THE 3-FOOT SQUARE PLOTS are graded according to the ease with which the plants grow in temperate climates. Salad plots start the list because lettuces, chives, and radishes are quick and easy to grow. These are followed by the Fava Bean Plot in autumn to give copious results for little work, while putting nitrogen back into the soil. Gradually, the plots get a little more complex and varied. Add or delete vegetables as you go.
If you are an apartment or condominium dweller, a few boxes on the balcony or patio will allow you to plant most plots in this book on an even smaller scale. A square plot translates into approximately four to five boxes. Boxes dry out quickly, so push them together and pack wet towels or newspapers around their sunny side in hot weather. Or, put up an umbrella during hours of blazing sunlight, or invest in a sun screen for you and your greens.
While your Salad Plot is growing, read Part Two if you skipped it and make yourself familiar with the essential list of abbreviations here.
ALL MENTIONED salad vegetables and herbs are discussed individually in the List of Common Vegetables and the List of Common Herbs in Part Four. Varieties of lettuce are discussed under Lettuce; radicchio and endive have separate entries; see also Salad Greens.
Salad Plots are discussed in detail, because they are probably the ones you grow most often. Almost all green leaf vegetables mentioned are pick-and-come-again plants until they bolt to seed. If you want the easiest of all salad plots, buy a packet of mesclun seed, a mixture of up to a dozen salad greens. Sow half the packet, rake in, and water well. Sow pinches of seed through the season as space becomes available.
Home-grown salads can contain a dozen vegetables without a leaf of lettuce. Leaves of amaranth, beet, endive, giant red mustard, yellow mustard, radicchio, arugula, sorrel, spinach, bok choy, and mizuna, as well as cucumbers, peas, rutabagas, nasturtium leaves and flowers, carrots, radishes, salad onions, tomatoes, chives, bronze fennel, cauliflower and broccoli florets, borage, marigolds, and zucchinis all mix in the salad bowl. If fresh dandelion grows in your garden, use the leaves to add a delicious bitter twang and lots of nutrients. Then there are beans, beets (raw, boiled, or pickled), and cabbage for coleslaw. These take a little longer to grow.
Try adding sprouting mung beans (which take up to a week to sprout, depending on temperatures), or succulent brown or lima beans to add bulk to winter salads. Or, toast croutons with crushed garlic and olive oil in a skillet and toss over the greens.
One quarter of a Salad Plot showing beet seedlings, cilantro, oak-leaf lettuce, new chards, and young nettle.
Herby salads are achieved by adding basil, chives, cilantro, fennel, mint, marigold petals, pennyroyal, salad burnet, and tarragon. Look around an herb nursery and sniff the leaves. Small leafy herbs, like cilantro, basil, dill, and caraway grow well between vegetables. Make a separate plot for herbs that sprawl—like arugula—in a border or under a tree with at least half a day’s sun. Later in the season, take cuttings or seed from there to grow on as companion plants for vegetables, in the ground, or in mobile pots.
Seed saving: Let one of each variety go to seed. Stake tall plants.
A square plot can produce enough to provide three to four people with a small daily salad if you feed and water it well and keep plugging in seeds or seedlings. If artistically inclined, you could even paint with your vegetables by dividing the plot into triangles and growing different colored vegetables in each with a marigold in the center.
Read Seeds and Seedlings on raising seedlings and the unexpected benefits of toilet paper tubes. And don’t forget about seed saving.
Spring & Summer
6 varieties of lettuce
6 bush beans
10 – 12 green onions in bunches of 3
2 – 3 cherry tomatoes on corners (staked)
radishes on the sidelines
1 arugula on the last corner
1 – 2 cucumbers in tub
In early spring, dig the square with well-rotted manure and compost. Rake in B&B and lime if soil is acidic. Mix six pinches of lettuce seed varieties in a cup (romaine, butter head, green oakleaf, red Lollo, mignonette, chicory). No need to keep these separate. Sow a row. If the weather is vile, or you want to protect seedlings from wildlife, sow in a deep box—such as a wine casket with a few drainage holes—that can be kept in a protected place until plants are large enough to be planted out. Sow one to two arugula seeds in one corner of the square.
Sow two or three cherry tomato seeds and twelve spring onion seeds in separate containers (a container can be a margarine tub with drainage holes). Plant six bush beans in toilet paper tubes stacked in a container, and two cucumber seeds in two toilet paper tubes standing in between containers. Choose dependable Lebanese, striped, or heat-tolerant Chinese cucumber. Place all in a warm, protected place. Water daily, twice if temperatures rise above 85 degrees. Seedlings should never dry out.
When seedlings are 2 inches high, transplant lettuces 4 inches apart, in three short rows 6 inches apart. When soil has warmed up and all danger of frost is over, plant tomato seedlings on the corners where they can be staked. Plant green onions in bunches of three, between lettuces. Plant bush beans between the lettuce rows. Plug in a dozen radish seeds here and there. When cucumber plants have four leaves, replant them in a tub or large pot with plenty of CMC, next to the square where they can sprawl.
As plants grow, plug in compost where there is space. Pick outside leaves of lettuces regularly. Pick onion greens when young, and they will keep growing. Pick arugula all the time and, when it grows large, use leaves in stir-fries. Tomatoes take longer to ripen, so start picking as soon as the fruit gets a blush and ripen it on a sunny windowsill. Late, unripe tomatoes can still ripen inside or make green chutney. Freeze cherry tomatoes for sauce. Pick cucumbers young to keep plants producing.
A Salad Plot ready to go to seed but still providing plenty of pickings: endive in the background, four kinds of lettuce in the foreground, tomato on the right, and chicory on the left.
Spring & Summer
1 endive on one corner
3 lettuce varieties (oakleaf, butterhead, red Lollo)
12+ garlic on two sides
2 × 6 bush beans in two plantings
10 beets
2 – 4 mizuna on two corners
1 zucchini in tub
In early spring, dig the square with well-rotted manure and compost. In late winter, rake in B&B. Mix three pinches of lettuce seed varieties in a cup (butterhead, red Lollo, green oakleaf). Sow as in Salad Plot A, setting rows 8 inches apart. Sprinkle a few endive seeds in one corner and some mizuna seeds in an opposite corner. Break one knob of garlic into cloves and plant 3 inches apart on two sides of the square. Sow ten beet seeds 3 inches apart in one row. Beet seedlings produce more than one bulb and don’t like being transplanted. Beans are best raised in toilet paper tubes or plugged straight into the soil but protected from rodents—see Pests and Predators. Raise one or two zucchini seeds in a pot in a warm position, or directly in a tub with plenty of CMC. When lettuces are 2 inches high, transplant 4 inches apart in alternate rows, parallel to the beet. When the weather has warmed beyond danger of frost, plant 2 × 6 bush beans as in Plot A. Plug in compost as mulch where there is space. As plants grow, pick young garlic greens for salads. One month after planting first beans, plug in six bush bean seeds where there is space. Protect—see Hardware in the Food Garden. Repeat once more before mid-July.
Pick young beet leaves for salads, leaving plenty of crown leaves to feed the bulb. Pick endive and mizuna leaves as soon as plants grow vigorously. Pick zucchinis young to encourage continued production. Feed and water well.
Spring & Summer
2 – 3 choy sum on one corner
2 lettuce varieties (butterhead, red Lollo)
onions in a diagonal row
carrots in two rows along onions
mustard between lettuces
1 perennial spinach on other corner
1 miniature squash (such as patty pan) in a tub
In early spring, dig the square with well-rotted manure and compost and set up a tub or large pot for patty pan squash. In late winter, rake in B&B and sow two pinches of lettuce seed as in Salad Plot A (see here). Sow a few choy sum seeds and a few perennial spinach seeds in two opposite corners. Make three diagonal drills connecting the other two corners, sowing the middle one with onion seeds 2 inches apart, and the other two with carrot seeds every ½ inch. Don’t get the ruler out, just sprinkle between finger and thumb. Cover with ½ inch of soil, tamp down with a flat hand. Sow two patty pan seeds in a pot and raise in a protected position—the kitchen sill is fine—until all danger of frost is over and plants can go into the tub or large pots.
When lettuces are 2 inches high, plant out as in Salad Plot A. Plug in compost as mulch between plants. Plug in a dozen mustard seeds between plants. Pick outer leaves of lettuces, choy sum leaves and flowers, and spinach. Pick mustard leaves from the bottom up; also use in soups and stir-fries. Pick some onion greens and the biggest tufted carrots.
Summer
3 bok choy
1 chicory
green chives, thin sprinkling of seed
1 romaine lettuce
1 cucumber on a corner
1 endive on a corner
fenugreek, thin sprinkling of seed
5 mibuna, pick early
4 mignonette lettuces
mizuna, sprinkle 10+ seeds, pick early
1 oak-leaf lettuce
4 radicchio (red)
20 – 25 radishes
1 arugula on a corner
1 sorrel
1 tomato, staked
nasturtiums, 3 seeds in a pot or tub
In early spring, dig the square with manure and compost. On the first day of spring, rake in B&B, then sow a cucumber seed and a tomato seed in toilet paper tubes. The other varieties are to be sown in open ground. Divide the square into sixteen squares of 25 × 22 inches. Next, sow or plant a different vegetable in each small square, such as four small lettuces or radicchios, a sprinkling each of seeds for fenugreek, mibuna, mizuna, small radishes, and three bok choy seeds. Sow large-leaved sorrel on corners. Grow arugula on an edge so it can flop outside the square. This is a basic salad plot, and it is pretty full. If you like more solid salads, you can leave out some leafy greens and plug in green beans or butter beans or rutabagas. Once plants are 2 inches high, add compost as mulch.
When the danger of frost is over, plant cucumbers and tomatoes on two corners kept free, where they can be staked. And the plus? A large pot with nasturtium seeds, placed next to the square to provide peppery leaves, edible flowers, and fake capers to pickle for the salad bowl. While harvesting plants from summer salad plots, plug in bush beans until mid-July. Water daily. And do save seed!
Autumn & Winter
baby carrots, light sprinkling of seed
9 Chinese rutabagas
cilantro, light sprinkling of seed
5 lamb’s lettuce
1 daikon radish, on a corner
1 endive, on a corner
mizuna, sprinkle 10+ seeds, pick early
16 onions
parsley, light sprinkling of seed
1 arugula, on a corner
25 shallots
4 snow peas, on a 4-stick tepee
spinach, 1 perennial or sprinkle seed
1 tatsoi
6 winter lettuces on two small squares
1 salad burnet in a large pot
3 fingerling potatoes in a tub
Divide the square into sixteen smaller ones as in the previous plot. Sow one of each of the vegetables from the above list. Once the plants are 2 inches high, plug in compost as mulch.
There are two extras to try. Place a tub beside the square with fingerling potatoes cut into 2-inch pieces—see Potatoes in Part Four—for that firm potato salad with fresh cilantro. Also place a large pot in front of the tub, sown with a pinch of salad burnet seed—see List of Common Herbs—to hide the tub gracefully as well as grace the salad bowl.
If the parsley takes off, and you make tabouli, remember that a renowned Lebanese chef said that tabouli needs spices, especially five-spice.
Many a salad can be elevated to gourmet food by an imaginative dressing. But as taste is such a personal thing, the last word will never be written. You can hardly go wrong with a plain vinaigrette. Invest in good virgin olive oil and balsamic or wine vinegar; add pepper and salt to taste. Plant a lemon tree.
Try rice wine vinegar and the pleasantly acidic pulp of tamarind from the Asian grocer. Make herb vinegars by steeping any of the following in a small bottle of white vinegar for a month: thyme, oregano, rosemary, lemongrass, sage, tarragon, juniper berries, lemon balm, lemon and/or orange zest, Persian catmint, bergamot, nasturtium leaves and flowers, elderberry flowers, or marigolds.
Visit an Asian grocery for sauces: Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, Balti, Korean, and more. Check out your local grocery. Read the names, and if your taste buds start to salivate, read the label of the bottle that did it. If there are no objectionable ingredients (like MSG, palm and vegetable oils, aspartame sweetener, or genetically modified ingredients), buy that bottle. Organic soy sauce, garlic chili sauce, and mustard are a compatible trio. A few drops of sesame oil add a nutty flavor to any dressing.
