Barbara Damrosch,
Vegetable Farmer and Writer

Occupation: Vegetable farmer and writer

Place of Residence: Harborside, Maine

Background and Personal History:

Barbara Damrosch went from being a college English teacher/writer to a landscape designer/writer to a vegetable farmer/writer. Although born and raised in New York City, she spent summers gardening with her parents at a cottage in Connecticut, or with her grandparents in Northern Louisiana. Both  experiences taught her that home cooking starts with home-grown ingredients — from the spears in her father’s  asparagus patch to the nuts that fell from her grandfather’s 40 pecan trees. Her major culinary influences were her mother Nell, her grandmother Cile, and Irma Rombauer, author of The Joy of Cooking, all of whom urged an unstinting generosity in the kitchen.

Barbara is the author of three books: Theme Gardens, The Garden Primer, and The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook, which she wrote with her husband Eliot Coleman. In addition to writing “Gardener’s Table” features for MOTHER EARTH NEWS, she writes a weekly column in the Washington Post called “A Cook’s Garden.”