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This is the year that I figured out why all those planting instructions warn about placing perennials too close together.
For years, my gardens sprouted sparsely, with plenty of open space between the invited, introduced plants and with ample space left for all of those uninvited, native species to flourish.
But this summer’s perfect growing season produced an overlapping luxury of plants with the lilies drowning in hostas, which in turn overlapped with the peonies and poppies, all competing with the scattered blooming weeds that I welcome into my gardens … to a reasonable degree.
The vegetables and herbs also flourished. We had a great container crop of tomatoes and scallions plus a bonus of squash that should be ready any day now.
The two-year-old oregano (now a perennial) went crazy alongside the sage (also self-sustaining), and we enjoyed basil and cilantro until they flowered. The only disappointment was realizing too late that we don’t have a long enough growing season for eggplant. The little quarter-size purple “egg” my container plant produced probably will not reach the 6 inches required for a good harvest before the frost gets it.
Even here in the Northland’s short growing season, fall is the time to enjoy the harvest and to reflect on the seasons that brought us here.
While we don’t have an overflow of farms around all of the Lake, it is time for freshly gathered apples and for celebrating that fact, which is to say, do not miss Bayfield, Wisconsin’s 50th Apple Festival (see dates and details in our events). It also is time to pick pumpkins for carving or for pies, and for wandering lazily inside the corn maze found among our nurseries and farms in the Slate River Valley, Ontario, as well as in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan.
Many stories in this issue show just how good a harvest our region delivers. And sometimes that means a bounty of good people.
The winners of this year’s Lake Superior Magazine Achievement Award, in fact, have been for water and water issues what Johnny Appleseed once was to apple trees. They’ve walked far and planted the seeds of knowledge about the beauty and the battles of our water. No doubt those seeds will sprout with a harvest of solutions and protections.
In Juli Kellner’s Recipe Box, we get ideas for how to prepare that great fall and winter produce – the squash. If you don’t have too many zucchini by now, I’m afraid you don’t have enough local friends. As you read this, every guilty Northlander is trying to find a home for those extra armloads of zucchini. (You can’t just let it rot out there; that would be wrong.) Meanwhile, our publisher, Cindy Hayden, added her family favorite acorn squash recipe.
Another kind of seed planting can be done in any season. Our Recreation Guide offers great ideas about activities that sow the seeds of delicious memories in your children and grandchildren – memories to harvest throughout their lives.
On my personal winter To-Do list, thanks to the guide, is downhill snow tubing. In my childhood days, we piled onto toboggans. I still recall with amusement a film of the family crowding onto a toboggan at the top of the hill, followed by family flung happily here and there for every bump on the way down the hill, and finally the lonely toboggan completing its journey alone.
That seed of memory didn’t take much planting – in fact, we generally were scattered on the winter wind up there – but “decades gone by” I can still savor the sweetness of laughing, snow-covered, together.