Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest. ~Douglas William Jerrold
"Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans." ~Marcelene Cox
"Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden." ~ Orson Scott Card
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Have you ever been at home alone and cooked up something so yummy that you just had to invite a friend over to delight in the deliciousness with you? If you have, then maybe you can understand why it is that I feel the need to share the salad bowl garden concept with my fellow gardeners. Think of this as a healthy recipe that feeds people and the environment at the same time.The salad bowl garden slices and dices a few basic gardening concepts and tosses these together with a few spicy gardening techniques to create the yummiest garden you’ve ever grown. Rainwater conservation, habitat creation, and food production are a few of the key ingredients for any earth friendly yard. When these concepts are combined with the use of seed balls, living mulch, and plenty of compost, the salad bowl garden begins to take shape. In my yard spotting the right place for the salad bowl garden was the easy job, on one end of the yard, the pooling water showed me a natural low spot, and on the other end of the yard, a drain spout comes down off my roof and spills storm water out on the lawn. With the help of some dedicated friends, we first removed the sod, we then simply dug out the low spot a little further and drove a trench through the earth from the low spot to the drain spout. As we dug away creating a low trench through the yard, all the excavated soil was placed along the sides of the trench thus creating a swale with tall, sloped sides. We excavated the low areas a little deeper then they’d need to be so that we could layer six inches of compost over the whole space to create a rapidly draining and fast growing garden. Once we shaped our salad bowl, it was time to start planting food for folks, and flocks alike.Seed balls made of clay and compost and impregnated with seeds, combined with a few shrubs, some of my favorite native perennials, potatoes, asparagus roots, and some healthy salad green plugs and herb starts made the planting menu for the afternoon. We planted more then enough plants to rapidly fill the space in with the idea in mind that the more we packed into the garden, the sooner we would be able to harvest. This is the garden technique that I call “living mulch”. I find that my gardens grow much more quickly if I get enough plants in the ground to cover the earth and quickly shade the garden soils. Just like any forest, prairie, or wet-land, the earth should be completely covered with plants in order to retain the most moisture possible and quickly penetrate the ground with roots from a wide variety of plants that will nourish and support each others growth. Now I can already attest that cabbage, collards, and kale grow much more quickly in the lowest, most moisture rich parts of the garden, but if you ask the birds and butterflies, I’d bet they’d tell you how fast the Joe Pye and Butterfly Weed grow in those low spots as well. I’ve already seen great results in this garden from combining native perennial plants and bird attracting shrubs with my food crop plants. The perennials drive roots down that pull moisture up from below the surface to help feed and nourish the food crop plants growing around them. At the same time the shallow rooted food crops grab up the available surface moisture and help pull it into the ground to feed the deeper-rooted perennials. This is a win-win situation if ever there was, and an easy earth friendly way to increase your food yields at home.In the three months since planting, this garden has yielded 10 pounds of potatoes, 5 large heads of cabbage, beautiful bunches of broccoli and cauliflower, and more lettuce, spinach, kale, and collard greens then I can shake a crouton at. We’ve also been using thyme, cilantro, and rosemary from this bountiful salad bowl, and there’s more to come with tomatoes, onions, peppers, artichoke, and kohlrabi yet to ripen. As if that weren’t enough reward, we get to watch butterflies and birds already making a happy home where unloving lawn grass once grew. My neighbors probably think I’m nuts, but I just love running out in the rain to watch the water trickle down the drainpipe and into the new garden. Whenever I pick food from the garden I leave a little offering of thanks to the ingenious gods who help me grow health, and happiness at home. Life seems to make so much more sense when the work I do helps my family and my environment to thrive. If you ever find yourself wondering what the heck you’ll do about that darn low spot that puddles up every spring, then maybe you’ll decide to toss your own salad bowl garden into the ground and grow yourself and your world a little something to eat. | ||||
The Seed Vol. 28 July 20, 2009 A Giving Tree Gardens Newsletter
Photos by Russ Henry ©2009 ,Text by Russ Henry ©2009 by Giving Tree Gardens, all rights reserved.
