On the Garden Path Carolyn Herriot
The salad box
he first year we moved into our new home I asked my husband Guy to build me 12 cedar planter boxes for Christmas, one-foot deep and six-feet long, on short legs. Eleven years later, I decided to use six of these planter boxes for winter food crops. I refilled them with screened compost and planted them in fall, using both direct seeding and transplants to fill them up with food. In November, just ahead of the first harsh freeze, we wheeled them into the unheated greenhouse using a flatbed dolly. We have been harvesting nutritious greens of kale, spinach, hardy lettuces, arugula, beets, chard, parsley, cilantro, radicchio, chicory, scallions, pea shoots and mizuna mustard all winter long. We have been adding greens to breakfast smoothies (see recipe), fresh salads and sandwiches as well as steaming them for side vegetables and using them in stir fries, soups and casseroles. We suffered a few brutal freezes this winter that knocked out a lot of the vegetables outdoors, but these salad boxes, under one level of protection from a singlepaned glass greenhouse, sailed through. If you do not have a greenhouse, cold-hardy winter vegetables are just as happy if grown under a cold frame or a protective plastic cloche, which keeps them frost-free. When the sun shines and the greenhouse (or cold frame) heats up check to see if they need watering, as the soil can dry out. Otherwise, very little watering is needed and there’s little to do but harvest. Heck, you can even go away for a month in winter and forget about them completely. The most important thing to consider when container growing is the growing medium you use in the container. It needs to be fertile and well drained, a medium that does not dry out too fast or that sets to ‘concrete’ over time. Screened compost makes the perfect growing medium if it contains all the vital nutrients and the best way to ensure the highest quality is to make what I call ‘super duper’ compost. When screened, it makes a wonderful, rich crumbly potting mix (or top dressing) for planters and barrels.
diversity of plants you can grow in containers. This method also makes harvesting food very convenient. I often use the ‘cut-and-come-again’ technique, snipping off leaves to within two inches of the soil and letting them come back up again. j Carolyn Herriot is author of The Zero-Mile Diet: A Year-Round Guide to Growing Organic Food (Harbour Publishing). She is a food security consultant and grows ‘Seeds of Victoria’ at The Garden Path Centre in Victoria, BC. http://earthfuture.com/gardenpath/
Goldie’s Goddess (Makes 4 cups) A perk up ‘vita-mineral’ boost any time of day.
Photo © Viktorija Kuprijanova
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ORGANICS
Put in a blender: 1 bunch greens: kale, spinach or chard 3 large carrots, chopped into chunks 5 medium apples, cored and chopped 2-3 tbsp. fresh ginger root (to taste) ½ lemon, juiced
‘Super Duper’ compost ingredients: • Aged manure (cow, sheep, horse, llama, goat or chicken) • Leaves (Tip: store extra in circular wire cages in the fall) • Herbaceous prunings • Weeds (avoid weeds in seed or pernicious weeds) • Spoiled hay • Grass clippings • Nettles (in season) • Comfrey (in season) • Seaweed (in winter) • Wood ash (uncontaminated) • Sawdust and fine woodchip (not cedar) When spring rolls around, I remove the plants that are no longer productive and replant with a host of new vegetables. I encourage you to try growing food this way; you’ll be surprised at the w w w.commonground.ca
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