How does your garden grow?

Early morning in the onion patch

How strange to be hunting for stakes and strings in the garden shed, fetching the rake, axe and hammer, and wondering what pants to put on so I can kneel in the dirt and not have mosquitoes bite through them. Planting time in hot and steamy August.

Dennis already harvested our six rows of onions, laid them out on a sheet of plywood to be washed by the rain and dried by the sun, before gathering them into tubs for the winter. We grow enough cooking onions to last us all year, in soups, stews, spaghetti sauce and omelets. With the rototiller fixed, by a handy small-machines mechanic he found in nearby south Oshawa--originally from Newfoundland, more points in his favour--Dennis plowed up the onion patch for our “winter greens”—mainly spinach,  which if planted now should produce crisp, delicious leaves in early spring, just when we’re craving fresh greenery.

Last winter, a mild one, both our spinach and kale plants were doing well, looking green and hopeful, until deer knocked over a fence post, broke in and ate them all, while we were off birding in Ghana. This year we’ll be ready for intruders, with new cedar posts and another round of barbed wire. Deer have plenty else to eat around here, including treats doled out by a generous neighbour.

So there we were, plowing and planting, on a sunny morning just before a scheduled three-day rain, ideal for sprouting seeds.  Along with spinach we put in black-seeded Simpson lettuce, red lettuce, arugula and dill, to eat later this fall. Dennis regularly replants in harvested rows so we always have tender greens on hand for salads and sandwiches, and to give to friends.

The only seeds we were missing were for cilantro, a favourite of mine. Dennis detests the smell, the taste, the very idea, but willingly grows it for me because 1) he’s kind and 2) he likes me. Surprised that we didn’t have seeds left over from spring, he phoned around to local garden centers to ask if they did, then drove to our nearest Home Depot just in case they hadn’t withdrawn their seed racks. No luck.

Some cilantro always comes up on its own, as dill does. If I was a better gardener I’d harvest seeds and keep them through the winter, as I do zinnias. My great gardening friend Dianne Pazaratz saves seeds from practically everything she grows, and sprouts a lot of them indoors at appropriate times, ready for replanting when winter retreats. Lucky me, she gives me hummingbird sage plants that are just now producing the red tube flowers that migrating ruby-throats love as much as jewelweed. Dianne also grows all the garlic Dennis and I can use in a year.  It’s supposed to be in exchange for something we grow for her. Radishes, maybe? I suspect we’re getting the better deal.

We have another gardening friend who’s a baker and preserver.  Lois Gillette regularly passes on jars of jam and green tomato chutney, and just last week promised us blackberry syrup to put on ice cream, given the bumper berry crop in her backyard patch. Moral of the story, you can get a lot of great organic food from a garden. I remember Don Nichol, yet another dear gardening friend, telling of someone he knew who was confident humanity could survive quite well doing “intensive gardening” in suburban yards, as he had in his, running a co-op delivering fresh veggies to a whole bunch of appreciative customers.

But back to the onion patch. Sure enough, the rain came right on schedule, but so hard and fast—an inch in twenty minutes!-- it created a lake out there. Thank heavens for our sandy subsoil, which soon sucked it all in.

Hunting for a house, back in the day when such a thing was possible for young people, all I wanted was a yard facing south into sunshine, so I could grow flowers and vegetables instead of mowing grass.  I’ve been grateful ever since, to the universe for finding the perfect one, and to the garden devas who so busily and brilliantly grow all we plant.

Planting spinach

Deluge, an inch of rain in twenty minutes

Start of the carrot crop

Saved from the chipmunks

Ready for canning

Nasturtiums, lettuce, beans...

So grateful for the harvest