better living | gardening

Vegetable gardening

just might grow on you

By MIKE BROSSART, PHOTOS BY EUSTACIA L. BROSSART

ECONOMIC NEWS got you down? You say your home equity has dropped so much you won’t be able to finance that ascent of K2 you’ve been dreaming of? What you need is a home-based hobby.

How about a pastime that relieves stress, saves you money on food and maybe even on gas, satisfies your experimental curiosity, keeps your lower back healthy and gets some dirt under your fingernails? Try vegetable gardening. Going green? Going organic? Reducing your carbon footprint? You can do all three by growing vegetables in your yard.

Good karma and good eats.

Right now we’re growing tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers, carrots, radishes, onions, leeks, garlic, green beans, lettuce, spinach, chard, kale and several herbs in a dozen 4-by-5-foot beds.

But there’s no need to go nuts like that. Better for a novice to start out by planting, say, just tomatoes and lettuce. just might grow on youA strawberry pot holds an Ichiban eggplant along with lettuce and chard.

If you’ve got some land available, clear a little and plant some young tomatoes from the nursery and some lettuce seeds. If you’re land poor, plant them in containers on your patio — tomatoes in pots that hold five gallons or more, lettuce in just about anything that will hold a little dirt.

Try some different varieties of each to see what works best, to make sure everything doesn’t mature at once and to compare flavors. After all, it’s only worth the effort if you really care how your food tastes.

Experimenting is half the fun. Each year we try a new tomato variety or two and jettison one that didn’t produce all that well the year before; same with lettuce and other crops. This year our tomatoes are longtime favorites – Celebrity, Champion, Cherokee and Currant – along with more recent additions Glory, Green Zebra, Mortgage Lifter, Pruden’s Purple and Mr.

Stripey. (Did I mention we go overboard?) Last year Kitty bought some kind of purple Peruvian potatoes from an organic grower at the Claremont Farmers’ Market, cut them up and stuck the pieces in the ground. Voila! A nice, tasty, unusual crop.

We work organic compost and some cottonseed meal into the soil before planting.

Many backyard tomato growers have their own top-secret additives, like Epsom salt or bat guano.

When lettuce heads are young, you can assemble a delicious salad by tearing a few leaves from each of several heads. Once they get big enough, you’ll want to harvest a whole head now and then before they get too old.

You can grow lettuce pretty much year-round here, but we usually run dry in late August or September because the summer heat causes heads to bolt and go bitter. (See the accompanying list of some lettuce types that are slower to bolt.) If you want to add another flavor to your garden, buy a basil plant or two or a packet of seeds. Basil adds a delicious accent to salads and you can make your own pesto. The plants look good enough to put in a decorative garden and will do fine in poor soil; a tough life just hones the flavor of most herbs.

If you get hooked on growing vegetables, you might wind up going as bonkers as Kitty and I. In the fall we plant a winter garden: cool-weather lettuce varieties, more carrots and radishes, snow peas, cabbage, broccoli, spinach, kale, bok choy and mustard greens. (Fall is also when we plant the onions, leeks and garlic that we harvest in spring and summer.) All year we have parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, plus less lyrical herbs like tarragon and dill.

You might wonder how I find time to keep up with all that gardening. My secret: Kitty does most of the work.