If this spring, with all this rain and insufficient heat, has been frustrating or lacking in inspiration, don’t despair! You can still have a lovely garden this summer. Here are some resources to help you — especially those of you in Montreal, Quebec, and eastern Ontario, where most of these resources can be reached.
While deciding what it is you want in your garden, double-check your zone (Montrealers: we are in Zone 5). Look for vegetables that can be planted in the middle of June for a harvest in a short timeframe, up until October.
Vegetables
The word potager has long since migrated into English to knowingly refer to a kitchen garden: the herbs and vegetables a cook can reach for at almost any time, to add to a meal, or, space allowing, plant up for proper harvest.
If you can read French, download the Guide potager urbain by the couple from Drummondville who were given a legal hassle in 2012 about having a front yard full of vegetables. This 240-page e-book is a handy guide to having a very attractive and productive garden. You might not be able to do so as extensively as they had it, but set yourself a goal of one small project.
This is the “offending” garden that won the Drummondville couple a victory regarding the use of their front yard for purposes other than lawn and parking
Here are the next steps: Vegetable seedlings are now well past their prime at the grocery stores, garden centres, and greenhouses where they’re sold (one such vendor is Semis urbains / Urban Seedling). You’ll surely be able to find some on sale. Get them into the ground, or into standard or wicking (self-watering) pots as quickly as possible, and water them well (you can even provide some shade for the first day or two; if it’s a sunny spell, they may need it).
Make sure that compost is part of the soil mix, and mulch the surface to retain moisture. Water them every day if the rain doesn’t come.
Non-gardeners have funny ideas about what a pest is: usually something that gets into your unsecured garbage, something that has a “bad reputation,” something that they haven’t seen before and isn’t necessarily cute…
If you garden, you’ll necessarily have food and maybe some shelter for insects and wildlife — and that means you’ll have visitors. Not all of them are pests! With some experience, you’ll know which animals and insects are, and which are merely hazards of gardening. Here I discuss both nuisance and beneficial wildlife.
There are a lot of strategies to attract the animals and insects we want, and repel the ones we don’t. And sometimes, an act of welcome will reduce the nuisance effect.
For instance, putting out a dish of water for the squirrels will reduce the number of tomatoes and cucumbers they steal — because your vegetables are an easy source of water on a hot, thirsty day. They’ll go for the water bowl, so put it out sooner rather than later, and the birds will benefit too. (But you still want to put netting on your fruit!)
This March, I avoided planting my garden seeds until this past weekend. Though I knew I was blowing the schedule for many seeds, I hadn’t done any additional homework about them until last week. I’ve not even completed the list, but the image above shows you the crops that I should have started earlier, based on our May 3rd frost-free date. See, last year, I thought frost-free was three weeks later; no wonder I had such a paltry garden.
Even starting late, it’s still worthwhile planting your own seeds. I found out last week that a lot of greenhouse seedlings are treated with neonicotinoid pesticides at the seed/seedling stage, and I don’t want anything that will harm native pollinators in my garden. So I used seeds I’ve saved, and some I bought.
Two weeks ago, I went to Ontario for a little family/business/pleasure roadtrip. About 3 kilometers east of Fenelon Falls, I went to a farm where they had a table selling produce. I’m the special kind of stupid that forgets I’m a blogger, so I forgot to take pictures of the farm stand and the turkeys making a ruckus at the farm gate. So let me interrupt this blog post with an appreciation of turkeys and ducks:
A family of wild turkeys passes by the Discovery Shack at Gami’ing Nature Centre. They’re heading over into the farmer’s soybeans.
I managed to take pictures of the one lonesome Muscovy duck, Mamma, who belongs to the people I stayed with down the road. Mamma used to look after the chickens, and at nine years old, if she survives over the winter, she’ll do so again in the spring. She apparently likes to kick the hens off the eggs so she can hatch and look after the chicks. Though I wonder, with broody hens, if they’ll give up that easily.
They had to spend about an hour a day out in the garden, vacuuming the squash bugs off the leaves. They let me harvest purple beans from their box garden full of them. And even though obviously I’d found my camera, I forgot to take pictures of that, too. So instead, I can to show you the giant zucchini, the dozen corn, some tomatoes, and the cabbage I bought, with the basket of beans right here on my kitchen counter (look up: it’s the header image).
So, pickling!
Two nights ago, I took the last of the corn and transformed it into corn relish. The recipe was not the same as last year’s; it called for too much flour in the sauce, so I am afraid it’s too creamy. Still, corn relish is better than the green relish you get at the store. It’s homemade by me, which beats your random corn relish.
Yesterday’s efforts began with slicing cucumbers, peppers, and onions to make a batch of bread-and-butter pickles (7 jars). Cucumbers are surprisingly hard on your knives! I have a sharpening stone, for which the traditional lubricant is spit. I sharpened the big butcher knife twice, once with the stone and once with the pestle (ceramic also sharpens blades) from my mortar-and-pestle. Here they are, pre-salting.
And then I got ambitious enough to make a batch of sauerkraut with the very large head of cabbage featured above. I chopped up the whole head and salted it in this pickle crock.
A 3 gallon crock from Medicine Hat, Alberta
I used the instructions from Boing Boing, whose creator sounds like the kind of guy I’d get along with — he wrote a book about making everything. You can read all about it at the bottom of the “How to make sauerkraut” instructions.
But I had a problem: I have no 9-¾” wooden disk to push down or cover the contents of the crock. So I phoned Dad to ask him to cut me one, “and not out of plywood.” The old man actually sounded happy to have something to do, which is surprising because it was a favour for me and usually he’s like “I’ve got enough to do, make it yourself.” But in this case, I can’t. It requires a band saw or at least a jig saw, and a belt sander to smooth the edges.
So I tried to weigh down the cabbage with a plastic bag filled with water, but the bag leaked. Now I have more watery contents in the crock pot, but that’s OK because it helps keep the environment anaerobic. I added more salt. The plate I inverted keeps most stuff from floating. I have no “bloom” on my stuff yet, and that’s a good sign.
One week later, my sauerkraut-in-the-making still looks like this:
And short of jarring it, I’m all done. Unless some something like an excess of green tomatoes happens, the pickling is over for the year.
This is a long-running “lifestyle” blog about the pleasures of living like a farm kid in an urban context. There’s a big focus on ecology and wildlife because this has brought me joy – and this is also the greatest potential we have of restoring some balance to nature where we live.
I write practical content for people to do little projects that basically make things beautiful, but also support climate readiness (energy efficiency, heat reduction, drought tolerance, flood prevention, and more). I’m a relentlless promoter of having a live-and-let-live attitude towards biodiversity.
Comments and questions are welcome! And if you’re anywhere near the Montreal region, you can also use my “Rewilding” service to landscape your property using native plants, convert to a green driveway, and prevent your windows from killing birds.
