A Reasonable Garden

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Written by Eliot Coleman, author of The Four Season Harvest.

A Reasonable Garden

For most people, growing their own food is just a dream. We believe it is a possibility. There are ways to integrate food-growing into our lives that are simple, non-technological, time-efficient and above all, pleasurable. Wat we need is a new approach, a reasonable garden.

We all lost out when food production became a complex industry rather than a simple process. The soul of the household was removed from our lives and put into the hands of "experts". Why? When a simple natural process becomes complicated, whether it is giving birth, growing food, or burying the dead, it is always because some industry is trying to sell us products or services for its own benefit--but not necessarily for ours. Somehow we got caught up in these arrangements to the point where we assume there is no way out.


Much has been said in recent years about the risks to ourhealth posed by the way our food is grown. From the moment a seed is planted to the moment the fruit enters our bodies, our food comes incontact with so many substances having known or suspected ill effects that we tend to give all of it a glance of mistrust. "Where has this cucumber been and what has been done to it?"

But most of the reasons for making food production a daily activity are positive ones. Participating in the progression of food from the garden to the kitchento the table is an important part of the human experience. It involves us with the flavors and textures of foods so that we select the ones that give us the most nutritional value. Our own hand-dug potatoes or newly harvested peas are irresistible. Tasteless ones brought home in aplastic bag leave our palates unfulfilled, and we turn to sugary unwholesome fare by way of compensation.

If home grown food is clearly better, why is store bought food still the norm? Why not recover the simple joy s of providing our own? When an obviously superior practice doesn't catch on it is usually because people perceive it to be more complicated and onerous than the present one. Often a simple refinement of the idea is necessary to move from the contagious enthusiasm of a few passionate devotees to a practical reality for everyone. We believe that there are three mistaken assumptions that inhibit people from participation in home food production. First, soil fertilityis assumed to result only from very hard work or expensive soil amendments. Second, homegardening is assumed to be productive only on the summer. And third, is assumed to require complicatedequipment such as pressure canners and large energy-consuming freezers.

A return to home food production requires more than a change of habits. It requires a rethinking of gardening methods. During the sixties and seventies there was a movement back to home gardening but the way it was conceived kept the movement from achieving lasting success. People soon tired of the idea. Raised beds, double dug half way to China, seemed like punishment. Extending the growing season failed because the methods used were more technological than biological. Elaborate solar greenhouses were complicated solutions that required endless tinkering and close attention. If you chose to can and freeze you faced long days and nights getting ready for winter before the garden labor was even finished. It was a puritanical philosophy of life, that spoke of dedication not celebration.

Because it seemed to involve so much hard work and a great deal of land, home food production came to be regarded as an all-or-nothing proposition. It went along with chucking the whole system, returning to the farm, living outside the national economy, and making everything you need at home. While there is much to be said for doing just that, it was not something many people embraced for long because it was so much more difficult than the norm. For behavior to change, the new idea must offer more reward than effort, and it must possess an elementary elegance in both conception and practice. An elegance, to quote Saint Exupury, which "had not been invented but simply discovered, had in the beginning been hidden by nature and in the end been found."

The elementary elegance lies in understanding gardening as a process, not as a goal. Growing food can be a comfortable, manageable part of your life, just as cooking is--something done a little at a time, as needed, not all at once in a series of overwhelming chores. Instead of the usual sequence--"putting in the garden", "bringing in the harvest", and "putting up food"--wouldn't it be better to have a garden that is "in" all the time, an a harvest that goes on all year, whenever fresh food is needed for a meal?

This sounds like something that would only be possible in a frost-free climate, or with a heated greenhouse, neither of which is available to the average person. But in fact it is easy to do without moving to the tropics or spending a lot of money. We eat fresh food out of our Maine garden every day of the year without a heated greenhouse, in a climate where the frost-free season lasts only three and a half months and winter temperatures can drop to minus 20F. How? By appreciating the unique abilities of various crops to do their best in their respective seasons; by growing them in a logically planned succession; and by respecting and working with the natural world. There are four components of the system: compost, cold frames, cool-season vegetables, and a root cellar.

Compost is the principal input that keeps a garden producing bounteously. You make compost in your backyard by layering organic materials to encourage air and moisture to permeate them. This allows the natural populations of bacteria, fungi, earthworms and other creatures to create the dark, crumbly humus that bespeaks soil fertility. Since the ingredients for your compost heap are either kitchen and garden wastes--carrot tops, outer cabbage leaves, apple cores, egg shells--or plants that grow in your backyard--weeds, old grass, leaves and stems--this wonderful product is both home produced and free. For extra compost ingredients you can easily replant lawn areas to high yielding forage crops such as alfalfa and mow them periodically.

John Updike, in a poem about compost, noted that "all process is reprocessing"--a nice metaphor for this conception of the home garden as a cyclical process rather than a liner, goal oriented chore. Compost keeps your garden going the same way the natural world keeps itself powered--by recycling organic matter. That's why it is simple and successful. You spread compost on the surface and mix it in shallowly with a cultivator. No digging required. Plants grown in a soil amended with compost are not stressed for nutrients and are consequently healthier and more resistant to pests. Once you try using compost you will never want to be without it. Good compost takes a year to mature. The trick is to simply start the process and keep it going. "Making compost" is not a job; it is the remains of one season becoming the fuel for the nest.

A cold frame is a low box covered with glass that sits on the soil. The sides of the box can be boards, logs, straw bales, or concrete blocks. The glass covers on top are usually recycled storm windows. The size is any dimension that the available materials will cover. For taller crops, you make taller frames. The simple cold frame, which has been around in one form or another for centuries, is the home for your winter garden.

