Vanessa Boniface Photo
Mint, harebells and yarrow in the wild.
Vanessa Boniface
Saskatchewan Perennial Society
Food weaves northern communities together. Sharing homemade berry jam, trading wild harvests, collecting mint, and sharing community meals creates bonds beyond sustenance. These traditions draw from knowledge passed down over generations, predating colonial agriculture by millennia. For settler gardeners in the north like me, this broader context transforms how I think about horticulture.
Unlike southern gardening, where focus is mostly on planted crops in defined spaces, people in our La Ronge region commonly gather and steward wild foods and medicines as part of daily life. Families protect and pass down secret berry picking sites, stewardship practices, and recipes across generations. Pre-colonial Indigenous food systems were more sophisticated than the “hunter-gatherer” label I was taught in school. Indigenous peoples intentionally cultivated landscapes to encourage food plant diversity, deliberately creating an environment much richer in edible plants than untouched wilderness. These carefully managed spaces may be easily mistaken for simply “wild” nature by modern eyes.
Gardening in La Ronge blends this time-honored wild management with formal gardening. At our place, we steward our wild spaces and carve out garden beds where sunlight and workable soil allow. Walking the land, we observe thriving native edibles, prune overgrowth to favor them, and propagate the best throughout our property. We sometimes plant near-native horticultural varieties of locally native plants like Theissen saskatoon or Boreal Beast haskap. This approach makes the land more abundant without making it less wild.
When it comes to classic crops like tomatoes and carrots, nature sets the limits. Prime spots with ample sun and soil get our compost and the topsoil we haul in from town, always finished with mulch. Seeds and seedlings are limited and expensive, so my yard has become a horticultural test site. I trial dozens of new species every year to discover what thrives without extensive care. Learning what survives naturally allows me to plant strategically later, building diversity and resilience into my garden while supplementing local seed supplies.
I am cautious about introducing non-native plants. Biodiversity remains strong in the north thanks to lower human impact and colder winters. However, climate change means I can’t assume hardy winters will always stop invasive species. Snow presents its own challenges. In the south I would cover perennials for protection but up here, snow loads sometimes force me to remove snow. I learned this the hard way last winter, when heavy snow damaged our greenhouse, picnic table and camper.
Our frost-free season is at least two weeks shorter than Saskatoon’s, with unpredictable frosts on each shoulder. Choosing fast maturing cultivars as well as locally native food crops is not just practical, it honors which plants naturally belong in this landscape. Many imported garden favorites won’t thrive here, and that’s okay. Plus, I’m eating a much wider diversity of plants!
For many crops, season-extending solutions like cold frames, row covers, greenhouses, and indoor starts aren’t luxuries, they’re necessities. While heat-lovers struggle unprotected, peas, potatoes, hardy greens, and brassicas thrive. Pest pressure is lighter here too, largely thanks to cold winters and few local monocultures. Pollination is more hit-or-miss, probably because of fewer bees so I plant abundant flowers to help. We never seem to run out of biting black flies though! Fun fact: they’re drawn to height, so if you don’t have a head net, gardening with a tall friend or extending a stick above your head might distract them.
Wildfires are another challenge. Recent fires forced large game, especially bears, into our communities and gardens, and reduced sunlight for weeks, stunting crop growth. Only after the smoke cleared did plants recover, but many lost their season entirely. It’s easy enough to wear bells when picking berries but try bear-proofing a compost bin!
Anyone who remembers my Gardening at USask days recalls my obsession with mulch. Wherever you live, mulch is essential for suppressing weeds, conserving moisture and soil building. In Saskatoon, aged straw or bagged leaves are easy to find online, wood chips are freely available at city depots, and you can purchase commercial mulches. Here, options are limited to what local landscapers provide or are purchased in small bags; costs add up fast. Wild rice harvesting means rice husks can be redirected from landfills for use as a mulch or soil amendment. I still avoid peat moss for all outdoor soil use and living near many beautiful wetlands only reinforces why they need our protection.
DIY resourcefulness is a way of life. Old skylight panels from a local building repair became my cold frames. From our local “free shack,” I reclaimed drainage ditch covers for row protection. This isn’t just thrift, it’s necessary when supplies are expensive and hard to source.
Gardening in the north is more than neat vegetable rows. It’s a holistic, biodiverse practice, an ongoing partnership with nature. Northern gardening isn’t “making do,” but reimagining what growing food can look like. It’s larger in some ways, tied to forest health, community resilience, and traditions that stretch back before settlers first broke prairie. Although our yards may look very different from those further south, northern gardening isn’t any less sophisticated than gardening in the south. it’s an invitation to grow differently, to recognize our unique landscape, and to reshape how we relate to both land and one another.
This column is provided courtesy of the Saskatchewan Perennial Society (SPS; saskperennial@hotmail.com). Check our website (www.saskperennial.ca) or Facebook page for a list of upcoming gardening events.
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