Hello fellow horticulture enthusiasts!
I joined several months ago, and am just getting around to introducing myself now. Over the past several years I have learned so much from reading posts on this forum, and I'm delighted to be able to join your group. Technically I am a backyard gardener-- but some days what I do feels closer to small-scale farming. My garden is in the Vancouver, B.C. area where we have cold wet winters and warm dry summers for the most part. Our house sits on 1/4 acre of fertile well-drained land, where we've been working on enriching the soil for 20 years. In addition to our yard I grow on several neighbouring properties, with dedicated seed-crops for sharing with our local seed library. Some of my current areas of focus are small-stature tomatoes that can be grown without much support, heat-tolerant lettuce, bush beans that are beautiful enough to use as front-of-border plants, half-runner snap beans (haven't found any yet), gherkins for pickling and fermenting, not-too-spicy-peppers, flowers that double as cover crops, and crops that can be grown strategically to provide shade for other plants. That last one has proved vital over the last few years, as our garden beds are in full-sun and we can go for weeks without rain in the summer.
Seed starting is also a year-round passion. A couple of new seeds that were gifted to me this year are Manitoba Black Half-Runner beans that were selected for purple pods (2015 seed that a friend had ordered from Thumbs Heath, but never got around to growing out), and Arctic Pot N' Patio tomato (a rare Canadian-bred cultivar from the 1990's that's being reintroduced to the seed trade by Common Sense Seeds). I'm really curious about each of those. And this summer I'm growing out F1 seeds from my very first tomato crosses, which is very exciting.
I joined several months ago, and am just getting around to introducing myself now. Over the past several years I have learned so much from reading posts on this forum, and I'm delighted to be able to join your group. Technically I am a backyard gardener-- but some days what I do feels closer to small-scale farming. My garden is in the Vancouver, B.C. area where we have cold wet winters and warm dry summers for the most part. Our house sits on 1/4 acre of fertile well-drained land, where we've been working on enriching the soil for 20 years. In addition to our yard I grow on several neighbouring properties, with dedicated seed-crops for sharing with our local seed library. Some of my current areas of focus are small-stature tomatoes that can be grown without much support, heat-tolerant lettuce, bush beans that are beautiful enough to use as front-of-border plants, half-runner snap beans (haven't found any yet), gherkins for pickling and fermenting, not-too-spicy-peppers, flowers that double as cover crops, and crops that can be grown strategically to provide shade for other plants. That last one has proved vital over the last few years, as our garden beds are in full-sun and we can go for weeks without rain in the summer.
Seed starting is also a year-round passion. A couple of new seeds that were gifted to me this year are Manitoba Black Half-Runner beans that were selected for purple pods (2015 seed that a friend had ordered from Thumbs Heath, but never got around to growing out), and Arctic Pot N' Patio tomato (a rare Canadian-bred cultivar from the 1990's that's being reintroduced to the seed trade by Common Sense Seeds). I'm really curious about each of those. And this summer I'm growing out F1 seeds from my very first tomato crosses, which is very exciting.