The Grocery Row Gardens in Early June

This is when the Grocery Row Gardens really start looking great.

The trees and shrubs have filled in, the ground covers are running, small vegetables are popped into the gaps, the flowers are blooming and various vines are covering their trellises.

‘The vines in the photo above are Dioscorea pentaphylla (trellis on the left, curling into the air).

We weren’t sure how they would do here, but we got some from Derek Clawson’s nursery last year and planted them. I couldn’t find where they were by the end of fall when we were cleaning up and harvesting, but they burst from the ground with incredible vigor in the spring.

Last year they were overrun by D. alata, so this year they got their own trellis. Perhaps they’ll give us some bulbils this year. I’m curious to see how their roots work as a survival crop. They have survived a 17-degree night in the ground and come back stronger, so it seems they are better adapted here than the name yams (D. rotundifolia) we have planted multiple times here. Those consistently rot in the ground over winter and fail to return in spring.

Here’s a shot from the left edge of the Grocery Row Garden, looking across the first row.

That’s a Musa basjoo cold-hardy banana in the middle, flanked by mulberry trees, Canna musifolia and taro. Musa basjoo doesn’t make edible bananas, but we are testing it as a biomass crop for compost and feeding to livestock.

Speaking of livestock…

We have wandering ducks. They are pests when you are are trying to grow smaller vegetables, but they aren’t much trouble in the Grocery Row Gardens since we have more perennials and less touchy stuff that they can chew up or trample. It’s fun to watch them wander around.

We’ve been surprised by how predator-savvy our small flock of ducks has been. We’ve lost a couple of them (one to a snapping turtle that destroyed her leg), but the remaining ones are doing well. We even had a buff duck hatch out five ducklings a few days ago, and a female mallard is sitting on a next beside the house trying to hatch her own clutch.

We don’t even feed our ducks – they just wander the yard and feed themselves.

I’ve said in the past that you could probably expand the pathways in a Grocery Row Garden to a full four feet and it wouldn’t be too much space. The density really gets intense during the growing season.

We’re already pushing our way through branches and vines and banana and taro leaves to get through, as we carefully step over sweet potato, cucumber and watermelon vines.

It’s truly a beautiful system. I much prefer the jungle growth of a Grocery Row Garden to boxed-in raised beds, containers, square foot gardens or standard row gardens.

Compare this:

To this:

That was how we grew gardens, long ago.

There is a wild beauty to a Grocery Row Garden which reminds me more of Eden and less of ugly modernity.

I wrote the little book on how to create this system a couple of years ago, and the method has not let us down. It just gets more and more beautiful.