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Angling for a decent garden

When I was a kid in Brooks, the two great spring-summer outdoors recreations were angling and gardening; I learned how to pitch into the latter so Dad and I could go fishing. Later, in Red Deer, I frantically fitted gardening among as many as 80 to 100 fishing forays a season.
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Left: author with swollen broccoli head; Right top: one variety of this year's garlic harvest; Right bottom: Imperial star artichoke.

When I was a kid in Brooks, the two great spring-summer outdoors recreations were angling and gardening; I learned how to pitch into the latter so Dad and I could go fishing. Later, in Red Deer, I frantically fitted gardening among as many as 80 to 100 fishing forays a season.

Last year, a poor fishing season produced our second-best vegetable garden ever, the only failure being shallots, which don’t like heat.

So far, this is a worse fishing season, and the gardening results are “interesting,” both owing to excessive cold and rain up until about mid-July. From all quarters come wails of “weeds and ants,” and worse: the inability to slog the mud to do anything about them.

Our first two Green Arrow pea crops were a bust, but the third row is showing the pods of promise. Blue Lake green and Stringless Golden wax beans just will not stop producing, inspiring prayers for an early killing frost.

We successively plant six rows of Norlands, so we can continue enjoying the small, sweet new potatoes well into September. Spuds have produced well, and soon we’ll have to dig the big ones that are left for winter storage. We’ve already done that with our half-dozen hills of Bintjes, which make world class frites in Europe, and the best French fries you’ll ever eat in North America.

Eureka broccoli and Cheddar cauliflower are showing swelled heads, and Salad Bush slicing cucumbers are finally over-achieving. Cobs will be ready soon from our Seneca Arrowhead corn.

Unfortunately, the heat did not arrive soon enough to help the tomatoes or eggplants, which just will not set fruit when it is cold over a prolonged period.

Surprisingly cold-tolerant Imperial Star artichokes are “budding,” and some have “chokes” ready to pick; we just hope we started spraying the insecticidal soap in time to stop the blackbean aphids, which can blacken a whole artichoke crop.

Daily we are picking up a bumper crop of huge shallots that crowd themselves out of the ground, but scallions, green onions, have been a total bust, mainly because McKenzie Seeds continues to sell “Multiplier Onions,” which aren’t and don’t. Next year we’ll plant our own smaller shallots and use them for scallions. All of this adds to the suspense as harvest day for our other alliums, garlic, approaches.

Back in the day, we’d attend the agriculture-gardening competition displays at the Red Deer Fair to judge how we were doing relative to other area gardeners.

But early July is really too early, and now the Red Deer Public Market provides a better, season-long yardstick, and many gardeners I know gather there to trade tricks among themselves and with local and area producers.

Increasingly, the market booths are offering fresh, but unnamed hard neck garlic for sale. So when I saw huge (25 cm circumference) bulbs of “Russian Purple,” I bought two from which to plant the cloves and had a discussion with the young clerk about growing garlic; he asked and was astonished to learn that there are hundreds of garlic varieties.

The next week, the Russian Purple was gone, replaced by a box of smaller bulbs, labeled “Russian Garlic.” From over my shoulder a voice sneered “what’s so special about Russian garlic?”

I restrained myself from answering: “for starters, it isn’t that cheap, over-stored, often rotting, Chinese soft neck garlic, with tiny, hard to peel cloves, and which is all you can buy in our supermarkets.”

That afternoon, Aug. 24, we dug, pulled and hung up to cure what came up from the garlic cloves we had planted almost 11 months ago. There was both excitement and foreboding, because of the weather, and because we had tried some new varieties and methods, such as foliar fertilization, by spraying the leaves with a fish-oil-seaweed concentrate mixed with water.

None of the soft neck garlic varieties I have tried have done well in our climate. This year we tried Red Toch (from Russia) and harvested, among 18 bulbs, half a dozen far larger than the ones we obtained from Nicola Valley Garlic. We had planted eight cloves from the one bulb allowed by Boundary Garlic of the rare, weakly-bolting hard neck, Rose de Lautrec, and got eight bulbs back, three much larger than the original.

But the great surprise, the tour de force, was the hard neck French Rocombole we got from Boundary, which touts its “sublime flavour.” All 20 bulbs we harvested were huge (nine-plus-cm in diameter; 24-plus-cm in circumference), two to three times the size of the bulbs we broke the cloves from to plant, larger even than the bulbs of our perennial go-to porcelain hard-neck, Fish Lake No. 3 (also originally from Russia).

So, late in September, we’ll be planting cloves from the biggest and best bulbs of all of the four above, plus cloves from the Russian Purple, and some of the purple stripe hard necks, Chesnok Red (Russian) and Tibetan, now in transit from Nicola Valley Garlic.

Bob Scammell is an award-winning columnist who lives in Red Deer. He can be reached at bscam@telusplanet.net.