The Chatelaine's Keys

admin April 25th, 2011

Periodically someone will come up to me and denigrate one of the three things discussed here, while praising the others.  For example, someone will tell me that food preservation is simply too much work, and not worth their time, but assure me they do have a garden and store food for a crisis.  Other times, someone will tell me they don’t bother to garden because “other people will just come and steal your garden” or “gardening doesn’t pay.”  Sometimes food storage is the target - after all, the commenters observe, eventually stored food runs out, right?

While I’m always grateful to see people picking up on one or two of these principles (after all, the average American practices none of them), I do find myself troubled by the idea that one can grasp the need for and merits of one, but not another.  To me, they look like a three legged stool, on which a very basic concept - food security - rest.  And like most three legged stools, you can’t sit on it with one of the legs missing.

If we are to make by necessity or desire, a shift to a lower input society, it is necessary to take the lessons learned in other lower-input societies and ask the question - what are the major food security issues likely to be?  We already see from the current recession that food issues are more acute than they were anticipated to be - the newest set of numbers is likely to show one in every seven Americans and one in every three children, for example, requiring food stamps.  Six million plus American households have no income at all except food stamps.  Food pantries and soup kitchens are dramatically overdrawn - and need cannot be measured by output, because demand so dramatically exceeds it.  And yet, just a few years ago at the beginning of the recession, we were told that food insecurity was unlikely to be a major issue in the US as it was in the Great Depression.  It turns out that in reality, food insecurity has risen much faster than expected, and the food crisis in the global south is playing out in parts of the developed world as well, and stands only to get worse.

It is simply clear that food is going to be a central site on which this crisis plays out - and because of this, it is necessary that we take lessons from our own history and from other societies that use less energy in their food system to begin to predict what will be needed.  What we know, doing so, is that we will not have a viable food future without all three legs of the stool standing solid.

Food production is probably the easiest sell - gardening is trendy, it is pleasurable, and we all know that food straight from the garden is both more delicious and more nutritious than broccoli from the grocery store that is five or six days old.  Heck, the salad you pick outside your door even has it over the good stuff from the farmer’s market.  Still, there are plenty of people who don’t grasp the importance of gardening, or who don’t think their gardens can make a difference in food security.

Let’s look at the evidence, however.  We know, for example, that in 1944, US Victory Gardens together produced as much produce as all the truck and produce farms in the entire US - fully half of the vegetables in the US came from victory gardens.  We know that urban gardening in cities in the Global South (and historically in the Global North during times of crisis including the Great Depression, Europe after WWII, Russia after the Soviet Collapse etc…) has helped make the difference between nutritional inadequacy and adequacy.  Consider, for example, in Tanzania, where involvement with urban food production means that poor children whose families garden and/or raise livestock have nutritional status equal to middle class children.

The historical evidence is very, very clear - in difficult times (which, realistically are likely forthcoming, and in many respects already here), gardening is a basic way that people who are struggling put food in the table.  To those who observe that urban and suburban gardeners can’t grow all their food - this is absolutely true.  What small gardens do is make the difference between an unremitting diet of staples and a nutritious, tasty diet.  They can grow chiles to spice their food, greens to keep their children from getting sick from nutritional deficits, fruits to add sweetness and flavor to bland diets.  Add small livestock living on garden wastes and human food wastes, and as long as you are able to buy a small amount of staple grains in a market, you can live.  All of us know that meat and veggies are expensive - for poor people, affording these things is a much bigger issue than getting ahold of some staple foods.

For larger households, gardens can provide staples as well - although we are accustomed to seeing grains as our primary staple, root crops have operated, particularly in cold climates, as staple foods - “vegetables” doesn’t mean “lettuce” - it  can also mean staple foods like potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, beets and other filling root crops that supported the people of Northern Europe for decades.

At both the household level and the regional level, a sweeping view of gardening is best - in much of the global south gardens cover rooftops, balconies, marginal space along roads and railroad tracks, and it includes marginal weeds on which local livestock pasture, fallen tree branches that provide fire wood or brush for staking and building, and perennial crops that belong to the whole community - bamboos whose shoots are taken home from the park, fruiting street trees, and wild edibles.  Consider the difference that planting food-producing street trees alone could make.  Perennial edibles represent a kind of garden bank account on which the community can draw on for pleasure and upon need.

