Last spring, at one of the many fun festivities under the oak tree at Michel-Schlumberger, I overheard a bemused young woman as she wandered through the organic vegetable garden.
“This garden is a mess!”
Ouch. That wasn’t one of the better compliments I’ve received on my gardening but it did get me thinking. And I can kinda see her point. I’ve seen plenty of Sunset Magazine gardens — Perfectly manicured raised beds of color coordinated crops in neat rows. Comparatively, our garden is certainly on the wild side. And what makes a wild garden?
I’m fairly casual about weeds. I try to go after the big, invasive ones before they re-seed. I also clean out the weeds right around the vegetables to reduce competition. But, really, is it worth the time and energy to obsessively pick at every last little weed in the garden? Besides, some of those “weeds” may not be so invasive and may actually provide food and habitat for beneficial insects (plantain is a good example).
My planting rows aren’t perfectly straight and the beds are bumpy. And the sight line of my tomato stakes and cages is certainly no picket fence. What can I say? I’ve never seen too many straight lines in nature.
In any given season there are all sorts of vegetables and herbs in my garden that have bolted and gone to bloom. Most gardeners avidly pinch their herbs to prevent bolting. And most harvest all of their plants before they go to seed. I try to always let a few plants in each crop fully mature to seed. For one thing, beneficial bugs and pollinators LOVE veggie and herb flowers. Right now there is a patch of incredibly beautiful blooming broccoli that is teeming with honeybees, bumble bees, bee flies, tiny wasps, syrphid flies and soldier beetles. These are the good guys and that’s exactly what I want to encourage in my garden. Also, by letting veggies go to seed I’m blessed with all sorts of “volunteers” each season – veggie plants that pop up unexpectedly from seeds set by the previous crop. I suppose some might think it looks messy to have lettuce and cilantro plants popping up among the garlic but I think it looks perfectly natural. Again, look to the wild – not too much orderly segregation of plants species out there in the woods.
In short, my idea of the perfect garden is one that is as wild as possible. I want it to look natural, not sterile and linear. I don’t mean to criticize those gardeners who have perfect little rows of gravel-lined raised redwood planting beds. Everything has its place. Gardening, I think, is a very personal thing. And just as some folks are happiest with a perfectly clean and organized desk there are others (like me) who do just fine with a desk covered with stacks of papers, old junk mail, numerous dried up pens and several empty tea cups. Diversity – you gotta love it.
Natural Farming. Savage Hills. Worms to Wine. All that good stuff. Come on out and get wild.
Tony “Green Thumb” Wasowicz
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Thanks for explaining why you like the “gardens gone wild” instead of gardens ready for a phot shoot. It is important to understand how and why an organic garden grows and that having happy garden critters is just as important.