Garden Understories: 2025

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.