By chance I found Charlotte Mendelson’s book Rhapsody in Green; a novelist, an obsession, a laughably small excuse for a vegetable garden. Thank you Country Living UK Nov 2018. The book starts in late winter. I read it in early winter, in the dark, cold, rainy days of November. The perfect book for this time of the year! A real feel-good book. Throughout the book I was laughing at myself. I found myself on many of those pages. The seed bags I find when looking for something completely different, the nasturtium seeds I planned to pickle as an experiment, the plans on what to do with the huge harvest of a) runner beans (didn’t even grow), b) gherkins (one; tasty and crunchy, but just the one), c) courgettes (three, four per year) d) tomatoes (five to about 50, depending on whether I grew the plant from seed or bought it), e) etc; both at the cottage and on my balcony. Collecting jars, looking for recipes. And going to the supermarket for the goods. The writer’s garden is a whopping six square metres where she grows edibles. I have a seven square metre balcony, where I like to grow edibles. However, my balcony is not just a pot garden. It is also my patio; fridge in the cold season, sometimes also freezer; recycling centre; a space for airing clothes and drying laundry; an extra room for most of the year. My grand-nephew Liam even planned where I could put a sofa and where the TV could go. The point being, I cannot plant anything in the ground, which in my case is decking five floors above ground. Everything is in pots. If I add together the pots I used last summer, for instance, it probably comes to about one square metre. Another difference is the fact that at these latitudes everything freezes and nothing grows for months. The growing season is a lot shorter. And there are very few pollinators this high up. There’s more land for planting at the cottage. Much more. However, only a fraction of it is something other than forest and the soil is too acidic for anything but indigenous forest plants. A new problem in the past few years are deer. We used to have to go to the zoo to see any deer. And as I divide my time between the cottage and home (80 km) I’m not always there to shoo the deer away. Besides, they wake up long before I do. In order to avoid acidic planting conditions I have started to plant edibles, in addition to boxes, in mother’s flower beds with mixed results. Mother didn’t like mixing edibles with her flowers. Wild strawberries are taking over and I am letting them, although they may be suffocating other plants. For some weird reason some edibles get nibbled away in the flower bed, like wild rucola, but when I move them into a box they’re fine and now seed themselves all over which is fine. The writer also picks whatever edible she can find in the wild. Or ”wild”, as the case may be. Hedgerows, abandoned plots, someone’s front garden if the branches hang over the pavement. Depending on the year we may get litres and litres of blueberries, sometimes a few desiltres of lingonberries. We had some big trees felled around the house and the new growing conditions are already bringing us new edibles: wild raspberries. Some years we get a nice harvest of rowanberries which make a lovely gelée. However, rowanberries are difficult to pick as the trees grow taller and taller. Early summer brings new shoots of growth in spruce trees which are a nice addition in salads, interesting flavour in vinaigre and oil and they also make a lovely gelée. I limit my gathering of anything wild mostly to within our fenced property so if we don’t get berries I go to the market. I make gelées and jams and then save them so I have some when I need or want them. So often I end up having several vintages of gelées, waiting to be eaten. Hmph! My latest experiments are hablitzia tamnoides or Caucasian spinach and Meum athamanticum or karhunjuuri in Finnish. That translates as bear root (the same in Danish, German and Swedish, at least). According to Wikipedia common names in the UK include baldmoney, spignel and meu. I bought the hablitzia on-line because I couldn’t be sure the garden centre would have any. Turned out they did and better ones, but by then I had the on-line purchase. I was expecting the whole wall to be covered in hablitzia like I’d seen in pictures. I got one strand. I should have snipped the top to make it branch out, but I was adviced not to do so. In late August I was adviced to do so. I know better next year. It is a hardy plant, it should survive winter on my balcony. I can now see many buds at the base of the single strand so I am hopeful. Maybe next summer I can make spinach pie from my own, climbing spinach. The Meum I found in the garden centre. It looked interesting, so I bought one for the balcony and one for the flower bed at the cottage. The leaves have a slightly aniseedy flavour and the lady in the garden centre said it pairs well with fish. I was hopeful. The plant on the balcony was soon covered in tiny bugs and it was sticky all over. And then it was suffocated by a nasturtium… The one at the cottage was still alive when nature fell asleep for the winter although it didn’t exactly thrive.
My real balcony challenge is getting the heat right. The balcony is protected by a ”push-aside” glass system. Great for keeping dust, snow, rain and birds away from the balcony, although birds don’t come in even when I open the glasses, at least not while I’m at home. Great for a jump-start in spring, great for drawing out summer in the autumn. They turn, in effect, the balcony into a green house, but without the vents and things greenhouses have. I keep little gaps between individual glass panes and one or two of them open almost permanently during summer. Still, I seem to be in the wrong place for my edibles when they need more or less fresh air and water and I can’t control the blinds when I’m away. Herbs do well in both places. Chives, chinese chives, parsley, sage, thyme, oregano, rucola, basil. Unless they are suffocated by common chickweed at the cottage. Chickweed is a good source of magnesium, though. The good thing is I’m not dependent on this ”farming” for my sustenance. It’s fun, it makes me happy. I just saw a seed catalogue for this coming season. They are tempting me with crunchy, yellow carrots, with tomatoes the colour of cherries, with daikon that's white on the outside and pink inside. Help.
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AuthorI'm Piisa and I will be sharing with you my thoughts on this and that, maybe even on whatever. Archives
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