“Only two things that money can't buy, that's true love and homegrown tomatoes.” — Guy Clark, singer-songwriter

Hello Friends.

This past week, I found myself on my hands and knees editing. Not on the written page, but hacking back at the overgrown cucumbers, the falling-over tomatoes, and the spent marigold blossoms. It was an attempt to put some order into the chaos that can happen in a bountiful garden. To leave it be, or cut it down. That was the question.

With plenty of nice weather still to come, garden clean-up is essential to extend the growing season. Editing a garden late summer is no longer just about weeding; it's about making big decisions about what stays standing and what can be taken away. And oddly, I feel the same excitement holding the pruning shears and loppers as I do holding a seed packet over fresh soil. It’s all part of the garden cycle that makes up a year in the garden.

Good gardeners can make beautiful gardens look easy, but keeping them productive over time takes a lot of maintenance. For every tangle of fall plants that looks like they belong, there is usually a certain amount of behind-the-scenes trimming off dead leaves that takes place. And for every ripe tomato, there is time spent pinching out the suckers. It is an art that is hard to teach; it happens as you go, and mistakes happen. But it's a garden, and it will always grow back.

I leave behind just enough lush foliage to support new growth, while clearing an open area so sun can reach the center of the plant. Revising involves removing spent blossoms while also noticing smaller stems that still have a touch of color and leaving the tiny blossoms for bees. Cut anything that looks sick, spindly, brown, or wilted, because if it isn't already strong and robust, it won't amount to much before the end of summer. Side-dress with compost, especially the brassicas, which will come into their glory any moment now.

Maintaining a garden this time of year means leaving the romantic liaisons between plants that have twined together; you can’t untie these partners, and it's best to let these lovers grow with wild abandon. For the most part, plants that hold each other up tend to do better than those left on their own, kind of what is said about people. I will also watch for the strong personalities that dominate, because these are often the ones that will thrust their seeds and become weeds next year.

Taking on the role of a garden/editor is similar to editing a piece of writing: the goal is to focus on the big picture and make it better. In both cases, editing involves intentional review, change, and refinement, adding just enough polish to existing plants to get them through another few weeks. It’s resisting the urge to make it look tidy; leaving behind hollow stems and foliage provides safe havens for insects and their eggs in the winter. I’m all in favor of a little mess.

Right now, it is more about revising the garden than creating any big change. With a small yard and too many plants, part of this process will involve discarding and moving plants. I plan to reduce the Lady’s Mantle to only a few dozen, transplant wild asters into the woodlands, and divide the hostas to create more foliage clusters in shady corners. Like taking out whole paragraphs, this type of editing changes the garden's overall look drastically; it’s best to take my time.

What happens outside is also happening inside; on rainy days, I have been reducing clutter by tossing out papers that have accumulated in file drawers. This includes recipes, correspondence, and magazine clippings I'd saved but no longer need, and while I wonder if I am doing the right thing, it feels good to let it all go, recycling along with the trash. Almost as good as cleaning up the garden and understanding how the two can work together on some level.

I am learning to leave behind only what truly matters, because less is always more. Learning to organize a house, edit a piece of writing, or revise a garden can teach you that once you create empty space, something else will always fill it.

From my kitchen garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Recipe for Herb Salt

Every cook has a secret ingredient, and mine is herb salt. I keep a bowl next to the stove to toss onto grilled salmon or sprinkle inside a chicken before baking. I make it with fresh herbs in summer, always adding a touch of lavender to accentuate the flavors.

Ingredients | Makes 1 cup

2 plump garlic cloves, crushed

½ cup coarse sea salt

1 cup fresh herbs: (equal parts fresh Parsley, Sage, Tarragon, Rosemary, & Thyme)

¼ teaspoon dried culinary lavender

Instructions

Chop the garlic and the sea salt together by hand, blending them thoroughly. Add the fresh herbs and continue to hand chop them into the mixture. Spread the mixture out on a flat baking sheet or wooden cutting board to sit for at least 24 hours, or until the salt has completely dried the herbs. If the mixture has not dried completely, heat in a low oven. Crush the mixture with your fingers into small pieces or transfer it to a food processor fitted with steel blade and chop until fine. Transfer the mixture to a glass jar with a lid and store at room temperature for up to a year.

Notes

Keep a small bowl of herb salt near the stove to use as desired, with remainder in a sealed jar in the cupboard. Stores well for up to a year.

“Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” -- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Hello Friends.

In the summer of 1980, I was living in a rustic cabin next to a well-tended organic garden.  I had not yet become a gardener or a writer, but I was newlywed and loved to cook. I read cookbooks instead of novels, dreaming of ways to use all the produce that this garden produced. We had very little money, and yet it didn’t matter because we ate well. There was always that moment at the end of the day, when I set the table and made it pretty with fresh flowers in a vase. Life felt good.

Now, I see what I didn’t know back then: this is still how I do dinner. There are always fresh flowers in a vase, on the table. Often gathered quickly while the onions simmer on the stove, I run to the garden to see what I can pick. It might be a simple mix of lemon gem marigolds, orange dahlias, and pink zinnias—or brown-eyed Susan, mixed with purple scabiosa, and verbena. Putting together a bouquet is rarely planned; it simply happens. Much like making dinner from the garden, it usually works out just fine.

At the time, way back before I knew how to grow flowers easily, I thought so little of this small act of setting the table. I had gathered wildflowers, daisies, and colorful weeds along the road, then decided I wanted to take flowers more seriously. That winter, I studied seed catalogs for annuals and read the White Flower Farm catalog to learn more about perennials, then ordered. That spring, I planted a large flower garden with no aesthetic plan. In fact, there was no design involved, only long straight rows since this garden was primarily for cutting.

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I knew nothing about flowers or flower arranging, but knew just enough to know that a range of shapes, colors, and long stems were essential. I chose pompom asters, tall snapdragons, gladiolas, and zinnias, and baby’s breath for fillers. I also made sure to include fragrance with sweet peas, stocks, and lavender. I tried delphinium and sunflowers but decided they looked better in a garden than in the vase. After a few years of experimenting, I started making flower bouquets for our farm stand.

The bouquets sold for $5 a bunch and, to be honest, didn’t always sell out. I’d leave them for two days, then toss them onto the compost. As time passed, I gave up cutting the bouquets and put a sign at the end of the driveway for cut-your-own, leaving scissors and buckets. I’d watch people park their cars and wander through the garden, carefully choosing what to pick and creating their own mix-and-match combinations. Everyone left happy.

In my post-farmstand life, now equipped with years of experience both designing and growing food and flowers, I still value those times just before dinner when I gather flowers. These days, in the depths of summer splendor, I make fresh bouquets every few days and no longer even think about it; it is a habit that simply happens. A habit I can’t break, and don’t want to change. Sitting at the table, with candles lit and flowers in a vase, this is the moment I stop and think: let the magic happen.

From my kitchen garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Hello Friends.

A few weeks before summer started in earnest, I designed a sign that read: “Welcome All Artists. Come paint, draw, and photograph in my garden.” It was a well-thought-out plan that I schemed up during the winter, planning to place it in front of the house. I’d been collecting art supplies and was excited to spend more time drawing and painting outdoors, and invite others to join me. Choosing a day dedicated to making art en plein air seemed like a good way to slow down from the routine of being a gardener and initiate a deeper, more purposeful connection to the plants.

Making art in the garden can take you beyond the ordinary. It requires noticing how the pistils and petals grow out of the center of a flower, how the leaves alternate up the stem of a Brussels sprout, and the way delicate seed pods develop on the tip of a lettuce shoot. My plan involved sharing my garden with others, too, and in my mind’s eye we would sit quietly together and simply notice. Making art, and finding beauty in the small things, sharing this time in silence. There would be no judgment.

Then the construction started. The family next door had also been plotting all winter. For them it was adding onto their house; a garage and more living space. Since the beginning of June, an endless parade of trucks arrives at 7 AM to unload heavy equipment; diesel wafts through open windows, and glass and metal shatters as it hits the dumpster. The noise is unrelenting, and how quickly my plans changed, along with my inner peace. I’ve gone through the various stages that one goes through when plans are disrupted, and loud noises fill the gentle stir of a summer’s day. The desire to make art outdoors, or to invite others to do the same, quickly vanished.

It became my yard versus their yard. We’re neighbors, yet we feel so differently about the land and the natural beauty it provides. I plant trees; they cut trees. I value outdoor living; they prefer the inner sanctum of a bigger house. It’s now mid-July, and while I have made peace with the fact that this construction is a given, I have also begun the gentle practice of not noticing. It’s a technique that is the opposite of what I hoped to begin, yet by ignoring the chaos I can continue my routine. And it’s working.

How often do we notice the things we most appreciate only when something changes in our routine? Now that I’ve taken the vow of not noticing, it is the everyday routine of the garden that is keeping me from going completely mad. Instead of wallowing in the din of the dump trucks nearby, I am burying myself in the daily tasks that once seemed onerous, the things I can control: weeding, edging, turning the compost every week. Because the noise and diesel fumes, I can’t change.