Ok, we’ve established the not-very-difficult case for why we need to garden.  Why is food preservation a fundamental pillar?  The reason is pretty simple - in just about every place on earth, there is a season in which not much grows that well. It could be the dry season, the hot season or the cold snowy one, but gardens slow down or stop, and not much fresh is coming out them.  Even in places where there is year round production, there are also bumper years and bad years - years in which everything does well, and years in which everything - or some important things do badly.  The ability to preserve what you grow for periods in which such things are not available is central to the project of food security - because most of us can count on some periods where we either will not be able to garden or where not much is available.

Moreover, one of the examples to look at is that of the global south, where food is wasted in more or less the same quantities as it is here.  The difference between the Global North and the Global South is pretty dramatic, however - overwhelmingly almost half the food produced in the Global South is lost because it cannot be preserved.  Lack of refrigeration or adequate storage, lack of techniques for food storage, problems with transportation.  In the Global North, more than half of all food wastage is lost after it is transported from the field, in stores and in our kitchens.  This gives us a sense of our future - we may find ourselves with a great deal of food loss due to problems of preservation, unless we can support and build the infrastructure for preserving food in a lower-energy input society.

That infrastructure doesn’t have to be industrial - it might be simple as large solar food dryers and better storage to keep grains away from rodents.  It would include networks for delivery and distribution by bicycle, water, rail or other ways, so that food doesn’t rot in the fields.  It might include strategies used in the pre-oil era, in which families took their “vacation” to help harvest and preserve crops like hops or fruit, acting as migrant laborers in exchange for fresh air, accomodations and good food.  It may also include something like the rural dachas of Russia, where urban dwellers grow their gardens and preserve homegrown and wild foods for the long winter to come.

I wrote _Independence Days_ in large part in response to a question a woman once asked me. I was speaking at a conference, and the woman, an urban dweller, asked me what she was supposed to eat once her 22 week CSA subscription ran out, and what people had eaten in the past.  I observed that they ate preserved and stored food and she asked me who did that - beyond Clarence Birdseye, the answer that was that there are some small producers out there that to produce high value (and usually high cost) preserved foods, but for the most part, this was a do-it-yourself job - the next logical step in eating out of your garden was to take what is abundant and make it last.

You can, of course, purchase preserved foods, and store them that way, but this is much more expensive proposition, and it isn’t a terrifically strenuous one.  Despite the rhetoric of standing over a hot canning kettle, the actual work load of slicing some fruit and sticking it in a solar dehydrator or an electric one, or canning up some chicken broth is not terrifically demanding.  Many people hear the word “food preservation” and think “canning” - but while canning is one strategy for preserving food, it isn’t the only or best one.  Indeed, if one couldn’t survive without canned food, the human race would not exist, since it was invented only in the 19th century. It is a lovely addition to people’s tool box, but root cellaring, in garden-storage in clamps and with mulches, dehydrating, lactofermentation, and the rest of the toolbox will get you everywhere you need to go if you prefer.

What about food storage?  What does that have to do with anything?  Most of us have fond memories of grandma and her homemade pickles or whatever else - we may think it is too hard or too much work, but we can see the point.  Food storage, however, having  pantry that can sustain an extended period without a trip to the store, well, that seems weird.  Our society does a great deal to make it seem weird, pushing us to view stored food as the territory of survivalists with bunkers and guns.

This is very strange, because of course, storing food is one of the most basic things humans do - first they preserve it, then they put it by for years of shortfall.  Consider the Biblical Story of Joseph, who tells Pharoah to put up food for the days when “there will be no food in all the land.”  It was considered a simply responsible and necessary thing to do - in fact, food preservation and the storage of food for the cold season is an older human activity even than agriculture - we have been reserving our bounty for times of hunger for as long as we have been human, or nearly.

Why might we need stored food?  It could be as basic as a period when we are ill or out of work, and unable to shop.  It could be a supply interruption or a natural or non-natural disaster (think Japan) that contaminates or prevents food from reaching us.  It could be a medical crisis that require isolation and reduced contact and makes shopping risky.  It could be a short term power outage or a several month supply interruption.  Indeed, most of us experience periods in our lives when stored food is or would be valuable.  This is so normal that the US government, the US and International Red Cross and most governments recommend that people store food.

