The Garden Way

Organic Gardening by Linda

Spring is most gardeners’ favorite season. But your winter garden can produce an amazing amount of food. This year, I tried growing cabbages over the winter. They all survived, but only a few grew to full size. And, surprise! They all started going to seed early this month. I have only one of my four-year-old Swiss chard plants left; one froze this winter and deer ate three. But I have five “new” Swiss chard plants that wintered over from last year’s planting and are now ready to harvest.

Our biggest harvest of the winter was from our Jerusalem artichoke bed. We harvested over a bushel of artichokes this month. This is a great plant that requires little care, and you don’t have to replant each year. It requires only a tiny amount of artichoke to begin a new plant. So, no matter how much you harvest, there is always enough to repopulate the bed. My partner, Carol, started this bed three years ago with just a few artichokes and now we are harvesting so much that we have to give them away.

But no matter how much we harvest, my garden pales in comparison to my mother’s and both my grandmothers’. My mother grew enough potatoes, carrots, beans, corn, cucumbers (pickling), tomatoes, rhubarb and Swiss chard to feed a family of twelve each year. In addition there were numerous summer crops of melons, lettuce, onions, peas, plums, broccoli, cabbage, squash, etc. And one of the biggest reasons for all that gardening was that there weren’t many options. You either grew your own or you bought from local farmers. You could buy some fresh food in the winter, but it was very expensive. And furthermore, it was inconvenient to go to the store; it was much more efficient to go to the root cellar to get the potatoes and carrots, to the freezer to get the beans or corn, and to the larder to get the canned tomatoes and pickles.

We are fortunate to have produce available year around from California, Washington State and Mexico, but we pay a price in high shipping costs and in the use of foreign oil. And unless we are buying organic, we are also using oil to fertilize the plants. Furthermore, most of the produce comes from large farms which use diesel fuel to plant, harvest and package the food. The natural solution is to buy locally and grow your own. Research shows that if we were to eat locally, especially local grass-fed beef, instead of eating shipped products, the savings would be similar to us all driving hybrids.

To promote local growing, WAG (Women’s Action Group) held a seed exchange in February and is organizing a street theater to encourage growing food locally. For WAG information, phone Susanna at 443-0031.