Designing an Organic Garden

We are now here in my organic garden, and I want to show you some of my plants. This is corn, sweet corn, and you want to plant sweet corn in a group, together because it has to pollinate itself when the wind blows. I’m always laying my garden out in sort of creative ways and I decided to plant the corn in a circle. And then I decided to plant the green beans that are vining around the corn. So as the corn grows tall, the green beans will attach to the corn and grow up it. So that will be the stake for the green beans. And these are the green beans, and they’re just beginning to flower, and the corn - I don’t think it has any tassels yet, but within a week or so, it will start to get tassels and then the corn will come.

I like to, in my garden, I like to put herbs and flowers and plants all together mixed in. So what I do is I put stepping stones through the garden so that I, or a visitor that’s coming for supper and wants to help me pick the plants while I’m cooking, will know how to get through the garden. And so, this is my upper garden, this is my middle garden, and that’s my lower garden, and the lower garden I’m just beginning to plant with okra. We have, in this upper garden, other than the corn and green beans, we have beets. So these are beets and they are so delicious in a salad. These beets are so great - you use the greens - you can chop them up finely in a salad - and you can use the stems in a stew - it’s great in lentil soup or vegetable soup. But you want to be able to take the stems out - but they give the soup a really good flavor. And you take the end of the beet, and you can either steam it, or you can shred it up and put it in a salad like shredded carrots. Delicious with pecans, shredded beet, shredded carrots and homegrown lettuce - great salad - a little feta cheese, maybe goat cheese made at the local farm.

These are sunflowers. These will get very tall with great big, huge sunflowers on them. And these are herbs. This is thyme, marjoram, Mexican oregano, and rosemary. And down here, very small, are basil - we have little basil seeds coming up that came from seeds that I’ve collected for about fifteen years - the same basil seeds - I collect them and replant them every year.