Vert-à-Go

photo: Library of Congress archives

Earlier this year, Kitchen Gardeners International launched a campaign to plant edible landscapes in high-visibility locations. At the forefront of the campaign is a petition to ask the next US president to convert part of the White House lawn into a large organic food garden that would supply the White House kitchen and local food banks with fresh produce.

Roger Doiron, founder of KGI, explains that there is a well-established precedent for ‘eating the view‘:

“The White House lawn has been a sustainable and edible landscape in the past, notably at times of national emergency. In 1918, for example, Woodrow and Edith Wilson did away with gas-powered mowers, replacing them with a hungry herd of sheep. Later, in 1943, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden on the White House lawn inspiring millions of citizens to follow suit. For the really obstinate opponents who say “that was then, this is now,” you can point them to the governors of Maine, New York, and North Carolina who are already happily eating their view and saving tax-payers money along the way.”

In his victory speech last night, President-elect Obama declared the importance of embracing a spirit of service and sacrifice “where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other.” I think taking responsibility for feeding himself and his neighbours would be a terrific way to start. Vote for the Eat the View proposal at the On Day One web site or “buy” a parcel of the lawn to fund kitchen garden projects!

This Lawn is Your Lawn from roger doiron on Vimeo.

photo: my 2008 Weird James Beard Award winner

When you grow your own food, you inevitably produce some bizarre specimens from time to time. Nature isn’t perfect–no matter what those bins of clone-like supermarket produce or air-brushed food magazine photos might lead you to believe. This prejudice against misshapen vegetables is responsible for supermarkets rejecting thousands of tons of perfectly edible food every year, which, if farmers cannot sell elsewhere, is relegated to compost or animal feed, or simply left to rot in the field. It also forces a significant number of farmers to use pesticides for purely cosmetic reasons.

How did we reach a point where so much food is wasted or unnecessarily doused with chemicals simply because someone decides it doesn’t look pretty enough to eat? I believe that a vicious circle has been created between consumers, who refuse to buy blemished produce, and supermarkets, which respond to and then further feed that choice by only stocking cosmetically uniform produce. Generations of people have become so removed from the food production chain that they no longer understand that vegetables come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, that they are grown in fields exposed to insects and the elements, and that the best-tasting fruits and vegetables are often the funniest-loooking ones. Because they’ve never grown their own food and usually have no idea who is growing the food they buy or how they’re doing it, their main instinct in the supermarket is fear*–fear that can only be assauged by seeing the same reassuringly familiar and homogeneous produce every time they walk in.

Thankfully, there is a growing backlash against this produce perfectionism. I also hope that as more people take up gardening, they will develop an emotional investment in their food that will keep them from cavalierly tossing a not-so-perfect specimen. Indeed, I hope that they will embrace them and celebrate them (and, if possible, eat them)!

This year, I’ve given my annual weird vegetable award to the potato above, which is shaped like some kind of…well, I’m not exactly sure, but it’s got an interesting snout, at any rate, and it looks quite jovial. For more amusing examples of Regular Food Gone Horribly Wrong, visit MoFA (Museum of Food Abnormalities). And please comment about or send pictures of your own strange home-grown examples!

* fear of eating food that ‘tastes gross’, fear of eating food that has gone bad, fear of germs and dirt on food, fear of getting sick from food, and the deep-seated fear of acknowledging that food is produced in the real world and isn’t just magicked out of thin air by white-clad fairies.

One solid 11-hour day in the front garden later, the erstwhile lawn has been transformed! There is an anemone border extending along the front with day lilies and hostas in the right-hand corner, and two new fancy day lilies in the bed by the tree (Black Stockings and French Lingerie, oo-la-la!). I’ll be planting carrots along the other edge (I’m not sure how they’ll do in the front, but should provide some pretty foliage if nothing else! I’ll also be adding lettuces, spinach and other greens that do better in a shadier setting, and sticking in some clumps of chives too.

I dug in some flat stones to create a pathway to where we’re hoping to place a chair from the Core Neighbourhood Youth Co-op. I’ll be putting ferns in the empty bed to the left of the herb spiral. We repositioned our larger rocks so they accent the corners and foundation much more nicely. We also will probably add a willow-branch obelisk in the v-shaped bed next to the shrub by the sidewalk, and train some scarlet runner beans up it. I got an ornamental chilli pepper which should look quite cool along with it!

I’ve rearranged a lot of the plants that I already had to make more purposeful and attractive groupings (shade-loving plants close to the house (hostas, lamium, campanula; dianthus along the edges of the beds for colour) and will be receiving donations of other plants from kindly neighbours (including irises–this will finally be the year when I put in bulbs for some spring colour! Right now it’s pretty much limited to some tulipa tarda and the lilac bushes).

Because the soil was in pretty poor condition where the lawn had been, I added a fair amount of cow manure to the new beds. This year I got it from the The Cyclones road and track club, a competitive club for disabled athletes, who was fundraising by selling well-composted organic manure from a local acreage. A 50-lb bag is $10 (buy 10, and get 1 more for free). They have a booth at the Farmer’s Market, or you can call Dale at 374-9046 or Becky at 955-9194. This is a great cause–one of the Cyclones has qualified for the Olympics and will be heading to Beijing!

I made a new friend yesterday as I was finishing digging up all the new beds. This robin trailed me around the garden the entire day, at times only 2-3 feet away, fixing me with a beady stare as he grabbed mouthful after mouthful of worms. His maximum seemed to be three worms at a time, but he kept trying to cram just one more in!

(photo: Tigerella and Green Zebra by Strata Chalup)

I am pretty close to having everything I need for the garden; now I just need to get the ground all worked, add manure, and finish hardening off the bedding plants.

This year I went to a couple of new (to me) greenhouses for my bedding plants. I first stopped at Shaughnessy Gardens, who offer a variety of unusual/heirloom tomatoes, as well as organic herbs. There, I picked up all my herbs (bar parsley and cilantro, which were sold out/looking a tad leggy), as well as some bell peppers, roma tomatoes and three nifty tomatoes which I have never seen here before: Thai Pink, Tigerella, and Green Zebra. At least a couple of these tomatoes, along with the peppers, will be taking up residence in our community garden plot, which gets a lot more sun.

I then stopped off at Floral Acres, where I picked up a Sweet Million cherry tomato as well as some Sweet Gold cherry tomatoes as well (I just adore those little guys in salads). And a butternut squash for good measure–I haven’t had a good crop of sweet peas in years, so this year I’m going to grow some squash up the fence instead!

Unfortunately, I wasn’t organised enough this year to get my seeds at Seedy Saturday in March. Jim Ternier from Prairie Garden Seeds in Humboldt has a big booth there with loads of interesting heirloom and prairie-appropriate varieties. He also sold some of his seeds at Steep Hill Co-op on Broadway, and if you are more organised than I was this year, you can order them directly by mail too. I did buy some of his garden huckleberry seeds from Early’s, which my mom started under grow lights and which we will both be trying out this year.

(photo: Yin Yang/Orca beans from the Park Seed Garden Journal, Geo. W. Park Seed Company)

I picked up the rest of my seeds at Early’s–lettuces, spinach, beets, carrots, green beans, and so on. I also placed a very last-minute order with Salt Spring Seeds for their orca beans as well as some Strela Green lettuce, an attractive variety that dates back to the 1500s. The orca beans are ridiculously cute, but I don’t know if they are going to arrive in time to get them in the ground. They are an early producer, apparently, so hopefully I’ll still be able to try them out. This seed company specialises in heirloom varieties and has a lot of really cool vegetable seeds.

Do you have a pesky gardening question? The University of Saskatchewan’s Gardenline is now open for the season and is taking calls from domestic gardeners and small-scale commercial growers.

Gardenline offers information and advice on everything green. You can ask about starting seeds, growing vegetables, fruit, houseplants, trees and shrubs, yard and garden plants, and find out how to deal with diseases and pests.

The free phone line (966-5865) will be open until 31 August on Mondays to Thursdays, from 9am-noon and 1-4pm. You can also email questions to gardenline@usask.ca.

Gardenline’s web site also has a ton of very informative articles grouped by category (they are rather awkward to search, but fun to browse). You can find advice on planting early vegetables here.