On likely the coldest day of the year, my mind is on spring. This past week I received a few orders of seeds for Yestermorrow’s small kitchen garden - we purchased from Fedco, True Love Seeds, and the Experimental Farm Network. These will join a battalion of seeds I’ve saved and bred for the past few years while working on the coast of Maine. 

This will be my first year intensively gardening at Yestermorrow after a relatively fallow summer of 2022. As the primary gardener and one of the staff chefs, I’ve approached the garden and its productivity as a design problem, informed by my experience in farm-to-table dining and small-scale market gardening. To grow more than fun and folly, we need to ask: What can our site reasonably produce? What do we need it to provide, given our cooking habits and financial restrictions, and our aesthetic goals? How much time can I invest in a side project, and what activities will that rule out? 

The following are some opening thoughts on building out the garden (again).

When shopping for seed, it is easy and understandable to get lost in the excitement. Wild tomato relatives with iridescent skin, landrace squashes, and ancient herbs catch my eye, and yet I know that the trade-off for my initial excitement is less meaningful interaction with local food for Yestermorrow students. If our aesthetic goal is to provide students with food (and somewhat selfishly, to get the best produce we can into our chefs’ hands) and to reduce the carbon and plastics footprint of our food consumption, then we need to produce as much food as is reasonably possible. That means heavy producing vegetables, and the iridescent tomatoes will have to wait.

On the other hand, there’s an argument to be made for growing with a bit of flair. Culinary herbs, carefully selected, are a great place to start. A high-yielding basil, a patch of dill, and a long row of parsley won’t give us much caloric value, but they can significantly cut costs or even surpass what we would otherwise have been able to afford, while giving us something really luxurious to cook with. Strong-smelling domesticated herbs are also great team players in the garden, providing chemical defenses without strong competition for resources. 

There are other considerations too, which continue to modify our best approach. For example, our garden infrastructure currently lacks a good wash station, our kitchen is pressed for cold storage, and I lack hours in the week. So, I’ve opted for above-ground, cut-and-come-again produce like green beans, kale, tomatoes, and summer squashes, rather than carrots and potatoes, which require much more of the specific resources we lack. 

Of course, the most important thing for a gardener is to know when it’s appropriate to rip something out of the ground. Perhaps my plan has vital flaws - is there enough air circulation and morning sun for so many leafy greens to escape late-season mildew problems? Will last year’s abandoned squash have primed the squash and cucumber beetle populations? Are a few pairs of hands, with limited hours in the workday, enough to supply the kitchen for what we put in?