Over the winter, you need to plan your garden and order your seeds. I suggest getting seeds on line, rather than buying them at the hardware store because you will have a much greater variety and a higher quality of seeds to choose from. Also, by growing heirloom and heritage varieties, not only will you have tastier produce, you’ll be playing an important role in maintaining genetic biodiversity. My favourite sites are Jardins d’écoumene and The Cottage Gardner. They are quite local (Laurentians and Ontario) and specialize in heirloom and heritage seed stock. Each vegetable has a different ideal planting date, maturity times and space requirements. The more closely you respect these guidlines, the more successful and productive your garden will be. This information usually can be found directly on the seed packet according to the last frost date, which in Montreal is the 22nd of May. The spacing, timing and requirements for each vegetable is spelled also out per vegetable in the “vegetables” section of our website. Once you have chosen what kinds of vegetables you want to plant, you need to make a diagram of your garden and a calendar of planting dates and harvest times. Divide up your garden plan in to square feet of space. You can then block off square foot sections of your garden per vegetable you want to grow. Radishes for example: On the seed packet, it tells you to thin to 3” between plants and to plant 3 weeks before the last frost date and that they take 4 weeks to mature. In the intensive gardening system, this means that you plant the seeds 3” apart in every direction – no rows. This means you can fit 16 plants per square foot of garden space. With this information, you mark on your calendar: “plant radishes May 1st” and “Harvest radishes June 1st”. Since radishes grow so quickly, you can fit in another planting of radishes June 1st, and harvest them July 1st before it gets too hot. In your garden plan, block off the number of square feet you want for the amount of radishes you will eat at one time. If you will not eat more than 16 radishes at once, don’t plant more than one square foot of radishes. For a much more in depth discussion about the ins and outs of each vegetable, read “Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholemew, “The Organic Grower” by Eliot Coleman or “Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on ¼ Acre” by Brett L. Markham

I suggest you get started on this right away! Spring is a busy time in the garden. If your planting bed is ready in the fall, you will be able to get an earlier start on the season. The possibilities here are endless, so I will focus on our main vegetable garden format and explain its advantages. Our “grocery garden” is about 100 square feet. 45 sq ft are for vegetables. The rest make up a path lined with flowers and herbs. This is enough space to supply two people with plenty of vegetables throughout the summer I have mentioned before, but it bears mentioning again: Herbs and flowers are essential for a healthy garden ecosystem. You need to make an environment that good bugs want to be in for them to do the work in your garden for you. Choosing a location: Pick whichever spot is the sunniest. Vegetables need a lot of sun, especially tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, beans. 6 hours a day is a minimum. Pick a spot that has easy access to water and that is high traffic. If your garden is inconvenient, you will ignore it and it will not produce for you. Beyond that, your imagination is the only limitation. Only have vertical space? Grow climbing plants. Only have a balcony? Build a box and put a garden on it. Only have a windowsill? Make a window box and stuff it with herbs and greens and it will reward you with beautiful fresh salads. Since we are building small, but efficient gardens, we can afford to start with ideal soil from the get go, rather than trying to fix whatever existing soil available to us. To do this we mix in equal parts: black earth, vermiculite and peat moss for water retention and drainage and compost for organic matter, elemental nutrients and microbial life. If you are gardening on concrete, you need to dig around and find a couple of earthworms to add as well. 1. Find North. Your garden is directional. The tall plants need to go in the back (north side) so they don’t shade out the rest of the garden 2. Build two 10’ long raised beds out of 2” x 8” lumber. One 1.5’ wide and the other 3 feet wide separated by a 3 foot path 3. Put down a thick layer of wet newspaper covering the entire garden. This will kill the grass and weeds so they don’t come up through your garden. 4. Fill the boxes with your soil mix. Equal parts vermiculite, peat moss, compost and black earth. *soil health is imperative. This is the heart and soul of your garden. For a happy healthy garden you absolutely need top quality soil fertility and the soil fertility needs to be maintained through out the year. If your soil is not doing well, your plants will not do well. For a more in depth discussion of soil fertility please read the blog entry “Feed the soil, not the plants”* 5. Add mounds of dirt on either side of your path to plant the flowers and herbs in. 6. Add mulch (at least 3” thick) as a foot path down the middle at least 18” wide 7. Put up a trellis on the north side of the narrow bed to accommodate your climbing veggies. Build a frame out of wood, or steel conduit 6-7’ high the length of the garden and string up trellis netting you can get most easily on ebay. 8. Put up a 2.5’ fence around the entire garden to keep pesky animals out. It can be chicken wire or animal netting with rebar for structure. Whatever you choose as fencing needs to let the light through so you don’t shade out your plants in the front row 9. Sow Dwarf white clover, or New Zealand white clover as a cover crop over both beds to prevent nutrient leaching over the winter, and to provide nutrients and organic matter when turned under in the spring. This is part of your soil fertility program. It is also referred to as green manure.

