Things Consumed

 
Where food comes from: the best part of gardening

My kitchen, my house, and the sweater I am wearing are all exuding a powerful herbal rosemary smell. A wooden basket on the dining room table is filled with trimmings from my oldest rosemary bush, once a 7” tall seedling I’d purchased three years ago, which S kindly transplanted for me when we moved here from San Bruno. It’s now a leggy, 3’ high, nearly as wide bush, displaying tiny purple flowers. Any time I garden anywhere near it, the smell surrounds me.

It is WONDERFUL.

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The main reason I garden is for food. (Of course.) While my partner, S, designs gardens filled with showy flowers all times of the year, I’m in it for the scents and tastes of herbs, fruits, and veggies. Moving to San Francisco, to a house on an extra-long lot with a sandy and overgrown backyard, finally provided me with an opportunity to grow plants of my own choosing.

S’ garden in San Bruno was well established by the time I arrived. Even though he’d created a deep floral border around the edges of the lawn, it was already packed with four seasons of flowering plants. Squeezing in a cymbidium and a green grape tomato were about all I could manage. A bit of container gardening appeased me, but I really wanted to plant a lot more. And now, I can.

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I’ve always planted things. When I lived with my parents in the Mission, I collected plastic juice bottles, cut the tops off, and grew chili peppers and other small plants indoors on my south-facing windowsill. I still have one of my first peppers, which I carefully dried in the sun, turning it regularly. (Our previously productive ‘side yard,’ a strip of 3 feet of dirt beside three feet of walkway, was shady all the time after we raised our house by one story, so I didn’t garden there.) When I lived in the Castro, I did the same, growing cucumbers and peppers in a light well. They were tiny, but VERY cute. In the Richmond, within the fog belt, I tried to expand my repertoire, but the tomatoes I grew in my overheated apartment grew too tall and spindly to be content when I had to move them outdoors, though the cherry fruit they bore was very sweet. (One of the last things I did before catching the plane for my trek in Nepal was to taste the tomatoes I had grown in the yard, so I would remember the taste of food grown in my home soil, and carry it with me.)

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Once we settled into this house more than a year ago, we set about clearing the jungle. There were ivy vines so complete growing over the trees in the yard, that we hadn’t realized we had acquired a shed until after we owned this house. The trees covered by the ivy were sickly and spindly, covered with moss, and shocked by the sun when they were exposed to it again. One of the trees, an apple, may never fully recover, though it threw a half dozen sweet, Macintosh-like fruit to us on a windy day.

Once the jungle was pulled down, we had a massive mound of cuttings filling the center of the yard. Every week, we filled the yard waste/compost bin; every week, the pile became smaller and smaller. Finally, we could see the clover, could permanently plant the 50+ plants and tubers S had brought with us from San Bruno, buy seeds, and start experimenting with our sandy soil.

I ordered seeds from the wonderful organic source, Seeds of Change. They photograph plants the way I do: with enthusiasm and love for each gorgeous plant. They use no pesticides, and provide rare varieties of herbs and foods that you just won’t see in stores.

Though we had poor soil and made only modest amendments (some potting mix here, some steer manure there), I made an ambitious plan. With some windows purchased from Building Resources, the non-profit salvage yard, S built me a small greenhouse for tomatoes and a small cold frame for starting seeds. And so I started seeds in our sandy soil here on the edge of San Francisco’s fog line, with mixed results due to the soil and our location. (All of these seeds can be purchased from Seeds of Change.)

Basil: Greek, lettuce leaf, and opal purple variegated: none of these were happy in the poor soil. The purple variegated leaves were beautiful in the warmth of the tomato house, but not very prolific because of the sand. I’ll have to grow them in potting mix next time.

Chard, golden: THIS is so happy! There are three plants right now, spreading slowly across the soil in the garden. I hadn’t realized the are biennial: they live for two years, getting bigger and better looking all the time. They are happier now than when they first grew last spring, with their deep yellow stems and leafy green leaves. And they taste WONDERFUL.

Chili, Hungarian hot wax: I bought these seeds, but realized there wasn’t enough room in the greenhouse for these, the purple basil, AND all the tomato seedlings. So these are still waiting patiently for their chance.

