Beautiful Gardens: Alberta Sweet, Calgary

One side of the vegetable patch.

Alberta Sweet.

Beautiful Gardens

alberta sweet Calgary story and photo byshauna dobbie

Every year the neighbours an kids ask the same question: are you going to garden again this year? And she gives them the same answer: I most certainly am. She may be slowing down a bit with the vegetables and putting in more perennial flowers, but the family can count on a bountiful harvest of raspberries, cherries, potatoes and lettuce. All organic. Every year.

Alberta Sweet keeps the garden going because she loves it. She grew up in Calgary with parents who gardened. Her husband Arthur, who passed a couple of years ago, grew up at the north end of Gull Lake, just north of Red Deer. His parents were farmers, so they gardened to keep themselves in vegetables throughout the year. When they got married in 1966, they lived here and there for a few years, but when

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Window screens are placed to protect peas from Eastern grey squirrels and hares. In the early stages of growth, the screens can be covered with frost cloth to protect the seedlings from the sparrows that have developed a taste for young pea plants and tendrils.

A weasel, sculpted from the old stump of a spruce by Alberta’s son and his friend with a chainsaw. It used to be a meeting spot for neighbourhood children and their parents when they went to the park; the kids would run ahead but had to wait at the weasel for their parents before heading to the main road to cross to the playground.

Household metal baskets to keep the critters from digging up the lupins.

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Phlox.

Double poppies bloom in a riot of red.

they moved into this Calgary house seven years later, there was no question that they would start a garden.

The question was more, what had the previous owners been thinking? There were balled-and-burlapped spruce trees all over the lot, only some of them heeled in. It was winter, so they waited until spring to get started. They planted some of the spruce and gave away the rest.

They poisoned the dandelions in the front yard their first year (it was 1974) and then quit. They thought about having kids running on the lawn with bare feet. After that they handdug dandelions with a dandelion tool. For general pest control, they’ve used wood ash, eggshells, coffee grounds, cinnamon and a mixture of ammonia and water (one part ammonia to four parts water) in a spray bottle for slugs.

“We started out in this yard with barely an inch of topsoil underlaid by clay. Through the years we have built the depth of topsoil to greater than the depth of a spade in most areas. We simply dug in all the leaves we could gather from friends, neighbors and a company that raked leaves from the office where my husband worked. We added household compost as well. The result is an organic and edible yard,” she says.

Alberta and Arthur’s passion for gardening has been taken up by two of the three children. They have smaller yards, though, so Alberta planted potatoes for everyone last year. And they all have potatoes to last the winter. Their daughter and her husband bought a greenhouse this year to augment the variety of produce they can grow— early cucumbers, eggplants and peppers mainly.

Alberta has had an excellent harvest this year, particularly of raspberries. Last summer, her daughter and some friends did the first big picking of raspberries with 18 ice-cream gallon pails 2/3 full. Later the family picked 10 pails 2/3 full followed by many individual pickings of one or two pails before the season closed out. Cherries were another big producer. There were several pails of sour cherries, which Alberta juiced and froze, giving her the opportunity to drink cherry juice for breakfast.

The fruit that grows at the borders of the property is available to anyone who would like to pick it. Fruit inside the yard, though, is Alberta’s. A few years ago, she saw a young girl in

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Calendula as bright as late afternoon sun.

A beautiful yellow rose.

Yarrow.

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Violas grow in a few places in the garden.

Apples taking form.

the yard picking raspberries; she told Alberta that her mother said she had to get four cupsful, enough for a pie. Alberta helped her pick the berries and told her she could come back in the spring and get some plants to grow her own raspberry patch. The family did not take her up on her offer, but many other people have acquired their raspberry plants, rhubarb and Nanking and sour cherry trees as offspring of Alberta’s stock.

One of Alberta’s great joys is watching her grandchildren in the garden. All seven of them look for berries,

Bleeding hearts dance among the lights.

mainly Nanking cherry, sour cherry, saskatoon or raspberries. One really enjoys the red currant berries. “It is a pretty nice way to live—nothing better than seeing the grandchildren picking apples or berries.”

In addition to the flowers and vegetables, Alberta has a bird corner. Here the birds enjoy the crabapples high up in the trees. From November to April, she does a bird count for Project FeederWatch, operated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada. It’s a good situation; she uses the crabapples lower down on the tree

for jelly, and those at the top are left for the birds and squirrels through the winter.

Alberta says that, overall, she is content, watching and working in her garden through the year. “Each kind of two-week progression brings on different things. I love to see that I’ve had germination. I love to see the tomatoes ripening on the vine. I love to see in the fall, when you’ve got sunflowers in bloom and you’ve got the blue jays waiting for the sunflower seeds…. I guess I just have to say I love all of it.” i

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Trees stand tall under an Alberta sky.

Garlic scapes loop around deliciously.

Chokecherries without a hint of colour yet.

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