Awaiting the arrival of the Dandelions

With spring on its way, I start to look forward with excitement for the first plants to appear in my neighborhood. On my regular (but solitary, given social distancing) walks through my garden gate and into Massey Park, the snows have gone, the grass is greening, and the migratory waterfowl and songbirds are out in abundance.

I’ll be looking for dandelions, but they’re not up yet. Give it another week or so and we’ll start to see a lot of changes. The pretty yellow flowers will appear here and there, almost by surprise, and I’ll be picking couple of handfuls of these flowers where no killer sprays have been used.

The flowers are edible, medicinal, and bursting with Vitamin C. Peel away the tendrils under the flowers and wash in cold water. Dip them in a runny pancake batter and fry in oil for 3 minutes. Eat as appetizers or as toppers on a dandelion salad of freshly picked leaves. They’ll be the first fresh treats of the season!

More Sex in the Garden

Every summer, I have a lot of fun observing the interesting reproductive variations of the plants emerging in the garden. Sexual reproduction was an early evolutionary innovation and, when we think about it, is commonplace. The birds do it, the bees do it and plants do it throughout the growing season. 

The latest sexual wonder in my garden this summer has been a Franz bunching onion.Its companions normally grow in bunches of 20 or more tops. It’s what I general expect. However, this single Franz erection that popped up in the onion patch this year is 140 cm tall (and that was a week and a half ago!)!  This Jack in the bean stalk onion appears to be a celebratory show-off, with a flower like no other, eagerly inviting pollinators to fertilize it to reproduce another unique Franz onion. Just goes to show, garden sex works!

Life from the Soil

                     “To forget to till the earth and tend the soil                         is to forget ourselves.”   – Ghandi

Today, most people live virtual lives playing with their technological toys and have lost their connection to planet earth. Scooping up handfuls of garden soil or walking barefoot in garden soil, allows your skin to breathe and absorb vitamins and minerals from the soil. They do not understand that we are part of nature and that our bodies are made up of the same elements, minerals and energy that make up this planet. Life from the Soil.

Rhubarb

I love honey-sweet, tangy rhubarb. I enjoy it on my cereal in the morning. And I enjoy it with plain yogurt drizzled with maple syrup.

I have three separate plants in my garden, some I’ve picked weekly and shared with family and friends, some I’ve cooked as a simple compote for myself. A third plant on the east side of the garden I’ve only started to pick. Yesterday, as I was picking some stalks from that plant I noticed several gigantic leaves. Rhubarb leaves bigger than I’ve seen before. Sure we’ve had good rains recently and lots of prairie sun. But there was something unusual in the size of the leaves that caught my attention.

A recent Financial Post article by Lawrence Solomon: “Hooray! There’s reason to celebrate that CO2 levels are rising,” that my brother-in-law sent me, jostled my mind. Plants love CO2. Could it be the over 400 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere has given the rhubarb leaves an extra growth spurt?  Nature loves abundance. Should I celebrate?  Should I shout out “Hooray” with my 400 ppm CO2 filled lungs?  Not likely!

CO2 levels are rising at a rate of 0.04 % annually. Existing coal fired plants and over a billion cars spewing out CO2 may well raise that to 550 ppm.  Concentrations that high were last seen 23 million years ago. That may be way more than humans, plants and animals can handle. Welcome to the Anthropocene!*

What the planet needs is a green thumb species, working with nature, building healthy soils in backyard gardens, in community gardens and adopting Miquel Altieri proposal for an agroecosystem of agriculture which “could sequester more carbon than is currently emitted.”

Let’s start digging and planting!

* "Record Levels of CO2 Herald the Future of Climate Change", by David Biello in the November 10, 2015  issue of Scientific American.

The Eternal Garden

Digging the winter garden of 2014.

