Gardening Corner

There’s nowhere more local than your own backyard by Grace Bubeck  April 2023

In the era of global warming and concern about reducing CO2 emissions, buying local makes a lot of sense. It supports local producers, and I’m all for that. But: the most local you can get is growing some food in your own garden. This may not be right for everybody, but even just growing something you like to eat, like some tomatoes, peppers or cucumbers, is a start. It all adds up.

That’s how I got going. I was never drawn to gardening. Weeding my mother’s flower beds was one of my chores as a child, and that put me off for the rest of my life. Or so I thought. It was my friend and housemate Wendy’s idea to grow some food, and she started off with a few plants in pots the first summer. The next year, we put up three raised beds on top of the way too rocky soil in our backyard.

During this second year, it happened: I caught the gardening bug. It wasn’t just the satisfaction of eating veggies that were harvested just before we prepared a meal. Crunchy salad leaves, tasty herbs, incredibly sweet peppers and tomatoes that we picked ripened by the summer sun. Peas that never made it into a salad bowl or pot because they went from the vine straight to the mouth.

For me, what turned out to be even more amazing, though, was growing plants from seeds. I started with just a few veggies that were easy to grow from seed or that I wanted to try out. It was a bit hit or miss, until I chanced on a youtube video that showed a method of pre-sprouting seeds in closed ziplock bags by placing them on two or three layers of moist kitchen paper. You put the bags into a paper envelope that cuts the light and keep them warm.

And then you can watch the miracle happening: little white roots start growing out of the seeds, some very quickly, others taking their time. It’s so exciting to check and discover something else has started sprouting. Then it’s time to put the sprouted seeds into seedling pots and, again, wait until the tiny shoots make their way out of the soil.

As I am writing this, the nightshade plants (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, ground cherries) have mostly been planted already. All were seeded on the same day, and all sprouted except for a tardy variety of peppers and some older seeds that are taking their own sweet time. There is very little loss with this method, and I don’t have to deal with the disappointment of seeds never sprouting. There will be enough discouragement later on with creepy-crawlies feasting on the plants out in the garden!

Over the years, as my growing adventures expanded, the house became too crowded with all the seedling pots in sunny spaces. So I created a growing station in our unheated basement with a mini-greenhouse plastic tent on a table, a heat mat, and LED workshop lights. When the seedlings get too big, they go into a cold frame on the deck. That’s what works so far. But as I am having so much fun, every year there are more ideas what else I could try.

Some ideas work, some don’t. We found out the hard way that okra plants are hard to grow. Carrots, potatoes and winter squash don’t seem to do well either, and we don’t have space for cabbages or a lot of onions. From one year to the next, we choose what to grow. What we don’t grow ourselves, we buy from our local organic farm, the Fermette, which is just down the road.

We’re blessed to live in an area where the growing season is the longest in all of Quebec, and where so much food is grown. But there’s nothing as local as our own backyard. Start with a few pots and see what happens. Maybe you’ll catch the gardening bug, too? Or maybe you’re a much more experienced gardener than me? If you are, why don’t you share some of your experiences and expertise in this new gardening corner?