Why have a Vegetable Garden?

          

           When the frost king has iced up the windows,

            And the wind has turned noses all numb.        

            When the snowstorms are here it’s the time of the year

            When those lovely seed catalogs come.

    Oh, it’s rubicund beets and tomatoes,

    It’s corpulent carrots and corn .          

            It’s lush little peas that bring summer’s sweet breeze

            To a winter that’s bleak and forlorn.

            Then I get out my gardening notebook;

            I lay out my plot with a rule.

            No trowel do I need to plant my fresh seed.

    A pencil’s my gardening tool..

    My garden is lush and prolific.

    In my mind all the seeds are soon sown.

    My potatoes and beans and my various greens

    Are the finest that ever were grown

    I know, for experience teaches,

    Come summer it won’t be the same,

    But I’m knee-deep in snow so my garden can grow

    Just the way that those catalogs claim.

This poem that I put to music for my Vegetable Program was written by Cedric Adams. I haven’t a clue who Mr. Adams is, or was, except that he obviously was a great gardener, and his poem is so appropriate for this column I had to use it.

I can think of dozens of reasons to have a vegetable garden besides the joy of brousing the seed catalogs when you're snowed in. It doesn't require the sort of talent or training needed by an artist or a musician.  Trying to sing in the choir when you don't have an "ear" can be as painful as trying to do your income tax without a calculator.  But the gardener doesn't need expertise to try his hand at growing thing.  Green thumbs are a fallacy - all thumbs get brown in the garden.
Vegetable gardening is a hobby that entails no red tape.  Think  of that! No forms to fill out, no need for a permit, no reason to stand in line, and nopthing to declare on your income tax.  What other hobby can you say that about?  Even a simple fisherman has to get a license or he'll have the game warden breathing down his neck.

Nnowadays there’s a very special reason to have a vegetable garden.  With our nation’s frightening obesity problems,  being able to offer your kids or grandkids fresh  and tasty vegetables for snacks is one way to keep then thin.  I"m  sure my mother's vegetable garden began my love affair with rabbit food,  what Mom called raw edibles.  Getting the kids to help plant, weed, mulch, harvest and do all the other jobs involved in a garden is another way to help keep them thin.

My three daughters learned how vegetables grow as soon as they could toddle out to the garden and help pick the beans, but I can remember one summer when I had the pleasure of introducing a city child to the miracles of the vegetable garden.  Tommy was about four at the time and his blue eyes grew as big as morning glories when we went out to pick a ripe tomato for lunch.  After all, tomatoes are supposed to be wrapped in cellophane, not hanging like red rubber balls on green vines.

Tom was as delighted as a kid at a magic show as I showed him around the garden, and I must admit I felt a bit like Houdini as I pulled aside the leaves of a squash plant to reveal the tiny golden sausages just starting life, and one fatter than the biceps of a weight lifter that I’d neglected to pick when it was young. I untied the leaves protecting the just beginning fruit of a cauliflower plant, relishing Tommy’s laughter as he discovered the little golf ball tucked inside.

We walked the new carrot row, thinning a few so that Tommy could see the magic of pulling a bright orange carrot from the dirt. The bush beans were ready for picking so I went to get a basket, and what with the phone ringing and a few other interruptions, it was a while before I got back to the garden. Sweet little Tommy had turned into a magician himself.  He’d pulled the entire row of inch-long carrots out of the hat so to speak. At least he seemed to enjoy eating quite a few of them at lunch.

The difference between vegetables fresh from the garden and ones bought at the supermarket is like comparing Beethoven’s 5^th symphony to a child’s rendition of chopsticks. And  as Cedric Adams points out, browsing through the seed catalogs is  a great way to spend a snowy afternoon.  But before you make your list of the seeds you plan to order, you might do well to check out last year’s leftover seed packets. If, like me, you’ve left your unused seeds  scattered around so they get wet or moldy or overheated,  very few will germinate. However, if you’re one of those conscientious people who puts her tools away at the end of the day and her seed packets in a cool dry place,  preferably in a coffee can so the mice can't get them, you can assume all of the 2010 packets will be viable this year.

