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Column: Hope springs eternal for northern gardeners

It is not easy to make a garden on the Canadian Shield. Yet for the past 30 years I have been giving it a try.

It is not easy to make a garden on the Canadian Shield. Yet for the past 30 years I have been giving it a try.

Raised beds, containers, half barrels, and lots of imported dirt, sand, horse manure, composted leaves, straw and whatever else we could find has made it into the stuff we call soil.

Every year hope springs eternal that this year will be different. This year could produce a bountiful harvest.

This year I had three half-barrels with potatoes. I read about the method, and of the huge rewards. The bottom third of each barrel was filled with dirt. Each had three potatoes planted.

One barrel got a thick layer of straw, one got a thick layer of old leaves, and one got a blend of homemade dirt. As the plants grew, more of the same was added to each barrel.


The plants thrived! Some even made flowers! I recently pulled the plants with visions of buckets of red, gold and white potatoes.

Sigh. The total harvest just barely filled a 10-litre basket. And that included the potatoes planted in the raised beds by the garage and the three volunteer plants that came from those I missed in last year’s harvest.

Oh well. I have all winter to read up on how to grow potatoes. There’s always next spring to build hope again.

Two crops that do grow well no matter what I do, are lettuce and garlic. Most of the lettuce grows automatically from seeds that plant themselves. I let the self-seeding lettuce plants go to seed every summer, and they reward me with fresh greens from May through July. I have yet to find a way to have bountiful lettuces through August and September.

My success with garlic is due for the most part to the excellent “seed” source I received 25 years ago. Garlic is planted from cloves. The variety I have has six cloves per head. Each year, I choose the best cloves to plant for the next year’s crop.

In early July the garlics send up a central “flower” stalk, called a scape. It does have tiny flowers that squeeze their way between a small head of tiny cloves. These little cloves are what make the variety of garlic that I grow so special.

Usually scapes are removed soon after they appear. This is to allow the energy of the plant to go into the main garlic head that’s in the ground. I always let a dozen of the largest plants keep their scapes.

As the scapes mature, this variety produces just a dozen little round garlic clones. They are about the size of my little fingernail. These I plant in October, about an inch apart in a corner of a raised bed.

In the first year, they grow to about the size of my thumbnail. Then they get replanted about eight inches apart to grow for another year. The magic is that they can grow into a full-sized head of garlic in that second summer!

Most commercially available “seed” garlic would take 10 years to do this. So, I keep growing potatoes because I keep hoping to get it right some year. But it is garlic that gives me the satisfaction of gardening every time.

Viki Mather has been commenting for Northern Life on the natural world and life in Greater Sudbury since the spring of 1984.


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