Editorial Content - Growing Your Own
Growing Your Own By Deborah Madison
When Victory Gardens were called for during World War II, I imagine it wasn't that difficult for either the man or woman of the family to tear up a lawn and plant vegetables. People had the knowledge to do so in hand, then. But imagine if our government asked us to respond to the crisis of global warming, diminishing oil and poor health by planting vegetable gardens. I suspect that reactions would be, "Don't know how! Don't have time! Don't have space! Don't want to!" But growing our own food could be a good thing for us, and this piece is to tell you about one man's garden here on the edge of Santa Fe. The celeriac salad ringed with thin slices of sweet carrots was one of the dishes on the holiday table. It was made by Jean Pierre Maillard, a lean, wiry fellow who, in addition to being a chef trained in his native Switzerland, is also a builder, a traveler, an inventor, a man who captains his own boat around the Caribbean and who is building an airplane in his workshop. He takes on the things he does without the benefit (or burden) of doing so as a member of a group. Quietly independent, Jean Pierre lives what others often dream about. One of the things he does is garden.
"So, did you really grow this celery root yourself?" I asked him, only half-expecting him to say that he had. After all, snow was falling as we spoke. Not only had he grown it, and the carrots, too, but he also had more roots in the ground waiting to be dug. By the time I visited Jean Pierre around New Year's, the severe cold had finished the salad greens--there were none at the farmers' market then, either--but tiny seedlings were just emerging on the floor of the greenhouse, the beginning of spring salads, turnips, mache and other cool weather vegetables. It was a New Year's garden, sparse, with the old plants running out but promising with seedlings.
Apparently one doesn't have to be born to gardening. It wasn't a big part of Jean Pierre's childhood, except when his father gave him a little plot to till along with packets of seeds for parsley and radishes. "I was six or seven years old, and I remember the magic of planting a seed and watching it grow," Jean Pierre recalls. But the urge to garden didn't really take hold until he arrived in Santa Fe in l979.
You might think that someone who wants to grow food would choose a piece of land that is more or less flat. (Good soil would be nice, too.) But Jean Pierre chose to build on an extremely steep slope that was pretty much devoid of soil.
"I thought I'd never be able to garden here," he says, but after almost thirty years, his garden is so well established that to the naïve eye it looks utterly at home and even easily doable. However, it took a lot of toil to get it to this point-- digging the shallow beds on side of the hill, bringing in soil, manure and compost to fill them; manipulating rocks into walls, digging areas for composting and holes for trees, and finally building an enviable automated drip system.
This little garden, with its little greenhouse, myriad fruit trees, grape arbor and small vegetable plots, is designed for one or two people to eat from. It's a home garden, not a farm.
"And it's not cost effective," Jean Pierre is quick to admit, "though maybe that will change with the cost of oil. The thing is, once you've gardened, it's hard to go back to the store. It redefines freshness and flavor. The quality is superior, plus you have the joy in the process."
Perhaps it's the joy in the process that sets the home gardener apart from the farmers market shopper. There is joy in the market too, but let's face it, it's in good part the joy of people consuming. Gardening is a more creative and demanding endeavor. Of course, the farmers market offers foods and social opportunities that no other place does, but we don't discover the magic of planting a seed and watching it grow there.
Not everyone wants to do that, but many do, if nurseries, garden clubs, and seed catalogues are any indication of interest. Catalogues are also filled with every device imaginable to give gardening structure, but looking over Jean Pierre's little beds, arbors, greenhouse, and courtyard, it's clear that everything there has been crafted from need, imagination, and goods on hand, including the outdoor stove for baking, the grape arbor, and the grey water system, which has reduced his water consumption by 65 percent. He also saves his own seeds from season to season. Witnessing that level of self-sufficiency in an era where everything is hired out was alone inspiring!
So what does Jean Pierre in fact grow on his mountainside? For starters, potatoes, garlic, Italian heirloom red onions, celeriac, turnips, beets, carrots, squash, pumpkin, lettuce, chard and other greens, broccoli, apples (six kinds), quince, grapes, pears (two varieties), cauliflower, tomatoes, cucumbers, leeks, green beans, shell beans, shallots, summer squash, Jerusalem artichokes, ginger (!), chile, peppers, rhubarb and asparagus. Of these fruits and vegetables, Jean Pierre grows several varieties of each, and he is pretty sure that he's forgotten certain things, like the Brussels sprouts, "every kind of herb" and the radicchio I spy on the greenhouse floor. All in all, it's a generous array. Someday Jean Pierre would like to grow his tobacco as well as his food. And why not?
For those who doubt the possibilities of a winter garden, when I visited in January, Jean Pierre had just eaten his last cauliflower, harvested his final leeks and enjoyed the last of the tomatoes. In the 8x10 greenhouse, which, Jean Pierre insists, "will feed a man for a year", celery, carrots, and radicchio were hanging on. Lettuce seeds were starting to sprout. Under the row cover the leathery shoulders of celery roots and beets could be seen resting above the soil, along with a broccoli plant and a few greens. And indoors were jars of canned apricots and peaches, bottled white Concord grape juice (the birds ate all the Pinot grapes), potatoes, pumpkins, apples and dried beans. "There would have been more," JP explained, "had I known I would be here this winter," but it seemed like plenty to me. This was not a fanatical display of gardening prowess. There was no pantry crammed with hundreds of jars of indicating super-heroic efforts in the garden. Rather, Jean Pierre's modest pantry suggested a practical and even fairly relaxed approach to feeding oneself year around.
When I asked Jean Pierre what he looked forward to eating from his garden next, he answered immediately, "Those wonderful salads, and they'll be ready in six weeks!" The chervil, baby wild arugula, mizuna, butter lettuces and mache that will make up Jean Pierre's salad mix are what bring the magic back into play. There's nothing more pleasing or delicious than eating your own mix of herbs and greens (rather than the eternal bag of Spring Mix), or going out for some asparagus stalks for dinner, or lifting an apricot from tree to mouth. It's hard to imagine ever being blasé about the miracle of food that has thrived under your watch.
In his book, Hungry Planet, which garnered the James Beard Book-of the-Year Award in 2007, Peter Menzel interviews an Okinawan woman named Matsu, whose mother is over 100 years old. Matsu, who grows her own vegetables, finds it impossible to comprehend that there are people who don't grow their own food, and that there are people know nothing about agriculture! What she doesn't grow herself, Matsu buys at her local co-op. Now I would never suggest that home gardens replace the small farms that supply our wonderful farmers markets, and I suspect that most home gardens wouldn't succeed. Farmers, after all, know what they're doing, and a lot of us gardeners are amateurs busy with jobs. Do farmers think, when they sell us tomato starts, that we're really going to have such a success that we will never come back to the market? Surely not! But when we talk so much about eating locally, reducing our food miles, and our desire for food that is utterly wholesome, then a home garden might well be something to consider, even if you grow only one or two things. As an extra bonus, know that gardening burns calories and tones fleshy limbs, saving that drive to the gym. And by the way, the greatest longevity is found not in the U.S., but on Okinawa where homegrown vegetables reign and the soil is difficult, like it is here.
