Home-grown series embraces traditional, organic gardening
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/10/2010 (5654 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Gardening is all about the cycle of life, the change of seasons, and creating the perfect conditions for rebirth and new growth.
Local producer/filmmaker/host Coleen Rajotte has embraced all of these concepts quite effectively with her spiritually and culturally rich and organically inclined series Vitality Gardening, and the result of her efforts is that the program has taken root at a second TV-network home.
Vitality Gardening, which premiered on APTN a couple of years ago, has drawn praise for its clever combination of traditional wisdom, grassroots gardening techniques and practical tips for cold-climate cultivation. Rajotte, a former CBC-TV journalist of Cree/Métis heritage, came to the series as a neophyte gardener, which meant the material in each episode was as new to her as it was to the show’s viewers.
“I used to think that gardening was time-consuming and difficult,” she says in the series première, which has its specialty-cable debut tonight at 6 on ONE: The Body, Mind and Spirit Channel. “But you know what? I was wrong. Watch how easy it was to plant my first-ever vegetable garden.”
Indeed, it turns out to be a simple project, with experienced local gardener Audrey Logan helping Rajotte plant a traditional crop of corn, beans and squash — dubbed “the three sisters” in aboriginal-gardening circles because the three plants actually help each other grow — in a patch of previously uncultivated land in her backyard.
But the series also takes Rajotte much farther afield, with segments that explore how some producers adapt their crops and methods to suit the shorter growing season in the Far North, and how Mayan farmers in Mexico have been growing corn as their primary crop for centuries.
The emphasis is on organic gardening, with a heavy reliance on traditional aboriginal methods, but Vitality Gardening also diversifies its crop of topics to include a how-to guide to composting, a look at the role of plants in traditional aboriginal medicine, unconventional uses of plants ranging from restoring hair to repelling insects, and how to prepare a harvest feast with crops grown in your own garden.
The timing of Vitality Gardening‘s première on ONE is a bit odd, given that gardening season hereabouts has pretty much come to an end, but the transplanted series is still worth watching because its simple, straight-ahead information can be stored away for the winter and used next season.
It’s all part, even for a slow-growing crop like the couch potato, of the fascinating cycle of life and renewal.
brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca