Bookish Gardener: Ratatouille Garden

I'll be gardening edibles this year in three new, small (four foot squared) raised beds. Madison has a great farmer's market, so I'll limit the home vegetable garden to things that taste appreciably better when just plucked off the vine (or so to speak), that don't take up too much garden space for the yield, and that I'm enthusiastic about eating. The short list: tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini--ratatouille! Round out the list with lettuces, chard, endive, scallions, shallots, pole beans, okra, and cucumber. I'll also be tucking in ornamentals here and there. I'll leave the indoor seed starting on most of these for future years when I know what I'm doing; this year, I'll try to pick up as many transplants as possible from the spring sale at Seed Savers Exchange's store in Madison.

Since I'm new to this aspect of gardening, I'm (as per usual) stoking my enthusiasm and quelling my anxiety by scouring the used bookstores. My growing stack (pardon the pun):

Step by Step Organic Vegetable Gardening: The Gardening Classic Revised and Updated. Shepherd Ogden. HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. ISBN 0-06-016668-1.

Making Vegetables Grow. Thalassa Cruso. Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. ASIN 039449783X (hardcover).

Square Foot Gardening. Mel Bartholomew. Rodale Press, 1981. ISBN 0-87857-340-2 (hardcover).

Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding! Patricia Lanza. Rodale Press, 1998. ISBN 0-87596-795-7 (hardcover).

Crockett's Victory Garden. James Underwood Crockett. Little, Brown and Company, 1977. ASIN 0316161209.

I'm working my way through these books, hoping to be able to synthesize their useful parts without ending up with too much of a Frankenstein's monster. I'm enjoying and learning a lot from each of them in its own way, but I was stopped dead in my tracks when I picked up The Epicurean Gardener by John F. Adams. For me, this hits the same sweet-spot as Henry Mitchell's writing. It's funny, punny, full of know-how and fully down-to-earth, philosophical without an iota of preciousness or pretentiousness, and brutally honest and caustically opinionated—which, to my mind, renders it utterly trustworthy. And, by the way, it's also beautifully written. Here's Adams, having a little fun with a well-meaning gardening publication of the USDA:

Consider these instructions for planting horseradish:

["]In planting, make furrows 3 to 5 inches deep. Plant the cuttings with the tops all in one direction in the row, dropping a cutting every 24 inches. As the cutting is dropped, draw a little soil over the lower end of it with your foot and tamp firmly. After all cuttings are dropped, they are covered with soil to slightly above ground level (to allow for soil settling), being sure that the soil is firmly in contact with the cutting.["] Gardening for Food and Fun. The Yearbook of Agriculture. 1977 U.S. Department of Agriculture, p. 243.

What this means is, "Plant cuttings 3 to 5 inches deep, 24 inches apart." So awkwardly is it written with its shift in tense and vacillation in person that I had to read it several times to figure that much out. With this much information—if you need this much—you can grow horseradish until its cultivation is prohibited by some other agency of the U.S. Government. Actually this Department of Agriculture publication uses an additional three pages to discuss the proper home garden cultivation of this pungent condiment.

Clearly the expert assigned to do this segment of the Yearbook felt he or she had some information to pass on and a certain amount of space to use up. To use up space the author began to become a little stern and uncompromisingly exact in the information, implying a kind of superiority in the exactness and a false importance to the significance of the instruction. I have seen no recorded instance where a planting of horseradish has failed. I think if you were merely to pronounce the word horseradish with a clear intonation above a spot of soil, horseradish would germinate there spontaneously in a few days. What this horticultural bureaucrat should have done to fill the space, of course, was to tell a couple of interesting stories about the history of horseradish and its cultivation—magical properties attributed to it, what cultures consider it an aphrodisiac, and one or two particularly brutal murders committed with it. With that information the space would have been read gladly, with no less instruction or decreased likelihood of success.

The Epicurean Gardener. John F. Adams. E. P. Dutton, 1988. ISBN 0-525-24597-9.

Comments

Square Foot Gardening is a wonderful book, one of my favorite of that type. Great advice for vegetable gardens. The rest I am unfamiliar with, but I will have on my list to check out now.:)

Posted by: Alicia | March 07, 2004 at 01:51 PM

Have you gone to Amazon and looked up Adams' other books? Guerrilla Gardening and Two Plus Two equals Minus Seven are what's in my library's system, so that's what I'm going to start with. Putting any writer in company with Henry Mitchell is high praise indeed, but the reviews in amazon don't agree with your assessment of that book. All the more reason to check it out for myself.

Posted by: Kathy | March 09, 2004 at 03:09 PM

I'm very interested in tracking down some of his other writing. It'll be interesting to see if it's of the same caliber. In the meantime, I'm really enjoying The Epicurean Gardener. Since I can't post all of the excerpts that "bang the gong" for me without running afoul of copyright "fair use" rules, I've had to subject my poor hubby to a lot of read alouds.

Posted by: Bookish Gardener | March 09, 2004 at 04:35 PM