The Urban Permaculture Farm Magazine

I started gardening when I was 5, helping my grandmother in her garden. Growing my own food became so appealing in college that I started back up where I left off all those years ago. Flash forward to today, where gardening is an integral part of life. Our garden serves as a stage to entertain guests, appreciate nature, exercise, and grow food!

Each year we plant our row crops in different patterns, to slow water run-off and look cool. Love that balance of practicality and creativity. Carrot, beet, radish, and turnip all planted with a line of potting soil on top to remember where they were lovingly nestled, for watering later. This year our beets bolted before the lettuce was 6" tall...but our carrots look great! It has been a cool spring in the Mid-Atlantic, eggplants, peppers, melon, and tomatoes all holding their own...but one variety of cherry tomato, "Sun Sugar", is shaping up to be 8' x 4' since it was already 3' x 3' by June 10th this year.

Small, warm-season veggies like peppers benefit from a protective covering in early spring when night temps still dip into the 40's. Cutting the bottom off a one-gallon water jug gets you a free mini-greenhouse to cover small plants at night.

Our veggie garden is not big enough to house our herb collection, so we have to sprinkle them into the landscape. Most culinary herbs are planted within a few steps of the back porch, for quick trips from kitchen to garden for necessary aromatics. We encourage plants like parsley to go to seed, but let natural seedlings come up where they may have landed, editing when necessary. The infinite variation of baby seedlings gives you something to look forward to as the next generation grows up, and expresses genes that change the plant's color, leaf shape or pattern, fragrance, disease resistance, or any number of characteristics. Some seeds germinate the next season, while others take a couple years to germinate and grow. Coolest random seedlings so far, a red flat-leafed lettuce that now has cool looking ruffles, and a parsley with abundant thin foliage that looks more like grass than parsley.

Some plants are not so good from seed, such as hybrids. All plants have names. When a plant is different from all others of the same species, it has a specific name, a named cultivar, like "Yellow Brandywine" or "Tim's Black Ruffles" heirloom tomatoes. Without going into genetics, simply put, most heirloom plants can be saved for seed, if you do a little work. The purity of maintaining the named cultivar, requires crossing it with two of the same plants. You've likely noticed cross-pollinated peppers before. Ever grown hot peppers next to sweet peppers and wondered why your red bell peppers are kind of spicy? Cross pollination. Serious seed savers pollinate plants by hand, and then protect the pollinated flowers from other pollen, to preserve the pure named cultivar. Thank goodness for the seed savers out there! Baker Creek Seeds and Seed Savers Exchange are but 2 of the many seed companies out there saving and producing seeds for the homestead grower in all of us.

Turning over earth to produce food and beauty provides a sense of fulfillment like no other. Each victory garden claims victory for your kitchen and lessens the load on our global food system. If everybody did a little, it would add up to be a lot! How interesting would it be if everyone spent a few hours gardening each day?! We would have a nation of people exercising outside, lowering their blood pressure, experiencing nature, increasing our collective sustainability, gaining appreciation of where food comes from, and working to improve our environment. Bring on summer. V is for Victory.