In spring of 2007 I caught up with Marian (or Chef Marian to her TV fans) and Russ Morash, creator of The Victory Garden on PBS, in their home in suburban Boston for a conversation about the pleasures of growing your own food.
CV: How much of your own food are you able to grow in season in Lexington and on how much land?
Russ: Our garden is 75 x 75 feet and, when it was producing at maximum capacity, we grew all our own vegetables.
Marian: At our garden in Nantucket we grow half of our vegetables for a family of eleven.
CV: Is your garden organic or do you use Integrated Pest Management methods?
Russ. Both! We believe that you have to know what the problem is in order to fight the problem. The Colorado potato beetle will affect potatoes if you don’t do something about it. So we treat that organically by using an organic biological agent to control the caterpillar that lays the eggs that causes the beetle to form and devastate the crop. It is rare that we would use any insecticide. When we had fruit trees we used a few hard pesticides because frankly we didn’t know how you could raise fruit without them, particularly if you wanted to grow perfect apples. Back then we rationalized that a perfect apple was an apple without worms now we would argue that a perfect apple is one raised without pesticides.
CV: Does fruit need to be perfect?
Russ: That’s my point exactly. We love bananas. They used to be heavily sprayed but today, once they are pollinated, each staulk is covered by a polythene bag which keeps the bugs from getting in. That’s a strategy that is used by the commercial grower but similar non lethal methods can be used in backyard gardens. For example, Chard or beets cannot be grown here without protection because the leaf miner will attack it and destroy the leaf and thus the potential to grow a good crop. But it is simple to grow the crops under floating row covers, thus keeping the fly from her destiny to lay eggs. Another strategy is to observe and eliminate bugs by hand picking them. The key to bug control is a clean garden: no weeds allowed lots of good compost, and high soil fertility. Healthy plants discourage the bugs.
CV: What does it mean to step out to your garden and pick something fresh for your dinner?
Marian. Well it is wonderful, but my husband is dangerous. He goes out into the garden and picks a lot. He comes in at 5:00 pm with 19 tomatoes, a basket of Swiss chard, , a half peck of new potatoes and 12 zucchinis and expects me to cook them all. He gets carried away.
Russ: The life of a hunter gather is not an easy one. At the moment I have some of the most glorious parsnips. Parsnips are one of the great triumphs over garden misery. They take a long time to get out of the soil. When you sow them, you really need to know where you planted them or they will fool you and come up weeks later.
They have to be grown lean; if they see any commercial fertilizer the roots will fork yet if you are looking for exhibition parsnips you are well advised to prepare the planting holes with buckets of priceless home made compost. They will love it.
Then you must be patient and let them grow throughout the summer and fall into the winter... They need a lot of cold weather to be truly sweet. They especially favor hard freezes which keep the sugars from changing to starch.
Marian: He brought some in two weeks ago and they were just like sugar. In the market when you buy them they are flavorless. A lot has to do with getting them from your garden; they have to winter over. It is a very good plant to grow.
Russ: We don’t long for them in July or September. We are perfectly happy to wait until April. This is key to the way we think gardening should be done: grow things in season and enjoy them in season.
CV: Do you cook meals on the spur of the moment based on what’s in the garden?
Marian: I certainly cook what’s in the garden but it’s not spur of the moment, because you know what is in your garden. I immediately think of a ratatouille in the summer time because the tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, and zucchini are all ready in the garden. The meals do develop from what’s in the garden at any given time.
Russ: Another big advantage is that you know where the product came from. Today more then ever when it’s not only a matter of how they were grown, but how they were harvested and transported, to say nothing of the cost of transporting them and the difficulty of the lives of the workers who pick them. It’s something that people need to be thinking about. The other reason you grow your own is for the taste. It is extraordinarily different. Marian: That is why a farmers’ market is so valuable. There, you are not getting produce trucked in from across the country. You are getting it from local growers. There is a 100% difference in taste from asparagus harvested from local gardens or getting some picked days or weeks earlier from hundreds of miles away. The same is true with strawberries and fresh-dug potatoes.
CV: Where can the novice gardener get help on how to start?
Russ: One of the reasons we started the Victory Garden TV show was because of this question. My father grew a bit in our victory garden during WWII. I got interested in growing vegetables early on but had no training. What little I learned was by trial and error. Because of my many failures growing the wrong things in the wrong soil and the wrong exposure, I wondered if it was possible to find a great gardener to teach us.
I went out and found books on the subject and then I found a wonderful gentleman in Concord, Jim Crockett, who was willing to join us in a television experiment to see if we could explain and demonstrate how to garden on TV. His mantra was “get the soil right and a lot of things will follow from having the soil right.” Good soil has no unpleasant odors but might have indispensable earth worms living in it and making it even better.
As a first-time gardener one would be well advised to avoid certain vegetables that everyone says are easy to grow but are not…Radishes come to mind.
Although they come up quickly they are soon ravished by the cabbot root maggot, a tough bug to control. Moreover, radishes mature quickly and then go quickly into bitter hot spheres that will disappoint you. I prefer to let the pros grow radishes although Lord only knows what’s on them. Until you’ve had some experience, I would recommend you avoid radishes, spinach, beets, or carrots although each is considered easy to grow.
Lettuce, on the other hand is very easy to grow and that which you raise will beat what you can buy in the store . So, it’s other good gardeners, books, the Internet, and even knowledgeable help at garden centers who can be helpful. Find yourself a mentor.
CV: What do you think of buying salad greens in plastic bags?
Marian: I will never buy them. The thing that bothers me is that folks take it for granted that the washed greens have been washed and they throw the leaves into a salad bowl and eat it. Now after this last spinach scare they are now saying wash it regardless.
Russ: I think there are things that they are doing with produce that is not in the best interest of those who wish to protect the food chain.
CV: And your final word?
Marian: Russell’s family started out in Belmont!
Russ: I have seen that meadow over by McLean hospital and if I didn’t have a garden, I would be growing my food there. Gardening is a terrific way to exercise. Down with dumb gardening and up with smart gardening is my final word!
--a shorter version of the interview was published in the Late Summer 2007, Belmont Farmers Market Roots and Sprouts magazine. http://www.belmontfarmersmarket.org/newsletters/2007/newsletter-2007-0809.pdf
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