For the last three years I have not let up begging our gardens intern, Lilah “Weed Woman” Anderson to write a guest post for the blog – on any garden topic of  her choosing (vegetable gardening, please.) At long last, she gave in! Accompanying photographs are also by Lilah.

Blithewold’s vegetable garden has undergone some big changes this year. It has nearly doubled in size and the design has been re-organized to demonstrate a variety of different planting techniques. For my third year as the gardens intern I have been spending much of my time in the vegetable garden. Fortunately master gardener and devoted volunteer Dick Philbrick is there for helpful advice and a very green thumb.

The main goal for this year’s garden is to be an educational resource to our visitors on different growing techniques. We have put in our usual rows with succession plantings as well as companion beds and hills for vines. These different planting methods work well for different kinds of gardens. So if you have a large space like us it’s easy to do rows, but for a cramped city garden companion beds may be a better route for maximizing space and productivity.  The hills may also prove to be a challenge for a small plot, however I am experimenting with different trellising ideas that just may work for a tight spot.

There are also three different kinds of mulches being used (straw, grass clippings, and woodchips) to accommodate the many different plants in the garden. The tomatoes are well suited to the thick golden straw whereas the petite herb and flower rows enjoy the finer grass clippings. For our pathways the woodchips keep down weeds and provide easy access to beds. The fourth section of the garden is devoted to Blithewold’s younger visitors. It is filled with lots of pathways around flower-beds. The deep purple salvias and the bright marigolds and zinnias are meant to attract birds, bugs, and butterflies. There are also some interactive plants like cotton and pineapple sage (which smells surprisingly like a ripe pineapple). Fred and Dan have designed a playhouse for our young visitors and camp attendees that is slowly being covered by pole beans. This area will hopefully spark an interest in children to grow vegetables and flowers of their own. Overall, we have incorporated a number of different vegetable growing methods to educate and inspire our visitors both big and small.

The idea of having a garden can seem daunting if only a small yard or terrace is available but on a recent trip to Cambridge MA it was easy to see that every green pocket can produce.  My boyfriend’s father has quite an impressive city garden that utilizes a large raised bed and numerous containers to avoid the lead-filled soil. I have to say I have never seen rhubarb growing so happily in a container nor have I seen such an intricate tomato trellis as in Ivan’s garden. The small but robust garden provides quite a harvest that even includes cucumbers and broccoli growing in containers.

This tiny but productive plot inspired me to visit some of the Cambridge community gardens. There were two within walking distance from Ivan’s garden. The community gardens were composed of many small plots, all of which were stuffed full with a variety of plants. Many plot-tenders had creative combinations of plants to take advantage of space and maximize yield. A man and his daughter were already harvesting zucchini and another woman and her daughter gave me some of their ripe gooseberries to try. These pockets of green were an inspiration to me in furthering the educational aspect of the vegetable garden at Blithewold.

In an age of large food corporations it is refreshing to see so many people growing there own food and I hope that the Blithewold garden can serve to encourage visitors to try their hand at a vegetable garden.

I know I’ve said it before but it’s good to get out. Yesterday Gail, Julie (our education coordinator) and I went to the Perennial Plant Conference at UCONN in Storrs, CT and came back jazzed all over again about things like native plants and edible landscaping.

Rosalind Creasy has been advocating and demonstrating edible landscaping –beautifully – since at least the early 70’s and we have certainly been playing with the idea here for the last few years too. But now I’m all over the idea for my own garden – all over again. Truth be told, I haven’t been much into planting vegetables at home unless they’re exceptionally pretty. But I’m coming to realize that they’re almost all exceptionally pretty if they’re worked into the design in the right way. Not to mention the benefits of growing your own food. And she makes such a compelling case for replacing lawn (preaching to the choir) – I don’t even have kids but if I did maybe I’d already know they prefer a garden to a blank expanse of turf. Gardens are always more interesting. Plus I came home with her cookbook …

And Doug Tallamy who wrote Bringing Nature Home (a book I have mentioned being excited about before) made an even more compelling case for replacing sterile suburban wastelands (ie. lawn and other exotics). He of course makes the case for planting native species. Tallamy recommends “flipping the age-old landscaping paradigm on its head. Instead of designing where your flower beds will go in a sea of lawn, design where you need lawn for walking spaces and plant the rest of your property with native ornamentals.” And here’s why we should all do that:

As he puts it, “humanity’s life support systems are failing.” We have to remember that the ecosystem provides services such as the air we breathe, water management and purification, food, weather systems, carbon dioxide sequestration, waste recycling and so on, and we have to quit taking all of that for granted. If we lose biodiversity, we literally lose it all. 33,000 species of plants and animals are considered “imperiled” and unable to perform their function within the ecosystem. Not good.