As a gardener, I have come to understand how the repetition of certain tasks and the necessity to get things done go hand in hand, and it is time well spent, giving me a sense of accomplishment at the end of it all. Even though there may be little to show for my efforts at the end of the summer, no lovely art prints or sketches, it’s through this web of a thousand commonplace acts that progress is being made.

I am noticing that the garden is the only place where I can count on to stay the same, even though it is changing every day. There is constancy, enriched by moments of wonder, and the stability of sameness that gives me a sense of sanctuary. I revel in the repetition of each day, of what can appear to be a viscous circle of endless small tasks, yet it is never boring or meaningless. And there are always the flowers, the way they offer inspiration to make art, both indoors and out. The small bouquets that I bring indoors as a reminder of what truly matters.

The rewards come at the end of the day, when all is quiet. I can once again hear the gentle evening sounds and be dazzled by lightning bugs. Last week, a gray fox sauntered confidently through a small opening of the woods. We looked at each other, perhaps in recognition that we both have been slightly shattered by the endless commotion of earth-moving machines, and at the end of the day, we find solace in the stillness of the night sky.

From my garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

If you are a new subscriber, thank you! I’m Ellen Ecker Ogden, author of The Complete Kitchen Garden and The New Heirloom Garden, with designs and recipes for cooks who garden. In this column I share ways to find beauty and artful elements for your kitchen garden design, helping you connect with the food you grow and your landscape. Follow my Vermont garden on Instagram.

Hello Friends.

When you spend a day in the garden, as most of us do, it’s hard to plan how to spend your time. I’ll start off in the morning with a small task, such as making an arbor for the climbing rose, and end the day on my hands and knees weeding between the small stones in the kitchen garden. All in all, at the end of the day, I feel pretty darn good about everything I accomplished, yet deep down, I can’t remember what I actually did. Furthermore, I know it will all have to be repeated the following week.

That is the nature of gardening, making things up as we go. Getting things done, then doing them again. You can plan all you want, make lists, and check off the big things, but the fun happens in the small ways that the garden ultimately takes care of itself. As with raising children, all we are doing as gardeners is sparking the ideas, nurturing, ushering, and then guiding in a healthy direction. Eventually, we find time to step back and take pride in how it turns out.

July, however, is beginning to get a little messy. This is changeover month, when all the spring plants are past their prime, and it’s time to begin anew. It’s lots of yanking, editing, trimming, and sowing more seeds for a summer crop. These will replace the tidy rows of lettuce, spinach, and peas that earlier graced the spring garden. It’s also the month when I begin to lose interest in spending so much time on my hands and knees in the thankless task of weeding. It even makes me question whether it is a worthwhile pursuit. Yes, it is. Be patient, you will see.

Spending time in the garden is a clue to what truly matters, and these days it is the kitchen garden over the flower borders. The flowers are nice, but they are largely self-sufficient, while the vegetables require vigilance all summer long. Both are a source of constant change, yet only the vegetable garden demands that a succession of plants grow from early spring through fall, and possibly right through winter. Flowers, on the other hand, do nothing but look pretty. They are far easier to maintain than a kitchen garden.

Many gardeners, myself included at times, fall behind on remembering that mid-summer marks the halfway point — and I am here to remind both of us that there is still plenty of time to start a second crop. Most garden centers don’t have plants anymore, so it’s up to us to buy more seeds or sow the remaining seed packets. Garden catalogs welcome and encourage seed orders this time of year and offer specials to get us planting more. It feels a bit like a marathon; I’m getting weary, but I know if I find the time now, I will be rewarded later in the season. Keep running. We can do this.

All the plants we grow in our kitchen garden are annuals, which means the fruits are full of seeds that mark the end of their life cycle. Regular harvests keep the plants producing for longer, yet starting a second crop, or even a third, will yield vigorous, hardy plants that grow into the fall, rewarding the gardener and the cook with more good food. Successional planting is a way to keep a garden growing all summer long, so you never miss out on a green salad or fresh cucumbers.

If you are tempted to sit down, or even give up growing a garden because it takes time away from other pursuits, just don’t. Because once you taste the first tomato standing in the garden, sun-ripened and warm, with juice dripping off your chin, there is no going back. If you have ever seen light glimmering through a leaf of rainbow chard, or watched bees in cucumber flowers, you won’t doubt your choice to spend time this way. Gather aromatic sprigs of Genovese basil for pesto, pull the garlic and braid it, and step over sprawling nasturtium vines, because these are moments that only get better in a kitchen garden. And as always, it is time well spent.

From my garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

p.s. It’s a good time to visit other gardens for fresh ideas and a new perspective. Note for subscribers – your subscription includes a garden tour! If you plan to visit southern Vermont this summer, please let me know. I’d love to show you around. Follow me on Instagram or my website.

Hello Friends.

If you make a recipe over and over again, at a certain point, you may feel you don’t need to open that cookbook to check the ingredients. Which is what happened last Friday when, after harvesting an armload of rhubarb, I set about making a rhubarb coffee cake to take to a friend. I know this recipe by heart, I make it every spring when rhubarb is in its prime. But this time, by mistake, I added only one cup of flour instead of two.

The result, while not the usual cake-like texture, was instead thick and dense. The topping caramelized, so the edges were crispy. It was soft and gooey, and hard to cut out into pieces from the pan, so a spoon was required. My first thought was to discard it and make another, but after tasting, it was clear that this mistake was superior to the original recipe. Not exactly a coffee cake, yet it was unctuous and divine. My friend agreed, and we stood at the kitchen counter, unable to stop eating it.

These are the times I most enjoy, the mistakes that turn out well. This is also what I enjoy about my garden, every year a new opportunity to have failures and successes, but also to adjust the ingredients – plant peas earlier and basil later, more parsley, less arugula, endive instead of lettuce in summer. It’s a constant state of flux, and what gets planted in spring is no longer the same as the summer planting. Change is good in a garden. Remembering mistakes when they turn out well is the hard part.

Rhubarb is all about reliability and a never-fail attitude. From the first rosy knobs that push through the soil to the tender pink stems and abundant foliage, it is saying to the gardener and the cook, “I’m here again, happy to oblige.” I admit my rhubarb recipes are limited to cake and pie, with the occasional chutney or sweet sauce for ice cream, and when production outweighs appetite, it is chopped and frozen for winter. But it never has the same appeal. The time is now.

The rhubarb plant in my garden is a source of beauty and food, but also contains a history I can only imagine. It was here when I settled in two decades ago, and most likely had been growing for decades before. An unnamed heirloom its foliage spreads along a 10-foot side of the kitchen garden. Dividing rhubarb requires deep digging to capture the long, thick tap roots, which two people must pull and dig at the same time. Needless to say, once planted, it prefers to remain in place.

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Rhubarb, along with asparagus, horseradish, berries, fruit trees, vines, and a range of other perennial edibles, are those old friends that come back every year. Ornamental and productive, they all perform like a well-synchronized orchestra, allowing the gardener to predict when the harvest season will begin and end. Most require only minimal pruning and care, yet in the case of rhubarb, no care at all.

After the first month of vigorous growth, giant seed heads form that will shut down the production of edible stems. Keeping them trimmed allows the plant to continue sending up new tender growth, which it will do until mid July, when the lush foliage forms a safe haven for slugs and toads. The latter keeps the former nicely under control.

My kitchen garden is a little unpredictable, similar to the way I like to cook. Yet the reliability of rhubarb keeps me on track. If you don’t already have a rhubarb plant growing in your garden, find a plant and make space. A healthy rhubarb plant will stretch wide, so give it berth. While I have seen rhubarb planted as a standalone in the yard, it is best to include it in an artful kitchen garden design.

From my kitchen garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

p.s You can find my recipe for Rhubarb Coffee Cake here. And if you want to take a chance, try it with a cup less flour, and let me know what you think.

Hello Friends.

Let’s all agree that Mother’s Day is complicated. We can either be grieving our mothers and feeling motherless, or we can be honoring our mothers and ourselves as mothers. Or we can do what my mother did: ignore it completely. After years of doing just that, I finally figured out a way to honor Mother’s Day that would make a difference: on our hands and knees, weeding her garden. It was a long drive from Vermont to Cape Cod, and I’d arrive for the weekend with my garden tools in the back of the car. After breakfast, we’d begin, and we knew the routine. She’d start at the compost pile, while I weeded the front garden.

Even at age 94, Mom would start by sifting the compost. After she navigated the rusty metal wheelbarrow from behind the shed, she took it up the small hill to the compost pile. With a small shovel, she lifted the mostly decomposed food scraps and grass clippings onto the wire sieve and pushed the small chunks through to make a light, airy compost. Truth be told, it took her most of the day, while I dug out the dandelions and other weeds from the front garden. We barely said a word to each other because we were in separate areas of the yard. We stopped only for lunch and a cup of tea in the afternoon. But it gave us a sense of satisfaction that we were accomplishing something that would be appreciated later that summer.

I’d pass by on my way to dumping tubs full of weeds in the woods, and I’ll admit, I thought making compost was far less important than what I was doing. There were so many weeds, and I tried to convince her to come help me in the front yard. Besides, I would enjoy her company, but she wouldn’t budge, determined that sifting compost was equally as necessary. And she was right. Mothers are often right, even when it may not seem like it at the time.