It is something that must be done in anticipation of a crisis - in a crisis, storing up food when shortages are already present is viewed as hoarding and can be discouraged, penalized with social consequences, or outright illegal.   In order to ethically ensure a reliable food supply during a period of constraint, you need to have a reliable supply of food all the time.  Moreover, all the evidence suggests that we waste the least amount of stored food when we base our storage on what we eat already, and include it in our daily diets and rotations.

The line between preservation and storage is very fine - once you have done the work of preserving food, you need to know how to store it.  Some people’s food storage consists entirely of things they have grown themselves, other people rely heavily on food produced elsewhere.  Since most of us rely on dry staples, often these will be grains produced in other places, but this varies from situation to situation.

Preserving food is not like preserving works of art, or insects in amber - it doesn’t last forever.  So preserved food must be properly stored, in order to maximize both its lifespan and its nutritional value.  With grains, this may be a matter of putting them in air-tight containers in a place without wild temperature fluctuations or too much moisture for years.  For lactofermented food, it may be finding a cool basement spot or underground spot to allow it to last a few months.  Without the knowledge to both store food correctly and integrate in your diet, all your money or labor in preservation and purchase is wasted - instead of reducing waste by preserving a bountiful harvest, you are simply throwing money and food out the window.  And none of us can afford that.

Nor can any of us afford to believe that natural or human-caused disasters, economic crises and other hard realities will never affect us.  None of us can rely entirely on stores and good fortune in a world where climate-linked disasters are on the rise and where instability of all kinds is the normal.

Without all three legs of the stool, you place yourself, your family, your community at risk.  With all three legs integrated, we have the beginnings of a model of collective food security on which we can build.  If there is a leg that is weak, wobbly or absent on your stool, time to make it strong and build it up.

Sharon

• Food Storage , garden
• Comments(9)

admin March 3rd, 2011

Ok, you know about edible landscaping - you’ve replaced your burning bush with blueberries and your spireas with elderberries.  You’ve trained that grapevine over the arbor.  Now you are eying that space on your front lawn where the perennial border is (or should be or used to be or is in your head).  You want flowers.  You need flowers because they make you happy.  Maybe you have to grow flowers there if you grow much of anything but grass, because of neighbors or zoning laws.  Can you grow an ornamental flower garden that is totally edible?  Yes.  Yes, you can!

I don’t just mean “edible flowers” which, after all, are very cool but not main crops.  And I don’t mean something you might add a tiny taste of to your garden. I’m talking about food plants that are beautiful too.  Consider it  your stealth food garden - and consider it perfect for public places, where you are worried about someone nipping off with your cherry tomatoes or your carrots.  Only the well informed will have the faintest idea that these are even food.  There’s something magical and fun to me about the idea of a “secret garden” in plain sight.

I have two plans here for a garden of edible flowering plants, one for sun, one for shade.  Obviously, if you live somewhere tropical or desertish, you’ll have to do your own planning, but for much of the temperate US from zone 7-4 certainly and probably into parts of 8 and 3, you could grow most of these plants.  They are beautiful, they offer a long season of flower and foliage beauty, many are perennial (you can fill it in with annuals that I’ll suggest at the end) and they are tasty.  What more could you want?  My idea was to ask myself “If Gertrude Jekyll was planning an edible garden, what would it look like?”

First, a shady ornamental-edible garden - this will work best for light to moderate shade and reasonably moist conditions - very dry or very deep shade won’t work.

Ok, even I didn’t know until my awesome partner-in-crime Aaron Newton told me - Hostas are edible!!!  I’ve never liked them much, but after I heard the shoots  taste like slightly salted asparagus, well, I’m softening on them.  So first, hostas!   My research suggests that some varieties are tastier than others, but that not much research has been done on this - so here’s an opportunity to contribute useful and important knowledge!

Daylilies are a gorgeous and delicious edible plant/flower and will tolerate partial shade, although they do best in full sun (at the southern end of their range, they might actually prefer shade).  The wild orange daylily will do well in part shade, as do several cultivated varieties, including “Orange Crush” and “Dallas Star.”  One source I found suggested that dark-colored daylilies generally do better in shade.  I have a Stella d’Oro that does well as well in moderate shade.  Daylilies provide two seasons of food - the shoots are tasty fresh and are traditionally dried and used in hot and sour soup, called “golden needles.”  The flowers are the best tasting edible flower out there and wonderful in salads.

