The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon May 16th, 2009

I was recently asked by a magazine to recommend a list of garden tools for new gardeners, and I was surprised by how hard a list it was to come up with.  Not because I don’t have favorite tools, but because I’m acutely aware that not every gardener gardens the way I do, and the tools you use depend a lot on your garden style.  So I thought I’d write about what I do use – but more importantly, about why I use them, and how one’s body, one’s preferences, one’s style – all these things mean that an ideal tool list is awfully hard to come by.

So let’s start with how I garden.  I garden these days mostly in beds, rather than wide rows or other forms – and many of my beds are raised to give better drainage in my wet soil.  I’ve also got a lot of rocks.  This is important because it automatically makes a bunch of tools not very useful to me – for example, shortly after we moved here, someone gave me an Earthways seeder, a tool many farmers absolutely – the tool makes a row to plant seeds, marks the row and covers it.  And I have used it in circumstances that were very useful – but the problem is that the little thingie (so I’m not good with technical terms, sue me ) that makes the row doesn’t like rocks, or bumps, or uneven ground. It really requires a very smooth seed bed.  This is hard to get in my soil. And for the places where I do have it – say, on my raised beds, it is awkward to push a seeder that is elevated – it isn’t the most ergonomic position.  While I did use it sometimes during my CSA days, it mostly lives in my garage now.

I also really like to get into the dirt.  I know a lot of people who garden in gloves, and whose preference is to work from an upright position, either for physical comfort or simply so as not to get totally filthy.  My preference is to get down on my hands and knees, as close to the dirt as possible.  That doesn’t mean I don’t use long handled tools – I do, but I find that short handled ones, that do the same things from down near the ground get my attention more.  But someone who found getting up and down more difficult (and I admit, in late pregnancy, I used to prefer long handles), or simply doing it another way, might like it otherwise.

The other thing is that I’m a fairly big woman – at 6′ tall, I find it very easy to use heavy tools, and those sized for men.  I have a friend who I had raved about a particular hoe to, and she got one – but my friend is 5’1 and weighs maybe 108lbs – she found hoeing with this tool heavy, uncomfortable, and because the handle was long, occasionally found herself pole vaulting if she hit a rock.  It was not the right tool for her!

So a lot of the tools I use are particular to one of these factors.  For example, if I had to pick a favorite tool of all time, it would be my hand tiller.  I got it from Johnny’s selected seeds here (it is the bigger clawish thing in the picture) (btw, I have absolutely no economic connection to any of these companies) - it is the serious version of those little garden three tine things, designed to loosen a little soil.  This thing is heavy (not a good choice for those with arthritis in their hands) and tough – perfect for loosening soil while keeping the structure intact, perfect for getting tough weekds I’ve let go, like thistles, perfect for working through heavy mulch to the soil below.  I love it so much I have two – and my husband agrees.  But it does require some strength to use, and it gets used as much as it does precisely because I like being down on the ground.   It is also not cheap – this is a serious and heavy duty tool, and if you gardened less you could probably get away with something lighter.

My husband’s vote for favorite tool on the earth is his scythe, and I’m only slightly behind him on that.  Scything, when done properly, is a whole lot of fun – it is a great way of managing grass, great for weeds and field margins, as well as grain crops.  Despite our large expanse of grass, we’ve decided not to have any internal combustion engines involved with it.  So we either get creatures to eat it, scythe it, or use our little push mower.  We’re probably the embarrassment of the neighborhood, but our neighbors are gracious enough not to comment. 

If you’ve only ever had a heavy, old American scythe, you may not know how wonderful they are.  Modern european scythes are light, a pleasure to use, and simple – the motion is a gentle side to side motion, great for love handle reduction.  Remember, in Wordsworth’s poem about the solitary reaper, she’s singing as she harvests grain – the reality is if you can sing while you do most activities, you aren’t working at an intense pace – and scything is really very gentle and pleasant.  If you want a scythe, the place to get one is www.scythesupply.com.  You’ll need a whetstone and a peening kit as well.  Should everyone have one?  Well, no – if you live somewhere where you have to keep your lawn tidy by mowing, the scythe, which cuts long grass, won’t do it. 

My next favorite tool is a little Korean tool, given to me by my Dad.  I haven’t seen the one I have online, but the “hand hoe” listed back at the link for Johnny’s looks a lot like it. The one weakness of the tiller is its large size – it isn’t great for tight space weeding or tillage.  The hand hoe, again, given my preference for hands and knees gardening, is a very quickly weeder, and wonderful.  Mine is sturdy, and my only complaint about it is that it tends to disappear into the grass, so I’m a strong advocate of brightly colored duct tape or ribbon to make sure you can find it when you put it down.  This is one tool for everyone – very light, very small, and just plain pleasant to use.

