Gardening With Blurred Edges

Gardening is really a lot less about what you plant than about how you think about things--and what you decide to weed around.

I do have my raised vegetable beds, and my mess of perennial-flowers-and-weeds out front, but my garden is so much more than that. Out back, for instance, there was this small patch of wild beebalm, Monarda fistulosa, growing when we moved in. Whenever I'd cut some for drying, we'd also pull out a few of the other things that were growing around it, giving it a competitive advantage. The patch is now maybe 8 feet by 12 feet and growing, the plants reaching 5 feet high, and many of the scarlet flower heads sporting these interesting double-decker puffs. I leave these and harvest the singles for tea, encouraging the double heads to seed in.

Now that patch of beebalm is large enough to easily dry a year's worth of tea. My two beebalm cultivars that I have planted in the 'garden' out front don't do half as well. The bright red type I picked up at a nursery somewhere is being overrun by the lemon balm, and rarely clears 3 feet high. The lavender purple bergamot that I have in the flower bed blooms in a lovely shade over dusky gray-green foliage, but it suffers from mildew and expands only very slowly. I cut a few heads from it to throw in the tea mix for color, but that's about it.

I could order beebalm in various colors and configurations from any number of nursery catalogs, but why would I? Clearly none would grow as well and be as perfectly suited for the local growing conditions as the native variety that has adapted itself to this precise environment aons.

Other vegetative inhabitants of my yard that I've weeded around include red clover, a big patch of white yarrow that enfolds one corner of my lettuce bed, a couple of random mulleins that I always let grow each year (I pull out many of these from the raised beds but let some live at the bed corners, in the lawn or the flowers beds -- release them from competition and they will easily tower 6 feet tall or more).  Medicinal herbs like Heal-All (Prunella vulgaris) and Gill-Over-the-Ground (Glechoma hederacea) I pull out as weeds in some patches of the garden, and pull other weeds around to let grow in other patches. When I weed it out, I stick it in the dehydrator or hang it to dry if the weather is cooperative, for valuable immune-boosting winter tea come flu season.

Clumps of black eyed susans move around my yard each year depending on where I decide to yank them out and where I don't bother.There's some lovely pink mallow blooming under the birch tree that I weed around every year, and it slowly spreads. We've planted sunflowers several times, but don't really need to anymore. They also self-seed, and i pull them out when they are in the middle of a veggie bed but let them grow at the corners and elsewhere around the yard, often transplanting the young volunteers before their deep roots take hold.

Am I just lazy, or are there benefits to gardening without bright-line edges between what is cultivated and what is wild? I feel like the benefits in attracted honey bees, butterflies and songbirds (who love the sunflowers) probably does help the garden productivity, and it also makes it a lush and aesthetically wonderful, alive place to be. This state of mind also blurs the edges between my garden and the living world beyond where my deed says my property ends. A circumnavigation of my block this morning added a whole dehydrator full of red clover blossoms to the stash I'd picked in my yard.

I suppose my yard is 180 degrees from the artistic suburban landscape wastelands I've seen in the upscale neighborhoods of the greater New York area, and folks who prefer that highly structured look of exotic shrubbery with red mulch between and not a weed growing would view my garden as a mess. They'd likely hire landscapers to bulldoze the beebalm, heal-all, yarrow, mint and marrow and plant a proper yard of mugho pine and dwarf weeping cherry. While that might satisfy the realtors, I prefer the life and soul of this flourishing, diverse landscape that blends seamlessly with the surrounding natural environment (though admittedly not so seamlessly with my neighbor's stunning, impeccable lawn, but he seems a truly good sport about that).

Guerilla Gardening

I'm about to suggest that you do something that might be a little illicit: Guerilla Gardening.

Live in an urban area with little more than a fire escape and a narrow windowsill on which to enact your gardening dreams? Renting a house but lacking permission to dig up the lawn for a garden? Don't despair.  Plant on somebody else's land.

Now yes, that's trespassing, but hear me out first.