Giant Solomon’s Seal (polygonatum giganteum) is a gorgeous woodland native that offers spring to early summer white bell flowers.  It will even take partial sun, but without enthusiasm.  The shoots are edible (look like asparagus but taste more like artichokes) as are the tubers (good with butter, I’m told, but I haven’t tried them).

Orange Jewelweed -aka Spotted Touch Me Not.  Ok, you aren’t going to get more than a tasty snack out of this - they aren’t really a calorie crop, but it is such a valuable plant it is worth it.  Jewelweed seeds (you know, the ones that “pop,” which explains the other common name) taste exactly like walnuts - they are delicious.  Very, very small - you won’t be making too many cookies with them, but yum. Plus, Jewelweed is the best anti-itch plant around - soothes poison oak and ivy, rashes of all kinds, etc…  The leaves are weedy looking, I fear, but the flowers are gorgeous and orchid-like and well worth it.

Ramps don’t really flower, but their strap-like foliage is pretty and pleasant all year round, and their flavor is spectacular - my kids beg for ramps. They do look a lot like lily-of-the-valley, so don’t plant them anywhere near the latter, since lily of the valley is quite poisonous.

Ostrich Fern - the ideal source of fiddleheads.  A delicious and beautiful crop, you get your spring delicacy with ferny beauty put together.

Jerusalem artichokes will tolerate quite a lot of shade, and indeed, are less aggressive that way.  They provide delicious tubers that are really wonderful, and provide bright late season color.  The only important thing is to keep them from overpowering everything else.

Bee Balm is another possibility - it will probably do well in partial shade.  It is prone to mildew in shade, but it is an excellent tea plant and the bright red, pink or purple can light up a border.  The flowers are also edible.

Finally, let’s anchor our planting with a couple of shrubs - two beautiful black elderberries, providing flowers in the spring and fruit in the autumn, and a black currant, whose leaves can be used to crisp and give a smoky flavor to pickles, while their delicious fruit makes jam, wine or juice.  Or if you prefer, red or white currants.  All will tolerate partial shade, all are extremely ornamental and tasty!

If you live in a warmer zone, you can probably also grow taro (elephant ears) and additional plants.  Pansies and Johnny-jump ups are good annuals for shade to fill in any weak spaces and add more color - the flowers are delicious in salads - they will provide color all season long in the cooler regions and spring and fall color in warm places.  Tuberous begonias have edible, slightly tart-crisp flowers and do well in shade as well.

Ok, now a sunny perennial border with a few annuals thrown in for good luck!

As much as I really don’t like hostas (a prejudice I’m getting over) I *love* sea hollies - they are a favorite plant of mine.  The roots, roasted, really do taste like chestnuts.  They were once upon a time candied and served as aphrodisiac desserts.  I’ve not tried the latter .  The shoots can be blanched, the leaves are edible and tasty, and they are weird but stunningly beautiful, and come in the rarest of all colors, blue. What’s not to love?

Sweet and spicy Codonopsis roots are a delicacy, served in korean style barbecue sauce or used to give a spicy-sweet taste to rice, or added to soups.  It is also known as Dang Shen or “poor man’s ginseng” although the compounds in it are not the same as in ginseng.   They are an important medicinal also used as food in much of Asia.   It does need something to climb on, and the roots usually take several years to mature, but are well worth the wait.  In the meantime, the plant is gorgeously ornamental.  In the warmer parts of its range, it will take part shade, and it will take light shade even in more northerly spots, so it could be part of the garden above as well!

I credit Eric Toensmeier’s _Perennial Vegetables_ for pointing out that ornamental cannas are actually edible.  In our range, the tubers have to be lifted and stored over the winter, but that’s a small price to pay for something so delicious and so beautiful.   Canna starch is used to make cellophane noodles used Vietnamese and other Asian cuisines, and Canna production for starch is a major Vietnamese agricultural product.  Canna tubers do need to be roasted for a long time, but come out meltingly sweet and carmelized and very delicious.

Daylilies would be another great addition to this, and you could add Jerusalem artichokes or Maximillian Sunflowers, or just use annual sunflowers at the back of the border to add height and drama.  As long as we’re talking about drama and height, annual amaranths come in a wide range of stunning colors, produce edible grain, young salad leaves and cooking greens.  They are the perfect ornamental edible.