Also from Johnny’s (they make terrific tools) is my broadfork.  If you have raised beds and soil that needs to be loosened in the spring, but don’t want to till, with all that implies in disrupting existing soil structures and ecologies, broadforks are a terrific thing (carefully used, and with some practice, the hand tiller can also do this).  Best of all, instead of using your muscle power, you use the weight of your body to loosen the soil, so you don’t have to be strong to do a tremendous amount of work.  It is much easier than shovelling – and while broadforks aren’t designed for this, a good one can be used to make beds, cutting through soil (this is more work, but easier than using most shovels). 

Broadforks are pricey – mine cost nearly $200, so if you have only a very small garden, it probably isn’t worth the effort.  You can make them, actually, and if your soil is very loose, an all wood one would probably be fine.  I also wouldn’t recommend them for anyone who has serious balance issues – you use the broadfork by standing on it, and it does require some surefootedness, although no more than average (I’m a complete klutz, and we can be absolutely certain that if it is possible to hurt oneself with a tool, I’ve done it – I’ve never done anything bad to myself with a broadfork ).

Again, unless you have only containers or a very small number of raised beds, you need a good standing hoe – if only because you will not want to be down on your hands and knees when the corn is tall and you barely fit between them standing.  I have two hoes I really like.  One of them is an ancient old farm hoe that I got at an auction shortly after we moved here.  It is a heavy tool, with a rusty old, regular shaped hoe, and I use it almost like mattock a lot of the time for hacking out roots - but I can use it to spread manure, hoe the garden or hack at heavy weeds.  I would recommend, if you are going to get this kind of tool, that you actually get an old one – or spend some money and get a good one.  My observation is that cheap modern tools are almost always awful – if you’ve ever split a shovel or had the handle of a tool break off in your hand, you know how annoying it is.  Try and get tools whose handles you’ll be able to replace.

 The other hoe I really like is yet again (sense a theme here?) from Johnny’s – it is stirrup hoe.  It is serrated, and slices right through the weeds, and the soil, and doesn’t need frequent sharpening.  (BTW, despite saying that, learning to sharpen my tools was one of the best things that ever happened to me – it makes all the difference in the world, and it really isn’t that hard). 

Technically also a hoe, but really a digging and tillage tool is my Azada, also known a grub hoe – it is great for digging even fairly deep irrigation trenches, but it works well for making seed rows as well.  This is a heavy duty tool, and it is worth noting that in many ancient societies, about the only garden tools were something like a mattock and something like this, made of stone.  I got mine from www.easydigging.com, and I like it a lot. 

 My favorite pruners are my Felco-F8 pruners, but I’ve got several other sets, including a set of floral snips that I sometimes use for the smallest sprouts, and some heavy duty loppers.  I have some older pruners that aren’t Felco that we inherited, but they simply don’t do as good a job.  If you don’t have anything to prune, obviously, you don’t need these.  My husband who is a leftie does fine with our rightie pruners, but if you are going to buy them anyway, you might consider getting a set that are appropriately handed for the person who is going to do most of the pruning.

Spear and Jackson are British manufacturers who make serious, heavy duty, built to last garden tools.  This is not a Martha Stewart pretty thing – these tools will be passed on to your kids.  I’ve found several at auctions, and they work great.  I had a yard sale hay fork some years ago, and then found this one, and the difference is night and day.  Now not everyone needs a hay fork, or a potato fork, or whatever, but everyone needs a good spade, and IMHO, the only one that will not break on you (unless you leave it in the rain for two years, and then it is your own fault), and will work forever is the Spear and Jackson, at least that I’ve found.  The good thing is that I’ve found them used a number of times, because they aren’t cheap.  If you buy one new, they make a large number of sizes.  I’ve been told that a cheaper source for really good shovels are lumberyard mason’s shovels – I’ve heard these hold up well also, but not tried it. 

While I talk about buying good tools, it is important to note that I accumulated these tools over a matter of years, not instantly.  Yes, I’ve spent money on them, but I’ve also used a lot of cheap and crappy tools in the meantime, and they do function for a while.  So don’t think you have to go drop $500 on your garden tools – my suggestion would be to hunt around some auctions and yard sales and find some garden tools that have clearly been around for a while.  Don’t buy anything made of plastic, and avoid composite handles like the plague.  Get a cheap set of basic tools, and then add what you need one or two a year, and through used sources.

