Gardening is said to be one of the most popular pastimes in Canada and certainly Rainy River district residents are holding their own. The warm, dry summer has been ideal for vegetables and flowering plants and many have taken advantage of the season to turn out bumper crops.
But one La Vallee resident seems to have taken it one step further.
Lise Barker lives on a 30-acre spread south of Devlin near Mud Lake with her husband, two children and a dog. The self-proclaimed “city girl” from Quebec moved there four years ago and soon converted what had once been an open field into several vegetable gardens, flower beds and green houses. Now she has a thriving cottage industry, selling potted plants as well as vegetables from her home.
But it wasn’t always like that.
“I only started gardening after I got married 11 years ago,” Barker explained. “I’ve never taken any courses or studied any books about it. I guess I just have a green thumb,” she reasoned.
It would seem she has more than that.
Not only is her yard a profusion of oranges, reds and yellows from a wide variety of potted flowers, her vegetable garden is a virtual cornucopia of the best northern Ontario can produce – in spite of the constant, ongoing war with mice, raccoons and deer.
And she does it all from seed.
But this year, something rather strange happened. It seems she has discovered (invented?) a new variety of vegetable. Hidden amongst her bell peppers is a strange, green freak that has the colour of a green pepper, but the size and shape of a gourd or miniature pumpkin growing happily on a pepper vine. Barker was somewhat at a loss to explain it.
“I planted the peppers throughout June from plants I had started in the greenhouse, and then remembered I had forgotten to plant the gourds, so I just put in the seeds at the edge of the patch,” she recalled.
Barker said she plants gourds both as ornamental fixtures for her house and in an attempt to deter mice and squirrels from invading her peppers. It seems the rodents don’t like walking over the sharp edges of the leaves of these companion plants.
“Last Wednesday (Aug. 27), I decided to check my garden and that’s when I made I made my little discovery,” she said. “It seems the gourd vine crossed over the peppers while they were flowering and made babies.
“I just put them (the gourds) there as a barrier. I didn’t think they’d grow into the peppers like that.”
What was all the more odd was the vine passed through several rows of salsa, jalapiño and chili peppers before encountering and, apparently, fertilizing the bell peppers.
Melanie Mathieson is a former master gardener and resident Gardening Guru at the Fort Frances Times. She found the idea of such disparate species interbreeding to be improbable, but not impossible.
“It’s obviously a freak of nature,” Mathieson observed. “There’s no literature that says such a thing is possible, but then again, there is none that says it’s not,” she added.
Mathieson said even if such a thing is possible, it is highly unlikely it is repeatable by merely planting the seeds produced from such a union.
“If the seeds are viable, you’ll probably get a gourd or a pepper, not whatever this thing is,” she stressed. “But the seeds probably won’t be viable anyway,” she added.
And what exactly is this exotic oddity to be called? Mathieson suggested pourd or gepper, but Barker prefers to call it “my little mini-pumpkin pepper.” Try saying that quickly five times in a row.
In any case, the “thing” won’t be the only oddity in Barker’s garden. It seems she also has a five-headed sunflower growing amidst her regular ones, and once again, she is at a loss to explain it.
“It has four heads, facing each way and one on top,” Barker explained. “It’s sort of like the four faces of a clock tower.”
The clock may be running down on this growing season, but who knows what surprises may emerge from Lise Barker’s garden next year?
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
