Gumbo

Is gumbo:

a) a delicious thick soup featured in Lousianan cuisine that typically contains "a strongly-flavored stock, meat or shellfish, a thickener, and seasoning vegetables, which can include celery, bell peppers, and onions (a trio known in Cajun cuisine as the 'holy trinity')."

b)The plasticine-textured glop that is rock-hard when dry, impervious when wet, and passes for soil in the area in which I live?

The answer, here, is b) and c) the bane of my gardening spring. At my job, I have been working with 5400 square feet of this muck, which, despite the application of countless bucketloads of topsoil, still looks like this:

We need to get on the institutional composting, stat.

What is the soil typically like where you are?

Connect the Dots: Wetlands and Agriculture

My extended family gets together on all the big holidays. Lately, my relatives on a farm southeast of where I live have been hosting. My cousins are thoughtful folks and I enjoy talking with them about farming - and I was gifted with some homegrown lentils, homeground flour, and some borage seed.

My one cousin is sitting on his RM's advisory board for a pilot project focusing on environmental stewardship. It's an area pocked with sloughs, and he was telling me about the benefits of leaving and/or aggregating the wetland areas in fields: increased biodiversity including pollinators and predatory insects, and less water erosion immediately spring to mind. He and his family also like to have cook-outs near one picturesque slough on their land. But lots of farmers like to drain wetlands and seed them, because driving around them takes more time and they want every bit of their land to yield a crop. My cousin figures this is a bit silly - often, the drained bits are still too wet to seed when the rest of the field is ready, then they get all weedy, and you have to spray more. Despite the benefits of maintaining the wetlands, my cousin estimated that maybe ten to twenty percent of farmers in his area would take up the practice.

Flooding in Yellowgrass in 2011, picture courtesy of CBC Sask.

The spring of 2011 saw unprecedented torrential rains and flooding in a vast area of southern Saskatchewan. I don't think I'm crazy for suggesting that wetlands could have helped mitigate the damage, but apparently dams, dikes, and disaster assistance are the Saskatchewan answers. Manitobans probably don't think I'm crazy, either. Many of them have connected the dots and realized the importance of wetlands What will it take before Saskatchewan does too? 

Turns there's something else that provides the service of water retention and can reduce flood risk. Unfortunately, it also gets in the way of being able to drive a tractor in a straight line for miles. That's right - shelterbelts - which are going to become even more of an endangered species since the federal government cut funding to the PFRA shelterbelt program.

Earth Day at Our House

First Harvest of 2012

 The kids are nibbling at the chives.

May Long

It's traditional to plant your garden on the May long weekend in Saskatchewan. I broke with tradition this year, and most of my salad garden is planted already. Lots of beans, corn, and bedding plants yet to plant as soon as it dries up a little!

Aphids' spinach buffet surrounded by chives

Lettuces!

Radishes. If only they were as tasty as they are quick-growing and prolific.

Dwarf Siberian hot pepper

Tomatoes, peppers, cucurbits, brassicas hardening off

Gardening Interlude

There's at least four inches of snow on the ground right now, but my bedding plants are happily sunning fluorescentlighting themselves in the basement, oblivious.

The peppers are happy. They were planted a month ago.

The onions have also been growing for a month and have been trimmed once already.

The pansies - maybe not so happy, but I think they're just late bloomers.

The tomatoes are decidedly sad. Any tips for me?

Spring is here!

Can't you tell?

My seed orders have arrived! I've gardened some in the past, and my mom had one of those famed giant, farmwife gardens for years, so I'm not inexperienced - but I've happily bitten off far more than I can chew this year. I want ALL THE VEGETABLES!

I did something quite foolish last year. I only had access to about 20 square feet of garden space, so I planted spinach, peppers, and tomatoes. Mostly tomatoes. The spinach had bolted by the end of June, so effectively, I monocropped. In the wettest summer in decades. My tomatoes got early blight. My tomatoes got late blight. I got a scant boxful of tomatoes, many of which subsequently rotted. I learned my lesson.

This year, I have a strategy - and access to three garden plots. I concentrated on ordering short-season crops (we have 109 frost-free days where I live, which makes it riskier to grow, for example, an onion with a 110 day maturity from direct seed rather than transplant.) I ordered some hybrids so I'd have more of a guarantee of a good yield, and I ordered some heirlooms so I could save seed and choose varieties bred for my specific climate by local growers. I've started two varieties of onion and three of peppers already. I plan to succession plant (in this happy future when I have endless leisure time) to hopefully have at least one planting that grows during the weather it likes best. I also ordered.... wait for it... over fifty varieties of vegetable.

I've ordered some pretty interesting ones - Riesetomate, like a cluster of partially fused cherry tomatoes; Dragon Tongue beans - but the vegetable I'm most excited about is the Costata Romanesco zucchini.

That's right, I'm excited about zucchini. I generally like zucchini, because I see it as a blank canvas on which delicious sauces may be poured. But this zucchini - they say this zucchini is different. That it has flavour.

I can't wait.