A garden enthusiast in the city can run next door or a few doors down to borrow a tool, pick up seeds and cuttings or have a coffee and get advice.
But on farms and remote rural areas, the nearest neighbour who actively gardens might be 20 kilometres away, and so a lot of borrowing never happens, a lot of advice is never received and a lot of frustration occurs.
However, the digital age has brought an entire planet of neighbours into the home of every rural family that has internet access.
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Some gardeners say it eliminates the feeling of isolation that once enveloped rural gardeners.
Official gardening sources and individual gardeners’ blogs get information flowing fast and well.
“I find the Saskatchewan GardenLine website is helpful in advising on some diseases and pests,” said Lisa Friesen, an avid gardener in the northern, forested community of La Ronge, Sask.
“Otherwise, posting on the blog about a disease or pest often results in a helpful response from a reader with more knowledge.”
Friesen’s blog, Northern Exposure Gardening at zoneonegarden.blogspot.com contains photographs, thoughts, questions and advice from her garden and is typical of well-done gardeners’ blogs. They can be a great resource for gardeners looking for ideas, information, answers or a community of like-minded people scattered across Canada and the world.
Friesen said posting a question on the blog has brought results.
“An example was rust affecting the Honeywood saskatoon berries, with an expert informing me of the disease’s natural cycle, with a connection to affected junipers,” said Friesen.
Many universities offer online gardening advice, with their knowledge based on solid science and academic expertise.
A quick Google search for information brought up gardening advice from Washington State University, UBC Botanical Garden, the University of Maine and many Canadian universities.
The University of Saskatchewan’s telephone-based GardenLine has provided help identifying diseases and bugs, Friesen said. Older forms of media are also helpful to the relatively isolated rural gardener.
“Canadian garden magazines and Saskatchewan radio broadcasts on gardening are also helpful,” said Friesen.
But at the end of the day, the best resource is probably still neighbours.
“Up here in La Ronge, there are a smaller number of people that do garden,” said Friesen.
“Quite a few of those are quite fanatical about gardening, taking special measures to avoid frosts and lengthen the season. We do have a nice little network of people that share seeds, discuss new offerings in seed catalogues and share plant divisions.”
