Garden Hopes
One of the reasons Darwin and I moved to central Alberta from the Foothills is to grow more of our own food without all the blood, sweat and tears of trying to grow in Chinook Country. This is the overgrown yard we inherited in Cochrane. It was south-facing and raked by west AND east winds. We could (and did) have killing frosts every month of the summer.
By the time we moved last summer, we’d improved the yard to this point. We had to solarize the berm under black landscape fabric for one year to kill weed seeds and reset it to a primarily fungally-dominant culture. More on that in future posts.
Just for fun, here’s a sampling of one year’s typical entries from the sad little garden journal I kept of our efforts:
June 8 - Rainstorm with a bit of hail late afternoon. High 29C, low 8C.
June 17 - Blustery day yesterday. Lots of bubbly clouds and some rain squalls but extremely little rain here, less than 1mm. -1C.
July 5 - Still lots of slugs esp. in NE berm. 3C. Major storm ripped through around 1:30 and lasted an hour or so. Lots of hail but small to normal sized. However any tender greens very bruised including container lettuce destroyed. This rain/hail so intense with 2.5’ over 30 minutes that overwhelmed our rain harvest systems. We had to close the totes and open 3 drains (at tote, at final low drain and at house) just to keep the pipes from overflowing at the leaf collector!
July 28 - We went away for five days, debated over asking someone to water for us while away but the forecast said 60% chance of rain M-T. But when we got home we saw it had rained barely at all, like 1mm in our gauge…we didn’t lose anything but the lemon verbena but potted tomato, zucchini, potatoes and some beans showed signs of drought stress. The tomato in the pot was frighteningly crispy and wilted but came back overnight. Lesson: we have to have someone check the garden every couple of days - it’s too hot and windy here and the forecast is never accurate.
August 19 - Crop killing frost warning yesterday. We spent two hours covering everything. Predicted 0C, actual 3C, light frost.
Hail damaged our one apple.
Covering all the beds would take quite awhile.
When we moved, our forest system was coming along, but we still struggled to obtain full harvests - the season was too short. So, this year, I’m hoping for better results in our more garden-friendly climate. I’ve even ordered seeds! I might grow celery!
Hopefully I’ll have photos from this summer transforming our new yard from snowy wasteland into garden paradise. Wish me luck!