Two other tools I really like.  One of them is my jab corn planter – this thing is 100 years old, and I’m not sure if there are modern versions available.  The idea is that you basically smack it down in to the ground and it drops the seeds in the hole.  It is great for corn, but also for bean and squash, and some of them are adjustable for different seed sizes.  I use it for easy planting of larger quantities of large seeds.  I’ve seen these a number of times around me, and I’d imagine they were even more prevalent in places where they grow even more corn, so they can still be found, old, but usable.

I’m also a big fan of the large recycled rubber trugs that are now widely available – they come in vibrant colors, are cheap, and stand up to just about everything.  I love them for hauling weeds, harvesting crops, even hauling water.  Five gallon plastic buckets, though, are free from the grocery store, and will haul plenty.

That’s my list – it probably won’t be precisely the same for anyone else.  So what are your favorites?

 Sharon

• garden
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Sharon May 8th, 2009

When we came here, we knew we wanted to grow our own food, and we had sneaking intuitions that we might want to grow other things.  Gradually, I’ve been both excited and delighted to discover precisely how much we can and do grow – but figuring this out has required that we overcome the prejudices we were raised with, the first being “things area always and only just one thing.”  That is, when I began planting, I thought “these are my herbs, these are my vegetables, this is to eat, this to season it, this for beauty.”  Each thing was divided into its place.  It has taken me a while to overcome that habit, and herbalism has been one of the primary instruments of doing so – they were a living reminder that plants are almost never only one thing, even to we simple minded humans.

The side yard of my house is about 1/10th of an acre, with a birch tree (there used to be two, but unfortunately they are not long lived), a young pear and crabapple, grassy areas where the kids play, and a bunch of garden beds.  For us, this is the proverbial kitchen garden – just a step out the door from my kitchen, I can watch the boys playing under the birch from my window, and step out to clip some rosemary or pick basil leaves and come back to a pot on the stove. 

This area includes a stone porch, where we sometimes eat, and at this time of year holds the flats of plants waiting to be transplanted, a small courtyard garden where I grow tender plants with shelter on three sides – here’s where my Maypop runs up the wall, where my quinces, apricots and dwarf peaches are.  

On the other side of the path runs a sunny garden full of salad ingredients, some self-watering containers of tomatoes and greens, the long asparagus and rhubarb bed, and a few other odds and ends. 

Along the grass are a few other small trees and shrubs – a dwarf sour cherry, a couple of hazels, and here was where I established my official herb garden, when I first moved in. It was  a culinary herb bed, filled with the usual perennial things – sages and savories, three or four thymes, greek oregano, giant lovage, tarragon, catnip for the cats, sorrel, more chives than any sane household could actually eat.   The bed is made with old cinder blocks found around the house, and I each year I fill some of the small holes in the side with dianthus, johnny jump ups and portulaca, which look lovely all summer.  A few other of the holes hold pesky culinary herbs – various mints, chocolate, spear, pepper, grapefruit…and lemon and lime balms.  A cluster of tea herbs takes up a corner – bee balm and betony, mostly.  For a long time I also tried to cram in the annual herbs, since this was THE HERB BED, but it never worked that well – we wanted more basil than that, and the perennials disliked having their soil disturbed while I attempted to cram in the other plants.

So eventually, the annual and biennial herbs (and I grow a lot of them) moved to the salad beds, rotated around and integrated with the rest of the plantings.  Here is my basil plantation, with six kinds at present.  My caraway and cumin plants kuve there, as do shiso, parsleys and tender sages like pineapple and honeydew, which I grow from cuttings from the old plants each winter.  The cilantro and dill are mixed in everywhere, attracting pollinators and going in any free corner.  And I grow some uncommon culinary herbs, most of them perennials in other climates but since I’m short window space, I grow them as annuals - rau om, papalo and dittany of crete.  Other tender perennials live in the house in winter, looking increasingly grumpy about it, until they move out to the porch for a full dose of sun – rosemary, lemon verbena and curryplant among them.

So I’d always grown a lot of herbs. But until four or five years ago, I didn’t think much about herbs as medicinals – or rather, I did – I used them, and purchased them, but I didn’t grow most of them.  I’m embarassed to think how long it took me to notice that instead of buying red clover blossoms for tea, I could just pick them out of my pasture, or that the red raspberry leaf tea that I was taking in late pregnancy could have been made from the scores of red raspberry leaves growing under my spruce trees.  I was somehow intimidated by the whole project of figuring out when to harvest, when things were medicinally active, and how best to use them.

