Nurturing a gardener's inner Taoism

I planted my peas a few days ago on one of those long-awaited spring mornings, when the breeze was soft and sweet, and the high, long whistle of the chickadee pierced the air.

It was a month later than usual, thanks to that arctic winter, but frozen pipes were a distant memory as I planted my sugar snaps and a snow pea called Oregon Giant Sugar.

Carol Deppe, a plant breeder and gardener in Corvallis, Ore., had whetted my appetite for her favorite snow pea and many other spring greens in her latest book, "The Tao of Vegetable Gardening: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy and Serenity," published in February by Chelsea Green.

So now I sowed those peas, per her instructions, 2 inches apart in a wide bed. I sowed one batch for pea shoots, which can be harvested at 6 inches high, and others in wide rows in a circle around my tomato cages.

This is another Deppe method: Oregon Giant Sugar is a medium-vine variety, not a tall one that needs a 7-foot trellis. So she lets the vines scramble up her tomato cages, before the tomato plants need the space. And tall varieties, she writes, "do not have bigger peas, better flavor or greater yield than do the best medium-vine varieties."

Deppe, 69, a geneticist who left the research lab for the garden years ago, applies her scientific mind to organic methods, breeding disease-resistant vegetables with the best taste, nutrition and yield for the least amount of work (hurray).

Her earlier books, "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties" and "The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times," are treasure troves for people who love to grow good food.

But once I read the "Tao of Vegetable Gardening," with its mix of sly humor, dirt gardening (how to use a hoe with the least effort), the art of non-doing (very Tao), how to cook greens and even freeze them (heretofore impossible in my kitchen), and passages from Deppe's own translations of 2,500-year-old Chinese texts - well, I had to meet this woman.

"What does the Tao have to do with growing vegetables?" I asked her one cold gray day back in February, over a steaming bowl of bean-and-squash soup, made with her own homegrown varieties.

"It's going with the flow, rolling with the punches," Deppe says. "I think most experienced gardeners have got a good bit of Tao in them. If the weather isn't good for tomatoes, well, it's great for cabbages."

As she writes in the book's introduction, "The word Tao includes the concepts of way, path, method, subject, art, science, force, Spirit, God, power and essence."

Like the essence of the Gaucho Golden beans we were savoring.

"I didn't change the bean, I just cleaned it up a little bit," said Deppe, comfortably settled in her blue plastic Adirondack chair, bowl of soup in hand.

(By cleaning up the bean, she meant selecting only the plants that bore the kind of beans she wanted, and pulling up any "rogue" plants that produced differently. By growing and saving only the best seeds over several years, she developed a uniform variety.)

"It's a great technique for any gardener who saves seeds," she said.

Stacked buckets of dried shelled corn, piles of drying beans and rows of butternuts take up most of the space in this house in Corvallis. A freezer stashed with glass jars and plastic bags full of seeds is parked in the garage. A sign over the bathroom sink asks visitors to not disturb the spider webs, or George, who spins them.

"He eats the grain moths," Deppe said.

(If saving your own seeds or breeding your own tomatoes seems akin to building your own house out of trees felled in the wilderness, Deppe lists sources for favorite varieties, including her own mail-order company, Fertile Valley Seeds, in the book.)

"And you won't fall off the face of the Earth if you don't save your own seeds," Deppe said as I handed her another thick slice of skillet cornbread, slathered with Irish butter.

"I make it from Cascade Ruby Gold flint corn," Deppe said, nodding to the bowl of colorful, foot-long ears on the table, where I was wolfing down the beans. I mean, experiencing their essence.

"Each color has a very different flavor," she said. "You're basically tasting the red-brown colors, which overwhelm the yellows."

Deppe, who has celiac disease, which is an intolerance to wheat gluten, has developed different flint corns, some for cornmeal, others that grind up into flour for cakes, pancakes, even gravy.

She also craves nutritious leafy greens, and she lists her top 11 favorites in the "Tao of Vegetable Gardening."

Her "eat-all-greens garden" is perfect for small spaces, producing a whole crop - as much as two pounds per square foot - before it's time to tuck a few tomato plants into the same spot.

Now is the time to plant Green Wave mustard, which also thrives in cool weather. Its ruffled leaves, peppery hot when raw, mellow out when blanched or sauteed, or tossed into soups.

The early leaf radish, Shunkyo Semi-Long, which produces edible leaves as well as roots, is another early spring green.

Deppe's eat-all-greens garden came to her in a Tao sort of way.

She was renting a house in town, with a couple "dinky raised beds," and she had some compost delivered and dumped in the driveway. She didn't need the compost for a few weeks, and she didn't use the driveway, because she didn't have a car.

"I realized I could spread that compost out about 6 inches deep and double the size of my garden," she said.

She broadcast seeds of Green Wave mustard over the bed, and then lightly covered them with soil by bouncing the back of a leaf rake over the area. (Raking them in buries the tiny seeds too deeply.)

The densely planted greens grew so fast in the fertile compost, they shaded out the weeds. In six weeks, she was cutting swaths of greens with her serrated kitchen knife.

As for the Tao Te Ching, Deppe hadn't heard of the 2,500-year-old text until 1990, when she came upon eight different translations in the Grass Roots bookstore in Corvallis.

"Pretty soon, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the bookstore, with all eight versions, tears rolling down my face, it hit so hard."

Deppe eventually created her own translation, taking what was most powerful from each of the other versions. And she includes passages, as well as Taoist stories in her book, to suggest what she means by gardening with the Tao.

In the chapter titled "Non-Doing," for example, which speaks to the wisdom of not intervening when some awful thing happens in the garden, she quotes the Tao: Muddy water, when still, gradually becomes clear.

Such words resonated with Deppe, who has found her way through many life changes: the death of a man she loved, her mother's struggle with Alzheimer's, the realization that a windowless lab was not where she would find those moments of life worth remembering.

When she was caring for her mother, there were also times when medical emergencies meant abandoning her crops for weeks and losing them. She realized she needed "a more resilient garden" that could survive good times and bad.

Hard times can come in a personal way, or an impersonal one, like the wild weather of climate change.

I think of these things as I scatter my seeds of Green Wave mustard and use the back of a leaf rake to cover them with just enough soil.