A TASTE OF NATURE, Part 1
I can’t believe how my garden has changed my life. Heaven only knows what motivated me to build my first raised garden in 2013. Maybe I saw the Lee Valley Tools Catalogue showing raised-bed kits and I actually spent time studying their catalogue. Maybe it was linked to my purchase of a ‘push’ lawn mower, called a Reel Mower, from Lee Valley Tools a few years earlier, when my electric mower died. I can’t remember what happened but I do remember that I had retired and was exploring many possible changes in my lifestyle, not the least of which was my diet and health care.
I always say that I didn’t know what I was doing, with my first raised garden — the plants grew in spite of me! Over the years, I ‘borrowed’ fennel plants from a neighbour’s laneway, which were very much at home in my first raised garden. I love to add the young sprouts to my salads or wraps and to save the seeds for that wonderful licorice flavour in a variety of concoctions over the winter. Another friend gave me 2 clumps of chives which were in a bad spot in her garden. They offer wonderful colour and hope to my springtime and fit nicely in the corner of one of my gardens. I love eating chives and their spicy, purple flowers in my salads or wraps.
My sister, a master gardener, gave me 2 dwarf apple trees which she had grafted. The most beautiful one gave me 3 seasons of fabulous, tasty, red apples until it got canker and had to be destroyed — probably because it was badly situated, in damp soil. The second one, a different kind of apple, has been laden with fruit every year, with branches drooping down to the ground. Dwarf fruit trees are small enough that you can easily reach all of the fruit, but as their above-ground plant only grows to about 5-6 feet tall, so too their root system doesn’t go deep, and I needed to transplant the remaining tree to a better location at the beginning of 2021. I’m happy to see that it has already settled into it’s new, much brighter location and is already yielding apples.
As for the blackberries that line the east and west sides of my backyard, they may be invasive, but I’ve always been able to eat my fill, and then some, filling my freezer with enough to last through the winter. Yes, it’s a big job to control their growth, or should I say overgrowth, but that’s the price you pay for having such fantastic fruit every year. I’ve learned to ‘train them’, as a friend taught me to do, by hanging the branches along my fence and clipping off the ones that don’t fit. I’m looking at my biggest harvest ever, in 2021.
Nature offers us such wonderful plants. Tune in, next week, for more about this accidental gardener.
Fiona