The protection of a cold frame tempers the winter climate. It takes the harsh edge off the extremes of the cold, the wet, and especially the wind. That slight moderation allows a wide range of cool-weather crops to be harvestable through the winter in all parts of the United States. In far northern climates where the winters are severe, in order to harvest the full range of crops even during the coldest parts of midwinter you may want to place some of your frames inside another layer of protection, such as simple, unheated, lean-to glass greenhouse. The key is to provide enough protection to prevent the soil in the frames from more than superficial freezing. Each layer of protection is like moving the garden a zone and a half to the south.

Cool-season vegetables are the cold-weather equivalents of the conventional summer garden vegetables. Some 20 crops-both familiar ones such as spinach, leeks, kale, chard, carrots,broccoli, scallions, parsley, and Brussels sprouts, and the less familiar like mache, claytonia, arugula,mizuna, dandelion, kohlrabi, chicory, cress, sorrel, escarole, endive and radicchio--thrive in the cold of winter with a little protection. These are hardy plants and are not harmed by freezing on cold nights. During the day even weak sunshine will raise the cold frame temperature above freezing so you can harvest fresh foods for both salads and main courses. Cool-season vegetables supply you with six months of fresh food with almost no care, no pests and no weeds.

Planting a little at a time makes the process of the garden continuous. After the various summer crops are harvested, winter crops are sown in succession. Most of their growing is done by late fall and, with roots in the soil, they remain fresh all winter. Many of these cool-season vegetables have become fashionable of late and appear on up-scale restaurant menus. But in Europe, thanks to slightly more temperate winters, they have been traditional fare for centuries. They are not thought of as a substitute fro summer foods but as a full palette of delicious ingredients in there own right.

The root cellar is a hole in the ground in which you store root crops over the winter when they can no longer remain in the garden. Whether as substantial as the concrete cellars of colder climates or the buried barrels used where winters are less hard, root cellars take advantage of the natural coolness, dampness and darkness of the earth. Cool and damp and dark are the ideal storage conditions for potatoes, carrots, beets, rutabagas, cabbage, celeriac, and parsley root. Onions and squash prefer cool and dry conditions and can be stored in the attic or an unheated room. Drying is the best storage method for a winter-long supply of tomatoes.

A root cellar is an extension of nature's own system, since it contains crops that are designed to be stored underground. It needs to be sufficiently below ground so the contents won't freeze, but beyond that it operates almost automatically. As the weather cools down in the fall the earth cools, and so does the cellar. The high moisture conditions required for optimum storage are supplied naturally under the ground. The darkness prevents sprouting in storage and keeps potatoes from greening. The crops in our root cellar keep dependably into June every year. By the time the earth and the cellar become warm in early summer everything is fresh from the garden once again.

When many people think of "extending the growing season", they think of prolonging summer and summer crops. Such a goal can only lead to high-tech, high-energy systems. In this garden we are only "extending the growing season" for those crops that don't mind the cold. For every season there is a vegetable--corn, tomatoes, eggplant and beans in the summer, spinach and peas in the spring and fall; mache and chicory in the winter. Preparing meals in harmony with the climate is a delight.

Our own lowest-common-denominator food system, based on nationwide, year-round sameness, leads to cooking that is boring and predictable. Eating seasonally keeps us connected with the natural world. We associate young dandelion greens with fragrant spring mornings, fiery chili with peppers turning scarlet in the sum, apple crisp with the bracing bite of autumn, hardy leeks with a robust soup simmering on the stove when you come in from a snowy walk. Jut as its easier to write a sonnet than free verse, its easier to cook well with seasonal limitations; they are a spur to creativity.

But doesn't gardening year-round mean a lot of work? Actually it is less work than trying to do it all in the summer. The trick is to garden a little and often. Think of your garden as a patchwork quilt of different crops. You plant seeds in one small patch today and another next week. There is never a disaster when a planting fails because there is always next week's planting, or next season's. Even thinning a row of greens becomes part of the ongoing process of gardening and eating; by consuming each week's thinnings you put food on the table at the same time you are giving next month's dinner more room to grow. And winter is still a resting time for the gardener: the crops in your frames were planted in late summer and fall, and sit there all winter--fresh, flavorful and waiting to be harvested.
Seasonal successions also mean you can grow a huge variety of crops in a much smaller space than that occupied by the traditional summer garden that grows everything at once. Thus they're a perfect solution for the town or suburban gardener with the use of a tiny yard or community plot. Even in climates with the shortest season, a garden 30 feet square will easily feed one person all their vegetables for one year. 30 feet square is smaller than the singles are on one side of a tennis court.

Fruits are also a home garden product, and definitely worth the effort. Small fruit trees or berry bushes can be planted on the north and west sides of the garden. A bed of strawberries can be included in the garden, with a new bed planted from healthy runners every year. Apples, over most of the country, are the easiest tree fruit to grow, and they store well in the root cellar. Grapes, raspberries, blackberries, and high-bush blueberries are the most dependable small fruit. Blueberries can be dried like grapes to make "blueberry raisins. which lends a heavenly flavor to winter dishes.

Don't try to remake the whole world all at once in your back yard. Just start growing some food for your table in a way that makes it central to your everyday life. Once you begin to enjoy the food, the process will achieve a flow of its own. (Eliot's book The Four Season Harvest gives a detailed program for how to do it) Too often gardening is like the great summer vacation trip that has to make up for 50 weeks in the city. Make gardening ordinary, daily, a nourishing interaction with the natural world around you.