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Friday, August 21, 2009

First-year gardener

Say hey to Morgan Perlman, a 12-year-old from Bala Cynwyd about to enter the seventh grade. He and his parents had a vegetable garden this summer for the first time, but Morgan was the chief planter, tender and harvester for four raised beds measuring a neat four feet by four feet each. I visited Morgan and his mother Rachel yesterday to see how everything went. I'm here to report that it went spectacularly well! Morgan is quite the researcher, looking things up on the internet and consulting a very valuable book by Barbara Damrosch called "The Garden Primer." (Barbara and her husband Eliot Coleman have an organic farm in Maine.) I'm always talking about how much work goes into a vegetable garden because seed-sellers and others seem to go overboard in the other direction, implying that simply tossing seeds in the ground guarantees a bountiful harvest. The Perlmans didn't exactly toss seeds into the ground. They had Morgan to carefully plot the rows and insert the seeds and seedlings. The family ate fresh zucchini and squash, bush beans, eggplant, along with a lovely variety of herbs, all summer. Rachel is a wonderful cook and found many uses for all those squashes, including ratatouille and egg frittata. And while Morgan was a little reticent around a stranger, Rachel talked about how much she loved having company, serving food from the garden and telling her guests that it was homegrown. That's something we all love. Story to come - on Morgan and other first-time gardeners - in a couple of weeks.
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About Virginia A. Smith
Ginny Smith, a Philadelphia native, worked as a reporter at newspapers in New York, Connecticut and Ohio – with six short months at the end of the Bulletin tossed in – before returning to Philadelphia in 1985 to join the Inquirer. Her favorite beats here have included Center City, roving around Pennsylvania (and getting paid for it!) and alternative medicine. She’s also been City Editor and Pennsylvania Editor. Ginny has been happily writing – and learning - about gardening fulltime since 2006. She’s won two silver medals of achievement from the national Garden Writers Association and in 2011, Bartram’s Garden honored her with its Green Exemplar award for her stories about “the region’s deeply rooted horticultural history, cultural attractions and bountiful gardens.”
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