For years, gardening has been perceived by many as almost exclusively a retirement activity. “In my silver years, I’ll tend to the garden.”
But as the homesteading lifestyle continues to gain popularity, it seems that the pastime’s demographic is — and forgive the pun here — growing.
For Kevin and Marcel Reimer, twin brothers living in Winkler, one of the main joys that comes with gardening is the satisfaction of knowing where their food comes from.
Growing with the garden
The Reimers have been doing this for the better part of five years now, and they say they have learned a lot during that time. And with all the options out there, Kevin says that he hasn’t stopped experimenting.
“With tomatoes, it’s a tomato. It has a season, it has this much maturity, but there are thousands of different types of tomatoes you can grow… There are heirloom ones that are more difficult to grow, but they’re more vibrant in colour, taste better and have different shapes.”
Marcel shared one of his personal experiments from a season past with a plant that he says isn’t grown in the area much: bok choy.
“That was a little bit of a battle, because I treated it like lettuce. Which was a bad idea… the lettuce will shoot up, the bok choy needs a lot more space.” He also said that living next to a field, he had an unplanned surprise after its harvest season that he hadn’t seen before. “Everything else was fine, but all the bugs that were there [in the field] searched for other things… the bok choy was black with bugs. It got completely eaten away within a day.”
Kevin shared that one of the solutions they’ve learned to deal with that is simply spraying dish soap on some of the plants that are more at risk.
“And it’s not toxic to you because it’s soap. It washes off.”
Gardening in the fall
Though most associate gardening with spring and summer, Kevin says that even going into the fall, there’s still plenty to do.
“I’m putting my garlic in tonight. You put those in in the fall, they sprout up in spring as soon as the frost is out.”
He also said that fall is the time to treat the soil to get it ready for the spring if a person doesn’t plan on wintering plants.
Marcel added that tilling the soil to aerate it is important. But for people like him, with raised garden beds, that isn’t an option.
But he offers an alternative:
“We put in wood shavings, very fine stuff, to aerate it, to help it get soft. Stuff like that.” He also said that with small enough gardens, covering them up after harvest is a great way to keep weeds out of the soil and prevent the hassle of pulling them out later.
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Growing the food that’s on the table
Both of the brothers agreed that gardening is a fulfilling hobby, but it’s the fact that they can bring the fruits of their labour into the kitchen that’s the real reward.
Marcel pointed to the cost of produce in stores compared to the cost of seeds but said there’s more to it than that.
“To me, I’m doing something for my family that’s not just ‘going to work and making money,’ I’m supplying food… It’s a different sense of pride that I specifically get from gardening.”
Kevin agreed, saying that there’s something special to investing in something as simple and real as food.
“Knowing that this bread I made from scratch, you put a tomato on there or butter from a locally sourced place, the satisfaction of knowing ‘everything I’m eating now was made by myself,’ it’s so much more gratifying.”
On top of gardening, both brothers do, in fact, make a weekly sourdough. Is that relevant?
Only a little.
But whether intentional or unintentional, these ‘Botany Brothers’, these ‘Terrarium Twins’, both have found their way to a pastime they see value in and have committed to tending to their gardens, long before they’ve reached their ‘silver years’.
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