“I'm very happy if I can have a day where I can do something in the garden,” said Jeremy Gulley of Waitsfield, “any day is fine, there's always something to do in the garden.”
Garry, a baker from Red Hen, Middlesex, tends a plot that is 140ft long and 50ft wide, taking up about a quarter of his garden. This year he's growing “common garden veggies” such as carrots, parsnips, peas, beans, sweetcorn and a range of other fruit and vegetables. Garry's favourite is chilli peppers, and his two children love strawberries, which he says are “very ephemeral”.
“Over the years, I've narrowed it down to just what I really want to grow and eat. Just because I know how to grow it doesn't mean I overproduce,” he said.
Cultivation and processing
Gary started a vegetable garden with his wife, Sally Kendall, a local massage therapist, when they bought their Waitsfield home in 2008. They tilled the land and planted cover crops in preparation for the next growing season. “We were really excited to finally have our own garden space,” he says. “We love nurturing plants, watching them grow, helping them grow, and just being there and doing whatever it is that we need to do.”
Gulley had previously worked on a farm in Colorado, and Kendall was introduced to agriculture and gardening while working at a Farm and Wilderness Foundation summer camp in Plymouth, Vermont. When they first moved to the Valley in 2003, they helped revive Warren's Rootswork Community Garden. They tended plots there for about two years and considered moving into commercial farming. “But we both decided we loved our day jobs,” Gulley says.
Garry does most of the gardening work, while Kendall does most of the processing. “Once we get to the harvesting and processing stage, I lose interest,” he says. “I'd be really missed without Sally. She spends a lot of her time making sure all this stuff is utilized.”
Kendall blanches and freezes bags of kale, cans salsa with peppers and tomatoes, and makes what Gulley calls “kimkraut,” a fermented kimchi made from shredded cabbage like sauerkraut. Gulley's favorite recipe using ingredients Kendall makes from her garden is beet salad with an onion vinaigrette. “That's the main reason we grow beets,” Gulley says.
Act like a bee
Speaking to The Valley Reporter from the parking lot of Vee's Flowers and Garden Shop, where he was on his way to buy some seedlings, Johnno Landsman shared some fun ways to cook with vegetables grown in his own garden.
One of his dishes is a variation on the Indian dish saag paneer, using ramps instead of the more common spinach. Landsman has been growing ramps on the hillsides of his Waitsfield property for the past few years. To make saag, he simmers the ramps with tomatoes, butter, and spices like coriander and cumin, and adds cubes of paneer (a fresh cheese).
The rest of his garden, which stretches across the back yard, features four rows of vegetable patches surrounded by seven raised beds planted with fruit trees and flowers.
Landsman loves flowers. He plants about 150 daffodil bulbs in his garden each year, and he also experiments indoors with crossbreeding varieties of amaryllis, a bulb that takes 12 years to flower. He uses cotton swabs to transfer pollen from plant to plant, collecting new seeds that germinate. “They basically act like little bees,” Landsman says, “but indoors.”
Ordered Chaos
Outside, Landsman said his garden feels like “ordered chaos, with things I can control and things I can't control.” He said he likes tracking the development of plants over time because “there's beauty in the gradual change. Watching things grow, die, live, and how they live.”
Growing up in Illinois, he had always been interested in plants, but his current garden, which he started after purchasing his Waitsfield home in 2016, was the beginning of a more intentional gardening spree. “It had the feel of a once-beautiful yard that hadn't been touched in 15 years. It was a tangled mess,” Landsman said. He later realized that in his efforts to clean up the mess, he'd uprooted some gorgeous perennials. “I deeply regret removing some of the peonies,” he lamented.
Gardening isn't just beautiful and fun. It also brings challenges. For Gulley, the biggest challenge has been dealing with woodchucks and adapting to parts of the garden that have become shaded by growing trees and shrubs. He's had to return parts of the garden to grass and create pollinator beds that don't need much light.
Landsman said she's lost some of her favorite plants; last year, insects ate away at the roots of a columbine flower. “There are so many moments when you get attached to your plants, but not all of them survive,” Landsman said. “That part is painful, but it's a good lesson in impermanence and being part of the world.”