Looking back, I can see that making compost was meditative, essential to the success of her garden, and gave her something else: connection. I could tell she was deep in thought, feeling something that stirred her, yet I didn’t ask. It could have been that she was thinking about Dad and missing him puttering around outside nearby. Or thinking back to the garden the summer before, what she had planted that the deer didn’t eat. While I only had two days to get everything done, she had plenty of time, and honestly, it could be that she was thinking this might be her last. I certainly did, savoring the sight of her in a moth-eaten felt hat and baggy pants, protection against the cold wind.

This may sound trite, but compost is full of life. It is made from all the meals we eat, and food we don’t eat, the apple, orange, and banana peels, with non-compostable stickers to prove it. Plants from the previous garden, grass clippings, and leaves. Bugs and worms, stale bread, coffee rinds, and tea bags. A compost pile is full of things we can’t name, and no longer want, but is ready to serve us up with another chance by feeding our gardens with a nutritious blend of earthly matter. It is essential for a garden to thrive.

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Gardening is all about compost, and making it yourself is the best way to absorb all the benefits of this life-giving force. Buying compost in bags is like fast food and cheating a bit. You don’t really know where it is coming from or what it is made of, yet you put your trust that it is a good thing. Mom knew better and taught me that making compost is feeding not just the garden, but our connection to the garden. It is a part of us that naturally returns to the soil.

Making compost and Mom go hand-in-hand when I think of Mother’s Day. It’s a ritual I will continue, in her memory and for my garden, because I inherited her compost screen along with a few of her garden tools. After her death, my brother was about to toss them out in the dumpster when I yelled, “Wait!” He couldn’t understand why I’d want these broken old heirlooms, while he preferred the more valuable furniture that graced the dining room.

But he never spent a weekend on his hands and knees weeding alongside Mom, in a familiar routine, silently communicating how happy we were to be together in the garden, making compost, weeding, and, at the end of the day, spreading compost among the Shasta daisies and columbine.

Mother’s Day is every day, whether it is nurturing ourselves, our mothers, daughters, or Mother Earth. Make it special.

From my garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

If you are a new subscriber, thank you! I’m Ellen Ecker Ogden, author of The Complete Kitchen Garden and The New Heirloom Garden, with designs and recipes for cooks who garden. In this column I share ways to find beauty and artful elements for your kitchen garden design, helping you connect with the food you grow and your landscape. Follow my Vermont garden on Instagram.

“To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.” - François de La Rochefoucauld

Hello Friends.

It’s a gardener’s spring ritual: waiting and watching for hints of green. Emerging plants move to a tempo like a well-synchronized orchestra, spears of asparagus combined with rosy, red knobs of rhubarb, the familiar sounds of spring wafting through the air. As gardeners, we play a role in this music, yet each of us has a different tune in our heads. For me, it starts with that first packet of Arugula: tearing paper, pressing seeds in soil, and watering from the hose.

Fast food is unhealthy unless you are talking about arugula. It takes no time at all to rip open the paper seed packet, sow a row of seeds, and walk away. Green grass-like sprouts poke through the surface in less than a week, followed by oak leaf-shaped leaves a few weeks later. For this reason alone, it is easy to be smitten with Arugula, the ultimate fast food, harbinger of spring, and ubiquitous garden staple.

My introduction to arugula came in 1982, when a friend brought back a seed packet from her travels to Italy. The unopened packet of “rucola” sat on the counter for a few weeks, since the directions were in Italian and the photo on the front looked like dandelion greens. Being new to gardening, I was a little fearful of anything that might run rampant as a weed in my newly cultivated soil. Eventually, I found space near the edge and pressed the “rucola” seeds into a row. They sprouted almost overnight.

Once the leaves matched the photo on the packet, I took my first taste standing in the garden and spit it out. Bitter, nasty, why would anyone want to grow this salad green? Eventually, I learned to tame this wild green with a creamy dressing, tossed with more neutral Bibb lettuce. A little goes a long way, and arugula gave a tangy bite to an otherwise bland leafy salad.

Arugula was not yet available in seed catalogs, but it piqued my curiosity. My friend was not going back to Italy right away, and the only option was to write to the address on the back of the packet to buy more. An Italian catalog arrived a month later, revealing a whole world of bitter, tangy, and wild greens for salads that gardeners have enjoyed for centuries, and I was about to experience. It changed the way I gardened; now I favor planting a tapestry of greens.

Arugula is the first seed to sow in the spring; it is always reliable, no matter the weather or the time of year. It grows so fast that you can practically watch it transform into different stages; there are the first true leaves that appear like tiny spears, followed by another set of leaves that resemble an oak leaf and, if not harvested at maturity, will send up a center stalk with yellow flowers to reproduce more seeds. Fast and furious, the life cycle of arugula is short-lived, which is why following a succession planting every few weeks results in a continuous harvest.

This famous green goes by many names: “rucola” in southern Italy, “ruchetta” in the north, and “roquette” in France. The Americanized ‘Arugula’ went mainstream in 1960, according to the first Oxford English Dictionary, thanks to an article written by food editor Craig Claiborne for the New York Times. Yet the term originated in the Mediterranean, derived from the Latin name for garden rocket, Eruca sativa. The root word “Eruca,” meaning peppery plant, and sativa is the Latin term for a cultivated plant.

Before becoming a cultivated garden crop, however, it was foraged in the wild throughout Italy by women who placed bundles of tiny wild rocket leaves in the folds of their aprons, stems attached. Along with other foraged weeds and flora, it would bring in a small source of income at the local market. This wild form has leaves that are smaller, and has an intense spicy flavor - unlike what is commonly available now, and more like the first arugula I tasted in my garden.

There are different types of arugula that have been developed; the smaller-leaf variety, Sylvetta, is closer to the original wild cousin and has a stronger flavor, while the larger-leaf common variety, named Astro, is milder. A newer type of arugula, named Red Dragon, has red-tinged stems, and others continue to evolve. Arugula has the benefit of being a cut-and-again green; harvest the row with scissors, cutting at the soil line, water, and it will regrow with another set of leaves. Do this three times before the stems become woody, and the heat and bitterness will overwhelm.

If you believe ancient lore, Arugula has a reputation as an aphrodisiac and a health tonic. Arugula is identified in the Babylonian Talmud as gargir, a peppery plant used medicinally. It is noted: “this bitter herb is not to be eaten by high priests in the seven days leading up to Yom Kippur, on account that it would foster impurity.” Other historical accounts from medieval monasteries indicate that it was an ingredient in love potions. First recorded by Pliny the Elder, arugula is mentioned in the Old Testament, and anyone who came across it was encouraged to eat it for healthy eyes.

The arugula noted in these ancient texts, however, was most likely Arugula Diplotaxis tenuiflora, aka wild roquette, a perennial herb with a woody stem and spreading branches. It is a different genus and species from our domesticated garden variety Eruca Sativa, yet similarities exist because all our domesticated plants were once derived from the wild. Most were mouth-puckeringly bitter, and why plant breeders set out to make everything we grow a little sweeter, so that we would find pleasure rather than purpose in eating. Yet in doing so, many of the valuable health properties were, alas, left behind.

Arugula seedlings are sometimes sold in plastic pots at the nursery, yet skip this method and buy a packet of seed instead. It grows easily in almost any type of soil, although flea beetles may attack the tender leaves in early spring, leaving pinholes throughout the foliage, yet it remains edible. It’s one of the few garden plants deer, rabbits, groundhogs, or squirrels will not eat, so it’s all yours.

My first lesson as a new gardener was to learn the difference between a weed and a welcome garden plant, and now that I am hooked on arugula and other greens, I find myself actually putting weeds back into the garden in an orderly fashion: arugula, cress, chervil, chicory, and purslane. When we eat our weeds, we also embrace the diversity of all plants and make the world and our gardens healthier places to live.

Gardening and sourdough bread baking have much in common – they start with the best intentions, yet not everyone will succeed or stick with it. But if you sow a row of Arugula, you’ll be off to a good start.

From my garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

Hello Everyone,

I love a good routine, in my daily life and in my garden. As soon as I feel the tug of spring and notice the rosy knobs of rhubarb beginning to poke through the frozen ground, I begin to unpack the garden shed. Inside, I can barely walk around with so much clutter, yet I am grateful that it has been a safe place to store all the garden stuff over the winter. I have collected and will now place artful things around the garden in a way that makes me smile. I am aware that there is a fine line between art and junk, so I choose carefully.

It’ll be another month or more before I can dig the soil and sow Mesclun seeds, so staging the garden, as if I were moving furniture in the house, gives me purpose. I place the eight large blue pots in the corners, then fill them with soil. The ornamental trellis is set up near the steps for climbing roses. I’ll build a bamboo trellis for the soon-to-be-planted peas and for the wren to perch and sing his mating call loud and clear. Finally, I set up the garden benches - one in the sun, one in the shade, and two in the kitchen garden facing each other. Then I sit down.

Sitting around is not something gardeners do easily, and it may look like I am lazy when I am doing nothing. But I am doing something. I am thinking, observing, listening, and inhaling the spring air; it is not wasted time. I am imprinting how it feels to be in this moment. Early on, as a gardener with two young children, sitting down was not possible. That one hour I got at naptime was precious, and I filled it with as much activity as feasible.

