Your Small Kitchen Garden

That’s a hanging lamp in the living room of my dad’s house. It hangs above my lettuce seedlings which sit on a stack of boxes. The tray extends beyond the edges of the lamp shade so I move them from side-to-side periodically. Heliotropism makes the seedlings bend to-and-fro to track the light bulb; they’re getting a lot of exercise.

We’re all gardeners here, so I’m comfortable confessing that a seasonal urge has overtaken me: I need to start seeds for my vegetable garden. Unfortunately, I’m spending about two days in three out of town. My dad has moved from our family home, and I’m helping him get settled in his new apartment while I’m preparing the house to rent. But the seasons march along, and if I’m going to have lettuce at the front of the parade, I need to have lettuce seedlings in lock step by late March.

To satisfy my seasonal urge, I’m exploiting some cosmic truths:

• Seeds want to sprout
• Sprouts want to grow up and make seeds
• Seeds don’t much care where they are when they do that sprouting thing

Seed-Starting on the Road

I was fortunate, before I came to Ithaca, to receive an assortment of Fertilpots from a friend who imports them for US distribution. A French company manufactures Fertilpots primarily from trees—a renewable material—using only a small peat moss component. While roots in a 100% peat pot turn back on themselves and ball up, roots grow unimpeded through the walls of Fertilpots. I used Fertilpots last season and found they live up to the promise: meaty, healthy roots emerged all down the sides of the pots as my vegetable seedlings grew strong.

I had a second good fortune on this trip: I attended a workshop on February 23^rd at which attendees received free samples of products from various sponsoring gardening supply companies. Among the samples I received were two envelopes of lettuce seeds—a red oak leaf lettuce, and a red romaine lettuce from a company called Sustainable Seed Company. As February ended, I succumbed to my urge.

I bought a plastic seed-starting tray and a bag of seed-starting soil. I filled one flat of Fertilpots with soil and set half the pots with the oak leaf seeds and half with romaine seeds. The remaining challenge: light.

Seed-Starting Without a Shelf

At home, I run two four-foot fluorescent light fixtures side-by-side and set seed-starting planters three inches below the tubes. That keeps the plants from reaching for the light and developing weak, thin stems. What to do on the road?

Two lettuce sprouts in one Fertilpot looked pretty good on the day they emerged. A few seeds didn’t sprout, so I’m replanting those pots. In all, I hope to have 18 healthy plants for the garden in late March. That should satisfy our salad craving as I direct-sow seeds to start a second crop of lettuce plants.

I stacked boxes on furniture to get my seed tray really close to a hanging light. The light has a three-way bulb whose top output is 150 watts. I’d like to get the seeds closer to the light but the lampshade interferes. Besides, having an incandescent bulb, the fixture puts out way more heat than my fluorescents do back home and I don’t want to cook my plants.

My lettuce seedlings might grow more spindly than I’d like, but they’re growing. When I visit my family later this week, I’ll set up my fluorescent lights over the tray and leave the plants in my wife’s care. If she moistens the soil periodically, I’ll have viable seedlings for the garden at the end of the month.

No, this isn’t how I wanted to start the vegetable growing season. I’d like to be home to prune my fruit trees and do some grafting. I need to be home to do large-scale seed-starting for broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, and peppers. Goodness, I need to be home at the end of March to prepare and plant the garden. But right now, given the circumstance, starting a flat of lettuce seeds was all I could manage… because it was easy!

Want lettuce? You can grow that.

Learn about You Can Grow That and find other participating blogs at the movement’s website: You Can Grow That!

My dad’s love for gardening grew in his parents’ yard. This photo from 1955 shows his mother’s garden—there are onions among the flowers. The corner of a structure appears along the left edge of the photo. Before I was born, that structure came down and my grandmother had moved her garden within the structure’s foundation.

I used to sit at the kitchen table long after my family had finished dinner and left the room. This was because of my parents’ edict: eat at least two spoons full of each item served before being excused. I detested certain foods mom prepared repeatedly: tomatoes, mushrooms, olives, and fish topped the list. Thankfully, she didn’t prepare these every night, so I sat alone only occasionally.

Each time I fell victim to my parents’ edict, my hatred for the food in question increased: here, tonight, not only didn’t I like the flavor and/or texture of this horrid crud, but I was being punished for my dislike and so I resented the crud. On those nights that my mother set a bowl of stewed tomatoes on the table, I felt despair through the entire meal knowing that eventually I’d have to choke down two spoons full of that soupy, soggy, tangy muck.

Not much of a photo, but you can see my dad’s tomato patch over the family dog’s left shoulder. That tomato patch was our sandbox until I was seven or eight—I was 12 when I shot the photo.

Folly of Forcing Food

My parents’ edict didn’t lead me to love these foods. Rather, it strengthened my dislikes and added a plank to my own parenting platform: I would never force a child to eat something the child claimed to dislike. Except for antibiotics; when a kid had strep, antibiotics were going down despite the 20 minute tantrums.

