Bolean Gardens

05/10/2024

What's blooming in your garden today? We've got Fall Crocus, wild strawberries, and a geranium not yet dead from the frost. Fall is indeed a magical time of year, eh?

30/09/2024

Minus one this morning. Yesterday was a blur of picking, chopping, and preserving. Not a bad haul for a couple of hicks up in the mountains, eh?

25/08/2024

We can't grow redwoods in Falkland (Lord knows we've tried), but we can learn about them. Here's another clip from one of my favourite American tree people:

17/08/2024

We are pleased to introduce Hummus, the newest addition to the menagerie at Bolean Gardens.

Hummus is a peafowl, born last night at 9:12 pm, weighing 66 grams, s*x unknown and completely irrelevant.

Welcome to the world, Hummus. Live long, and prosper.

16/08/2024

Just in case you didn't get enough cuteness in your life today - and on the off chance that you've been overloaded with gardening posts - this is one of our chickens. Her name is Opal, daughter of Carmen Marans. We don't know exactly who her father was, but we're pretty sure he was a handsome young Lavender Orpington named Merideth.

We thought Merideth was a girl for the longest time, gave him a girl's name and everything, but he turned out to be a boy. C'est la vie.

Opal, and her ancestors and descendants, provide eggs, meat, pest control, and fertility to our gardens. They improve the tilth, nutrient and moisture-holding capacity, and productivity of our sandy, rocky, terrible soil.

That being said, we have about 40 recently hatched chicks who will need names soon. If you've still reading this, feel free to comment with your favourite chicken names. Merci beaucoup.

10/08/2024

Today's bounty: fresh cut flowers, strawberries, and the first tomatoes of the year.

04/08/2024

Came across this gem of a post this morning:

Let’s talk about one of my favorite topics: “Failure Tolerance”
Y'all, we have GOT TO STOP beating ourselves up when we fail. It's not helpful in any way.

One of my top goals for this space is to NORMALIZE FAILURE.

I used to get so upset when I failed. 
I would make it mean all sorts of terrible things about myself…

“You’re so stupid”
“How could you have done that?”
“What were you thinking?”
“Other people wouldn't do that”

None of these self-deprecating thoughts were helpful. They just made me feel even more stressed and upset.

But I learned a better way…

I learned to embrace the reality of failure.
I learned to remove emotions from failure. 
I learned to see failure as neutral feedback.
I also learned to EXPECT failure. Here’s an example:

From past experience, I know that about ¼ to ⅓ of my plants will get eaten, destroyed by weather, succumb to pests or disease… the list goes on. There are a million ways plants can die 🤣 😳

Using this factual information, I work this into my planting plan now. I EXPECT that I will lose ⅓ of my plants, so I over plant by ⅓. 

If nothing goes wrong (which has never happened! Ha! Things always go wrong!) I will find myself with an overabundance of flowers, which is a delight.

But if (WHEN!) something goes wrong, I have a “back up plan”. 

All this to say:

Normalize failure

Expect failure

Neutralize failure

Plan for failure. 

I firmly believe that INCREASING OUR FAILURE TOLERANCE is the path to peace of mind and success.

03/08/2024

Wasps: some of the most beneficial creatures in the garden.

03/08/2024

Today's fresh cut beauties:

27/07/2024

That feeling when you try to take a picture of a crab spider but an enormous bumblebee lands on your hand... What do they call that in French?

10/07/2024

Well, the only thing hotter than the temperature today is this fantastic new Shuswap farmstand trail website. And guess who's at the end of the road?

https://shuswapgrown.ca/

ShuswapFarmstand TrailFind fruit, veggies, eggs, honey, flowers and organic chicken. 
Watch for the Shuswap Farmstand Trail signs throughout the Shuswap. View Map 1 Highland Meadows Farm Established in 2013 and situated at the base of the magical Mt. Ida in the fertile Salmon Valley, Highland Mead...

06/07/2024

Beat the heat this weekend with local strawberries and fabulous fresh cut flowers!