Yet looking back now, if I could advise my younger self, I’d say: Take time to sit. Put a bench in the garden, and just think. Slow your mind and let the garden speak to you, rather than always trying to manipulate it. Now that my attitude has shifted around taking time, gardening feels more magical, as if the plants are here to assist me, just as I nurture them. We are in this together.

Sitting down can slow the fast-and-furious momentum of spring. It’s my time to reflect on last year’s glory and look ahead to this year’s vision. I may scroll through photos for inspiration on what to repeat or improve, yet mostly I look around. I notice which plants need to be moved and which need pruning, and picture what to put in the blue pots. It is time well spent; I’ve learned that this is my time for dreaming and is equally essential as getting things done.

As gardeners, we all start with the same three things: seeds, plants, and soil, but each of our gardens will be entirely different. I think of mine as an extension of my home, because I have so many places to sit. There are the benches under the apple tree, the chairs near the fire pit, two facing benches in the kitchen garden, and those on my front porch. It is my invitation to begin another garden year, letting go of the purpose, and allowing the place to fill me with all the glittering magic. Happy Spring Equinox.

From my kitchen garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

If you are a new subscriber, thank you for signing up. I’m Ellen Ecker Ogden, author of several books featuring kitchen garden designs with recipes for cooks who love to garden. In this column, I share ways to find beauty and artful elements for your kitchen garden design, helping you connect with the food you grow and your landscape. Follow my Vermont garden on Instagram.

Hello Friends.

If there were a way to go back in time, it might be to step into my kitchen garden full of heirlooms. “Here, try one of these!” I’ll say, offering a handful of sugar snap peas. “Taste this!” as chervil tingles your taste buds, followed by sweet Fraise des Bois strawberries. “Look at this!” I’ll say, carefully peeling away deep mahogany leaves from Treviso radicchio and plucking off a bitter leaf. “Smell this!” as I draw closer to vanilla-scented Nicotiana.

You may think I am going a bit mad, but I secretly hope my enthusiasm will rub off on you and fill you with awe, or maybe even spark you to try something new that is old. An heirloom, as defined by the dictionary, can be either a valuable object that has belonged to a family for several generations, a breed of animal that is not associated with large-scale commercial agriculture, or a plant that is grown from an open-pollinated seed. The term originated in England, combining the words “heir” (inheritance) and “loom” (tool) to describe the transfer of property without a written document or legal settlement.

Heirloom seeds are often described as being grown before 1950, when open-pollinated seeds - which means that if you save the seeds, the resulting plant from that seed will be like the original parent plants - were still the most common seeds available. After 1950, hybrids became the dominant seeds sold through catalogs, and seed saving and the need to grow heirlooms became less interesting to some gardeners. But there are plenty of gardeners, like me, who prefer heirlooms for a few practical and ephemeral reasons.

All heirloom seeds are open-pollinated. It’s the way of continuing the cycle of life, and a guarantee that there will be another garden the following season, something gardeners have depended upon for centuries. While those who prefer hybrid seeds often value attributes such as high productivity, more vigorous growth, and disease resistance, I am not passing judgment. But I am taking the side of heirloom gardening over the alternative.

This is why I wrote The New Heirloom Garden (Rodale Books, 2021) at a time when heirlooms were beginning to gain attention from gardeners, farmers, and chefs as a source of exceptional flavor. As a cook, I was primarily interested in flavor, yet there are other reasons to grow heirlooms: plant diversity, fragrance, preservation, and political advocacy. As gardeners, we have a modicum of power to preserve the past by saving seeds, regenerating the soil with cover crops, and preserving old fruit trees that are disappearing.

Over the past two centuries, approximately 12,000 distinct apple varieties have been lost, with the most significant decline occurring after the 1950’s. Industrial agriculture has made its mark not just on heirloom seed varieties but on every aspect of the gardens we grow and the food we eat. Of the thousands of apple varieties that were once grown commercially, only about 100 are still readily available, due to a decline in how food is grown and to shipping across the country. This act has largely replaced the adage to make do with what we have.

A seed has the capacity to be mnemonic, to hold memories of people, places, food, and fragrance. When heirloom seeds and heirloom apple trees remain in circulation, the stories and conversations continue. Seed saving was once a necessity, and some of the heirloom seeds we grow today were brought to the United States by immigrants who smuggled them inside the linings of coats, suitcases, and hat bands, or by sewing them into the hems of dresses. Handed down from family to family, open-pollinated seeds were small things that could bring them together and connect them to their homeland.

Heirloom seeds and fruits are often named after a person, place, or descriptive characteristic; chicories throughout Italy are named after the region in which they are grown. Or a person, such as Aunt Molly’s cape gooseberry, named after a favorite Aunt, who left seeds in her bureau drawer, or an attribute, such as Tennis Ball lettuce, which is a tight green ball – it was one of Thomas Jefferson’s favorites. Often, heirloom seeds are passed down from family to family or friend to friend and are renamed, like the children’s game of telephone, the names change until the origins are no longer accurate. But this doesn’t matter as much as the motive to save and to share the seeds.

Saving seeds is a gift that is essentially free and available to everyone. Watching green shoots emerge from the ground – active, robust, and alive – is proof that seeds are pre-equipped with everything they need to send forth a root, a shoot, and a leaf. All you need to do is insert them into the soil, step back, and watch.

Setting an example is one of the best ways we can effect positive change. When we bring our families together around the table to share our love for good homegrown food, we are cultivating a healthy choice that spreads beyond our own backyard. Teaching basic skills such as how to build a compost pile to keep waste out of the landfills, how to encourage natural pollinators, and how to cook with simple, whole foods harvested seasonally may seem like small steps, but when we learn to become responsible consumers, we also reclaim our health as a nation.

As gardeners, we have so much to learn – and so much to give. It’s time to get to work.

From my heirloom garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Green Apples and Heirloom Fruit

I attribute my old-fashioned beliefs to the 150-year-old apple tree that is the focal point of my small backyard. When I moved to this location over 20 years ago, it was already leaning over like a gardener after a long day of digging. The first fall, when hundreds of smallish green apples ripened, way too tart to eat, I baked a cake instead. We’ve lost the art of knowing how to appreciate apples, and if I had been that type of gardener who wished for a Honeycrisp instead, this old tree would have disappeared long ago and been replaced by a more modern apple. Instead, every year, I wait and watch with anticipation as my unknown tree sets blossoms in the spring, and then drops apples in the fall. Then I make the best darn Apple Sharlotka Cake you’ll ever taste.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon butter, for greasing the pan

5 large tart, firm green apples

3 large eggs, at room temperature

1 cup granulated sugar

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon almond extract

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 cup all-purpose flour or almond flour (gluten free)

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Cut out a parchment paper circle the same size as the base, and lightly butter. Generously butter a 9-inch springform pan, line it with the parchment circle.

Core and slice the apples into quarter about 1/4-inch-thick pieces. Skin can be left if preferred. It adds a nice touch of color to the finished cake.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, or in a large bowl if using a handheld mixer, beat the eggs, sugar and salt on medium-high speed until thick and ribbony, about 5 minutes. Beat in the almond extract and cinnamon.

Using a fine-mesh sieve, gradually sift a third of the flour into the egg mixture, then gently fold with a spatula until just combined and no flour streaks remain. Repeat twice with the remaining flour. The batter will be very thick.

Place half the apples in an even, compact layer on the bottom of the pan. Cover with half the batter and use an offset spatula to spread the batter evenly over the apples. Repeat with the remaining apples and batter. Gently rap the pan a few times against the counter to get rid of air bubbles, and transfer to the oven. Bake for 50 to 55 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out free of batter and the top of sharlotka is golden brown.

Let the cake cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, then gently run a butter knife around the perimeter of the cake to loosen and carefully remove the sides of the pan. Serve cool, with whipped cream or confectioners sugar.

Hello Friends.

There are a million ways you can plant your garden, because there are so many seeds and plants you can choose from. Are you a flower gardener or an edible gardener? Are you neat and tidy, or do you prefer a crazy path through tufts of tall grass? Do raised beds make it easier to maintain order, or do you prefer to step into the garden on small stones? All of these are decisions you make as you begin planning your garden and as you plant.

I often think about how, if your garden could reflect your personality, what it would tell you? I’ve long been curious about how the inside of a person’s refrigerator can share a glimpse into their personality, and it turns out I am not alone. There is a major discussion on Reddit, and a few books with photographs that share intimate details of celebrity chefs’ refrigerators, like a voyeuristic party guest poking around when no one is looking. Neat or tidy, full or empty, packaged food or fresh. I confess that my refrigerator remains mostly empty, most of the time. This is because I am a gardener.

Gardeners have the advantage of being spoiled when it comes to good eating, and the joy of winter produce does not come easily. For years, I would not even allow myself to consider a head of broccoli, tempting as it looked, piled high on a bed of ice. I knew that the broccoli I might be tempted to buy couldn’t come close to the flavor and nutrition of my own homegrown. But alas, what is a Vermont gardener to do in winter?

