2025 PLANT SALES!

while supplies last

4” pots, $10 each

CASH ONLY

Sunday May 11

Mother’s Day Market & Plant Sale

KP Park, Salmo 

Sunday May 18

Plant Speed Dating & Plant Sale

If you want to add natives to your garden but aren’t familiar with the plants, come at 10am for a plant Speed Dating Meet ’n’ Greet, where I’ll introduce each plant available and describe its good looks, personality, likes, and dislikes! 😉

Plant Speed Dating 10-11am

Plant Sale 11am-3pm

Garden Understories Nursery, Salmo

(Email gardenunderstories@gmail.com with "SALE" in subject line for address)

Saturday May 24

Kinseed Native Plant Sale

Nelson BC

More details coming soon

Fall Plant Sale 

TBD

 

Plants Available:

Forbs:

Nodding Onion / Allium cernuum 

Pearly Everlasting / Anaphalis margaritacea 

Philadelphia Fleabane / Erigeron philadelphicus 

Wooly Sunflower / Eriophyllum lanatum

Brown Eyed Susan / Gaillardia aristata

Round-Leaved Alumroot / Heuchera cylindrica 

Golden Aster / Heterotheca villosa

Scarlet Gilia / Ipomopsis aggregata (2nd year biennial, should bloom this year!)

Wild Bergamot / Monarda fistuliosa (not for restoration)

Western Canada Goldenrod / Solidago lepida

Western Willow Aster/American Aster / Symphyotrichum lanceolatum var. hesperium

Smooth Aster / Symphyotrichum laeve

Grasses:

Bluebunch Wheatgrass / Agropyron spicatum

Idaho Fescue / Festuca idahoensis

Shrubs:

Black Hawthorn / Crataegus douglasii

All 4” pots, $10 each CASH ONLY

 

Welcome to the

Garden Understories Alphabet of Native Plants

From now until the plant sales I will be sharing fun tidbits of information regarding native plants. 

Plant Sales:

Sunday May 11: Mother’s Day Market, KP Park, Salmo BC

Sunday May 18: Garden Understories Native Plant Nursery, Salmo (email gardenunderstories@gmail.com with "SALE" in subject line for address!)

      10 - 11am Native Plant Speed Dating

      11am - 3pm Plant Sale

All plants sold in 4” pots, $10 each. Cash Only.

 Wrote this eight years ago; it rings true, still.

Spring is here. I notice the brown water pooling in the bathroom sink as I wash hands after a day in the garden, and welcome the first forearm rash of the season, and I look forward to all this year brings.   

burn me

sun

                burr me

burdock

                bite into me

bugs 

land in my tangles

leaves

scratch, stick

and prick me

thorns

stain me

berries

resonate

with my senses

resin

rough up my skin

rocks

dry, and dye

my hands

soil

steal my breath

morning air

sneak into my house

duff

fall over me

rain

                and after it all

embrace my body

icy river

this is life

and I am alive

 

Garden Understories has expanded!

We are thrilled to launch

Garden Understories Native Plant Nursery

Spring 2025!

Providing hardy, exquisite plants to enrich your home ecosystems.

Stay tuned for more info on growing native plants, species available, and where to find us!

All grown (from ethically collected seed) right here in Salmo, by yours truly.

These plants need homes !

 

UPDATE: Salmo's Mini Food Forest Spring 2024

Remember this?

Here is the food forest three years later. From greens to onions to flowers to berries, there is always something to nibble on here. Currently the perennial plants are taking centre stage, but the garden will evolve as the shrubs grow and eventually dominate.

Thanks to the community for donating time, brain power, labour and plants during the design and installation back in 2021, and for continued engagement with the garden, ensuring the berries don't go to waste! 

Thanks to the Salmo Valley Youth and Community Centre for not only welcoming the Mini Food Forest, but expanding the project, and for keeping monthly maintenance visits in the budget! Without consistent maintenance, these gardens would be a mess of weeds - there are "low maintenance" gardens, but there are no "no maintenance" gardens.

perennial arugula

nodding onion about to bloom

wild strawberries - a forceful ground cover,  they perfume the entire garden

thyme and chives in bloom

SVYCC Herb Garden

SVYCC Native Meadow Garden. 

While simple, small, and a bit messy, this is one of my favourite gardens. It is full of plants native to the Kootenays. Did you know our native flowers were this exquisite?! This hardy garden is ALIVE with busy pollinators and always in flux, with annuals like Threadleaf Phacelia creating an ethereal blue backdrop one year, fluorescent and uniquely-petaled Pink Fairies another, and Scarlet Gilia displaying its shock of red spires biennially. In early autumn, the asters (ok these ones are technically from coastal bc, but we have plenty of our own Kootenay asters) glow with erie purple blossoms, providing a buffet of much-needed late-season nectar. And yes, for the Braiding Sweetgrass fans, there is goldenrod, too.

Threadleaf Phacelia

the dependable Brown-Eye'd Susan

Pearly Everlasting

Yarrow

Scarlet Gilia

Milkweed - maybe we'll be visited by Monarchs one day!

Pink Fairies

 

Is your fruit tree stuck in the Bart-Lisa Simpson cycle of sibling rivalry?!?

It's early March, prime time to prune fruit trees. Here are some insights and tips to consider regarding water sprouts.

Water-sprouts (those fast growing, vertical shoots) are often a "panic" response to severe pruning. The tree is desperately trying to replace all the photosynthetic capacity it lost all at once. Vertical water sprouts do not produce fruit. Severe pruning is a two-fold waste of energy for the tree: firstly in the loss of all those leaves, and then again as it devotes resources towards replacing all of that growth (only to be cut off again). 

Another analogy for this water sprout cycle is the Greek monster Hydra, with a head of snakes. If one snake was cut off, two more would regrow in its place.   

There is a way to exit this unecessary cycle and return the tree to a more beautiful and natural form, with renewed reproductive growth, and without the Hydra effect. Renovating old, malpruned and neglected trees is something I do often, and it usually takes 2-3 seasons/prunings to bring the tree into a gentler "maintenance" state. An added bonus is that after the first couple seasons, pruning inputs (time and energy) become much less.

Ideally fruit trees are pruned every year, so that issues can be detected early and one is never having to make large, stressful cuts.

Finally, remember to water your fruit trees, even the mature ones that seem well established and self sufficient, during times of drought!

If you'd like to learn more about pruning, I highly suggest Chris Holt's tree pruning workshops through Selkirk College, which include many of the above insights and much more, as well as the book Cass Turnbull's Guide to Pruning.

You can learn more about Garden Understories' pruning services here

You can find Garden Understories contact info here