Spring shows
what God can do
with a drab and dirty world.
—Virgil A. Kraft
In the Garden
In the dooryard, an old farm-house
near the white wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall frowning
with heart-shaped leaves of rich green
With many a pointed blossom ringing delicate,
with the perfume strong I love
With every leaf a miracle…
—Walt Whitman
Growing Joy: Herbs and Veggies
I have lived in homes where my only gardening options were containers on a deck or planters on the front stoop. This taught me you can do a lot with seed packets, pots, and an open mind. When selecting space for your kitchen garden, you can have something as simple as a set of containers; this can be planned as with any other garden space. If you are lucky enough to have a backyard or land, I suggest you begin the designing process by incorporating all the plants you know you want to use in your magical workings and your cookery, and always allow yourself to experiment. Trying new veggies or seeds can be enormously rewarding. I agree with Londoner Alys Fowler, who is one of England’s top gardeners. She says there is no earthly reason why roses and cabbages can’t go side by side and veggies can nicely nestle in among florals. Once you have tried a few such painterly plantings, you can give yourself a free hand in your creative approach.
The Art of the Kitchen Garden
What veggies do you love? What are your favorite salad greens? The first rule is to plant what you will actually eat and feel proud to serve to guests. Take your book of shadows and list your preferred herbs, greens, vegetables (including root vegetables), fruits, and herbs. Now, strike out anything you can buy really cheaply—no sense in using valuable space for something easily available at a lower price than the cost of growing it. Another caution: check out your soil type. Carrots need deep, rich soil to grow well. If your lot has shallow and sandy soil, cross carrots off your list and look to surface crops like potatoes and beets instead.
Here are the vegetables anyone can grow, from beginners to pros with their own greenhouses:
Lettuce, peas, onions, beets, potatoes, beans, and radishes.
Lettuce leaves for your salads are the easiest edible crop to grow. A few varieties will be ready to harvest in weeks! Choose a seed mix that will give you a variety of leaves for different tastes, colors, and textures. For best results, sow in stages so you don’t get loads all at once. Sow a couple of lanes every few weeks throughout the summer to ensure a continuous supply.
Once you are a pro with lettuce, grow spinach and rocket for your salad bowl.
Peas are a trouble-free crop that can handle cooler weather, so you can skip the step of starting the seedlings indoors. Simply sow the seeds in the ground from March onward and watch them thrive. The plants will need support—put in stakes or chicken wire attached to posts, and occasionally wind the stems around as they grow. Harvest your fresh peas from June to August—the more you pick, the more will grow.
Onions are problem-free and easy to propagate. After your seedlings sprout, thin seedlings to an inch apart, and thin again in four weeks to six inches apart. Onions are a staple for cooking, so you and your family will be grateful once you have established an onion patch in your kitchen garden.
Potatoes and beets give a high return for your labor. To me, the best way to grow both is the world’s laziest way to garden; I remember reading about it when I was ten, in a book by Thalassa Crusoe, a pioneering organic gardener. I was fascinated that you could grow root vegetables without even needing to turn any soil. You can grow potatoes, yams, etc. under straw! Simply cut up mature potatoes that have “eyes” or the fleshy tubers sprouting out of the flesh of the potato, making sure each piece has an eye. After you “plant” or place the seed potato chunks on the ground, put loose straw over the pieces and between all the rows, at least four to six inches deep. When the seed pieces start growing, your potato sprouts will emerge through the straw cover. How easy was that? Crusoe also said you could do the same under wet, shredded newspaper, but straw is more organic.
Radishes have enjoyed a new popularity thanks to Korean and Japanese cuisine. They add a fun pop of spicy, tangy flavor to soups, stews, tempura, and salads, and are also tasty all on their own. They can grow equally well in the ground in spring or in a pot. Radishes like a lot of sun and well-drained soil. They are also a crop you can grow in several waves per season. If you keep the soil moist, you’ll have big beautiful radishes to brighten any dish.
Green beans are the opposite of the low-maintenance beets and potatoes, as they will need staking or poles for support. However, an easier path to a great crop of green beans can be to grow them in a five-gallon container. After they have reached four or five feet long, place a pole or stake carefully in the pot and allow the bean vines to wind around it. Soon you’ll have a pot of beans even Grandma might recognize as a favorite vegetable for any occasion.
Harbingers of Spring
One of my favorite times in my flower garden is pre-bloom time. The blush on the plant about to bloom starts to glow. It resembles a young girl of that certain age—twelve? thirteen?—just starting to fill out, grow up, straining to show her hidden promise. Then, a shine and dominance as it pushes everything out of the way to say, “Watch out world, here I come!” Tomorrow or the next day, I know it will be soon. Its arms reach out to the warm sun and soft spring rains. Everything surrounding it stays down and low, letting this one have its turn in the sun. I wait anxiously for the peak to arrive. Tomorrow?
One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides.
—W. E. Johns
Signs of the New Season
Nature signals the return of spring to each of us in a different way. For some, it is the blooming of a redbud or forsythia; for others, it is the determined daffodil, who is the trumpeter of spring, in bold pre-Easter yellow. For me, it is the dogwood tree, budding up everywhere with pink-infused blossoms of thickest cream. I love that the dogwood is such a democrat, growing anywhere and everywhere, in places where no other such beauty dare show herself.
A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up in the air.
—Henry Ward Beecher
How to Grow a Wildflower Meadow
I believe having a lawn is vastly overrated. It takes a tremendous amount of water and too much labor and causes vast quantities of chemicals to be dumped into our water supply. So I decided to dig mine up and plant a wildflower meadow instead. It took some work to get it going, but within four weeks, I had my first bloom. It was a glorious sight for six months and, unlike a lawn, is virtually maintenance-free. Plus I had an almost endless supply of cut flowers from late spring to late fall.
The tricks are to till the soil in the spring, select a pure wildflower mix (no grass or vermiculite filler) appropriate to your growing area, and blend the seed with four times its volume of fine sand, so it will disperse evenly. After you’ve spread it over the dirt, put down a layer of loose hay to keep the seeds from blowing away. Usually the mixes are a combination of annuals, biannuals, and perennials. To keep the annuals going, you have to rough up parts of the soil and reseed just those every year.
To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.
—Beverley Nichols
Sun-Infused Flower