POCATELLO — This year the end of the garden season holds a different meaning. This 2006 garden may literally be my last great effort.
These days (I should have done this sooner) I’m hiring help to weed, prune and trim, all things I used to do myself, but a deteriorating hip joint now prevents me. Those I’ve hired are doing a wonderful job. Their deft and skillful bodies relieve me of considerable stress, as well as guilt.
My physical predicament isn’t jibing with my preconceived vision of what these middle-later years would be like. I imagined wrinkles, gray hair and some weight gain, but not this level of physical discomfort.
After all, I have my mother and her sisters as role models. They are all in their 80s, slowing down, but going strong. My mother is 83, and this is the first year she’s hired help for yard maintenance.
Because I imagined only my looks would change, with maybe a minimum of minor aches that could be fixed with a good night’s sleep, I prepared myself to replace any elements of youthful beauty I may have had by developing my eccentricities.
I covered my little Westside hovel in vines, turned my entire house into a weaving studio draped in red mosquito netting, the windows are hung with handwoven window rugs, and the walls decorated with posters of Bob Dylan and Jack&Neal.
I have lots of books collected over the last half century. I painted a mural of bright red flowers on my dining room wall, and I not-so-secretly ferment fruity concoctions in a dark cupboard and store them in crystal decanters.
I keep a supply of champagne in the fridge for visitors, and my weavings have taken on a Gypsy theme, colorful wanderings from the status quo.
Lately, I’ve taken to playing 1960s music almost exclusively: John Sebastian, Jesse Winchester, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins . . . Their golden voices cast a nostalgic pall throughout my rooms, memories of the olden days when I was a hippie poet living in the East Village in NYC and could march for many blocks in anti-war rallies.
Then there were the 1970s and 1980s at the Central Idaho ranch when I could cross country ski, ride horses, run after my kids, climb stairs two at a time, dance, scale ladders in an apple orchard, grow 100 cabbages in my garden, ferment and preserve huge crocks of sauerkraut. . .
This morning I brought my potted herbs into the house, bay, rosemary and basil. I can still handle this flavorful level of digging in the dirt.
When I finish writing this column, I will chop onions and garlic, saute them in olive oil, add garden produce: tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, summer squash, and chard to make a healthy fall soup. Bay and rosemary add depth to the flavor.
Some of these vegetables were given to me by gardening friends whose bodies are more spry than mine, and I am very appreciative of each healthy mouthful. I am also pleased to peruse our local Farmer’s Market, a joyful place that makes it possible to regret my gardening abdication much less.
Change is about the only thing we peculiar humans can count on; the trick is learning how to accept the universe as it shrinks and expands, accept the earth as it crumbles and groans under our feet, pulling us under to nurture future generations -- you know, like the dead Hiawatha pushing up that famous corn patch . . .an early garden that predates those Puritan ergot-inspired witch burnings . . .

Posted by Penelope at 08:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Depends on how they are grown. Take a look at this article titled The Green Revolution by Adam Federson at http://www.energybulletin.net/19525.html . While the article gets off to a rather dark start, it ends on a hopeful note. And the good news is that since you are reading this blog and other postings on the Kitchen Gardeners website you are probably already a part of the solution.

Posted by ammyers at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Near the end of the spring planting season, I purchased a couple of cucumber plants and set them in a flower bed under my kitchen window. I didn't expect much -- never do from cucumber plants because of the excess shade in my gardening area. However, this year I have been pleasantly surprised. I've harvested four lovely plump, delicious cucumbers which I've eaten in raw chunks accompanied by chilled glasses of champagne and the company of friends.

Years ago I read a report in a literary magazine from a writer visiting a poet in Soviet Russia. The poet produced chilled bottles of beer then ran out of the house to the street market returning with cucumbers and tomatoes. They drank their dark Russian beer with cucumber and tomato chunks and furthered releasing the grasp of oppressive governments on freedom of speech.

It's sort of odd the things that stay with us, the simple things that make for lasting impressions, like the comical vision of my father wearing a pith helmet, plaid bermudas and hip boots as he worked in our garden in Western Washington. He sang while he worked, sea chanties and old songs like "Juanita". To this day, I associate those songs with cucumbers, string beans and carrots. I save the corn memories for Shane, my sister's horse, who desimated the corn patch the morning my father left on another of many sea voyages. We never told him.