What could my garden tell you about me? I primarily grow heirlooms, which began when I moved into an old house and felt the urge to surround myself with only vintage-era plants. I researched fragrant flowers and planted sweet peas, peonies, nicotiana, and climbing roses. I became obsessed with Italian chicories and European salad greens, and I found that the ease of sowing seeds freely all summer long became a healthy habit. I even wrote a book, The New Heirloom Garden (RodaleBooks 2021), to encourage other gardeners to taste the difference between heirloom varieties and the ordinary stuff.

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I prefer a weed-free garden and value plants that grow on a trellis because space is tight, and I can pack a lot into a small area. I do enjoy the look of a good jumble of plants, if I can get into the middle and harvest the ripe fruits. Plants should be able to touch one another, buoyed by a collaborative spirit, to hold one another up or, at the very least, create a carpet of greenery that will hold back any weeds vying to poke through. If you were to look at a photo of my garden, you might think I have a green thumb, but the truth is, I have good soil, which can make all the difference when growing any kind of plant. Organic soil feeds the plants, which ultimately feed me, so I make it as nutrient-rich as possible.

Yet the real key to my garden is that I value the connection between good eating and the land, which adds an extra pleasure to the food I harvest. It is not simply an agricultural product that grows, or the result of a plant or seed that has been pressed into the ground. It is the culmination of creating a vision in my mind’s eye and the freedom to plant whatever I want to grow, woven together with appreciation for the beauty of the plants. When I first started designing gardens for others, I would often start with the question: What foods do you like to eat? That way, I could cover all the bases and make sure the garden was designed around these foods. But I see now that this is not the correct way to start any garden.

These days, I always start by looking at how the garden will integrate into the landscape and ultimately become intertwined with the gardener’s daily routine. The ideal kitchen garden is shaped by the site and its location, the views from inside and out, and the addition of places to sit, areas for entertaining and relaxing, water features, and wildlife refuges. Food and flowers, after all, are products of nature, and when we create an atmosphere for them to thrive, we do as well. Fences are optional; when necessary, they are artful as well as practical.

In the words of Wendell Berry, eating is an agricultural act, and how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. Large-scale agriculture has had a harmful effect on the land. If we are consumers who depend on food grown outside our gardens, we may not pay as close attention to how food is produced or care much. Yet as gardeners, we can choose to participate in food production and be responsible for the food we grow, from seed to flower, to compost, and around again.

It’s a complex relationship; yet for people who know they are a reflection of their garden (and of what’s inside their refrigerator), it becomes a way to honor the fruits of the earth. As you begin this new season, consider that you are also choosing a way of life that connects to everything around you, with gratitude. Love your garden, and it will love you back.

From my heirloom garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart” – Rainer Maria Rilke.

Welcome to The Art of Growing Food.

If you are a new subscriber, thank you for signing up. I’m Ellen Ecker Ogden, author of several books featuring kitchen garden designs with recipes for cooks who love to garden. In this column, I share ways to find beauty and artful elements for your kitchen garden design, helping you connect with the food you grow and your landscape. Follow my Vermont Garden on Instagram.

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Hello Everyone,

If you have ever watched the first snowflakes fall from the sky, you might wonder how tiny wisps layered upon each other can form a formidable snowbank, as I did the other day. Watching snow accumulate is a reminder that each of us has the power to come together as a force. The same is true with drops of water forming the ocean, minutes on a clock that make up an hour, honeybees in a collective hive, and the seeds we sow each spring. When we participate in tiny acts that make up a bigger whole, we keep going with the work we are doing because we can make a difference.

While the world feels like it is falling apart, thinking about your garden and the seeds you will sow can bring solace. There is a reason why the seed catalogs arrive in January, when most of us are desperate to escape the winter, the snow, and, right now, the daily destruction of everything we know to be true and right. It’s hard to ignore the colorful photos of flowers and vegetables, tempting us to grow everything. Picturing your garden right now may offer a little escape, break the dormancy of winter, and it starts with choosing the right seeds to grow.

Seeds are powerful yet tiny, essential to life. As a gardener, knowing I can sow a seed and watch it grow into a plant still fills me with awe. Each seed forms a collective that matures into a garden full of beautiful edibles; alone, it would not have the same impact. Instead, we rely on a single packet filled with tiny seeds to meet our needs. And so, faced with all the options and knowing that I only have one chance to grow everything on my dream list in a single season, I’m putting a little extra effort into the decisions I am making right now.

After decades as a gardener, I still approach each garden season by choosing 80% tried-and-true and 20% new. And while I love to grow a bit of everything and somehow manage to pack a lot into a small space, I am slowly inching away from growing the “hard stuff” in favor of an easier and perhaps kinder approach to my garden. The “hard stuff” includes anything started early in a seed tray or under grow lights, or that requires special attention, such as watering, fertilizing, and staking. If it is a tender plant, coddling it until the sun's warmth and the threat of frost demand extra effort.

This year, I’m taking a new approach. I will no longer fret about the broccoli that goes to seed too quickly, the tomatoes that never ripen, or the zucchini that attracts squash beetles, because I plan to focus on growing only greens. Beginning with salad greens: arugula, chicory, and chervil, purple Osaka and Mizuna mustard, and lots of loose-leaf lettuce. There will be hard-to-find greens such as golden purslane, sorrel, bok choy, and cress (both land and water), celery, and mache. I’ll mix up packets of Mesclun from last year’s seed packets, and include herbs such as basil, dill, and fennel.

If it grows easily from seed and can be sown directly in the garden, and is cold-hardy, it is on the list. Making life easier by choosing seeds that grow quickly and with minimal fuss is my way of stepping back from the chaos and the extra planning it requires. By sowing a weekly succession of greens, I’m bound to have ample harvest, although I may lose a few plants, as I do every year, and it usually involves rabbits. But I plan to grow enough to feed us both.

Reflecting on the garden season ahead, I am hungry for greens. And the simple act of pressing a handful of seeds into the soft soil, watering, and watching green shoots emerge from the ground—active, robust, and alive — will make life a little easier this year. Learning to let go of the way I have always planted the garden in favor of a new method keeps the garden interesting.

The same goes for where you buy your seeds. Maybe it's time to look beyond the big mainstream catalogs in favor of smaller, family-owned regional seed catalogs that are popping up all over. Supporting these alternative seed companies is a way to honor diversity and the regional history that seeds represent. Seek out open-pollinated and heirloom varieties that offer exceptional flavor and will increase healthy pollinators in your garden.

Seeds are pre-equipped with everything they need to send forth a root, a shoot, and a leaf, and with very little effort. It’s a helpful reminder that we can choose the hard path or a slightly easier, kinder, and more compassionate one. In life, or in the garden. This can take the form of extra harvests delivered to a food pantry or inviting neighbors into the sanctuary of our gardens.

From my garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Hello Friends.

I recently sat with a friend in her new house, looking out at her future garden, moving from window to window to see how a garden might be framed from inside. With snow on the ground, it was easy to feel as if we were in a cloud-dream of all the possibilities. How lucky, I thought, that she is starting again from the beginning. A clean canvas of ideas ahead, yet starting a new garden is never easy. There are many steps along the way.

In the distance, tufts of wild grasses and dried seed heads poked up through the snow, indicating the former owner’s flower garden. “Do you think I should keep that garden?” she asked. No, I responded, this was to be your garden, the perfect time to start over with a fresh perspective. “Keep a few plants, maybe,” I added.

This moment reminded me of starting my first garden decades earlier, and how little I knew about where to site it, which plants to choose, or really anything about design. I didn’t even know how to start seeds or recognize weeds, but I had a vision of what I wanted to see. I was fresh out of art school, eager to create something beautiful. I marked the boundaries with four sticks and twine, dug up a thick layer of turf, and removed the rocks. I measured out long, straight rows, planted seeds from packets I had bought at the hardware store, watered and walked away.

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I would be stretching the truth to say the garden thrived. There was a constant battle with the weeds, and the garden hose didn’t quite reach, so the plants were frequently thirsty. Yet I look back on this time with a sense of awe at how far I have come, and how much knowledge I have accumulated over the years, inch by inch, row by row.

Gardens reflect who we are and what we have become. Gardens give us the opportunity to start at the beginning and begin again, to find new seeds and plants to grow that will enrich our enjoyment and add to our environment. Every January, when the new garden season begins, I get out the graph paper and start doodling a design, figuring out how to fit all the new plants I want to try.

The truth is, for several weeks I have been searching for a worthy topic to write about, something to counter the news, to offer encouragement to you for your own garden. Yet each day, it gets harder to know what to say. One thing I know for sure, however, is that gardens, more than ever, are something that truly matters. We could all benefit from cultivating a piece of the earth and surrounding ourselves with greenery. It’s one small step we can take toward a greener, saner world.

I’ve discovered that putting ideas on paper first helps, which is why I left my friend with a large sheet of graph paper and suggested she first draw a big-picture view of her property, perhaps create a five-year plan. “It will help establish the vision and create the dots that will begin to connect over the years,” I told her. I could already imagine her snowy yard soon filled with paths, plants, trees, and benches, providing a sanctuary for her and all the wildlife that would come forth.

After two decades, my own garden is well-established, and I know it would be hard to start over, but I am tempted. And so this garden dreaming of mine begins again, with a new season, several seed catalogs, and more ideas percolating. I’m ready to look at the garden with fresh eyes, as if I were just starting over.