Traditional row gardening uses agricultural techniques developed for ease of harvesting with farm machinery. In a home vegetable garden we have no use for such techniques, and the spaces between rows of vegetables meant for a tractor wheels are a liability and a waste not only of space, but time and resources spent weeding, watering and caring for this non-productive space. Our intensive gardening method uses raised beds no more than 4 feet wide (if you have access to both sides or no more than 2.5 feet wide if not) and plants are spaced as close together as the mature plant size will allow. This technique eliminates that space used for rows between vegetables and allows you to plant for the same yield as a traditional row garden in just 20% of the space, and therefore using a fraction of the resources. Deep organic gardening means you become a steward of your land. Instead of controlling different aspects of your ecosystem (fungus, parasites) you encourage a healthy and complete ecosystem that controls itself. Practically speaking this means NO pesticides, fungicides or herbicides regardless of whether their origins are chemical or biological. Example: if you use a product to wipe out all of the aphids from your garden, you will starve the ladybugs, which are the aphid’s natural predators and they will leave your garden for somewhere else where they can find more food. Once the ladybugs are gone, and your product washes away, the aphids will come back 10 fold because your garden is a predator-free space for the aphids to roam. To create a balanced ecosystem, you need to start with a healthy, fertile soil. This soil has to have good drainage, good water retention, lots of organic matter, a pH close to 6.5 and lots of the elements that plants use as their building blocks – nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. With a healthy soil, you have healthy plants. Healthy plants are much more resistant to pests and disease. With the addition of herbs and flowers to attract beneficial insects as pollinators and predators, lots of sun and consistent watering and voila! You have a beautiful vegetable garden to call your own. Small space means you can do this wherever you have enough sun, and access to water: In your front yard, on your balcony, up your spiral staircase or walk up, on your rooftop. I recommend a planting depth of 10” if you are on concrete and make sure you have good drainage if you are planting in containers. In Montreal we have a relatively short growing season. To get the most out of your vegetable garden you need to choose quick growing, highly productive varieties, start seedlings and continually replant them as you harvest to make the most of the space that you have. Details on this to follow, it suffices to say that Santropol Roulant produced well over 1 tonne of vegetables this summer on a 1000 sq ft rooftop and in containers at the “edible campus” at McGill.

1. Great taste:

• you get to choose varieties for their taste, aesthetics and variety rather than transportability, shelf life and compatibility with farming machinery.
• you get to pick them when they are fully mature rather than veggies maturing in the back of a truck, and eat them when they are fresh-picked
• I can’t emphasize enough: taste-wise there is NO COMPARISON between vegetables in a supermarket, and vegetables picked that day from your garden.

2. Nutrition:

• vegetables start to lose their nutritional value as soon as they are picked, so the sooner you can eat them the more they are doing for you.
• you are guaranteed not to have any chemical residues from fertilizers, pesticides etc.
• you are encouraged to eat more fresh veggies because they are growing in your garden

3. Environmental impact

• your “zero kilometer diet” eliminates fuel consumption because your aren’t using transport trucks or heavy farm equipment
• you aren’t contributing to pollution through potash runoff, or chemical products
• increasing biodiversity. You are encouraging healthy ecosystems in your environment by providing food and habitat for insects and birds and preserving heirloom and heritage varieties of flowers, fruits and vegetables.
• there is an economy of resources (water, soil, amendments) because of the small space required for intensive gardening for the same yield as a traditional row garden.
• You will be better equipped to deal with the apocalypse because you will know how to produce your own food. (in all seriousness, food security is a great reason for urban agriculture)

