Who: Thean Pheh
Age: 65
Experience: He grew up in Malaysia and worked for the country’s department of agriculture for 15 years. He moved to Edmonton in 1982 and became a fruit and vegetable technologist with Alberta Agriculture from 2002 until his retirement in 2007. Over the last 27 years, he has grafted 14 varieties of apples onto a single tree in his backyard. The fruit is larger and juicer than one would expect from our short growing season. Now he and his wife, Gaik Thuan Ooi, grow local Edens filled with blueberries, gooseberries, garlic, pears, squash, melons, ginseng and countless others at their Beverly home and at a farm near Mundare. That’s difficult, to say the least, in our central Alberta climate. The Phehs sell their produce and Thean’s gardening books at the City Market Downtown on 104th.
– “I practise zero tillage. I will not till my vegetable beds, and I’ve lived on this property for 27 years. The first few years, you get lots of weeds. But after that, you won’t. We live in the black soil zone of central Alberta where soil has a very granular structure, which is one of the best soils you can find. When you till it, you destroy the structure, doing more harm than good.”
– “You can graft anything of the same family. It’s hard to grow melons, because the soil and air temperature is cool. You can circumvent the problem by using plastic panels over the plant. But if I could find a cold-tolerant root stalk, I could try to graft my melon onto it and grow without the plastic panels. I had a fig-leafed squash in mind for the root stalk because it may be tolerant to our cold.”
– “Many people are trying companion planting as a natural way of controlling insects. So, one plant will produce a chemical that will prevent insects from attacking the other plant. For example, marigolds dispel nematodes [roundworms] . I also leave aside certain areas so that beneficial insects such as ladybugs, bumblebees and hoverflies have some place to be.”