But as I looked into the uses of the herbs,  I found that I was growing a surprising number of medicinal herbs already, simply out of fascination with the plants.  For example, I wanted to make marshmallows out of marshmallow root, simply because I thought the kids would find it fun.  It was no real trouble to start them from seed, and they love our wet climate, so quickly I had more marshmallows than anyone would want to eat, and I still had the plants as gorgeous ornamentals, happily self seeding around the property.  I had cranesbill and hollyhock in my ornamental gardens, and calendulas in the window boxes.  Milk thistle grows wild in our fields and the previous owners had planted maidenhair fern, lungwort and lady’s mantle around the north side of the house.  

I wanted to make good use of the plants around me, wisely, safely, thoughtfully, but I admit, I also was fascinated by the plants as link to a past – the history of human use of botany entrances me – how did they know to use this?  What process of observation, transmission of knowledge taught us these fascinating things?  Why did someone carry these seeds across an ocean, or replant natives in their dooryards?  Is it worth trying to make nettles into fiber?  What do real marshmallows taste like?  Did my great-grandmother use the pennyroyal in her garden for fleas or to prevent pregnancy?  I will never know some of these things, and others only when I get around to it (still haven’t tried the nettle fiber), but I can’t help thinking about them, as I rub my own pennyroyal leaves on my skin to see if it makes any difference with the midges. 

Gradually, I started harvesting what I had, and reading more about how best to process the harvest.  But other than the surprisingly large number of herbs that I had lying around, I wasn’t precisely sure what should go in a medicinal herb garden, were we to grow one.  The problem has been innate good health, something that I don’t claim to be complaining about.  My boys are no more immune than anyone else to the usual sorts of colds and injuries (although we’ve had only one broken bone so far, which IMHO, is pretty good for kids who essentially live in trees like small apes ;-)), nor are Eric or I, but generally speaking, we’re a healthy bunch.  While I could see the obvious benefit of garlic and chamomile, what else? 

So that required we think about our overall health, and our overall goals and expectations from a lower energy future.  Now it is hard to know what you may need as you age, but it is possible to make some useful guesses.  Eric suffers from a mild irregular heartbeat for which he’s taken hawthorn for years, so that was easy – time for a hawthorn bush.  I get urinary tract infections now and then, and while we already had cranberries and garlic, some bearberry wouldn’t come amiss, and moist acidic soil, we’ve got.  Eli already takes flaxseed and evening primrose oil as a supplement, so growing those was no great trouble.

  Basic remedies for the kinds of things active children and farmworking adults are good too – calendula for rashes, jewelweed for poison ivy, comfrey for bone poultices.  Chamomile, catnip, dill seed and peppermint for upset stomachs.  Valerian and catnip for the occasional sleepless night.  Elderberry and rosehips for colds.  Maypop and borage for anxiety.  California poppy for pain relief.  Mullein, plantain and nettle already grew aplenty around the property, but I started encouraging them, making sure not to scythe down the mulleins that grew along the driveway, and encouraging them to go to seed.

Thinking ahead, I knew that someday I’d go through menopause, so that means plenty of sage, which is fine, since I like the stuff already – I used to avoid it in large quantities, since it can dry up breastmilk, but that’s no longer an issue.  The day will come when Eric may actually have to think about his prostate, and our nettle patch awaits.  Thinking forward to times when it might be more difficult to afford or access modern medicine, I wanted to make sure that my herb gardens included medicines to treat things that ran in our family – gotu kola and ginko for memory loss as one ages in Eric’s family, willow and cayenne for the arthritis that runs in mine, and motherwort for heart issues.

 Then there are the critters – they use herbs too.  My goats are wormed with an herbal formulation that I don’t try to duplicate, but I know its major components, and try and keep some of them – wormwood and pennyroyal – around.  We put garlic in the food of almost all the critters, and find that in improves their health.   

Well, that’s quite a list already, and the process of getting comfortable with all these herbs has been a slow one – because we’re healthy, I haven’t always had much occasion to use them, but the good thing is that alcoholic tinctures do keep.  Moreover, most of the plants I learned to like for themselves – oh, the elecampanes do try to take over, and I can’t quite convince myself that lungwort isn’t ugly, but even if I never need black cohosh for anything, who could fail to appreciate its bottle-brush beauty, or the autumnal purple waves of joe pye weed?

