My Kitchen Garden

I have always loved the idea of a kitchen garden--a small plot of land just outside the kitchen door planted with herbs, vegetables, small fruits, and flowers, which can be maintained and harvested easily and organically.

Not so long ago, kitchen gardens were commonplace. During World War II, many families had what were known as "Victory Gardens". Planted to help the war effort, in 1943, when canned foods were rationed, these backyard gardens supplied more than 40 percent of all edible domestic produce. And before that, growing one's own food was just part of keeping house. My grandparents had a large kitchen garden and one of my fondest childhood memories was going out with my grandmother before dinner to help her harvest, second only to my memory of my grandfather lifting my three-year-old body high up into the peach tree so I could pick my own peach.

Today, with our reliance on consumer sources of food, the kitchen garden has all but disappeared. I think it's time for a revival. In small plots, we can produce fresh, nutritious organic food, protect heirloom vegetables against the loss of biodiversity, and provide habitat for local wildlife (parseley, it turns out, is the host plant on which our native Fritillary butterfly lays it's eggs).

One important reason to grow your own food is that nutrients in foods begin to decrease the moment they are picked and continue to decline until they are eaten. The sooner you eat the food, the more nutrition it contains. Once a plant is removed from the ground, or a fruit or vegetable is removed from the plant, heat, light, and exposure to air all reduce nutrient content. According to Storage Time and Temperature Affects Nutrients in Spinach, researchers at Penn State found that spinach stored at 39 degrees F lost nearly half its nutrients in eight days. When stored at 68 degrees, the same amount of nutrient loss occurred in only four days. If produce is being shipped across the country by truck, by the time it arrives at the supermarket, it's already lost half its nutrients, and that doesn't even count the days it sits in the supermarket bin or in your refrigerator. This, along with pesticide contamination, is, to me, the best reason for us all to be growing food in our own backyards.

The Garden

This is our first year having a kitchen garden here in Florida. It took us several years to observe the climate and sun patterns, which are so different here than in Northern California. Because the summers are so hot, we actually have a completely opposite growing season. Many plants can only be grown in the wintertime, when the temperatures are mild. In the summertime, many plants don't survive the scorching heat and high humidity with heavy rains most afternoons. Some of our early attempts to grow test plants failed utterly. But now we are getting to know how to grow here and our kitchen garden is thriving.

One of the joys of this kitchen garden is that it is near the kitchen. Every day I am grateful for living in this house built in 1940, designed with a mudroom next to the kitchen, with a door out to the backyard--just like my grandmother's house. It's only a few steps from kitchen to garden. All houses should be designed this way. I pass by the kitchen garden plot several times each day as I walk in and out of the house. It's easy to stop for a minute to check on the ripeness of a strawberry, pull a weed, or pop a cool mint leaf into my mouth. It's so exciting to watch the plants grow from seed and to watch fruits emerge from flowers. When we were living in California, there was no land at all next to the kitchen--it had all been covered with cement for a patio. To get to the only plantable area, we had to walk all the way to the opposite side of the house, then down a path, through a gate, and down the steps. Though the trip was worth it to fetch luscious tomatoes, raspberries, leeks and lettuces, it wasn't as convenient or immediate as having the kitchen garden there every time I open the door. Here I feel it is part of our family.

We actually started our kitchen garden in containers on the steps of our back porch. When we moved here, I couldn't wait to at least get some herbs in pots. We learned quickly that parseley, sage, rosemary, thyme, sweet basil, and chives grow very well here all year long, so there is no need to buy them at the store. We also grow pineapple sage for it's sweet edible flowers and bright peppery nasturtium flowers to add to salads in the summer. And we grow stevia--the sweet herb--to add to our ice tea, and strawberries.

Several years ago, our next door neighbor told us that he had successfully grown pineapples in his backyard, so we thought we would try that too. We just bought a pineapple fruit, cut the top off, ate the pineapple, and stuck the top into a pot with some potting soil. Well, it is finally growing a little pineapple!

This year, we cleared a small plot of land right next to the walkway so we could plant directly in the ground. After a few years of observation, we determined this was actually the best spot for sun and shade as well as being most convenient. It's only about 5' x 5', but we managed to get three tomato plants, a row of garlic (we just planted the cloves from heads of garlic we used for cooking that were too small to peel), a row of green onions, a patch of lettuce and a patch of carrots. We started small because we didn't want to plant more than we could handle at first, but I'm sure we'll be expanding a bit each year. We have room to expand to make a plot 5' x 20', which I think would supply all we could eat.

