THE HAPPY GARDENER

Every Spring when we return to The Mountain, I hanker for gardens and to dig in the dirt, and I manage to plant a small flower bed at the entrance to the cottage.  This year, the garden struggled through the worst of July heat and has been revived by late summer rains.  I haven’t had to replant; however, perhaps I should!  My good friend, Janet Faulk-Gonzales, is a consummate gardener and used to create a flower bed for us exactly on Good Friday every year when she lived in an apartment adjoining our Louisiana home and dug her own garden.  This morning, she sent me an e-mail with gardening information excerpted from Plant Delights Nursery that had been forwarded to her from a friend in North Carolina. 

According to a newsletter from the Plants Delights Nursery, a study done at Bristol University and University College London has shown that dirt is a good anti-depressant.  It seems that a soil-borne bacteria, Mycobacterium vaccae, has the properties of an anti-depressant because it causes brain cells to produce high levels of serotonin, which most of us know is the “happy hormone.”  I suppose that you really have to get a lot of dirt under your fingernails to get the best effect for mood elevation, but I believe that the researchers are probably right – all the gardeners I know are happy gardeners.

Janet wrote two essays about gardening that appear in her delightful book, The Road Home, a book of happy memories about her childhood in Alabama, and I pulled the book from my shelves this morning to re-read before I went off to morning services at St. Mary’s Episcopal Convent.  The one essay that best represents Janet’s love of gardening is entitled “A Garden in Eden,” and I am again publishing excerpts from it, hoping that the passages will present a new way of getting serotonin uptake without resorting to pills:

“When I was ten, I lived in Eden, a place midway between here and there, right in the middle of nowhere, a tiny town carved out of a pine thicket where the railroad used to run.  Summers were spent riding my blue bicycle on packed gravel roads all the way to California (in my mind), swimming in an oversized cow trough, and ducking horseflies…

“The yard in Eden was a magnificent place.  At night it was filled with the sound of crickets chirping and the flashing of neon green fireflies.  It was the safest place in the world to play “Ain’t No Boogers,”
“Hide and Seek,” and other never-find-me games.  In the daytime, the backyard always provided shady places for picnics of outrageous pickle sandwiches, Oreo cookies, and Coca-Colas in eight-ounce, thick, green glass bottles.  One of the coolest places was under the pomegranate tree near the back door of the house.  I remember not liking to eat the pomegranate so much as I loved its rich red coral color dotted inside with hundreds of brown hard seeds.  Along the old rickety "bob-wire" fence on the east side that separated our yard from the yard of a haunted house, heavy round, orange-gold plums grew.  Farther down, there was a blackberry thicket where delicate white blossoms turned into purple juicy fruit. 

“A perfectly rectangular garden bordered by yellow and orange marigolds, both giant and dwarf varieties, covered the farthest edge of the backyard.  By design, the marigolds helped keep pests from the vegetables, but to my delight, the flowers drew summertime butterfly dancers, mostly yellow ones, and sometimes the orange and black or blue and black Monarchs.

“Tomatoes grew tall, their thin stalks made sturdy by tying them to wooden stakes with worn out stockings.  Summer squash plants grew as wide and round as the kitchen table, with blossoms that turned into yellow crooked necks.  When stewed down with onions and black pepper, these vegetables became the smell of summer supper cooking.

“There were always green beans and tiny butter beans, just enough in our garden for a “mess.”  Okra grew tall and prickly, waiting to be cut, floured, and fried…I begged for my okra to be fried to dark brown, just barely burned.

“The backside of the garden was strung with shiny tin pie plates that reflected sunlight to scare off birds.  There were enough tassels to allow pollination of the corn that grew at the edge of the garden, running perpendicular to the other rows.  Sometimes a watermelon vine or two threatened to spread and conquer the entire garden, but was worth the trouble when you found a thumping ripe melon with smooth, green variegated rind and anticipated the cold, sweet juice that dried sticky on your face after you had eaten so much chilled melon you thought your stomach would pop.

“When I was ten, I lived in Eden, but did not know it.  Now, on winter days when the best I can do is hope for Spring and the warm explosion of color, and when I cannot bear to watch another Sunday afternoon colorized movie classic on television, or to hear another basketball shoe squeak against the highly-glossed parquet floor, my greatest longing is for a little sunshine and the smell of good dirt.  The next best thing is to reach for the Burpee Seed Catalog and to choose prize-winning vegetables, low shrubs, fruit trees, to contemplate pears and peaches and the time it will take to harvest the first pecans from a newly-planted backyard sapling -- and I single out the best hybrid roses, the wildest vines of morning glory and fragrant jasmine…so I can recreate Eden.”