In the grain department, what about Job’s tears?  It is perennial tropical grass, grown as an ornamental annual here - and it is lovely stuff.  Moreover, the seeds can be eaten as  a porridge, ground to make a nutritious drink, or for that matter, laquered and used as jewelry - they have a natural hole that lends itself to stringing.  It doesn’t overwinter, but the tufts of grass are pretty if left standing in the winter garden as well.

I admit, I simply don’t grasp why everyone doesn’t grow okra in the north - it just isn’t that hard.  Somehow, okra and sweet potatoes (another fave) have the perception of being southern crops - but I get good harvests of both her in zone 4.  Okra is certainly purty enough to make it into the border.  Other more common vegetables worth including in the sunny border are eggplant, ornamental hot peppers, edible chrysanthemum, and “Red Russian” and “Bright Lights” Chard.

(Shunkgiku, or edible Chrysanthemum)

As fruiting things go, Maypop is sort of borderline in the northerly parts of our range, and it can be invasive in the most southerly ones, but there is a happy medium, and I’ve successfully managed to nurture one along in a sheltered spot and get a few passionfruits every year - worth the effort.  The stunning flowers are worth a lot too!

There are certainly no shortage of ornamental shrubs out there to anchor your border - I’m sure you can think of a bunch.  I won’t bore you with blueberries, however - what are some of the unusual ornamental edibles you could grow?

Honeyberry is pretty - it is a honeysuckle and has lovely, very early flowers an is the first fruiting shrub in my garden.  The berries are good - its only major flaw is that it drops its leaves early in the season, but I’ve heard you can stave this off by fertilizing late.  The provide such beautiful early flowers and fruit, however, this seems a small price to pay.

Bush cherries are just plain stunning in the landscape - well worth it. The fruit is ok straight, but excellent in jams and syrups, and my one experiment with it suggests it makes terrific wine.

Aronia is my other recommendation - the bright, fiery fall color would make it worth it alone, but the berries are terrific, highly nutritious and the whole thing is the easiest plant out there - put it in a hole and forget about it.

If we need to fill in spots in the border with bright annual color, certainly, let’s throw in some nasturtiums which obviously add color, delicious flowers, tasty leaves and best of all, seed pods that taste like capers when pickled.  Or how about safflower blossoms, to add to salads and to color our rice without spending bazillions on saffron.  For that matter, you could add autumn color by growing saffron crocuses (not annual).  What about flax for edible seeds?  And a tuteur or trellis covered with Hyacinth beans and/or scarlet runner beans.

See, Gertie, told you I could do it!   I’m hoping, btw, that we will be able to offer many of these plants, if not all, in our plant CSA and herb nursery - more information on that coming up ASAP!

Sharon

• garden , garden design
• Comments(21)

admin January 5th, 2011

Ok, I did this with food storage and preservation, and the response was overwhelming - I didn’t actually respond to the half of them.  I haven’t forgotten about it, though, and some of the questions are going to come back in the next couple of months as posts.  I’m hoping to do better this time, though, so go ahead, ask me anything about your garden.  I’ll do my best to answer!

Sharon

• garden
• Comments(18)

admin January 3rd, 2011

This is one of my favorite posts I’ve ever written - it appeared last year at Science Blogs, and I find myself drawn back, as I plan my garden to the question of what constitutes a true vernacular garden for my place. 

At first glance, swept yards, derived from Africa, at one time common in the south and now mostly the province of a few, aging African-American southerners; and Cottage Gardens, invented in Britain under the feudal system and now evolved into a trendy “flower garden style” that implies mostly a mix of abundant plants and mulched paths as seen in any supermarket magazine, have nothing to do with one another.

But looking past the obvious, the two of them have a great deal in common indeed. Both emerged from the need to make good use of a smaller piece of land for a family with subsistence needs. Both responded to climate and culture and evolved over time in keeping with their environment and the needs of the people that grew them.  Both allowed for a substantial variety of activities and plant life in a small space. Both made use of what was available, valuable and abundant, rather than focusing on rarities. Both responded to inadequate housing by transforming outdoor spaces into living spaces. And perhaps most importantly, both took pragmatic traditions and made them respond to two equally important needs - the need for food and medicine and subsistence from one’s garden, but also the need for beauty, peace, and respite and a place to express one’s artfulness.