The habit my herb gardens had of overflowing into things not officially labelled “herb garden” was what led me to think about the possibility of growing herbs on a larger scale.  I have been wondering with what to replace the CSA – I don’t think I’m going to run one again, at least during the summer.  I loved doing it, but the time requirements are too intense while writing as well. And while I love animal agriculture, love working with the animals, I don’t ever want to be just one kind of farm, and if I have to test my heart, at the root of things, my greatest passion is the growing of green stuff.

So were herbs a possible answer?  Was there any market for the things that do very well in my climate?  I realize that we’re to cool and moist to get the highest levels of capsacin in my cayenne peppers (although we do ok), or the best essential oil levels of thyme, oregano and lavender, things that like it hot and dry and evolved in mediterranean climates.  I can make the conditions on a small scale, using my cold frames in the summer, or adding sand to make my lavender at least moderately happy, but not on a large one. 

But what about things that find our cool, moist soil useful? Obviously, that includes marshmallow, but also meadowsweet, boneset, joe pye weed, wild bergamot, valerian, liatris, blue vervain, mint, angelica, black eyed susan, burdock, cardinal flower, catnip, comfrey, elecampene, elderberry, goldenrod, mullein, nettles, potentilla, self-heal, cranesbill and viburnum?  For a long while, I’ve been mulling over how much work to invest in adapting our property, a part of which “lays wet” – should we drain it?  The cost has been somewhat prohibitive, but moreover, it has troubled my basic sense that my relationship with the land ought to be about getting the most out of what it does well, rather than forcing it into something else.

And thus came the generation of a new business idea for me – that perhaps, just perhaps, it would be possible for me to make some money sourcing plants that in many cases, either already grow here are grow easily in our conditions.  Instead of trying to grow vegetable row crops in places that lay wet, perhaps I could grow medicinal crops that thrived in those conditions.  So I asked around a little, and to my surprise several people expressed enthusiasm for a local source for some of the herbs listed above. 

We are still in the experimental stage, exploring what grows well, and what there’s a market for.  I want to make absolutely sure that I know how to produce herbs that lose as little as possible in processing.  And it isn’t clear to me on what scale we will do this – this year is all about exploring markets.  We’re also exploring whether we can grow some of the more useful woodland herbs in our woods, with minimal disturbance of the current denizens.

Around the herb beds, as I imagine them will be wet-soil tolerant food plants – we’re not interested in monoculture here. I’ve already planted swamp white oaks along the borders of the property, and have cranberry bush viburnum everywhere.  I want my property to grow food at least as much as it grows medicines.  I’m also starting to sell herb and vegetable starts – mostly as a way to compensate for my absurd overplanting habit. 

My herb garden started out as a 4×6 cinder block bed, and it has somehow expanded to include the rest of my side yard.  That might not be so remarkable, but it also now includes the meadows where I harvest my clover and the creekside from which I take the raspberry leaves.  It includes the fields that once grew my CSA vegetables and the pastures where I compete with the sheep for the chicory.  It ranges under my children’s playset, where the jewelweed insists on growing, and in that weird soggy spot near the old burn pile where there’s a ton of yarrow, which isn’t supposed to like wet places. 

When I moved here, I imagined that farms are made up of discrete lines – here the pasture, there the field, there the garden.  And they can be.  For me, I think blurred ones work better – the goats help clean up the garden in the autumn, and keep down the grass before we can get it all in.  We grow grains in the garden, and our field crops may turn out to be herbs.  We wildcraft very carefully, on our own property, but also try to increase populations steadily, blurring the lines between wild and tame.  And we are trying to tame our own impulses to subdue and reshape more than strictly necessary, to balance the need for lines, fences, will and limits with the desire to do what the land can do willingly, and within its own bounds.

Sharon 

• garden , herbs
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Sharon April 3rd, 2009

A reader who signs herself “Grandma Pansy” and who gave me permission to post this wonderful letter asked this:

I wanted to ask your advice about something.  For the last 14 years, my husband and I have shared in a wonderful project – a garden.  We’ve been building soil and tending our plants together.  Since we both retired three years ago, the old half acre garden has sprawled across another full acre of our property.  We sell at farmer’s markets, and donate to the local shelter, as well as sharing with our neighbors.  It has been the best gift to our marriage and made us happier together than we ever were – when Roger hit middle age, he told me he’d rather have perennials than a Ferrari, and watch me dig in compost than get a new girlfriend, and I’ve been glowing with happiness ever since (we’ve been married 31 years). 

