You Grow Girl™

Most of my peas are finished and have been replaced by beans but the Blue Podded Shelling Pea is still producing over at my community garden. I harvested a handful just yesterday. This beautiful purple pea with frilly pink flowers is one of a handful of unusual pea types that I can’t resist growing every year. I can’t say I love the flavour of this variety, but then again I tend to harvest the peas when they are small and eat them steamed rather than leaving them longer to produce real peas as is the norm. When cooking, the blue/purple colour actually bleeds off like a dye. I steamed a handful on top of rice once and the rice was dyed purple.

Another photo from my community garden.

Butter and Eggs (Linaria vulgaris) growing out of the gravel on abandoned railroad tracks.

Calendula had been self-seeding itself in my community garden plot in abundance, until last year when I put in a lot of soil amenders. I think the seeds got buried too deeply underneath all that extra compost. No matter, some are still coming up and in manageable quantities. The borage continue to self-seed with no noticeable change in population.

The flowers in this picture are not from my community garden. Those flowers are yellow, and try as I might I can’t get a bright orange variety to come up. No matter, this year I started some unusual varieties from seed and transplanted them into the garden. I’ll post pictures when they start to bloom.

Another wasteland favourite, Butter and Eggs thrives and blooms where most plants won’t.

There are all kinds of mulleins/verbascums but this one is my favourite, a monster of a plant that can thrive in some of the driest and poorest soils under a punishing sun. I know this firsthand observing the mullein that volunteered to inhabit the street garden and not only survived but successfully reproduced.

The possibility of Bill C-51 going though has made me a little bit wary of writing about the medicinal usage of plants like mullein, however if you’re interested there’s lots of information about it elsewhere. The flowers and leaves are okay but do not eat the seeds.