdoor compost bins, I began the search for wood mulch. Within a week or so, I found an arborist that would deliver 4-6 yards of mulch only for the cost of delivery (about $65).

Other than about 1.5 yards that friends took to use, we made use of all of the mulch. Here is a close-up of the mulch. It was steaming and already full of fungal growth--perfect for our pending food forest!

The future food forest looks a lot more polished and ready for some cherry trees.

Next up: Growth on our urban farm

Hot Tub Wicking Bed

After renting the concrete saw for the THIRD time (pity our neighbours!) we finally unearthed all of the blocks from the 4th bed. There was no better sound than the last block being lifted out!

Here is the 4th bed dug out:

After lining the bed with the bed with pond liner, I tried to convince Tim to fill the bed with water and make it into a hot tub instead of a garden bed. At 14' long and wide enough for 2 people, I thought it was a great idea.

Tim won this debate, and we began finishing the bed. Here is the weeping tile being laid:

A total of 200' of weeping tile was used in the 4 beds and garden swales. Next we added chunks of concrete, larger rocks and rock debris from a neighbours pile in the alley to hold the tile in place and to create the overflow area seen towards the bottom of the pic (above).

After weeping tile came the landscape fabric and 1 cubic meter of soil.

After MANY, MANY months of work, our four beds are done!!!

Summer garden update pics are to follow soon!

Woody Plants

It was time to make our yard a bit more permanent by planting some woody perennial plants. After ripping off the lower deck last year, we planted a currant and gooseberry along the south fence. This year after getting the gas lines marked in the backyard we had to change our plans of where we originally wanted to plant fruit trees. Here you can see where we planted 2 blueberry bushes with a cucumber in the middle. This is the space where our higher deck was last fall.

When there are sales mid to late season at any store in town, I have to scope them out. On one of my trips I got 2 other blueberry bushes at Zellers for $5 each and a golden elderberry, seen planted by our pallet composter in the alley along with a volunteer rhubarb and some raspberries.

This year was the first time our currant bush produced! We made the juice from the berries into a beautiful jam along with other fruit from our yard and alley: rhubarb, raspberry,& nanking cherry.