remembering summer and getting ready for another one!

February's almost over and very soon, there'll be less time in my days for desk and paper work.  In a little more than a week it'll be March!

In 2013, I only made 2 posts on this blog, whoa!!....and I learned that when I suddenly stop posting on my blog, some of the folks who follow regularly will worry and think that perhaps I've quit gardening or even that I'm not well.  oops! not so good.  Last year, I had to devote my time to the real nitty gritty of what needs to be done in the garden to make it what I want it to be...

......and what it seems to want to be too!  There was a lot of figuring out to do.

  Looks like I didn't have time to take many photos either since when I went back to look in my albums, I found a very small and incomplete collection. 

Anyway, in case you'd like to see, here are a few things that went on at the garden last year:

Shoots, of course!  Lots and lots of shoots!

sunflower shoots on their shelves, ready for harvesting

pails of pea seed soaking before planting

Emily planting up a sea of pea shoot grow trays in the greenhouse

endless harvesting and packaging!  We really produced a whole lot of these last year.

...and I worked on beautiful flowers for summer-time weddings on Mayne Island too

bouquets, boutonnieres and corsages for 

Amanda and Nathan's wedding at Ag Hall, Mayne Island.

photos: Jean Cueta 

wedding table arrangements in process at the garden

and specially ordered flower arrangements.....

made with flowers from my garden and delivered
to welcome some Mayne Islanders back home

a beautiful peony, pea vine and lady's mantle  'thank you'  bouquet from someone in Victoria to someone on Mayne Island.
That's Sara holding it, she's one of the wwoofers who came to experience life in the garden last summer.
She's from Tokyo. 

Clementine also 'wwoofed' in the garden last summer.  She's from Brittany, France and here she's making mayonnaise in the garden kitchen.

....and lots of other growing things.....

a big potato crop growing in big pots 

yummy food for us too:  new potatoes with dill and garlic chives

flavourful and juicy cherry tomatoes in many different colours, one of my favourite summer-time things to grow...and to eat!

Our new pup's first summer in the garden: what an adventure. Here I'm teaching her how to lie beside the parsley patch, instead of on top of it (which she prefers).

coming home on the ferry after a trip to town to make deliveries and get supplies....a beautiful commute

So in January, I created a new Facebook page, just for Christina's Garden....you can follow along there, if you don't find much here.  It's way easier to do quick posts there when I'm busy...but I do hope to be here more often this year too.  
We're designing a new website and blog with a shop too!!  Exciting! It might take forever tho!  When looking around my blog stats a while ago, I saw that this post on my golden hops vine, (from almost exactly three years ago) is the most visited post on my blog, thousands of visits (amazing).  This post  and  this post  both on the tumbler cherry tomatoes that I sell as plants to other home gardeners were a close second place  and this post on how I grow pea shoots in the winter-time is third.  This post on mouse melons was fourth.....I'm not sure what all this means but I suppose it's sort of interesting.

So the ornamental cherry tree outside our house is blooming right now and I sure do know what that means:  seed starting time for the coming summer season is NOW!