For millennia, gardens have played a major role in every culture. Vegetable gardens prevented massive starvation and flower gardens placated man’s enduring quest for beauty.
Gardens are intertwined in our lives, and this year the St. Albert & District Garden Club is encouraging local green thumbs to experiment with a broader range of seeds than the regular packets available at retailers.
The club has purchased and is giving away free heirloom seeds to local gardeners. Heirloom seeds are classified as having faithfully reproduced from generation to generation for more than 50 years. They are open-pollinators that ensure the plant reproduces itself true to its DNA and will look like the parent plant.
The major driving force behind the give-away project is the city’s premier gardener, John Beedle, a member of both the club and the St. Albert Botanic Park. “I thought it would be a nice idea for it to coincide with the 150th anniversary. I initiated it last year to work out the bugs,” says Beedle.
He searched for heirloom varieties that early 19th century missionaries, farmers and Hudson Bay store proprietors would have brought west, a simple cross-section of vegetable seeds — peas, beans, tomatoes and root vegetables.
“There was no refrigeration. They had to dry or store everything in root cellars.”
During his quest, he brought on board Derrick Harrison, president of the garden club. Harrison, who is always looking for ways to help promote the club’s annual flower and produce show in August, saw the potential of distributing seeds that might attract different species of plants to the exhibition.
The two white-haired horticulturists, with more than a century of gardening experience between them, started scouring the Internet for seed sources and ended up purchasing half their supply from the Heritage Harvest Seed Company in Manitoba, a reputable firm that supplies appropriate Zone 3 heritage seeds for this area’s short growing climate.
They settled on a wide spectrum of seeds such as beans and peas, plants from the cabbage family, root vegetables, onions and leeks, lettuces and spinach, squashes and tomatoes. As a bonus, they added a sprinkling of herbs from the basil, parsley, sage, savoury and thyme families and several annuals leaning towards marigolds, zinnias and cosmos.
What they deliberately avoided were potato tubers, a popular vegetable eaten by every pioneer family. As Harrison explains, “Alberta Agriculture has put out a warning about potato blight, the same blight that created a famine in Ireland in the 19th century. It is a fungal disease that creates brown or black spots on the leaves. It gets brown blotches and rots all the way through. If it’s not disposed of properly it can come back the following year.”
Harrison is also quite vocal about endorsing heritage seeds as way to preserve and perpetuate genetic diversity from the increasing corporate push to use genetically modified plants.
“Seed banks for heirloom varieties provide an alternative. If you only grow one variety, diseases that affect that plant will multiply and eventually wipe it out or cripple it.”
While Harrison examines the practical applications, Beedle has discovered a nostalgic aspect to scouring for heirloom seeds and reminisces about the settlers.
“It was difficult. They had no stores and had to provide seeds for the next year from a previous crop. And I believe the climate was more severe back then. We have more frost-free days today.”
Gardening can be hard work, but rototilling a patch in our yard takes only a few hours. Back in the 19th century, the obstacles to break in a garden were enormous. “They had to remove trees. The soil was not worked and the only fertilizer they had was manure, wood ash and straw bedding that had rotted.”
Beedle goes on to explain that manure was loaded on a stone boat (a type of sled), spread in rows and plowed into the soil. “The next year, they’d do another piece.”
Once Beedle ordered his first batch of seeds in 2010, their growth and production was tracked at the St. Albert Botanic Park. One of the park’s perks is that anyone who donates 40 hours of volunteer labour has access to a 100-foot-long row to plant whatever they choose.
About 20 volunteers took up the challenge to grow heirloom varieties with a healthy crop of lettuce and cabbage. “The success rate was about 80 per cent.”
Some of the seeds unfortunately did not germinate, and in the case of the French radish, “They were dreadful radishes, horrible, very tough.”
At this point Harrison interjects and suggests the radishes may not have been at fault. “They’re very fast growing — in 28 days — and you have to pull them when they’re just right. And they won’t grow in heavy clay. They need a loose soil and lots of water.”
And beans, normally an abundant crop, were thinner than usual. “They didn’t seem to bloom in time,” explains Beedle. “And if you didn’t pick them at the right time, they got tough and stringy.”
Unfortunately, because of last year’s brief growing season, cut shorter by a late summer and early winter, no seeds from those plants were collected. All the give-away seeds this year have been ordered through the Heritage Harvest Seed Company and from England.
On its website, the garden club lists all the heirloom varieties planned for distribution with accompanying photographs. The website is at www.stalbertgardenclub.info.
Many of the plants are a wealth of history and culture. There’s the historic Arikara yellow bush bean that travelled on the Lewis and Clark expedition. The early scarlet horn, a thick carrot was common in the Netherlands in the 1600s and the Norfolk spinach is a rare heirloom from Quebec.
All the give-away species are marked on the website with a red dot. The site also displays additional pictures of heritage varieties that can be grown in the area, but are not being distributed. These types do not carry a red dot.
The seeds are free of charge and can be ordered by emailing [email protected] before the end of April.
For general information on heirloom plants, check out Seeds of Diversity at www.seedsofdiversity.ca.
