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 . . .

Seeds

It's done!  Well, sort of.  I've ordered all my vegetable seeds from good old William Dam as well as a few from a new-to-me catalogue - Henry Fields. 

As you get older you're supposed to take a greater interest in growing flowers and move away from the vegetables, but that hasn't happened.  At least not yet.  I love growing vegetables.  I pore over the vegetable section in seed catalogues with the same growing excitement other women might reserve for shoe shopping. 

I ordered this exclusive beet seed from Henry Fields called Harrier Hybrid that is supposed taste like you've already added the butter.  The blurb went on to say that even non beet lovers will ask for seconds.  I was telling Darcy about it and he was doing his best to look interested, when I realized that I have never put butter on my beets and I'm not even sure I would like how that would taste.  I guess I'll find out in a few months.

I definitely like butter on my popcorn.  I ordered some Japanese White Hull-Less Popcorn that is supposed to mature in only 83 days and give incredible yields.  Or as the catalogue puts it...Incredible yields!  Every stalk produces between three and six ears of corn and there's 300 seeds in a packet, which means I could produce as much as 1800 cobs of my own popping corn!  I just need to find the room to plant it all. 

I also ordered some seed for brussels sprouts called Royal Marvel Hybrid that only takes 85 days - most of the others I've tried take 95 days and up here in Zone 2a our season is often too short to get much of a crop.  Although the good thing about brussels sprouts is that frost is what gives it that great flavour.  In fact if you grew them in a place where it never froze it would be pretty much tasteless.  However, you still need to at least have some brussels sprouts on the stalks when the frost hits. 

When I looked over my list I noticed it had a lot of hybrid vegetables.  I tried to rectify the situation by searching for open pollinated, preferably heirloom, replacements.  I finally found one old variety of brussels sprouts variety called Catskill but it took 120 days to  mature.  We average 90 frost free days.  The thing about hybrids is that they have been crossed and bred for certain qualities such as earlier harvesting and up here that's pretty important.  I've decided that hybrid brussels sprouts are better than no brussels sprouts at all and I just hope that all the green minds out there will forgive me.  Please.  I need my brussels sprouts. 

It's interesting how a hybrid vehicle is usually seen as a good thing, but a hybrid vegetable isn't.

Signs of Spring in January

I was in Peavey Mart today picking up a couple salt blocks for the horses and sheep when what to my wandering eyes should appear but a bottom shelf stacked with GRASS SEED!!!!  I stopped my boots right there in their tracks as a warm glow of hope coursed through my heart.  I would have leapt for joy if my boots weren't so heavy and if I wasn't such a klutz.  Visions of sprawling across the aisle face down in the bags of grass seed kept my feet planted on the floor - but just barely!  The two shelves over top of the grass seed still held a picked over assortment of Christmas lights, decorations and wreaths (60% off) but the sign of things to come could not be denied.  As if the grass seed wasn't exciting enough, a couple aisles over I made yet another discovery . . . bags of potting soil and packages of brown fibre pots!!!!!!!!!  No seeds yet but where potting soil and fibre pots are can seeds be far behind?

Brrr

Hah!  I knew it!  Just checked and it's down to minus 30.5 out there . . . not sure why being right about how cold it felt out there makes me feel so happy.  Crayola is curled up on her big dog pillow looking very pleased with herself.  Old but pleased. There's nothing more cozy than a cold Canadian winter night when you're on the warm side of the wall. 

Just me and the dogs

Welcome to the very first entry of my new blog! Come on in and warm up your toes. I just finished taking the last two boxes of Christmas decorations out to the storage shed. Baby it's COLD outside! The thermometer reads minus 22 but I'm a bit suspicious. I think a moose must have wandered by and licked the outside sensor because it feels closer to minus 30 or beyond.
Just a sec . . . the dog wants in and who can blame her? brb.

There. Sorry about that. Crayola is 15 years old and starting to go a bit senile. She scratches on the door to come in and then stands in the mud room looking puzzled like she doesn't know how she got there exactly and then she starts whining to go back out again. Because she is 15 I try not to get annoyed. She's something like 105 in human years and I hope that if I ever get that old someone will be patient enough to open and close doors for me without getting mad.

The holidays ended yesterday and now it's just me and the dogs once again. Darcy is back at work and the boys have hopped a plane back to their respective cities. After weeks of planning, list making, and preparations it's all over once more for another year. It was a good Christmas though - it just went by way too fast. It always does.

The house feels so big and empty now that the tree and all the decorations are gone, along with all the people. Once I finish getting things completely cleaned up I am going to dig out all the seed catalogues that have been trickling in since November. Every cloud has a silver lining . . . I just wish our clouds weren't so full of snow! And I wish the boys lived closer. Ah well, if wishes were horses and all that. --> -->




-->