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Rebecca :
I'm a big city girl & gardening was the province of my parents in their handkerchief size worn-out London earth. This is your story of your first garden in the lovely coastal town of Santa Cruz in California. Why had you not gardened before then?
Amy :
I moved to Santa Cruz just after college. I'd mostly lived in apartments before then, & I suppose I never had the space, the time or the money. That's not the only reason. I came to California from Texas, & as far as I could tell from my limited Texas experience, gardening involved pushing a lawnmower across an ultra-green lawn in 100° heat!
There wasn't much there to inspire me, although I remember a few exuberant
organic gardens tended by graduate students in Austin where I went for college. There, for the first time, I saw sunflowers, poppies, & corn all growing together in happy confusion. That was the kind of garden I wanted, & that's what I set out to do when I settled in Santa Cruz.
Rebecca :
What is the first thing you would urge someone who is contemplating their first garden do before digging & dropping in their seeds?
Amy :
I know I should advise new gardeners to plan carefully, read up on plants they'd like to grow to make sure they understand their water & sunlight, & to get out the colored pencils & do a little color-coordinating. But the fact is, I didn't do any of that when I planted my first garden, so I can hardly expect anyone else to!
After I finished writing From The Ground Up, I moved to a new home & started a new garden. I thought I'd do better this time -- I made detailed lists of plants I wanted to grow, looked them all up in my Sunset Western Garden Book to make sure they could survive the cool, foggy climate. I even made a Sun Map of the garden -- where the path the sun took along my property & marked the time of day when different parts of the garden went into sun & shade.
But when it came time to start planting -- it was no different than the Santa Cruz garden! I walked into the garden nursery & was utterly charmed by, & unable to resist, all kinds of plants that weren't on my list. When I brought new seedlings home & started to put them in the ground, they didn't always go in the spot I'd marked for them on my plan. They had a mind of their own. They always do.
I talk in the book about the way Cosmos seedlings would just speak to me, demand to be planted in the herb garden or along the back fence with the Sunflowers -- in spite of my plans to the contrary. I always end up scrapping my plans & doing whatever feels right.
I do have one piece of advice to new gardeners. It's an old saying, actually, that goes something like this: If you have a dollar to spend on your garden, spend ninety cents on soil & ten cents on plants. For me, what that means is: If you have a nice blank patch of land, spend the money now & bring in a truck load of compost or manure. It will never be so easier to improve the soil again.
The latest thinking in organic gardening is that there is no real need to do a lot of back-breaking digging. Just spread the thickest layer of good rich compost across your garden that you can afford. Looking back, I hate to think of all the plants I bought & stuck in my awful clay soil, only to watch them wither away & die after just one season. It's all about the dirt, I've decided. When I visit someone's garden, I want to get down on my knees & check out their dirt first thing.
Rebecca :
When we first moved onto this clearcut there wasn't an iota of earth left after those logging machines had had their way. Our first plantings couldn't get beyond the two cotyledons before expiring for want of some good earth. We've been composting ever since & each year have a yurt of the black gold to dig into our beds.
In the Pacific Northwest rain forests, Oxalis is a vividly green ground cover that turns the wintry duff into a brilliant shag carpet each spring, tell us about your Californian Oxalis.
Amy :
Yellow oxalis, also called yellow wood sorrel, is a pretty plant -- when viewed from a distance. I'm perfectly happy to look at a field of it as I'm driving down Highway 1.
The problem is that this plant is so invasive it covered my garden completely each winter, blocking out light and air. My spring bulbs, my young groundcovers like Yarrow & Lanium, & my tender young lettuce & sweet pea seedlings were all consumed by it.
The trouble is that you can't pull it out without stripping a dozen or so new bulbs off the taproot, making it even easier for the plant to reproduce. Really, there is no way to get rid of it, as far as I know. I tried hard to just accept it, in a very Zen way, to just turn the garden over to it for a few months each winter. But it was never easy. I always felt so sloppy with all those out-of-control weeds in my garden. In my new garden, so far, I've seen very little oxalis. It's such a relief.
Rebecca :
Tell us about your composting method.
Amy :
I'm something of a compost addict. The process is so fascinating -- the idea that shredded newspaper, coffee grounds, orange peels & faded roses can be turned into dark rich garden soil. (There I go about the dirt again!) My favorite composting method right now is worm composting. I have a worm bin outside the kitchen door, & hundreds -- I suppose thousands -- of red wigglers eat my morning newspaper, coffee grounds, & kitchen scraps. The worms are a delight too -- they are hard workers, quiet, polite, well-behaved -- the perfect pet! I love to go outside in the morning, lift the lid off the composter, & watch them working their way through a banana peel or a carrot top.
They leave behind their earthworm castings (manure), which I add to the garden, & a liquid that I drain off to use as a fertilizer. Of course, the worms came with me when I moved from Santa Cruz. I just wrapped their bin in a few trash bags, put them in the trunk, & drove them up north to my new home. They are well-traveled worms: how many worms can say they've been across the Golden Gate Bridge & toured the wine country?
I also have a big black plastic composter that I use for big stuff like garden trimmings, & food the earthworms don't like as much, like onion skins & orange peel. I also grow crops just for compost: fava, vetch & clover all grow quickly in the winter & make a good compost just turned under right where they grew.
