As soon as dinner was over, I had to go back out into the garden for more lettuce. I thought we had picked enough for dinner and next-day lunches, but the bowl was empty.
Our supper salads are simple enough this time of year, before the garden is giving us cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes or even baby squashes. My friend in the more tropical climes of Saratoga Springs says she’s already harvesting zucchini, but up our way, we’re still a week shy of peas. Still, we’re happy with our bowl of lettuces, wild and cultivated greens and fresh herbs, cut and tossed together.
The kids, who like to organize their plates so that foods don’t touch and then eat by section, polish off their salads first.
“Are you going to eat the rest of your dinner?” I’ll ask the 8-year-old.
“Sure, Mom,” he’ll say. “But first can I have more salad?”
Music to our ears.
The girl, meanwhile, likes identifying flavors. “Did you put mint in the salad? Are these chive blossoms? What’s that lemony taste?”
It was lemon balm.
What I like best about our gardens is feeding the kids good food, and watching as they eat it with relish. There’s something special about eating the food you grow yourself. And we might be hopelessly arrogant, but we are convinced our lettuce is the tenderest, most flavorful lettuce anyone has ever eaten, just as we’re convinced our chickens lay the best eggs on Earth and that our pumpkins cook up into the finest pies and soups the world has ever seen.
Do all gardeners feel that way? It probably has a lot to do with the fact that everything tastes best when it’s fresh, and what could be fresher than a salad that was still growing 10 minutes before supper?
My husband says our food tastes so good because of the soil it grows in, and he’s probably right there too. And soil is what he does, using a simple mathematical formula: ox poop + time = really good soil.
There’s a little more to it. Kitchen compost, wood stove ash and chicken manure are mixed in too, but the oxen are such prolific fertilizer producers that they provide by far the biggest percentage of our compost piles, which are so large they are often named, like mountains. Unlike mountains, they are moved from place to place, turned as they are moved, until they are “finished,” at which point they are like potting soil. Then they get spread on the home gardens and the more distant patches of potatoes, corn and pumpkins.
Well-composted manure contains plenty of the three main chemicals that plants need — nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium — as well as trace elements. We think our ox manure is superior to horse manure, and it’s possible that there is more than just arrogance here. Cattle are more efficient digesters than horses, so their manure contains less weed seed. But we use horse manure too, from a neighbor’s barn. Horse manure has higher nutrient levels than cattle manure, but we make up the difference in quantity. Chicken manure is the highest in nutrients, but needs to be composted really well or it will burn plants. Wood ash helps.
Manure improves soil structure, and can turn sand into soil, and clay into something workable. Our gardens, which were sandy 20 years ago, now boast soil that is black and rich and holds moisture well. We rarely have to water our gardens, except to set in new transplants, and then we just use a watering can.
And our vegetables, and our children, reap the benefits of that improved soil.
Right now that benefit is green — lettuce, spinach, mustard, bok choy, pigweed, pokeweed, mint, oregano and basil — but soon it will come in other colors too. Corn and tomatoes, anyone?
Margaret Hartley is the Gazette’s Sunday and features editor. Greenpoint appears in the Gazette’s print edition Sundays on the Environment page.
Have a question or a topic you’d like addressed on Greenpoint? Add a comment below, or email greenpoint@dailygazette.net.
