Get Your Hands Dirty
Is there anything to eat that won’t grow in Southern California? There are so many microclimates--cool winters, warm winters, subtropical belts, moist coasts, dry mountains--it’s a rare plant that won’t flourish here somewhere. My mouth waters at the prospect of the range of vegetables, herbs, fruits and edible flowers.
Then how to choose? My feeling is that, after freshness and purity (I’m an organic gardener), the reason for growing one’s own food is to taste the unusual. I go a little crazy when I discover the apple tree in a garden is a Red Delicious.
I want gardeners to sow seeds of green perilla instead of just sweet basil this year. To look around for a place to set a Seville orange in a barrel. To have the thrill of pulling blue potatoes from the earth. And whizzing Aztec black corn to meal in a blender. Once in a while, there might be a classic such as peppermint, or a heritage vegetable such as Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage, to remind us how terrific these things taste ultra-fresh.
When a vegetable or herb is unusual, I will try, whenever possible, to give a source for purchasing it fresh--many gardeners may want a taste before they commit to growing a plant. On the other hand, sometimes I’ll write about a cultivar with superb flavor that, for one reason or another, rarely gets even to a farmers’ market. In these cases I hope the column will be clipped and tucked away against the day seeds and plants can be ordered--or until there’s a garden space.
It needn’t be a large garden, not at all. Mine is small, a voluptuous mix of flowers, vegetables, herbs and fruits. Mine is also proof that anyone can grow good things to eat, given good soil. My garden began as pure decomposed granite on a boulder. Over the years, I’ve added enough manure, compost and other makings of humus to end with reasonably good soil.
About myself. I have been writing about food forever, it seems. And I have been gardening longer than I’ve been writing, beginning in my mother’s garden in Brentwood, where she still tends her flowers and herbs. I gardened for a number of years around the San Francisco Bay Area, a bit in Buckinghamshire, England, and for 16 years in a sheltered canyon in Malibu. The last 11 years I’ve worked in the garden on the boulder at 5,800 feet in the San Jacinto Mountains.
I sense that organic gardening is rapidly becoming the method of choice for most gardeners in this country. I assume rudimentary knowledge--information available in a dozen standard books. But no plant I’ll talk about will require uncommon skill to grow. Finally, although the drought may be over, water will always be a concern. I’ve gardened under the rigors of water rationing for four years, and I can promise that a judicious use of water will be a consideration.
Ah, but I’ve neglected another important reason for growing one’s own vegetables, herbs, flowers and fruits. For their beauty. Colors!
Most of all, I’d like the column to excite your curiosity and appetite, to have you wondering each week: “What’s she got this time?”