Hope this message from a southern gardener incites visions of digging in the dirt and getting your shot of serotonin via rich soil.  Happy gardening!

Select The Road Home by Janet Faulk-Gonzales to order or write to Border Press, P.O. Box 3124, Sewanee Tennessee 37375.  

PART II. GARDENING HIGH UP



Susan's "plant-mobile"

 This is the second part of a blog featuring Susan Elliott, artist and designer for Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado, who did the cover art for Chant of Death, a mystery written by me and Isabel Anders. Susan is a consummate gardener and during this season of Spring planting, Susan has been preparing the ground for a new garden. She agreed to an interview with me about her gardening on the Uncompaghre Plateau in the southern Rocky Mountains where she lives with Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing. Readers with real green thumbs will enjoy her comments in this second blog about the art of gardening.
Moore: Although my grandfather and my father had gardens, and my father planted a patch of mint in every place we ever lived, I have a black thumb and have had numerous failures with my “crops.” Do you have many failures?

Elliott: Yes, I have many failures! Each time we work through a “problem,” that’s one new skill we have for a better season next year: spring deer, bunnies, over-fertilizing container plants, salts, evaporation, squirrels, too much sun, too little sun, fungal diseases, carelessness, wind … It’s all a learning experience.

Moore: Does your garden attract many birds? The deer here on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee destroyed my first season of home-grown tomatoes, and I’ve refused to replant. Do animals eat your produce?

Elliott: We have a lot of birds here (about 75 species come through each year), but none have bothered our garden. Some are helpful (like bluebirds, which eat insects). The goldfinches enjoy our sunflowers. Hummingbirds visit the tomato flowers (though I’m not sure if they’re effectively pollinating). Turkeys come through in the spring before plants are out of the ground. In the summer many birds move to higher elevations. Deer also move to higher elevations, or else they would really be hard to control. All we need for bunnies is a two and a half foot high chicken wire fence. No digging under fences around here because the ground is too hard and rocky! We share occasional tomatoes with chipmunks; they’re too hard to control (and they’re awfully cute). It’s too dry for slugs or snails, but I demolish a lot of tomato hornworms and the like (so much for being an entirely ethical vegetarian…); ying-yang.

Moore: I know that one summer Gary wrote to me about preparing sauces and other products from tomatoes. What foods or preserves do you can or bottle?

Elliott: All varieties of tomato sauces/salsas, though my favorite it just plain cooked tomatoes (like Gary’s mom used to make). Also peaches (big chunks, in a light sugar-water solution). The valley farms have GREAT roasted chilies (heavenly!!), which we freeze and can. Pickles and ketchup are favorites, too. When we make it to Virginia in the fall, Gary’s family hauls out the 30-gallon copper kettle and cooks down about 10 bushels of apples into apple butter. Gary is the king of canning. His mom canned her whole life, and Gary learned from her. Gary is very good about making sure sauces are good and boiling, and he makes sure the jars boil for extra time to kill any potential bad guys. We also bottle homebrew Imperial Pale Ales, but that’s a different story.

Moore: Do you have an herb garden?



Spring planting

Elliott: In my dream world, I have a garden/farm devoted entirely to basil (perhaps basil and lavender). If I had a son, I think I’d name him Basil. Fresh basil is intoxicating. They don’t call holy basil holy for nothing. But alas, we’re a bit too cool (especially the summer nights) for basil (or lavender) to flourish. We had one basil plant going all winter indoors this year. Instead of the prolific sweet basil varieties, we grow smaller-leaved Thai and Greek varieties. They do better when we keep them in containers next to the cabin with a window propped up next to them to insulate them at night. We treasure every sprig we harvest. I snip it and take it over to Gary for a “smell” before I add it to a dish. We savor it. And yes, we grow parsley, rosemary, chives, mint, and oregano; they all do fine. The mint overwinters each year; it loves its spot under the eaves, picking up lots of rain and snowmelt.
Moore: Gardening is known to be an activity that not only nourishes the body, in terms of exercise, and in produce received, it nurtures the soul. Would you speak to this idea?

