Our Garden and More

Trinity Western has a very small community garden across the street from campus. The land used to be part of the large farm that would feed the people living in Fort Langley (the birthplace of British Columbia). This is actually the first year of the community garden, so we gardeners have had to work together a bit to put it all together, but it's been fun and our plants are growing!

Here's the garden. Our garden is to the left of the wood gate.


Here it is up close and personal! We have spaghetti squash, patty pan squash, zucchini, green beans, turnips, beets, swiss chard, carrots, peas, cabbage, and flowers growing.


I've learned a lot about gardening by having this little garden. Turnips should not be planted by beets. Don't give up on carrots, no matter how long they take to pop up out of the soil (ours took 40 days!). Make sure to set up twine or fence for the peas to grow on right away, otherwise you get a big mess.


I was excited to go this morning and find peas growing and a zinnia about to bloom!


Since we're on an old homestead, there's no electricity - meaning no hose. One of the gardeners connected the water reservoir to this hand pump, so now we can fill up the watering cans right next to our gardens. Before the hand pump was put in, we were scooping water out of the reservoir with buckets!


A perk to the garden is all land around it. We have sheep grazing in their own field 50 yards away, so we always hear their baa-ing. There are also lots of fruit trees in the general area, and we've been told any fruit that grows on the land is ours if we want to pick it.


The above is a plum tree. We have a big colander of plums sitting on our counter right now. Below are apple pears - supposed to be quite delicious.


After getting home from gardening this morning, I was picking up our bedroom. I picked up a blanket that was on the floor and what was underneath but the dead spider you see below. We've had a lot of large spiders in this apartment but our friends tell us that's normal. Spiders are big around here. But this one - I mean, check out those legs! Disgusting.