Fitting Homegrown Food into a Gardening Lifestyle

One aspect of synchronizing my garden with my day to day life that has proven to be a challenge for me is homegrown food utilization. I have never been much of a vegetable gardener, although I love to grow perennial foodstuffs like asparagus, apples, raspberries, and so forth. I am also rarely without tomatoes, but my challenge has always been in organizing my meals around food available in the garden. I will often forget that asparagus needs to be cut; I won't feel like eating what's ripe; or I will be in a hurry and not want to take the time to pick and/or process what's out there. The most memorable frustration along these lines was when my then spouse insisted on buying lettuce at the grocery store rather than walk forty feet to three rows of different lettuces she helped select.

Some successes have included raspberries and blueberries which are like picking candy to me, making fruit "leather" from apple sauce(my kids love it), growing potatoes and garlic which can be harvested all at once and stored, and drying cherry tomatoes to make so called sun dried tomatoes. (I use a dehydrator, not the sun alas.)

I am alert to new way of getting better satisfaction from the large surplus of food I grow. For example, this year I am keen on trying fingerling potatoes which may offer a bigger reward than the varieties of potatoes that are so amazingly inexpensive at the grocery store, but I am looking for more and better ideas.

“Luck is the Residue of Design”

Sometimes success in gardening results from luck, but gardeners can improve their luck through their gardening practices. For example, I tried a couple of different cultivars of the hybrid saxifrage often called mossy saxifrage or Saxifraga x arendsii but usually just called Saxifraga followed by one of a huge number of cultivar names such as, in my case, Purple Robe and Floral Carpet. I have noticed and read that they are subject to rot in anything but a very light soil. I hoped a crevice in a rock wall would give them proper drainage. They grew well the first growing season and the second, but alas it looked like I lost them over the second winter. But wait, as the third summer wore on I noticed that in the little moss covered clumps of soil that accumulated on top of the projecting rocks the little saxifrage leaves were emerging. So maybe the crevice didn't work out for them, but I did provide the general environment suitable for the plants and luckily some seeds found the right spot nearby.

 

Planted the previous year, this Saxafraga X arendsii hybrid is doing well the following spring (on 30 April). Unfortunately, this site will ultimately prove to be unsatifactory. Luckily the plant will find a better spot to grow nearby, as seen below the following year.

 

While there are two saxifrages in this picture the one that I describe above as finding its own best spot in the garden is the one with the feather on it. (Click on the picture for a larger version.)

The Pleasures of Coppicing

One of the pleasures of owning some open land is the challenge of managing the vegetation. Of my ten acres five was farmed until I bought it ten years ago. Now it is growing up into woodland with black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) being the overwhelmingly dominant component of the trees colonizing this land. Those of you who know black locust know that it suckers freely, especially when cut down or when the roots have been cut. I have been cutting the black locust when it gets to be about fence post size. I use the posts in my garden and for firewood while the roots sucker into an interesting grove of uniformly sized trees, which I will cut again in about six years. This practice creates what is called a “coppice” which is a word that can be used as a verb to describe the process or as a noun to describe the forest that results. It is an ancient forest management practice for continuous production of useful wood products. The history and practice is fascinatingly described in a book called Ancient Woodland its history, vegetation and uses in England by Oliver Rackham.

I enjoy the look and feel of the coppice and the process appeals to the gardener in me. It also keeps me closely in touch with these five acres of land as I intimately watch and manage the development of the new woodland. This is one aspect of what I mean by life style gardening. I am doing something similar with a grove of willows I planted along a creek (a topic for another posting).

 

Winter work! This is the first cutting of young trees several years after the plowing stopped. Posts and firewood are harvested and the trees will quickly sucker to form an attractive grove (aka coppice).

 

The young even aged trees make a nice grove to walk through. These will be cut in three or four more years and they will quickly regrow into a similar stand.

Yellowroot - great fall color plus more attributes

 

When we worked together at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Chris Turner used to tease me about my affection for Yellowroot (Xanthorhiza simplicissima). True, during the growing season it is rather plain, but it comes alive in the fall and is one of the very last plants around here in Ohio to lose its fall color. It also makes a very useful groundcover for heavy shade where it will grow almost two feet tall. This photograph is from my planting at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.