By Stephanie Pettigrew
From top left, counterclockwise: Calendula, pansies, feverfew, morning glory, morning glory, pea flower, and another variety of calendula.
One of my favourite things about summer is gardening. Watching tiny little seeds grow into four to five foot tall tomato plants out on my deck is something akin to magic, and even though I know that I would never be able to feed myself from our tiny pot garden in a million years, it gives us a certain feeling of independence; it cuts down our produce bills, we can make salads all summer long by simply going out to the garden and picking out what we need, and it tastes so much better.
Both my spouse and I practice heritage gardening – not so much by choice, but because it’s all we really know. I learned how to garden from my grandmother, while my spouse learned most of what he knows about gardening from his place of work, the Fortress of Louisbourg, where he works in the department of animals and gardens. The Fortress only allows heritage breeds of animals and plants, along with historical methods of gardening, while my grandmother never really taught me how to garden with pesticides or manufactured fertilizers, so between us we manage to produce an all-natural, organic, heritage pot garden. It could easily be replicated on a larger scale, say, in raised beds or in a community garden if you don’t have the space or your own land or yard, but we live in an apartment with a 100-squre foot patio, so a pot garden is pretty much our only option.
Historical Gardens
Gardens in eighteenth-century France and New France were all about utility. In the case of New France, the French became experts in manipulating the micro-climate to their advantage, thanks to the advice and knowledge of indigenous allies. Even their ornamental gardens were completely 100% functional.
Of course, that didn’t mean giving up on ornamentation. Symmetry and beauty were also paramount in the French garden. Even flowering plants have utility, though we’ve mostly lost sight of that today. Some of the plants grown in Louisbourg include soapwort, which, when crushed in your hands and diluted with a bit of water, lives up to its name and makes an excellent substitute for soap – extremely useful when you’ve been digging in the dirt all day. Wormwood isn’t just good for brewing absinthe; it’s also an excellent astringent, and when drunk as a tea it was said to calm stomach pains. Lavender was grown in reams and used as an anti-inflammatory. Calendula is a very pretty flower, and when made into a cream can help speed up the healing of minor wounds. Even abortifacients were grown in Louisbourg gardens, catalogued as “plants to bring on a women’s cycle if she is late.”
The discovering of new plants and their medicinal properties was a whole extension of empire building in the 17thand 18thcentury. Londa Schiebinger discusses the race to discover the best and largest quantity of new and scientifically revolutionary plants in her book, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Bioprospectors would explore an area, glean as much information about the local fauna and flora as possible from the local indigenous people, and take samples back home, sometimes resulting in the return of larger numbers of British or French to exploit whatever the prospectors had found – particularly in the case of coffee, cocoa, and other useful produce. Royal botanical gardens were cultivated in a competitive show of who could amass the most “exotic” collection of flora.
What is Heritage Gardening?
All that said, you don’t need to go out and start bioprospecting to cultivate a heritage garden. Nor do you need to transfer cultivars from one side of the world to the other. In fact, the opposite is encouraged.
Heritage gardening is gardening using historical methods, which takes into account the local microclimate and conditions. Instead of using any old seed, you plant heritage seeds. This is a fancy way of saying you’re planting historical strains of plants. Some heritage varieties are also family-strains, which means that that have been developed on a family farm. For example, there is the family-strain Morning Glory called “Heavenly Blue,” which originated in the 1800s. (My favourite family-strain Morning Glory is Grandpa Ott’s, which you can see in the photo above.) Some of these seeds are handed down through generations of family, some of them are cultivated by the company, and some of them have been preserved by local indigenous groups.
Tomatoes growing on Stephanie’s balcony
Apart from the seeds, the other distinguishing factor when it comes to Heritage Gardening is the methods. Compost and manure are the only fertilizers (although, for the sake of everybody who lives in my neighbourhood, we use treated manure). No pesticides are used; instead, natural barriers are planted around the garden to discourage the type of insects that would do harm to the garden, while still attracting pollinators. Tomatoes themselves are mite-resistant, while chives and garlic keep the mites away. Nasturtium and morning glory attract the pollinators. Last year our peas were infested with some particularly nasty spider mites, which did require a more aggressive approach; spraying the plants off thoroughly with water in the evenings was enough to take care of it. And I do mean thoroughly – we lifted every single leaf to spray underneath and made sure there were no mites, every single night, until they were gone. Another natural barrier are ladybugs, which you can purchase at any gardening supply store. If you have aphids, ladybugs will take care of the problem.
I should probably mention at this point that, if you’re looking for an easy gardening experience with plants that essentially grow themselves, heritage gardening is not for you.
First Steps – Choosing your seeds
You should start thinking about getting your seeds about six weeks prior to planting season. Your planting season will be somewhere around Victoria Day, depending on where in the Country you live; if you’re in Vancouver or Victoria, you’ll have already planted your garden long before Victoria Day so take that advice and throw it out the window. Planting outdoors all depends on the last frost; you can’t expose your seedlings to frost under any circumstances without potentially killing them. So aim for Victoria day, unless you live in a part of the country where you are absolutely certain that your frost season is over with before then, and plan ahead to order your seeds in time to plant the varieties that need to be planted indoors six weeks beforehand.
