Organic Gardening

Reaping the Harvest

This weekend we harvested all that remained in our three sisters garden. The boys and I dug out the ten-by-ten plot and planted it at the beginning of May on a bit of a whim, and I wrote about our adventures in polyculture in June when it was in its infancy.

Since then we watched a few heirloom corn plants shoot toward the sky. Spotted rattlesnake beans twisted up their hardy stocks, and half a dozen varieties of spiky squash plants covered the ground beneath them. The soil in our plot wasn’t great, but we harvested loads of zucchini and summer squash and at least a dozen winter squash. We ate many rounds of green rattlesnake beans and let the rest dry on the vine for cooking beans.

We eat a lot of beans around here, and it was an educational process to grow them ourselves. Beans are such a humble and inexpensive food; it’s easy to take them for granted. But once you spend an afternoon hunched over a bowl shelling them, you’re less likely to do that.

What a thrill it’s been to watch what was a patch of weeds last April transform into a robust and beautiful garden. And because beans fix nitrogen in the soil, we’ll hopefully see even bigger harvests in our plot in future years. I definitely understand why this sisterly trio has such a rich history in the Americas.

What have you been harvesting this fall? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Welcome to My Garden

By Abby Quillen

Oh hello there, come on in. Do you want to see the garden? That’s what I’d say if you stopped by today — even if you happened to be selling magazine subscriptions, educational materials, or hand woven baskets. Oh yes, everyone ends up out in the garden munching on plump snap peas and tender butter lettuce, watching zucchini grow before their very eyes. It’s all I can do not to gush about these bursting beds twenty-four hours a day. (Sorry, friends.)

So come on back. Check out the sun-dappled chard and the lettuce forest. Marvel at the sheer ambition of hop plants and the audacity of fennel. Learn from the sunflowers, who turn their faces to follow the sun all day.

Despite the scarcity of corn and the abundant weeds, my Three Sisters bed is bringing me constant delight. “Look at all the squash we’ll have!” I proclaim daily as I count all of the bright yellow flowers dotting the spiky vines. We’re already eating zucchini nearly every day. (Can you see the excitement on my sons’ faces?)

Come, let me show you how the bean tendrils wrap up the ears of corn. It’s better than television, I tell you.

What’s that, you need to go now? I wish I could send each of you off with armloads of lettuce, beets, and peas. (I’m sure my sons would insist you take a zucchini or two.) But alas, I’ll invite you back soon.

How’s your garden growing? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Jefferson’s Garden

By Abby Quillen

4061678114_a4649fa84d_b — Photo by stereogab

“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.” ― Thomas Jefferson

I am happily in a season of gardening right now. We’re enjoying a beautiful, sunny late April here. All of our doors and windows are open, and our garden feels like another room of our house. We weave in and out of it all day, planting, watering, and watching. There’s so much magic happening out there right now.

I’ve also been helping a neighbor in her garden, and I’m learning a lot from her. If you have a little time and the interest, I can’t say enough about pitching in at a garden work party or offering to help a more seasoned gardener. You’ll take home all sorts of practical wisdom, and perhaps some seeds and starts too.

Thomas Jefferson, one of history’s legendary organic gardeners, understood the value of sharing horticultural know-how and plants with his neighbors. Jefferson collected seeds and cuttings from all over the world and reportedly always shared a little with his master-gardener neighbor George Divers. That way, if a plant died in Jefferson’s garden, he could visit Divers for some more seeds or clippings and try again. It was “a great lesson about sharing stuff,” Peter Hatch, the director of the Monticello garden, told The New York Times.

Jefferson’s Monticello garden is a thousand- foot long terrace built into the south side of a hillside. It houses a pavilion “reading room,” a recreation of the one where Jefferson spent many evenings.

Jefferson ate little meat and said vegetables were his “principle diet.” With the help of slave labor, he grew 330 varieties of 89 vegetable species and 170 fruit varieties. He planted lettuce every Monday from spring through fall, including heirloom varieties like Tennis Ball and Brown Dutch, which he apparently ate boiled. (Has anyone tried that?)

Jefferson kept detailed gardening journals, which you can read in his immaculate handwriting here. According to Hatch, Jefferson once wrote that even if he failed in the garden 99 out of 100 times, the one success was worth 99 failures.

When Jefferson retired, he rose with the sun every day and spent his mornings writing letters and working in the garden. “Although an old man, I am a young gardener,” he wrote in 1811 when he was 68 years old.

I have a feeling I, too, will always be a young gardener.