Rudjak is an Indonesian salad made with either fruit or vegetables, with a unique sauce. For vegetable rudjak, parboil (for just a minute) florets of cauliflower, broccoli, sliced carrots, and green beans. Cube cucumbers and drain. Add frozen peas after draining. This is a basic version, and you can add whatever you grow, including zucchini. If you want more filling, add marinated tofu. For a fruit rudjak, chop bananas, pawpaw, cantaloupe, apple, pear, and anything not too juicy—even sweet cucumber.
For the sauce, mix half a jar (a whole one if feeding a tribe) of crunchy organic peanut butter with 2 tablespoons of white vinegar, lemon juice, or tamarind. Mix in 1 to 2 teaspoons of chili paste (sambal oelek) and 1 to 2 tablespoons of dark brown or palm sugar. These measurements are but a guide—add more of one or the other ingredient until you find the taste irresistible! If the dressing is too stiff, add coconut milk by the teaspoon, stirring vigorously until it is the consistency of a thick mayonnaise. The fruit or vegetable juices will thin it down further. Carefully fold the mixed fruits or vegetables into the sauce with two implements. Serve in a blue bowl, garnished with cucumber slices. Take this to a party to reap compliments.
For a more authentic rudjak sauce, fry onions and garlic in oil, adding chilies, shrimp paste, coconut cream, and crushed peanuts. Keep stirring before adding more coconut cream, lemon juice, and pinches of salt and sugar. This is also a thick sauce. Thin it down for a green leaf salad.
Another great standby for anything from a garden salad to a parboiled salad with cooked beans or a plain potato salad, is a yogurt-based dressing. Use plain or Greek yogurt. Crush several cloves of garlic and add thoroughly mashed coriander seeds, cumin, and black peppercorns. Add a good shake of olive oil, and dashes of sesame oil and orange essence to finish.
One of the simplest dressings is freshly squeezed orange juice, with or without a touch of lemon. Delicious on textured salads of apples, grated carrots, and zucchini, or on plain garden salads or grated carrots with fresh cilantro.
There is no end to the varieties of vegetables and herbs that can make a salad, nor to unique dressings. There is no excuse for an iceberg with mayonnaise from a jar. And if you live in wild parts, you may find additions in field and forest. Eating wild green leaves is the peasant’s way, and we lost much more than a pleasant ramble through the fields when we started to live in big cities.
Mustard can be picked young for adding to salads, or used in stir-fries when bigger, dug in for green manure before flowing, or grown on for mustard seeds. Toasted seeds are great in dressings.
Autumn & Winter
THIS PLOT follows the Salad Plots to return nitrogen to the soil, as all beans do. The fava bean is the only bean that will grow into the winter. Should there still be lettuces and seed-producing plants in the square, just plant fava beans in between and harvest the others by cutting their stems so as not to disturb bean roots. Add compost and OF.
25 fava bean seeds
4 stakes on the corners
furrows for thin sprinkling of carrot seeds
Leaving a 4-inch edge, push single bean seeds 1 inch into the soil at 20-inch distance, five across both ways. This gives twenty-five plants per square. Dense planting avoids stems breaking. If you have night prowlers, protect each seed with a plastic protector, either rings of PVC pipe or bottomless yogurt tubs. Push a piece of screening or pot scrubbers into these. Alternatively, place wire cages or dish racks all over the plot. See Hardware in the Food Garden.
Make shallow furrows around the edges and thinly sprinkle carrot seed. Cover with ½ inch of soil and pat with a flat hand. Water well. Cover these furrows with strips of old tea towel, held on the corners with stones, to aid germination of carrot seed and prevent ants from eating it. Peek after a week. When carrot seedlings are ½ inch high, remove strips, wash, dry, and store for later.
Once the fava beans have four strong leaves, remove protectors, and spread CMC between plants but not along carrot furrows. Soon, beautiful white and black flowers appear. Might the white cabbage butterfly with its black wing dots mistake these flowers for competitors? Try growing cabbages on an adjoining plot.
Place four stakes on the corners of the square and run baling twine or rope around the plot. As they grow, repeat this higher up to prevent outer plants breaking in the wind. Plants can reach 6 feet high. While the top is still developing flowers, finger-length beans appear near the base. Start eating the young ones whole. Picking helps the plant put energy into newer pods. Plants produce multiple pods. Pull baby carrots to thin out and serve with young fava beans.
When there are no more finger-length pods to eat whole, begin eating shelled beans twice a week. They also freeze beautifully, tasting as fresh as the day they were picked if frozen minutes after picking—a connoisseur’s food out of season.
When harvest is over and seed beans have dried, cut stalks at ground level, leaving the roots with nitrogen-fixing nodules in the ground. In this nitrogen-enriched soil, you can plant green-leaved vegetables, of which there are more varieties than supermarket shelves reveal.
Seed saving: As pods grow bigger, choose the largest for seed. At four or five seeds per pod, tie red yarn around eight to ten pods. Let these dry on the stalk. But beware, during a heat wave they could dry to a sudden pitch black, which may cook the seed. Dried pods should be dried but not dead.
Only sixteen fava beans were planted in plastic rings with screening pushed in to prevent rats digging up germinating seed. Four stakes were used for roping in growing bean stalks. A denser planting of twenty-five would have provided better protection against wind.
Spring & Autumn
YOUR INTAKE of carbohydrate-rich processed foods may deliver too many omega-6 essential fatty acids, which can lead to the so-called “modern lifestyle diseases.” Get into balance with more omega-3s by eating two servings of leafy green vegetables daily with your main meal and a green garden salad with another meal or stuffed in sandwiches or bread wraps.
1 Siberian kale
2 broccoli (eat leaves also)
6 cavolo nero (Italian kale)
4 small green cabbages
4 chard
4 saag (Indian spinach)
4 perennial spinach
4 endives
3 bok choy
3 tatsoi
3 mizuna
3 mibuna
9 onions (eat straps also)
1 pot arugula
1 pot sorrel
1 pot parsley
1 salad box (alternate with garlic and start new salad greens seeds, as needed)
Choose winter-hardy varieties for autumn plantings. Raise seeds in toilet paper tubes while preparing soil with CMC, OF, and a sprinkling of lime. Harvest outer leaves from these plants as they grow. Douse with LS every two weeks. Plant one row of whole brown onions to harvest long green straps that give a lift to any dish or sandwich.
Cook kale, spinaches, chards, and cabbages quickly: steam, simmer, or stir-fry in olive oil. The first three are superbly tasty as purée: cook with onion and garlic until half wilted, cool, blend with a little olive oil and soy sauce. Make up for lost vitamin C with a good squirt of lime or lemon juice. For kale soup, see here. Serve steamed endive with white sauce and nutmeg, or use fresh in salads. Stir-fry mizuna, use young leaves with mibuna in salads.
This plot is planted so densely all year round that you will need additional containers. Sow seed of open-headed salad greens or a mesclun mix directly in a box or large pot. Sow another box when the first one has matured, and again if the season allows. If the season does not allow, bring salad boxes into a veranda or sheltered place so that you have salads all year. For salad dressings, see here.
Add three large pots for perennial sorrel, parsley, and arugula. These big yielders allow you to use green leaves by the handfuls. Sorrel gives another dimension to salads. Add it to cooked leafy greens for a sour touch, and try sorrel soup. Parsley makes delicious tabouli and is chopped into salads, soups, stir-fries, and root vegetable dishes. Arugula is not just a garnish. Try arugula salad, arugula soup, and arugula lasagna!
In spring, keep kales, chard, Indian saag, perennial spinach, and mizuna growing, and sow carrot seed in open places. Cultivate a new square to plant summer cabbages and broccoli with Chinese greens, spring onions, and a patch of cilantro. Start new salad boxes and replant finished boxes with garlic. Douse all with LS every two weeks.
At summer’s end, the plot needs a rest from all that growing. Harvest what still grows as long as it lasts, while sowing a cover crop in between (peas, mustard, wheat) to dig in just before spring warms up.
Start a new Omega-3 Plot nearby to grow your favorite leafy greens.
To give your digestive system enough enzymes to digest all those greens, always serve some raw food with meals and packed lunches: sliced carrots, celery, rutabagas, red onions, apples, pears, arugula, or a tomato-laced tabouli. Good health!
Spring, Summer & Autumn
IF YOU NEVER grew anything else but this plot and picked three meals a week, the benefits to your health would be without measure. Antioxidants are essential to fight damaging free radicals in our bodies and help delay the onset of degenerative diseases. Fortunately, antioxidants in the form of green-leaved vegetables grow easily, tall, and fast.
1. amaranth
2. broccoli rabe
3. endive
4. mizuna
5. mustard
6. pea shoots
7. arugula
8. chard
9. spinach, perennial
10. turnip greens
In winter, swap some of the above for beets, bok choy, broccoli, cabbage, or kale
If you grew fava beans last season, cut stalks at soil level, fork in B&B, cover the plot with a thick layer of CMC, and water in well. Choose up to ten vegetables from the above list to try.
All brassica leaves are edible: pick lower leaves of cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and kale, and also the leaves of rutabagas, turnips, and Asian greens. Stir-fry or steam a weekly mixed bunch with some onions, ginger, garlic, and a little spice.
For a spring planting, don’t choose beets, bok choy, or kale, but plug these in during early autumn if you want to keep this plot going through the first hard freeze. Raise broccoli in toilet paper tubes. All the others can be sown directly. Perennial spinach comes up in spring and grows throughout the year.
Pea shoots are young pea plants, picked at 4 inches for stir-fries. They only shoot once and are cut above ground. Sow a handful or harvest pea shoots from pea straw.
For easy germination, plant seeds in a handful of potting soil pushed into the compost layer. Ten different vegetables grow at different rates, but soon, you should be eating raw greens in vinaigrette, or steam up concoctions of ten different leaves for a taste sensation.
Whether you plug in winter greens or not, this plot is bound to continue into winter. So, for your next plot, you might just take out the garden fork and prepare another 3-foot square!
Autumn & Winter
WHILE CAMPING in Northern India, my travel companions and I ate a basic curry of cauliflower, carrots, potatoes, onions, and peas almost every day. Autumn and winter are good times to grow these vegetables. Because cauliflowers and carrots take time, grow a row of Japanese rutabagas as well. Daikon does well in curry and makes good use of small spaces. If you like more green, grow bok choy, kale, broccoli, fenugreek, and cilantro.
3 Siberian kale/broccoli or 6 bok choy
7 mini cauliflowers
fenugreek
red or brown onions on the diagonal
double rows of peas
carrots
20 rutabagas
8 daikon, pull young
cilantro
1 pot garlic
1 pot potatoes
To grow gross feeders, such as the cabbage family and root crops, divide the square diagonally. Fertilize the gross feeders half with COF plus B&B. Dust the other half with B&B and add a layer of compost. Dust all with lime, and water well.
Sow broccoli and cauliflowers in toilet paper tubes and sow all others directly three weeks after soil preparation. On the gross feeders side, plant cauliflowers with your choice of bok choy, broccoli, or Siberian kale, and a row of fenugreek. On the diagonal line, sow red or brown onions; on the other half, carrots, cilantro, daikon, peas, and rutabagas. Plant small potatoes in a tub or on a small hill, and garlic cloves in a big pot.
6 mini cauliflowers
15 cilantro seeds
20 peas in a double row
50 carrots
30 rutabagas
fenugreek, sprinkle thickly
10 daikon radish, pull young
9 bok choy or 3 broccoli or Siberian kale
3-foot row of onions
Fertilize with compost and LS. Only manure rows 1 and 8 for cauliflower, bok choy, broccoli, and kale.
1 pot garlic
1 pot potatoes
You can use an alternative pattern of 33-inch rows with a 3-foot row of onions as a border.
Read up on how to grow all these in Part Four. Douse seedlings with LS once a week and again after planting out for several weeks until they take off. Throughout the season, apply OF or B&B monthly.
