Garden to Table: Gardening for Year-Round Eating

Last year at this time (I’m writing this in mid-May), I had just embarked on a new vegetable gardening plan: I wanted to modify what I planted so that my garden could play a larger role in feeding my husband and me all year long. I wanted to do what I could, in my small way, to reduce the environmental impact inherent in eating grocery store vegetables that have traveled many miles in fuel-burning trucks. I started small, supplementing my normal summertime planting with extra quantities of about ten things I knew would last through the winter. I could store onions, garlic, and butternut squash in my cool basement. I could freeze sugar snap peas and string beans. I could pickle cucumbers and shishito peppers. And a few things could even be preserved in the garden itself: kale, collard greens, leeks, and parsley will sometimes overwinter. (Last year, they lasted until the big freeze we had in late January, when temperatures dropped well below zero.)

I learned a few things over the course of the year that I’m applying to my planning for this summer’s garden:

1. It turns out that we don’t like pickled shishitos, but my cucumber pickles were fabulous — we want more of those.
2. We don’t need as many winter squashes; I stored about twenty, and five eventually rotted.
3. We could use more frozen sugar snaps and string beans. They’re great in salads, stir-fries, soups, and even eaten just by themselves, briefly zapped in the microwave.
4. The larger the onion, the faster it sprouts and rots, so eat the big ones first.
5. You actually can have too much garlic. If ours from last year doesn’t dry out or start sprouting (which, amazingly, it hasn’t yet), we might be still eating it when we harvest our next crop in July.
6. The chipmunk population exploded last year. Our new dog may well solve the problem that lost me so many of last year’s tomatoes that I didn’t have enough for canning. Freddie, our poodle-mix rescue pup, wouldn’t hurt a flea, but he loves chasing the chipmunks for sport, so I’m using him for pest control, in hopes that he’ll harass the varmints enough that they’ll decide to move to calmer shores. So far, it seems to be working.

I’ve also realized that my planting last year didn’t take into account the extra fridge in our basement. Most root crops (beets, carrots, kohlrabi, celeriac, daikon radishes) will store for many months in the fridge, so this year, I’m allocating more garden space to a variety of them (not including turnips and rutabagas, which I like but my husband hates). Cabbage, while not a root vegetable, also lasts forever in a fridge, and it’s wonderfully versatile — delicious raw in salads, cooked in soups and stir-fries, or even tossed in a little coconut oil and salt and roasted in the oven. So, note to self: more cabbages this year. (And by the way, we grow mainly purple cabbage, because, as is true with darker vegetable varieties in general, purple cabbage is considerably more nutritious than its lighter-colored counterpart. For starters, purple cabbage contains ten times the vitamin A and twice the iron of green cabbage.)

By the time this issue of Bluedot Living hits the stands, you’ll be picking your sugar snap peas, which of course, if you read my gardening article in the last issue, you remembered to put into the ground before the end of April. I hope you used my tip about soaking the seeds overnight in water, then folding them into dampened newspaper for a few days to get them to sprout. This methodology eliminates the planting of non-sprouting seeds (there are always a few in every packet) and also gives the peas a head start when you put them in the ground, so the vines will emerge faster and start climbing their trellises.

If, indeed, you are now picking sugar snaps, and you find yourself with some to spare, freezing them is a breeze. They must be parboiled first, to kill off the enzymes that lead to decomposition. This link provides excellent, step-by-step instructions for the entire freezing process, though I disagree with them on one point: they recommend boiling for 90 seconds, but in my experience, this is overcooking and leads to mushier peas once you thaw them. Last summer, I boiled my peas for 30 seconds, and it seemed to do the trick, since they came out of the freezer still green but not soggy.

Like sugar snaps, onions should already be planted by now for best results. They like getting started in cool weather. But planting either seedlings or “starts” (small bulbs) now will still produce onions — just smaller ones than if you’d begun earlier.