This week is the anniversary of my baby sister's death two years ago from a long miserable bout of cancer. I remember her gardens, a lush one in Wenatchee, Washington: summer squash by the bushel and fresh blueberry jam. Her last garden was a zen garden in the backyard of her new house in Twin Falls, Idaho. She was always meticulous about her spaces, and her loved ones knew it was the end when the garden's edges became shaggy, then overgrown, then choked with weeds like her body.

Humans are more like plants than we admit. We do, afterall, desire to set out roots and harvest friends and lovers. We return to the earth, compost, fertilize the future.

Posted by Penelope at 06:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Thankfully, t's not me wearing the panty hose, it's the squash. My 30' x 60' raised bed garden does not have the luxury of space for sprawling plants. So to have my squash and eat it too, I trellis them. Only these Buttercups got bigger than expected, forcing a little creative intervention to keep them from breaking off the vine before theyget ripe. Better they wear them than me!

Posted by ammyers at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's too hot to think much less work in the garden. Once the temperature moves above 90, I go into slow motion. I am managing to keep plants watered, although I nearly killed my basil plants and resusitated them just in the nick of time.

The irony is, I now have fresh vegetables and an un-airconditioned house, so I don't feel much like preparing them. I even find myself wishing for winter's sub-zero weather during which firing up the oven is a pleasureable warmth.

The thought of making jam or canning sounds like torture today. I am saved from dealing with a small batch of apricots -- the first ones my little tree as produced -- the squirrels ate them all, all at once one morning when I wasn't looking.

My grape vines are trying to take over the world. There are several luscious bunches of grapes. I hope there are more than the squirrels can eat.

Posted by Penelope at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

1914 North of Boston
by Robert Frost

"YOU ought to have seen what I saw on my way
To the village, through Mortenson's pasture to-day:
Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!
And all ripe together, not some of them green
And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!"
"I don't know what part of the pasture you mean."
"You know where they cut off the woods--let me see--
It was two years ago--or no!--can it be
No longer than that?--and the following fall
The fire ran and burned it all up but the wall."
"Why, there hasn't been time for the bushes to grow.
That's always the way with the blueberries, though:
There may not have been the ghost of a sign
Of them anywhere under the shade of the pine,
But get the pine out of the way, you may burn
The pasture all over until not a fern
Or grass-blade is left, not to mention a stick,
And presto, they're up all around you as thick
And hard to explain as a conjuror's trick."
"It must be on charcoal they fatten their fruit.
I taste in them sometimes the flavour of soot.
And after all really they're ebony skinned:
The blue's but a mist from the breath of the wind,
A tarnish that goes at a touch of the hand,
And less than the tan with which pickers are tanned."
"Does Mortenson know what he has, do you think?"
"He may and not care and so leave the chewink
To gather them for him--you know what he is.
He won't make the fact that they're rightfully his
An excuse for keeping us other folk out."
"I wonder you didn't see Loren about."
"The best of it was that I did. Do you know,
I was just getting through what the field had to show
And over the wall and into the road,
When who should come by, with a democrat-load
Of all the young chattering Lorens alive,
But Loren, the fatherly, out for a drive."
"He saw you, then? What did he do? Did he frown?"
"He just kept nodding his head up and down.
You know how politely he always goes by.
But he thought a big thought--I could tell by his eye--
Which being expressed, might be this in effect:
'I have left those there berries, I shrewdly suspect,
To ripen too long. I am greatly to blame.'"
"He's a thriftier person than some I could name."
"He seems to be thrifty; and hasn't he need,
With the mouths of all those young Lorens to feed?
He has brought them all up on wild berries, they say,
Like birds. They store a great many away.
They eat them the year round, and those they don't eat
They sell in the store and buy shoes for their feet."
"Who cares what they say? It's a nice way to live,
Just taking what Nature is willing to give,
Not forcing her hand with harrow and plow."
"I wish you had seen his perpetual bow--
And the air of the youngsters! Not one of them turned,
And they looked so solemn-absurdly concerned."
"I wish I knew half what the flock of them know
Of where all the berries and other things grow,
Cranberries in bogs and raspberries on top
Of the boulder-strewn mountain, and when they will crop.
I met them one day and each had a flower
Stuck into his berries as fresh as a shower;
Some strange kind--they told me it hadn't a name."
"I've told you how once not long after we came,
I almost provoked poor Loren to mirth
By going to him of all people on earth
To ask if he knew any fruit to be had
For the picking. The rascal, he said he'd be glad
To tell if he knew. But the year had been bad.
There had been some berries--but those were all gone.
He didn't say where they had been. He went on:
'I'm sure--I'm sure'--as polite as could be.
He spoke to his wife in the door, 'Let me see,
Mame, we don't know any good berrying place?'
It was all he could do to keep a straight face.
"If he thinks all the fruit that grows wild is for him,
He'll find he's mistaken. See here, for a whim,
We'll pick in the Mortensons' pasture this year.
We'll go in the morning, that is, if it's clear,
And the sun shines out warm: the vines must be wet.
It's so long since I picked I almost forget
How we used to pick berries: we took one look round,
Then sank out of sight like trolls underground,
And saw nothing more of each other, or heard,
Unless when you said I was keeping a bird
Away from its nest, and I said it was you.
'Well, one of us is.' For complaining it flew
Around and around us. And then for a while
We picked, till I feared you had wandered a mile,
And I thought I had lost you. I lifted a shout
Too loud for the distance you were, it turned out,
For when you made answer, your voice was as low
As talking--you stood up beside me, you know."
"We sha'n't have the place to ourselves to enjoy--
Not likely, when all the young Lorens deploy.
They'll be there to-morrow, or even to-night.
They won't be too friendly--they may be polite--
To people they look on as having no right
To pick where they're picking. But we won't complain.
You ought to have seen how it looked in the rain,
The fruit mixed with water in layers of leaves,
Like two kinds of jewels, a vision for thieves."