What’s the problem?  Well, that acre and a half is all flowers.  We have a full acre of gorgeous perennial gardens, and a bit less than a half acre of annual flowers that we cut and sell at market as our retirement hobby (we were both music teachers, and we still give a few lessons to stretch the pensions too).  The gardens are beautiful, they are our babies (our daughter is grown and lives across the country), and our passion.  We do make some crab apple jelly, and give the ornamental quinces to a friend of ours, but there’ s no food in this garden, really just flowers.  I read what you write and agree that we’re facing tough times.  And we’ve talked about it, and that’s the right thing to do, we’ll start pulling out the peonies and irises and putting in blueberries, and stop growing zinnias and tuberoses and start growing potatoes and eggplant.  But we love our flowers so much, and we love our property as it is, and it is awfully hard to imagine letting the whole thing go.  What do you advise us to do?  And do you think our marriage will survive eggplant?

 Oh, Gosh, poor Roger and Grandma Pansy, worrying that food-obsessed blog chick is going to make them give up their gardens and their marriage.  I’m so sorry to have given that impression!  Let me start by assuring you that I think flowers have a major place in the future, and by thanking you for the stunning pictures.

Where?  Well, first of all, there’s the fact that they are cheap thrill.  A bouquet of basic summer annuals costs a few bucks at a farmer’s market – even when I was a desperately poor college student, I sometimes splurged on flowers.  We all need beauty to get through our lives and our days, and even getting poorer, there will probably be a market for flowers for a long, long time to come.  People in tough times need comfort and beauty and reminders of good things.  Flowers do all that.

In fact, when we ran our CSA, flowers were a major component, and they probably got us more customers than the vegetables did.  I admit, I never did anything as fussy as tuberoses – besides some perennials, my bouquets were full of wildflowers and easy to grow annuals like zinnias, rudbeckia, statice, larkspur, cosmos and sweet peas, but people seemed to like them.  And I admit, I used to save the process of arranging the flowers for the last step before delivery, because I enjoyed it so much! 

When Eric’s grandparents were alive, I promised to keep their vases full all summer, and I loved making sure they had nature inside even if walking too far outside wasn’t possible for them.  I could see how much pleasure it gave them, and I think there’s no question that they were one of the great pleasures of their lives – to feel that their house was beautiful, to smell the scent of flowers – these were basic sensual pleasures that could be enjoyed even when many other joys had passed.  There are reasons we send flowers to the mourning and the sick – because they are reminder of life and hope and beauty.

Moreover, my own faith has the idea of “Hiddur Mitzvah” which means that if you are going to do a good deed for the glory of G-d, you should do it as beautifully as possible.  I try to make sure that I have flowers on the table every Sabbath, whether dried flowers from last fall or fresh.  As more and more of us have to give up the idea that we can live “decorator” lives, we will be turning towards the beauties we can have – and flowers are everywhere and can be everywhere.

I also plant some flowering plants to help attract pollinators to my plants – I’ve been undercropping cucumbers with alyssum for years, for example, and it seems to improve my yields.  I grow sweet peas as a nitrogen fixing crop, since I saved a lot of seed a few years ago – they make a gorgeous, sprawling cover for a bed, and after I cut all I want, I cut them down and till them in.

Moreover, the reality is that people need to make a living and flowers often pay better than food.  This, I think, is somewhat unfortunate, but it is the reality – flowers can be a great transitional move for people looking to make some money growing, or establish a small market garden – today’s celosia is tomorrow’s cabbage.

Does that mean they shouldn’t grow any practical crops?  Well, I’d tend to bet that they already do.  Daylily petals are delicious.  So are sunflower, poppy and flax seeds.  Many, many ornamental plants are also medicinal or have dye or fiber uses.  They may already have the beginnings of quite a good medicinal herb garden.

Instead of wholesale giving up the peonies and dumping the iris, what I’d suggest is a much more moderate course.  Look into edible landscaping – consider adding in plants that are both ornamental and food, fiber, dye or medicine producing.  The blueberries are a great idea – they turn flaming red in the autumn and are gorgeous.  Some species of viburnum are very tasty.  And I’ve never been clear on why people don’t grow eggplant, colored chard and okra ornamentally – they are stunning, as are many hot pepper plants and asparagus ferns.  You don’t have to keep everythings separated – mixing these plants into annual and perennial plantings will keep the basic structures of your gardens intact and allow you to gradually add food plants.