Meanwhile, grind your own curry powder, just in case the blackbirds eat your fenugreek sprouts. All curry cooks have their own favorite combinations, so try the basic recipe for garam masala in Part Two, and vary it, to taste. With fresh garam masala, add the diced vegetables, keeping the tender stuff till last. Add vegetable stock. Serve with rice and plain yogurt, garnished with cucumbers, cilantro, lemon juice, and pepper.
In the beginning, pick leaves of bok choy, broccoli, cilantro, fenugreek, kale, onions, and rutabagas to go with cooked chickpeas or sprouted mung beans. You either have to buy onions and garlic for curry day or do with the greens, as bulbs won’t be ready till next season.
Other combinations such as beans, parsnips, and celery, are tasty, but the more absorbent a vegetable, the better it blends in a curry. In summer, the Curry Plot could grow versatile eggplants and tomatoes.
Seed saving: Come spring, let cilantro and fenugreek go to seed to dry for next year, and make garam masala.
Spring & Summer
HERE WE ARE in fantasyland, in the realm of Jack and his bean stalk. You will remember this when your climbing beans grow beyond the farthest reach of your bean poles and when, suddenly, one morning, there hangs a whole handful of beans where you had not noticed anything yesterday. Beans like to surprise you.
This plot follows Curry Plot A (see here) with its diagonal row of onions still maturing.
lettuces on either side of onions
trellises either side of lettuces
2 × 9 climbing beans on
trellises, 1st planting
18 bush beans, top right corner, 1st planting
1 pot garlic
Later in the season: 2 × 9 climbing beans on other side of trellises, second planting eighteen bush beans, bottom left corner, second planting after removal of winter greens.
If you have flogged your square for two seasons, it is time again for a nitrogen fix. Grow early bush beans and slower-climbing beans with under-plantings of green and brown lettuces. Serve succulent garlic beans for dinner; make bean salads with radishes and almonds. Do remember that the scarlet runner bean prefers cool climates.
We are taking a risk here if last season you grew the Curry Plot and are left with that onion row on the diagonal and either kale or broccoli in one corner. Onions and beans are supposed to be incompatible. Test this, for there are gardeners who claim this companion plant ruling is baloney. When it’s warm enough to plant beans—they don’t even like chilly nights—start harvesting onions so that the acquaintance is kept brief. And if you grew Curry Plot B, where onions grow along one side of the square only, plant lettuces between them and the beans. Your garlic pot is still going.
Begin by raking in a light sprinkling of B&B on both halves. Cover with compost and water in well. Make shallow furrows on either side of the onions and thinly sprinkle mixed lettuce seeds, cover with ½ inch of soil, and tamp down with a flat hand. Water with LS.
Indoors, set up six containers with six toilet paper tubes each. Sow three containers with bush beans and three with climbing beans. Here, we enter fantasyland again, because choosing beans is pure myth. If you have joined the Seed Savers Exchange (see Useful Addresses), you will know that people make claims for their beans that border on the fantastic. Yet, by trying them out, you will find that some claims are true—all things such as soil and weather being equal.
The Ukrainian runner and scarlet runner bean sport bright red flowers. Others make do with mauve, purple, yellow, and white. Resolve to try them all out over the coming years, sticking to one bush bean and one climbing bean per year, and learn to grow these well. If you are a bean lover—health be upon you—grow them every summer to revive a winter plot. Spend an hour rigging up a wire or bamboo trellis across the lettuces for the climbers, or poke in tall twigs.
When all danger of frost is over, plant out beans with at least four leaves, in their rolls, roots already hanging out. Dig deep holes, fill with water, drain, and push toilet paper tubes into the mud, firming the soil around them. Plant nine climbing beans between each row of lettuce and the trellises, totaling eighteen beans. Plant eighteen bush beans in the triangle not retaining winter greens. Water well and apply LS. Place shade cloches on new beans if planted in hot weather.
After one week, place CMC between rows. Set up the second sowing of eighteen bush beans and eighteen climbing beans in thirty-six toilet paper tubes. Or, if you do not have enough trellis, do thirty-six bush beans. Nurture these until big enough for bare ground. Plant 2 × 9 climbing beans on the outer sides of trellises and plant eighteen bush beans in vacant triangle after removing remnant winter greens. Place shade cloches, where necessary. Treat like first planting.
Plant out germinated beans until mid-July for a continuous supply. Keep harvesting lettuce leaves. Yes, they are in a slightly inconvenient spot between two trellises, but as they enjoy dappled shade, they’ll be succulent and won’t bolt to seed too soon.
Harvest last season’s garlic—see Garlic in Part Four. Replant some in fresh soil, dry some, and pickle some. When bean plants are definitely finished, cut stems at soil level, leaving nitrogen nodules in the ground. May you have had your fill of beans!
Seed saving: Tie red yarn on as many bean pods as you will need next year and some to give to friends. Especially if growing heritage beans, ask friends to grow some so that the variety gains a foothold. Let one of each variety of lettuce go to seed. Some lettuce leaves are still quite edible when the plant is setting seed.
STIR-FRIES ARE a wonderful way of using up summer’s last greens, beans, and roots, old carrots, and celery stalks that mash in the wok with onion, garlic, ginger, and soy sauce. That’s your basic stir-fry when the seasons flow into one another in your food plot. Serve with a bowl of rice, noodles, or roasted potatoes and pumpkin. If you grew the previous plot, autumn is waving its gentle wand. Cut old bean plants at soil level, cover the plot with a layer of CMC or COF, and water in well.
Autumn & Winter
CENTER:
4 stakes surrounded with twine
9 fava beans
4 × 3 snow peas under the twine
CORNERS:
3 flowering broccoli, 3 cabbages
5 mini cauliflowers, 3 cabbages
FIELD:
North: 9 bok choy
East: 5 tatsoi + 10 cilantro
South: 9 Brassica juncea
West: 5 mizuna + pea shoots
Raise three flowering broccoli rabe, six cabbages, and five mini cauliflowers in toilet paper tubes. Plant nine fava beans in a 3 × 3 bean square in the center, placing four stakes around them, tied with twine to prevent stems breaking in high winds. Plant 4 × 3 snow peas under the twine to climb up.
When seedlings have several sets of leaves with roots hanging out, plant broccoli, cauliflowers, and cabbages in the corners. Sow directly the spaces between center and corners with bok choy, mizuna, Brassica juncea, tatsoi, cilantro, and pea shoots. Rake in seed and tamp down. Pea shoots grow from thickly sown peas cut as shoots at 4 inches, or collect seed from pea straw.
When all are growing, scatter B&B. Water in well. By early winter, apply CMC and douse with LS every two weeks. Now put that wok on the stove twice a week for the pickings.
Use up end-of-summer greens, beans, and roots in a tasty stir-fry.
Spring & Summer
CENTRAL TEPEE OF TWIGS:
12 sugar snap peas on tepee
1 marigold in center of tepee
FIELD:
North: carrots, sprinkle thinly
East: 10 flowering broccoli rabe
South: giant red mustard, 3 mizuna or mibuna, sprinkle thinly
West: 10 Chinese cabbage
BORDERS:
green onions, sprinkle thinly
Since these plantings have different requirements, don’t do anything to the soil except sprinkle lime around the four edges for green onions and in the central circle for peas. Then, cover the square with fresh compost.
Sow the following in individual toilet paper tubes: twelve climbing sugar snap peas, ten flowering broccoli rabe, and ten Chinese cabbages. Raise them on LS. Sow a whole packet of spring onion seed into two containers. The other vegetables are sown directly.
Build a tepee of tall twigs or bamboo (or from old blinds) in a circle of 15 inches diameter. This is a small tepee, so push twigs well into the soil and tie tops firmly so that it doesn’t keel over in a wind gust. Plant marigold seed in the center.
Reserve a 3-inch edge all around the square for green onions. Divide the remainder of the square from inner edge to outer circle into four diagonal sections.
Sow carrots in one section and cover with wet tea towels. In another section, sow mizuna and/or mibuna with a few giant red mustard seeds. The remaining sections take flowering broccoli rabe and Chinese cabbages when seedlings have four to six leaves and roots are showing.
The peas may grow quickly. Cram twelve in a circle around the tepee. Green onions are planted out along the four edges when 2 to 3 inches high, covering white parts with soil, for they are modest and shy.
Since no manure was applied, make seedlings carry over with LS. Apply B&B to broccoli and cabbage monthly. Gradually pick one vegetable after another until your summer stir-fry contains the full complement.
Seed saving: Before you devour it all, remember seed saving. Tie red yarn on one tall carrot plant, one each of mizuna, mibuna, mustard, broccoli, and a handful of pea pods. When the seed peas have dried on the vine, cut plants at soil level. Enjoy the coming and going of happy insects buzzing around beautiful vegetable flowers setting seed.
Spring & Autumn
THERE ARE many green-leaved Asian vegetables that are worth growing, including bok choy, mizuna, mibuna, and tatsoi. Check Asian stores and seed catalogs and try a new one each season to find favorites.
CENTER:
red mizuna
NORTHWEST:
Chinese chives
bok choy
NORTHEAST:
mibuna on the corner
Chinese kale or tatsoi
SOUTHWEST:
mizuna on the corner
Chinese broccoli
Japanese greens
SOUTHEAST:
giant red mustard on the corner
Chinese cabbages
3 pots for Vietnamese mint, cilantro, and fenugreek
In spring, plug in Japanese turnips where gaps occur
A very attractive peppery one is red mizuna, a tall, slender stalk with branches like fine seaweed and burgundy red-green leaves. It is long lasting for picking. Use raw in salads, sandwiches, roll-ups, and pastas for a punch. Red mizuna will seed itself through the garden from just one plant. Give some away and eat the others.
Red mizuna is an ephemeral herb that looks stunning in salads. It has a pleasant peppery taste. Let one go to seed, and it will pop up here and there next autumn so you should never be without.
Tatsoi.
A number of Asian greens are mustard flavored and may come under the common name of Brassica juncea. All are tasty additions to stir-fries and steam pots. Grow some true mustard plants: yellow or giant red. Mustards improve soils and act as insect deterrents for nearby plants. Use leaves freely in cooking, as they lose their fiery sting.
Varieties of Chinese cabbage are useful vegetables, but keep slugs and snails at bay. They need compost around the base. Grow Chinese chives alongside to keep off insects.
Komatsuma, aburana, santo-sai and hengsaitai (Japanese) are all easy-to-grow brassica vegetables, happy with what’s left in the soil after a heavily manured crop. They may also come by Chinese names. When you see a picture on a seed packet of a green leafy vegetable with tufts of four-leaved yellow flowers, it is a brassica.
Growing a number of brassicas together means that, if they flower simultaneously, bees will cross-fertilize them. The new seed may then grow a slightly changed plant next year: a green mustard with a red leaf rim, or something less attractive! Choose which seed to save in one season, and nip off all other flower buds. Don’t throw them away! Not only do they contain nutrient value but most taste really delicious. I eat the tops and side shoots raw while gardening, then cut the stalk right down so the plant may grow leaves a little longer. If you have a bowlful, sauté buds in olive oil with a touch of soy sauce.
Grow a good cluster of flowering Chinese broccoli, known also as broccoli rabe, to extend your collection of Asian greens. Eat stem, leaves, head, and flowers, lightly stir-fried. Sheer goodness. And if you have space and energy, plant an Asian squash, herb, or cucumber without being able to read the name—just go by the picture and guess which season it would like!
All Seasons (Check seed packets for appropriate varieties)
THIS IS everyone’s favorite plot for tender-leaved salads fresh from the garden into the bowl. Plant seed of spinach, red chard, perennial spinach, saag, Swiss chard, or other spinaches, to taste. Plant seed of red and green lettuces, non-heading varieties. All these are normal varieties of vegetables, scissor-harvested at 4 inches and left to regrow.
Growing baby greens becomes really economical if you save your own seed. Densely sow a whole packet of seed in a box, or several varieties in a 3-foot square plot, either mixed or in separate rows. Use good composted soil and apply liquid seaweed solution every two weeks.
Carefully mark the best two plants of each variety in a sunny corner to produce seed (this takes many months). Begin cutting baby leaves with scissors when about 3 inches tall. Plants will regrow several times. Keep snails and slugs at bay.
