By Helen Chesnut, Times Colonist
Pick a spot - any spot in my garden. It's almost certain something will need doing there, and fairly urgently. That's just a fact of life when one person is attempting to manage a large garden.
There is an advantage to the situation. At every gardening session I can elect to work anywhere, and I often choose the prettiest or most fragrant location at the time.
That's why, on the Victoria Day weekend, I decided to spend a day in an area of the back garden where a longestablished Shogetsu (Myako) flowering cherry spread its long, horizontal limbs, dipping some of them into a stand of tall, self-sown, violet honesty (Lunaria, money plant) against the side fence. The flower-filled limbs also hovered over a neat row of cushion spurge (Euphorbia polychroma).
When it's in full bloom, I love standing under the flowering cherry tree and looking up into the fluffy mass of dangling white blossom. All this visual beauty was accompanied that day by the strong, clove-like scent of Korean spice viburnum blooming nearby.
Looking around from under this magical tree, I immediately spotted two villains needing to be challenged. The wretched Peruvian lily (Alstroemeria aurantiaca), despite being dug up many times, had resprouted through the wood anemones and daylilies. And sweet cicely had wandered again from its spot against a snake fence into a neighbouring geranium planting. More digging.
A rectangular plot adjacent to the flowering cherry tree had already been planted at one end with potatoes, and sweet peas against a length of wire fencing. Nasturtiums edge that end of the plot. To complete the planting, I dug compost and natural-source fertilizer into the soil, sowed canary vine seeds along a similar length of wire fencing at the opposite end, and filled the rest of the bed with cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower transplants.
It was a day well spent, amid flowers and fragrance, dabbling in a bit of trouble shooting and making another worthwhile down payment on floral beauty and fine food.
A twisted tale of cauliflower. At the most recent potluck gathering in my home, my friend Daphne brought a dish of lightly steamed cauliflower floret clusters topped with a white sauce deliciously flavoured with a little sharp cheddar. The cauliflower was grown at a local farm and sold at the Saturday morning market.
The following Saturday, I bought one of the cauliflower heads at the same farm's table and asked what variety it was. The grower identified the large, beautiful heads as Snow Crown, one of the earliest and most dependable cauliflower varieties. It is exceptionally cold tolerant but not recommended as far as I know for overwintering. This grower planted Snow Crown in her large greenhouse last September.
Snow Crown was for years a constant, reliable cauliflower in my garden, but over the years I'd drifted away to other varieties. Now I'm quite intrigued by the gorgeous May heads at the market. I've acquired seeds (West Coast Seeds) and will sow some indoors soon for transplanting next month and a fall crop.
As an experiment, I'll make another indoor sowing in July for transplanting into a cold frame in September, just to see what happens. A lot will depend on the weather this winter. In a good year, a January indoor sowing and March transplanting of early varieties will yield late spring and early summer crops of cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower.
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