Yep, it’s Memorial Weekend in Seattle…you can tell by the steady downpour. While I did have plans to work in the garden, instead I think I might just curl up on the couch in front of the fire and continue along with my favorite soggy season activity – reading! Edible Heirlooms: Heritage Vegetable for the Maritime Garden by former North Dakota farm boy, now Northwest author and avid gardener, Bill Thorness, seems like the perfect title to while away my afternoon and whet my appetite for the inevitably warmer (& dryer!) days ahead.
Edible Heirlooms: Heritage Vegetables for the Maritime Garden
The following is a brief excerpt of a review I wrote for the spring issue of Pacific Horticulture, the quarterly publication of the Pacific Horticultural Society. Read the entire review here.
Those of us blessed enough to reside in “Cascadia, the evergreen landscape seemingly defined by water, whether it be the rivers, lakes, ocean, or omnipresent rain,” recognize the unique challenges of our terroir. Edible Heirlooms focuses on the growing conditions of our maritime climate, found in coastal areas from San Francisco to Vancouver, British Columbia, from the foothills of the Cascade Range to the Pacific Ocean.
Perhaps you can see why this is my go-to choice for a rainy weekend smack in the middle of what should be prime gardening season. I think you can file it under “misery loves company.” Recognizing that I’m a part of an entire region of gardeners working within the same challenging – yet ultimately benign and fruitful – conditions helps take the sting out of the sight of my poor tomatoes huddled against the chilling rain.
Profiles of twenty-six heirloom vegetable make up the body of the book. From arugula to tomato, Thorness includes cultivation guidelines as well as information on harvesting and storing your produce… Charming illustrations by Susie Thorness, Bill’s wife, accompany the vegetable descriptions. The beautifully rendered pictures ornament the page, (and make me want a set of colored pencils) but do not distract from the valuable content.
An oh-so-practical chapter on site selection and season extenders outlines tips for making the most of our long, yet relatively cool growing season (see rainy weekend above). But it’s the inspired chapter entitled New Gardening Energy for Every Season that give this gardener hope on a dank, gray day. Thorness believes in fostering community. He promotes the notion of gathering like-minded gardening friends and neighbors to join together to build a community garden, support the neighborhood food bank with excess produce, or host a lively winter seed swap, reminding us that many hands make light work, and any excuse for a party is a good one.
In recent years, “heirloom” has become a loosely bandied-about phrase – more a horticultural branding effort to gain market share than a description of the range of human effort required to keep these venerable plants alive. From preserving bio-diversity to creating a competitive niche for small family farms, Thorness offers thoughtful and compelling reasons for the preservation and continued cultivation of these living pieces of history.
Edible Heirlooms is a little book with a big job. Thorness defines heirloom seeds as a “living lesson on human history and the nature of civilization” whose preservation and continued cultivation is critical to the future of our health and that of the planet we live on.
And you thought it was only a tomato.
'Brandywine', illustration by Susie Thorness