When seed-bearing plants grow tall, consider staking them against stormy weather. When the seeds have dried on the stalks, cut and strip seeds onto trays to dry indoors for another week or so. Lettuce seed dries on the stalk in a brown paper bag.
When bone-dry, store all seeds in brown paper bags in a dry place, or in plastic containers. Label with names and year: “Saag spinach 2012” or “Red chard 2013” or “Coral lettuce 2014.” The seeds can now be used to sow more plots and boxes of baby greens. When you have used half your seeds, grow more plants for seed production. If you like greater variety, try mizuna and mibuna, or sow broccoli and kale seed for baby broccoli and baby kale; these add good flavor. Not all may regrow like the spinaches and lettuces do. Pick young leaves from these brassicas. Grow a nasturtium plant to add peppery leaves and flowers to the salad bowl. Health to you.
Spring & Autumn
ARUGULA GROWS so profusely that it obviously is meant to be eaten or browsed by the mouthful. Forget one-leaf decorations. Arugula offers micro nutrients by the bowlful throughout the year. Being green leaves, they are bound to provide a generous dose of omega-3. Sow arugula (Eruca sativa) in autumn and wild arugula (Diplotaxis tenuifolia) in spring.
Make arugula salads. First, add a few leaves to lettuce salads, increasing the amount of arugula until you crave entire arugula bowls, writes garden writer and cook Theodore James Jr. about arugula. He adds mature leaves to creamed soups; they lose their bite when heated.
The two arugulas enjoy long-growing seasons in full sun, one during winter, the other in summer. Arugula launches its own seed, so it returns seasonally. They deliver a constantly renewing harvest of tasty green leaves that can be added to just about everything: sandwiches, salads, soups, quiches, stir-fries, omelets, frittatas, and pastas—as well as lending themselves to making many containers of pesto for the freezer.
If you love the taste of arugula and the textures of all of the above, why not grow these plants in separate plots of their own? Arugula self-seeds in the wild to grow more or less in the same place like good weeds do. But you can also make it part of your rotating 3-foot square plots. My own arugula usually takes up 1 × 3 feet, plenty for a household of two. But if you plan to make pesto for the freezer to use at family feasts, a whole square plot is nice. If you like the peppery taste, you can add the cream-colored flowers to salads, salsas, pasta, and frittatas. When seed sets, wait for some to dry and fall, and pick some to store.
I grow the wild arugula in a large pot on the edge of the garden. It throws out long thin stems to 3 feet, covered in bunches of narrow, serrated leaves 4 to 8 inches long. The end of the stems become festooned with bright yellow flowers that are crowd pleasers to bees for several months whenever the sun is out. The bees pollinate vegetables and fruit trees in passing, so wild arugula plays an important role in backyard food gardens!
I’m suggesting you try wild arugula in a pot first, cut the stems right back in autumn when they dry off, and pot one or two seedlings that will pop up nearby, just in case. Don’t bother to save the seed, but grow these seedlings on. All but one or two will be given away.
Arugula leaves and flowers.
Autumn & Winter
IF YOU grew the Summer Stir-Fry Plot, there will be many plants still going to seed. This is a good opportunity to plug root vegetables in between. Root crops quietly mature in the earth while rain and wind lash taller plants. They mature at different times, so eat those that are ready. Leave out carrots if they grew here the previous season.
1 container onions in center
1 container leek, lower west
2 – 3 heads of garlic, upper west
Sow seed of beets, winter radishes, turnips, and rutabagas in rows, radiating from the center (see rutabagas, south) at distances appropriate for the size of the root vegetables.
Sow one container of onion seed (red, brown, or white) and one of leek. Prepare square with a light sprinkling of lime. In soils that are poor to start with, root crops can’t get ahead on nutrient left after a previous crop. So if your soil is poor, add a modest sprinkling of B&B; overdo it and you reap more leaf than root.
Mark out a circle in the center of your square for the onions. Divide the rest of the square into six sections. Sow around last season’s seed-bearing plants and when these are finished, cut stems at soil level so as not to disturb root crops. Sow winter radishes, turnips, beets, and winter rutabagas in four sections. In order to mulch for winter, sow in short rows radiating from the center, and mulch in between. Break enough garlic knobs into cloves to plant the fifth section and cover thickly with straw.
When onions and leeks are 2 to 3 inches high, plant them in the circle and last section, respectively. Mulch between rows with CM. As the other vegetables come up, mulch them also with CM. Once the plot is up and growing, douse it once with LS. That should be enough.
You can eat the leaves of onions, garlic, turnips, rutabagas, and beets, as well as young radish leaves, but don’t rob a plant of its crown. Pick lower leaves gradually for a weekly feed before pulling the roots.
Seed saving: Tie red yarn on your best plants. Save one leek, beet, rutabaga, and turnip and three onions (braid together to avoid flopping). Let garlic tops die down, pull, then tie in a bunch or braid, after storing a few knobs in a dark cupboard for replanting in autumn. To let one winter radish go to seed brings a glory of mauvy-pink flowers, but it is a big plant. Choose a radish on the edge of the plot and gently guide it to flop sideways, for it can take as long as the garlic for the pods to dry. Pick young radish seed pods to pickle in vinegar with olive oil. Should you produce big beets, pickle a few sliced into jars and add to your home-grown food store.
THESE ARE the favorite plots of many a busy cook because bland pasta is so amenable to being married to these pronounced flavors for a quick and healthy meal.
CENTER:
onions maturing
Top half, left to right:
1 container red onions
1 arugula
3 eggplants
LOWER HALF, LEFT TO RIGHT:
3 chilies + chives, sprinkled thinly
3 bush tomatoes + 1 basil
3 bell peppers
3 fingerling potatoes in a tub or on a small hill
Spring & Summer
There are half a dozen plants going to seed in all directions of your square. As these plants dry off, they don’t use nutrients, so you can plant around them or harvest what seed there is and pull them out. Avoid watering the onions in the center when the tops are drying off. Alternatively, prepare a new square for pasta/pizza vegetables and herbs and sow a summer Bean Plot in the old Root Crop Plot.
In spring, sow three seeds each of eggplant, bell pepper, chilies, and bush tomatoes in toilet paper tubes. Sprinkle a pinch of basil seed in a pot and red onion seed in a container. As none like frost, keep damp and warm under glass or indoors. If you don’t want to raise basil from seed, wait till the weather warms up to buy a plant.
As previous seasons have used up any goodness you put into the soil, prepare your plot as for gross feeders. Apply CMC plus OF or B&B. Preserve the division in six sections.
Sow arugula directly and early—it likes cool nights but may bolt to seed in summer. Chives are sown directly. Prepare a tub or hill and plant potatoes; mulch with compost and straw.
When the weather warms up, plant out red onion seedlings. As nights grow warm, plant eggplants, bell peppers, chilies, and tomatoes—protect with plastic, if in doubt (see Hardware in the Food Garden). Plant basil between tomatoes. Douse all except last season’s onions with LS. As plants grow up, push in mulch to preserve moisture, as these plants hate drying out.
This plot can be used in so many ways, apart from roasting the fleshy vegetables. A mushroom and fingerling pizza with chives, arugula, and goat’s cheese goes down really well. You can cut eggplant slices and vine-ripened tomatoes to sun-dry on a tray under muslin. Bell peppers can be dried, or preserved in glass. Basil can be frozen. Make tomato sauce.
If cold weather sets in, dig up eggplants, basil, bell peppers, and chilies with root balls, pot them up, and bring indoors. Feed with LS. Rather than design a new plan to follow this Pasta/Pizza Plot, continue to sow where there is space for a winter plot.
Autumn & Winter
Rake in some B&B between still-growing plants. If you grew the Stir-Fry Plot, the onions have now been harvested. Flop one arugula plant over the edge to produce seed.
Around the old arugula, sow lots of cilantro for Thai dishes. Plant garlic where no onions grew previously—this is where a garden notebook comes in handy! Sow Asian greens and giant red mustard in all other spaces. Apply compost. Plug in a few chard seeds for ricotta torte and vegetarian lasagna.
Those who love asparagus with pasta or pizzas should dig a separate permanent plot, because asparagus are perennial plants, producing for decades. See Asparagus in Part Four and plant roots in autumn, applying thick CMC.
All Seasons
THIS IS a made-to-measure crop for a food garden developed one square at a time. Since ancient times, the Greeks have gathered horta by climbing rocky mountains after autumn rains to pick a multitude of edible wild greens for the pot. If your environment does not have such abundance, you can sow a Horta Plot. Until you know how much horta you will consume, prepare one square and divide it into four quarters with a trowel. Sow one quarter every two to three months, choosing seasonal varieties.
Go to the spice cupboard with a deep bowl. Put into the bowl a teaspoon each of yellow mustard and coriander seed, and add generous pinches of buckwheat, caraway, dill, fenugreek, and any whole spice seed you have. From your seed collection, add three or four seeds each of bok choy, Brassica juncea, Chinese cabbage, kale, mizuna, giant red mustard, arugula, French chard, tatsoi, and any other fast-growing greens, plus a sprinkling of chive seeds. Go outside, mix seeds, and rake lightly into one quarter of your plot. Water in well. The mustard will be up in a week, shading the others. By the time you start picking this plot, seed the next quarter. Pick leaves and tops of mustard, lots of arugula, Chinese greens from the bottom up, and stems of spicy greens, leaving the roots to shoot again.
Enter the kitchen with a bowl heaped with greens. If your natural environment sports edible greens like dandelion, nettle, or milkweed, add these. Greek cooks put it all in a pot of boiling water to simmer for five minutes before they drain and fry it. A lot of the goodness remains in the water, which women take as a health drink.23 I prefer to wash, drain, and roughly cut the lot and throw it half wet into the wok to quickly stir-fry with a dash of olive oil, and onion and garlic to taste. Or steam the horta. The volume goes down rapidly. You get two small heaps of dark greens with a powerful yet velvety, spicy taste. Combine horta with bland sweet potato or tofu, or use in an omelet. Eat horta the Greek way with chunky fresh buttered bread and olives. I would have put the Horta Plot at the head of the list, because it is my mainstay in a new garden with unimproved soil. While other vegetables took time, we were eating horta six weeks after moving in, almost as soon as radishes. Through winter, I add shredded cabbage leaves. At any time, I add anything green to the horta fry-up.
The Greeks also serve horta cold. Boil greens a few minutes in water with salt, tough ones first, tender ones last. Drain, then rinse in cold water. Swing them dry in a tea towel before chopping finely and serving on a flat dish. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, olive oil, and lemon juice. Or go Greek-Korean, using oil, chili salt, rice vinegar, and toasted sesame seeds.
Although this is intense companion planting, pick the plot clean seasonally to grow peas or beans followed by a root crop for rotation purposes. Set one square aside for next year’s horta. Quickly grown food carried straight from the garden to the kitchen and eaten within the hour is as good as it gets! You and those you feed will burst with health after a year on horta. They fed Olympians on it!
Seed saving: Let one of each kind of green go to seed so that the plot becomes self-perpetuating.
Spring & Summer
THE HEALTHY DIET of the Aztecs was based on companion planting. Aztec staples were corn, beans, and pumpkin or squash, all shallow-rooted plants. The beans climb up the corn stalks, shaded by their broad leaves, and the pumpkin or squash vines ramble underneath keeping everyone’s roots cool. Read up on these in Part Four.
After so much crop rotation on one square, why not let the horta grow on into summer, and if you have not done so yet, dig up another square for a new experiment. The Aztec combination can also grow after a winter’s Fava Bean Plot. But it is not a pick-and-come-again plot. You will pick beans first, corn late summer, and squash in autumn. So consider sowing a Salad Plot as well, or plug seeds into the Horta Plot.
1 marigold in the center
4 small pumpkins or squash
16 sweet corn
16 climbing beans
4 stakes on the corners
What still succeeds in Mexico’s climate may not flourish where you are. None of these plants stand frost, but some varieties take cold nights better than others. Instead of sowing all seeds simultaneously, plant squashes first, sweet corn next, and, lastly, beans when spring warms up. Use a plastic roof, or re-seed if plants fail.
