The gardening year is 365 little festivals, Barbara Damrosch said. You can go into any supermarket and get anything anytime. But the real entitlement is to eat each fruit and vegetable at its perfect moment.
She contrasted hotel melon, the tasteless fruit often available in hotel lobbies, with a slice of luscious heirloom melon fresh from the garden picked at the peak of sweetness. No comparison!
Damrosch spoke about the joy of eating with the seasons and from the garden at the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show in March. With her husband, Eliot Coleman, she owns the experimental market garden Four Seasons Farm in coastal Maine and wrote the book The Four Seasons Farm Gardener's Cookbook: From the Garden to the Table in 120 Recipes (Workman, 2012).
They've simplified their gardening and cooking to make the most of space and time, Damrosch said, and are always looking for how to do it quicker and better. The secret to making the most of the space you have is to always have something ready to plant before something else comes out, she said. Other ideas include interplanting shallow-rooted plants such as lettuces with deeper-rooted plants such as radishes, and training vining plants such as cucumbers or melons on trellises.
Damrosch offered interesting ideas for saving gardening and cooking time.
To grow leeks with more of the edible, white part, usually you'd have to mound soil around the plants as they grow, which takes time. But Damrosch offered a way both to plant only once, and to get an extra-long white shank. Instead of planting seedlings at ground level, she uses a metal rod to make a hole 9 inches deep and drops the seedling into the hole. (I've used a crowbar or a piece of rebar.) The whole plant still gets enough light to grow, because the hole is not filled in. By the end of the season, though, the hole will have lightly filled in, and you can harvest a leek with a very long white shank.
To make applesauce or lemonade a pretty color, Damrosch adds some grated or juiced red beets. Conversely, if you like the flavor of beets but don't want your food to be pink or red, you can grow golden beets or white beets.
Rather than processing fresh tomatoes, she freezes them in plastic bags. When she's ready to use them, the skins easily slip off the frozen tomatoes if they're rinsed with hot water, Damrosch said. Then, she puts the tomatoes in a colander and lets them drain for several hours. The liquid can be saved for soups, and the drained tomatoes won't need to be cooked down to make puree, she said.
To control brambleberries, she ties several canes to a stake, with adequate space between clumps. When it's time to pick, she can walk all the way around each staked clump, rather than reaching through a thicket from one side.
Golden beets are as pretty, tasty, and productive as red beets, but they don't spread their color to other foods. Though orange-tinted on the outside, golden beets are deep yellow inside.
Use rebar to make a hole, plant leek seedlings 9 inches deep, and let the hole fill in over the season to harvest leeks with an extra-long white shank. This saves all the time usually spent mounding soil around leeks as they grow.
If you could grow only one crop, the potato is the easiest one for the home gardener, according to Barbara Damrosch.
© 2013 Tanya Kucak