A Life in the Garden by Barbara Damrosch

A Life in the Garden by Barbara Damrosch

This book came out in 2024, and the subtitle is Tales and Tips for Growing Food in Every Season.

The New York Botanical Garden's Plant Talk perfectly captured Barbara's essence when they called her "the Julia Child of gardening."

And indeed, just as Julia demystified French cooking for American homes, Barbara has made sustainable, small-scale gardening accessible to all of us.

This new hardcover is divided into five thoughtful parts: Why I Grow Food, Where to Start, The Garden Year, Sharing the Garden, and What to Grow.

Barbara takes us through everything from garden geometry to the secrets of growing perfect tomatoes, all with what The Seattle Times calls "the snap of a good snow pea and the spice of an old rose."

Let me share a passage from Chapter 5 that perfectly captures Barbara's ability to tackle universal gardening challenges with both wisdom and wit:

Among gardeners, soil envy abounds.

"Try living on glacial moraine," one will grumble. "Millions of years ago, a receding glacier casually dropped rocks all over my yard, leaving me to dig them up and haul them away. No sooner do I do that than evil forces push up more from below."

"You think you have troubles," whines another. "My soil is sandy, so it doesn't hold water and nutrients well. The corn is as high as an elephant's toenail in summers if we don't get rain."

"That's nothing," wails a third. "Job had better soill than mine. Have you ever tried to till gumbo clay? When it's too wet, it's like glue. When it's too dry, it can form an impenetrable crust, cracked like the surface of an inhospitable planet and I need a jackhammer to dig the parsnips."
The fact is, though, that every type of soil texture, based on the size of its mineral particles, has its virtues. Sandy soil, which is made of mineral particles 0.05 to 2.0 mm, warms up fast in spring, is easy to dig, and drains well after rain. Carrots love it. Clay, with its smaller particles (less than 0.002 mm), tends to be fertile, holding onto moisture and soluble nutrients in times of drought, to the delight of peas and beans. Silt, whose particles are 0.002 to 0.05 mm, is in between. Even soil with lots of visible rocks in it has its good points.

Once I followed my friend Deborah's pigs through some oak woods while she showed me their foraging habits. "There," she said, pointing to a favorite, stony patch. "Stones hold
the sun's heat well, producing tasty roots, and luring worms and other soil life that the pigs love." Maybe that explains how my own granite-strewn garden produces hardy crops so well in late fall. You must make the best of your soil's texture...

Isn't that just perfectly Barbara?

The way she takes something as potentially dry as soil composition and turns it into an engaging conversation?

As Daniel Hoffman, our 22nd United States Poet Laureate, noted,

She makes kitchen gardening an imaginative experience.

The New York Times Style Magazine didn't hesitate to crown her

The Queen of organic growing... a human search engine when it comes to questions about gardening and cooking.

Drawing from her decades of experience at Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine, where she and her husband Eliot Coleman have created a nationally recognized model of small-scale sustainable agriculture, Barbara shares insights that, as Booklist notes, make this

a wonderfully informed how-to guide... cleverly disguised as simply a leisurely stroll through the garden.

This book is 378 pages that will teach you how to grow food successfully in every season while making you feel like you're getting advice from a cherished garden mentor.

You can get a copy of A Life in the Garden by Barbara Damrosch and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show notes for around $20.