What a Life!

Yesterday I picked up my copy of Earl May’s 2012 Flower & Vegetable Seed Guide. With snow on the ground, it is certainly not time to start planting any time soon. But it is time to start planning.

I have made more than one attempt at gardening over the years. When I first moved to Nebraska, I planted a garden. But I lived in a house built on the side of a hill where all the topsoil had washed away over the years. The soil was so full of clay that the only time you could weed the garden was when it was muddy.

When we moved to this house, there was a nice garden plot in the back yard. The previous owners had a garden and left a cherry tomato plant that grew the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted. I tried doing wide rows (3 feet) and planting a various array of things, but the most I ever accomplished was trying to keep up with the weeding. As in, the time I spent in the garden would be spent weeding, and I never got much harvested (when I could find it amongst the weeds). We’ll just leave it at that.

Two years ago I built eight boxes along the lines of Square Foot Gardening (SFG). I got some peat moss and some good compost and planted lots of things. It was far more successful than any previous attempts. The weeding was minimal, and green beans actually grew quite well instead of being eaten by bugs and never producing a thing.

Last year was my second year with the SFG boxes. I didn’t plant any zucchini as it had taken over an entire box the year before. I didn’t have any volunteer potatoes as I had had in the pre-SFG era. Some of my herbs came back, but not all of the ones I expected. I planted fewer green beans, but they didn’t do as well. With a toddler in the house and an incomplete fence, it was hard to get out and spend much time in the garden. So I got less out of it than the year before.

Last fall I read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. I grew up eating bread that my mother made using wheat she had ground herself, but I had never thought about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts when it came to other food. It totally revolutionized my thinking.

I got rid of [most] of the processed food in our pantry. [One half shelf of such food remains, aptly referred to as “contraband.”] I started shopping at the farmer’s market. I bought new cookbooks, including The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. I read Cooking Solves Everything by Mark Bittman and bought his cookbook, How to Cook Everything.

Then I started reading An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler. It’s an essay rather than a cookbook, though it does contain a few recipes. But Tamar totally changed my approach to cooking. Rather than needing a recipe with a list of ingredients, I now look at my ingredients and think of how I can combine them into something that will taste good.

Which leads me back to gardening.

I don’t mind the work involved – the weeding, the planting, etc. My problem was that I didn’t know what to do with the produce when I got it. I mean, you buy six little cauliflower plants and they’re all going to be ready at the same time since they were all planted at the same time. So when they’re ready, you’re going to have nothing to eat but cauliflower for a few days since you have six heads to consume. After that, you won’t have cauliflower for another year. How motivating is that?

In one of the early chapters, Tamar Adler talks about coming home from the grocery store and cooking all her produce – roasting, boiling, whatever – and then eating on it for a week. Cook it when it’s fresh, use up all of it (including the broccoli stems and the water used to boil the vegetables, if you can imagine), and then eat on it and make the week’s meals out of it. With that approach, I can roast five of the six heads of cauliflower, freeze them, and eat them next winter when the ground is frozen. That I can do…and I no longer fear harvesting six heads of cauliflower at once. So now I’m excited about gardening in a whole new way.

{Yes, I know you can freeze things and can them. I saw my mother do all that with my parents big garden we had in Michigan (before I started school). But I homeschool and work from home – I can’t make a full-time job of gardening and putting up produce as my mother did.}

So this is my garden. This is where I am starting. I have my seed catalog, and I am doing my planning. I am excited about what I am going to grow, and I have lots of ideas for how I’m going to use it. This year’s garden will be like no other. Stay tuned…