VEGETABLE Self-Sufficiency

(Page 9 of 9)

February/March 1996
By Mort Mather 
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It is time to invite people over for Thanksgiving dinner. Beans, potatoes, onions, and carrots from your garden will grace the table. How about fresh carrot sticks as an appetizer. Did you think I forgot to mention the succession planting of lettuce? That lettuce planted in early August might well have withstood several frosts and be available for a salad, that is if the deer, woodchucks, or rabbits didn't eat it. Lettuce cells are flexible enough to take a certain amount of freezing, and we frequently have it available until the end of November.

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The idea of companion planting is that one crop helps another, that there is a symbiotic relationship. I read that insects that like beans don't like potatoes and visa versa, so I coupled them. Darned if I know if it does any good, but the two crops go well together so I just keep doing it. It doesn't hurt.

Cabbage will be a new challenge. Ideal storage temperature is 32 degrees F at 90 to 95 percent relative humidity. I'm thinking of making a room in my cellar that is insulated from the heat of the furnace for troublemakers like these. An insulated box in the wood shed with a pan of water in it is another thought. I do miss the perfect root cellar but without the furnace we can't leave the house for more than 12 hours at a time in the winter.

Nothing has fascinated me for as long as gardening. There are so many variables and so many things yet to be learned the mystery of the soil, the beauty of growth, the timing, the search for the best variety of a vegetable, the fresh air, my bare feet connected to the earth, working with nature, learning, observing, and every year tasting and being nourished by the product of this collaboration.

Mort is now on his 26th self-sufficient garden and immodestly reports that the last time he went to the grocery store was for batteries.

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