Did you know that keeping fresh flowers in your house will not actually lower air temperatures at all? But you'll feel a lot cooler anyway.

Follow this page for more excellent summer living tips... And have a great weekend.

30/06/2024

Here's a funny story with a happy ending for all you rainy-day wildlife habitat gardeners.

Ps: not my story, I stole it from the internet. I've been sickling tall grass in the rain all morning, and am far too tired and wet at the moment to tell my own story.

29/06/2024

Good morning all,

This weekend we've got beautiful fresh flowers, the last of the asparagus, and the first of the strawberries.

Hope you're all enjoying a great long weekend, full of friends, family, adventure, and relaxation.

And flowers. I hope you have a lot of flowers 🙂

29/06/2024

Vespula pensylvanica, aka Western Yellowjacket. This lovely native lady is literally a queen, caught in the act of accidentally pollinating (all pollination by animals is accidental) our figwort flowers. She's harvesting nectar to bring back to her tiny (so far) colony, which she will feed to her developing larvae.

As soon as the larvae pupate and hatch into adults, she'll be able to spend the rest of the summer living the good life, laying eggs and being fed, groomed, and pampered by her offspring.

There is a reason we don't ever have to worry about caterpillars eating the leaves of our fruit trees, or cabbage moths demolishing our broccoli, or incomplete pollination of our tomatoes, and she is it.

Long live the queen!

26/06/2024

If I was a spider, I think I'd want to be this spider:

23/06/2024

Ahh, Miss Kim, a lilac like no other. Later blooming than the more common French lilacs, just as drought tolerant, non-suckering, and incredibly fragrant. At this time of year, visitors walking past this plant invariably stop in their tracks, sniff the air, and ask, "What is that smell? Where is it coming from?"

These days properly scented plants are few and far between, as most plant breeders focus on flower size and colour. It's a shame really. Big flowers are great, colour is lovely, but it's the scent of flowers that soothes the souls of savage beasts like you and I.

What are some of your favourite scented plants?

22/06/2024

Good morning all,

We are pleased to report that neither the rain, nor the hail, nor the heat, nor the cold, nor the recently hatched swarms of black flies were enough to prevent us from harvesting a whackload of delightfully scented flowers for your enjoyment today.

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the last couple of seasons. We couldn't do this without you.

16/06/2024

Our newest peony is blooming today. This is 'Pastelegance' after a night of heavy rain.

15/06/2024

We managed to cut the flowers just before the rain this morning... I love it when a plan comes together!

11/06/2024

Pink pussytoes: pure pollinator paradise.

10/06/2024

"Woke up this morning,
New iris blooming.
Covered in little green beetles
What are they consuming?"

- Nazareth (unreleased)

03/06/2024

Ok everybody, time to fess up: what's the worst thing you've ever done to a peony?

I planted this one far too close (4 feet away) to a young White Fir in 1998. It thrived for about six years, but then the White Fir started to shade it out. I didn't want to prune the Fir, so I allowed it to basically smother the peony for maybe ten years.

Then one winter I was doing some construction and needed a place to dump an old 4x8 sheet of plywood. I figured I'd lay it on the snow under the Fir, so I wouldn't have to burn it and so it could maybe create some habitat for ants and earwigs and fungi and all those other beneficial organisms.

I totally forgot that there was a peony there, and the plywood ended up right on top of it.

Fast forward three years: today, while making a level place under the White Fir for a creepy concrete garden sculpture, I lifted up the plywood and beheld the peony. It's been in total darkness for three years. And all things considered, I think it looks pretty good.

01/06/2024

Good morning gardeners, stop by on Saturday or Sunday for a nice selection of local cut flowers. Fyi this will be the last time this year to experience the heavenly scent of Lily of the Valley...

Also this weekend our vegetable seedlings are 25% off. We still have a decent selection of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, broccoli, lettuce, and onions.

They say it's gonna get hot next week, time to get those veggies in the ground!

25/05/2024

Today's flowery offerings: Lily of the Valley, Lilacs, Bluebells, and the first of the early Peonies.