Read an Excerpt
About This New Edition
The book you’re holding in your hands has helped many people grow food. I wrote the first edition after realizing that we live in a complex of microclimates quite different from anywhere else in the country. National gardening books will tell you how to grow food somewhere in America, but you can’t just grow food “somewhere.” You grow food in a particular place. So I created this book to tell you what to do in your garden, and when to do it, in the mild-winter parts of central and northern California.
Though Golden Gate Gardening is a regional gardening book, it is a complete gardening book. It covers preparing your soil, composting, watering, starting from seed, managing pests, and attracting beneficial creatures—all the topics you need to make your garden successful. It tells you how to grow common and uncommon vegetable crops, and includes culinary herbs, edible flowers, fruit-bearing trees, and fruit-bearing shrubs. There is information to help you select and grow cutting flowers in our region. There are even seasonal recipes to help you use what you grow.
The first edition of Golden Gate Gardening was published 30 years ago. Gardeners who fed their own children from a garden it inspired are now watching those children feed their families from their gardens. The book has remained popular, even increased in popularity, and serves as a textbook for many gardening classes.
I made some big changes in the previous edition, the third. Particularly important was that I modified the book to make it as useful to the inland gardeners of our region, the ones the fog rarely reaches, as it is for those who actually hear the foghorns. As part of this change, I added two more planting calendars, on pages 388 and 389. Master Gardeners helped prepare these calendars for the Walnut Creek and San Jose areas, and then further refined them for this edition. Also, because the world is constantly changing, I updated varieties and sources, pest management advice, Resources for Gardeners (starting on page 406), and Suggested Reading (starting on page 418), for the third and then again for this edition. I have retained third edition improvements, such as a list of flowers that attract beneficial insects (page 108) and the revised Chapter 16, A Garden-Based Cuisine, starting on page 363, which explains how I became the gardener I am and describes our ongoing task of creating a garden-based cuisine for a region that has not had one before.
CHANGES TO THIS EDITION
Because it has been over a decade since the last edition of Golden Gate Gardening, it was time to revisit everything in it. I’ve made many changes throughout that will bring you up to date about gardening matters. Here are a few:
• Organic seeds, and also seeds that are immune to patent laws, are easier than ever to find. (See pages 44 and the new seed company list, starting on page 400.)
• More and more available crop varieties are pest resistant. (These varieties are listed throughout the book; for more about resistance, see pages 275 and 401.)
• Gardeners are ever more adventurous in crop selection. In addition to the already broad variety of crops, this edition includes nepitella, saffron crocus, goji berry, and paw paw.
• Gardeners are using a surprising new tool to hunt snails and slugs at night. (See page 124.)
• New kinds of gopher baskets are cheaper and better. (See page 128.)
• This edition provides online contact information for all listed resources and seed retailers.
• And, finally, the big one: climate change. I have been making my discussion of this issue stronger and more pointed in each successive edition. This book is not about the changes caused by human-generated CO² , but these changes are increasingly affecting gardens. Coastal gardeners ask me if they will be able to extend planting times and varieties, and while this is possible, most of the effects of the climate shift are not positive and will not be positive in the future, either in or outside of a garden. While gardeners will not be the worst impacted by the likely changes, how we garden can help forestall changes, and hopefully our concern for our gardens will inspire other climate-friendly actions.
An international plant naming body has been using genetic understanding in their efforts to reclassify plants. In the long run this will clarify life relationships wonderfully. While this may not be of day-to-day importance to your garden, getting names right sets the book up for continuing relevance in the plant world.
A PHILOSOPHY FOR GARDENERS
As I continue to garden in one of America’s most crowded urban areas, I clearly cannot grow enough food to meet all my nutritional needs. However, I continue to develop a philosophy as a gardener.
The first of five aspects of that philosophy is that I am increasingly grateful for the anti-consumer nature of food gardening. It allows me to keep in touch with the food production process that underlies human existence, a process that filled our needs before we could fulfill the many wants a consumer economy allows and promotes. Gardeners are producers, and gardening lets us see outside of the consumer economy mentality to our basic humanity. A food garden adds value to my life but does not require much money. A garden is subject to a different set of constraints than those of a cash economy. It is challenged by pests, weather events, and neglect, not by inflation, deflation, or unemployment. While we would not wish to return to an era in which many were dependent on what we could grow to be able to eat, we can experience the emotional echoes of that reality—I call it Emotional Archaeology—which will help us keep our bearings in the consumer economy storm. (See Chapter 16, A Garden-Based Cuisine, starting on page 363.)
The second principle is that a garden reminds me of the importance of plants to the human diet. Many Americans are not healthy because they live on diets heavily influenced by advertising of processed food products that create the highest profits. (See Food in America in Suggested Reading, page 426.) The food industry has learned the trick of profiting from what people want to eat, not what they need to eat. The vegetables and fruits we grow ourselves are part of the antidote. Because of the work that we put into growing them, they have a positive aura that makes us want to eat them. Recipes both historic and modern, in this book and in others, help us relearn delicious ways to do so, improving our diet and our health.
The third principle is that of sharing. When I have grown food, I have created food that did not previously exist on the earth. Because of this, I feel a responsibility to make sure that food is eaten, by myself or by someone else. While some would preserve extra food, and I do freeze a few vegetables and make a little applesauce, for the most part, I seek to give away what I can’t eat up fresh. I look for food banks or other free food distributors and also share garden food with friends and neighbors. If I had more fruit trees, I would find gleaners to make sure all the fruit was eaten. During the pandemic years, when many avoided frequent grocery shopping, it has been particularly important to have and share fresh greens. I also share extra seeds with seed libraries and seedlings with nonprofits and with friends. (For more on seed libraries, see page 44.) All of this sharing connects me with my roles as a producer and citizen rather than only a consumer.
Fourth is the connection with nature that gardening can give. I know a garden is not a natural habitat. It is a human-centered endeavor, a disturbed habitat. We control organisms we don’t want to grow ones we do. We remove biomass (food, pruned branches) and may bring in purchased fertilizer, or even purchased soil (a concept that would be considered strange by previous generations). But gardening makes us aware of the roles of soil microorganisms and pollinating birds and insects, and the need to foster their actions. So we compost, grow plants to attract native bees, avoid toxic chemicals, and act to counter the effects of the climate crisis.
The fifth principle is gardening as a practice. To me, gardening is the chopping wood and carrying water that guides my meditation on life and joy. It provides me exercise and time to think, or not think. It teaches me patience, persistence, and thrift. While I do not meditate or pray, I garden with intention and care. I also cook with care. Then I celebrate that the results of my gardening and cooking let me share my pleasure with others.
