Gardens Update: 3 of 7

I started out with a plan when I was planning my seven garden spaces. It was logical, as plans are. It took into account harvesting times, water needs, and companion planting. I have no idea what it is. I seem to have just planted "things I like" in each of the seven. But they're thriving!

This is at my friend Sarah's. We each have half of her garden. The onions love that clay soil! The peppers, on the other hand, haven't grown since I put them in 1.5 months ago. I'm pretty sure you can't even see them in the photo.

This one is at my cousin's house. Three 100 sq ft beds, 4 ft wide. I was going to try square foot gardening, but rows are ingrained in me.

 

There is actually some reasoning behind crop selection in this last one. It is on a friend's acreage, 30 minutes away, so I planted potatoes, winter squash, and dry beans. This photo is pre-weeding.

 

I should be learning a lot from growing things in different soils (clay predominates in the city, sand at my cousin's, and lovely manure at the acreage) and planting at different times, and battling different weeds... but my record-keeping is so poor that this is nowhere near a scientific study. Maybe my goal this year can be not collapsing under the harvest weight.

Four more to follow!

Home Garden is where the heart is

I've planted in seven garden plots this year, but our home garden is still dearest to me. When we moved in three and a half years ago, it was a 54 square foot strip of patchy weeds in front of the driveway. That summer, I dug it up with a spade, added half a bale of peat and a garbage bag of well-rotted cow manure, and had a bumper crop of tomatoes. The next summer I learned the pitfalls of monocropping, as blight hit my tomatoes. The following year I diversified, and this year - I think I like this one the best.

I planted vegetables that I knew my kids would enjoy picking and snacking on and vegetables that are best when brought to the table five minutes later. Lettuce, snap and shelling peas, cherry tomatoes, mizuna, carrots, shungikyu, basil, radishes, peppers, fall-planted garlic and the perennial chives. My son added three onions he grew from seed and an upside-down tomato he got for his birthday and my daughter planted a butternut squash.

And now that I've picked up the old seed packs and trimmed the grass, I can show it off! Tomorrow: first salad with lettuce and mizuna thinnings, chives, and radishes.

Photoessay: What does a six year old find interesting about gardening?

My son got a camera for his birthday. He came to work with me last Tuesday. Here's what he thought was fit to shoot:

Raspberries

The windows look like arrow slits in a medieval castle.

Bedding plants

Me opening a can (there were many pictures like this)

Wheelbarrow

Disgruntled mom (see "Gumbo")

Himself

May flowers?

Rain. All week. With a low of zero on Saturday. I have three gardens left to plant, not including the 5400 sq ft one that is my job.

I'm not too worried. It'll keep. Here's some happy pictures!

Grandpa's Siberian Home Pepper

Silvery Fir Tree

First Harvest of 2012

 The kids are nibbling at the chives.

My Absence Explained

On March 19, I was offered a job.

Not just any job. A kick-butt job. A job that combines my academic studies, my favourite hobby, and my teaching and volunteer experience.

I am planning, coordinating, publicizing, recruiting volunteers for, and implementing, a 5400 square foot vegetable garden at a public institution in town.

It's been a bit crazy! We launch the project in three days. Other than the launch, my tasks this week include planning what and where to plant, creating specs for compost bins to be built, liaising with local artists to possibly procure trellises, sculpture, and planters, ordering seeds and seedlings, creating a production timeline and duty rosters, preparing posters and handbills, deciding on tools to buy, and exploring possibilities for various classes to make use of the garden.

It's gonna be a ride!

Starting 'Em Young

I asked my five year old what he would like to grow by himself this summer (note, I didn't give him a choice about growing something), and he said, "Edible flowers!" He thought the calendula in the Richters catalogue looked pretty good (although there is a divide on the internets: is it peppery, or bitter?)

I figure the earlier you start them, the better. This is good advice for getting kids to do chores, so why not with food production and preparation?

Here he is at age two, already taking it seriously.

 

With a farming grandpa, how could he help but?

 It wasn't all work, though.

 

There was reward.

 And, idealist that I am, I am hoping that the pleasure of work will become its own reward.

What's so appealing about seeds? Possibility.

There is no possibility that I will spend an evening with Ryan Gosling, but a girl can dream - about seeds.

I am looking forward to seed shopping from Tourne Sol, Heritage Harvest, and Prairie Garden Seeds. (Sure, I saved a bit of seed, but I'm getting that shopping bug that apparently other women feel when thinking about shoes.) Some of these companies will be at our local Seedy Saturday in early March. Is there a Seedy Saturday near you?

