Giving thanks for the winter harvest
Iwas longing for spring, and warmth, as I trudged into the back garden on the morning of the last, slight snowfall and dug through the snow to harvest carrots, parsnip, red-fleshed and white-fleshed potatoes to combine with stored onion and garlic, frozen garden peas and chunks of cooked turkey into a pot pie.
I thought of a favourite novel, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and the supreme blessing of access to a bit of that good earth to produce flavour-rich, nutritious food. And probably because two books by Salt Spring Island authors lay on my desk awaiting close scrutiny, I thought also of that island hotbed of earthy enterprises where seed companies, gardening gurus, farms, a seed library, nurseries, and garden writers live and flourish.
Some Useful Wild Plants by Dan Jason (Harbour Publishing, 192 pages, paperback, $16.95.)
The original 1971 edition of this book, from my father’s library, has survived many thinning-out sessions of my garden books, because it is so interesting and useful as a guide to identifying, foraging, and growing wild plants for food and medicine.
The plants are sectioned into herbs and shrubs, berries, seaweed, and trees, with an additional chapter describing poisonous plants found in the wild.
This new, brightened edition of the book has the same roster of useful and beneficial plants from alfalfa to yarrow and alder to willow. It includes salmonberry and thimbleberry, sweet woodruff, vanilla leaf, and fir, whose needles, rich in vitamin C, are used for tea.
Seeds for many of the plants in the book can be found in Dan Jason’s Salt Spring Seeds catalogue.
Listen to Your Garden by Jim Warren (FriesenPress, 214 pages, paperback, $17.50).
A retired surgeon living on Salt Spring Island has authored this wonderfully relaxing book, not at all a typical gardening manual, but rather a series of mainly one-page, gentle observations on the natural world of what he calls “Lotus Island.”
Jim Warren sees in the pansy no “shrinking violet.” The modest little blooms are deceptively tough, enduring, resilient. They bloom through snow and ice. The name may signify timidity, “but they are mighty!”
A somewhat informal and chaotic hedgerow of native shrubs on the author’s property, in its diversity of growing habit, colour, flowering time and fruiting, displays a strength and durability that are hallmarks also of diverse human populations.
Warren reflects on the “dahlia indigestion” that comes with split root clumps and resulting excess numbers of tuberous roots for planting. “Dr. Flower” is the name apartment-block residents gave Warren for his weekly deliveries of cut dahlias to the complex.
There’s a disastrous delivery of pig manure, episodes of peeing in compost heaps, and a lesson on the physical and spiritual benefits of kneeling in the garden for only short periods at a time.
This calming, thoughtful book is one to pick up for brief moments of respite and reflection. It is available at Salt Spring Books, online from FriesenPress, Amazon, Chapters and other outlets.