The two books I have that describe how to test for seed viability make it sound more complicated than a pregnancy test, and more work than just planting the seeds and hoping.  More helpful are their lists of the life expectancy of various vegetables seeds.  Some, like tomatoes, cucumbers, melons and beets can last for six years or more.  The weaklings, viable for less than two years, include corn, leeks and onions, parsnips and parsley.  All other vegetables fall in the middle, living anywhere from two to five years.

I hope I’ve convinced you all to have a vegetables garden this year, or at least a few containers for a tomato plant or two.  I am still addicted to rabbit food, and in summer  I like nothing better than a heaping plate of whatever is ripe in the garden every day – snap peas, asparagus, radishes, carrots, peppers, cherry tomatoes, cauliflower.    In winter, even though they’re from the supermarket, I cut up a pile of  raw vegetables including celery  or cauliflower with a dip to dunk them in. I don’t carefully arrange my veggies on a platter, but I bothered to do so for their photo. 

My Favorite Houseplant

          I’m no authority on raising houseplants, but that doesn’t stop me from having plenty of them. Houseplants help me keep my sanity during the winter as much as my cat does. Both need food and water and sometimes bring unwanted creatures into the house, be it white fly and red spider mites or dead moles or baby birds, but when Jack Frost covers my gardens in a blanket of white and I hear the deer mice scurrying around in my attic, I’m glad to have both houseplants and my cat.


        My favorite houseplant is the creeping fig, Ficus pumila. I first became acquainted with it at the age of 12 when I saw one growing in my great aunt’s house. She had allowed it to escape from the confines of her conservatory and wander at will. Its dainty creeping branches, which cling by tiny aerial rootlets, had traveled across the livingroom ceiling to the hall and were gracefully making their way upstairs.


        It was more than thirty years before I saw another creeping fig and thought to raise one of my own. That year I topped my Christmas Wish list with a Ficus pumila. Not many nurseries carried them back then, and I think Hank probably went to half a dozen before he found one at Whiting's in West Hartford. It was a scrawny looking specimen, but I set it in a sunny window and taped its two drooping branches to the window frame. Two months later they had still made no attempt to cling to anything.


       Finally in late March two new shoots appeared and before I’d even taped them, they had put out stickers of their own and begun to creep up the window frame. By June one had almost reached the ceiling. If I’d done a little research, I would have saved myself a lot of agony. It turns out that the creeping fig has both male and female branches. The males are sterile and they refuse to cling to anything. The females are fertile fruiting branches, the ones that latch onto whatever’s close at hand and start to climb.


       Being an advocate of Women’s Lib, I won’t stop to make any analogy of all this. Suffice it to say that it is the fertile branches that produce babies and climb the walls. Of course a ficus raised as a houseplant does not produce fruit, but in the wilds of Asia, its native habitat, it does have small edible figs. Like its close relatives, the weeping fig and the rubber plant, it is undemanding and disease free when grown as a houseplant, but it must never be allowed to dry out. The one that sat in a south window died of thirst one hot summer day when I’d forgotten to give it a drink.

       In fact I killed several ficus plants that way before Hank

began building me containers that insured my fig plants  plants

would never die of thirst. The first was the wooden planter
lined with plastic.  As you can see, it stands almost 3 feet tall,
so that once a plant’s roots get established they can reach
down deep to where they can always get water, provided I
give the soil a good soaking once in a while.                             

That was a nice solution, but the next planter Hank designed was even better as it provided a plant's roots with an endless supply of fresh water.

       Using a bread tin as a container, Hank punched a hole in the bottom for the roots to go through and fitted the tin  into a nice mahogany board that sat, and still sits, on top of the toilet tank. How’s that for clever? The ficus in that planter was so happy it soon covered the walls and the ceiling . Eventually, however, I re-papered the bathroom and had to pull it down. Apparently it considered this treatment so traumatic that it has been reluctant to start climbing again.

                                                                                         This ficus lives in my bedroom.  For two whole years it just sat and sulked, but finally this past spring several fertile branches appeared and began to climb the wall.        
        So don't be discouraged if you buy a creeping fig that doesn't want to creep right away.  Provided you give it plenty of water, new shoots will appear and  their heart-shaped little leaves will start to make a tracery of greenery as they climb.                                                                         I do have other houseplants, but I find none of them to be as interesting as my creeping figs.