The Great Guerilla Bean Giveaway
April 21, 2011 – 6:00 am
The folks at SeedLiving are celebrating International Seed Day (April 26) by lending you varieties of rare, heirloom, organic beans to grow this summer. The seed sale will take place in Calgary on Saturday, April 23 – noon to 3pm.
This is the deal. Select some seeds, grow the beans (clean and organic please, no pesticides, chemicals or fertilizers), harvest some for yourself and return the rest back to the library. Growing and saving rare seeds is all about biodiversity to help ensure a healthy growing environment that is in turn more resistant to weed, disease and insect attacks. It’s also about flavour, aesthetics and choice.
The oldest variety offered from the SeedLiving bean library is 200 years old. And get a load of these names – Black Valentine, Cherokee Trail, Dragon’s Tongue, Lazy Housewife, Rattlesnake Snap, Speckled Cranberry and Sultan’s Golden.
So head to Inglewood for the event, find the Nellie Breen Playground and give at least a 25 cent donation for each packet you pick.
They’re Back
March 19, 2011 – 12:43 pmYup, the Canada Geese are back in town and are starting to wake me up in the morning with their noisy fly-bys. Spring can’t be too far behind.
Summer Visit to Winter Gardens – Flagstaff
February 8, 2011 – 9:00 amThis city garden is the place where early settlers to Melbourne came to view the harbour and chat – in the 1840s.
Signal flags sent up the flagpole or flagstaff were the message system of the day between the harbour the the town.
The hill has also been home to a meteorological station and then a recreation site. As a public garden, it’s a pretty little area even in the winter, when I was visiting last summer. The borders were mature and heavily planted – I was amazed at how lush they were. The winter foliage was healthy and there was an interesting selection of late flowering perennials. And like many of Melbourne’s garden parks, Flagstaff was full of families, out for a stroll and shoppers cutting though to get to the local market.