 But I’d hate to see you give up the flowers – right now I’ve got a flat of marigolds and calendula, one of zinnias, another of perennials, one of sweet peas and still one more of alyssum and poppies in my house, so I’m certainly no one to talk.   The future is going to be about food – but with bread must come roses.

 Sharon

• agriculture , garden
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Sharon February 5th, 2009

Wanna see a sketch of my place? Or part of it, anyway? http://poweringdown.blogspot.com/2009/02/creating-base-plan.html

 This is the courtyard of our property that I’ve been turning into a combination food forest and potted garden – Aaron made a sketch of it as an example of how to draw a useful base plan for your own garden.  One of my goals for this class is to really optimize our use of the space, which has several advantages:

1. It is much warmer than the rest of the property – it is a south facing space sheltered on three sides. In addition, the walkway and the cement slab porch soak up heat pretty nicely. 

2. It has the best soil on the property – it was trucked in for my husband’s grandparents garden, something I’ve written about here in this essay (“Sure as G-d Made Little Green Apricots”).  Not sure where they got it, but that stuff kicks ass compared to the heavier, wetter soil that came with the house.

3. It is right outside the kitchen door – and thus is is zone 1 in permaculture terms – the perfect space to put the things we need most.  There are glass doors (which I forgot to indicate to Aaron, thus screwing up his design) off the kitchen that go straight onto the slab porch.

 Here’s what I do with it so far, but I’ll gladly take suggestions.  Most of the large beds inside the enclosure now have tender fruit trees – two apricots, two dwarf peaches and two quinces.  Along with a bunch of Hansen’s Bush Cherries, a couple of hazels and a grapevine, (oh, and a spirea I can’t get out from the narrow space between the slab and the walkway, so its staying – very pretty) that pretty much takes up all the space I’ve got for larger plants.  But other than a lot of comfrey (underplanting the trees) , some bulbs and galliardas for pretty and pennyroyal run rampant (along with some ivy), my low plantings are more limited than they should be.

I run containers along the walkway and cover much of the slab with them.  The slab is also where indoor flats move in and out in springtime and where potted plants are put out in fall and then back in at night as the temps fluctuate.  Oh, and there’s a grill and a picnic table out there.

The two beds on the side are herb beds, made with cement blocks, one for herb teas and the other for culinary herbs.  I really love the cement block beds, because they’ll never rot (unlike the wooden ones we’ve got) and the little holes are great for planting pretty small plants – dianthus, johnny jump up, curly parsley, etc….

My goals are to organize the space better, especially the slab, which gets cluttered with my pots, to underplant more useful things (wild ginger, sweet woodruff and ramps underneath the shady apricots, alpine strawberries along the edges, and….?  And to do more vertical stuff – besides my grapevine I want another maypop and to make the cinnamon vine I have stop crawling over the slab .

In the long term, I’ve thought about insulating the slab and putting a greenhouse on it – but so far no money for that.

 Suggestions? Ideas?  What are you doing with your smaller spaces?

 Sharon

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Sharon February 5th, 2009

I’m an avid container gardener.  This may seem weird, given that I have literally acres of dirt on my farm, and yet, there are simply things that do better in containers for me than they do in the ground.  Containers provide a way of dealing with a host of garden problems, and, IMHO, are useful to all gardeners, whether you’ve got a balcony and stone stoop or a vast farm. 

Among the reasons I use containers:

1. To mimic soil conditions I don’t have – for example, I have a tough time growing any long carrots in my heavy soil – so I grow my carrots in containers which have just the perfect carrot soil.  This would also work for those who don’t have acidic enough soil to grow blueberries or who need other specific conditions.

2.  To heat up my plants more.  Where I live, in upstate NY in the hills, overnight temperatures often fall into the 50s (and sometimes 40s) in the summer. Peppers, eggplant and melons just plain don’t like cool nights.  Since containers heat up more in general, I find that I get better production from these plants.  The heat stress also gives me hotter peppers.  For those who don’t need more heat may not find this useful – at least in the summer.  On the other hand, a sunny, warm spot might be just what you need to overwinter an especially tender plant.

