Green Witch, Green Witch, How Does Your Garden Grow?

With all kinds of weird and wild plants!

Someday I will have a lovely kitchen garden bursting with tomatoes and zucchinis and sweet potatoes, with overflowing urns of herbs lined up along a patio. In the meantime, I have an 11x11 plot in the community garden down the street from my apartment, as well as some pots arranged along my back steps. I’m still aiming for the tomatoes and zucchinis and sweet potatoes, and I do have a pot of herbs happily blooming at the top of the steps. Gardening is relatively new to me; my grandparents had a huge garden when I was a girl, but by the time I was a teenager they were living in an apartment and they had given up gardening, though my grandmother’s begonias and geraniums were always stunning splashes of color on her windowsills, and her window boxes danced with pansies and petunias. The house that I grew up in had the occasional flower patch, but never any vegetable garden.

I don’t know why I have such a strong interest in planting and gardening. Maybe it stems from the early love I had of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and my imagined playtimes of living in that era. Maybe it’s because I’m a vegetarian. Who knows? I do know that my boys are enjoying the garden plot as much as I am, and the little one always has a great time planting his sunflowers and picking the strawberries and purple green beans that I make sure to plant each year.

This year’s garden is a mix of traditional and whacky, with multi-colored heirloom tomatoes and some newer varieties that were just too cool to pass by.

These crazy-looking tomatoes are “brad’s Atomic Grape Tomatoes” from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I cannot wait until they start growing. I also ordered some “Dark Galaxy” tomatoes and some “Wagner Blue Green” tomatoes. I’m sure you can figure out which is which.

As well, from my local farmer’s market I have “Green Zebra,” “White Beauty,” “Sun Gold,” and “Brandywine” tomato plants growing. Call me obsessed, I won’t deny it. I’m going to have the most beautiful tomato tarts this August! And my spaghetti with raw sauce is going to dazzle, just you wait and see.

My little guy planted two types of strawberries: “White Carolina Pineberry,” which apparently taste like pineapple?? (WEIRD) and red “Allstar” strawberries. I saw an ad online for blue strawberries, but unlike the pink blueberries I hope to plant someday, blue strawberries hold zero appeal.

Pretty, maybe, but I really can’t go there…..

I’ve got some more familiar things in the garden as well: golden beets, peas, bell peppers, hot pepper varieties for my spice-loving husband, a baby zucchini mix and golden zucchini, three varieties of cucumber (a family favorite is the “Lemon” variety), butternut squash, spaghetti squash, 3 “Jack O’Lantern” pumpkin plants, and sweet potatoes. This is my first year trying to grow sweet potatoes and pumpkins. Our last plot was 3x10, which required some finagling as far as plant spacing went, and I didn’t want to use any of it up with pumpkins. With and 11x11 square, I’ve got enough space to play around.

A pot on the back steps holds herbs, and this weekend I am buying fill for the rest of the pots and transplanting lettuces, more peas, grape tomatoes, and flowers. (I also have to do some cleaning, as the landing has gotten piled with unused pots and a rather battered Wardian case that I am trying to figure out how to resuscitate.)

I love sitting on my back steps amid my plants, hidden from view from passersby by the grapevine-clad maple tree, drinking tea, maybe reading, usually just sitting and listening to everything going on around me. I look forward to the day when I can lounge on my front porch and listen to my bees buzzing around my azaleas and butterfly bushes and chase my chickens out of the herb garden. In the meantime I will console myself with crazy tomato varieties and velvety pansies peeking out from under the potted basil.

If you are planning a garden (you have probably already planted, but there is still time) consider heirloom plants. Mother Earth News says that the benefits of heirloom plants include better taste and nutrition, they cost less and you can save the seeds, and they are “less uniform,” meaning they don’t all ripen at once, so you aren’t inundated with 60 pounds of zucchini all at once. As well, they have amazing histories, and if you’re a story-nerd like I am, that’s a good enough reason to plant. Who wouldn’t want to plant a story like this: “The great aunt of Viva's fiancé gave her seeds of a tomato as a wedding gift in 1922, at which time the tomato was already called an heirloom. "I like to re-tell this story because I think of where we are today and when people get married they have registries and you buy them coffee pots they don't need and silver services that will probably never leave the closet. We live in a more narcissistic time in my view.

"Here we are in 1922, and there is this young girl, Viva Lindsey, getting married and receiving seeds of a tomato, and it was probably one of the most cherished wedding gifts she received. And it makes me think about simpler times and how nice it would be if we could all treasure the gift of seeds of a flower or a tomato or a bean just as equally as an Amazon Echo or an Apple iPod or something like that."”