And what of my hatred of tomatoes? My brothers and I outgrew our sandbox; that’s what my dad seemed to think. He removed the “box,” moved much of the compost heap from behind the garage, and stirred the compost into the sand. Then he planted tomato seedlings.

Perhaps the first produce I ever ate IN a garden, peas directly from the pod to my mouth tasted awesome.

Our neighbor also planted a vegetable garden. One day, I was chatting with that neighbor and he shared peas fresh from the pod. I’d never eaten raw peas, but I didn’t want to be rude so I tried them. Oh, my, they were good! But that crazy neighbor demonstrated the most amazing thing: he picked some pea pods that weren’t yet fattening up, and he ate some! When he offered one to me, I tried it and liked it.

Later that season, my neighbor’s garden produced ripe tomatoes and he cut one up to share with me. To a finicky, emotionally challenged eight-year-old, that tomato tasted good. Clearly, the tomato was no different from my dad’s homegrown fruits, but I liked only the neighbor’s produce.

Finding the Farmer Inside

My parents bought farmland when I was eleven, and my mom developed a kitchen garden there. She did the lion’s share of work, but over the years I shoveled tons of horse manure, stretched and weighted down black plastic mulch, carried water from the stream, and pulled weeds. By the time I moved away, I’d stored somewhere in my brain the certainty that homegrown food matters.

When I was young, I’d willingly eat tomatoes only as ketchup or pasta and pizza sauces. Now I can’t get enough of this tomato and mozzarella salad, made with homegrown tomatoes, onions, and garden-fresh basil.

Fully 10 years passed before I started a garden. I’d succeeded as a writer, married, and was a father to two boys when my wife and I bought a house in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. A job I landed as we moved into the house took me away for 18 months. But on a visit home in that first spring, I set tomato seedlings in the one raised bed left by the previous owner.

I wasn’t around to care for the plants, but leaving the bed fallow would not have sat right. We probably harvested a few meager tomatoes. It was enough to inform me the soil was poor so I ordered up a dump truck of mushroom soil to smother the planting bed for the following season.

My love for tending and cooking what grows in my yard increases each time I serve dishes featuring produce just hours or minutes after harvest. The love also grows when I empty jars of home-canned fruits and vegetables. It grows when I season a meal with home-dried herbs or when I add home-dried fruits to baked goods and salads. My love grows when I toss home-frozen veggies into boiling water to serve as a side and when I bake a home-frozen fruit pie to serve in winter when no locally-grown fresh fruit is available to make a pie.

Grow Love for Real Food

Grow some love. Don’t force your kids to eat. Involve them with food; real food. Start seeds, till, transplant, tend, harvest, snack, cook, preserve, eat! Immerse your kids in your own love for real food, and you might just grow some love in them. I imagine it’s very satisfying when you discover your grown children are planting gardens of their own. My dad is obviously pleased about my gardening. He knows it’s love. You can grow that.

Learn about You Can Grow That and find other participating blogs at the movement’s website: You Can Grow That!

Learn how to receive free seeds to grow some of the vegetables that I’ll be growing in my garden this spring: You Can Grow from Seed!

My climbing beans reached the tops of the trellises and kept growing. Eventually, there were huge knots of bean plant at the tops of my trellises. When frost finally killed the plant, I found dried bean pods that I was counting on to provide new seeds for next year’s garden.

This past growing season, my climbing beans far exceeded the carrying capacity of the trellises I provided for them. When they reached the tops of the trellises, the vines turned back on themselves and formed a knot of foliage that concealed at least a meal’s worth of beans. Perhaps your bean plants did something similar.

I knew the beans were there, and left them deliberately. My thinking was to leave them alone until they finished growing, the plants died, and the bean pods dried up. I’d then harvest the dried pods and find bean seeds to plant next season, and that’s what I did.

A single dried bean contained eight bean seeds. A few days after harvesting these, I planted one in a container and kept it moist until it sprouted. It’s important to test the seeds you collect. If they won’t germinate, finding out early gives you time to order replacements.

If you haven’t yet tidied your garden, you also may have seeds available to harvest. Dried, dead vegetables that look only good enough for the compost heap may be worth examining. Peel open some shriveled beans, sift through a frozen tomato or chili pepper carcass, or crush a seed pod from beneath the floret of a broccoli plant, and you might gather enough seeds to start next year’s plants.

I love extending my garden this way and there’s a possible benefit from gathering your own seeds year-after-year: Seeds that grow in your garden come from plants that have done well there. Each successive generation may adapt slightly better to your garden—perhaps imperceptibly—until they become ideally suited. You may even accidentally breed a new variety of your favorite vegetable.

Do you still have dead vegetables in your garden? Go collect some seeds.

It’s autumn. Please enjoy this slideshow of photos from the heart of Pennsylvania farm country during leaf-peeping season: