Goodnight Garden

Even though there's no more swimming in the lake, no more camping trips, no reading our books while the kids play on the beach for us till next summer, we really do have it pretty good in the early fall on the island. We have had lovely warm weather and blue blue skies most days this September.

In the garden, the strawberries are producing nicely, as is the lettuce. The tomatoes and squash are still ripening, and our winter crops of kale and rainbow chard are trying their best.

I have a long list of things I'll do better next year, like building a plastic cover to protect our tomatoes from the wind, and to keep them warm for an earlier, better crop. And more. More of everything, especially greens. And next year, I swear it, I will grow a decent crop of carrots.

But, it is time to move on and prepare the garden for the winter. The last thing to go into the ground in our garden this year is garlic. We planted some of what we grew last year (although we've already eaten most of it!), and some that we bought at our local farmers market. We chose soft-neck garlic because it is easy to grow, and will keep in a dry, dark place for longer than the hard-neck varieties.

To prepare the garlic, we pulled whole bulbs apart and separated them into cloves just before planting. We prepared the garlic bed by working in a bag of fish compost, and then digging two trenches side by side, about 3" deep. When the trenches were ready, we placed the garlic cloves into the them, about 5" apart, and then covered them with soil and watered them well. Before long, we should see the greens come up, and they will last through the winter. We will harvest this crop next summer, likely some time in July. Now all we have to do is wait!

The Blackberry Patch

Sometimes even the most invasive of weeds can be forgiven its aggressive ways. For my part, every year at the end of summer I forgive brambles, wholeheartedly. Just now they are heavy with their big, sweet berries that are readily available to anyone who takes the time to pick them.

Many of us have our favourite bramble patches that we swear have the biggest, sweetest, and most abundant berries. I believe the same of our patch. My son Lucas was the first to discover this patch when we first moved to Victoria from Vancouver a couple of years ago. It is on the side of a road in an open field near the ocean, and it provides us with as many berries as we can pick, or in Abby's case, as many berries as she can eat.


This year my mom and sister and I went out with all of our five children. Not counting the three or four pounds of blackberries we ate while we picked, we came back with about eight pounds of blackberries, which was enough to make eight large jars of jam, to freeze a bunch for smoothies over the winter, and for my sister to make a delicious blackberry peach cobbler for dessert that evening.


Blackberry picking is a yearly ritual shared by many of us on the islands and lower mainland, filling our cupboards with jams and jellies enough to last the winter. This of course is a testament to the amount of disturbed open areas that have succumbed to the bramble, which for most of the year is just a mean and thorny vine. But, for its part, it provides us with wonderful berries that we can pick, can, freeze and bake with, all without spending even a penny.

potato pullin'

It seems to me that this year a lot of people decided to grow potatoes in a new or different way. My sister called me early in the spring to tell me about the tire method, in which you plant your seed potatoes in an old tire, and then pile tires upon tires as the plants grow. The idea is that when it comes time to harvest, all you do is pull apart the layers of tires and voila! No dig potato harvesting.

For our part, we decided to grow potatoes in straw this year. First, we used the sheet mulching method of applying layers of newspaper over lawn, and added a layer of compost to that. On top of this, we added our seed potatoes which were the lovely and delicate fingerling potatoes.

Then, instead of adding more soil, we covered the seed potatoes in straw. As the potato plants grew, we continued to add more layers of straw, keeping the whole plot well-watered throughout the season.

Eventually the plants flowered, and then after they died back, we called our friends over for a little harvest party. Harvesting, of course, is the most satisfying part of gardening, and we were all pretty excited to see what we had under our layers of straw. The whole idea with the straw is that the plant produces its little gems in the clean straw, and you have a nice, perfectly clean potato to harvest.

As we peeled back the layers, however, we found that most of our potatoes had not produced plants along the stems as they were meant to, but had produced at the base of the plants, and yes, we had wonderful, perfect, clean little fingerlings! They were very easy to harvest because we were just plucking them from the first compost layer, and we did not have to use a shovel at all. Even my little Abby was able to help with the harvest, much to her delight.

And my son Lucas, very much into numbers at the moment, did the final count, which came out at 129 little blond potatoes.

Overall, I think that the straw method was a success, and was certainly an easy way to grow the potatoes, right from start to finish.

Another bonus is that now we have a lovely little garden bed to layer up, lasagna garden style, and plant our winter vegetable crop to get us through the cold, wet months of the year to come.