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Gardening season is underway across the county and traditional Indigenous gardens are flourishing in Winnipeg.
Audrey Logan, a Cree-Metis Plant Knowledge Keeper has a community garden that bears fruit from generations of knowledge. The garden has no rows, no tilling, and no fertilizer.
You won’t see neat lines of tilled and hoed lines of seeds in an Indigenous cultivated garden. Companion plants are grouped together and feed and protect one another as they grow.
Melissa Ridgen / Global News
“When Europeans came over they didn’t recognize our method of growing and because of that were able to use the doctrine of discovery to take land from the people because it was not being used in the same way of plowing and rows and domination of the land,” Logan said.
“I do a more natural method of growing and there’s a modern word that they use which is permaculture.”
Logan said they use a technique that allows companion plants to grow well together, which includes what’s known as the “Seven Sisters” method, involving seven different crops planted together with each playing a role in the health of the group.
“We have the sister sunflower, she cleans the soil. Before that, though, would be planted the sister sunroot, and she busts up the soil because she loves clay.” They said.
Other examples of this method are the three sisters’ beans, corn, and squash and they are helped by sister tobacco, which is a natural herbicide.
As a 60s Scoop child, Logan said they were drawn to what grows, while being bounced around foster homes.
They said when they reconnected with family in the Fort McMurray area of Treaty 6, they discovered an aunt who also shared this passion and from there, the learning grew.
“We have to acknowledge blood knowledge,” they said. “In Western society usually a doctor, his son would be a doctor, they have a family of doctors or you have a family of musicians.
“So why not in Indigenous ways? Knowledge of plants, knowledge of animals, knowledge of our lands here.”
Logan said walking the garden path with ancestors nourishes their spirit and the fruits and vegetables of their labour will feed others who work there.
And Logan’s knowledge is helping others to set up their gardens the same way.
“The sisters planting, as I have learned it, is a super economical, really smart kind of way to combine plants, and to work with this prairie ecosystem,” said Louise Willow May, co-owner and operator at Aurora Farm.
The secret, Logan said, is observing the plants carefully and working with the land rather than trying to impose colonial ideas onto it.
“Coming out at six in the morning and seeing what insects are about. Coming out and seeing how plants are reacting to each other when they’re close to each other. Seeing how onions within 20 feet of beans will affect the beans.” they said.
Sweat equity of $10 an hour gets people on a list of food co-ops with local farmers, something Logan said they hope will grow in every community to feed good food to good people.
— with files from Global’s Melissa Ridgen
© 2023 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.