Three weeks before planting, prepare the soil as for gross feeders with CMC and a sprinkling of lime to please the beans. As you do for fava beans, pound stakes on the corners to rope corn stalks in when 18 inches tall.
Fill four toilet paper tubes with potting soil, plant four pumpkin or squash seeds, germinate under glass or indoors. Raise with LS. If rodents are a problem, also raise sixteen sweet corns and sixteen climbing beans in toilet paper tubes indoors until 4 to 6 inches with a good set of leaves. Plant out when the danger of frost is over. Raising plants before that date gives you a head start.
Four-year-old Emile’s accidental Aztec Plot: sweet corn, zucchini, and beans.
If you prefer to sow directly when all danger of frost is over, push sixteen sweet corn seeds 1 inch deep in four rows of four. Plant sixteen climbing bean seeds next to each sweet corn. Place PVC rings or bottomless yogurt tubs over both, preferably with screening (see Hardware in the Food Garden). Place four rings with pumpkin or squash seeds equidistant between the sweet corn, and put a marigold in the center because you can’t have enough of them. Sprinkle organic fertilizer between rings and water in well. Douse with LS. When all plants are up and away, top dress with CM. The Aztec Plot supports a lot of growth, so rotate LS, B&B, and OF every two weeks.
Expect several pounds of beans depending on variety, thirty-two corn cobs, and ten to twenty squashes, depending on how well the bees pollinate the flowers. If you have any doubt about bees, hand-pollinate by picking a male flower (the one without the swollen base at the stem) and pushing it full onto a just-opened female flower (with the swollen base at the stem), rubbing them well together. That’s getting physical, and it works.
Seed saving: Tie red yarn around your best cob and best beans. Let them dry on the stalk. Leave one pumpkin or squash drying on the vine, scrape out seeds, rinse well, and leave to dry in a dark place. Sweet corn seed does not remain viable for long—use it next spring.
Spring & Autumn
MY SECOND JOB in Australia was pea picking in late winter. These were bush-podding peas, whereas now we have tender snow peas and sugar snaps, which tend to grow well in early spring. Generally, peas don’t fancy hot summers, but if you live in cool or snowy regions, you may have to plant peas in early spring for a summer harvest. Know your own mini-climate or experiment with seasonal sowings of pea varieties until you learn what does well when and where you are.
Peas are as exciting a crop as beans. Flowers of white and pretty colors climb high or huddle demurely, bush style. Lime your plot. If you don’t have rodents, sow direct three weeks later. Otherwise, sow seed in toilet paper tubes. Protect with wire, racks, or cages until plants are 3 inches high. Plant bush peas densely, six across the square, thirty-six plants in all. For climbers, push a tepee, wire trellis, or tower into the ground—see Hardware in the Food Garden.
When plants are up and away, apply B&B or OF, and douse with LS. This should be enough to keep them developing. To add to pea dishes, plant mint in a pot and place on a paver to stop roots from sinking in. In case of overproduction, snap-freeze peas.
Spring & Summer
I USED TO sprinkle melon seeds in a corner during the busy spring planting season, to discover two months later that nothing had come of them. One year, I decided to pay attention to melon seed, raising six seedlings of Hale’s Best and Amish melons in toilet paper tubes in a cold frame. I prepared the bed with cow and horse manure covered with compost. When the weather was warm enough, I planted the seedlings and applied B&B.
I watered daily and deep. “See,” I grinned to myself, “the other seeds must have been taken by the birds.” By mid-summer, the vines sported a few dozen melons the size of tennis balls. At summer’s end, they all died.
For that, I blame the weather—it was the hottest summer in living memory, after the driest winter. I began wondering about melon growing in Afghanistan, Israel, and the Turfan Depression in Central Asia, places renowned for extreme temperatures. The fame of their melons spread far beyond their borders. The Turfan Depression is the lowest lying land on the globe, with average summer temperatures around 120 degrees. Their melon farmers irrigate. I took note of places in Australia where melons have been grown commercially. They are hot places, too.
So I tried again, using Percy’s plastic roof (see Hardware in the Food Garden) to keep seedlings warm during spring, feeding them pig compost. Edible melons were almost mine, but when they ripened, the wildlife ate them!
Next year, I’ll dig a ditch in a sunny spot, layer it with manure, B&B, compost, and straw and drench it, to imitate the Turfan Depression. I may experiment by sticking water-filled plastic bottles with drip holes in the caps upside down in the soil to irrigate, applying compost, LS, and OF, and pinching out the tips of the vines when the melons have set. The sight of melons in your own garden is worth all that.
For watermelons, I am tempted to try the same method, but I also know they love to spread their roots through undisturbed compost heaps that get watered. Don’t come to me with tales of people who just spit out a few seeds from the veranda and eat melons all summer! They aren’t telling where they spat. As for not sharing my melons with the wildlife, I’ll try a cage held down with bricks to keep those rats out. Best of luck to us.
Late Spring & Early Summer
NO, THIS IS NOT about how to grow a melon variety from China, but how to grow melons the ancient Chinese way. It comes from a 1958 collection of extant sections of ancient Chinese books, going back to the 2nd century BCE and collected by Professor Shih Sheng-han, on all aspects of making a living from the soil.
A farmer could learn everything he needed to know from these ancient manuals. Because in our society we come to organic farming anew, after a century of dallying with chemical agriculture, much of this sounds terribly modern, for instance, soil conditioning with green manures.
Melons originated in Africa, entered Europe as the Roman Empire ground to a halt, and were introduced to Asia from there. A Chinese description of raising melons dates from the 6th century CE, but was copied from 1st century BCE writer Fan Sheng-chih!
1 earthenware jar
1 tile to cover jar
4 melon seeds
10 spring onions or shallots
The ancient measurements of a hole 9 × 3 inches are not sufficient for dry conditions.
First, locate the warmest spot in your garden, sunny, well protected from wind, perhaps against a wall. If necessary, build a south-facing suntrap from a wooden crate on its side, open at the top, lined with 21st-century silver foil or other reflective material.
Preferably plant melons where beans grew previously (such as winter broad beans). Make a shallow pit in the ground, 9 inches across and 3 inches deep. Mix one shih of manure (my guess: one bucket) with an equal amount of earth. Place an earthen jar (unglazed) in the center of the pit, with the mouth at ground level when manure and soil are returned to the pit. Fill jar with water and cover with a tile. When water level drops, fill the jar up to the rim. Plant four melon seeds around the jar. Plant ten shallots or spring onions around the jar and the melon seeds.
Mulch the shallow “saucer” around the jar, and water it well after sowing. The jar should keep the melon roots cool and provide seepage; the shallots give biochemical protection. Towards the fifth month, when the melons ripen, the shallots can be pulled. Place ripening melons on a tile and protect from rodents and birds by wrapping each fruit in layers of orange bag netting.
I picked some ten melons the size of tennis balls from two plants that came up in rough compost from a store-bought melon seed. Without transplanting, they did the best they could where they fell, but were sweet and lovely tasting. Easy to germinate, melons do well in warm summers, if given extra care.
All Seasons
HERBS ARE WILD PLANTS. They have survived numerous climate changes, grazing by megafauna and microfauna, and land degradation caused by humanity. Still with us, they offer concentrations of micronutrients, and omega-3s because they are green-leaved. Use them daily. Herbs have medicinal qualities. Scientists are at last becoming interested. Garlic, onions, oregano, and thyme are antibiotics. So are chilies and many spices used in curries.
Dry bunches of herbs before they set seed, by hanging upside down out of the sun. Rub off the stalks, store in jars, keep in a cool dark place. Use dried herbs for cooking and mixing herbal teas.
Some herbs are invasive and can get out of control, the gardener’s nightmare. Instead of ending up with an overgrown herb wilderness, grow your chosen herbs in 10- to 12-inch pots in a round plot. Push pots an inch or two into the soil. If the herbs root through the drainage holes, they will still be contained by the pots. Stuff mulch between and around pots, and it looks ever so pretty. Only mint and lemon balm must be placed on a saucer, as their roots really mean business when they sniff soil. Garlic needs more than a pot; give it a plot.
Chives: Leaves and white and mauve flowers are edible. Can be divided. Cut finely and sprinkle on everything.
Lemon balm: This refreshingly fragrant relative of mint is very invasive. Grown in a pot on a saucer and pruned regularly, it looks great. It will seed itself, so pull seedlings out. But use lemon balm daily in your greens pot, stir-fries, and fresh juice drinks.
Garlic: Classed with herbs as it is used in small quantities in cooking. To grow good bulbs, plant cloves in the soil or a box in autumn and cover with thick straw mulch. Harvest in spring when straps start losing their color. Braid the straps of five bulbs and hang up in a cool, dark place to dry.
Mint: There are so many. Choose one for mint sauce and one for mint tea (peppermint or Moroccan). Place pots on saucers so no roots can escape and overrun your estate! Prune down when flowering starts, so that bees can’t cross-fertilize different mints.
Oregano: This plant also spreads when planted in the ground, but not as relentlessly as mints. Mine didn’t do well in a pot, but seeded itself beside the pot. I am keeping an eye on it. Use in Mediterranean cooking. Dried oregano is more concentrated. Dry in bunches, strip, and rub down.
An ongoing greens plot surrounded by bottles of water.
Parsley: Grow flat-leaved Italian for fine cooking. Curly parsley is bulky enough for tabouli. Both parsleys go to seed in their second year, then die. Let the best plants produce seeds, dry, and save a little, but sow a new bed immediately. After a month, it will peek up.
Rosemary: A rosemary bush is decorative and too big for a tiny herb plot or pot. Plant it in an ornamental border. Pick a 4- to 6-inch branch daily. Strip leaves off branch and chop finely. Cook with greens or pasta dishes and experiment. It has powerful benefits. Take cuttings before pruning the main bush, as they sometimes die.
Sage (Salvia sp.): Buy Salvia officinalis, the medicinal one, to make a gargle for sore throats and drink as medicinal tea. Although probably not a true salvia, I also grow the large, light-green plant with masses of light-blue flower tufts for cooking with greens or adding to a creamy pasta sauce. Pluck a top with ten leaves, strip, and cut finely. Also good roasted. This one lives in a large pot beside the apple tree.
Tarragon: There is French, Russian, Mexican, and more. My Mexican is a woody perennial, growing in a 10-inch pot in a sunny spot with periodic shade. The plant falls dormant after flowering, when I pull a few rooted pieces to pot on. In summer, pick freely and dry enough to tide you over the cold months. Delicious in just about everything, but especially with eggs.
Vietnamese mint: Essential for laksa and other Vietnamese dishes, this elegant plant has pointy leaves with a burgundy center. Being tropical, it needs a warm spot and may not survive frost. It does well in a big pot in part shade. Must not dry out.
Lemon balm, mint, rosemary, and sage: These make a good mixed herbal tea. I add to that my favorite fatigue fighter yarrow (flowers and leaves). Dry tea herbs in bunches, strip, dry off on a tray, then store. If you have a lot, fill pretty jars and surprise your friends. Nose around your local nursery’s herb collection. There is always something new—or very old—coming on the market.
OLD-FASHIONED SOUPS with no names used to be made with a soup bunch of carrots, parsnips, shallots, and parsley. These were sold door-to-door from a basket at Newcastle in the early 20th century by a Chinese market gardener.24 Now, mixed roots for soup come in plastic packs without the greens, which sell in different packs.
All soups are good for you, even if only for the deep comfort they spread in our bodies. In the Soup Plots, plant your choice of green herbs to add to soups made from leftovers. What cook doesn’t have tiny leftovers, if not on a daily basis? Fight food waste with healthy soups! Save tiny leftovers in a container in the freezer (see Preserving and Using Home Produce: Freezing).
Autumn & Winter
CENTER:
1 container of onions in two triangles
1 – 2 knobs of garlic
1 – 2 Siberian kale
NORTH:
carrots, sprinkle lightly
EAST:
20 – 24 beets
SOUTH:
1 sorrel and 5 drumhead cabbages
WEST:
1 container of leek
1 tub or small hill of potatoes
Also recommended are herbs from the Essential Herb Plot. Three weeks before planting, rake lime into the square. Divide into four quarters. Prepare one quarter for gross feeders with CMC and B&B.