From my garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Author of The New Heirloom Garden and The Complete Kitchen Garden, among other books for cooks who love to garden.

p.s. I’ll be teaching The Art of Growing Food at Longwood Gardens on January 27th. Click here for more info.

Hello Friends,

For a few years now, I’ve been a volunteer with an organization called Grateful Hearts. The mission is to prepare healthy, fully cooked meals for the food pantry. Each week, our group packages more than 1,000 meals, which are distributed to six locations. Every week, the menu changes based on ingredients that arrive in the kitchen from local farms and producers.

During the summer and fall, volunteers glean vegetables from local farmers’ fields, while others pick up cheese, milk, and eggs from local producers. Donations are received from a bakery and other sources; once all items are gathered, menus are created for that week, and the process begins.

When volunteers gather, it is called ‘Chop and Chat’, often with a different group of volunteers each week, sometimes the same. On Monday, there might be a dozen of us in aprons standing at a long table with cutting boards and knives, peeling and cubing squash, stripping stems from kale, and dicing carrots and onions. We prep the vegetables for cooking on Tuesday when another set of volunteers comes into the kitchen.

The cooking component is overseen by a dedicated team of volunteers who compile recipes, often loosely written, with quantities not calculated precisely. It’s the art of winging it at its best. Everyone who volunteers knows how to beat the eggs for a frittata that will feed 100, how much spice to add to the coconut curry soup that will fill a 10-gallon container, and what size to chop the apples for the ten dozen apple muffins.

After all this menu planning, prepping, and cooking, individual meals come together on the third day, when portions are packaged into small containers, a label is affixed to the top stating the ingredients and heating instructions, and they are placed in the freezer, where they will be delivered to the food pantry later in the week. Cooking for a crowd is not for sissies. But somehow, it always works out well.

I’ve learned that everyone who participates in Grateful Hearts is there because feeding people is an act of love, and it is time well spent. The deep satisfaction comes from taking all the raw ingredients delivered to the kitchen on Monday and transforming them into 1000+ healthy meals. But the real reason it works so well is that everyone in the kitchen is improvising as they go.

This is how I cook most of the time at home, too, especially in the summer when the garden is an endless source of inspiration. Yet in the winter, I often have to take out a cookbook to find a recipe that matches what I have on hand. I am reminded of how much cooking and gardening have in common when it comes to improvisation — we rely on the familiar and routine, yet also value the unexpected that comes from trying something new.

When the seeds we grow become the recipes we cook, it is easy to see how cooking and gardening go hand in hand. This January, as the seed catalogs come rolling in, we have a choice: stick with the same tried-and-true vegetables, herbs, and flowers we know how to grow, or instead, choose to go a little wild and try something new. I’m opting for both.

Learning to wing it is what gardeners and cooks are good at. And sometimes, improvising is the only viable option.

From my kitchen garden to yours,

Ellen O.

Family Cookbook Writing:

Have you ever wanted to write a family cookbook? Join others in a virtual gathering to talk about how to write your own cookbook. This is not an instructional class; however, it will focus on specific topics each month. The purpose is to share ideas and keep you on track to finish the cookbook you plan to write. It’s free, no obligation, simply a way to connect with others who love to talk about food. Sign up on this Google document, and we’ll start in mid-January. (In the last newsletter, I posted a link that did not work. Pls try it again.)

Sign up for Cookbook 2026

Hello Everyone.

A few years ago, I taught a writing class titled “How to Write a Family Cookbook.” After a few of my own cookbooks, this was a topic I knew well, and others might enjoy learning the process from my experience. From the start, I did not promise to connect students with a publisher or an agent, and I made it clear that we would be doing a lot of writing. I would teach techniques for writing proper recipes and tips on taking better food photos. Still, the focus would be on developing a vocabulary for describing food and the stories they wanted to tell about why they loved to cook.

During the six-week class, we would immerse ourselves in the world of food writing. I encouraged everyone to read food lit, food magazines, cookbooks, and get to know their own style. Would they be writing about bread, desserts, family meals, or a collection of recipes that filled their childhood?  Every week, there was homework, and we spent the first hour of class sharing what we were cooking, eating, reading, and writing.

The goal for nearly everyone was to produce a cookbook by Christmas. With the class starting in August, this seemed like ample time to get it done. I knew better, however, since all of my books had taken a whole year to write, with another year for photography and editing. Writing a book takes time, and it requires making time, which may mean taking time away from other things.

As we neared the end of the class, only a few students were even close to finishing. They could make a smaller book, I suggested, or reduce the number of recipes. Or divide it into two parts: give the first half this year, then the second following year? But once you get started writing the stories, digging up memories with family photos, and deciding which recipes to include, it takes up a lot of emotional and physical time. Six weeks were clearly not enough time for most of my students. It certainly would not be enough for me.

In my cookbook writing class, almost everyone started with a vision, a working title, and an action plan, yet evolved into something completely different, much like a garden. Everyone had a story to tell, and as we navigated the course, all sorts of excellent writing came to life. Writing our stories is how we give back to others, in small and mysterious ways, sometimes without even knowing why or how.

One Christmas, my mother made me a book with many of her best recipes typed and pasted onto pages. It was a bit of a rough draft, but I know she made it with so much love that I nearly cried. She didn’t ask which recipes to include, nor did she write up the stories behind them. But somehow, she knew which ones were important, and just by including people’s names in the title, flooding me with memories: Bertha Teele’s Macaroons, Marti Fiske Cocoa Bread, and people in her life that were meaningful.

I recently read an excellent essay by a fellow Substack writer, Susie Middletown, about time, and taking time to notice how the light moved through her house. A simple concept that touched me deeply, reminding me of how much of how we spend our time defines our lives. Maybe it’s time to celebrate eating, reading, and writing the recipes and stories that you can hand down to the next generation. It might help to make sense of the world.

From my kitchen garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Author of The Complete Kitchen Garden, The New Heirloom Garden, and other books for cooks who love to garden. Follow me on Instagram.

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Cookbook Journal Writing - Starting in January

If you are reading this and were a student in one of my classes, thank you for taking the first step toward completing your cookbook. I sincerely hope you finished the project.

To anyone who would like to get started with a cookbook journal and begin writing your own family cookbook, I will be hosting a monthly virtual meeting – and all are welcome, free of charge. I have set up a Google document here for you to sign up. When we are ready to get started, I will send out more information.  

Hello Friends,

While other people are thinking about turkey, cranberry sauce, and pie, this week I am deep into planting bulbs. Not the kind that go outside underground, but the bulbs that are forced to bloom during winter. If it doesn’t happen this week, it might not happen at all. It’s a routine, and possibly a bad habit, that has evolved ever since I became a gardener. Because if I can’t be outside tending the soil, I might as well be in the basement potting up bulbs.

I live in Vermont, where winter is half the year, and forcing bulbs of all types is the only way to bring grace to the dark, cold days of February and March. Forcing bulbs is nothing new to most gardeners; it’s a way to bring on spring a little sooner. Developing tips and tricks comes with many years of experience. When I started decades ago, I reveled in learning how to pot up hyacinths, mini daffodils, and various small bulbs, with some success. I failed miserably at planting Freesia and Calla lilies, and the ubiquitous amaryllis has never managed to bloom on Christmas. All bulbs continue to lure me into the possibility that I may figure it out this time and keep trying each year.

I have given up on the significant quantities that started my habit when inexpensive options became readily available at supermarkets around holidays. Like so many things these days, why go to the trouble and mess of growing bulbs or flowers when they are easily attainable? The reason I continue to grow anything at all is the satisfaction of actively participating in a plant’s life cycle. For this reason, I will continue to force at least a few bulbs every year and take pride in this pleasure.

Since not everyone has a cold, dark basement to store bulbs, there is another option: The Paperwhite (Narcissus papyraceus). It has been my family tradition to plant during Thanksgiving week for as long as I can remember. Perhaps because it typically takes only a few weeks from bulb to bloom, and is insanely easy to do. Never one for big, showy flower displays, I shun red poinsettias (though they look nice in other people's houses). Instead, I prefer a Canton blue bowl full of delicate, scented paperwhites. Simple and understated.

Paperwhites are a no-fuss bulb that will grow in any medium: soil, stones, or even just water. Pre-programmed to force themselves into bloom in four to six weeks after planting, by planting this week, it is with a degree of certainty that they will be ready for the next holiday. If you are new to planting Paperwhites, follow this link to the White Flower Farm resource page with a video. (If you live in California, you’ll think we’re nuts for growing them indoors.) Either way, put down the turkey baster and get started.

You can buy kits, but I prefer to buy the bulbs in bulk through a catalog or at a garden nursery, typically near the other bulbs. They cost about $1.50 each with papery skin and a touch of green stem already showing, indicating they are ready for action. As for stones, if you have a patio, you can scoop up enough pebbles to make a base for the bulbs, or buy a bag of pea-sized stones or smooth, highly polished ornamental rocks. Choose a glass bowl or pot with no drainage holes, and you are all set.