In every developed region of the planet from small towns to huge cities, there are disturbed but abandoned sites covered with local opportunistic vegetation (also known as weeds, but that's in the eye of the beholder, I don't want to be overly judgmental). It may be a spot where a building was torn down, or a site prepared for a building but the owners were unable to secure permits or financing. It may be a corner dug out for a new highway interchange that got put off for a few years due to budgeting constraints.

What better place to throw in the fast-spreading herbs that thrive on poor soil and that you don't have room for in your own garden, like mint, lemon balm, bee balm, yarrow, parsley, dill, oregano and marjoram.

The trick is this: Throw in seeds or plants you get for free as splits from friends or relatives--you don't want to spend money on an ephemeral planting with no guarantee of how long it will be around to reap the harvest. This still leaves a lot of cheap and free planting choices that will yield culinary and tea herbs to delight you for months to come.

The personal safety rules are this: Don't climb or sneak under fences, approach a barking dog chained to guard the site that looks like it was borrowed from an old junkyard, go near any unstable pits or dirt piles, or dodge no-trespassing signs.  This still leaves a lot of available spaces.

The personal health rules? Watch out for poison ivy, and wash plants well before consuming, as you don't what car exhaust or passing stray dogs may have done to the plants when you weren't watching over them.

The ethical rules are this: Do NOT, ever, plant in a wild undisturbed area or in parklands. Invasive species, even those you love like chocolate mint, can wreak havoc on the natural environment and out-compete endangered local species or plants needed for local wildlife habitat. The idea is to plant in areas that are already disturbed and are slated for further disturbance--development, paving, etc.--in the foreseeable future. You are creating your own temporary foraging zones. Also be prepared to share -- should anyone else notice your plantings, they may well dive in and harvest too. Don't fight about it, in fact obviously you share common interests and might make good friends. The plants are not really 'yours,' you are just facilitating their existence in a place you can access.

Not quite at a comfort level for guerilla gardening? Start small -- the little patch of dirt around your street tree, or a small weedy strip between the street and sidewalk.  The benefit? Your green plants provided beauty and soil stabilization while they were growing, and left you with a potentially huge harvest of culinary and tea herbs for absolutely free.

And of course, you got a little thrill doing it, too, didn't you...

Growing Tea

Growing tea herbs is about the lowest-maintenance gardening operation you could imagine. Bee balm, mint, and anise hyssop--like the Golden Jubilee variety shown here--thrive in even marginal soils, spreading to sometimes invasive proportions, which you can contain by harvesting frequently (or assaulting with the lawnmower if necessary). Lemon balm and most mints will also grow happily even in partial shade. If you are a rogue urban gardener, plant tea herbs around street trees or in empty disturbed lots (where you will not interfere with native ecosystems -- don't ever plant in parklands or healthy wild places) and harvest as they spread, but monitor carefully to make sure the plants have not been sprayed with herbicides or pesticides before your harvest.

More unusual tea herb options include thyme and sage, which makes a wonderful broth-like tea sure to sooth a winter cold (add honey and a quarter onion to each cup for a truly powerful cold fighter). Yarrow blossom tea warms you right up when you have the chills. Raspberry leaf tea is a traditional treatment to strengthen women's health. Rose and lavender blossoms sweeten the teapot with scents of summer.

Cut your tea herbs back a few times in the spring to encourage branching, then harvest again while the plants are blooming and include the blossoms in your tea for a cheery touch of color and scent. Hang small bundles of the cut herb stems (I use a small rubber band to hold them together, as wrapped string will slip once the stems dry and shrink) in a shady, airy place out of rain and wind to dry, or use a dehydrator. Just keep a careful watch on the herbs in a dehydrator, they usually only need an hour or so to dry thoroughly, and after that you are losing flavor.

Strip the dried leaves off the stems and store them in glass jars, out of direct sunlight. Use about a teaspoon of dried leaf per cup of boiling water, but feel free to mix and match herbs or adjust the quantities to taste. Save the peels from organically grown citrus fruit through the year and dry those as well, adding a chunk to your tea in winter when citrus is quite expensive to add a flavorful zing to your tea.