Sow five drumhead cabbage seeds in toilet paper tubes. Sow one container each of leeks and onions. Plant potatoes in a tub or on a small hill, and mulch with straw. Sow beets, carrots, garlic, and Siberian kale directly. Plant out leeks and onions in shallow ditches as explained in Leeks (see here) and Onions (see here). Plant one sorrel plant, or a few seeds in a corner of the cabbage quarter. When plants are up and away, douse with LS to give them a boost. The cabbages are planted tightly, so pick outer leaves as they swell.
You are still eating pumpkin soup from the freezer compartment, blended from summer’s last pumpkins. Soups are meals par excellence to freeze and pull out in a hurry, served with bread, cheese, and salad. Your cupboard holds lentils for lentil soup. Make a hearty blend with lentils, pumpkin, and cumin. Maybe you grew celery and are a bit sick of celery soup from those leafy heads. A little celery goes a long way, and it’s great for your health if organically grown. There are still pickings in the square for a mixed vegetable soup. Once all that is gone, we are into winter soups, one-pot meals that do not need a dollop of fattening cream on top, because that would mask the good taste of vegetables grown especially for winter. Serve with fresh buttered bread. Garnish with fresh herbs. Apart from making soup, you can also eat the greens of beet, kale, and sorrel, and fry cabbage with garlic and onion greens.
The vegetable stock used in the following recipes can be made in bulk and frozen in meal-size portions. Roughly cut carrots, celery, and onions to simmer in water until soft. Cool, blend, store, and freeze. For clear stock, drain first and use vegetables as puree. Alternatively, save vegetable offcuts (roots, peels, onion skins, pods, herb stems, and such) and freeze until there’s enough to boil a pot of stock—add fresh herbs.
A bouquet garni that will enhance any soup is made with a bay leaf, sprigs of parsley, two cloves, half a teaspoon of cumin seed, and some peppercorns tied in a square of muslin for easy removal. Or tie other combinations of parsley sprigs, rosemary, sage, and thyme in a bunch. These bouquets can be used fresh, made ahead of time and frozen, or dried in a dust-free place.
Any Season
TOP ROW:
leeks
BOTTOM ROW:
whole onions
FOUR MIDDLE ROWS:
shallots
carrots
parsnips
turnips
LEFT BORDER:
thyme
parsley
tarragon
RIGHT BORDER:
sage
nasturtium
oregano
3 POTS FOR FRESH TOPPINGS:
cilantro
cumin
chives
In spring, plug in Japanese turnips and sow more carrot seed where no carrots grew before.
Plant a patch of parsley, a pot of celery herb (use sparsely), a few nasturtium seeds on the corner so plants can sprawl (pick the peppery leaves), tarragon, sage, oregano, and thyme. Plant whole onions to grow green straps. A box of sorrel is an asset for many a soup.
Anyone with a freezer compartment can make tasty vegetable stock and store it, rather than buy a packet. Chop a large carrot, a few sticks of celery, and half a leek, and boil in plenty of water for an hour. You can add a slice of onion and a turnip. Frugal cooks freeze cut-offs from any such vegetables until there is enough to boil up. Cool the pot, strain off the liquid, and pour into ice cube trays.
On the day you need a hearty soup to restore your sanity, get out a stockpot and a soup pot. Break out three or more blocks of stock and melt in a little water to form the base of your soup in the stockpot. Tell yourself: “I made this. It does not come out of a carton. It has no preservatives.” Retrieve cooked leftovers from the freezer, tip into the stock to melt on a low flame. Cool sufficiently in a bowl to put the contents through the blender. Add an extra stock cube, if necessary. Set aside.
Go outside and pick a handful of fresh herbs, a few leaves of sorrel, and some onion straps. Strip and finely chop herbs and straps, sauté briefly in the soup pot with some olive oil and a drizzle of sesame oil. Rotate pan to avoid burning. A wonderful aroma arises. You feel good already. Just as the herbs curl up a little, pour the blended soup into the soup pot and reheat, stirring the greenery through. Season with salt and pepper or a squirt of soy sauce. Voilá. Serve with grilled cheesy dreams of whole-wheat bread and farmers’ cheese. Add a little salsa of freshly cut tomatoes and red onions, no dressing, just salt and pepper.
The beauty of this leftovers herb soup is that it is never the same. Much depends on the quantity and spicing of leftovers. You can vary the fresh herbs each time. Add fresh young kale for a change, finely chopped; or a handful of frozen green peas, and wait for the requests for second helpings.
This plot can be extended by adding other herbs to make the Essential Herb Plot.
Herbs growing between the vegetables.
Sauté raw, grated beets with sliced leeks, onions, celery, shredded cabbage, and garlic. Stir frequently until vegetables are reduced. Add vegetable stock. Boil for several hours. Traditionally served with sour cream added just before serving, so put a dollop on top with a sprig of dill. Also excellent served chilled with plain yogurt, dill, and diced cucumbers.
This soup is famous in European novels for leaving a nauseating stink hanging in the stairwells of crowded tenements. Let’s start anew with this noble vegetable that has saved many people from starvation, and was the mainstay of my hardy ancestors.
In the midst of the Dutch famine in the 1940s, a compassionate enemy soldier gave me a large green cabbage. It was so heavy that, as a ten-year-old, I could not carry the bag but had to drag it a mile through the snow during curfew hours. I could have been shot for this cabbage but I got it home, and it fed us for a week. Unforgettable things happen in wars.
Finely shred a quarter drumhead. Sprinkle with half a cup of wine, cover and set aside. Grate two or three potatoes, sprinkle with a splash of vinegar, cover, and set aside. Sauté a big diced onion in olive oil. Add 2 cups of vegetable stock, grated potatoes, and a teaspoon of caraway seeds. Simmer twenty minutes. Whisk until smooth. Add salt and crushed black pepper. Add shredded cabbage and bring back to a boil. Simmer until cabbage goes limp, but is still al dente. Serve with sesame bread sticks.
Ditch those packets and chop onions into rings and sauté until translucent. Add black pepper and vegetable stock. Turn on the oven. Cut a French loaf or two baguettes into slices and toast one side under the broiler. Place half the bread in an ovenproof pot and grate hard cheese over it. Pour in the hot soup. Cover with the rest of the bread and more cheese. Brown a little in a hot oven before serving this French lunch.
Another recipe starts the same, with sautéed onions. Stir in a few spoons of flour, add enough hot milk for a soup, then pepper and salt. Cook and stir. In a separate bowl, beat some egg yolks and add soup one spoon at a time until it is fifty-fifty. Then pour the egg and soup mix into the soup while whisking. Reheat without letting it come to a boil. Serve with fried bread.
Contrary to the powerful sensation the name of this soup brings to the taste buds, it is a gentle soup. Crush six to twelve cloves of garlic and boil in vegetable stock with as varied a bouquet garni as the garden provides: parsley, bay laurel, tarragon, thyme, oregano, fennel, and rosemary are good. Boil for an hour to extract flavors. Add salt and pepper. Beat one egg, slowly pour into soup while whisking, but don’t boil. Serve with cheese sandwiches, fried, grilled, or plain.
Slice leeks and potatoes. Boil until soft. Cool and blend soup while adding salt, black pepper, and a pinch of fenugreek powder. To serve, reheat. Meanwhile, lightly sauté a handful of chopped sorrel in a tablespoon of olive oil and stir into the soup just before ladling it into bowls. Serve with boiled egg slices on crackers.
Coarsely chop leaves of Siberian kale and simmer with one chopped onion and garlic cloves until soft. Cool and blend. For a punch, blend the onion raw. Add soy sauce, to taste. Reheat this delicious green soup and serve with cheesy dreams—cheese sandwiches fried on both sides.
A lovely soup for late summer gluts of cucumber. Cook cucumbers in water, cool, and blend. Mix in plain yogurt. Serve chilled with dill or arugula and a dusting of cumin or ground coriander. Also make this soup with zucchini.
This is a famous Spanish dish and a main meal. Mix a few slices of bread with olive oil, a little vinegar, garlic, and 2 cups of stock. Add chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, and onions. Blend or mix well, carefully adding cayenne pepper. Add salt and chili to taste. Serve cold with chives. Adding crushed walnuts tastes good, though maybe not very Spanish.
Spring & Summer
BY NOW, you may have a collection of seed packets for all sorts of pick-and-come-again greens. Check which can be planted in spring and summer. Since you may have grown onions, garlic, and leeks for the Soup Plots, and these continue into early summer, plug in seeds of Asian and other summer greens while harvesting the older vegetables as time goes by. Plug in non-heading lettuces and raise one cucumber plant and one or two cherry tomato bushes in toilet paper tubes. Scratch B&B between plants and douse seedlings with LS.
This plot will give you ingredients for stir-fries, soups, quiches, and salads, if your way of cooking and composing meals takes into account what grows at a particular time. This is all you can do while the allium family is drying off. But nothing stops you from digging up a new square if you haven’t done so yet, to grow your favorite starchy staples. And if you have done so, there should be space available.
Endive and perennial spinach take up one sixth of a square, yet provide interesting greens for most of the year.
Spring & Summer
SWEET CORN grows well after a winter crop of fava beans—leave the stakes in place—or after crops that were well fed. If the plot is new, treat with CMC or COF. Plant seeds in a square grid 6 inches apart, denser than for the Aztec Plot—6 × 6 seeds may yield thirty to fifty cobs, if you feed and water plants well. Use braided baling twine or pantyhose to tie around stakes to keep stalks standing in high winds. Apply B&B when cobs start forming, and keep up the watering. Harvest when the silk dries off. Should rats eat ripening cobs, cut waxed paper plates once to the center, place one under each cob upside down, staple the cut section, and wind a strip of sheeting around the stem to keep the plate in place. Or, cover each cob with an orange net bag. Cobs can be frozen. Dry the best cob on the stalk for seed, and use within a year.
Potatoes are prolific croppers. One plant can produce up to 1 pound of potatoes, depending on the variety and soil fertility. You will get much more from one square than from the tub we’ve used to grow fingerling potatoes for salads and pizzas. Choose a bigger potato this time. Whereas fava beans and sweet corn can be alternated for a few years, never grow potatoes in the same place for at least five years, to avoid root rot. Apply manure and straw.
Sweet potatoes grow mostly in tropical to subtropical climates, but in temperate regions, try sprouting a tuber indoors, then plant it in a sheltered, sunny spot. Water daily but assure good drainage. If the plant produces plenty of vines above ground, you can pick leaves and crunchy fry them for a delicious green vegetable. Apply a thick cover of CM after planting. Read more in Part Four.
All Seasons
MANY PEOPLE take pride in growing one prolific crop really well each season, rather than bother about diversity. As long as you can buy a range of locally grown organic vegetables, your square can grow the fillers.
Begin in spring with a plot of sweet corn. Follow this in autumn with fava beans. Follow this the next spring with potatoes, and the following autumn with peas. Read up on their cultivation in Part Four or in previous plot plans. After harvesting, snip bean and pea plants at ground level, chopping up and digging in the plants as green manure. Such a sequence returns some of the nutrients the crops take out, but in the fifth season, it is best to grow a grain or a green crop, like mustard, to dig in. Or, cover the square thickly with CMC and B&B and grow shallow-rooted lettuces, Asian greens, or horta through summer and winter, before returning the plot to the sequence, starting with sweet corn in the fourth spring, but omitting potatoes for another four years.
Spring & Autumn
THIS IS another gem from 6th-century China, still practiced today. Professor Shih Sheng-han calls it olericulture. The Webster’s Dictionary defines that as “the cultivation of edible plants as pot herbs,” but the professor talks about the “Interlacing Plot System” grown in open ground. Pot herbs may also be herbs for the cooking pot.
The problem to be solved, he writes, is “how to obtain the maximum number of individual plants in a unit area of land, yet eliminate the ill effect of overcrowding, and to avoid temporary vacancy as far as possible.”
