Novice gardeners and those new to gardening in our coastal climate will do well to acquire a copy of the West Coast Seeds Gardening Guide, a catalogue filled with essential information on growing vegetables, herbs and flowers. This source has emphasized year-round gardening organically for 30 years, and has added new varieties for 2014.
New herb and flower planting charts have been added to the established vegetable one. There is detailed growing and harvesting information for each vegetable.
Among featured new listings is the fully double Snow Puff cosmos, one of the award-winning French “Double Click” series. New also is Peppermint Swiss chard with dark green, savoyed leaves atop striking pink and white stems.
A page of Patio Picks for the Urban Gardener features the multicoloured Bright Lights chard, short-rooted carrots, the new Mascotte bush bean, a dwarf dill, Patio Snacker cucumber, and Red Robin, a dwarf cherry tomato that has done well for me in pots.
More new listings in the 2014 WCS catalogue:
• Taunus, a cylindrical beet that has been highly productive in my garden in recent years.
• Aspabroc, a fast-producing baby broccolini with small heads and an asparagus-like stem.
• Seed collections of patio vegetables, heirloom sweet peas, sunflowers, and another for a children’s garden of flowers and vegetables.
• Markant endive is the best I’ve grown for harvesting in the cold, dark conditions of late autumn and winter.
• Kale fanciers will find a tantalizing 12-variety selection that includes the new Winter Red, a tender, super cold-hardy Red Russian type with early flower bud clusters. New also are Red Ursa, a form that combines the broadleaf frills of Siberian kale with the colour of Red Russian, and a beautiful blue-green and white Portugese kale called Beira Tronchuda.
• Tom Thumb is a thickly packed miniature butterhead lettuce that produces quickly and is ideal for containers and small garden spaces. This heirloom lettuce delivers an astonishing abundance of leafage in a very tiny package. Pair it with Little Gem, an equally tiny but productive miniature romaine. Salad lovers will find two pages of salad mixes to suit all seasons and individual taste preferences.
• Of all the onions I grew last year, Kelsae grown from WCS seeds produced the most uniformly large, sweet and juicy bulbs. This is by far my most reliably productive onion.
• Fizzy Fruit Salad is a wonderfully winter-hardy, frilly-petalled pansy in dramatic, velvety colours, in bloom now in a shallow, bowl-shaped planter on my patio.
• Informational articles on controls for common pests, planting seeds, mason bees, microgreens, fertilizers, seed storage and much more make this publication as much a gardening guide as it is a catalogue of seeds suited for our climate.
Go to westcoastseeds.com to order a catalogue (click on Catalogue at the bottom of the home page) and/or get a list of retail outlets (click on Retail Partners) that sell their seeds.
Getting organized. Before purchasing seeds, make an inventory of leftover seeds from previous years. I list all the seeds I have on hand in a garden notebook, by the month of their first seeding. The seeds are then filed in envelopes labelled by the seeding month. As some seeds are sown, they are replaced in the month of their next seeding. For example, I sow carrots and beets, bok choy and daikon radish outdoors in March or early April, and again at the beginning of July.
As you acquire new seeds this year, mark “2014” on the package, to keep track of their age. Most seeds, kept in a uniformly cool (ideally 4 to 10 C), dry place, will stay in good viable condition for about three years. Exceptions are onion, leek, parsnip and corn seeds, which usually give good germination for only two successive years. Cabbage-family seeds, beets, chard, squash and pumpkins last four to five years. Cucumber, endive and melon seeds last five to six years.
GARDEN EVENTS
VRS meeting. Rhododendron Society meets Monday at 7:30 p.m. at the Garth Homer Centre, 813 Darwin Ave., to hear John Lucas speak about the gardens of Oak Bay. Visitors welcome.
Flower arrangers. The Victoria Flower Arrangers Guild meets Tuesday, 7 to 9:30 p.m. at the Garth Homer Centre for a presentation on the upcoming 2014 Christmas show.
