A garden plan for 2025

I just finished reading Kate Colquhoun’s epic, Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking. It is expansive: from gruels and early breads of the Iron Age through the sophistication and global marketplace of the Romans through the great wars to modern days. It lays out the many, many peaks and valleys of British cuisine. I was deeply inspired by this passage, which I quote at length, on Tudor herb gardens:

Markham believed that the huswife’s principal skill was knowledge of the secrets of cookery, and the first step to this was to know her herbs and vegetables and to cultivate them successfully herself. As she tied on her bonnet, slipped her teet into her clogs and reached for her hoe, she might have turned to books by straightforward agricultural writers like Martin Tusser (1557) for advice on when and how to sow seeds, and when to prune and harvest. If she was lucky, she could pore over one of the exquisite, voluminous herbals like John Gerard’s of 1597, filled with fine illustrations and compendious advice about every known plant. She could heed their advice to buy radish, turnip, cabbage, onion, parsnip and lettuce seeds in England and to send for the rest from abroad and might grow pompions (pumpkins), artichokes and melons as boundary plants to keep order in the kitchen plot. She collected herb seeds each year for sowing the next, and she might allow a handful of ducks on to the beds to pick off pests and slugs.

For those of us whose use of culinary herbs is restricted, say, to parsley, coriander, sage, thyme and basil, the cornucopia in use in the late sixteenth century is striking:

Thyme, Savourie, Hyssop, Pennyroyal… sage, Garden Clary, baulme, Mints, Costmary and Maudeline, tansie, Burnet, Monkes Rubarbe, Bloodwort, sorel (much used in sawses), langdebeef, arrach, blites, betes, Alisanders, Smallage, Parsley, fennel, Dill, chervil, mallows, Succourie and Endive, spinach, lettice, purslane, tarragon, cresses, rocket, mustard, asparagus.*

* Langdebeef was lamb’s lettuce, bloodwort was dock, clary was a kind of sage, arrach was similar to spinach as a pot herb, and succourie was curly chicory.

Charmingly, Tusser urged his readers to gently stroke basil to bring out its flavour.

Some herbs were reserved for the pot and others kept for sauces, seasoning or decoration. Many found their way into the fashionable new sallat, no longer simply the preserve of courtiers, carefully composed for colour and shape. Primroses, violets, gillyflowers, bright blue borage, hyssop and bugloss, as well as the new nasturtium called ‘Indian cress’ all gave both taste and colour and were generally dressed with vinegar, olive oil, sugar and, sometimes, hard-boiled eggs. Pickled onions were bottled in sugar and vinegar, and roots like carrots were laboriously cut into fanciful shapes - knots, escutcheons, birds or beasts - to liven up these fresh summer dishes. Since it was the height of good middle-class taste to close a meal with lettuce or succulently salty samphire, Markham included pages of them - ‘a world of sallats’ - limited only by imagination.¹

What a compendium. Interestingly, many of these are in the mint family, for which a little goes a long way. I, sadly, currently lack the space for a proper British smallholding — or a gardener aside from myself — but take inspiration. Here’s my Hardiness Zone 5b garden plan for 2025, focused on herbs and “sallats”:

Public community garden plot

Fortunately, my plot gets plenty of sun; unfortunately, theft is an ongoing issue. I have a few perennials but otherwise strive to plant odd things that folks won’t steal.

Primary

1. Climbing peas
2. Lovage, a wild relative of celery that grows like parsley
3. Chard (mixed color)
4. Escarole Cardoncella Barese
5. Sorrel
6. Korean chives (perennial)
7. Oregano (perennial)
8. A sweet cutting lettuce, like Franchi’s Lettuce Bionda a Foglia Liscia
9. Radishes
10. Strawberries (perennial)

Ornamental

1. nasturtium, which grow well in my lot and are entirely edible and interestingly peppery
2. borage, which my allotment neighbors grow as much for the bees as for its cucumbery flowers, and I shall grow for making stuffed pastas
3. Hyssop (H. officinalis)

Kitchen Garden

I have a small private kitchen garden, composed of three Earthboxes on a sunny second floor balcony outside my home office. It will include:

• Two kinds of cherry tomatoes
• Rosemary
• Thyme
• Sage
• Mint
• Basil
• Tarragon
• Chives

Well, that’s the plan in February, anyway, when it’s bitterly brisk out and the heart turns to garden dreaming.

Update: March 30th seeding

I bought two Burpee SuperSeed Seed Starting Trays, 36 cells each. It’s a reusable seed starter tray with integrated water system. Seeded:

Tray 1: Kitchen Herbs

	1	2	3	4	5	6
A	Parsley	Parsley	Parsley	Thyme	Thyme	Thyme
B	Savory	Savory	Savory	Chives	Chives	Chives
C	Basil	Basil	Basil	Lovage	Lovage	Lovage
D	Dill	Dill	Dill	Cilantro	Cilantro	Cilantro
E	Marjoram	Marjoram	Marjoram	Rosemary	Rosemary	Rosemary
F	Sage	Sage	Sage	Oregano	Oregano	Oregano

Tray 2: Chard and others

	1	2	3	4	5	6
A	Borage	Borage	Borage	Hyssop	Hyssop	Hyssop
B	Borage	Borage	Borage	Hyssop	Hyssop	Hyssop
C	Borage	Borage	Borage	Hyssop	Hyssop	Hyssop
D	Nasturtium	Nasturtium	Nasturtium	Chard	Chard	Chard
E	Nasturtium	Nasturtium	Nasturtium	Chard	Chard	Chard
F	Nasturtium	Nasturtium	Nasturtium	Chard	Chard	Chard