My new Exhibition

"The power of Victor Cicansky’s sculptures result from the intimate relationship the artist has with the art of gardening. When emulated in clay and bronze with his carefully attention to detail Cicansky’s enhances the often overlooked beauty of common fruits and vegetables. This effective use of materials accentuates the dependency of humanity on produce and allows the sculptures to speak to the delicate and fleeting existence of the bounty of the harvest."

A Gazebo for Grow Regina

This is my working model, a maquette 15" high and 24" in diameter, laser cut in MDF, a representation of the gazebo planned for Grow Regina. Large or small, a gazebo is a refreshing focal point in the garden, providing shade, shelter, rest and intimate views of the surrounding landscape. It's a place where life and art are rooted; a place where the smell of wet earth, the sight and feel of nature's fecundity and the rhythm of its unfailing cycles reminds us of our place in creation. And it's a place to watch butterflies and bees among the flowers, to delight in the passing seasons, the evening moon and the morning star.

This gazebo is still a work in progress. The Cicansky Gazebo is being planned for installation next year at the Grow Regina Community Gardens, and will be fabricated of powder-coated metal. It will also be  available in sizes from 25 feet in diameter to the size of a child's dollhouse. The railing around the gazebo can be custom-designed using a child's drawings, or a variety of other designs.

Harvest time

Dug these carrots in the garden. They were celebrating a spectacular garden season. Let's boogie!

The First Day of Summer

It's been another cool, wet, grey day. The sun made an appearance late in the afternoon and stayed for a few minutes, just a glimmer. The real summer heat that pole beans and tomatoes love, hasn't arrived. Unless we get a couple of hot hot sunny months there won't be much of a bean, tomato and squash crop.

On the bright side, the paper birch outside my kitchen door is luxuriant. In over 15 years I have never seen it hung so heavy with glossy leaves. Branches droop with the weight. The hostas, berginias, wild cow parsnip and Siberian Irises thrive in the cool wet conditions. The plants are taller and the colors more vibrant. In the far corner of the garden the fragrance of the Korean lilacs is seductive.

An iris I traded for and planted five years ago has finally bloomed. The information I got with the trade was that it was a tall purple iris. I didn't know what to expect. The purple blooms are huge almost the size of my open hand. In a brief moment of morning sun the deep chokecherry purple standards and the wine colored falls are dazzling. There are few flowers in my perennial beds to match this iris for striking blooms.

The Winter Garden

I’m sitting in the kitchen looking out at my winter garden. Recent storms have piled drifts upon drifts of snow covering most of the perennial stalks I left standing in the fall cleanup. The prairie sunflower, clumping grasses (Karl Forester, yes, that's the name of the grass), yarrow, a couple of rose bushes and tangled pieces of driftwood, tall enough to defy the drifts, poke through the snow.

Alongside Karl Forester, October Corn, a five foot tall bronze sculpture has easily managed, for several decades now, to withstand the elements. Further down the garden path sit two terra cotta self-portrait planter pots buried under the snow.

Closer to the pond stands a lovely clumping paper birch, lustrous white in the bright January sun. Next to it half buried in the snow is a sculpture of the persistent and tenacious dandelion. In the icy pond cattails gone to seed are among the perennial survivors.

Bordering the pond, old weathered prairie bones I collected over the years, sit in a pile, reminders for me of Regina’s past as Pile-o-bone, a landscape still I carry around in my head. The pile-o-bones lie comfortably under the snow.

My fascination with the bones surfaced again when Reginians celebrated the city’s centennial in 2003. As I handled some of these old bones I was struck by the strong resemblance between the architecture of bones and plants. Vertebrae have the look of an exotic prairie amaryllis, limbs like stems and flat bones like leaves. In my imagination these bones were transformed into a garden of ceramic bone plant delights. Two of these sculptures sit outside my kitchen window radiating color in my snow drifted winter garden.

Blight-free Shovel Tomatoes

I love tomatoes. Nothing beats the feel of holding a firm vine ripe tomato in hand...except the taste. For decades now I have been able to satisfy that love by planting between 25 and 30 mostly heirloom tomatoes.