CENTRAL DIAGONALLY
5 Tuscan kale
5 Siberian kale
LOWER LEFT CORNER
3 mibuna
UPPER RIGHT CORNER
salad greens
20 beet seeds
7 broccoli plants
row of rutabagas
row of bok choy
row of radishes
row of carrots
4 – 5 choy sum plants
row of turnips
This book is full of interlacing plots! I confess that overcrowding was less of a worry than unused space. The professor advises that the Interlacing Plot grows well-chosen sets of different plants that are harvested successively with as little as possible “mutual interference.”
Examples are spring onions or bush beans planted among melon vines, as commended by the compiler of the first agricultural almanac in the 2nd century CE. Chia Ssu-Hsieh in the 6th century CE adds his combinations of onions and parsley, turnips and hemp (hello!), and turnips among mulberry trees.
If you look around your garden, you will find spaces not as well occupied as they could be. Take into account how deep the roots of the plants you combine will grow, how wide the plants will become, whether they need the same water and fertilizer treatment and like the same soil, usually neutral at a pH of 6.5 to 7, as well as their share of sun or dappled shade. If planting under a tree, consider whether the tree has deep or surface roots.
I successfully “interlaced” the wine tub in full sun that contains my mulberry tree. As garlic is a good companion for most fruit trees and likes soil deep enough to develop bulbs, I planted thirty cloves in the surface soil of the tub. Both mulberry tree and garlic plants looked happy. I harvested thirty garlic bulbs—and the generous crop of mulberries is not garlic flavored! It’s now re-sown with carrot seed.
I interlaced cauliflowers with cilantro. Both grow in the cool season, so just plant cauli seedlings and rake coriander seed through the soil between them. The cilantro did better than the cauliflowers.
Another combination was high-rise broccoli with small Japanese turnips. Pick the lower leaves of the broccoli to give the turnips some sun. Wash and cut leaves and stir-fry in olive oil with a kaffir lime leaf, garlic, and thyme. Delicious on toasted bread or pasta.
Great interlacing patterns can be made by planting root crops like onions, scallions, radishes, and carrots among high-rise plants like broccoli, kale, and choy sum. Plant in short rows so you can find the shorties at the back. Beet, turnip, and rutabaga benefit from shallot and carrot companions. As they all take a fair while to grow, I interlaced them with quick-growing salad plants whose outer leaves are constantly picked. Or try bok choy, mibuna, and radicchio.
If interlacing appeals to you—and it should appeal to anyone with little space—sit down with a companion planting book and your garden notebook. While the rain pours down outside, or the sun bleaches the skin off the fences, educate yourself on the plants that grow well together. Write down combinations to try through two planting seasons: autumn and spring. Hang up the list near the back door, or in your seed cabinet, and let the experiments start.
Professor Shih warns “to avoid temporary vacancy.” The moment a thin row of shallots or radishes has been harvested, recondition the soil with fresh compost and a little B&B, and plug in lettuce seeds or seedlings. When carrots come out in meal-size bunches, replant with bok choy or kale. As long as the soil is kept supplied with nutrients, there is no reason you can’t plant continuously, all year round.
Should there come a day that all the vegetables in the interlacing plot are reaching maturation, let it happen, eat marvelous meals of the combinations, pick seed-head salsas, then sow a green manure crop of mustard seed (a good handful), and turn that in before it starts to flower. Another month later, apply old manure and fresh compost, and the plot is ready to be planted with whatever you choose, as it has undergone considerable crop rotation already.
Autumn & Winter
IF YOU grew starchy staples and peas, there ought to be enough nutrients left to grow a root crop. Maybe you are too busy this year to pay attention to the food garden. But you can save much money without spending much time by setting out an onion and garlic plot. Decide how much garlic you want and how many onions. Clean the soil and draw a dividing line. Divide a packet of onion seed over two containers and break heads of garlic into cloves. Buy a handful of shallots to plant direct and triple in volume.
To save maintenance time, plant garlic in rows and transplant onions in straight drills when 3 to 4 inches high. Mulch thickly on top of the garlic and between onion drills. Douse with LC. The only work left to do is weed the onion plot while seedlings are struggling up. They look like grass but they don’t feel like grass between the fingers, much less smell like grass. This once-only weeding job cannot be avoided. Do it when straps are 5 to 6 inches above ground, then cover soil between rows thickly with CM.
Water the square if rains should fail, and douse with LS once a month. You can harvest onion and garlic straps to flavor many a meal. You are having a winter off from food gardening, yet saving money and eating home-grown produce. Plan to have more variety next season!
Spring
YOU MAY want to grow either ginger (Zingiber officinale) or its close cousin galangal (Alpinia officinalis or Alpinia galanga). Ginger has a stronger taste. Some sources say it originated in Jamaica. The New Oxford Book of Food Plants says it “evolved in South-East Asia but is never found in the wild state,” but there is also Indian, Chinese, and African ginger. Since the ancient Greeks, Romans, Indians, and Chinese all had it millennia ago, who can know for certain? I saw ginger growing wild on the big island of Hawaii, along the road leading from Hilo to the top of the volcano Mauna Kea, where the rainfall is notoriously high. Like all roadside plants, they grew on rain and sun and sometimes received not enough of one and too much of the other. The flowers are fragrant and gorgeous.
My own gingers and galangals near the water tank are as wild as they come; they seem to thrive on neglect. The part eaten, the root or rhizome, grows partly above ground. Using ginger and galangal is a daily affair in Asia. It is part of the trio that starts off any stir-fry: garlic, onion, ginger, or galangal. Galangal is milder. India is named as its country of origin. The plants look like ginger, but galangal has a pretty mahogany red sheen to the skin of the root.
A warm spot in the garden, partly sunny with a few hours shade, will grow ginger and galangal. As they grow tall, you can plant them as background or along a fence as a screen. In spring, make a rich mix with compost and humus, buy a root or two and push them just below soil level. Water well and initially cover with a thin layer of straw mulch. Never drown them, but don’t let them dry out, either. Shoots will appear and grow into strong green stems with narrow leaves. When these have become a bunch that pushes above the soil surface, you can cut a piece off for the kitchen. Keep using it because, when summer ends, you may have to pull up the entire plant to divide it and harvest the bigger roots. Chop stems and leaves for the compost, and grow young roots in pots in a warm veranda to go out in open ground next spring. Process or use the rest.
Ginger and galangal keep in a cool, dark place, in the fridge, can be frozen, or preserved. Preserve finely cubed ginger or galangal in honey. Peel, cut, pack into jars, and dribble with honey until covered. Use these preserves for baking and desserts. Small jars make great presents. Over time, the honey becomes ginger mead!
If you live in cold climes, you can grow both ginger and galangal indoors in 1-foot pots filled with potting soil and humus. Buy a few roots, push just below soil level, and water in well. Place in a sunroom or enclosed veranda, keeping pots just moist. Cut off a chunk when needed, but harvest when they burst out of the pot. Replant the best piece and use the rest as above.
Do not plant a whole 3-foot square with either plant, unless you mean to use it frequently. One root of each will do, in the ground or in pots, until you know how much you are likely to use. Make these tasty roots part of your life, and you will add another health plus to your tasty meals.
Galangal in flower. Galangal and ginger plants grow in pots by a water tank that provides shelter and reflected warmth.
KIDS OBJECT to strong-tasting vegetables. So do some adults. Brussels sprouts and broccoli used to taste bitter, but this has been bred out to make these vegetables more palatable. The old bitter taste was caused by glucosinates that helped the plants ward off pests, and also helped the human immune system ward off the formation of tumors. That is how the brassica family, especially broccoli, became known as cancer-fighting vegetables. There is evidence that modern vegetables have less vitamin and mineral content than old varieties. The epidemic of cancer in a bewildering variety of forms has been blamed on an equally bewildering number of possible causes. But since the maintenance of our bodies and immune systems relies largely on what we ingest, we should perhaps take note of these findings.25
It seems that by altering vegetables for modern tastes or for longer shelf lives, the plants’ innate protection mechanism has been reduced. Subsequently, genetically modified crops have been bred to make them pesticide resistant so they can be sprayed against pests. Waste no time, but return to the old varieties available from seed banks (see Useful Addresses).
Spring & Summer
For a spring and summer Anti-Cancer Plot, plant Chinese flowering broccoli, green summer cabbage, and kale. Raise broccoli and cabbage, in toilet paper tubes while preparing soil with CMC, OF, and lime. Plant broccoli and cabbage 8 inches apart. That’s crowded, but you’ll pick outer leaves for stir-fries. Sow seed for several kale plants to make green soup—see the Soup Plots. Douse all plants with LS.
Also eat yellow/orange vegetables to bolster the immune system. Read up on carrots, pumpkins, and squashes in Part Four. Sow carrots direct as instructed; raise pumpkins and squashes in toilet paper tubes as in previous plot plans. Plant out when danger of frost is over.
Feed monthly with B&B, OF, and LS in rotation. If there’s space, plug in seed of summer-loving Asian brassicas—see An A–Z of Vegetable Families.
Autumn & Winter
In mid-summer, raise half a dozen brussels sprouts in toilet paper tubes to grow on into winter. Sow seed for new kales, winter broccoli (slice the thick stems and cook with florets), cabbages, and Asian brassicas preferring cool weather. Grow winter or all-season carrots and daikon radishes (see recipes under Daikon in Part Four). Sow a row of beets, for all red vegetables and fruits are cancer fighters.
Apart from eating brassica vegetables three or four times a week, make meals with one green and one yellow/orange vegetable, and add red fruits and vegetables whenever you can. Prepare these foods in several ways—fresh, steamed, in soups or salads—so the body gets a steady supply of disease-fighting nutrients. Do not discard outer cabbage leaves, but wash and simmer with onions, garlic, and caraway seed. These leaves are the best of the cabbage. Make cabbage rolls with grated daikon, fresh cilantro, or fenugreek and marinated tofu. Steam beet greens. Use all stems of kale, broccoli, and cabbage for juicing, adding apples, carrots, or ginger for flavor. Blend beet juice with carrots. Health!
Autumn
ALL BERRIES prefer cool weather. For growing notes, see Easy-Care Fruit Trees and Berries. Appropriate netting not dangerous to wildlife may be necessary, therefore plant hedges that can be reached from both sides. Berries are superior foods providing immunity boosters and disease-fighting and health-restoring minerals and vitamins. Red and blue berries are cancer-fighting fruits.
Presently, blueberries top the list of anti-cancer fruits, followed by blackberries, a disappearing species due to spraying by landholders. If you have a stand of blackberries on your land, and you can keep a goat, let her prune it after fruiting. Goats know what’s good for them. The bushes grow back to fruit copiously. Dig out seedlings where you don’t want them. The main reason for the spread of blackberry seedlings is neglect of unattended land. If they get into your garden, either dig them out or cut them down continually. Regular edge trimming for three years eradicates them. Should you have acres of blackberry bushes on your new country block, mend your fences and get another goat. But don’t contaminate the neighborhood and waterways by broad-acre spraying.
A thornless blackberry is available from nurseries. It grows like topsy on a support and can be pruned into shape. Also consider raspberries and other brambles such as youngberries. Youngberries bear large, juicy fruit and will grow vigorously on lower wires between espaliered fruit trees. Extreme heat can kill them. Plant them where they get shade in the heat of day. Apply deep mulch and rocks to keep roots cool. Water during dry spells.
Raspberries need a string support between stakes. Train new shoots espalier fashion for easy picking.
Berry bushes with thorns are best kept away from vegetables. Plant bushes so you can cultivate the soil around them. Or, plant a freestanding berry hedge, spacing bushes according to their labels. Include one or two of each variety, let them fight it out, and pick your three-berry mix straight from the bushes. My partner grew up in North America. One day, picking over a large wild blueberry bush, he sensed someone else was picking the other side. Peeking around the bush, he came face to face with a large brown bear! The bear was more interested in the berries than in other pickers, so that expedition ended well. See Blueberries for requirements.
Gooseberries are delightful if ripened on the bush. They are thorny and perennial.
Strawberries live the low life in semi-permanent beds. As they need netting, make a bed the size of your cage or netting. It’s a nice idea to plant strawberry borders, but long borders are hard to protect from birds. Even under netting, millipedes come for dessert. Read up in Part Four for important directions.
