(Photo: T.C. Worley NYT)Straight to the Source
By Michael Tortorello
March 24, 2010
ON a recent Saturday, over a cup of tea, I redefined the farm-to-table food movement. It didn’t take much. All I did was move my herb garden — that is, the farm — to my dining room table. Potting mix, dirt, seedlings, water. Everything. Without boasting, I think I can say that food does not get more local than this.
A few friends stopped by to lend a hand, in the spirit of a country barn-raising. We began by unboxing five container garden kits — three of them new to the market — that allow the gardener to grow food year-round. Several can be started indoors, then moved outside.
When I ordered them online, I bought the promise of fresh herbs and greens as early as the ides of March. But when my friends and I tore open the packages, we found mundane stuff like plastic trays, fertilizer baggies and water-wicking mats. General observation: The gardener who’s allergic to gadgets should wait until later in the spring.
Traditionalists might argue that gardening — like baseball and dueling with pistols — should be done only outdoors, on open ground. But the American consumer seems to think otherwise. According to Bruce Butterfield, research director at the National Gardening Association, container gardening is roughly a billion-dollar-a-year retail business. And he said about half the country’s home food growers — that is, 18 million households — do at least some gardening in containers.
After several years of steady growth, container sales climbed 25 percent last year at Gardener’s Supply Company, a mail-order business with a store in Burlington, Vt., said Maree Gaetani, the company’s spokeswoman. That’s “mostly owing to the increase in vegetable gardening and people’s desire to grow anywhere they can,” she said.
This popularity has led to a proliferation of new products. “Last year we had two different varieties of grow bags, and this year we have five,” Ms. Gaetani said.
One of these is the Herb Grow Bag ($10.95), a thick black sack that is a little bigger than a shoe box. Two of them will fit on the Gardener’s Supply Company’s Self-Watering Tray ($16.95), a black plastic reservoir with a fabric mat that wicks water up through the bottom of the Grow Bag.
“I’ve never seen this stuff before,” said Nick Schneider, a 33-year-old chef and community garden instructor who dropped by to play with dirt. His own indoor plantings have typically gone into things like recycled yogurt containers, he said.
Still, planting the reusable Grow Bags was about as easy as spilling a few quarts of dirt and burying a half-dozen herbs from the local garden center — basil, mint, oregano, thyme.
Nick rubbed the black cloth between his finger and thumb. “When I saw it, I mistook it for a wool felt,” he said.
In fact, it is a dual-layer polypropylene. According to the instructions, this material should allow the roots to breathe and prevent heat buildup when the bags move to the wilds of the patio in the warmer weeks of spring.
“A lot of long underwear is made of polypropylene,” Nick said. Interesting.
For all its convenience, the Herb Grow Bag would still require some honest-to-goodness gardening. Not so the Garden-in-a-Bag ($8) from Potting Shed Creations, which promises the one-stop ease of an instant cake mix.
Another friend, Ali Lozoff, a 40-year-old marketing manager for Minnesota Public Radio, examined the variety of little pouches that came with it. “Do you know what this reminds me of?” she said. “Sea-Monkeys.”
Ultimately, the contents of those pouches — coconut husk chips, dirt, oregano seeds — would go into a 6-inch-tall brown paper bag. Then that would be covered with a plastic bag (not included) to keep the soil moist.
Ali blanched at all this packaging. Why, she wondered, couldn’t the shipping bag be repurposed to cover the grow bag?
“To be positive,” she said, “I could see this being something that could be a good interest-sparker for a kid.”
Whether the kit would grow robust herbs seemed almost beside the point, Nick said. At its heart, he suggested, the Garden-in-a-Bag is a housewarming gift — attractive, affordable and ultimately disposable.
Most gardeners would think twice before tossing out the Garden Patch’s Grow Box ($29.95). It’s too heavy, for one thing. Load the 30-inch-long container with potting mix and fill the plastic reservoir tray with water, and you’ve got 58 pounds of instant garden.
“It seems like an adapted version of a typical plastic window planter box,” Nick said. One adaptation is particularly hard to miss: the green jungle-themed plastic soil cover that contains a dissolving cylinder of squishy fertilizer.
