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Table of Contents

Introduction

There seems to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth.
The first is by war, as the Romans did in plundering their conquered neighbors.
This is robbery. The second is by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third
is by agriculture, the only honest way; wherein man receives a real increase of
the seed thrown into the ground in a kind of continual miracle.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

In your hands is a handbook for year-round vegetable growing in the maritime Northwest. It covers the at-home production of most types of garden food, with information on just about every regional aspect of vegetable gardening. It is as complete and as simple as I can make it.

Why I Write This Book

Please observe that I say write, not wrote. Thats because Ive been steadily revising this book since I began the first edition in 1979. This one in your hands is the sixth edition, revised in 2007. The second through fifth editions demanded complete rewrites because each time I had learned too much to merely adjust the old structure. This one, the sixth edition, required but a bit of tweaking and a major revision of how I recommend the growing of asparagus.

My intention behind writing every one of these six versions has been that fresh, homegrown vegetables will become a major part of your familys food supply. Youre about to learn how to grow a full array of vegetables, not only during the heat of midsummer, but all year round.

Twenty-nine years ago I homesteaded in Oregon because I believed in self-sufficient living. Self-sufficiency is still my personal solution to a lot of the worlds problems and many of my own. It seems to me that as people become more responsible for their physical survivaland there is nothing more essential to surviving than eatingthey begin to have a more positive attitude about life in general. Theyre less dependent on a complex system that is entirely out of their control.

A self-sufficient person becomes independence minded. The Oregon countryside is still dotted with large vegetable gardens; consequently, independence-minded is how many old-time Oregonians describe both themselves and the unique culture of the state. Washington State isnt much different.

Although independence-mindedness is a spiritual state, Id also like you to enjoy a higher level of physical well-being, because I find it far more pleasant to be among healthy people. Having a feeling of well-being lets us throw back our shoulders, move confidently through life, and assert our independence. To enjoy solid health, we need to make a substantial part of our total food intake fresh vegetable food. But most North Americans have neither great vegetables nor strong health. The best way to change your diet in the direction of health is not to force yourself because someone told you to change, and certainly not to change by fighting your own bad habits and cravings. The best way to reform yourself is simpleexperience the pleasures and wonderful tastes of fresh garden vegetables. Given a few years to work on a person, the garden will effortlessly change the gardeners preferences. I know this works because Ive been through this change myself.

Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades has always been constructed a little differently than most other gardening guides. It advocates thinking for oneself. It explains the basic processes that happen in growing food and then puts you in a position to decide for yourself exactly what to do. In that sense I see my book as being very Oregonian.

This book must, of economic necessity, be a regional book. My publisher believes that the cover price would far exceed the markets tolerance, and the books size would scare away too many bookstore browsers, if I (1) tried to include all of the specialized information needed to succeed west of the Cascades and (2) also made this book into a complete, scientifically accurate general guide to gardening. As a result, Ive had to concentrate on point 1 at the expense of point 2.

This restriction will mainly affect the novice. If you already know enough to succeed at growing vegetables in another climate, my book will be all youll probably need. New gardeners, however, may want to find other sources of information about the general procedures for using raised beds, preparing the soil, making compost, and the many other gardening minutiae commonly called the techniques of gardening. Well, dear novice, the public library is full of nationally distributed garden books. Following the varietal advice, soil management systems, and planting schedules in a book targeted at the East often wont reveal the potential of our climate and will often lead to failure, but the general information in them can be very valuable.

Why We Need a Regional Gardening Book

Most gardening books published in the United States and Canada are actually very regional, although this is often not directly mentioned. They maximize profit by addressing the area of greatest populationthat part of North America east of the Cascade Range.

Gardening west of the Cascades is very different. Our winters are mild and rainy, and our summer days are rarely hot; even our midsummer nights are usually too cool for shortsleeved shirts. We also have a perverse pattern of rainfall. We get a lot of moisture in winter when our gardens dont need it, but it rains little or not at all in summer when they do.

If we adjust to our climate, we can grow fresh food year round. If we act as though we were gardening in the East, we will have fresh food for only a few months a year. The Americans who first settled the Oregon Territory gardened as though they were still living in Ohio. This seems ironic because the first colonial settlers were British gardeners from a maritime climate just like ours. But by the time these British had become Americans and then settled the continent, theyd forgotten not only that they were once British, but also how they used to farm and garden.

Had the native tribes of the Oregon Territory been gardeners like the natives of the East Coast, the first Anglo-Americans arriving here might have acquired appropriate agricultural technology, which is exactly what happened to the British in Massachusetts Bay Colony two centuries earlier. But the tribes on this coast were living quite comfortably by hunting and gathering, and gardening not at all. So the new arrivals continued to farm and garden hereespecially gardenas though they were back in Ohio, which sort of worked but was far from optimal.

This situation persisted in Oregon and Washington until we started to smarten up in the late 1970s. Cascadia then resembled a Third World backwater, exporting lumber, livestock, and fruit to the rest of the United States. Like other Third World countries, we depended on imported technology. We learned to garden from books describing techniques that worked in the East, and we bought our seeds from catalogs of eastern companies selling varieties that worked well where summers were hot and humid but that often did not grow as promised for us. And little in these catalogs helped us take advantage of the opportunities presented by our mild winters.

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