I've been hearing good things about Johnny's Selected Seeds. What are your favourite seed sources?

I remember opening up a peanut in grade two and being told that the tiny pineapple-shaped embryo embedded in the bottom was the future plant. I'm not going to belabour the "possibility" metaphor, but I think you gardeners can fill in the blanks.

Dreaming...

I think my subconscious knows the days are getting longer.

I've been a bit itchy without anything growing in our house or yard (for some reason, I kill houseplants) so I decided to go to the last Farmers Market of the season and get a sprouting kit.  Then I forgot to.

Last night, I dreamed our neighbour came over and planted two rows of perennial flowers in our front garden bed. I was pleased that we'd attract pollinators and admiring glances, but - THERE WAS NO ROOM FOR TOMATOES!

It was a rough night, so when I fell asleep again, I dreamed that my husband had planted our front lawn to the sidewalk with cold-hardy plants. The cabbages were a foot and a half tall. (They must have started them in the fall, I thought.) But again - NO ROOM FOR TOMATOES! I was trying to decide if I could squeeze in a couple plants at the end of each row when I wore up.

Just a couple more months, and there'll be enough daylight hours to start thinking about bedding plants. But darkness is good for dreaming in.

Contest and Giveaway!

I know you're thinking about it already... next year's garden. I'm going to fuel that hunger with a contest.

I just bought some beautiful winter squash from a local farmer. Provide me with your favourite squash recipe in the comments. I will evaluate the recipes, and on December 1st I will choose the recipe my family enjoyed the most. The winner will receive a package of Burgess Buttercup winter squash seeds and a package of Bohemian Flat Podded Sugar Snap pea seed (yes, the pea seeds you cannot buy in stores!).

Vegetable Hits and Misses

I tried a lot of new vegetable varieties this year, in two different gardens at opposite ends of the city, so I thought I'd review a few of them. Bear in mind that we're Zone 3 here, and I grew organically, so your mileage undoubtedly varies.

Carrots:

The clear winner was the Witches Fingers pack I got from Tourne Sol farm near Montreal. I am going to have to write and ask them what varieties are in the pack - I know the seeds are open-pollinated varieties. They germinated well, were early, long, big, delicious, and untouched by insect or disease.

A loser was Purple Haze, which I got from Veseys. In both gardens, it was skinny and small, and in one it succumbed to Alternaria leaf blight (although the Red Cored Chantenay inches away did not).

Tomatoes:

I was really excited about Andrina, a cute little 6" high cherry tomato that I got from Heritage Harvest Seeds and grew in a pot. Two disadvantages: first, the leaves grow so low on the plant that I had a lot of backsplash when watering. Second, it tasted TERRIBLE! My sister grew one in Montreal and disliked the taste as well.

However, Silvery Fir Tree was a winner, also from Heritage Harvest Seeds. This pack was thrown in my large order as a freebie, so I only planted one. Reasonable size plant, medium sized tomatoes, quite tasty, and a good yield.

Peas:

The Bohemian flat podded sugar snap peas that we got from a friend who got it from his mother who got it from an elderly neighbour who immigrated to Canada decades ago yielded decently, had a long harvest season, and were still tasty when they looked like they should be overripe and overgrown. Unfortunately, you can't get any of these unless you ask me very nicely.

Sugar sprint snap from Veseys had so many problems. An unidentified insect ate the life out of them in one garden, and in the other the yield was very poor. They succumbed to powdery mildew and had leaf miners. A cousin of mine also grew them and had problems.

Leafy Greens:

I had way more lettuces than I needed - Black Seeded Simpson and Matina Sweet. But what I really liked was the Mizuna from Veseys. A delicate taste hinting of cabbage, a very fast grower (we got four cuts), the only problem was that eventually the cabbage butterflies found it.

Mizuna at the bottom, Matina Sweet at the top, BSS in the middle

Would you believe, I still have seed packs in my fridge that I didn't even crack open this year? I look forward to more experimenting next year!

I have in my hands an advance copy of the book "Food Sovereignty in Canada" put out by Fernwood Publishing.  I am very proud! I would tell you exactly what I did for this book, but then my thin veneer of anonymity would be blown. I will say that I did copy-edit half of it, and did substantive editing for three of the chapters. Please don't tell me about any typos I missed. That was probably the other copy-editor.

The rest of you will have to wait until November to get a copy, but I'm going to whet your appetite:

"The language of food sovereignty was initially introduced by La Via Campesina to express both the truth of power relations within the food domain and the hope for the democratic, widely dispersed, just distribution of those powers over food...In order to transform the dominant forces, including those related to politics, economics, gender, the environment and social organization, we need to be able to imagine and articulate new relationships to food, community and ultimately the earth."

