A Year on The Garden Path
This is a post about A Year on The Garden Path by Carolyn Herriot, Harbour Publishing, 2005
This book is broken up into months which is nice because pruning, planting, harvesting and maintaining revolves around timing and seasonality. It's nice to have some tips about some important activities every month to structure your gardening. Living with the seasons and appreciating the winter for it's slowness, the spring for it's hope and potential, the summer for its chaos, the autumn for it's bounty and grounding, is one of the beautiful things I picked up at Linnaea Farm. Much of our lives are divorced from seasonality, even though in reality, it affects us profoundly.
I also enjoyed this book for Herriot's wisdom about ornamentals, even though I typically ignore landscaping plants in favour of the more multifunctional. Herriot brings in the classic gardening club material and blends it with the joys of growing your own food. Our landscapes could transform into multifunctional spaces that provide food, building materials, medicine, wildlife habitat, solace, shelter, as well as beauty and enjoyment.
She lives on the coast, so some of the seasonality and plant selections need to be run past your own climatic zones, if you live in a more continental environment. She gives lots of plant and variety suggestions, and you can also look up many plants on www.pfaf.org (one of my favourite plant web references) for additional attributes.
She also has some great tips about tools, greenhouses, recipes, soil mixes, fertility, seed selection, transplanting and more. A worthwhile look for home gardeners, especially for those people that are avid flower gardeners, but are still on the fence about growing food in their yards.
This book is broken up into months which is nice because pruning, planting, harvesting and maintaining revolves around timing and seasonality. It's nice to have some tips about some important activities every month to structure your gardening. Living with the seasons and appreciating the winter for it's slowness, the spring for it's hope and potential, the summer for its chaos, the autumn for it's bounty and grounding, is one of the beautiful things I picked up at Linnaea Farm. Much of our lives are divorced from seasonality, even though in reality, it affects us profoundly.
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| September in Food Forest at COTR, Creston, BC |
I also enjoyed this book for Herriot's wisdom about ornamentals, even though I typically ignore landscaping plants in favour of the more multifunctional. Herriot brings in the classic gardening club material and blends it with the joys of growing your own food. Our landscapes could transform into multifunctional spaces that provide food, building materials, medicine, wildlife habitat, solace, shelter, as well as beauty and enjoyment.
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| Apples ripening in late July, BC |
She lives on the coast, so some of the seasonality and plant selections need to be run past your own climatic zones, if you live in a more continental environment. She gives lots of plant and variety suggestions, and you can also look up many plants on www.pfaf.org (one of my favourite plant web references) for additional attributes.
She also has some great tips about tools, greenhouses, recipes, soil mixes, fertility, seed selection, transplanting and more. A worthwhile look for home gardeners, especially for those people that are avid flower gardeners, but are still on the fence about growing food in their yards.
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| Lonicera caerula, Clear Sky Food Forest, Fort Steele, BC |
Happy Spring!
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