Posted by earthnut at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just spent a month in France on a bike trip. One very interesting place we visited was a dye garden. The gardener was particularly interested in woad, an important blue dye plant in Europe before indigo was introduced.

Woad grows extremely well here, so well it is on the state noxious weed list. Fortuneately the dye is harvested the first year from the leaves when the plant is in no danger of flowering and setting seed. I intend to pull out all the plants except two or three, and remove most of the flowers from those before they set seed to only get enough seed for my own uses. I am very sensitive to noxious weeds since I have studied ecology and native plants a lot. (I even have a degree in plant ecology.)

I also hope to get some madder roots and weld seeds to plant in my garden next year. Madder, weld, and woad were the three major European dye plants before the importation of tropical dyes and the invention of synthetic dyes. All are lightfast and can dye a variety of fibers. Madder gives red, weld yellow, and woad blue. All three are also easy to grow in my climate. Madder is a perennial viny plant in the bedstraw family, and weld and woad are biennials that produce copious seed.

Posted by earthnut at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

POCATELLO — Recently, I’ve had the privilege of touring a couple of local gardens.
One was perfection, neat rows, completely weedless, and the plants tall and healthy.
Corn, not quite as high as an elephant’s eye, bobbed happily in the Southeast Idaho afternoon gale; individual heads of red and green lettuce had just reached reached their peak; several varieties of onions pushed the earth aside with their exuberant growth, and peas bloomed profusely as they climbed harmonious lattice work.
Squash and melon plants emerged from their black plastic mulch with every hope of bearing fruit before summer’s end, and the gardener himself beamed with full confidence.
I was enchanted, so much so, that the experience has challenged my entire concept of gardening.
Why do I do it?
My tiny backyard plot pales in comparison. It’s overcrowded, full of quackgrass and weeds. I allow volunteer plants to further crowd those already crowded because I’m too curious to pull them.
A certain level of vermin always attack some of my plants every season, while none appeared to have devoured any of the plants on my garden tour.
My lettuce, in comparison, although planted early, was just beginning to be harvestable, and my onions were as thin as pencils. And although half of my zucchini plants survived an infestation of slugs, I will be overwhelmed with joy if I get to harvest a few.
I’ve yet to experience the abundance of zucchini that causes people to lock their cars during harvest season lest gardeners fill up the backseats with “gifts” of the lusty fruit.
Other people’s tomato plants are loaded with green tomatoes by mid-end of June, while mine are blooming, but no fruit is setting on. The plants are wind pollinated, the book says, and there has been plenty of wind sailing through my garden. What’s the problem?
Last fall I toured the Franciscan Sisters’ garden during their harvest festival. Their tomato plants were amazing, beyond anything I’ve ever seen: thick lovely stems on the plants and a plethora of huge Roma-style fruits hanging like giant clusters of grapes, each fruit the size of baseballs in all stages of ripeness.
I’ve not recovered from the experience.
It appears that what each of these gardens has that mine hasn’t is full sun. Being in the city, sunlight is limited by neighboring trees and buildings. In fact, some of my plants literally grow sideways in a fruitless effort to reach full sun and become leggy in the process.
I guess I could sell my little westside hovel and search for a better location, but these past 8 years I’ve put down some rather solid roots, literally and metaphorically, in the neighborhood.
And some plants are quite successful; for instance, my grapes are lush and prolific; their presence fulfills a long-standing dream. My pleached apple arbor is just now becoming what I envisioned after seeing an example in a garden magazine.
Vines are beginning to cover my house and fences, fulfilling another longing after years of living on a high prairie where none of these things would grow, where I had to content myself with growing 100 short-season cabbages and onions so strong in flavor it was difficult to eat them raw.
On the prairie, a crab apple tree I planted when my daughter was born, finally bore one tiny apple the year we left the ranch when my daughter was 13, and then a wind storm whipped the tree about until it split the trunk vertically.
Another Pocatello acquaintance didn’t plant his garden until mid-June with every confidence that his plants will mature.
Perhaps I jump the gun too early every year, anxious after a winter’s confinement to see green, harvest fresh herbs to fuel a soup or chicken fricassee, eat that first heaping bowl of wilted lettuce.
Afterall, there are only so many gardens possible in a lifetime, and now that I’ve reached my 59th year hobbling about on a bad hip with a cane, I’m wondering just how many gardens the cosmos will continue to grant me.