"Instead of the current construct of farmers producing and individual consumers buying food, where both the access to and production of food are determined by the market, food sovereignty begins from the position of citizens engaged in decisions about providing life-sustaining good food."

From the publisher: "Achieving food sovereignty requires conceptual and practical changes, reshaping menus, farming, communities, relationships, values and policy, but, as the authors clearly demonstrate, the urgent work of building food sovereignty in Canada is well under way."

Inside:
"Advancing Agriculture by Destroying Farms? The State of Agriculture in Canada"
"Indigenous Food Sovereignty: A Model for Social Learning"
"Growing Community: Community Gardens as a Local Practice of Food Sovereignty"
"Community Nutrition Practice and Research: Integrating a Good Sovereignty Approach"
"Transforming Agriculture: Women Farmers Define a Food sovereignty Policy for Canada"
and more!

Harvest Update

The garden is taking care of itself now, except for the occasional watering. Here's what's fresh:

 

Carrots from Tourne Sol Cooperative Farm's Witches' Fingers seed pack.

 

Mini hot peppers: Grandpa's Siberian (L) and unknown variety (R). I plan on keeping the Grandpa's Siberian as a house plant over the winter.

 

Tomatoes, of course. So far: Golden Cherry, Bison, and Silvery Fir Tree. I really like the Bison - unblemished heritage plum tomato and a nice consistent size.

Garden Update: Early August

 

We're in the midst of beans - my favourite vegetable.

 

These are the first tomatoes. Finally, they're starting to catch up to the basil. I see pizza in our future.

July Salad

Butter lettuce, mizuna, peas, snap peas, walnuts, pansies, centaurea. Best served with friends.

First Roots of the Season

I planted radishes because they're fast growing and colourful. If I'd known my kids would actually like eating them, I would have planted a lot more!

Easter Egg radishes

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

Mother's Day

These pictures are from my parent's organic garden in 1977, in the back yard of their 400 square foot house. I found them while converting old Kodachrome slides to jpegs today to make a CD for my mother.

Half of the back yard. Note the neighbours' garden in the background.

Intercropping and marigolds as pest repellents.

Earthiness

For me, the deep satisfaction I find in gardening and food preparation occurs because it is a combination of what Kropotkin called "brain work and manual work". If I sit in front of a computer too long, or read for hours, I start to feel detached from the world around me, not to mention headachey and restless. But I can't be happy running on a track or treadmill; I need meaningful exercise that accomplishes something and gets my mind to work as well.

Working with food also connects me to the earth. It grounds me; I am in the present when I am working, not daydreaming of the future or dwelling on the past. My senses are attuned to the smell of newly-turned dirt, to the moment when the bread dough becomes smooth and elastic under my hands, to the buzz of a heat-dazed fly emerging from hibernation.

These experiences were a part of my childhood, and have become kinetic memories for me. I realized this three years ago, when I was helping my father plant a garden, and picked up a rake to tamp down the earth over a row of beans. I hadn't gardened in years, but my arms and hands knew how much pressure to put on the rake, at what angle to hold it, and how to move efficiently down the row.

Discussing the deskilling of the consumer, JoAnn Jaffe and Michael Gertler* put it like this:

"Food production has traditionally been learned through apprenticeship, with children learning first-hand while their mothers cook. These skills are sentient, practical, and in some senses non-discursive forms of consciousness, with the learner acquiring a knack, or a feel, that comes with the continual engagement with the physical and sensual qualities of food. (This is exemplified in the experienced cook’s instructions to add a pinch of this or a smidgen of that, or to knead until the dough is elastic.) It requires a fine-tuning of all the senses – a good cook knows how things ought to taste, smell, look, feel, and sometimes even sound through different stages of the cooking process. She recognizes off-notes and textures. Cooking involves body knowledge, such as the movement required to whip an egg, knead biscuit dough, or skillfully cut a chicken. Putting together a meal involves juggling several tasks at once."

I didn't remember that it was Earth Day today until half way through the afternoon. Unconsciously, however, I chose an activity for Earth Day that, for me, connects me to my history, my environment, the production of farmers in my region, and my family - my future. I am using my mother's recipe to bake bread.

Happy Earth Day.

*Jaffe, J. & Gertler, M. (2006). Victual vicissitudes: Consumer deskilling and the (gendered)

transformation of food systems. Agriculture and Human Values, 23, 143–162.

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?