Great Book

A couple weeks ago I found a great book at our library by Sandra Perrin called Organic Gardening in Cold Climates.  It has everything a vegetable gardener could want in a book.  It's been around since 1991 and I can't believe I never discovered it before.  I checked online and a revised edition came out in 2002 with a second printing in 2007 but it now seems to be out of print - at least I can't find any new ones available on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.  I managed to get a copy from a used book seller through Amazon and it arrived in the mail just this morning.  I can't understand why such a wonderful book would be out of print . . . and it seems a shame that Sandra isn't seeing any benefits from all the used books being sold.  I can see it becoming my gardening bible. 

Snow, snow and more snow

And the snow keeps tumbling down.  The groundhog definitely didn't see his shadow here yesterday, but it doesn't really matter since spring won't arrive until May - April at the earliest - no matter what the groundhog sees or says.   They say snow is the poor man's fertilizer because it contains a bunch of nitrogen - and since it comes from the snow it's free.  Every cloud has its silver lining - or in this case white lining.  There are all kinds of sayings.  The rich get their ice in the summer and the poor gets their's in the winter.  When the days begin to lengthen the cold begins to strengthen.  Or as e.e. cummings once wrote, The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches.  The latter must have been written towards the end of winter when old e.e. was getting a bit grumpy. 

Not only does snow have nitrogen, it also means much needed moisture in the spring given our four year drought and it's doing a great job of insulating all those perennials in the garden.  I can't wait to see what survived.  That's what I love about perennials - the excitement in the spring when you first spot them unfurling their little green arms up out of the ground.  It makes you want to drop to the earth and lip smack them right on their tender little shoots.  It's a thrilling thing.  In the meantime, the great white bump continues to grow and poor old Crayola is scratching to get in . . . gotta go!

Compost Happens

I've been following a tip I saw in Harrowsmith where this guy puts all his empty flower pots and containers under the eaves of the house in the fall and then all winter he empties his compost bucket into them.  In the spring he just tops the containers up with dirt, plants his flowers and by fall he's got all these containers full of rich compost.  It's also a great way to fill up the containers without using so much dirt.  If you're buying dirt for your pots it can get pretty expensive, not to mention heavy.  I've read about balling up newspapers to fill the bottom of pots too and that would both cut down on how much dirt you needed and keep things light.

Anyway, now I have all these pots full to the brim with carrot peelings, egg shells and bits of vegetable scraps and winter's barely half over.  Yesterday I noticed something has been digging through them - by the tracks in the snow I am suspecting a squirrel.  Now there's scraps flung all over the place.  I'm not going to win any awards for outdoor winter decorating, I can tell you that.  And so can anyone else who happens to go by the east side of the house. 

Snow and Spaghetti

It's been snowing enormous fluffy flakes since yesterday.  Everything is white, it's like living inside of a snow globe.  All the more fodder for my Great White Bump - my somewhat affectionate name for the 15 yards of garden soil dumped at the edge of my new garden just before winter came early to the Peace.  Come spring it will thaw just like frozen hamburger in the frying pan under the watchful eye of an anxious cook.  Only instead of peeling off the slowly thawing layers with a spoon, I'll be using a shovel instead.  I wish I had managed to get it spread before winter hit, but you know what they say; if wishes were tomatoes we'd all have spaghetti sauce.  Or something like that. 

Hey, at least now I have an idea what to make for supper, I just wish I had taken the hamburger out of the freezer  . . .

Growing Wild

I am renouncing my attempt at a cottage garden and starting anew. This time I am going au natural. Do not be alarmed, I do not mean to imply that I am going to garden in the nude, though that might be sort of freeing. I believe Ruth Stout, that indomitable Queen of Mulch, favoured gardening in the buff, but I digress.

What I have in mind is gardening with native plants instead. Some might argue that this is what is already happening to our yard, but what I mean to do is something that goes far beyond turning my back and walking away.

I will plant and sow and create with every bit as much vigour as I gave to my cottage garden, but this time I will toss the foreign paints and only select from a palette of what nature originally gave to Canada.

I am envisioning great sweeps of fireweed, purple asters, golden rods, yarrow and arnicas. Lots and lots of arnicas. I love the yellow daisy like blooms. I will plant bluebells, wild roses, and flax.

