Hello Everyone.
Welcome to The Art of Growing Food newsletter. I began writing this newsletter in 2013, shortly after my first book, The Complete Kitchen Garden was published. At the time, I was book touring and giving lectures, keeping a notebook where many of you signed up to receive my e-mails. Thank you!
Fast forward to 2023, (and five books later) I’m still writing about kitchen garden designs with recipes, for cooks who love to garden. For new readers who may not know about my books or my journey to becoming a garden designer, I’m posting a short introduction to give a little background about why this newsletter.
My goal is to encourage everyone to plant a seed, watch it grow, and experience the pleasure of sitting down to a homegrown meal. Because that’s how I became a gardener, but it did not start off as easily as I thought. Below is an excerpt from the introduction of my first book, adapted and condensed. I’d love to hear your story, too, please leave a comment below.
I am excited about a new virtual class The Art of Growing Food, which starts on January 27th. In this class, I teach you my six steps to successful kitchen garden design. If you are just starting out as a new gardener, or eager to renovate an existing garden, you’ll discover easy ways to design an artful kitchen garden.
From Art to the Kitchen Garden
I moved to Vermont in 1980 and planted my first garden by marking the perimeters with four sticks and a ball of twine. With a sharp-edged spade, I removed a thick layer of rugged turf, dug up the stony soil to create a reasonably loose pile, then shoveled on some compost. Using the same four sticks and twine, I measured out long, straight rows before planting seeds for basil, lettuce, and other greens sprinkled them with water and walked away.
I would be stretching the truth if I said the garden thrived. There was a constant battle with the weeds, and the garden hose didn’t quite reach, so the plants were frequently thirsty. Yet the thrill of dashing to the garden just before dinner to clip a few leaves of frilly Lolla Rossa and crimson Bull’s Blood beet greens for my salad kept me at it. And that thrill gave way to a feeling of pride in growing my own food. I reveled in fewer trips to the grocery store in favor of wandering into the garden with bare feet and a harvest basket.
Since I could buy tomatoes, corn, and cucumbers at the market, I focused on growing herbs, spicy salad greens, dozens of lettuce types, and mesclun. The harvest time between the garden and the table was always kept to just a few minutes before dinner, with the lemony vinaigrette already waiting in the bowl.
I was fresh out of art school, and just starting a small design business in Vermont. I thought this might be a good way to feed myself, yet found the garden took up more and more of my time. Eventually, instead of making art on a canvas, I began to think of myself as a food artist.
The long, straight rows gave way to fancy arcs and geometric triangles and built a collage of lettuces splashed with dabs of red orach, fronds of chervil, and rosettes of claytonia. Seeds and plants were my paintbrushes, as I combined waves of bronze-tipped lettuce with swirls of magenta radicchio and spikes of blue-green kale, highlighted with accents of brilliant orange nasturtiums.
I began to look for inspiration from classic European-style kitchen gardeners, with recipes to match, and attended cooking school in Venice, Italy with Marcella Hazan and at the Ballymaloe School in Shanagary, Ireland. Both taught me how to cook with the ingredients as the star of the show, and to write recipes that could be adapted to my Vermont kitchen garden all year round.
A kitchen garden may be just a fancy name for a vegetable garden located near a kitchen door, filled with tender greens, aromatic herbs, and select fruit that are harvested daily. Yet it can also be a way of life.
A successful kitchen garden engages all the senses through a rich tapestry of colors, fragrances, and ultimately flavors. When you cultivate a kitchen garden, you actively engage with your source of food and integrate with your natural surroundings in a way that far surpasses the experience of purchasing food at the market.
Growing your own food is truly the next logical step beyond “local” and in my classes and lectures, I continue to encourage gardeners to start small with herbs and easy-to-grow salad greens and then add something new each year to build their repertoire and experience. All gardeners are artists, and this is how we stay curious and engaged.
Setting an example is one of the best ways we can effect positive change. When we bring our families together around the table to share our love for good homegrown food, we are cultivating a healthy choice that spreads beyond our own backyard. Teaching basic skills such as how to build a compost pile to keep waste out of landfills, how to encourage natural pollinators with native species, and how to cook with simple, whole foods harvested seasonally may seem like small steps. But when we learn to become responsible consumers, we also reclaim our health as a nation.
It’s been thirty years since I planted my first kitchen garden. Now I find it easier to start the plan on a large piece of graph paper, and then map out the space with a stick and a ball of twine. I limit my wish list of seeds and plants to only my favorites and try something new each year that will surprise me and challenge the way I cook.
I’m excited to share that I am now teaching The Art of Growing Food both online and in-person weekend classes this spring. And in this newsletter, I’ll continue to post fresh ideas, resources, and recipes. If you are a new gardener, welcome!
My best,
Ellen Ecker Ogden
Ellen Ecker Ogden is a food and garden writer, and author of The New Heirloom Garden and The New Kitchen Garden, among others. She writes about food and gardens for numerous national magazines and publications.