basil in the garden

I'm harvesting lots and lots of genovese basil from the garden these days!

In this photo, such healthy looking transplants were waiting for me in the greenhouse this May.
I start a lot of these in the spring. They're a favourite at the Farmer's Market and I sell tons of transplants to folks like me who want to grow their own basil and fulfill their dreams of lots of delicious summer-time pesto.

Here I am transplanting some of those baby basils from their pots into the outdoor growing bed in my garden. I start the seeds in trays and then transplant them to their own pots when they have their first true leaves and are about an inch tall. They grow on in these pots in the seed starting greenhouse until it's warm enough to plant them outside.

When I have all the little plants transferred from their greenhouse pots to the soil, I give them some good waterings with a kelp tea. I water them with kelp tea occasionally all summer long....it really seems to make them grow faster and greener. At planting time I also add some complete organic fertilizer that I mix up myself (for basil, I add more seed meal for nitrogen and less bone meal). It's the same mix I use for spinach because I'm wanting to encourage the green growth with nitrogen and want to discourage flowering (and since the bone meal's phosphorous content encourages flowering, I want to give less of that to the basil)......for more on complete organic fertilizer, see: this post

Looking lovely, all planted, topped up with compost and hoops covered with plastic to try to make our springtime this year a little warmer for Basil, who likes it hot.

....but....not only was the beginning of June too cold in my garden for outdoor grown basil, the earwigs got to it and munched away on the tender new growth... check it out: basil heartbreak! Yellowy from the cold (because I was impatient and thought I could take the plastic off before it was really time)...and sad and ragged from earwig munching....
and this...hrrrummph, not very appetizing at all! So I decided to put the plastic back on the hoops and just wait and see.....





....and my hope-fullness was rewarded! It finally warmed up and the earwigs just...went away! I did nothing. I wonder what happened in the basil patch that I don't know about that made my hopes and dreams come true. Sometimes it's all such a mystery.
So now the plastic is off for easy access when harvesting and it's happily growing like crazy!I just can't get enough of the look of these beautiful green basil tips...
This photo above shows where the tip has already been harvested a couple weeks ago (brown stubby thing) and where I'm harvesting another tip and where the new shoot is beginning to develop, for harvesting in a couple weeks!....my basil plants get gloriously bushy if I continue to pinch the tips like this...long ago, when I first grew basil, I didn't understand how important it is for production to keep pinching the tips. I've since learned that it inspires the plant to grow more green shoots as it tries to produce seed (it's ultimate goal)...but we want the green so...never let it do what it's doing below....sending out a flower shoot!! oh. oh. Well...some in the garden are ok, I suppose, since the bees love them but I want the plants to make more leaves so I can make more pesto...and also, the bigger flower buds give the basil a bitter taste (don't want that!).....Below, some basil all bagged up in 2 oz. bags waiting to be delivered to Happy Tides Health Food store so some of the folks who live here and aren't growing their own can make some pesto too.....yum yum!

another lily bouquet

This lily is called "Scheherazade". I wonder how it got it's name? Perhaps to give people like me the idea that we shouldn't cut it? ooops....but it's such a beautiful flower and makes a gorgeous wildly natural looking bouquet. I made this one a couple days ago. Perhaps next year I shall leave them alone, let them bloom on and see what story they have to tell :-)

Tumbler tomatoes in containers, part 2

This is the time of summer when container grown tomato plants will start to go yellow and look really sad if they aren't getting enough of the nutrients and minerals they need to be healthy and produce delicious fruit. Folks who grow the Tumbler tomato plants I sell in the spring ask me about what I do to provide the plants with the nourishment they need, so......
......here's what I do:
I start by mixing up a potting soil (in my wheelbarrow) that's made of SeaSoil potting mix (from Home Hardware on Mayne Island) some of my compost and some shredded coco coir (for water retention). I fill my growing container with the potting soil mix and then I add about a cup full of complete organic fertilizer and mix it all up and moisten. Then I make a hole and plant the seedling in the hole with some earthworm castings...water...top up with potting soil and lightly press down the soil...that will give the little plant a good start!

The greenhouse Tumblers, just after planting up in their summer growing pots, end of April/beginning of May. I wait 'til end of May/beginning of June to plant my outdoor pots.

Complete organic fertilizer is a mixture of natural ingredients that supply a combination of nitrogen, phosporous and potassium, plus a few other goodies that plants like. I buy these ingredients in bulk and store them in metal bins in the garden. In this photo: bags of alfalfa meal, kelp meal, soft rock phosphate. If you live on Mayne Island and go into Victoria from time to time, 2 good sources of ingredients are Buckerfield's on Keating Cross and Borden Mercantile near Quadra and Mackenzie. Many farm supply stores carry these ingredients.

These are the metal garbage cans I use for storing my complete organic fertilizer ingredients and the finished mix.

The basic recipe I follow:
for nitrogen: 4 parts seed meal (canola, alfalfa)
for phosphorous: 1/2 part soft rock phosphate or bone meal
for potassium: 1/2 part kelp meal or sometimes a mix of kelp meal and greensand
for calcium: 1/2 part dolomite lime and wood ash combined
I often add a little extra bone meal to the mix when making this for tomatoes because I read somewhere that phosphorous encourages the plant to produce more flowers and so therefore more fruit...and I've noticed, it really seems to work!

I find that the complete organic fertilizer breaks down in time to continue providing nourishment to the plant after the compost in the pot has been depleted, usually beginning of July. As the plant starts to set and ripen lots of fruit, sometime in July, I like to start watering it with a seaweed tea. This has worked wonderfully for me and my tumbler tomato plants produce loads and loads of delicious red jewels.

There are liquid seaweed concentrates available to buy and I basically make a tea with them by mixing a small amount with water in a watering can....these are 2 that I use....Home Hardware's garden centre on Mayne is now carrying some of these.
But eventually, I'd like to make my own concentrates for watering and feeding.

These are some old wine barrels we've set up to collect rain water from a shed roof. I'm planning to steep all sorts of good things in them to create some lovely homemade feeds for my container plants while I water them....I hope to make concentrates of nettles, comfrey, seaweed, horsetail, manure, compost, etc...but that is another story for another day....now I must be off to water my Tumblers with kelp infusion and harvest some more for dinner!