The beauty of paperwhites is that they require very little fuss. Plant them in stones or soil, then water and set aside.  I save the stones year to year, and, like Christmas ornaments, they tell a story or hold a memory of a person or place. When I bring the bag of rocks up from the basement, I sort them by size, filling the base of the container with the small ones, then topping it with the special ones - the ones I have been collecting year after year.

You may enjoy collecting stones, shells, and other small objects from walks on the beach or in the woods. Topping off the paperwhite bowls is the perfect place to display them. My selection comprises dark gray streaked white from Lake Champlain, sea glass and seashells from Cape Cod, and broken pottery fragments from my garden. Your partner or kids may ask, “Why are you saving stones?” and attempt to toss them out. Save them, because year after year they become more valuable - in a sentimental way.

A few years back, when I was cleaning out Mom’s garden shed, I came across a cache of small stones, shells, and a few oddly shaped rocks that looked like fossils and arrowheads. She must have filled her pockets on beach walks and saved them for her paperwhites. It was an aha moment to see that we both kept rocks, shells, and other minor interesting artifacts that could be planted with our Narcissus bulbs. An heirloom of little value, except for the memory of time.

Like a Thanksgiving recipe, paperwhites, and saving stones, these have become a family tradition, a reminder that sometimes it is the small things that are most meaningful and have a magical way of weaving together our lives that only we can decipher.

Be kind, eat good food, save stones, and invite your neighbors over for a bit of holiday cheer.

From my garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Author of The Complete Kitchen Garden and The New Heirloom Garden, and other books for gardeners who love to cook. Follow along on Instagram.

p.s. Paperwhites make an excellent gift for other gardeners: a bundle of 7 wrapped in an organza pull-string bag, tucked into a bowl with white quartz pebbles. “What’s this?” your friend may ask. If so, show them how to plant, and they will now be hooked on Paperwhites forever. Share what you love with others.

Dear Friends.

A light dusting of snow fell over the garden last night, seeping into all the nooks and crannies of the soil. The first snow is always like fairy stardust embodied in soft, silent snowflakes. Once settled, it changes everything. Beginning with the daily routine of making dinner, I have less interest in a green salad and more in a hearty soup. For the most part, I am ready to begin the long journey into winter. And it starts today, with the first snow and a fresh journal to begin writing.

Journaling comes and goes in my life, and maybe for you, too? During rough patches, it helps to document what I am learning, in hopes that this will push me through. For a while, I kept a gratitude journal to stay positive amidst turmoil. Garden journals have a way of getting started each spring with gusto, noting the weather, planting schedules, and details on succession planting and harvesting, but once July is in full swing, all is abandoned. This year, I started taking short notes about each day in the limited space of a day calendar, not nearly enough space to fully let go.

Yet I’m still making the effort because I believe that writing and journaling can harness innermost thoughts in positive ways. Writing is different than speaking to a friend, because the way words come out is not for anyone else but yourself. Ideas that need a place to surface or triggers that give us an edge are all safe in a journal, which is why I purchased The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad. In her first book, Between Two Kingdoms, Suleika, a courageous cancer survivor, travels in a VW van with her beloved dog to visit other survivors. In this new book, she collects short essays written by many of my other favorite authors, along with prompts. And that’s where I started today.

With the garden now empty, blanketed with snow, with only the tiniest wisp of green poking through, I think back to all the things I most love about my garden as a way to transition into winter gently. Oddly, I always come back to the salad greens. The ease of planting seeds, watching them emerge as green stripes against the dark soil, and harvesting a range of shapes, colors, textures, and tastes can only be described as love. Pure love, the way one feels when there is no holding back with excitement and the urge to keep planting more, is consuming.

From the first spear-shaped leaves of arugula with its peppery bite, to the colorful Mesclun of frilly mustard and endive, ruby red chard, lemony sorrel, licoricey fennel, and towering lovage, these vibrant flavors live only in the past. I can still feel how tenderly I clutched a fragrant bouquet of sweet basil; admired full heads of lettuce, so luscious and robust they rival rosebuds, felt victorious when rabbits no longer ravaged the chard, a powerhouse of cut-and-come-again stalks I depend on all summer into fall. These are the things I can see, feel, and smell that will imprint on my memory and keep me going through the winter months.

Yes, I struggle a bit with winter, but it is because I love my garden and how we nurture each other. With the change outside, inevitably, a change inside is also occurring. These days, when I make salad, I will reach for red cabbage, carrots, spinach, or Brussels sprouts tossed with a cashew dressing. You, too, are most likely eating more root vegetables sautéed into soups and stews, making savory tarts with roasted vegetables. I am using the oven more often than I did in the summer, baking bread and spinach custard.

Prompt: What are the 10 things you love most about your garden? While the onions simmer and the sweet potatoes roast, take a moment to open a journal and write down your best memories of summer. Keep it to yourself, or share them below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

From my garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Author of The Complete Kitchen Garden, The New Heirloom Garden, and other books for cooks who love to garden. Follow my Vermont garden on Instagram.

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Hello Friends.

We are all students when it comes to the garden. Not just learning how to tend to the soil and plants, but also creating a design that fits into your landscape and busy life. A garden is a work in progress, and the key is to balance both productivity and a sense of sanctuary. You might have several acres or a small postage-stamp plot outside your kitchen door. Either way, once the garden season is over, it is the perfect time to take stock of what worked and what did not.

Typically, planning a garden starts in the winter, when there is a snowy canvas outside, and seed catalogs arrive. Yet with the garden season ending this month in the Northeast, it’s an ideal time to dream big, while images of the season past are still in view. Accept that the garden is like an art project, and permit yourself to explore options that may start as “I don’t think this will work,” and give them a try.

Last winter, I taught a six-week virtual class for students at Longwood Gardens who wanted to reimagine their gardens. From the start, I had them visualize how they would like to see themselves walking through the garden, and to put themselves in that play state of mind. Just enough to relax, enough to mess around, because you never know where it will lead.

During the class, I encouraged everyone to get wild by sketching three distinct designs, helping them discover which one truly resonated. Often, the first was drawn as a square box, the second an oval or spiral, and the third combined elements of both, resulting in a more artful garden. Yet when it came time to transfer from paper to soil, these designs don’t always work out efficiently. That’s where flexibility and adaptation come into play.

Last week, we had a “reunion” to discuss how their chosen design performed and, more importantly, what they learned in the process. Before our virtual gathering, I prepared three questions:

1. What changed from your original plan?

2. What worked better than you expected?

3. What are your plans for next year?

And the conversation started like this:

“I moved the garden gate from a front entrance to the side; it gave me room for two extra beds,” said one gardener, clearly pleased that the minor tweak from his original design allowed space for six more tomato plants.

“I grew all sorts of new plants that I had never tried before,” said another gardener, who also shared her enthusiasm for starting seeds indoors in trays, something totally new for her. “I plan to expand the garden next year.” She added.

A third student, one who spent endless hours drawing elaborate paths and garden rooms and created one of the most beautiful, detailed plans, did not plant a thing. In fact, she is still designing the space. “My neighbors put up a fence between our yards, which completely changed my design, “ she explained. “This created a shady corner, so instead I put up a hammock.”

But she’s not giving up —she’s simply taking time to adjust to the changes and gather materials. She has all the best traits of a true gardener: patience, flexibility, and an artistic streak.

While the details of these gardens were fascinating, their success lay not in their productivity but in their willingness to be spontaneous in their design. It was more about the process of taking a design from paper to the soil, and about learning by observing that it may not turn out as expected, but they were willing to step into the mystery and mess around with the materials.

The design may start with a vision in your head, but just because you can picture it doesn’t mean it is easy to put a plan on paper.

It helps to start by roughly sketching your entire yard from a bird’s-eye perspective. This gives an overview of how the house fits into the grand plan and establishes the obstacles. Next, visualize the pattern for how you will move around the property —from the kitchen to the garden to the outdoor seating areas. Now, dream about your five-year plan and how you would like to see the garden evolve over time.

Relax around any expectations for an instantly beautiful garden, because there is so much that happens in a single garden cycle, and each year your plan will likely change. But it does help to keep in mind the framework that gives purpose to the effort you are making, because some years are better than others. And if you are starting new, it is easy to be discouraged or encouraged, depending on your perspective.

Yes, all gardeners are artists. With some planning, a playful mindset, and the classic “spaghetti on the wall” approach, we can explore new ideas without knowing what will come of them. It’s fine to experiment and sketch out designs for next year’s garden, knowing that letting go can lead to exciting discoveries, to share and inspire others.

From my kitchen garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Author of From the Cook’s Garden and The New Heirloom Garden. Follow my Vermont garden on Instagram.

P.S. Thank you to the students in my garden classes. I’ll be teaching again this winter. Be sure to check out all the continuing educational opportunities at Longwood Gardens.

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Dear Friends,

There is no question about it – closing the garden at the end of the season is not nearly as exciting as getting it started in the spring. Both require getting down on your hands and knees to weed. A certain amount of planning is necessary for either planting or rearranging what is already growing.  Yet, the act of altering the current state of the landscape, which will either become a garden or is a garden in dormancy, cannot be done with a checklist.