Of course I won’t forget the bones! That is where I stumbled badly in the past. Instead of planting trees and shrubs I went straight to beds of annuals tucked under the eaves of the house looking out over a boring expanse of green lawn. I didn’t have time for trees. What was I thinking? Clearly, I wasn’t. Instead I was so impatient, I couldn’t be bothered, only to turn around five years later, crushed to the quick of my soul when my yard didn’t look anything close to the pictures in the gardening magazines. A garden needs trees. Trees are the bones, the foundation, or at least that’s the way it seems to me. I am willing to bet that God created trees first and flowers second.

Now would be a good time to say I strongly believe that a garden should be as individual as the gardener. There should be no such burden of “You must do this” or “Never do that.”  Do you love gnomes? Fill your yard to the brim! Hate pink flamingos? Don’t allow one on the place! Love peonies but despise roses? Say no to every Theresa Bugnet and Hansa that tries to tell you otherwise. Love dry creek beds, hate ponds, love iron trellises, hate wooden lattice? Since you’re the one making the payments, you’re the one that gets to call the shots. That’s the glory of a garden. It’s your own private oasis and no one gets to tell you what to do with it.

Moose in the Garden and Old Dogs

Having an old dog is reminding me of what it was like to have babies.  Crayola never used to want in the house at all and now she wants in and out 24 hours a day.  Because she is starting to look so old and frail it is hard not to let her in.  She has this endearing trick of rearing up against the door and then sliding down it producing a hair tingling sound exactly like fingernails on a chalkboard.  For three weeks now I've been up at some point between 3 and 5 a.m. to let her in or out or both.   This morning it was her barking that woke me up for a change.  From my bed I listened to her barks grow increasingly frantic.  You know you live in the country when you wake up to your dog barking like crazy and instead of thinking, "Someone is here!" and starting the mad scramble for your clothes, you just yawn and think, "A moose must be in the yard."  Sure enough, when I went out and looked there was a cow moose and last year's baby standing on the edge of what will be this summer's new vegetable patch.  I wonder if they're dreaming about fresh garden vegetables too . . .

Hardy and Heirlooms Too!

Found a wonderful site today that offers all kinds of hardy and heirloom vegetable and grain seeds.  It's called Prairie Garden Seeds and is ran by a man named Jim Ternier.  I was pleased beyond reason to discover that the Cold Set tomatoes I had already ordered through Henry Field's were offered on this site as well and that they date back to 1961.  Of course, I didn't get away without picking up a few seeds I didn't already have.  For one, I was thrilled to find Homesteader peas.  They used to be one of the most widely available old standards for our northern gardens, but in the last few years they have been replaced by new and so-called improved varieties and now you can't find them in any of the usual big catalogues.  I've started growing Green Arrow instead but they don't taste as sweet as Homesteader did.  As Jim mentions on his site, Homesteader is susceptible to powdery mildew later in the season but apart from being a bit unsightly, it doesn't really hurt anything.  I am so pleased.  I am going to try to save my own seed so I never have to worry about not having any Homesteader peas again. 

I also ordered some Dwarf Multicolored Corn that is supposed to be excellent for making cornmeal.  I recently read about how ground cornmeal has an extremely short shelf life, so the stuff we buy in the store has had all the life - plus nutrients and flavour - stripped out of it leaving a tastless but long lasting meal.  It described the taste of freshly ground cornmeal in such tantalizing language that my mouth was practically watering.  It seems a sad thing to never have tasted the real stuff.  If you grow your own field corn you can store the dried kernels indefinitely and then just grind up a few cups at a time as you need it.  It will only keep for something like two weeks after you grind it. 

I had already ordered some Seneca Arrowhead sweet corn (62 days!) from William Dam but couldn't resist ordering some Simonet sweet corn from Jim as well.  He says its his most popular seller and since it was bred by someone in Edmonton and Jim grows his seed outside of Humboldt Saskatchewan, it should do well here in the Peace Country.  I hope.  The only problem is that you can't grow field corn and sweet corn beside each other or they will cross pollinate, so I will have to figure out a way to have two corn plots a couple hundred feet apart.  I ordered some Lacinato Rainbow Kale too, which looks really interesting.

Now I am feeling a bit redeemed for all my hybrid orders . . .