Elliott: I find gardening extremely therapeutic. When gardening, I forget my (imaginary) troubles and feel like a kid. Yes, it’s a good work-out (especially hoeing hard dirt and hauling water in five-gallon buckets). And yes, the produce is yummy. But I’d do it all even if I didn’t get anything “tangible” from it. Even container gardening indoors, we’re connecting with earth. I’d even venture to say hydroponic gardening would connect you with something totally intangible, a life force—even if it’s the life force of garden “pests.” Just like reading connects us with a creative literary force, and that feels good. I think there’s something deep inside us that explodes into pure joy when we connect with that greater force, that connective tissue of animal and plant and mineral. Smelling freshly watered dirt will do it for me. I’m thankful. Gardening restores my connection and thankfulness. In a troubled world, it’s good to find life.

Photography courtesy of Gary Entsminger and Susan Elliott.




Susan's sunflower


Susan Elliott has a B.S. in Botany, a B.A. in French from Humboldt State University, and a Ph.D. in Biology from Dartmouth College. She has studied ecology, evolution, and conservation of plant-pollinator mutualisms. She has lived in Mariposa, California, southern France, Georgia, and New Hampshire. She moved to Colorado to do pollination research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Crested Butte (the official Wildflower Capitol of Colorado), and is a gifted scientist and artist.

GARDENING HIGH UP…



Susan the gardener

 Today, I spent a quiet afternoon reading the poetry of Marge Piercy and discovered a poem entitled “Six underrated pleasures,” in which she extols the virtues of picking pole beans and ends with these lines: “Then comes the minor zest/of nipping the ends off with your nails/and snapping them in pieces,/their retorts like soft pistolry./Then eat the littlest raw.” Piercy is a master at creating sensuous poems which inspire appetite for food, and I began to hanker after a mess of pole beans. I immediately felt this pining to plant a vegetable garden.

A few minutes following this poetry reading and my subsequent desire for fresh pole beans, Gary Entsminger, editor of Pinyon Publishing, sent me photographs of Susan Elliott, his partner, preparing ground for a new garden. I know that Gary keeps Susan busy designing books, marketing, and creating paintings for them, but some time during the day or week, she devotes a few hours to playing musical instruments, hiking, cooking (whew) and gardening year round up there on the Uncompaghre Plateau in the southern Rocky Mountains.

The photographs piqued my interest in this small enterprise, so I fired off an e-mail, requesting that Susan submit to the second interview I’ve had with her during the past two years and to tell me about her plateau gardening at 7,000 feet. Susan has been engaged in designing and formatting an upcoming issue of the Pinyon Review, a new literary magazine Gary is putting together, as well as drawing and painting pictures of plants for Why Water Plants Don’t Drown, a book she is co-authoring with Dr. Victoria Sullivan, but she agreed to talk with me about her garden.

Moore: When do you begin planting your summer garden?

Harvest

Elliott: I work the ground as soon as the ground thaws, before it dries and hardens. In March, we plant cover crops and cool-weather crops (peas, rye grass, greens, radishes, onions…). Then in late May, we plant warm-weather crops (tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, squash, flowers…).

Moore: What about your winter garden?

Elliott: We grow winter greens in 5-gallon cloth pots. While working on Why Water Plants Don’t Drown with Victoria Sullivan, I started to think more about oxygen supply to roots. I mix potting soil with coconut husks for soil aeration. And the cloth pots also encourage aeration and root branching. It’s practically impossible to over-water cloth pots because surplus water will drip out the sides. Our south-facing windows get a lot of sun, but we supplement light supply with energy-efficient full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs.

Moore: I understand that you do elaborate soil preparation for your gardens. What is the soil like on the plateau and what do you add to it to get maximum production and nutritional value from the products?

Elliott: The soil up here can get very hard and fairly salty (though there’s local variation; our neighbors a couple of miles down the road have sandier soil…). There are very few deciduous trees or herbaceous plants to add organic matter to the soil. So we compost throughout the year, producing about 30 gallons of compost to add each spring. I’ve also tried “sheet mulching,” layering straw, alfalfa, compost, manure, and the like to build up a garden bed. We mulch with straw to reduce water loss in the summer and to protect perennials from the winter cold. We fertilize only very lightly with organic “Age Old” brand liquid fertilizer. We don’t have huge robust plants, but they do well enough for the environment they (and we) live in, and they seem happy enough.



July in the garden

 Moore: Are you a vegetarian? Why?

