EDIBLES–2010
Anyone who has been around for awhile and is the slightest bit attuned to horticultural fashion trends knows that ten years ago kitchen gardens and ornamental potagers were all the rage. Back then, the 2000 Philadelphia Flower Show featured edible and ornamental plants mingled with wild abandon. Five years later, all of that had fallen from the front pages of the magazines, in favor of drifts of ornamental grasses and horticultural exotica from around the world. .Now the pendulum has swung back and people are back to planting edible peas among the ornamental sweet peas for nutritional, economic and ecological reasons. As the French say, “Plus ca change; plus c’est la meme chose.” The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Every year I try to grow something edible in the midst of my flowers. Last year I planted basil and Brandywine tomatoes, a popular heirloom variety. The basil succeeded, but the Brandywines produced only a few fruits. I did everything I could to encourage pollination, providing a garden full of flowering plants, water, cover and everything else that pollinating insects could possibly want. I mulched my tomatoes within an inch of their lives and hand watered them on the rare occasions when little rain was expected. The tomatoes were tasty in the end, but if they had been priced commensurate to the work invested in them, they would have made the “$64.00 Tomato” of literary fame look like a Blue Light Special. This year I may go with cherry tomatoes instead. Their pedigree is bourgeois, but their yield is generous.
The basil last year did as well as could be expected, given the rainy spring weather. I grow basil for pesto sauce and I got a couple of big batches out of last year’s harvest. I’ll grow them again this year, in pots on the porch to deter pesto loving pests.
I am a hopeless romantic about strawberries because my father grew lots of them in our home garden. Last year I laid out plants in the midst of an annual bed and got a tidy first year harvest. All the little plants set runners, some extending out into the walkways. I’ve transplanted the runners and this year I am hoping for a bumper crop. Of course this year, the resident birds, raccoons and groundhogs may be wise to the fruit harvest and will chomp down my strawberries. Netting, vibrating garden ornaments and a bit of electric fencing may be needed to safeguard my bright berries.
I may also need all of the above for the dwarf blueberry bush, which is five years old and has produced greater quantities of fruit each year. I made quite a respectable blueberry crisp from last year’s harvest. This year I am thinking of investing in a companion bush. The plants are quite ornamental, with small, glossy leaves, pink flowers in the spring and delicious, surprisingly large fruits. The soil in this part of the world is acid, which blueberries like, and the bushes don’t need a lot of care except when the berries are ripe. I suspect our blue house will be complimented by the blueberries, the hungry bluejays and the blue stains on the walkways that always accompany the jays’ predations.
Unless I tear out my beloved roses, I will never have the space to grow the abundant crop of red raspberries that I covet. People featured in the glossy magazines always do, and some even grow golden raspberries and fat black ones as well. However, every year self-sown blackberry canes wind themselves up through my large holly trees, adorning the branches with their five-petaled white flowers and bearing lovely large fruits. I am as proud of these berries as if they had been my own idea. After all, it is very fashionable right now to make the most of vertical space by growing ornamental vines up trees and large shrubs. If you can do it with clematis, you can do it with blackberries. My blackberries just happen to do it all by themselves. When life hands you lemons, you should make lemonade, so the saying goes. I say, when life hands you lemonade in the form of no-work blackberries, you should relax and enjoy it.
The English magazines are full of helpful articles about growing carrots and potatoes in soil-filled, reusable growing bags. I am not sure I will do that, nor will I probably try “upside down tomatoes,” that uniquely American innovation often featured on the backs of magazines. I would rather give sunny space to dahlias and asters than cabbages, eggplant, zucchini and kohlrabi. The jury is still out on peppers, which I could actually plant amid the roses. Maybe the nearby catmint and ornamental salvias that I cultivate to keep the aphids at bay would protect the peppers as well.
So I will not emulate what some of my more gung-ho neighbors did last year and tear out the entire front yard in favor of a vegetable garden. I suspect that this spring some of the neighbors may be rethinking those decisions anyway. Most of my summer veggies will still come from the Green Market. It is easier after all to keep the groundhog away from the hardy geraniums than to detour him around a stand of spring lettuce. With groundhogs as with teenagers, you have to pick your battles.