Posted by Penelope at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After 50 years of basic organic food gardening, I have finally begun paying attention to the principles that guide my choices and actions - not that I have come to them easily, or all at once, or all alone. Sustained gardening is of necessity a journey for the gardener, one that can take them beyond award winning varieties, professionally formulated chemistries and magical soil additives. For many the journey becomes a portal into the nature of nature, the nature of food and even the nature of the gardener. For we all seek and find ourselves somewhere in the garden – as imperfect as it may be.

Over the last few years, my garden (usually preceded with some adjective like “food” or “kitchen”) has become more than a place to grow food and more than a way to beautify the yard. In fact, never would it delight the eye of a landscape architect or grace the pages of Gardening Magazine. However, there are patches of beauty throughout the year, mixed in with the heartbreak of withering leaves, brown spots, gnawed stems and chewed fruit. Seems all the players in my garden are focused on their own needs rather than mine.

I sometimes stand in the ragged tapestry of green beds and marvel at how little there is to eat. What is for dinner – often drives me to the store and yet the garden has had a profound impact on our diet. In part because of what has grown there (memory being a persistent aspect of eating) and in part because of the qualities that we had discovered in the food. Food from the garden has informed our taste, so that we now require the flavor and nutrient density found in the olden style, pre-industrialized, earthly grown fruits, vegetables, eggs and meats. Yes, they can be found here in Las Cruces. The garden also provides a space for seeing and observing as well as a trampoline for my intellectual exercises.

Most of my garden looks like the gardener is ignorant of the rules or at least fails to comply with the standards for clear cutting, tilling, timing, rotating and spacing. That is an accurate observation, which brings me to the principles that are ultimately responsible for the look and function of the garden.

Continue reading "The Principled Gardener" »

Posted by darrols at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The British daily newspaper, The Independent, today carried a two-page spread about seed saving. This is something I have been quite interested in since first visiting Ryton Organic Gardens near my home, which is also the HQ of the Heritage Seed Library. The Independent article is wonderful, packed with new information - I had no idea there were so many seed repositories around the world.
There are a variety of approaches to this seed saving thing. For a keen gardener, it can just be a way to return to the good crop of last year and save a little money. To the environmental activist, it can involve searching for, cultivating and preserving vanishing varieties and ensuring bio-diversity. For farmers in a traditional agricultural setting, it is a simple matter of survival. And that was why I was so alarmed by what I found next.
I always like to jazz up my postings with lots of extra links, so I did some web searches. Now honestly, I had no intention to get political, but right there on the first page of results, was a story that made my blood boil. You won't believe what went down in the corporate takeover of Iraq, back in 2004, long before the electricity and water supply was sorted out - only a law against any seed savings, supposedly in the name of "protecting species". I could go on about this, but this blog is meant to be a rant-free zone, so I won't.
I have yet to actually do any seed saving myself, except for the self-seeding of my rocket and chard which came back for two years running. Have any of my fellow Kitchen Gardeners any good seed-saving stories?

Posted by Debra at 07:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)