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.

For a few hours on Sunday a living room-full of us were spirited away across an (insignificant) ocean to a place where gardeners grow. I’m still suffering (though suffering is definitely the wrong word for how I feel) from something kind of like jet lag. I feel like I was picked up and put back down on earth in a completely different place. I’m still getting my bearings. Nothing Fergus Garrett, head gardener and CEO of Great Dixter, talked about was particularly revolutionary and yet I’m all spun around.

As Fergus Garrett, head gardener and CEO of Great Dixter in East Sussex, England, spoke to us about the history of Great Dixter house and gardens, it was easy to draw some parallels to Blithewold. Both families put particular marks of their very own on their much loved houses and landscapes, and they passed on their passion for the garden to at least one of their children. Christopher Lloyd, an extraordinary plantsman and prolific garden writer learned the Fine Art of flower gardening from his mother, Daisy. “Christo” spent his entire life gardening at Great Dixter. He changed very little of his parents’ design but was never fettered to the past. Through constant experimentation he pursued and taught a method of gardening that is not for the faint of heart: there are no rules. — well, there’s one rule. Plant the right plant. And to that I’d probably add a doctrine: pay attention, stay engaged, take notes, and enjoy! There’s nothing static about a garden – in any season. It’s always changing and the passionate gardener revels in and directs the changes like a symphony conductor.

Walking around the Blithewold grounds with Fergus was itself a lesson for me. As proud as I generally am of our gardens, they seemed suddenly ordinary and contrived. Plants look planted. At Great Dixter there is a balance between the wild and natural – the tall-grass meadows full of East Sussex wildflowers, grasses and orchids – and the cultivated – crisply clipped topiaries and hedges. The same dichotomy grows with wild, meticulously tended abandon in their gardens. Fergus made a bee-line to our shoreline and studied plants there that I have taken so for granted that I don’t even know their names. His mind is wide open and interested in every plant and its potential use in their gardens.

The good news is that passion can be taught by any good mentor and learned by us. The spirit of Christopher Lloyd – and his parents – lives on not only through the tradition of a constantly changing palette of plants at Great Dixter but in the imagination of all the avid gardeners and interns who pass through the Lutyens gate. Fergus’ enthusiasm for gardening is as infectious as his mile-wide smile. Gail and I – and probably most of people who were in the living room on Sunday are ready to cross the pond to visit Great Dixter. We’d like to spend at least a week learning from the mentors there and definitely take Fergus up on his offer of cake. For more information on visiting Great Dixter, click here.

According to the calendar, we’re a week ahead of last year and even slightly ahead of May’s full moon, but we couldn’t wait another minute to start planting. And according to the temperature – hot! – we’re right on schedule. I do wish our timing didn’t seem to consistently coincide with the very hottest days of late spring… It would be much better for the plants to choose a week of cool, gray days. But it seems that when we turn the corner on night temperatures, we run headlong into the days of summer. We’re working against the clock of full summer heat all of a sudden.

We’re in good shape though because reinforcements have arrived – Cathy (Harvest Maven) is back to help Dick in the vegetable garden and Lilah (Weed Woman) completed her sophomore year at Bard and has joined our crew for another summer! They planted tomatoes in the vegetable garden yesterday and with the volunteers’ help, gave the weeds what-for.There’s room now for another round of vegetable planting.

Yesterday the Tuesday volunteers also planted the big Display Garden bed. For the last 3 years it has been slowly filling with perennials, shrubs and self-sowers but we have deliberately left plenty of blank canvas for painting a new picture every season – something the perennial plant addict in me can’t seem to do at home. This year Gail and I placed 300 annuals and tender perennials that we hope will grow to be a riot of deep colors and bold textures. It already looks night-and-day different from last year’s frothy haze of pale lavenders.

The Rockettes are planting annuals and tender perennials (dahlias!) in the North Garden tulip pockets as I write and, weather permitting, we’ll plant in the Rose Garden tomorrow.

But just because we’re planting this week doesn’t mean that by next week we’ll be finished and can go home. We aim to have everything still waiting in the greenhouse planted by the end of June even then there will be endless tweaking and editing to be done here and there. – The gardens are, in fact, a work in progress from here on out.

Are you planting this week too?