Written by Julie Cerny, TSC Upstate Garden Manager
I’ve always thought of gardens as co-creations of nature and people, a balance of the wild and the cultivated. Nature is busy maintaining ecological systems, and we’re busy engaging with those systems—at TSC, growing a garden for young people to learn in and eat from. It’s a collaborative process.
An inescapable part of that process is that every year, in every garden, you have wins and losses. This year we have the most beautiful garlic the garden has ever produced. And, dare I say, the cabbage was perfect. Last year the bush beans (green, yellow and purple) were prolific; this year a groundhog mowed the seedlings to the ground. We’ll be lucky if we get a handful. The carrots flourished last year, and this spring two rounds of seedlings succumbed to hungry mice. At last, the third planting is looking vibrant and healthy.
This unusually hot summer has been great for tomatoes, peppers, melons and cucumbers, but more challenging for our leafy greens (like lettuce and chard) and root crops (like radishes and turnips), which often get bitter or tough quickly when temperatures are high. The best workaround we have for this is simply making sure the plants have all the water they need.
When we’re cooking in our outdoor kitchen, we’re co-creating, too—with the ingredients and with each other—adapting to what’s in-season or to our visitors’ taste buds. Just like in the garden, we’re finding workarounds in the kitchen. Peppers not the most beautiful? We can blister them in the wood-fired oven. Not enough cherry tomatoes for the salad? Let’s throw some ground cherries in there instead. Lettuce a little wilty? Let’s soak it in ice water for a few minutes to help it perk back up.
Losses in the garden—whether by nature or human error—can be heartbreaking at times, but if we can be clever in our co-creating, we can still craft wildly delicious things. Few things bring me (and I think a lot of other people) greater joy than eating a meal that nature and I have prepared together. I hope the same joy finds its way to you this harvest season.
Happy growing and cooking,
Julie
