Gardner - Living with Herbs
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Living |  |
A Treasury of
Useful Plants for
the Home &
Garden
Jo Ann Gardner
Illustrations by
Elayne Sears
The Countryman Press
Woodstock, Vermont
I cannot say that I have always been interested in herbs. For many years, I was wholly absorbed in caring for our four children and learning the basic culinary and household arts, in which I was very deficient. Its no exaggeration to say that when I married at 19 I couldnt boil an egg.
These days I live at the end of a dirt road on a lonely peninsula, miles from the nearest neighbor, with neither a phone nor a vehicle, and my life revolves around herbs. The useful plants I grow, and those that nature has kindly grown for me, fill a variety of needs for food, flavoring, teas, and so on, and they provide the raw material for my little business, Jo Anns Kitchen & Garden. The name aptly sums up where I have spent most of my time over the past two decades and more, ever since we moved to an old farm on Cape Breton Island in northeastern Nova Scotia.
When we first lived in northern Vermont, it had been my husband, Jigs, who experimented with growing herbs, selected solely on the basis of their interesting names. At a time when few other gardeners were growing them, he raised such plants as horehound, pennyroyal, angelica, and calendula from seed. There was very little information available on how to use these herbs, and since I was busy with other matterssuch as learning how to feed our family of six with no income and a limited food supplyI left their care to Jigs.
In the years before we moved to Cape Breton, Jigs continued to grow unusual herbs, though we never harvested or used them, and we grew culinary herbsparsley, basil, marjoram, and thymeas row crops in the family vegetable garden. Although the growing season in Vermont is short, our harvests were always huge. I recall evenings spent stripping the dried herb bunches that hung from wooden beams in our kitchen, bunches so numerous they darkened the large room. My only problem then (incredible as it now seems to me) was what to do with the bounty.
Our lives were radically reorganized when we moved to Cape Breton in 1971. Once farming became our sole occupation (before we had also run a tutoring school in Vermont), Jigs no longer had the time or the inclination to seek out unusual herbs, so he bequeathed them to me. It was a fateful step, for these plants became the seeds, as it were, of a lifelong interest.
With the children growing up, I found that, even with the addition of farm workmaking butter and cheese, cutting wood with a crosscut saw in winter, loading hay with a pitchfork in summerI had time to lay out my first garden, my very own, in which I could plant whatever appealed to me. As it happened, my husbands Old World herbselecampane and hyssop, among otherswere sturdy and attractive plants that proved winter hardy over many seasons. Once planted, they meant to stick around. These and similar, vigorous plants formed the backbone of my first flower garden, having proved themselves well suited to my rough-and-ready landscaping needs.
Gradually, all the herbs, even those formerly grown in the family vegetable plot, came under my domain, as I expanded plantings around the farmhousenever too far away for quick gathering. I learned to incorporate herbs into beds of annuals, into shade gardens, into perennial beds, and into container plantings. I never made much of a distinction between the useful and the ornamental, since virtually everything I grew was pressed into service in one way or another. Even plants more often considered cutting flowers than herbsglads and dahlias, for instancewere dried and preserved for use in potpourris.
All this growing did not come about at once. It has involved a long process of learning (a process that is still going on, I hasten to add) to beat the odds of a short season, combined with heavy, poorly drained soil leached of nutrients, generally cold summers, and windalways wind. In Vermont, where we had always had a large garden, we considered ourselves master gardeners. And why not? Everything we planted grew well. But this was more the result of gardening in rich, deep, loamy soil than of our superior knowledge. In fact, as we soon found out after moving to Cape Breton, we really knew very little about gardening.
Over the years, I have devoted a lot of care and attention to the techniques of gardening, learning the secrets of seed germination, how to raise healthy seedlings, and how to create microhabitats outdoors to reduce plant stress, selecting those types and varieties best suited to our conditions. In a way, learning to garden in the face of adversity has been salutary, since I have become a more conscious gardener. Once the general principles of sound gardening have been mastered, moreover, they can be applied to any situation. So no matter where you live, I think you can benefit from what Ive learned through hard experience.
Aside from practical needs, herbs assumed an economic importance in our lives with the establishment of my business. At first, the thought of including herbs among the goods we marketed locallybutter and cheese and smoked baconnever crossed my mind. I rarely have a surplus of the traditional cooking herbs that prefer a warmer climate and that we once grew so easily: basil, marjoram, and thyme. And those herbs that do thrive in our cool, damp environmentchives, lovage, and the mintssomehow failed to suggest themselves as candidates for a cottage industry.
But necessity is a powerful stimulant. Almost 10 years ago, when I was invited to sell my jams and jellies at a Christmas craft show in the city (58 miles away), I jumped at the chance to increase our sluggish winter cash flow, which at times was confined to $25 a week from the sale of eggs. Having overcome the logistics of traveling to the sale (we hired a friend and his truck), I decided to make the trip truly worthwhile by packing something new to peddle: two 6-pound sacks of Mrs. Gardners Herb Salt.
Working with herbs that thrive here in my gardens, I had concocted this all-purpose seasoning, the base of which is table salt with varying quantities of dried herbs and spices mixed in. The dominant flavoring comes from either lovage (Levisticum officinale), an herb that tastes sharply of celery and parsley with spicy overtones, or the dark green leaves of celery itself. To these I add chopped chives (leaves and flowers); parsley (both curled and Italian flat-leaved types); deep orange calendula petals; small amounts of paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, and ground black pepper; plus a top note of pulverized dill. Flecked with bright colors, the salt is attractive, the aroma mouthwatering. But would the islands conservative cooks buy a strange homegrown condiment?
My jams and jellies sold like hotcakes that December weekend, but no one lingered to ask about the modest sign advertising HERB SALT. A DOLLAR A SCOOP. At least not until I started literally pushing samples under peoples noses. (I discovered then that Im a very persuasive salesperson.) The reaction was invariably the samea cautious sniff or two, then a sudden smile of anticipated gustatory pleasure. Almost everyone purchased a few fragrant scoops; in the end I sold out my stock, and thus was born, a few years later, Jo Anns Kitchen & Garden, featuring a variety of flavorings, teas, potpourris, and vinegars, products I had been making for years to satisfy our own familys needs.
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