There is never a perfect time to have knee replacement surgery…or any surgery for that matter. However, for this gardener, May 1, 2024, was exactly the wrong time since it erased for all practical purposes an entire gardening year. Even now, as I write this, my right knee is complaining after just a brief totter around the estate to make a Must Do list. But it’s not as bad as it was in the autumn — the knee or the list!! So, hope lives on, that this year will be verdant, especially in the vegetable arena.
Last year, it being the fallow year, even the things I did grow were a source of pain: I swore I’d never grow another tomato, zucchini, mixed salad greens, peas, beans, peppers or eggplant. But here I am, perusing the plant lists, encouraged by a visit to my library’s annual book sale where I picked up a copy of Gardening for Gourmets: Good Eating from a Small Garden Plot — I am a sucker for old gardening books, as you know. Published in 1957, authored by Ruth A. Matson, I was hooked by the first chapter, ‘The Armchair Gardener’, and entertained by the recipe for ‘Potpourri of Kale’, a slumgullion of sausage, onion, tomatoes, okra and that most ubiquitous of greens, kale. It tickled me no end to learn that slumgullion was coined by California miners who gave that moniker to the muddy sludge left behind after panning for gold. Seemed about right to me for a recipe including the dreaded kale. But I digress.
Respectfully referred to by her editors as Mrs. Matson, she’s a gal after my own heart. “The best way to plan a garden, as I rediscover every spring, is to settle comfortably in an armchair before dinner and dream about food.” Indeed! This sort of dreaming, specifically of succulent heirloom tomatoes, caused me to push their planting dates back to well before my May 1st knee op, with suitable winter protection. They did not respond well: where the previous year I harvested toms that weighed nearly a pound each, last year I harvested, in total, 2.5 pounds, i.e. 8 wimpy tomatoes. This year will be different, as I will be able to work more closely with my Rocky-Mountain-imposed calendar; one of the first things I learned on moving here was that May 14th is the earliest one can start planting, as that is when spring arrives…I’m writing this in mid-March, when friends in lower altitudes, or lucky enough to have spacious greenhouses, are happily sowing and such, while I am pondering where to eventually sow the zucchini seeds and resisting the temptation to visit the local nursery.
Mrs. Matson is of the school of garden-making that holds there is order in disorder, which is my personal mantra. I grow edibles in the fenced-in patio behind the house, where the deer can’t reach. So, the veg are tucked in among the ornamentals…even dinosaur kale looks decorative next to the peppers (that’s the main reason I grow the purple-leaved sort). She also shares my theory that the first thing to consider when setting out an edible garden is how much energy you have to expend on it. I know from experience that it’s far less exhausting to manage a small plot to provide daily fresh produce rather than a big one that will require hours in the kitchen prepping for freezing and bottling. When making a small “dinner” garden, considerations of time and space follow on in that order: the first is less of a tyrant when 15 to 20 minutes a few days a week pulling weeds and spotting any pest threats before they take hold is all it takes, and the second allows companion planting, where flowers, herbs, fruit and vegetable coexist.
Scaling down, too, prevents what Mrs. Matson calls “gadgetitis…an ailment common to gardeners and gourmets.” You go into a garden center for a packet of seed and walk out with several plants and a clutch of tools. Why buy a dibble to plant seedlings when a pencil does the same work, plus you can write notes-to-self with it, she asks as I think of the handsome, expensive dibble lingering on my workbench shelf, unused. Considering that I use an old dinner fork to weed and a kitchen knife to clean the cracks between pavers, I should know better.
Forget mulching, she declares! Cultivate gently to keep the ground open – I tried straw last year and it blew all over the place…just as Mrs. Matson notes. Pay attention to composting, but don’t turn it into a chore; like me, she follows a lazy regime, omitting the often-prescribed (and shoulder-aching) forking over, tamping it down with a spade or two of earth, watering it now and then, and adding a compost generator; for this I use nitrogen but when I had chickens, I’d add their manure that heated up the pile like magic, turning it to black gold in a snap.
Wrapping up the growing section, Mrs. Matson describes how to create a tabletop greenhouse, using a 5-sided box fitted with growlights and sheathed in plastic sheeting to conserve moisture; this is quite a useful scheme; I use wire shelving, heat mats and growlights, but the box might actually be more efficient at getting seeds off to a healthy start. We’ll see! Visions of foot-ball-sized tomatoes are dancing in my head.
Ethne Clarke 2025
Mrs. Matson’s now on-trend recipe for…
