Spring 1999

Since March 29, I have been in my native country Finland, establishing a demo garden and hosting a weekly garden show on Finnish Public TV. I welcomed this opportunity for two reasons: on the one hand I wanted to apply many of the gardening techniques I'd learned in Seattle during the past 15 years to my native country, and the other hand I was looking forward to the challenge of dealing with annoying events like frost well into May. And a challenge indeed it has been. Normally, the snow and frost is gone from southern Finland by the middle of March. Not so this year. I arrived here with my daughter Linnea a few days before Easter to find our garden site, and old meadow of about 1/2 acre which has laid fallow for the past seven years, covered with two feet of snow. And we were supposed to shoot the first show exactly one week later. The broadcast schedule had been set 6 months earlier, so I had to start preparing the site right away. I started shoveling snow from the meadow, almost falling asleep at my shovel from jet lag exhaustion. My brother suggested lighting some bonfires to melt the snow, but the heat they created seemed to go every other way except into the snow they were supposed to melt. So back it was to shoveling. After one full week, we had managed to clear an area of about 2000 square feet. We shot the first show in the cleared area, pretending to dig ditches and take soil samples, even though the ground was still frozen in many places and digging through it felt like breaking through bedrock. The chilly weather continued for two weeks, and on our second shooting day a week later it snowed as we were planting fruit trees in holes which I had managed to prepare beforehand by digging through the frozen top 2 inches of ground and keeping the holes from refreezing by piling hot manure on top of them right up till the filming moment.

By the third week in April, the weather finally took a turn for the better and we had one whole week of frost-free nights. I sowed seeds in pots in our newly erected greenhouse, and the seeds even germinated beautifully. Then by early May, we got another arctic blast with daytime highs only the 30s and nighttime lows in the 20s. Every evening, I carried containers of hot water into the greenhouse to keep the inside air temperature above freezing. The cold weather continued until mid-May, and I got tired of carrying hot water every night. So I learned from some locals to burn candles in the greenhouse at night, and amazingly they kept my tomato seedlings from freezing, even on the night of May 12th when the outside temperature dropped to about 20 degrees. The local storeowner smiled at me every evening when I showed up to buy more candles.

I did get a lot of work done in spite of the weather. We erected a wildlife fence around the whole site, since the forest is full of moose, deer, hare, badgers and lots of other creatures. We planted more fruit trees the second week of May when all the snow and frozen ground had finally thawed, we dug a garden pond and had the volunteer fire department fill it with water while we were filming a show, we put in large perennial beds in two concentric circles around the pond and planted well over 100 different perennials, and finally on May 14th we broke ground for the vegetable garden, turned and tilled the soil and planted potatoes. The ground was just saturated with quackgrass roots. And I used to think that Picardo was bad.

The locals are all being very polite to me about our project, but I'm pretty sure that they are hissing behind my back. I think their major concern is that quackgrass will prevail. I keep assuring them that I know my enemy and can deal with it.

It is now May 17th, and we have made 5 out of 10 scheduled TV shows. The last show for this spring will air June 24th, and by that time I will have to be able to present a thriving, beautiful garden. Then there will be a one month break in production, and by the middle of July we will be back showing off our wonderful harvest. And on top of everything, I promised today to provide fresh organic produce to the local farmer's market by the end of July. So I think my gardening in Seattle will take second priority this year. Fortunately, I planted my potatoes at Picardo in late March, mulched them heavily and expect them to take care of themselves until I'll be back harvesting them in September. Happy gardening to all of you, my friends, and wish me luck.