Gardening

YankeeFan · Jul 2, 2010

NEW gardeners smitten with the experience of growing their own food — amazed at the miracle of harvesting figs on a Brooklyn rooftop, horrified by the flea beetles devouring the eggplants — might be both inspired and comforted by the highs and lows recorded by Thomas Jefferson from the sun-baked terraces of his two-acre kitchen garden 200 years ago.

And they could learn a thing or two from the 19th-century techniques still being used at Monticello today.

“He was experimental and had a lot of failures,” Peter Hatch, the director of gardens and grounds, said on a recent afternoon, as we stood under a scorching sun in the terraced garden that took seven slaves three years to cut into the hill. “But Jefferson always believed that ‘the failure of one thing is repaired by the success of another.’ ”

After he left the White House in 1809 and moved to Monticello, his Palladian estate here, Jefferson grew 170 varieties of fruits and 330 varieties of vegetables and herbs, until his death in 1826.
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Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/garden/01monticello.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=all

Slide Show: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/06/29/garden/20100701-monticello-slideshow.html

93Devil · Dec 15, 2014

This is very true.

You remember what works and what does not.

These vincas

and marigolds

Will always have a place in my annual beds. In fact, they will probably be the only things in these beds.

It just depends on your soil, the amount of sun and how much time you have to water them.

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Gardening

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