This nutrient sausage seemed to give Ali the willies. “You have to get another one of these every time you plant,” she said, scanning the instructions. “I wonder how much a replacement patch costs.” (Answer: $8.95.)
So much fertilizer seemed like overkill for my pot of hardy chives. So after burying them in the middle of the box, Nick cut a few holes in the plastic jungle sheet and dropped in two clusters of Japanese Trifele Black tomato seeds.
“I like the fact that it’s a traditional water-from-the-bottom system,” he said, pointing to the wide lip at the base of the green container. “It’s an appropriate method for growing tomatoes.” In the heat of the summer, the 4-gallon well would keep the soil moist without constant watering.
What none of these kits includes is the kind of long, steady light that seedlings need to thrive indoors. So I placed most of my herb seedlings under a 4-foot-long Jump Start Grow Light System ($69.95) with an adjustable metal stand, which I picked up at Midwest Hydroponic Supplies. It came with an energy-efficient high-output fluorescent bulb and a dummy-resistant design.
A similar pair of bulbs powers the MyGreens Light Garden ($149), another new product from the Gardener’s Supply Company. When it is set up, the kit resembles a giant black veggie burger: the top bun is a rounded light bonnet; the bottom bun, a one-gallon base with a wicking mat; and the patty in the middle comprises four reusable planting trays, each a little bigger than an egg carton.
We stocked these trays with herbs I started from seed last month: Smokey bronze fennel, holy basil, Italian aromatic sage, Fernleaf dill, French rosemary and French thyme. Nick liked the way the individual trays could be filled with complementary herbs. I could start seeds here, too.
But the unit’s size — 16 by 24 inches — bothered Ali and Nick, in different ways.
“I feel like this would be cumbersome to have in a small apartment,” Ali said.
Nick, on the other side, wanted a larger kit with a higher yield. He couldn’t imagine the Light Garden paying off, he said, unless “you could sell some radicchio to your neighbors for $3 a head.”
They agreed, though, that for all the kit’s clean functionality, some of the materials felt cheap. The adjustable light hood, for instance, is supposed to slide up and down over a pair of posts, with rubber O-rings working as a guide. Or not working at all, in this case. I would like to introduce my friends at the Gardener’s Supply Company to an amazing piece of technology called the clamp.
By this point, everyone at the table was suffering from doodad exhaustion. The time had come to break out a package with no miraculous materials or removable plastic parts.
The Victorian Glass Bell Jar ($56) is a product newly available through Bosmere, a yard supply company, but the technology goes back to the mid-19th century. The model I unwrapped is a 10-inch-wide dome made of glass; the cloche flares at the top into a knob. For a reservoir, I bought a $4 terracotta saucer. That’s it.
“Aesthetically, I think it’s beautiful,” Ali said.
Practically, though, I didn’t know what to do with it. A few phone calls led me to Tovah Martin, a horticulturist whose book “The New Terrarium” came out last year.
Outdoors, the cloche would protect tender plants from a spring cold snap. Indoors, Ms. Martin said: “what you want to grow is something that likes indirect light. Once the sun hits these things, they really bake.” In other words, the bell jar would be a mausoleum for most herbs, which prefer dry, sunny, well-drained conditions.
There was one possible exception: mint. “Most mints can take high humidity and low light,” Ms. Martin said. “I’ve tried it.” What she wouldn’t recommend trying is to eat that mint — or anything else grown in an indoor terrarium. Unless you have an appetite for mystery fungus and a good toxicologist on call.
Following her directions, I spread some gravel in the saucer for drainage and sprinkled it with horticultural charcoal, to soak up any boggy smells. Next, I mounded dirt into a little volcano and plopped a spearmint plant into the middle. Finally, I lowered the glass.
That night, after my friends were gone, I scattered the garden kits on dresser tops and windowsills throughout the house. They are working for me there at this moment, growing food.
The bell jar remains on the dining room table, where its only job is to look exquisite.
No comments:
Post a Comment