So, what should you be planting now? Tomato seedlings. Basil, parsley, and other herb seedlings. Don’t bother with radishes for the time being, since most varieties don’t do well once the weather gets hot (they grow leaves, but the roots are often skinny and tough). But fear not: You can plant them again in late summer when it’s cooling down, and like other root vegetables, they will preserve well in the fridge. It’s also too late to plant lettuce if you want full heads, because in hot weather, lettuce grows spindly and tall and goes to flower quickly. You can, however, still pick its leaves (and those of arugula) when it’s young and small, but you need to plant a lot of seeds to get enough for a few salads. And again, planting later in the season when the temperatures are dropping will give you heads of lettuce in the fall.

Now is the time to start (or continue) planting root vegetable seeds. It’s a good idea with these to plant successive crops so you’ll have mature vegetables to pick throughout the summer and fall — and perhaps some extras to store for the winter. Read the backs of your seed packets to learn the number of estimated days to maturity, and keep planting every couple of weeks until the maturity date is around the end of October.

Now is also the time to get your string beans into the ground —successive plantings of these are also a good idea — and plant lima beans. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: You think you don’t like lima beans, but you will. Freshly picked lima beans, harvested when they’re still tender and on the small side, are delicious. Steam them briefly, then toss with a little butter, a pinch of salt, and some chopped chives and tarragon — you’ll thank me. Or briefly boil them with some fresh corn kernels, then toss with chopped fresh basil, salt, and olive oil — yum. Make sure you get those limas in the ground asap, because they take over two months to mature. Twice I’ve tried planting the climbing variety at the end of July after removing my sugar snap vines, and both times, I got towering, robust vines, and no pods. Declining sunlight may have been a factor; limas need about 10 hours of good sun a day to produce pods. I also wonder whether the number of pollinators drops off when the weather cools; my vines had some blossoms, but no pods.  

I hope your squashes and cucumbers are already in the ground, but it’s not too late to plant seedlings from one of the local nurseries. If you’re a fan of zucchini blossoms, all you need to know is that each plant will produce male and female blossoms. The females will flower on the ends of teensy baby squashes, whereas the males grow on stems. Pick the male blossoms for deep frying, stuffing, or chopping up in salads. Leave the females to mature into squashes.

I’ve never tried doing successive plantings of zucchini. Evidently some people do, but I can’t imagine why. Zucchini are vigorous producers — so vigorous that most of us wind up with far more than we can possibly use. And zucchinis mature so quickly that you can practically see them getting larger while you watch. Gardeners joke about getting rid of extra zucchini by dropping some off in random strangers’ cars, or leaving a huge pile of the overgrown ones (they can get absolutely enormous if you forget to pick for four or five days) on the doorstep of somebody one doesn’t much like. My preferred strategy has been finding unexpected recipes that incorporate zucchini. My favorite from last summer was turkey zucchini burgers spiced with cumin, coriander, and chili powder. There are many recipes for turkey zucchini burgers online. Try one that sounds good to you, and then maybe try another!

You will note that I don’t talk about planting corn. There are three reasons for this: First, it takes up a huge amount of space. Second, raccoons (who can easily climb over any deer-proofing fence) love it and can completely devour your crop, literally overnight. This happened to me the one year I tried growing corn. One morning, a day or two before I would have considered the corn ready to pick, I came out to my garden to find every single ear still on the stalk but stripped of its husks and eaten down to the cob. I had three twelve-foot rows of corn, and not one uneaten ear remained. That was a dark moment in gardening. Fortunately, there’s reason number three for not planting corn: Here on Martha’s Vineyard, the corn at Morning Glory Farm is plentiful and absolutely delicious. If you’re not on the Island, check your local farmers market. 

I’ll end by talking a bit about weeds. They are unavoidable, but there are things you can do to mitigate them. I lay down straw between my beds, and where appropriate, I cover beds in black garden paper that’s thick enough to keep weeds from growing through it, but porous enough to allow water in. I use it on the beds in which I’m planting seedlings; I cut out little circles just large enough to fit each plant. Weeds will still manage to grow in those little exposed circles of dirt, but they’re relatively easy to manage. Of course, paper doesn’t make sense for crops like carrots and beets, because you’re planting multiple seeds fairly close together.

Last summer, I finally accepted that some part of every day in the garden must be spent pulling weeds. I drop them right on top of the straw between beds, and after a few days in the sun, they become something like more straw, which the worms slowly eat away, and which biodegrades completely over the winter while I’m inside, happily eating last summer’s bounty.