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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Nurturing a gardener’s inner Taoism

Path to sharing soup with a new friend is full of detours; go with the flow

The Columbian
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A live-and-let-live attitude fills Deppe's entire home, evidenced by a notice about an eight-legged resident.
A live-and-let-live attitude fills Deppe's entire home, evidenced by a notice about an eight-legged resident. Photo Gallery

I planted my peas a few days ago.

Carol Deppe, a plant breeder and gardener in Corvallis, Ore., had whetted my appetite for her favorite snap pea, Oregon Giant Sugar, and many other spring greens in her latest book, “The Tao of Vegetable Gardening: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy and Serenity,” published in February by Chelsea Green.

So now I sowed those peas, per her instructions, two inches apart in a wide bed. I sowed one batch for pea shoots, which can be harvested at 6 inches high, and others in wide rows in a circle around my tomato cages. This is another Deppe method: Oregon Giant Sugar is a medium-vine variety, not a tall one that needs a 7-foot trellis. So she lets the vines scramble up her tomato cages, before the tomato plants need the space.

Deppe, 69, a geneticist who left the research lab for the garden years ago, applies her scientific mind to organic methods, breeding disease-resistant vegetables with the best flavor, nutrition and yield for the least amount of work (hurray).

Once I read the “Tao of Vegetable Gardening,” with its mix of sly humor, dirt gardening (how to use a hoe with the least effort), the art of non-doing (very Tao), how to cook greens and even freeze them (heretofore impossible in my kitchen), and Deppe’s own translations of 2,500-year-old Chinese texts — well, I had to meet this woman.

“What does the Tao have to do with growing vegetables?” I asked her one cold gray day back in February, over a steaming bowl of bean-and-squash soup.

“It’s going with the flow, rolling with the punches,” Deppe says. “I think most experienced gardeners have got a good bit of Tao in them. If the weather isn’t good for tomatoes, well, it’s great for cabbages.”

As she writes, “The word Tao includes the concepts of way, path, method, subject, art, science, force, Spirit, God, power and essence.”

Like the essence of the Gaucho Golden beans we were savoring.

“I didn’t change the bean, I just cleaned it up a little bit,” said Deppe.

(By cleaning up the bean, she meant selecting only the plants that bore the kind of beans she wanted, and pulling up any “rogue” plants that produced differently. By growing and saving only the best seeds over several years, she developed a uniform variety.)

“It’s a great technique for any gardener who saves seeds,” she said.

Stacked buckets of dried shelled corn, piles of drying beans and rows of butternuts take up most of the space in this house in Corvallis. A freezer stashed with glass jars and plastic bags full of seeds are parked in the garage. A sign over the bathroom sink asks visitors to not disturb the spider webs, or George, who spins them.

“He eats the grain moths,” Deppe said.

(If you prefer to buy seeds, Deppe lists sources for favorite varieties, including her own mail-order company, Fertile Valley Seeds, in the book.)

“And you won’t fall off the face of the Earth if you don’t save your own seeds,” Deppe said as I handed her another thick slice of skillet cornbread, slathered with Irish butter.

“I make it from Cascade Ruby Gold flint corn,” Deppe said, nodding to the bowl of colorful, foot-long ears on the table, where I was wolfing down the beans. I mean, experiencing their essence.

“Each color has a very different flavor,” she said. “You’re basically tasting the red-brown colors, which overwhelm the yellows.”

Deppe has developed different flint corns, some for cornmeal, others that grind up into flour for cakes, pancakes, even gravy.

She also craves nutritious leafy greens, and she lists her top 11 in the “Tao of Vegetable Gardening.”

Her “eat-all-greens garden” is perfect for small spaces, producing a whole crop — as much as two pounds per square foot — before it’s time to tuck a few tomato plants into the same spot.

Now is the time to plant Green Wave mustard, which also thrives in cool weather. Its ruffled leaves, peppery hot when raw, mellow out when blanched or sautéed, or tossed into soups.

Deppe’s eat-all-greens garden came to her in a Tao sort of way.

She was renting a house in town, with a couple “dinky raised beds,” and she had some compost delivered and dumped in the driveway. She didn’t need the compost for a few weeks, and she didn’t use the driveway, because she didn’t have a car.

“I realized I could spread that compost out about six inches deep and double the size of my garden,” she said.

She broadcast seeds of Green Wave mustard over the bed, and then lightly covered them with soil by bouncing the back of a leaf rake over the area. (Raking them in buries the tiny seeds too deeply.)

The densely planted greens grew so fast in the fertile compost, they shaded out the weeds. In six weeks, she was cutting swaths of greens with her serrated kitchen knife.

In her chapter “Non-Doing,” which speaks to the wisdom of not intervening when some awful thing happens in the garden, she quotes the Tao: Muddy water, when still, gradually becomes clear.

Such words resonated with Deppe, who has found her way through many life changes: the death of a man she loved, her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, the realization that a windowless lab was not where she would find those moments of life worth remembering.

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As she tended her mother, there were times when medical emergencies meant abandoning her crops for weeks and losing them. She realized she needed “a more resilient garden” that could survive good times and bad.

Hard times can come in a personal way, or an impersonal one, like the wild weather of climate change.

I think of these things as I scatter my seeds of Green Wave mustard and use the back of a leaf rake to cover them with just enough soil.

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