The Vegetable Garden

The Roberts Garden

Imagine that you never again purchase tomatoes, onions or garlic. Imagine trading garlic for wine. Imagine descending into your root cellar to grab a jar of homemade chutney or perhaps, you're fresh out of Kim Chee, sauerkraut, pickles or jam…your root cellar answers the call. Our forebears provided for themselves; now a new generation of sustainability-directed gardeners tills fertile soil. "It's fun," said this urban vegetable gardener, "and we know where our food comes from (mostly from seeds)…I want to demonstrate what can be done."

But it's hard work indeed to build retaining walls to level the property, transform heavy clay into arable soil with horse manure, compost, worm castings, and green manure. (winter crops of nitrogen-rich fava beans, vetch, wheat and/or clover are later tilled asunder).

There is no formal design here because "everything is moved so many times." "Everything" includes; 30 heirloom tomato plants, herbs, berries, apples, peppers, eggplant, onions, garlic, cabbage, chard, Charentais melons, rhubarb, figs, olives, artichokes and on and on. Soaker hoses, buried three inches below a straw-manure-sawdust mulch, irrigate the beds. Everything outside the fence doesn't get watered. Conserving water and feeding the soil are the big focus here.

The worm bin, garden shed and fence are from recycled materials. Even the roses (yes flowers co-exist with the edibles) and dahlias have been rescued from other sites. The parking strips, shaded by Crimson King Maples, are chock full of grasses, asters, hollyhocks, crocosmia, sedums, hardy geraniums and lavender. The cunning horseradish tries to dominate these drought tolerant standbys.

Egged on by the success of the veggie garden, chickens moved in this year.