After waiting for residency for more than a year, wondering how much longer I would be an illegitimate person was starting to wear on me. But, as they say, when the planets are in line everything falls into place. The full rose moon of June 7th, 2009 was such a day. I finally got my Canadian residency so that night I planted 13 Hidasta Shield Figure Pole beans (from The Cottage Gardener) to give my thanks to Vancouver, BC for welcoming and accepting us.

The previous year I had spent a lot of time walking the nearby streets admiring everyone’s fantastic gardens. I finally found the perfect spot on one of the Greenways of Vancouver. No one was using it, it got good sun and was just by a sky-train and rail-road tracks so it seemed a perfect spot. There is a lot more space available in this area, although much of it is under the tracks and wouldn’t get any rain.

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There are as many ways to guerrilla garden as there are stars in the sky, and that is the best thing about it. The best way to do it is your way and to just get started. Many people love to make seed bombs and drop them as a group, other people love sneaking privately about the city — planting plots. Some people like to be highly organized — others random and without a thought. The main thing that holds it all together is that we are people reclaiming the land around us, reaching out and getting involved, hanging around and making sure that it grows, and grows and is a pleasure for all who pass by.

I have recently started reading the book The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka and his natural farming methods have astonished me and made me rethink what little I thought I knew about growing plants. I was already familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s methods of biodynamic farming, yet even so this book has been a real mind-opener.

Although I have been planting things in random places for a few years I haven’t had a chance to really take over a piece of land in an urban setting until this year. I spent much of last year walking the streets around my area checking out pieces of land. I didn’t want it to be too far from where we live in case it didn’t rain much and I had to haul water every day. I didn’t want it next to a main road to avoid the pollution from car exhaust, and I wanted it to get plenty of sun and rain. I finally found a good spot on the Greenway under the skytrain and next to the train tracks not too far from our apartment.

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It’s that time of year in the Northern Hemisphere when everyone is itching for rebirth. I am relatively new to seasons, a side effect of growing up a few degrees off of the equator, in Papua New Guinea. This is my third year of living in the cycles without a break and I am starting to understand the effects the cycles of seasons have on my own psyche. I woke up on the 28th of February thinking about seeds, and jumped online only to find I’d missed the gun. Seedy Saturday, Canada’s nationwide seed exchange, was happening as I read about it and would be packing up by the time I got the bus to the beautiful Van Dusen botanical gardens.So, I planted some of the seeds I had saved from last year, instead.

While living in the Catskills of New York, I had gotten in contact with The Hudson Valley Seed Library, which is a brilliant arrangement. In the spring you check out various types of seeds you would like to grow, and in the fall, you return the seeds you have borrowed. It’s not so different from a seed bank, and creates a community around seed saving and sharing.

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I had a look through a ton of companies in Canada selling seeds online and chose out about ten that looked interesting and had websites that were workable on my computer. I mostly leaned towards West Coast seed companies, but there was one company from Ontario that is simply outstanding and couldn’t be passed by. From those ten I have weeded out the following five sites:

West Coast Seeds is a refreshing green site with some interesting products such as sprouting seeds, soil, coconut husk mulch, kitchen equipment and worm cast tea.

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Horizon Herbs is easily my favorite seed company. But that’s simply because I love reading the seed catalog that they send out. It is jam packed with useful herbal information as well as some interesting anecdotes of adventures to find seeds. They have an incredibly extensive range of hard to find, never-heard-of-before, plants and every year they have more. As I mentioned in my article on the vernal equinox, I also have special feelings towards this company because they recently, unwittingly helped to establish proof of my whereabouts for Canadian immigration. The catalogs are my bedtime reading.

My wishlist for 2009:

I was very excited to find pau d’arco and gotu kola in the catalog. I have used pau d’arco for years to support my immune system.

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