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2026 Backyard Garden Update
It has been quite awhile since Alison and I shared updates on our garden projects. Alison has stepped away from her balcony garden for now, but my backyard garden has continued to evolve and grow – pun intended! This year brought a mix of weather challenges, practical lessons, and a few successes that I’m excited to share as this growing season comes to a close. 2026 garden weather challenges The season started off in an interesting way as spring stayed stubbornly cold, delaying seed starting far longer than usual. Then, almost overnight, temperatures jumped, making it difficult for cool‑season crops like peas to get established. It was also quite a…
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Backyard garden: Spring 2024 update
This year my backyard garden is going to look a little different. In past years I’ve focused on growing vegetables, with various levels of success. But last year I so enjoyed going to properties with cut flower gardens and decided I wanted to try it for myself! There’s something so calming and uplifting about a bright bunch of flowers and I’m hoping to be successful enough to have lots of flowers to share. I had already been rolling this idea around in my mind, and then saw a post not long ago about how store-bought flowers can be less than optimal for the environment. I had never thought about it…
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Backyard garden: 2023 season update
As the seasons (abruptly, here on the southwest coast of BC!) change, it’s a good time to look back on the gardening season that was. As it’s all too easy to forget the nuances of the year, it’s helpful to make notes about what worked, what didn’t, and what could be changed up for next year! All in all I’d have to say it was a pretty good year, see below for highlights! Read along about past years here. Best thing made with garden produce (so far) Have you ever heard of a tomato mill or strainer? I hadn’t until a couple of years ago but then I discovered this…
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2022 Backyard Garden Update
Backyard garden background As I had posted in my 2022 backyard garden kick off post – we had realized that our garden wasn’t producing well in the past couple of years and weren’t sure why. To understand what was wrong and get back into good production, we had a consulting session with Seed and Nourish and found out where we had likely been going wrong – and so made some changes! We purchased a load of organic soil and spread a few inches onto each of our garden beds, and made sure we had fertilizer and have been applying it at regular intervals to support growth. I’ve also been watering…
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Backyard Garden: Digging in to 2022
Backyard Garden Plan Late last year my husband and I decided we would not be doing a large vegetable garden in 2022 in order to focus on some of our projects, such as (finally) putting up our greenhouse. However, given another in a series of world events that may result in food scarcity and higher food prices we decided we should make our garden even bigger and more productive instead! Nothing like making plans and sticking to them 😉 See past posts about our garden here! In the past couple of years we had been experiencing reduced yields – for example in our first year we had way too many…
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Backyard Garden: Surviving the Weather
Well, it’s been awhile since the last backyard garden update and a lot has happened this season! To set the stage for those who don’t live on the southwest coast of British Columbia: it’s been a wild year. We had a cold spring that ran quite late, which changed almost like the flip of a switch to a couple of very warm spells including a record-breaking heat wave that went above 40 C. That hasn’t happened here since recordkeeping began and the effect on the whole province has been profound. As you can imagine, the plants in the garden have reacted in varying ways – read on to find out…
