Home & Gardens – The Columbia Valley Pioneer • 1
October 9, 2009
By Cayla Gabruck Pioneer Staff
GARDEN GAL — Recession gardener Cayla Gabruck poses with her garden guard dog, Ruby, in the plot she planted this year at her home in Spur Valley.
Day 132 in the Garden of Champions. Well, it’s official: it was minus three this morning and I think my recession garden may be ready to be put to bed for the winter. It’s a bittersweet ending for my little garden. We took the fence down about a week ago, and no sooner than it was removed, some little critter came in and stole my prized pumpkin plant! It was to be expected, but still the shock factor was there. It reminded me that 4H kids must feel this way after raising a calf, feeding and nurturing it, and then shipping it off to slaughter at the end of the year. For my poor pumpkin plant, the slaughter came at the paws of a tiny, but ravenous, squirrel. Aside from that, I feel confident in saying my first garden was a success. I gathered enough vegetables to get me through the summer, learned a few very important lessons and gained a bit of insight into my family history. It is a lot of work to raise a successful garden, but thanks to writing this column, I have met several wonderful people with green thumbs who have given me ideas for next year. Catherine Tumason, who has an incredible front-yard garden in Invermere, stressed the importance of an irrigation system. I followed up on the idea and found that drip irrigation is a better way to water than using a traditional garden sprinkler. During warm periods, plants are dried out and stressed prior to watering with the hose or sprinkler, but drip irrigation prevents plant stress due to lack of water by oozing moisture from tiny
pores in the hose. It distributes water directly to the root zone of plants and you lose less water to evaporation. Economically, it also makes sense as you have less water waste – up to 30 percent! Lila Fodchuk and her husband, Nestor, also have a plentiful garden in Invermere. I met with the Fodchuks in early August and already their garden was bursting with vegetables and beautiful flowers ripe for the picking. Lila’s secret is to use lots of compost, a trick I will definitely employ next year. Dale Hunt grew the biggest tomatoes I have ever seen in his floating garden in Wilmer. I don’t have access to a body of water that large, but maybe I will make a floating tomato garden on the little pond in our yard next year. Just because the growing and harvesting seasons are over doesn’t mean that the work is done in my garden. Last weekend, I attacked the task of readying my garden for the looming winter, already showing itself on the mountaintops. This was not an easy job, as our handy-dandy roto-tiller was being a bit temperamental — and, by temperamental, I mean that it absolutely refused to start. So, after removing the weeds and leftover vegetation, cutting back my rhubarb, and adding a bit of compost, I enlisted the help of my beau, who worked it over with the garden tractor. Finally, to discourage any winter weed growth, I covered the entire garden with a layer of grass clippings – fresh from my local golf course, Spur Valley Greens. I read it is a good thing to do before winter and I figure I can rototill it into the soil in the spring — that is, if I can resurrect our rototiller from the dead. Here’s hoping. Happy harvest until next year!