Arctic gardening

Greenland is cold. You probably know that. One consequence is that almost all fruit and vegetables are shipped from Denmark. This means you need to be careful making your selection at the supermarket. A single aubergine might cost you eight dollars. Although the range and quality is still probably better than you might expect, visiting a normal fruit and vegetable shop in just about any other country leaves me in wide-eyed, jaw-dropped pleasure, drooling like an idiot and generally annoying other customers by loitering, basking in the sheer pleasure of being in the presence of fresh produce.

Before moving to Greenland we knew we would be more limited in our choice of fresh supplies. So I purchased a plastic, demountable greenhouse, a swathe of seeds, and some indoor plant lights. We were determined to grow things.

My husband was the one to up the odds though, by expanding our ambitions outdoors. From scratch, with largely ‘found’ materials, he built a five by eight foot garden bed. We dug out three tons of soil, seived out all the rocks (there were many), laid pallets to insulate from the cold below, and refilled with soil. To add nutrients, we foraged seaweed from the shore, rinsed the salt off in a raging stream during the spring thaw, dried it, dug it in, and covered the whole garden with insulating straw. We were ready.

In May we planted potatoes indoors. In the long, late spring sun they grew faster than we anticipated and before we were prepared for it, they were three feet high. We transplanted them outside in early June. Then it snowed – a few times. It wasn’t a great time for our potato plants, but they struggled on and mostly survived. By mid summer we had a reasonable patch of decent looking potato plants, some a little stretched-looking from their early abuse, as well as some burgeoning carrots, fennel, beetroot, and onions. Things were looking good. We had high hopes as the weather finally cooled.

On harvest day we started with the beetroot. My husband pulled the first lovely bushy, green top, to find a spindly purple thread beneath. The next was the same and the next – all beet and no root. The onions and fennel were small, but perfectly formed. The potatoes were what we were really waiting for and they were abundant. But they were also the tiniest I had ever seen, the largest perhaps the size of a golf ball. We filled a quarter of a bucket. Our complete carrot harvest is in the picture above. In the end we ate the entire harvest in a single sitting with friends. It was undoubtedly a massive waste of time, energy, and money, but I relished it from start to finish.

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