Vegetable Gardening

                                        ©Jim Cummings, 2002

It's January 7, 2002 and I have three Butternut Squash left in the cellar and a bag of beets and a bag of Jerusalem Artichokes in the vegetable crisper. There are a few containers of frozen string beans left and a couple of quarts of frozen blackberries, soon to be made into jelly; a taste of summer spread onto a slice of homemade bread. Soon the seed catalogues will fill the mail box. I am going to build a moveable planter this year to start the seedlings in the living room and move them onto the sun porch at the end of April.

Three years ago, I decided to move the vegetable garden from the side yard to the back yard. Pat had decided she did not like the look of the spent tomato plants and the cornstalks and the compost pile in this area. I had been using wide bed planting for years, but with just the two of us, I felt that Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening Method would be just the thing.

Mel says to start small with just a couple of squares, but I knew I wanted a lot more to work with than that so I dug up the sod from my wildflower garden, which had regressed to mostly quack grass and Milkweed, and made ten, four foot squares.

I bought some inexpensive firring strips at the lumber store to define the squares. These have not yet rotted away. I mulched around the squares with bark mulch, bought by the truck load, and used electric conduit to make four trellises for the vining crops. I built a wire fence around it to defeat the woodchucks and this worked the first year, but the second year a woodchuck learned how to climb over the fence. The third year, I extended the height of the fence another eighteen inches.

This system has worked quite well for me, but there is not enough space!  So this year I am going to extend the garden north and south and gain six more squares.

I have had a problem with flea beetles eating the just emerging seedlings in the early spring, so this year I am going to make covers for each square out of row cloth and see if that protects the early spring crops--carrots, beets, kohlrabi, spinach and lettuce. I have had some other pests, such as striped cucumber beetles and squash bugs, but the garden seems to have reached some sort of equilibrium between predators and prey and they do not do significant damage.

My favorite winter squash for years now has been Burpee's Bush Butternut. I plant several seeds in a small mound and keep the best two seedlings that emerge. Around the edges of the square I plant carrots, beets, lettuce, and kohlrabi. Thus I get quite a bit of food from each square. If I plant vine crops at one end of the square, them I can plant squash in the middle of the other end. I also plant bush varieties of zucchini and summer squash. I keep the butternuts in a warm part of the cellar and have had them into March.

Jerusalem Artichokes, the tall, lanky plants shown here, yield the most delicious white roots that can be harvested to use fresh for dipping, or can be cooked into Topinambour soup, another name for them.

Jerusalem Artichokes are a plant native to North America. They are a perennial and I have had a small patch for about fifteen years. They will spread if not checked and the best way to keep them in check is to dig them up and eat them, leaving a few in the soil for next years crop. They can grow to a height of twelve feet and might shade parts of your garden.  They belong to the sunflower family and have small yellow and brown flowers late in the fall. The flowers smell faintly of chocolate. I grow them outside of the vegetable garden since the woodchucks do not bother them.  In fact, nothing seems to bother them. They keep quite well in the vegetable crisper and will keep in the ground and can be dug up in the spring and kept in the crisper for a good part of the summer.

The best use is for salads and as a dipping vegetable. They also do well in stir fries. Cooked quickly, they retain their crunchiness and have a good earthy flavor. A friend of mine told me of a Native American recipe, a stew containing Jerusalem Artichokes, buffalo and blackberries (another Native American plant). I would love to hear from anyone who has tried this.

I love the smell of compost. I use as much as I can make from any organic matter I can get my hands on. That and some limestone and a bit of organic fertilizer are all that I use. I heap whatever I have into a bin about 4' by 4' by 4' and let it go for a year. If I feel a bit of ambition, I turn it once in a while. Compost is not something I get obsessive about so I don't worry about layering and watering and adding starters. Let nature take its course, I say. I have two, sometimes three piles working at once.

One year, looking for a lazy man's way to turn a section of  lawn into a garden, I stumbled across a method which looked good on paper. I acquired a truckload of cow manure and had it dumped in the back driveway. This perfumed the neighborhood more than I expected, so I covered it with a large piece of plastic. 

As soon as the snow melted off the lawn, I spread the manure over it to the depth of about four inches. I soaked it with a garden hose and covered the whole fragrant mess with a large piece of black plastic, weighting down the edges with bricks.

This was supposed to heat up and decompose the sod, in effect composting it in place. On June 1, I cut slits in the plastic to work the soil and plant seedlings. Since the grass roots had not rotted as well as they were supposed to, this was quite a bit more tedious than expected. I planted tomatoes, eggplants, green and hot peppers, and broccoli. I cut longer slits and planted squash seeds.

All the plants did quite well and required no weeding. Next year, I rolled up the plastic, spaded the soil and planted row crops. The method works well, but I don't think I saved myself a lot of work.

All of this vegetable growing is part of the art of gardening. This is a folk art and its products feed both the artist and our art. The garden is a rich place, full of color, form and texture. It abounds in  insect and bird life. Photos can be pulled from their albums in the winter to design images.  Vegetables can be cut and used to stamp prints on paper or fabric.  Leaves can be pressed and scanned into the computer, the images can be manipulated and printed onto fabric.

Seeds can be saved, colored, varnished and used like beads for crazy quilting. If you preserve your produce by canning, line some jars up on a window sill and photograph the image as the light illuminates it. Now make a drawing of this photo. Turn the drawing into a quilt. This is your work of art and can be preserved in more ways than one.

© 2002-2007. Quilter's Muse Publications, Concord, NH. Questions and comments can be sent to:  pat@quiltersmuse.com