In his superb history _African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South_, Richard Westmacott tracks the origin of the swept yard back to West Africa, and explores how it changed over centuries, from slave yard to a now-dying way of life in the rural south. Instead of attempting to grow grass or other ground covers in the hot south, often on difficult red clay, rural southerners would sweep and tamp down that clay until it baked hard as a rock, reducing dust tracking and making the space suitable for yard work. Houses, hot during the day, were abandoned and people moved outside to shaded yards where they could do the washing, cook, eat, butcher animals, and do other heavy work in the shade of trees. The gardens, a separate but often connected space, contain the crops - and the pig area, the chickens and other livestock. The yard was separate from the garden, often marked by an enclosure, and as Westmacott observed had originally been marked by medicinal herbs and dooryard plants, but gradually transitioned to largely ornamental flowers. Westmacott observes of the sustainability of the whole of traditional southern rural yards and gardens:

“It might be argued that a vernaculture garden must also be sustainable. Gardening is an adaptation of nature, and for gardening to become indigenous to an society, it must be sustainable. In most African societies, sustainability is intricately associated with religious beliefs. As has been shown, most of the gardeners in this study expressed alarm at the changes they saw occurring in the environment, and many lifestyles were remarkably self-sufficient and sustainable.”

A yard swept bare of plant life may not sound very pretty, but in reality, it made wise use of what there was - it allowed housekeepers to manage the clay and dirt, while transforming the dooryard into the “outdoor rooms” that ornamental garden books like to praise but rarely actually succeed in creating. And it wasn’t an empty space - containers and marginal areas were planted with trees and shrubs, where water could be focused. Recycled materials and scavenged ones made a remarkably creative yard full of planters made from abandoned materials - themselves artful. Moreover, there is, in the photos in Westmacott, a seamlessness to the transition space between yard, garden, livestock and field. Indeed, although I refer to this as an African-American tradition, it was so successful that before the advent of warm weather grasses, the swept yard was the norm in much of the rural south in white and black households, regardless of class.

I recently emailed Aaron Newton, my co-author on _A Nation of Farmers_ and my guide through southern life. We’ve been working together for four years now, and over the years have spent a lot of time politely and not so politely explaining the realities of our respective regions to one another, so I wasn’t surprised that my query about whether anyone still swept their yard in his region of North Carolina was responded to by “Does anyone still wear tricornered hats up by you?” I took that to be a no - it is, as Westmacott documents, a dying tradition - supplanted by warm weather landscape grasses, by people spending more time in air conditioning and less in their yards, but the homogenization of garden design and by the destructions of the informal economy and subsistence activities. But a lower energy, less wealthy society may yet find uses for some of the things that the swept yard did well.

Most interesting to me about the swept yard is how it contained space for both ornamental and food gardening. Westmacott observes that traditional African-American yards were often a riot of flowers and plants - but not organized as most white gardens were. First of all, the emphasis was on vigorous and abundant production and self-seeders. Flowering plants, instead of being organized by color and form were interspersed with one another, with a preference for bright colors. Until recently, few shrubs were involved - because of the high cost of woody plants, most woodies were food producers, rather than purely ornamental. Medicinal herbs would have been mixed in with flowers grown for scent and beauty. Because of the high cost of plants, annuals and seed grown plants were preferred and were shared widely. In this sense, the vernacular traditions of the rural south sound very much like the cottage garden.

In the early 1950s, Eudora Welty introduced the writer Elizabeth Lawrence to market bulletins published throughout Mississippi where gardeners sold perennials, herbs and ornamental sto one another. Lawrence took up a correspondence with dozens of women and men (mostly women) who divided and shared seeds and plants for a small fee, and generously offered advice and told stories of their origins. In their gardens were plants that were otherwise lost to the seed trade, being spread about and preserved in household gardens, and shared for pennies among men and women who valued them for the art and expression they could create. In _Gardening for Love_ Lawrence observes that these gardeners were minimally compensated for the considerable time and effort they spent in preparing and shiping plants, and explaining how to grow them - and most of them worked long hours doing other work. The compensation was the spread, the abundance, the increase in beauty and the preservation of the plants.

