Bowen Island Garden Club
Box 271 V0N 1G0 Bowen Island, BC, Canada

Soil: the Real Black Gold by Jeff Nield. Published in our Spring 2010 Issue. Next time you rinse the dirt from your carrots, give a moment to think about the st...uff that goes down the drain. Most of us don’t pay much attention to soil. We may have a basic understanding that soil is useful for growing plants, but the significance and fragility of this great connector gets lost on usuntil it’s gone. And once it has disappeared, natural processes can take a good 500 years to build up one inch of topsoil. By our very existence, humans deplete soil. Salinization, desertification, erosion, and chemical contamination are just a few of the myriad ways. In Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond illustrates how civilizations as diverse as those once found on Easter Island, in Norse Greenland, and in the ancient Mayan city of Copan (now Eastern Honduras), collapsed, at least in part due to soil mismanagement. Easter Islanders and the people of Copan depleted their soil through deforestation, while the Greenland Norse dug up turf to build houses (and churches). And here in the Fraser Valley we’ve paved over some of the richest agricultural soil in the world to build highways, strip malls, and big box stores. Read the entire article here: https://ediblevancouver.com/articl/soil-the-real-black-gold

Summer is the time to plant many crops for fall and winter harvests. Download our FREE Guide with the link below and learn which crops work best for fresh, cool season eating. #westcoastseeds https://bit.ly/37SLUcm

As soil warms up with the arrival of summer, many cool season plants "bolt" or very suddenly go into bloom. In the case of #cilantro, the flowers it produces ar...e highly attractive to a range of beneficial predatory insects. Not only that, but as the flowers mature, so does a long, edible tap root that can be used to make a delicious grilling sauce. Find out more about cilantro here: https://bit.ly/3hQ0BBH See more