EARLY SPRING CAN ENHANCE A MEAL

That Long Rainy Month of May is thankfully over. It did create a deepening sense of despair that the growing season would never begin. I had a great yearning to begin eating something produced in my own garden and the only three plants in the patch that were bursting with enthusiasm were the perennial parsleys, chives and sorrel. The huge Portuguese kale had taken a battering over the winter and despite the lure of consuming those big crunchy leaves I left the plant to recover. Making do with what was available I chopped up one cup of chives and parsley, two cups of left over cooked potatoes, two free- run eggs, and mashed them all together with herbed seasonings. Shaping them into large patties they were grilled in a hot cast-iron pan. Served with a slice or two of locally raised bacon makes an irresistibly good quick meal. I am just discovering the wonders of growing sorrel. It is a big deep green leafy perennial, rather like Romaine lettuce in appearance with a distinct lemony edge. It certainly punches up the flavour of a store-bought lettuce when there is nothing else in the garden with which to create an interesting salad.

Checking Out Other people’s gardens is a constant source of inspiration and this time I took my friend and mentor, Georgene Price along for the ride. Georgene is well over 90 years and yet has an abiding delight in the wonders of the garden patch. Last year she sold her Candy Lane home and moved into a waterfront condo at Willow Point. Leaving her beloved vegetable garden behind was a painful wrench but it didn’t take long to find a niche. She immediately volunteered to oversee the Sybil Morgan Andrews cottage garden where she had spent so many happy hours years ago learning to paint under Sybil’s tutelage. It was obvious that tending that small garden wasn’t enough for Georgene’s boundless energy. The next task was to take on the development of her son Gordon’s back yard. He’s working out of town now and she has a generous space planned out and already partly planted. It is most likely that she will plant far more than she could ever consume but her son and her neighbours will be the beneficiary of her generous spirit.

Spin Gardening is an off–shoot of Spin Farming. That is essentially what Georgene is doing. The gardening part of the spin is where a person, who does not have land, offers to cultivate a vegetable garden in someone else’s back yard in exchange for keeping the owner supplied with fresh grown food. This concept, on a larger scale, was pioneered in Canada by Sasktoon farmer, Wally Satzewich and his partner Gail Vandersteen have become an urban phenomena throughout the country. Satzewich is now renting around 25 backyards in the city totaling about a half-acre of growing space. He and his partner make a good living on their market sales. In Victoria Spin Gardening is wildly popular and not only are these gardeners providing food for the property owners but are marketing the surplus at either a market garden co-op or a direct-to-the door system. It is exciting to see these new developments on Vancouver Island that reduce our dependency on shipments from the mainland and also provide us with fresh high quality foods.