In contrast to the swept yard, at least superficially, the cottage garden is booming. Googling “cottage garden” got me a bazillion entries. The problem is that all of them are a watered down version of the cottage garden - but very few of them have anything to do with the cottage garden as it existed before it was taken over by the affluent who had no reason to grow anything but flowers. I have a fondness for Gertrude Jekyll too, but for those of us interested in vernacular gardens, she did everyone a disservice by taking up the cottage garden. Yes, they are very beautiful - but their beauty in reality lay in the way they combined aesthetics and subsistence - and the subsistence has been erased.

But the history of the cottage garden has as much to do with bees and pigs and vegetables as it does with wisteria and foxgloves. The recasting of cottage gardens as an intentionally informal style to be propagated by comparatively affluent ornamental gardeners obscures the fact that the cottage garden grew up among people just as poor as many of the rural African-Americans who preserved the swept yard.

Christopher Lloyd’s and Richard Bird’s _The Cottage Garden_ offers a concise history and at least an attempt to draw us back to the mixed use garden with a heavy emphasis on food plants and herbs. He observes that John Claudius Loudon in the 18th century attempted to help cottagers with reduced land access (as a result of the destructive enclosure laws) to use cottage style gardening to be able to feed a famly of five on 600 square yards of garden. Pigs, chickens and bees were essential to this project. They track back the ornamental elements of the kitchen garden to the Elizabethan dooryard and the herbs that lived in it. As in the African-American yards in the South, at first medicinal and other functional herbs predominated but they too had ornamental value, and it was hard to tell if tall spires of hollyhock were central because of their medicinal or ornamental utility.

The presumptions of the cottage garden were much the same as the African-American yard despite the radical difference in climate and culture - that much had to be gotten out of small space, that one needed a place to live and work outside when the weather permitted, that the ornament and utility were not incompatible, and that the best plants were abundant self-seeders or easily grown annuals. It had the additional virtue of using vertical space well - which some African-American gardens had as well, particularly in the use of scavenged articles as trellises. The ubiquitous cottage garden image, of course, is of a cottage covered with ivy or wisteria.

As the cottage garden was adopted by more affluent people, and transferred away from the real cottages of low income farmers and workers in Britain, the cottage garden changed, and became what we see today - a garden style, more heavily invested in perennials, with more shrubs and almost no emphasis on plant utility. The romanticization of the cottage in both gardens and literature worked to the detriment of the actual cottager - now that people longed to live in them, admired them, they became harder to actually live in for most working people. In _Sense and Sensibility_ Jane Austen’s romantic Willoughby jesting threatens to tear down his estate and replace it with a cottage. But the cottage imagined in the romantic imagination was erased of subsistence functions, because, they were unromantic. In Georgette Heyer’s superb _A Civil Contract_ the overly romantic, affluent Julia declares she would be delighted to live in a cottage, but her mother clarifies (in a terrifically funny passage) this fantasy for what it is - a sanitized dream.

“Could you be happy in a cottage? I could! How often I have longed to live in one - with white walls and a thatcheed roof and a neat little garden! We’ll have a cow and I’ll learn to milk and make butter and cheese. And some hens and a bee-hive, and some pigs.”

 ”Oh, won’t you?” struck in her unappreciative brother. Well, if you mean to cook the meals, Lynton will precious soon want something more and who is to kill the pigs and muck out the henhouse?”

…”Lady Oversly, having removed Julia’s hat, had clasped her in her arms and was tenderly wiping the tears from her face, but she looked up at this and expalined: “Live in a cottage? Oh, no, dearest you would be very ill-advicsed to do that! Particularly a thatched one, for I believe that thatch harbors rats, though nothing, of course, is more picturesque, and I perfectly understand why you should have a fancy for it! But you would find it sadly uncomfortable: it wouldn’t do for you at all, or for Adam either, I daresay, since you have both of you been accustomed to live in a very different style.

And as for hens, I would not on any account rear such dispiriting birds! You know how it is whenever an extra number of eggs is needed in the kitchen: the hen woman is never able to supply them and always says it is because the creatures are broody. Yes, and they make sad noises which you, my love, with your exquisite sensibility would find quite insupportable. And pigs,” concluded her ladyship with a shudder, “have a most unpleasant odour!”