This past summer my plants, loaded with green fruits, struggled through the cool, moist weather catching enough sun to produce a few mid-season ripe fruits. If the rains stopped and if the summer warmed up, it looked like I'd have a fair crop.

Then late season blight hit. Large brown spots began appearing first on the leaves, the stems and then the green tomatoes. I picked all the sound green tomatoes, washed them in a vinegar water solution, and laid them on newspaper in the cold room hoping to ripen them. After a week or so I noticed brown spots developing on some of the green fruits and decided to process the remainder into a green tomato relish.

There's always next year. Hopefully extreme cold weather will kill off the fungus and my tomatoes will flourish under the hot prairie sun. Meantime I have created my own shovel blight free tomatoes. Check them out:

               Tomato Shovel

               6 1/2" x 22 1/2" x 12"

               Clay, glaze

               2008

               Sliced Tomato Shovel

               6 1/2" x 22 1/2" x 12"

               Clay, glaze

               2008

Grow Regina Community Garden

We all need to eat; and our food choices are many. Walk into any supermarket today and you are confronted with an abundance of food from all over the world. Not so long ago, in my youth and probably yours, most of the food we ate was grown right here. Times were tough but we ate well. Back then you built a house and you planted a garden because you intended to stay there for a while. Children grew up with backyard gardens and had the pleasure eating food fresh from plants in the garden.

Prosperity, convenience and propaganda slowly disconnected most of us from our food source: the garden soil, the sun and water that fed us. In a recent survey of children in large cities like New York, when asked where their food came from, they responded that their food came from the supermarket in plastic containers.

Ecological thinking and concern for where the planet is heading; and the clamor for good locally grown food, safe food, accelerated the growth of urban community gardens and farmers' markets. Well known is the Strathcona Community Heights community garden in Ottawa, Urban Eden in Edmonton and Cypress Community Garden in Kitsilano where I visited recently, a lovely spot in the middle of the city. More and more people are joining together to start community gardens.

Grow Regina is volunteer group of people gardening collectively with a mandate to enhance the social, economic and cultural well-being of Regina residents. The energy and inventiveness of this group makes it stand out as an inspiration, demonstrating what is possible when a committed group of gardeners come together to create a garden to grow food for themselves and others. It is a model for schoolyards, for backyards and even front yards and other modest green spaces in the city. The school children that are already involved in this community garden are learning how vegetables actually grow and are already committed citizens donating their harvest to the Regina Food Bank, providing families with children like themselves with good food for healthy bodies and healthy minds.

The next exciting building phase for Grow Regina is the gazebo that we are proposing to build that will be a centrepiece in this garden. It will provide a place for the gardeners to meet, relax, and talk about the unusual vegetables they are growing like purple broccoli, blue corn, Black Prince Tomatoes, orange cauliflower and yellow fingerling potatoes. Imagine culinary demonstrations in the gazebo, where food, grown in the garden, is prepared as an edible work of art, shared and eaten under its canopy roof. The gazebo may also provide a cultural venue for poetry readings, musical performances inspired by the garden and for collaborations with groups like New Dance Horizons who host the Secret Garden Tour. Weddings anyone?

A project like Grow Regina Community Garden does much good. I am pleased to offer my imagination to enhance this community effort to foster the passion for gardening and love of nature and art to deepen the sense of community and to give this place a soul.

Lots of rain

The rainy weeks of May and early June have put a stop to my gardening plans. Today is the first really sunny day. The tomatoes (Brown Prince, Japanese Trifele, German Dwarf, Stupice, Lemon Boy, Black Cherry and a couple of red cherry varieties) I planted before I left for Calgary and covered with hot caps are still standing. The Japanese Trifele are about 12" high and have already developed flowers? Has the cool, wet weather stunted the poor babies? Driven them into maturity prematurely? These plants when they are mature stand a meter tall.

SUN! The tomatoes, the peppers, the squashes need at a minimum of six hours of vibrant life giving sun each day. The potatoes are loving this weather.