Consider strawberries in their natural environment of dappled light in forests and hedgerows, partially shaded in richly mulched, well-draining soil, surrounded by nutritious weeds. Hard to imitate. Commercial strawberries grow in open fields, through slits in black plastic sheeting on rows of heaped-up earth made weed-free with chemicals. They need to be fed and watered heavily to produce the three large annual crops that make them commercially viable. They keep every latest wave of human immigrants in part-time work, picking, packing, and cultivating.
Mulch strawberries with pine or fir needles to improve the flavor.
Spring & Summer
THE PUMPKIN takes an important place in our diet. It used to be the sloppy yellow one you had to have alongside your greens. With luck, it was baked pumpkin. As innovative cuisines gained popularity, the pumpkin took off in the form of a golden soup, adorned with herbs, spices, cream, and chives, whose popularity has not waned. Roast pumpkin turns up in convenience foods—baguettes, tarts, pizzas—and chefs’ gourmet creations.
Now that the seed of many old-fashioned varieties is procurable, everyone can find a favorite pumpkin, although the Queensland blue and the Chianti-bottle-shaped butternut will deservedly remain favorites for their sturdy flesh and keeping qualities.
An experimental summer delivered the good keeper Queensland blue pumpkin, Japanese pumpkins, and some prolific yellow squashes.
The ideal growing medium for pumpkins is the compost heap. Question is, how to leave a compost heap undisturbed for half a year to allow pumpkins their place in the sun? Compost heaps provide a variety of nutrients and preserve moisture with good drainage. All these the pumpkin vine appreciates. Pumpkins have been known to grow in long-term heaps, those you throw the rough stuff on.
Present climate changes leading to hotter summers must be taken into account. Planting three pumpkin seeds in a small hill and pulling out the two weaker seedlings may still work in cooler and wetter parts. But on the plains and in dry places where water is scarce, grow pumpkins in a thickly composted and manured bed. In semi-desert climates, grow them in a ditch.
Cutting three 3-foot ditches side-by-side gives a compact situation, where all water expended is kept in the family, whereas one long ditch of 9 feet tends to dry out on both sides. In the three-ditch square, the middle ditch may do best. Dig 12 inches deep. In late winter, fill ditches with layers of soft weeds or green leaves and stalks, manure, compost, OF, or B&B, and straw mulch. The green matter decomposes quickly; all layers will mash to form the feeding ground, with applications of LS or OF as pumpkins are forming.
Start off only one variety of pumpkin seedlings in nine toilet paper tubes as described in the Aztec Plot, three plants per ditch. Of course, they will clamber all over each other and sprawl beyond the square. But as long as you place straw, planks, or tiles under forming fruit, it should not matter. When there are several fruits on a vine, pinch out the tips. This tells the vine to stop having babies and put its energy into the ones it already has. Steam the tips and young leaves, flowers and all, in coconut cream, and serve as a vegetable.
Shade is important in very hot weather. With three ditches on one square, it is easy to place a shade cloth or hospital gown over the plot, holding it down with rocks. Remove cloth at dusk. Or construct a four-poster tepee wound with shade cloth.
Don’t pick pumpkins too early. When stems start drying out and are obviously unable to feed the fruit any longer, cut pumpkins with a 2-inch stem. Place on a table or bench in an airy place outside to harden off. Blend immature pumpkins for soup and freeze. Immature pumpkins have an immature taste, but mix with lentils, herbs, and spices to give edible results.
Seed saving: From the best one—the biggest and most mature—wash the seed, dry it for several weeks out of sunlight, and store in a mouse-resistant container.
All Seasons
READ UP on these vegetables in Part Four for more details. Perennial vegetables are ideal for the busy person who often does not see the garden in daylight until the weekend. These vegetables can look after themselves better than annual vegetables. Make sure you want them where you plant them, because they mean to stay more or less forever. They do not fit into the pattern of rotating vegetable plots. Here are a few indications of how little work is involved.
Artichokes are an underrated, decorative, and easy crop to grow along a sunny fence. A perennial vegetable, the plants can be divided each year to establish a hedge.
Artichokes are easily grown from seed in late summer, or offsets from a nursery. The plants make a great hedge, but after harvesting—spring to summer—they must be cut to the ground to rise again. They are not choosy about soil, although better soil breeds better chokes. Mostly, they require mulch and an application of CMC and B&B in late winter, before they fruit in spring. Give weekly waterings in summer as they grow back. When new plants form at the base, these can be cut off with a spade and planted out.
One packet of seed gives a good hedge, and that hedge will give you another hedge in time. And so on to the neighbors! For seed, let one choke turn into a thistle-blue flower and don’t cut down till it is dried on the stalk.
Asparagus is for the patient gardener, but worth every juicy bite. Dig soil a spade deep. Grow from seed sown in autumn, or plant crowns and cover with CMC and thick mulch. Do not eat any spears for two years, and then only a few, before picking meals in the fourth year. Never clear-fell them. They survive on an annual big feed and weekly watering.
Perennial spinach and sorrel, both spinaches, can be grouped together and cooked together. Both grow through all seasons, both survive on a twice-yearly feed and watering in dry times, and both increase by division or dropping seeds. Cut seed stems if not needed. They are a great standby.
Rhubarb grows from crowns, and one or two plants are enough for most families. As the (toxic) leaves grow big, two plants take up half a square, so it is advisable to plant rhubarb out in the garden to look decorative. Rhubarb also needs a good feed before the growing season, a rich mulch, and weekly watering.
Spring, Autumn, & Winter
THE ADVENTURE of a spice plot is that you would never have seen some of these plants, even if you cook with spices. A spice plot does not have to fill a whole square; a quarter will do, or even a handy strip by the kitchen door.
Just as you grow coriander and fenugreek from seeds bought in the grocery, so with other spices. Rake seeds into the soil in small patches or tiny rows and stick in name tags, as they tend to look alike.
Caraway, cumin, and dill look similar when young. Like cilantro and fenugreek, these green herbs are all great seed producers. Fennel grows enormous, so plant just one, and separately. Don’t let seed spread to the neighborhood—cut off seed heads before seed drops. Mustard soon towers over others and is better grown among vegetables. Buy kalonji or “onion seed” (visibly related to love-in-a-mist) from the Indian shop.
Duck into shops of various cultures for seeds in little packets. Ask what they are used for. Try them out in the kitchen and plant a few. Some, being tropical, may not respond, but other fresh spice greens make delicious additions to small meals of a few vegetables, noodles, roasted pumpkin, salads, blender soups, or bread sprinkled with olive oil and cheese. Gourmet eating made easy.
Spring, Autumn, & Late Winter
NETTLES? AREN’T THEY A WEED? They fooled you, too, didn’t they? Stinging nettles have developed one of the best defenses against being eaten by man or beast. A child who unwittingly picks a stem of hairy nettle gets such a shock and rush of tears that, as an adult, she goes circles around nettles. If the child could recognize a dock weed (Rumex sp.), she would pick a leaf and vigorously crush it to rub the juices into the affected hand.
A plant from the northern hemisphere, stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) has spread to southern continents through human migration. Wherever nettles grow tall and deep green, the soil is rich and fertile. Used over the centuries for medicinal purposes, it was and is an ingredient in peasant cuisine in the form of nettle soup and recipes calling for fine spinach. Nettle tea, from fresh or dried leaves, but with no sting, has a velvety taste. Rich in nitrogen, nettles are a soil food, a compost activator, and make excellent compost “tea” to spray on vegetables. For those who eat nettles, it provides vitamins, proteins, potassium, iron, calcium, and omega-3s. Flowering nettles attract beneficial insects to your garden.
Nettle is the designated food for certain species of butterflies and moths. Nothing else eats nettles in the raw. This virtual pest-free existence make nettles a good crop. There are still some farmers who grow it to make linen after soaking the stems. Experiment: soak nettles for a few weeks until leaves have dissolved. Drain liquid where you want to grow the next crop. Dry stems and thrash the nettles on a stick with many headless nails and you have the basic ingredient for a rough sort of linen.
Even before the age of garden gloves, curious humans found that nettles were actually food.
Toss young, leafy stems in olive oil or in a stir-fry for a delicacy on your plate. The heat of cooking destroys the sting.
Saved plants will eventually flower and set seed. As seed starts drying, tie paper bags over the tops to stop seed dispersing. Re-sow a patch nearby or a vegetable bed needing restoration. Keep this routine going: always harvest the bulk of the nettles and save seed of the best. Don’t let it blow about the neighborhood to people who think it is a weed and get out the toxic spray.
Although most animals will avoid a nettle patch, wild nettles could have been polluted by traffic fumes or farm sprays. But should you be so lucky to have nettles in your backyard, this is the way to maintain that plot of rich and tasty food. Just water them when conditions are dry, and if they look pale, apply chicken manure, and water in well. They will soak up the nitrogen. Leave some of the best plants untouched to collect seed. Gradually eat your way through the others. A famous Melbourne restaurant has nettles stir-fry on the menu, so what are you waiting for?
Spring & Autumn
FLOWERS PERFORM many functions in the food garden. They attract bees that will pollinate fruit trees and other flowering crops and attract beneficial insects that will control not-so-beneficial insects. They also exude their own unobtrusive chemicals that will protect food plants and fruit trees, and thus become valued companion plants. Spring and autumn are the best seasons to sow new flowers, but check seed packet advice.
In the edible flower plot, sow caraway, cumin, cilantro, mustard, dill, borage, chives, marigold, nasturtium, tarragon, and just a few carrot seeds.
It is easy enough to plant the right companion plant under a fruit tree. But it’s not always possible to plant the right flowers with the food plant that needs it, because food plants come and go, turning up here and there through the seasons.
I solve this by letting marigolds (Calendula officinalis, not the frilly French marigolds) seed themselves to come up where they will, pulling up excess plants, but saving seeds. I harvest the flowers for salads and also dry petals for baking biscuits and cakes. They brighten a green garden like little else will. Nasturtiums grow well on an asparagus bed after the vegetable goes dormant. Pick flowers and leaves for salads, and pickle the seeds as fake capers.
Arugula flowers are peppery and good enough to nibble while gardening. Strew them on pasta, salads, and salsas. Fold them in avocado filling for rolls. The flowers of the brassica family (cabbage, kale, mustards, Asian greens) tend to be all of the same yellowish hue. These yellow tops make delicious side dishes sautéed in olive oil. No spicing needed, unless you like a toe of garlic in it. Borage has blue star flowers with black pistils—eat only the petals. Endive and chicory going to seed produce heavenly blue flowers that look good on salads. Purple chive flowers are edible, too, if you don’t mind an oniony flavor.
Bees and insects are attracted to a plethora of colors and fragrances. So if your food garden is more than a few square plots, why not make one in the center, the Edible Flower Plot, for you and your winged friends. Make it round, surrounded by a path and then a larger circle of the plots it serves.
Leave the marigolds rambling through the vegetables. In the Edible Flower Plot, grow borage, nasturtium, dill, caraway, cilantro, cumin, and one flowering carrot. The colors here are orange, blue, yellow, white, whitish pink, and cream. For winter color, add Mexican tarragon with its stalks of deep golden flowers, and in summer, mauve or red-flowering bergamot for fragrant herbal tea. If you can place in the center a 6-foot tripod of three branches or bamboo stems and rake in a handful of sweet pea seeds underneath in autumn, you can look up at some of nature’s more divine flower hues against a blue sky come spring.
Once planted, the plot will re-seed itself. Whenever there is a bare spot, just sprinkle in a few carrot seeds, because when carrot goes to seed, it towers above all the others, so you can pull what is too much and eat the carrot, leaving one to rise and display its large umbels. Carrot leaves are a chemical factory in themselves; nothing ever eats them, but the flower is visited. Stand there on sunny mornings and watch the traffic!
Marigolds (Calendula officinalis) should ramble through any food garden. The flower petals can go by the handful in salads, cake batter, rice pilaf, or on top of soups and baked dishes. Petals can be dried and stored for later use without losing color. Marigolds are plant companions and renowned pest controllers. The plant also has medicinal value.