Cilantro, slow bolt: I have long loved cilantro, but I had never realized how great cilantro tastes until I began growing my own. In the mornings, making a Thai coconut milk soup, I’d run out to the garden in my bathrobe, snipping fresh cilantro and using it within minutes. Somehow, it tastes much better than the cilantro I buy, which has to sit in the refrigerator waiting days to be used. I am going to plant a ton of this. I learned that spacing out the plantings over the summer doesn’t help much if you don’t trim ALL the plants: the little ones I started in late summer bloomed at the same time as the older, early-spring planted cilantro did.

Cucumber, lemon: I only planted one of these, and wound up burning it in my first ever cold frame. I’ll try again this year. S doesn’t think this is meant for our climate: the morning fog will likely make it moldy. Hmmm.

Echinacea, purple coneflower: this has also waited until this year to be tried.

Lamb’s ears: this isn’t culinary, but it’s very fuzzy! I planted about 20 seeds, and was rewarded with just one plant, which is now three or four plants. I’ll try again, and weed a bit more rigorously so it isn’t overgrown by alyssum like last time.

Morning glory, Grandpa Ott’s: this is the most beautiful morning glory I’ve ever seen. The flowers are purple with deep red-purple veins. Absolutely gorgeous. We need to plant more of it this year.

Nigella, Love-In-A-Mist: also not culinary, but very pretty: pale purple flowers that could be a fairy outfit. If I weren’t so political, I might be one of these flowers for Halloween, rather than genetically engineered corn, a skeleton underwear model, etc.

Poppy, purple gleam: pink-purple poppies with cream centers!

Tomatoes: red currant, tigerella, and yellow pear cherry. The tigerellas dominated our greenhouse, and were our pride and joy. The striped, 2 inch tomatoes are DELICIOUS, perfect in everything. They taste like larger tomatoes than they are (they’re not excessively sweet the way cherry tomatoes sometimes can be.) The red currants made a GORGEOUS bush which sprawled over about 30 square feet of the garden, growing over our path, the rosemary, the oregano, the chard… The plant was lovely, though the fruit was too tart: it was more ornamental than edible. The yellow pears were delicious, but unhappy where I put them: they wound up moldy, producing very few fruits, though those that made it were tasty. I’ll try an all yellow-pear crop this year, in the greenhouse and out, and see how they do there.

Zucchini, black beauty: this is another one that cooked in the cold frame. This year, I’ll either purchase a vent control for the frame (at about $50, more than 5 times the cost of the frame itself, so I’ve been reluctant), or leave it propped open all the time.

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A proposed garden layout sketch and the plants above are my main contributions to the garden, along with rosemary, Greek oregano, and cymbidiums. Soon I’ll make some additions: Greek mountain oregano (seedling from HMB, less furry than the kind I’m growing now), lemon verbena (also a seedling, though the rest on the list are SoC seeds), garlic chives (“Chinese leeks”), lemon balm, royal burgundy bush beans, SoC’s mesclun salad mix (arugula, Osaka purple mustard greens, Persian garden cress, red Russian kale, and tres fin endive), and Italian flat leaf parsley.

Mmmm.

I will be competing for space, however: S is currently growing more than 120 types of plants, and plans to add about a dozen more over the coming days. (It turns out that giving him birthday credits at Half Moon Bay Nursery, in addition to some plant gifts for a nursery-owning relative, inspire him to branch out quite a bit.)

There are so many kinds of plants that I can’t keep track of them. I followed him with a pad of paper recently, and made him identify each and every plant in the garden. That didn’t cover it, since many of the flowers are annuals which weren’t visible, so we also had to go through his collection of plant tags to expand the list. I have since taken him to spend some of his Xmas credit at HMB nursery, and so there are flats of plants downstairs, just waiting to compete with me for space!!

I’ll be publishing the list on an upcoming section of my beauty page, which is currently devoted to others’ images of teahouses and orchids. I also have photographs of at least 100 of the plants, but I’ll leave that project for the distant future. I will put up before and after photos of the yard-turned-garden which has inspired amazement in all of our neighbors. (A party for our uphill neighbors was a hoot: nearly all the guests hung over our fence to make exclamations about how fabulous our garden is.)

And now, I’ll go back to pondering whether to make rosemary pesto, rosemary roasted potatoes, tomato sauce with rosemary…


posted by Arlene (Beth)3:44 PM

Saturday, January 10, 2004