Peace Country Gardens

When I open the laundry hamper I use for storing potatoes in our pantry I am greeted by white tentacles of potato sprouts waving about from the last layer of potatoes. Soon we will be out of potatoes altogether but no matter. It is almost planting time and in a few weeks we will be enjoying new potatoes fresh from the garden. Salivate, salivate.

We are down to our last jar of dried tomatoes but cracking the lid on those babies is an entirely different experience compared to the potatoes. It’s like lifting the lid to summertime. The aroma is heavenly and the taste is sublime. They’re Excalibur Dehydrator dried which doesn’t sound nearly as nice as saying sundried but they taste great just the same.

Last year I planted several types of tomatoes but still liked Cold Set the best both for taste, ripening outdoors in our Zone 3 garden (though some were plucked green just before frost and left to ripen in boxes on the kitchen counters) and overall productivity. I saved my own seed and this year’s Cold Set tomatoes are already a couple inches high.

The return of our Canadian geese are always a harbinger of spring. While waiting to pick up my son and daughter in law at our smalltown airport for Easter seven Canadian geese flew over the airstrip. Only the day before Darcy was removing the snowblade from the pickup (a sign of spring faith in of itself) when a pair of geese flew overhead. The runoff hasn’t started yet and snow still covers the fields, but the pussy willows are coming out and the days are getting longer. The sun is holding some real heat for the first time since fall. Oh, I can’t wait to get my hands into the soil!

Does your own garden look more like this…

Than this?

When we’re kids we can’t wait to grow up. It seems like we’re always straining forward, anxious to be a teenager, then desperate to turn 16 and get our driver’s license. We can’t wait to graduate from high school and get out on our own. But then we look back on those formative, growing years and wonder why we were in such a hurry. Why didn’t we slow down and enjoy it more?

The same can be said of making a garden. We can be so anxious to have a beautiful space; to have mature trees, fully formed shrubs and lush perennials that we don’t pause to appreciate the formative years. Many gardeners look back at the beginning when they had nothing but a blank slate of soil, a binder of grid paper and a fistful of seeds with fondness. No matter what age you are, when you start a new garden it’s like getting to be a kid again. Don’t be in a hurry for your garden to “grow up”. Gardening, like life, is about the journey not the destination.