Learn more about Thomas Jefferson’s garden:

At Monticello, Jefferson’s Methods Endure by Anne Raver – New York Times

Thomas Jefferson’s Garden: A Think of Beauty and Science – NPR

Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy in Gardening and Food by Peter Hatch – Monticello

Are you a gardener? What are you growing this spring? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

A Local and Organic Revolution in the Colorado High Country

By Abby Quillen

I lived in Central Colorado for more than half my life, and I loved many things about living there. I hiked the foothills most mornings and looked out on the valley where the massive Sawatch Range meets the Sangre de Cristos. I rode my bike and walked everywhere. I cross-country skied most weekends during the winter. The air was clean. I knew all of my neighbors.

But when I moved to Western Oregon, I was blown away by the food. Almost everyone has a backyard garden. The farmer’s market goes from April to November, overflowing with local, organic produce, wild berries, mushrooms, nuts, honey, meat, and eggs. We can choose from a dozen or more CSA’s. Small health food stores are open from early morning to late night in every neighborhood, stocked with affordable organic food – most of it local. I felt like I’d moved to Eden.

Well, Central Colorado is starting to feel a lot more like Oregon.

We first visited our friends Jon and Shannon and their two kids in Hotchkiss. They’re homesteading about 80 acres of land there. They built a beautiful passive solar house, and they have a sprawling garden, a greenhouse, an outdoor kitchen, and a pond.

But Hotchkiss and Paonia are on the fertile Western Slope of Colorado – an area long known for its plump, juicy peaches. As we meandered through canyons and over mountains toward my hometown, I imagined we’d find it much the way we left it – a veritable food desert.

The mountain towns of Colorado were not true food deserts, a term coined to describe inner cities with no access to foods needed to maintain a healthy diet. When I was growing up there, Salida had three small grocery stores, and they were stocked with produce. But it was all trucked in from unknown locations thousands of miles away, and none of it was organic. When my husband and I moved back to the area for a year in 2001, we could sometimes find a few heads of locally grown, organic lettuce in the refrigerator of a tiny health food store.

But now Salida has a bustling farmer’s market every Saturday, which is teeming with fruits and vegetables, all grown in the area. I ran into a friend picking up his CSA share – a huge box overflowing with lettuce, basil, zucchini, vine-ripened tomatoes, and more.

My friends Dave and Suzanne of the Morgan Center for Earth Literacy invited me to their property, where they’re growing an enormous amount of organic produce in the shadow of Mount Shavano. They’re raising chickens and stocking an old-fashioned root cellar with preserves. They sell produce, flowers, and Dave’s homemade green chili and tortillas at the Saturday Market.

A store opened this year in downtown Salida selling cheeses and meats, fruits and vegetables – all grown and made in the region.

This part of Colorado is at 7,000 feet elevation and gets only about 10 inches of precipitation a year. It’s a climate and terrain that can be challenging for gardening. (Just 60 miles away, Leadville’s average growing season is 25 days.) So if the local, organic movement is revolutionizing this part of the world, I wonder what’s happening elsewhere.

Is a local, organic movement sprouting where you live too?

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Blueberry Picking

By Abby Quillen

Today we visited a nearby U-pick farm, and spent a couple of hours picking and eating blueberries. We had a great time, and now we have gallons of fruit for the freezer. Here are a few pictures from our day…

I’ll be taking a brief blogging sabbatical for the rest of this week. But I’ll rerun an article from the archives later in the week, and of course, I’ll be checking in to read comments. See you next week!

News From the Garden

By Abby Quillen

Back in May, I wrote Notes From the Garden about my high hopes for our vegetable garden this year. In the three springs since we’ve moved into our house, we’ve set out with grand gardening visions each April. We’ve tilled and planted and watered … but we haven’t had much success. The first April I was seven months pregnant and vastly overestimated how much I would enjoy hovering over raised beds with a newborn in a sling. Then last spring the garden was doing great … until four ravenous chickens pecked it to shreds. So now our newborn’s grown into a toddler and we’ve built a chicken yard and I’ve charted and planned, and it just has to be our year, right?

Well, I’ve been feeling fairly optimistic about our progress. The chard didn’t do well, but we’ve been munching on peas for weeks, we just harvested garlic, the tomato plants are huge, the zucchini is threatening to take over the garden, and my husband’s hops are climbing their homemade trellises.

Then I glanced at those pictures I took in mid-May, and realized how much everything really has grown in just two months, and I couldn’t believe it. As my friend Rose said last year as she was harvesting bumper crops of peppers and tomatoes – “Gardening is thrilling!”