Oh yes, Cabbage and Sweet Potatoes as Groundcover

A funny thing is happening in my mourning garden. In between the garlic and the strawberries, a stout rainbow chard volunteer has emerged. These three edibles are for me associated with Thom's Olivebridge garden. He was probably best known for his garlic and then the Honeoye strawberries which appeared from May into June and would attract neighbors for basket after basket after basket. Well, he had a reputation for potatoes, cabbage and tomatoes too but more on those later. Chard was a more intimate crop, not usually shared with others but sauteed up with olive oil, good salt and fistfuls of sliced garlic for summer dinners at his house.

When I met him, I fancied myself a bit of a gourmand however, I quickly realized I'd been deceiving myself with years of copious amounts of Stellensboch white wine and other libations because, when asked one night to help him chop Swiss chard for dinner, I was at a loss. What to do with this hard midrib running down the center of the leafy bit? Well, Thom showed me how to prepare chard, kale and collards but also how to coax them from the earth. 'Chard will make you strong," he said one time early on after giving me a bouquet of it.

                                            not chard but red Russian kale

He was also quite fond of handing me arrangements of asparagus - usually around my birthday. That's how he'd mark the asparagus' arrival - 'in time for your birthday, Karina.' By the end of asparagus season, I'd find piles of them slowly wilting in his lower refrigerator bins. "I can't look at them anymore," he'd say. Ah, the joys of the abundance of eating with the seasons on your own farm.

So now, the single chard volunteer has decided to grow itself in between the garlic and strawberries and next to the solar powered stained glass orb that glows and marks the garden at night.

This year my birthday came with several gift cards - thanks to my sister - to Adam's Fairacre Farms. Somewhere along the way I'd mentioned that Adams has a fair selection of black plants and she plied me with a nice budget to chose black plants for the Mourning Garden. One of the things I was thinking about that day at Adams was ground cover. What to fill in the spaces and gaps between showy plants?

And then I saw an entire table of red cabbage seedlings which have beautiful silver gray purple-ly leaf. Cabbage. Yes. Of course. Cabbage to honor Thom's talent for kraut. He'd concocted it one year in a little crock and we'd eat it - piled high on black Angus hot dogs for him and faux dogs for me. After a little research, he started drinking the kraut juice for health reasons and adding whole peeled garlic cloves and red and green jalapeno peppers to the brine. Then came the rave reviews from family and friends and up went a whole field of green cabbage.

Another time, after I asked him to try his hand at sweet potatoes, he ordered up some slips from sown south and covered entire rows of earth with clear plastic to heat up the cold northern soil. All that work and we only harvested a basket of sweet potatoes. Something didn't work quite right. Either the soil temperature didn't get hot enough or it got cold again too soon or maybe the critters got to them but sweet potatoes never appeared in his garden again.

This season in my garden, 'Blackie' ornamental sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas 'Blackie) is planted throughout my garden intermingling with red cabbage (Brassica oleracea var. capitata), an easy to grow edible that enjoys cool weather - perfect for the Catskills.

 Other color appropriate edibles which are currently establishing: purple-leafed sage (Salvia) and dwarf purple basil (Ocimum basilicum). Nasturtiums are here again this year - how can any summer garden, edible, mourning or not, deny itself the old-fashioned romance of a heaping pile of nasturtium vines and flowers? And then there is newcomer marjoram (Origanum majorana), which I suspect is related to oregano from its Latin name, and keeps company with the creeping thyme and the lemon thyme in a hot and dry section of the Mourning Garden.