We've also planted some flower seeds for cutting--small sunflowers and bachelor buttons and dahlias. As I learn the cutting flowers that grow well here, we'll be adding more.

Our basic rule of thumb is just to plant the herbs, vegetables, fruits, and flowers that we like best. We're not trying to grow all our own produce, just grow what we can.

Beyond the plot next to the kitchen, we also have our "back orchard" which consists of two tangerine trees, two lemon trees, a large grapefruit tree, and a grove of banana trees. These also are within easy reach, just a few steps beyond the kitchen garden in the backyard, and they all produce an abundance of fruit.

The Soil

The soil here in Florida is very sandy--no, the soil here IS sand--so the challenge here is to actually create some soil. In California, we had the exact opposite problem--there was so much clay in the soil we needed to lighten it up. But the solution is the same either way: add more compost.

We purchase compost in bags at the nursery, but we also make our own. We take all our kitchen scraps and put them in a covered box outside. It just breaks down on it's own.

Another very important thing we do is add micro-oragnisms to our soil. We learned this from our friend Winston Kao at Go Beyond Organic. The function of micro-organisms in soil is to break down elements so they can be assimilated by the plants. Just like in our own intenstines, micro-organisms do the digesting. We can feed plants all the nutrients we want, but without without micro-organisms, plants are not able to "eat" the food we give them. Spraying soil micro-organisms in our garden creates fertile soil.

We saw the difference right away. Very shortly after we sprayed the micro-organisms the first time, suddenly most of our plants began to grow larger and looked more vibrant. We have a pineapple sage plant in a pot that grew to be about four feet high before it died back for the year, and now it's well on it's way to growing that size again in it's second year. And it is always covered with flowers. Everything we plant grows effortlessly. In my opinion, money is wasted on buying plant food unless there are micro-organisms present to digest it. This is very economical. We use only about a tablespoon per gallon of water and spray it around the garden about once a month.

Micro-organism technology was developed by a Japanese doctor over thirty years ago and it is being used in 120 countries around the world (but not very widely yet here in America). The micro-organisms are generally in a solution of water and cultured molasses. They work with existing micro-organisms to bring them into balance. It has been successfully used to restore damaged ecosystems, so restoring fertility to a backyard garden is a small task. In Japan, an inland sea that was horribly polluted was restored to life via a grassroots campaign of retirees, children and housewives pouring micro-organisms into the local sewage systems and streams. Imagaine how we could restore whole ecosystems by restoring the micro-organisms in our own backyards. I get my soil micro-organisms from Go Beyond Organic, but they are also available from other internet providers and might be sold at your local organic nursery. Search on "efficient microorganisms" or "effective microorganisms" for more information and sources.

We also started feeding our trees chicken soup about a year ago. Yes, chicken soup! I make chicken stock regularly and had been discarding the bones, bits of meat, carrots, celery and onion because "the nutrients have been cooked out into the broth." Then I use the nutrient-rich stock and add new meat and vegetables to make my soup. One day Winston was walking through my kitchen as a pot of these leftovers was sitting on the stove. I asked him what to do with them, and he said, "Bury them in the ground at the dripline of your fruit trees." So we buried the first batch at the drip line of our banana trees and wow! They immediately grew another two feet over the height they had consistently held for the two years previous.

Later I was talking with Winston about the results, and he pointed out that this cooked food--which I had been discarding because I thought it contained little nutrients--still contained enough nutrition to boost growth on my banana trees. He pointed out that more nutrition is lost between harvest and supermarket than is lost in cooking, and even cooked food still contains quite a few nutrients.

The Pleasure of the Garden

I've found that when I keep things simple, gardening can be a joy and not a chore. My husband and I find it easy and fun to care for our small selection of edibles, and there is nothing like the taste of fresh herbs sprinkled over a dish, or just popping a warm ripe cherry tomato right into my mouth seconds after I've picked it.

To me, a garden that can produce food and flowers is part of the system of a house. I'm very aware that I am returning nutrients to the Earth in the form of food wastes and wilted flowers and then receiving those nutrients back in the food I grow. There is a beneficial exchange between the activity in my home and it's surrounding environment.

We love our kitchen garden. It gives us great satisfaction to interact with living plants, and know we can care for them well enough to harvest their gifts of nourishment.