I know this to be true, because often I make a checklist in my head or on paper: move the pots into the garden shed, cut down the zinnias, take apart the tomato cages – but once I step foot outside, my instinct takes me in a different direction. I mention this because I thought about offering you a checklist of steps to take to help you close the garden in the fall. But there is no right way, and I trust that you already know what to do.

I do love a good checklist, however, and can make them for almost everything else in my life: books to read, letters to write, phone calls to make, recipes to try – it is an endless and long checklist of all the activities that I hope to accomplish in a day, or a week. However, when it comes to the garden and fall clean-up, a checklist is useless. The garden is the easiest place to be distracted, and for this I am grateful. There are a few things in life that allow us to get lost without guidelines, and the garden is one of those places.

Over four decades ago, I was a new gardener, and I wanted to know the best way to close up a garden for the winter. I asked a more experienced gardener if I could volunteer my time to learn the proper technique. Back then, it was a matter of shearing every plant to the ground, removing all the stems, seeds, and what we know as valuable insect and bird fodder to a pile in the back of the property. After spending several days on this task, the garden had become a barren and indistinguishable landscape.

I followed this rigid regimen every fall, until one year winter arrived in early October, before I could cut back the sunflowers, the echinacea, and the hollyhocks - it snowed! What a beautiful sight it was to see the dried seed pods and shriveled foliage against the crisp white snow. I marveled at the evening shadows playing with the grassy stems that fluttered in the wind, the birds balancing on wispy branches to glean the seeds.

No longer did cleaning the garden seem at all relevant to my role as a gardener, and I became more relaxed around the trimming and pruning that had once seemed essential. I recognized that the reason I was intent on tidying the garden was so that it might be easier in the spring to get a jump start on the growing season. Yet this was only helping me, the gardener, to save time, rather than enhancing my enjoyment throughout the year or providing a wildlife sanctuary.

These days, I stop in between untangling the vines from the bamboo poles to notice light filtering through uncut grasses and flocks of goldfinches feasting on seeds from the unruly native plants. I revel in this opportunity to ignore cleaning up the fall garden and to let go of the “right” way to do things in favor of creating an artful garden through an ecological approach.

In Vermont, the garden season has been extended longer than any other year I can remember. The remaining vegetables in the garden, including chard, spinach, and collards, will stay in place to feed the rabbits and deer. I’m happy to share. There is no rush to put an end to the garden season, because for now, I watch the play of light, take note of evening sounds, and feel it deeply, rather than doing the tasks that need to get done — because that is all in my head.

I may regret this languishing of time, yet I have learned that our gardens are best when viewed as moments in time, small sparks of joy, tiny filaments of light, and a reason for hope.

From my garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Author of The Complete Kitchen Garden, The New Heirloom Garden, and other books for cooks who love to garden.

Dear Friends,

I used to think that gardening was all about plants and design, but now I know that it is really about curiosity and sharing. This was proved yesterday, when I was in my front garden potting up mums and decorating the porch with pumpkins. The time was 3:30 PM, and traffic from the nearby high school had reached a crescendo, and now the students without cars were walking past my garden.

I heard two girls giggling in front of a row of Tithonia flowers. Not wanting to scare them off, I pretended to move a mum closer to be within sight, and to overhear what was delighting them. It was a bumblebee, tucked inside the center of an orange blossom. They were daring each other to touch its soft backside. Completely absorbed, but once we established eye contact, they knew they were doing no harm by standing in my garden or touching a bee.

I joined them in their delight and told them the name of the flower – both the fancy name and the common name, Mexican Sunflower, which I thought would be easier to remember. Yet I knew they may not remember, and likely would always think of it as the Bumblebee plant. I would do the same, unless I wrote it down.

I told them it was an annual flower that started from seed in the spring, and showed them the various stages of the blossom. Past its prime with many of the blossoms turning into seed heads, I showed them the prickly pods and how to extract the seeds. "What?" they exclaimed. "The flowers turn into seeds?" Yes, I explained, hiding my inner thought that they really had no idea about the life of a plant. With plants all around us, shouldn't this be mandatory in all our schools?

I offered that they could take as many as they would like and save them to grow next year. I held back another thought, knowing I would be happy to show them how to start the seeds, but I also knew that too much too soon would be overstepping boundaries, at least until we knew each other better. Or they asked to learn more.

I then pointed out the vine that was growing nearby, the Clematis: Sweet Autumn, which they seemed to have overlooked. It is smothered in tiny white blossoms, and to my eye, the high point of a Fall garden. "It has a light fragrance," I said, leaning slightly to put my nose to the blossoms, hoping they would follow my lead. They did not.  Instead, they kept their eyes on the bumblebee and began to notice how many bumblebees were in all the blossoms.

I wanted to point out some other plants, too, and bring them into the rest of the garden, but remembered that we had just met. And their interest was just starting. Too much too soon might scare them away. Even when a Monarch butterfly flew in, it was still all about the bumblebees. This introduction had to start small.

Yet they hung around a little longer. One of the girls offered that the orange flowers reminded her of a yellow flower that her mother once grew in a yard they once had. Signaling to me that they no longer lived in a place with a garden, and that this was a good memory of a place she once enjoyed.  "It might have been an annual flower." I ventured, hoping to engage in the start of educating her on how easy it is to grow annuals. A good starting point for becoming a gardener.

Long ago, when I caught the gardening bug – and it was not immediate, I must admit – I was so in love with the act of gardening that I wanted to share with the world, or at least a few school children, the ease and pleasure of planting a seed. In a way, it broke my heart to know that these girls had no idea about how a garden starts and had probably never planted a seed. Or if they did, it was in the elementary grades, the ubiquitous bean seed in a milk carton or Dixie cup – it most likely withered on a windowsill.

As the world falls apart, and we do our best to distract ourselves in ways that can still fill our hearts with joy, there is always the garden. Asking myself how I can be of service, I am reminded that perhaps by having a garden on a busy street with walkers, bikers, and high school kids wandering by carrying backpacks, I can gather up seeds and leave them in my little free library – with a note to please take for free - hoping to keep the curiosity about growing things alive and well. It’s a start.

From my garden to yours,

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Author of The Complete Kitchen Garden, The New Heirloom Garden, and other books for gardeners who love to cook.

"The three grand essentials of happiness are: Something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for." — Alexander Chalmers

Hello Friends.

If there's ever a time to make a change to your garden, this is it. Too often, gardeners wait until spring, when nurseries are full of tempting options. This time of year, nurseries are practically giving away their plants, which is why I've been stocking up on the two-for-one deals with a focus on native plants. Those poor plants are like shaggy homeless puppies waiting to be adopted and could use a good home, or so my thinking goes.

It may not be a wise decision to bring home pot-bound plants, with brown leaves and dry stalks, in the hopes that I can get them back to life. However, this is how I began a journey of digging, dividing, and renovating my perennial garden over the past few weeks. After 20 years, it has grown into a mature mass of healthy foliage, reliable blooms, and an established root system that requires fortitude to break apart. The flip side of having healthy organic soil is that everything grows too fast and too big.

With every force of the shovel into a tangled root system, it is unclear whether this is a response to gaining control of the chaos happening in the world or the hope of a better garden. Fortunately, I have the confidence that I know what I am doing, a far cry from when I first planted my garden. Twenty years ago, I began with a rough design on paper, then proceeded to plant sections in 10-foot increments, following a five-year plan. It took a little longer than expected.

Even back then, I took advantage of the end-of-year sales at the nurseries, bringing home peonies, grasses, and all the plants that looked terrible in pots, which nobody else wanted. I had a limited budget that matched my knowledge of how to mix height, bloom time, and visual interest, yet the result has been pretty good. It’s been a good run, but after two decades of the same plants and the same routines, it has become a little boring. It is time to give it a fresh look now that I have become a more confident gardener, and will put my education about native plants to work.

When I wrote my first cookbook and was looking for recipe testers, I asked myself what defines a good cook? Is it someone who follows a recipe, or who understands how the ingredients work together? The answer is, of course, a combination of the two: information and confidence. This comes from experience, observation, and the ability to take the information you have and make a judgment call.

What defines a good gardener has to do with attitude as much as knowledge and experience, which is why I compare gardening to playing a game of poker. I've always held myself to a degree of perfection, and a garden can be humbling. Still, a garden involves strategies like risk assessment, negotiation, and strategic thinking combined with a basic understanding of right place, right plant. The wild card is soil, and making sure this part of your hand contains only the best cards, or there is no chance of winning.

A garden teaches the gardener that we can make mistakes because learning is essential, and while the stakes may feel high, they really aren't in the scheme of things. Educating yourself about plants, primarily native varieties versus the ornamental choices, and striking a balance between the two has been on my to-do list. Gardens are constantly changing and evolving, and once you think the garden is complete, it may be time to start over. Which is what I am doing, but it is not a pretty sight.

Most of the lost puppies I am bringing home and making room for in the garden are the native plants, which are looking pretty shaggy right now. Not meant to live out their lives in plastic pots. I'm hoping they will adjust and adapt to their new home. It may be time to apply what you have learned as a gardener to create a healthier habitat for nature to thrive through a game of strategy instead of simply chance.

From my garden to yours,

Ellen O.

Ellen Ecker Ogden is a food and garden writer, as well as the author of five books on garden design and cooking. Visit her on Instagram and at ellenogden.com