MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR GARDEN
An item in a recent column about the efficient use of garden space elicited responses from readers. It’s clearly an issue of interest. Increasing numbers of people every year are keen to grow at least some of their own food and flowers, and often only very limited space is available in which to act upon that desire.
I had described how I use varying lengths of tall, sturdy wire as space-saving aids. An example from this year’s garden is a plot just 1.2 by 2.4 metres set up with a 2.7-metre length of arced wire at one long edge, with sweet peas growing up the outside of the wire and cucumbers with climbing zucchini up the inside, alyssum and calendula at the two triangles created by the bends in the wire, bush beans in a row along the outside edge of the plot and potatoes in the inner space.
Linda, who gardens on Salt Spring Island, had difficulty picturing how I had fit the wire into the space. I did this by bending in the ends a little, enough to make the wire fit at a 2.4-metre edge. That formed the broad arc that in turn created further planting spaces at the corners and inside the arc.
In another part of the garden, I bent a longer length of wire into a U-shape to use as an easy, space-saving way to support 17 staking tomato plants.
Peggy wrote from Duncan to describe a similar “mini-garden” in her back yard.
“The little garden was fenced because of bunnies. Inside the fence grew a good crop of Green Arrow peas in a U-shape with bush beans in the middle.” Around the fencing’s perimeter are nasturtiums — “for show. I love their bright colours.”
A friend who recently enjoyed a family vacation in England came back in awe of the many small-space gardens she saw delightfully and tightly filled with a broad diversity of ornamental and edible plantings. As residential spaces for planting become more confined here, we’ll be devising ever more strategies for doing the same. Giving a fig. It was good to see old friends again this summer, after too long an interval. We relaxed over tea in the garden, using chairs, a love seat, and two little tables that I’d rescued from complete decrepitude in the spring by sanding and scrubbing them, and using chalk paint to cover over their many defects.
In the morning of the day they were leaving, after breakfast, they ventured into the garden on a hunt for figs to take home. We arranged the figs in a shallow box from the liquor store. Because they had a fairly long drive home, they picked figs that had drooped and softened, but that had not yet developed the slightly darkened look and squishy juiciness that signal full sweetness and a syrupy interior that looks almost caramelized.
The colour and degree of softening indicate the state of ripeness in a fig. Cut open, not yet fully ripe figs will show a considerable rim of white “rind” and the flesh will be pinkish. As ripening progresses, the rind diminishes and the flesh darkens and starts to liquify.
If you don’t mind a bit of drooling, messy stickiness, for intensity of flavour and sweetness, it’s worthwhile waiting for full ripening in a fig. Greens forever. Like many gardeners, I’m perennially plagued by the “lettuce gap.” The lettuce season always starts out gleefully, with transplants, purchased or home grown, set out early in the spring. A bonanza of salad materials ensues. Sometimes follow-up plantings happen, for a continuing supply of lettuce, but more often in my garden that worthy project becomes lost in the flurry of a busy season — until this year, when I did manage follow-up indoor seedings, made at the time of each transplanting of previously sown lettuces.
This year’s progression of summer lettuces is partly due to the extreme adaptability of lettuces like Tom Thumb, a miniature butterhead, and the Salanova lettuces from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. In the heat of summer, they did well lightly shaded by tomato plants and large squash leaves.
GARDEN EVENT
Gordon Head meeting. The Gordon Head Garden Club will meet on Monday at 7 p.m. in the former Gordon Head United Church hall, 4201 Tyndall Ave. Speaker Diane Pierce will present Climate Change in your Garden: How to work with drought and dry, shady areas.