Introduction
"Odd as it may seem a gardener does not grow from seed, shoot, bulb, rhizome or cutting, but from experience, surroundings and natural conditions."
Karel Capek, The Gardener's Year, 1931
It has been almost a decade and a half since The Harrowsmith Northern Gardener was first published. In terms of gardening information in Canada, 1982 seems a very long time ago. At that time, there were no Canadian gardening magazines, books about vegetable gardening in cooler climates were scarce and a generation of back-to-the-landers were in need of coaching. Measuring was still done mostly in inches, pounds and degrees Fahrenheit; I worked on a manual typewriter. The Harrowsmith Northern Gardener was an immediate best-seller, and H. Fred Dale, garden editor of The Toronto Star, called it "the leading choice for Canadian vegetable gardeners."
Now there is, if anything, an information overload. At least five Canadian magazines are dedicated to gardening, Harrowsmith has become Harrowsmith Country Life, and every season, there are several new gardening books on the market. Those of us who were once dedicated to the single goal of producing food at home organically find ourselves overwhelmed by information and new products. But we are eager to learn more, because we have come to want not just a utilitarian garden but a beautiful one too. It is ages old, this desire for bread and roses. As Canadian pioneer Catharine Parr Traill wrote in 1854: "Do not allow the lusty teams and the broad acres, the grass, the grain and the trees to occupy all your time, but give a thought and an eye occasionally to the beautiful."
This new edition, then, input on my Macintosh 6100/60, has been expanded not only to include the metric system of measurement but also to share information about growing the best ornamental annuals and perennials for northern gardens. And just where is North? Harrowsmith magazine's hard-pressed readers living north of 60 occasionally commented about what seemed to them a cavalier use of the adjective. As I wrote in the original Harrowsmith Northern Gardener, the word "north" is relative. The most specific I can be for my own purposes is to state that northern gardeners have a summer twilight long enough to allow all the carrots to be thinned after the sun sets but before dark. Northern gardeners have at least one trick up their horticultural sleeves for protecting the tomatoes from fall frosts, and northern gardeners have lost most of their topsoil to Pleistocene glaciers that pushed it somewhere down around the corn belt. Northern gardeners may find their gardening endeavors squeezed into a growing season that some Southerners would consider little more than wishful thinking, but it is long enough to thaw their spirits and produce an abundance of fresh homegrown food and beautiful flowers for indoors and out. My own garden, a different one from my garden of a decade and a half ago, is north of Lake Ontario, with a frost-free season from about mid-May till mid-September, hot, dry summers, and winter lows around minus 31 degrees F (-35° C), sometimes without a protective snow cover.
This book is written for beginners and seasoned gardeners alike. it makes no presumption that you need a green thumb to be successful. A green thumb, after all, is little more than the experience, confidence and intuitive understanding of weather, plants and the earth that eventually come to everyone after a few seasons of observing and working in the garden.
The aim of this completely revised version of The Harrowsmith Northern Gardener is, as it has always been, to inspire the reader to grow a garden that is both economical and enjoyable, a garden that is a personal expression of your own likes and dislikes, climate and environment. Your garden can supply you with food and beauty without harming its surroundings, biologically or aesthetically. A lovingly tended garden is a living work of art that will repay you in ways too diverse to count.
--Jennifer Bennett