The Salad Bowl Garden
Early this spring while the snow was still melting, I noticed how badly the water pooled in a low spot in my lawn. A large puddle formed that thawed to a thick slushy consistency during the day and froze into a chunky icy mess each night. One night while walking to the garage, I slipped and had a close call with the ground, and it’s right about then that my determination grew some roots in my imagination. I decided that as soon as the thaw was over and the ground was workable, I’d set out to reshape the land in my backyard to accommodate and work with the available melt and rainwater.
Folks all around are digging rain gardens these days. Not only can we use rain-gardens to filter the water run-off from our properties, but when we use native plants in our rain-gardens we can create bird and butterfly habitat in our own back yards. As I sat inside the warm house rubbing my bruised knee and plotting against that slippery back yard mess, the thought occurred to me that if I was going to go to the trouble of making a rain-garden habitat for the birds in my back yard, I might as well go ahead and make some habitat for my family and myself as well. After all food plants tend to require a lot of water, and so I thought why not feed two birds with one hand and stock a rain-garden with my favorite edible plants. Seeing this garden take shape in my minds eye, suddenly I realized what it was I was about to create. This is how the story of the Salad Bowl Garden begins!
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Plant Profile: Burdock Arctium
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Weeds are just plants whose virtues are yet to be discovered, and burdock is a prime example of the truth in this old saying. While most folks I've talked with about the matter consider burdock at first to be an annoying weed, I hear attitudes change before me as I explain the benefits of this hardy, free growing plant. Eaten as a staple of Japanese diets, where the plant is known as gobo, and favored by macrobiotics, burdock's healthy potency shouldn't be overlooked by western gardeners any longer.
Burdock root is eaten raw, fermented, or dried and used as a traditional Chinese medicine. I always include burdock root in my kimchi recipe.
Burdock is a biennial plant that blooms only in it's second growing season. The tap roots of the first year plants are soft, easy to harvest, and ready to eat. Second season, blooming burdock has a hard woody root, not fit to bite into.
Health benefits derived from burdock include blood purifying, hair strengthening, help in healing burns, as well as my personal favorite, promotion of sexual vitality.
While many folks still consider this gift from the gods to be a wiley weed, I love it not only for it's health benefits, but equally for the aesthetic contribution it freely offers my yard. While the first year plants leaves are low and wide, in it's second year this thistley wonder reaches 5 feet tall with it's intricate purple blooms. Don't waste another opportunity to get to know this rugged, healing weed!
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The Salad Bowl Garden in full July glory! A little hard work in May pays delicious returns all year long!
The sod kicker! This machine makes a man into a mule! Anytime I need to rip up a chunk of sod grass, I call upon my mighty sod kicker to get the job done! As you can see we first laid out a garden hose as our guide so that we could shave off the sod in and define the garden edge at the same time.
Kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, chard, collard greens, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, and kohlrabi, are a few of the yummy edibles growing alongside contorted filbert, yarrow, butterfly weed, joe pye, and many other bird and butterfly attracting plants. What could be more earth friendly then growing food for yourself and the rest of the local fauna in your own back yard?
See how the ground in the salad bowl garden is completely covered in growing plants. This is what I call a "living mulch". The earth in the garden is shaded by the plants which helps maintain maximum moisture levels all season. If things get a bit crowded, I can always harvest a little more to make space for the late season vegetables.
The Salad Bowl Garden:
Nourishment for Earth and Earthling Alike!
A little hard work this spring is already generating more rewards then I can deal with. So far this season I've made up more kimchi and sauerkraut then our home can eat in a year. I love having an abundant harvest that I can share and trade with friends and neighbors. For great tips on fermenting vegetables check out Wild Fermentation, a book and website created by Sandor Katz, who will be making a guest appearance at the Seward Co-op on July 29th! Don't miss this informative and fun class!
This is the blank slate that was my back yard. The sod grass that wasn't doing myself or the earth any favors, just had to go! What better to replace this wasteful lawn with than edible plants for my family and the rest of the animals and bugs that call my yard home!
Once the garden was shaped and turned with compost, it was time to plant! After a mid May planting, this garden was ready to perform, and what a stunning performance it's given. Bountiful harvests keep growing in faster then we can eat!
Iris, thyme, and primrose growing in with self seeding red spinach and chives make a lovely, yummy scene for me and all my winged friends in this little corner of the salad bowl.