3. Beause I can put plants in places I couldn’t.  That means I can have morning glories twining up my mailbox (surrounded on three sides by concrete) and can pretty up my water barrels with snapdragons.  You can take advantage of your best sun exposure, even if there’s no dirt there, or make a place that would be unproductive fertile.  I also use containers to bring plants to my kids – putting cherry tomatoes and lambs ears where they play so they can nibble or pet.  And scent – well that’s still another reason – really fragrant plants deserve to be where we’re most likely to get the benefit from them.  And think about what could be done with all those city rooftops using containers?

4. To extend my season.  In pots on a glassed in porch, parsley, arugula, winter lettuce, scallions and bok choy will begin producing in March.  Nasturtiums seeded now on a sunny windowsill will start blooming by May, feeding both my need for color and my desire for peppery salads.  On the other end, the potted peppers, cherry tomatoes and eggplants I bring in will produce into December.  Sage, thyme, basil and mint will last all winter.  For those in hot climates, greens can be moved from warm spots to shadier and cooler ones, making the salad season longer.

5. To allow me to plant tender plants.  I have figs, bay and citrus trees and am mulling over a dwarf banana.  Lemon Verbena, scented geraniums, aloe, gotu kola, bacopa, zaatar, and Vietnamese coriander fill my windowsills.  And right now, my albutilon and begonias are flowering, brightening winter gloriously.   I’ve promised the boys a garden of carnivorous plants to be overwintered indoors as well.

I also find container gardening psychologically so *manageable* – that is, when the garden is full of weeds and merely facing it seems overwhelming, well, there’s no reason you can’t attend to one pot.  Deadheading one pot of flowers or planting herbs in a pot is a garden chore most of us can face, even on the hottest day.

Now what kills a lot of container gardening attempts is the problem of water – and on hot days, a plant might well need to be watered several times.  The best solution to this is the self-watering container, also known as an “earthbox.”  You can buy them or make them.  The definitive book on the subject is Ed Smith’s _Incredible Vegetables From Self-Watering Containers_.  It is worth looking at, because there are some specific strategies to be used.

Self-watering containers are essentially a pot within a reservoir pot, arranged so that nothing sits in water.  They can be made or purchased, but since my friend Pat Meadows has written a very clear and useful post on the subject here: http://entire-of-itself.blogspot.com/2008/02/growing-vegetables-in-self-watering.html I won’t duplicate the information.  The pots are not difficult to make at all, and you can play with the techniques a little.

Pat is one of the most knowledgeable people out there on the subject of container gardening – she used to sell seeds for container gardens, and she now moderates the Edible Container Gardening list, which has almost 2000 people on it.  If you are interested in subscribing, you can do so by sending an email to:ediblecontainergardens-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.  The group is an amazing resource.

If you live in a cooler place, or are prepared to water often, regular containers are great – in fact, some things do better in regular containers than the SWCs - herbs like thyme and oregano, nasturtiums and hot peppers (Smith says hot peppers do fine, but he doesn’t actually seem to like to eat them – since water stress makes peppers hotter, if you are an actual chile head, you won’t want to use SWCs).  You can use anything that hasn’t been used for something toxic as a container – we grow plants in old boots, in cooking pots with holes – after a while, everything is a potential garden pot.   

Here are some recipes for potting mixes: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/207498/homemade_potting_mix_recipes.html?cat=32.  If you buy peat, make sure it is harvested from an area that is not under ecological stress.  I don’t recommend vermiculite at all – breathing it in isn’t good for you.

For fertility, if you are using regular containers, you should remember that you’ll be washing out a lot more fertility than you would be with other plants, and fertilize often.  My own personal fertility plan is to add plenty of worm compost, greensand and a good organic fertilizer mix (make your own or purchase – more on fertilizers later in the class), and to fertilize alternately with compost tea, and human urine diluted 1/10.  To be safe, I don’t use urine within a week of harvest – although there’s very little risk unless you have leptospriosis (at which point you’ve got other problems: see my post “Free Nitrogen – Comes With Handy Dispenser!).

What can you grow in containers?  Almost anything, if you have a big enough container, up to and including small trees.  Realistically, smaller varieties are generally easier to grow.  I’m a big fan of “Red Robin” tomatoes, “Fish” hot peppers and “Little Fingers” Eggplant in containers, but really you’d be stunned at what you can grow in a pot.  I love to mix herbs and flowers and vegetables together – there is nothing like “bright lights” chard mixed with parsley and dianthus, or an artichoke underplanted with purple vining petunias spilling over the sides.  The art of edible container gardening makes it a delight.

I’d encourage everyone to expand their growing space with containers whenever possible.  It is easy to think that pots can only grow a little – but that little bit adds up.

 Sharon

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