I am having quite a time trying to find a good way around buying fertilizer for our gardens while keeping our soil fertile and healthy in the city! I am determined to find a way to return to a simpler brand of farming that does not use any kind of store-bought products. This includes pesticides and fertilizers, organic or not. The idea is to encourage a healthy ecosystem that takes care of itself with minimal intervention by the grower. Healthy soil begets healthy plants, which then resist disease and pests of all kinds. This, in addition to some best practices such as companion planting, regular weeding and grounds clean up of dead or damaged leaves and regular watering should encourage a healthy ecosystem that will sustain itself and produce beautiful vegetables. These practices were a matter of course for growers everywhere until the early 1900s, but since the industrial revolution we have been taught not to trust nature (or ourselves for that matter) and trained to buy products to fix everything. Learning how to have a top rate soil composition without store bought amendments in the city has been a real challenge and a rather steep learning curve. (All of my cucumbers are round!) I would like to share my progress so far. http://www.mofga.org/Publications/MaineOrganicFarmerGardener/Fall2009/OrganicMatter/tabid/1257/Default.aspx This article explains much better than I can exactly what a healthy soil consists of, and how to achieve it, but to summarize briefly: Your vegetable garden’s soil needs to have:

• pH 6 – 6.5
• lots of available nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium (NPK)
• an appropriate amount of organic matter (around 5%)
• a large variety of trace elements (boron, calcium, magnesium etc.)
• good aeration
• good water retention

Which might look like is this: Ok, I haven’t yet found a good way around buying vermiculite or perlite and peat moss or cohir (coconut fibers) for aeration and water retention… So: ¼ peat moss or cohir ¼ vermiculite or perlite ¼ soil ¼ compost* *But the compost needs to be made up of a large variety of sources: garden and kitchen waste (for P), wood ash (for K), charcoal (for good soil structure and a home for bacteria and microbes that do all of the heavy lifting in this whole ‘lifecycle’ business), poultry and horse manure (for N), and seaweed (highest source of micro and macro-nutrients). Apparently urine is very good source of N, P and K and readily available to boot. So go pee on your compost pile (but maybe under the cover of darkness…) We get compost from the city (you can too – through Compost Montreal www.compostmontreal.com), and have the results of a soil analysis to let us know exactly how much of each element we have. Now I just have to learn how to read it! Hopefully it will be well balanced, because honestly until we get out to our (at this point hypothetical) 2 – 5 acre hobby farm just outside the city, most of these ingredients are going to be hard to come by.

Your absolute best defence against pests in your garden is to build an army of beneficial insects to protect your vegetables. To acomplish this, you need to take advantage of the benefits of companion planting – certain plants can benefit others when planted next to, or close to one another.

www.companionplanting.net

Your high-density vegetable garden automatically takes advantage of these principals since all of the plants are already clost to one another!

Next you need to plant lots of flowers and herbs – ideally ones that the beneficial insects know and love. Insects such as butterflies and bees aid greatly in pollenating your vegetable plants for maximal yeild, and a whole host of other insects like lady bugs, tiger beetles, pirate bugs, ground beetles and soldier bugs that hunt and kill pesky pests such as aphids, slugs, whitefly, cabbage worms, caterpillars and even mosquitos. Be sure to provide decorative stones or logs and permanent garden beds for these beneficial insects to set up shop.

wildaboutgardening.org
farmerfred.com

Yet another benefit of organic gardening is this happy and healthy ecosystem in your garden. Even the least toxic chemicals can’t distinguish between the good and bad bugs, and will set you on a self-perpetuating downward spiral of pest problems. Yikes!

Urban Seedling’s organic vegetable gardens will be featured in the next issue of Montreal en Santé magazine! Read about us in clinics, hospital, health food stores and yoga studios starting in April 2011.

cmsworldmedia.com
yudu.com

The McGill University Health Centre is very pleased to endorse Montreal’s first bilingual health magazine: Montreal en sante, published by CMS World Media. This project will provide Montrealers, including the more than 1 million patients who pass through the doors of the MUHC every year, with important health and wellness information.

Montreal en sante will provide readers with wide-ranging health and wellness information; everything from advice on how to avoid the flu, to how to order a healthy lunch during a business meeting and how to prepare for heart by-pass surgery. Every issue of Montreal en sante will also include a special supplement focused on the innovative clinical care, research and teaching taking place at the McGill University Health Centre, in addition to the latest news of the highly anticipated redevelopment project