Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers

National Gardening Association Rookies of the Year

by Jack Ruttle

Driving through Eileen and John Lehner's neighborhood in Tyrone, a mountain town in central Pennsylvania, you can't miss the vegetable garden. It's out in front of the house, perched about 10feet above street level on a rocky outcrop topped with fill dirt left by the builders. The sun shines on it like a spotlight through an opening in the oak forest that dominates the area. The Lehners made that opening in the tall trees, and they made the entire garden on the ledge from scratch, all in just one season.

Eileen and John started felling trees in late winter. Then they tilled and retilled the hard-packed earth in the 30- by 70-foot plot, and worked in 66 cubic feet of peat moss, a pickup load of leaf mold and another of well-rotted manure. After that they shoveled the soil into a series of raised beds and planted. In midsummer, when I visited, I could admire the vigor of their tomatoes, beets, onions and peppers. The garden looked professional, and the plants were obviously happy.

What drove this couple to such Herculean efforts to put some vegetables on their table? An abysmal flop the year before, that's what.

"If I had read even one book, I would have known better," says Eileen. Her chief hobby is cooking. French, Italian, Chinese -- you name the country and she likes the cuisine. To get a bit more control of her culinary ingredients, Eileen began canning in large quantities. Knowing absolutely nothing about gardening, she bought bushels of tomatoes, onions, peppers and more to make tomato sauces, chutneys and relishes of all kinds. Several seasons later,she recognized the problem of getting enough of the right vegetables at the right time. That led her to the idea of growing her own.

Behind the house there was a small patch of open ground among the oak trees. The Lehners surrounded it with railroad ties, added topsoil from the yard and planted lots of tomatoes. The plants just sat there, getting more and more spindly as the weeks passed. The spot was completely shaded -- not a single shaft of direct sunlight touched the plants all day long. But by the time Eileen figured out the problem, it was too late to remedy it. "The next year we covered the patch with concrete to make a basketball court for the boys," she says. "We were hiding our gardening disgrace."

The garden bug bites

The gardening bug had bitten hard, however. And having discovered the source of all their problems, the Lehners began a crash course in gardening to make sure their next attempt would be successful. They became devoted viewers of "The Victory Garden" and ordered a seed catalog and several magazines, including National Gardening. That started what Eileen calls a mail-order avalanche that speeded them along their horticultural adventure. Before winter was over they knew exactly what to do and had planned their strategy.

Even before tree-clearing began, John built a seed-starting rig powered by fluorescent shop lights in the basement. Later he put together a cold frame and a three-bin composter, all based on plans he saw in the Victory Garden book. In late winter Eileen began planting vegetable and marigold seeds, and her second attempt at gardening was underway.

"I started lots of seedlings, as many as I had room for because I didn't know what would grow," she says. That meant a dozen tomatoes each of six different varieties, and the same for two kinds of eggplant and four pepper varieties. She also started broccoli and Chinese cabbage, some early lettuce, several dozen marigolds, pickling onions and about 20 kinds of herbs. As plants outgrew the area under lights, she moved them out to the cold frame, making room for more seedlings under the lights.

Outdoors, the Lehners covered most of the beds with black plastic. The edges of the plastic were buried in shallow trenches around the bed. "We never considered not using black plastic,"Eileen told me. "Spring comes late in this area, and a lot of people we know garden with it. Tomatoes are always grown under plastic around here. And our books told us it's good for getting crops early and holding down weeds. We're really happy with the way it's worked."

The first transplants to go outside were early lettuce Chinese cabbage and broccoli planted in month. Her broccoli transplants were spindly and weak, so she purchased replacements.She also found some pepper varieties that intrigued her at the garden center, and bought a few of those.

Indoors, Eileen kept transplanting tomato seedlings into larger pots. Since she had so many, she decided to take a chance and set out six of them during the first week in May -- two weeks before the average last frost date. All the early crops, including the leek transplants, were protected by clear plastic over wire hoops or with Ree may floating row covers.

Indoors, Eileen kept transplanting tomato seedlings into Indoors, after the Fourth of July," Eileen says. "That's extremely early around here. Our neighbor, who is an experienced gardener, picked his first tomatoes in early August, and I was already canning bythen. Of course it helps that we had more than 70 plants."

Top crops

The Lehners are very pleased with the garden's progress, especially the salad crops. The day I visited, there were young lettuce plants, along with some fall brassicas, growing under Ree may draped over wire hoops to protect the plants from blistering August heat. Those plants promised salads up to about Thanksgiving with a little help from the plastic covers again at the end of theseason. Eileen also had a vigorous stand of red radicchio for a fall crop and some Belgian endive to be dug in October and forced in boxes of peat moss in the basement in midwinter.

Eileen felt well rewarded by the canning crops, too. She had already put up vast amounts of spaghetti sauce, pizza topping and pickles, and the end was nowhere in sight for the tomatoes andpeppers. Seventy-two plants is a lot, she knows, but so far she's been able to use all that she's harvested. San Marzano has proven itself superior to Roma for her purposes, so next year she'll replace Roma with another canning variety. And she'll grow less eggplant -- maybe one in a whiskey barrel, instead of 11 plants.

Fennel was a flop, bolting to seed before she could harvest stalks of good eating quality. Eileen knows now not to plant it inspring but to wait until midsummer, so it can mature in the cool moist weather it likes. She made the same beginner's mistake with curly endive -- the spring crop was just too bitter to eat, and shehad planted a lot of it. But those were the only true disapppointments in their first year of real gardening.

"I expected I'd reach a point when the novelty had worn off and I'd get tired of the garden," says Eileen, "but it hasn't happened yet, and now I don't think it will. I suspect it's because with a garden like this, with good soil and the plastic and all, it never gets away from you. There's no drudgery out here. Right after we tilled it we had to pull a lot of grass that kept coming up. But that's over with now and we basically don't have any weeding.

"Originally I wanted the garden out back where it wouldn't become a weedy eyesore. But now I wouldn't have it any other way --it's right outside my door! If I've got 10 minutes to spare, I can come out here and do something useful and relax at the same time.The neighbors also love it. They walk by every evening and stop totake a look and talk. People I've never met stop me in the stores and tell me how much they like the garden.

John feels much the same way about it. Starting the garden took a lot of hard work, first clearing and then preparing thesoil. And it took a little money, too: $50 for the chicken-wire fencing, $50 for the plastic, $110 for the peat moss and another $100 or so for the composter and cold frame. But the big outlays of both time and money are over now, he says. And he anticipates settling into the quieter pleasures of the garden.

"The feeling of sitting down to a meal of things you've produced yourself is wonderful," John says. "But having a garden to work in is great, too. Say you've had a bad day at work, you can come home and start futzing around in the garden, and pretty soon you're thoroughly relaxed. That's something you just can't put a price on."

Jack Ruttle is senior editor at National Gardening.

Copyright NGA

Reprinted with permission HouseNet, Inc.

Back to Home Improvement Preview Lawn And Garden Preview Home Decorating Shopping Center