Farmzone.com provides weather and weather-related information for farm zones across Canada. Each Farmzone is unique and has specific information about your farming area.
Your FarmZone has:
- Unique short term and long term weather forecasts to help you plan your daily farming activities
- Reliable precipitation forecasts, historical weather data including sunrise/sunset times
- And planning tools such as drying index, growing degree days and crop heat units.
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Interplanting
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There are many combinations of plants for interplanting - which combination suits your needs the most?
One way of maximizing the return from garden space is to interplant crops. This is the practice of planting one kind of crop, and then planting a different crop in between the rows of the first. There are a number of ways this can be beneficial.
First, you may have an area devoted to larger, summer-maturing crops like cabbage, broccoli, or Brussels sprouts. These crops won’t be approaching their full size until late June. But by that point in the season, some cool-loving, fast growing crops will be ready for harvest. Think of arugula, spinach, and some lettuces – these plants tend to bolt with the arrival of hot weather. Ha
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While some types of vegetables are simply better suited to growing with their roots in the ground, the determined gardener can grow almost any kind of food plant in containers. It is the nature of all plants that some require more root space than others. Lettuce, for instance, has a relatively small root system that grows shallowly, near the surface of the soil. By comparison, some squash plants have roots that will have an eventual diameter of thirty feet if they’re allowed to grow unrestricted. Clearly, squash plants are not well suited to container growing.
Other kinds of plants don’t have enormous root systems, but they get too tall to manage in all but the largest container. Corn and quinoa grown for seeds are both good examples. And some plants need space for their roots to develop – beets, garlic, onions, parsnips, radishes, and turnips all need depth combined with lateral growth in order to develop fully.
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Many people ask us for the "Mary's Mix" complete organic fertilizer recipe. For smaller gardens, it may be more economical to purchase some premixed 4-4-4 Complete Organic Fertilizer from Gaia Green but for big gardens, and for determined do-it-yourself-ers, here is the classic blend that Mary Ballon used to print in the West Coast Seeds catalogue. She always included the footnote that "actually it's Steve Solomon's Mix and I have been using variations of it since 1983."
4 parts seed meal (i.e. flax or cottonseed)
1 part rock phosphate OR 1/2 part bone meal
1 part lime
1/2 part kelp meal
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West Coast Seeds offers its guidelines to companion planting to you as suggestions keeping in mind, each garden is unique and all of the factors should go into consideration while planning your garden, including but not limited too sun exposure, weather, ecology, pollinators, insect population, the soil, water supply and historical plant and harvest productivity and planning as well. West Coast Seeds has significant conducted research into the companion planting guidelines and has defined the best possible results and reasons for each of our recommendations in our companion planting chart, below are a few thoughtful suggestions for you while planning your garden this year.
The benefits of Companion Planting include:
Minimizing Risk: Increases odds of higher yields even if one crop fails or you are effected by natural hardships such as weather, pests or disease, the overall yield of your plot may be increased by limiting the spread and avoiding
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