We Homestead An Island

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And we're not the only ones who enjoy this foraging! Our rabbits cherish the wild greens we feed them, especially the salt hay which edges our island's tidal pool. The ten chickens pick up extra calcium from some of our crushed clam shells and gobble down all the leftover fish innards we'll throw them. Our two (soon to be more) mallard ducks have grown chubby eating the minnows that teem in our tidal pool. And our cat's favorite dish has become (are you ready for this?) steamed Nova Scotia clams on the half shell. Furthermore, if we ever decide (as many Cape Breton farmers have) to bring cattle and sheep to our offshore island for summer grazing ... we'll be able to just "turn 'em loose" and let 'em forage for themselves (no fences needed).

... AND ITS GARDENING "EXTRAS"

Other than adding wood ashes, rabbit manure, and chicken dung to our acidic, heavy clay soil ... we've relied entirely on seashore finds to lighten and enrich the VanderZwaag family vegetable patch.

In the early spring, we gather bushels of broken crab and mussel shells, which we pulverize with a wooden mallet right over the 30' X 70' garden. This not only lightens the soil's texture, but adds much-needed lime as well. (Unless the shells are crushed or ground, they break down far too slowly to be of much use to the clayey soil.) We also dig buckets of unrinsed sea sand into the vegetable patch to further aerate the heavy earth.

A shallow island cove supplies our seashore fertilizer ... wheelbarrow loads of rich mussel mud (a black ooze of rotted seaweeds, clam excrements, and whatever else ale Neptune throws in for good measure). This we gather at low tide and shovel?without rinsing -directly into the garden. Our plants thrive on it.

When each summer's vegetable crop is growing like sea monsters, we mulch the garden with a few-inches-thick layer of eelgrass ... a ribbon-like seaweed which is continually tossed up on shore-by the ton-near our cabin.

Eelgrass is also the secret of our "no dig, no mess, no work" annual potato crop. We just till the potato patch lightly in the spring, add a few Inches of the foraged grass, lay seed potatoes on the bed, and cover them with four to five additional inches of the mulch. That's it until harvest time ... when we simply pull back the mulch ... and pick up bushels of the clean, uniform, weed-free spuds. Folks have been growing potatoes in Nova Scotia this way ever since the first Scottish settlers mulched their spuds in this manner on their newly cleared, still-stump-ridden, shirttail farms.

Other "seashore" gardening help that we enjoy includes the salt water itself, which we sprinkle lightly on newly formed cabbage heads to discourage otherwise-pesky cabbage worms. Even the old tires which occasionally wash up on our beach are useful: When filled with dirt, they make excellent "raised beds" for tomatoes (the black rubber casings readily absorb solar radiation, which heats the soil they contain ... a vital factor in our never-ending effort to take the maximum possible advantage of Nova Scotia's all-too-short growing season).

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