Through the Seasons in a Quadra Food Garden: Blog #1

By Valerie Barr

Intro to Blog Series

My partner Grant and I grow a healthy amount of our own food and share the excess garden produce with friends. We have two freezers to take the product from the garden and they are full most of the winter with last year’s crop. The seasonal cycle allows us to clear everything out of one freezer each year, with the second freezer being emptied hopefully the following Spring.

We have an orchard with apple, plum and sour cherry trees, as well as blueberries, raspberries and blackberries which we process into the freezer. This whole system of growing what we eat has taken decades to get to where we are today. It seems second nature to us now and we don’t think too much about how to manage the garden.

It takes time: we both enjoy what we like to do in the garden and we each choose to be responsible for certain vegetables. I thought you might like to understand our system, as we do it, with a weekly-ish blog entry as we progress through the season. We don’t do anything the right way, we do it our way and change something every year to adjust to our changing tastes and changing methods of how we grow different crops.

We start much of what we grow in the house in the early Spring, and then harden it off slowly depending on the variety. The hardened off plants, and directly sown seeds, are planted in the garden between late March and early June each year.

What I am Doing This Week: Sterilizing Planting Trays

After ordering seeds in January (it is not too late now), and buying planting mix, I am ready to sterilize the trays that I use to grow out the seed. That is a job I will start today (February 17th) mostly because it is sunny outside and I am happy to spend some time outdoors pruning the climbing roses.

You need to sterilize seeding containers so that bacteria or fungus do not get into the young seedlings and destroy them – i.e. damp off.  I have never had a problem with damp off, which is often caused by too moist and warm of an environment for the seedlings.

I first rinse the dirt off from last year, starting with the nursery trays that have large holes in the bottom. I also use waterproof trays under the holey ones so water is contained, since this is all done on a counter inside our house. Then I use a short (3.5 foot) plastic garbage can, on our patio, and put a few cups of bleach in a 2/3 full garbage can of water. Yes, I still use bleach to disinfect these trays and pots and this is the only application where I use bleach now. I can let them soak for 4 hours or longer depending on what else I am doing. I do not scrub them afterwards as by then they are clean enough. It is a passive way to sterilize the containers since I move them in and out of the water/ bleach solution over about a week instead of spending a few hours scrubbing everything at once.

Coming Up

The first seeds I will start are the onions and leeks, since they take a longer length of time to get large enough to plant outside. For the next entry I will explain how I set up the trays, what seeds we use for the onions and leeks, and explain our ways to store each variety.

It feels like Spring has just arrived.

Grant Hayden and Val Barr are happily retired to play in their garden as they like.  Val worked in horticulture for almost 45 years and started her first food garden at 18.  Grant grew up as a prairie farm-boy and his last occupation was in forestry.  He has planted thousands of trees and cut quite a few down as well.