Abstract: Vegetable gardening persists in rural Newfoundland settlements as they undergo rapid technological, political and economic changes because gardening displays and perpetuates old values such as self-reliance, subsistence skills and family co-operation. Long-term research in northern Newfoundland has shown that it is not poorest who garden but proudest, especially flag-bearers of a traditionalist vision of rural life.IntroductionJust outside town of Main Brook, northern Newfoundland, where gravel highway turns down into town, a branch road turns inland to the Pit. The was dug for gravel, but it serves as well for planting gardens, picking raspberries and storing pulpwood logs. Like Camp Four on cross-country road, active part of the Pit is now marked by a sign, Gardens are not permitted in Town Gravel Pit/By Order of Main Brook Town Council. and frontloaders compete for ground not covered by forest. At edge of on about a tenth of an acre which she has been planting for 15 years, Aunt Bess, two adult sons and a granddaughter by another son are setting potatoes. The June fishery is keeping men up until late at night hauling caplin traps, so her sons have little time to help, but you make time, Bess says. Your garden is your livelihood too. The men begin by raking ground smooth and lining with string and stakes. The beds are a yard wide and 30 feet long. They then toss down some seaweed or stable manure where beds will be. Bess and her niece follow behind, placing potato seed, cut into egg-size wedges, each with a sprouted eye, in tight, neat rows of four across defined rectangles. The potatoes are long blues, an old variety, reds, which came along in 1960s, and canker-proof whites, a variety Canada Agriculture has been promoting lately. The men then lever up tan sand from strips of ground between beds and pitch it over seed, simultaneously forming trenches and raising beds.The gardening season began in April when Bess and some of her neigh-hours started cabbage seedlings in pots on their window sills. The sacks of potatoes saved for were brought into house from root cellar in May and allowed to sprout before being cut into chunks, one eye apiece. As soon as ground thaws in late May or early June planting begins. Planting and trenching potatoes usually involves a crowd of workers of both genders and all ages, sometimes representing several related nuclear families which share harvest. Men and women perform identical tasks in potato gardens, while women usually set small seed for cabbage and other vegetables in their kitchen gardens behind house. Kitchen gardens might also contain beet, carrot, onion and rhubarb or a currant bush--any fruit or vegetable housewife needs to protect or cultivate frequently. Cabbage seedlings started in house are set into kitchen garden's lazy beds in June. Cabbage and turnip may also be broadcast at that time over 10-foot-square, raised nursery beds for first three or four weeks of growth before being transplanted into nearby lazy beds.In early July gardens are trenched by spreading more fish or seaweed fertilizer over beds and banking up soil from trenches around emerging potato plants. Set 'em in kelp, trench 'em in caplin, gardeners recite. The annual caplin run is well timed to provide barrels full of fertilizer for trenching step. Since people moved their gardens out into country in 1960s, bears and crows have been rooting up fish, so commercial fertilizer has become more common.Bess straightens up from laying potato seed. Potatoes are easy, really. They're only three days' work: a day to set them, a day to trench them and a day to haul them. In fact, gardens are somewhat more than three days' work. Gardeners do return again to their lazy beds to weed in June and July, and to repair beds where moose have stepped. …
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Nov 1, 2018
Rezky Wahyudi + 2
Open Access