Rebecca :
What joys can neighbors offer & what surprising gifts do tourists?
Amy :
Gardening is certainly a community experience. I don't think I realized that when I got started. But when you're out in your front yard ripping up a section of lawn, people are bound to stop by & want to talk. I got to be good friends with my neighbors because of our shared interest in gardening. I took extra produce to my neighbors Charlie & Beverly, who lived on one side of my house, & for Mike & Kelly on the other side, I grew cherry tomatoes extra close to the fence so they'd have some right there on their patio.
Tourists were another story entirely. I resented them at first; they left their trash in my garden, they were always knocking on the door asking to borrow money or use my phone, & they seemed to just generally take over the town every summer. I lived right down by the beach, next to the historic Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with its old wooden roller coaster, so I saw more than my share of tourists. But in the book I write about how over time, the tourists helped me to appreciate my life in this picturesque seaside town. They envied my garden & my little bungalow by the beach, & I liked seeing my life through their eyes. I grew a lot of classic California beach plants, like Bougainvillea & Mexican Sage, to live up to the tourists' expectations.
Rebecca :
Tell us about your first salad.
Amy :
I didn't have much luck with vegetables at first. Remember, this is Santa Cruz! Just south of my house is an area of farmland known as “America's Salad Bowl”. They call it that because most of the artichokes, garlic, lettuce, & strawberries grown in the country come from there! So it was a little silly to think I couldn't grow a simple head of lettuce, but I was battling snails, aphids, & -- once again -- poor soil. It took a few months & a lot of compost, but I eventually got my lettuce, & my husband & I had a real feast. It was quite a triumph, eating something I'd grown in the garden for the first time.
Rebecca :
We await our first lettuces with undisguised impatience -- we know what ambrosia it will be -- nothing like the stuff you get in stores! I know that each season brings different flowers & each becomes a favorite until it is blown -- are there any flowers you actually don't like?
Amy :
Well, I devoted half a chapter in the book to the subject of roses -- the roses that I inherited from the previous tenant & was completely unwilling to take care of. They were ugly, disease-ridden, planted in the wrong spot, & unable to produce a single flower. Maybe it makes me sound like a bad gardener, but I admit -- I cut them down. All the way to the ground. They were impossible to get rid of, though -- they kept coming back, like a weed.
Somebody told me recently that she cried when she read that chapter of the book. Rose lovers are serious about their passion for roses. When I left Santa Cruz, I bought an old Victorian house that came with several roses. I am trying -- reluctantly -- to take care of them. They seem to go with the house. I even added a few of my own -- Lagerfeld & Just Joey.
I have to admit that I'm not very fond of bedding plants like Pansies & Impatiens either. I like plants that get tall & wild. I also like plants that will stick around from year to year, or at least re-seed. I usually walk right past those colorful racks of “instant color” at the nursery because they remind me of shopping center parking lots, where plants are put in each spring & ripped out & replaced each fall. That's not my kind of gardening.
Rebecca :
We're pretty water logged up here in the Northwest -- Lavender has been known to rot in one summer when the sun didn't shine more than 30 days in 3 months. So, store-bought flowers drown more often than not. I encourage the wild ones & what a change that makes. While I'm not a vegetarian I do cringe when I must ward off a slug invasion, as a confirmed vegetarian, how did you solve your snail problem?
Amy :
I toss them into the street & let other people run over them with their cars. I know, it's awful, & sometimes it leaves a rather nasty mess in the street, but I just can't stand to squish them myself. They're the worst garden pest I've ever had to deal with. At least aphids can be controlled with a squirt of dish soap & a few hungry ladybugs. But the only thing I could think of that would eat a snail would be a duck, & I just wasn't ready to start enlisting ducks in my war against the insects.
Rebecca :
Why are visitors important to a gardener?
Amy :
I get really crazy when visitors come to my garden. I run around pulling weeds & buying big, blooming, impressive plants that I can't afford. Gardening is such a public act -- it's meant to be shared -- but it always makes me self-conscious to take a visitor around my garden. The place never seems to live up to my expectations of what it should be, although my guests are always quite gracious about it.
Rebecca :
What holiday is celebrated on August 8th?
Amy :
National Sneak Some Zucchini On Your Neighbor's Porch Night! I always grow at least a dozen varieties of tomatoes and 4-5 kinds of squash, so my neighbors can expect to see a little bag on their porch this summer. If you want to observe this holiday yourself, remember that zucchini & squash must be snuck onto the porch in the dark of night. If you ring the doorbell & ask whether your neighbors could use some extra veggies, they might say no & spoil all the fun.
Rebecca :
What next are you digging up?
Amy :
Well, as I've said, I've moved to a new garden. It was hard to leave my garden behind in Santa Cruz, after I'd worked in it for six years & written a book about it, but I was a renter there & I guess every gardener has had to leave a rented garden behind at some point.
I have just started planting my new garden in Humboldt County, just south of the Oregon border on the California coast. It's a little cooler & foggier here, but I've got much more space than I did back in Santa Cruz. In spite of the weather, I'm growing twenty varieties of tomatoes this summer.
Rebecca :
I'll let you get back to your garden now, Amy, & thank you for a delightful read & Interview.
For you first time gardeners -- do check out my review of Amy Stewart's From the Ground Up & grab yourself a copy from Amazon.Com.
(Published June 17, 2001)
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