Elliott: I’m a vegetarian, for several reasons. Nutritionally, there are many great alternative ways to get proteins, and high meat consumption (particularly red meat) has been correlated with many health problems. Also, many studies show we need more vegetables in our diet. When we remove one (meat) dish from our plate, that creates more room for more vegetables. Environmentally, raising animals for consumption uses a lot of resources (water in particular, but also feed: corn, etc.). The conversion of resources through animals to our plate is less efficient than the conversion of resources through plants to our plate. So by not eating meat, I can help preserve a little of the precious clean water that’s becoming harder and harder to come by. Ethically, many animals raised for meat production are not treated very well. And of course, I love my vegetables…! Brian Wilson (creative force and lead singer in the Beach Boys) wrote a great song about eating your vegetables on his “Smile” album; the song is called “Vega-Tables.” Listen to it, and you’ll just want to sing and dance and laugh and eat vegetables. It will at least make you smile.

Moore: Do you attempt to supply all the vegetables for your table?

Elliott: Goodness, no. Maybe if we lived in a more productive climate with a longer growing season, but we eat a LOT of vegetables!! Fortunately, there are some very productive local farms in our area. Off the plateau, in the Uncompaghre Valley (and the Colorado “West Slope,” in general), there are many small farms that treat their plants well and avoid the over-use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. We U-pick tomatoes, and get boxes of chili peppers, cucumbers, and peaches for canning. We usually can close to a hundred quarts each fall. The local natural grocery carries organic Colorado produce when it’s available. When it’s not, they carry organic produce from California.

Moore: How much time do you allow for gardening during a day? Or week?



Layout of the garden

 Elliott: My work, play, music, gardening, yoga, running, hiking, etc. are all “as the spirit moves me.” Or as the plants need me… (Okay, or if the books “need” me, but all of this is relative…) Some days or weeks get more time devoted to one or the other. This morning, I was feeling tight, so it was yoga. Yesterday I knew there was a storm coming, so I worked on rain catchment repairs. A couple of weeks ago, the ground was in danger of drying out and getting hard, so I hoed away at it. I LOVE playing outside, “putsing” you might say. If it were up to me, I’d spend the better part of every day hoeing, digging, potting, watering, mulching, pruning, harvesting, weeding, exploring “my” plants… In reality, I probably get an average of 2-3 hours/day in the summer and 2-3 hours/week in the winter.

Moore: The design of your garden is intriguing. Is there a history associated with the design, and what are the advantages of the design?

Elliott: This year I laid out the garden plots so that many paths lead to the center (or so that many paths radiated out of the center, depending on how you look at it). It’s a convenient way to get around the garden. And it’s aesthetically pleasing to see something a more than just rectangles.

Moore: Do you plant primarily from seed or do you grow seedlings in a greenhouse and transplant them in the soil?

Elliott: In the early spring, I plant seeds (cover crops and cool-weather crops). I also plant native wildflower and grass seeds. In the late spring, I plant veggie and flower starts from our local nursery. The past few years, we traveled during the spring, so we didn’t have time to start plants indoors. However, a few years ago, I started many trays of plants when I was living on the East Coast. I then rigged my Subaru Impreza into a “plant mobile,” (double decker, including a grow light for the lower shelf) and drove the seedlings out to plant in Colorado. And this year, we’ll transplant the greens outside that we started indoors. But really, down in the valley, the local nurseries do a great job of getting plants going early (tomatoes, peppers, squash, and the like). We have a short growing season, so we take advantage of the local greenhouses getting a head start.

Moore: Is there sufficient rainfall to water the garden on the plateau? Or do you have a system of irrigation?

Elliott: We definitely have to supplement the rainfall water. In the summer, we can count on a good monsoon rain at least once a week, but that’s not enough for the garden. And in June, when the plants are very young, rains are infrequent. We have two hand-me-down 300-gallon tanks that are fed by rain gutters. The tanks (continually refilled by monsoons during the summer and snowmelt during the winter) store close to all the water we need for watering summer and winter gardens. We haul water manually (in 5-gallon buckets and gallon jugs); good for the upper body strength. We also prefer to water plants with rainwater because it is free of the salts that are prevalent in our soil and well-water. The salts tie up essential plant nutrients; so the plants are much happier with rainwater. And it’s collected passively; so we don’t have to use electricity to haul water 400 feet out of the ground.

Tune in to Part II of Gardening High Up on tomorrow's blog.