Everything is connected (just like in Avatar) and “insects are key!”, says Tallamy. They convert the energy from plants into food for other animals. Did you know that 23% of a black bear’s diet is insects? (In my family we always joked about all the protein we were getting every time we accidentally swallowed a bug. Turns out to be true.) Trouble is, most insects are specialists who will only eat certain native plants. If you worry about planting things that will just become defoliated and ugly because of all the insects, he says that doesn’t actually happen – and has the data to support it. Something always comes along to eat the insects. That’s how it works – and why it works. Here are his lists of great natives listed in order of how many butterfly/moth species will be supported by them.

I could go on and on … but instead I’ll just recommend reading his book yourself if you haven’t already. And in the next few weeks, take a look around and make a note of what is leafing out. Asian species are generally ahead of the natives by a week or two. Do you need a few more natives in your yard? In my own garden I have decided to evict a few things including a favorite young styrax tree. For one thing I know it can escape cultivation because mine had originally planted itself where it didn’t belong. And for another, it supports a whopping zero native caterpillars. I’ll also be evicting more lawn for vegetables… You too?

Every year Gail and I take it upon ourselves to try a few new tools. We want to stay on the cutting edge, so to speak, of what’s handy, so to speak. We have not been offered any free trials, alas – we buy only what we think looks useful. So what follows are a couple of unsolicited reviews and previews of products that maybe you have considered trying too. (Deliberately linkless because this is currently a no-ad blog.)

The super slim lightweight hose from Gardeners Supply truly weighs next to nothing. I love that about it. What I don’t love, and what they don’t tell you, is that its tiny slimness doesn’t provide enough pressure to support a full size watering wand – we use it only with a smaller wonder waterer. It is also super kinktastic. Plus if you don’t take the time to wind the diabolical thing up exactly the way it wants to wind, it becomes a tripping snake monster. Is there no perfect hose?

Last year we purchased coir (rhymes with foyer) pots for our seedlings because they are made of coconut fiber, a renewable resource more sustainable than peat. We were also sold on them because they are supposed to break down faster than peat making it possible to actually plant them. Too good to be true? You bet. They do not break down quickly. We had a suspicion so not every plant was planted in the pot – only the ones whose roots were already tangled in the fibers. And those plants did not thrive probably because they were strangled by pots that could probably survive an apocalypse. On the upside, we will be reusing the sturdiest ones.

This year we’re trying cow pots but because they’re much more expensive, we only purchased enough for our sweet peas. Cow pots are made from composted cow manure – a genius use for a truly unlimited resource – and are also supposed to break down quickly and be plant-able. I’ll keep you posted. We also bought a soil block maker – if we can get our soil mix right, we’ll just go pot-less.

Last year we also purchased half a pallet of coir bricks for mixing our own potting soil and that we love especially because it’s re-wettable. (Peat is so not.)

I already know we’re going to like the tub trugs because I have one at home and I’m not sure what I carried everything-under-the-sun in before I owned it.

The ho-mi digger (Korean hand plow) is new to us but has been used by other gardeners for something like 5000 years. Anything that has stood that kind of test of time must be a pretty perfect tool.

Everybody raves about the Cobrahead weeder so we bought a few last year for our volunteers to try. They haven’t taken to it yet. But most of them are fiercely loyal to an old broken-down batch of Cape Cod weeders that aren’t being manufactured anymore. And I don’t use it because I carry a hori-hori – my favorite garden tool ever – in my back pocket.

Have you used any of these things? What do you think of them? Do you have any suggestions for other tools we should try?