The best source of heritage seeds in Canada is Heritage Harvest Seeds. Even the Fortress of Louisbourg sources seeds from them. Heritage Harvest goes through great pains to seek out rare, endangered breeds of historical plants, and cultivate them enough to make selling their seeds viable. Their heritage tomato collection is especially notable; we managed to buy their Acadian cherry tomatoes last year for the first time. They’ve always been sold out in prior years, so we were pretty excited! They turned out to be an excellent, hardy breed; the vines did not grow very tall (maybe about 3 feet as opposed to the 5 to 6 feet of their neighbours, despite being in the same size pot, with the same soil mix), but produced an abundance of tomatoes – easily over a hundred.
Picking what to grow is always the hardest part, and involves some trial and error. It’ll take a couple of growing seasons to figure out what really works best for you, your soil, and your sun exposure. I recommend googling whatever varieties you’re considering to find out more about what kind of climate they require. Our deck faces North-Westward, and gets about six to seven hours of direct sunlight each day in the summer. Turns out this is ideal for the tomato varieties we order. Because we’re four floors up and facing a river, we also get a lot of wind, which is less than fantastic; we usually have to make provisions for that so the stalks don’t break. Last summer a severe wind storm nearly took out the entire garden mid-July. All this to say – plan for your specific local conditions. Heritage Harvest is usually pretty good about giving information about the plant they’re selling, and because they’re based in Manitoba, most of their varieties are cold-hardy; but if you live in an area that has a short growing season, it’s probably best to not get a variety of tomato that requires 85 days to grow fruit. If you notice that a particular variety doesn’t do well, try something new the next season. If you’re in the Maritimes, avoid the peppers unless you have a greenhouse.
Stephanie’s favourite seeds from Heritage Harvest are: blue pod peas, snow white cherry tomatoes, and Grandpa Ott’s Morning Glories.
How to make your garden “historical.”
To make your garden truly historical, aim for pretty as well as functional. The French were masters of constructing the most beautiful utilitarian gardens. Nasturtiums are the perfect example of utilitarian beauty – they add a colourful pop to your garden (particularly if your “garden” is grey concrete, like mine) and can also be added to your salad for a bit of a peppery kick. Blue pod peas are also gorgeous. The vines alone are rich in foliage, and it’s fun to watch how they twine around each other. Their flowers are delicate, and vary in colour from pink to purple. And the pods themselves are a deep, dark purple. They also grow very easily – it’s hard to mess up blue pod peas. Drunken lady lettuce is a nice loose leaf lettuce, easy to grow in a small pot, on a windowsill even; it’ll keep growing even after you trim some off for your salad. It has a nice ornamental look to it, with reddish-purple tints to the top of the leaves. And there are infinite ways to make a tomato garden look pretty; mix up the colours, try a stripe variety, it’ll take care of itself.
Peas from Stephanie’s garden
Although I personally tend to go for vegetables over flowers, that doesn’t mean flowers are entirely useless. In fact, if you’re going for the purely historical garden, flowers are very much on-point – no eighteenth-century garden would have been complete without a selection of medicinal flowers. Calendula, lavender, feverfew, columbine, borage, ladies’ mantle, meadowsweet, foxglove – all had their own medicinal properties, were grown in eighteenth-century gardens, and would make for some lovely flowerbeds.
Herbs
No heritage garden would be complete without a selection of herbs. I’ve already mentioned chives, which we use to fend off mites. We also grow garlic, a special Cape Breton heritage variety. We use a ton of chives and garlic, so it makes sense for us to grow both. When it comes to choosing your herbs, go with whatever suits your taste. They can easily be brought indoors for the winter, giving you a year-long supply of seasoning for the year (although if you have pets you’ll want to be careful not to let them chew on your indoor garden). Chives are extremely easy to grow; put the seeds in dirt, walk away, and you’ll have chives for the rest of your life. Are you a cilantro person? Grow it yourself! Never go without it again!
General Tips and Tricks for First Time Gardeners
If growing in pots, make sure they are properly drained. Tap into your handy side; drill more holes into the bottom of the pot if necessary. If that isn’t feasible, place a layer of loose rocks and pebbles into the bottom of the pot before placing the soil to increase drainage.
Mix compost/fertilizer with your soil before transplanting your seedlings. Don’t fertilize again after that. There is such a thing as over-fertilizing. Be especially careful to never fertilize after your vegetable plants have flowered.
The one mistake people seem to make when starting out is over-watering. The only time you need to over-water is when you are transplanting seedlings to their permanent outdoor home; that is the only time that you really cannot give plants too much water. Once a plant is in situ, only water WHEN THEY NEED IT – that is to say, when the soil is dry. If you water when the soil is wet, you are encouraging the growth of mold and the decomposition of the root system; particularly in pots.
The best time to water your garden is in the morning, or the evening – any time the sun is not shining directly on your plants.
And voila! You have your very own, historical, extremely complicated, garden! But at least you spent some time outdoors absorbing some vitamin D, right?
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