The beauty of the cottage garden in many ways was its success, and thus its downfall - while beauty was always part of the project of creating the garden, always intertwined with utility, its very success at being lovely made it ripe for the erasure of its utility. But it is possible to come back to the cottage garden - to the yard as proximate space that extends the kitchen and the household outwards, brings us outside and into a riot of color and forms that are both beautiful and useful. There is still a place for the herb garden, and the cottage garden and the traditional African-American yard remind us to value plants that may be both ornamental and useful, that are vigorous and energetic.

The swept yard and other southern vernacular garden elements don’t much suit my climate, but for thousands of my readers, they could be useful. This publication by cooperative extension suggests strategies for implementing some of the traditional design elements of African-American yards

In my wet climate, the cottage garden model makes a lot of sense. I may have 27 acres, but I also have a yard - a space outside my kitchen door that I have gradually been converting to herbs, flowers, vegetables and fruiting trees. Looking at the cottage garden model, I can think of ways of better integrating aesthetics and practicality.

The reality is that a shift to subsistence in a densely populated world will require us to draw upon all of the things we have learned about how to meet our needs - for food and beauty - in smaller spaces. There are thousands of traditions to draw upon from all over the world, and all of them will have things we can take and make use of. As we cast back upon our collective history, the answers to how we will feed ourselves - and feed our souls - is contained in part in stories from our past.

• America , garden , garden design
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Sharon August 11th, 2009

One of the consequences of this cold, wet year has been a devastating strain of Blight that has affected both tomatos and potatoes - much of the Northeast has it (it has yet to make it to me, but others have had it).  This has been particularlly destructive to organic farmers - pesticides can be sprayed to control the fungus that causes Late Blight, but while there are organic controls (Seranade seems to be effective), they have to be applied early, before the crop fails.  I know several farmers who have lost all their tomatoes and potatoes.  The bight spreads through airborne spores and is as far west as Indiana and as far north as northern Montreal and Ontario.  Just because you don’t have it yet, doesn’t mean you won’t.

Now the loss of tomatoes is a major inconvenience and an economic pain for gowers.  All of us want our salsa.  But the loss of potatoes, while a lesser economic trouble for most farmers and individuals, is actually more troubling - in tough times, potatoes are one of the more viable home staple crops.  Again, organic controls can be used, but these might not always be available.  In some ways, we are seeing the tremendous vulnerability we face in our food system - and the answer is not “great, let’s get out the pesticides,” obviously.  It is to diversify, and learn to live with our troubles.

I’ve heard people argue that this makes the case for industrial agriculture - if it weren’t for industrial agriculture, we wouldn’t have enough tomatoes, we are told.  But, besides the obvious fact that industrial agriculture doesn’t produce anything that tastes like a real tomato, there’s also the point that this is an industrial disease - late blight was spread in the US through tomato and pepper plants purchased from WalMart and Target and other discount realtors, and shipped around the country.

Certainly, it makes sense to use organic controls if they are available to you, and if you have the infection, to burn all affected plant material. But it also makes sense to learn to live with what we’ve now got.  This is little consolation for farmers and gardeners pulling out blackened plants, but people who have had chronic blight issues do point out that it is possible to learn to live with them.  Sue Robishaw, who has been saving potato seed for decades (most people have been told not to save potato seed because you might get blight, but since seed saving is method of creating food security, she’s had to deal with the reality of blight) has observed that often, early planted potatoes will set out a solid crop of potatoes before they succumb to late blight.  And those that succumb latest and produce the best are the ones to save seed from. 

With tomatoes, we can help by selecting blight-resistant varieties (and no, these are not only hybrids), by planting early determinate varieties that may fruit before late blight takes full hold, and by simply adapting ourselves to the spread of disease.

Just as important as diversifying our varieties, and developing resistant, will be diversifying our gardens.  Yes, tomatoes are a wonderful thing, and potatoes are a staple food.  But turnips and beets and sweet potatoes and corn and dry beans, carrots, parsnips and winter squash are all potential food staples as well - it never serves to rely on only one thing.  And if we don’t get tomato salsa, perhaps we will get roasted pepper, ground cherry or salsa verde.

This is the world we live in now - our vulnerabilities have been magnified.  The best tool we have for creating a resilient system is as much variety and diversity as humanly possible. 

Sharon

• food , garden
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