The Tao of Vegetable Gardening: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity

by Carol Deppe

The Tao of Vegetable Gardening explores the practical methods as well as the deeper essence of gardening. In her latest book, groundbreaking garden writer Carol Deppe (The Resilient Gardener, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties) focuses on some of the most popular home garden vegetables--tomatoes, green beans, peas, and leafy greens--and through them illustrates the key principles and practices that gardeners need to know to successfully plant and grow just about any food crop.

Deppe's work has long been inspired and informed by the philosophy and wisdom of Tao Te Ching, the 2,500-year-old work attributed to Chinese sage Lao Tzu and the most translated book in the world after the Bible. The Tao of Vegetable Gardening is organized into chapters that echo fundamental Taoist concepts: Balance, Flexibility, Honoring the Essential Nature (your own and that of your plants), Effortless Effort, Non-Doing, and even Non-Knowing. Yet the book also offers a wealth of specific and valuable garden advice on topics as diverse as:

- The Eat-All Greens Garden, a labor- and space-efficient way to provide all the greens a family can eat, freeze, and dry--all on a tiny piece of land suitable for small-scale and urban gardeners.

- The growing problem of late blight and the future of heirloom tomatoes--and what gardeners can do to avoid problems, and even create new resistant varieties.

- Establishing a Do-It-Yourself Seed Bank, including information on preparing seeds for long-term storage and how to -dehybridize- hybrids.

- Twenty-four good places to not plant a tree, and thirty-seven good reasons for not planting various vegetables.

Designed for gardeners of all levels, from beginners to experienced growers, The Tao of Vegetable Gardening provides a unique frame of reference: a window to the world of nature, in the garden and in ourselves.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction, Food, Nature

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2014

Reviews

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a sort of peculiar mashup of gardening… experience? but it earns those five stars by 1) explaining how to hoe a garden and 2) how to breed your own hybrid crops in a way that made it fascinating and ooh, shiny. I went out and hoed some of my weeds already. I have not starting crossing tomatoes, but now I could if I wanted to.

Also there were funny stories, thoughts on food resiliency and GMOs and preppers (she is one), thoughts on how gardening relates to the Tao (though she sort of got distracted as the book went on), and All the Things. This book was like hanging out with an eccentric neighbor.

[Pam Dawling · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed Carol Deppe’s The Tao of Vegetable Gardening as much as her earlier gardening books, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties and The Resilient Gardener. The Resilient Gardener focused on growing basic food staples – corn, potatoes, dry beans, winter squash and eggs. This new book moves us onward to groups of nutritionally- and economically-valuable vegetables we love to eat (and therefore to grow): tomatoes, summer squash, peas, green beans, greens. Each crop is used as an opportunity to explain a technique or concept.
An independent and iconoclastic gardener, Carol introduces each chapter with a passage from her own translation of the 2500 year old Tao Te Ching and intersperses fables from her anthology Taoist Stories. 13 chapters with titles like “Honoring Your Own Essential Nature”, “Non-Doing” and “Joy” lead us into the practicalities of crop requirements, plant genetics, lacto-fermentation and preserving land-races. A combination of Carol’s exquisite attention to detail, solid grounded-in-experience advice and application of Taoist philosophy can help make us better and happier gardeners.
The tomato chapter covers how to grow and plant transplants, how to choose the best-tasting varieties, then how to breed late blight resistant tomatoes. The chapters on peas and green beans explain how to direct sow big seeds. Carol recommends Gaucho golden dry beans for flavor, yield and for a short two-week dry down period. The greens chapter tells how to sow small seeds, and introduces the Eat-All Greens Garden, a new way of growing direct-sown greens, producing high yields from small amounts of work. The final chapter explains why and how to grow your own seeds and prepare them for long-term storage.
"Alexanders greens, Smyrnium olusatrum, self-seeds and a patch can be kept growing well for many years in a shady place where even grass won’t grow. Germinate in the fall. The flavor of the trefoil leaves is a cross between celery and parsley. Harvest young leaves, stalks and perhaps some roots mid-winter to late spring in Oregon. Use for salad or cook the greens. They bolt and produce seed in late spring. " Carol Deppe.
Carol clearly thinks for herself. I enjoy reading her take on the recent “accepted wisdom” of “imitating nature,” prioritizing perennials, growing in polycultures (the carrots-love-tomatoes school), increasing diversity: “Ant agriculture violates all these principles”. Instead, Carol encourages an emotional and spiritual attitude including humility and looking at what actually happens in nature, what actually works in the garden. Is this particular organic-approved pesticide actually less damaging to non-target organisms and the general environment than the synthetic alternative? Will planting extra to “share” with pests like gophers still provide enough of a harvest? (“Lots of luck with that,” says Carol.) In the Balance chapter, Carol cautions against veering into unrealistic beliefs about what to always or never do. “Prudence trumps completion when it comes to your health or safety.” “Ultimate Knowing does not create emergencies.”
Although the USDA doesn’t regard tomatoes as an essential food group, most gardeners act as if tomatoes are fundamental. Indeterminate varieties for full season crops give the highest yields and the best flavors. Determinates provide the earliest harvests and come to an early end. Make your own decision about “large determinates” and “compact indeterminates”. Plenty of large leaves will be more likely to produce lots of sugar and flavor for the fruit, compared to what is possible with less well-endowed plants. (But keep an eye on Craig LeHoullier’s new Dwarf Tomatoes.)
The color of a variety depends on the combination of skin color (clear or yellow) and flesh color (red, pink, yellow, green, purple, black, brown, striped or mottled). Green-when-ripe tomatoes have a gene that prevents them losing chlorophyll as they ripen, combined with a gene that causes them not to produce lycopene, the red color. Chlorophyll + lycopene = “black”. I was fascinated to learn that the green shoulders of some heirloom varieties are a cause of good flavor. The extra chlorophyll develops more sugars and flavors. Modern breeders decided to eliminate the undesired green shoulders and got uniform ripening at the expense of good flavor! My respect for Glacier and Stupice grew! Carol’s favorites for her shady Oregon garden include Amish paste – Kapuler, Pruden’s Purple (flavor, size, earliness), Black Krim, Legend (not for flavor, but for earliness, size, dependability, and especially for late blight resistance), Geranium Kiss (late blight resistance, lots of 1 ounce fruits).
Carol explains (Late Blight 101, page 96) why we need to be more careful about Late Blight now. Previously there were several strains of Late Blight, but they were all in the same mating group and could only reproduce asexually (requiring live plant material) and not produce enduring spores. Unless we left cull piles of potatoes in our fields, we only got the disease if we were unlucky enough to have spores blow in or be imported on diseased plants. This has now changed and newer strains of Late Blight, from both mating groups, have moved into the US. The disease will be able to evolve more rapidly, and the oogonia (sexually propagated ‘spores’) can persist in the soil. We will need to develop tomatoes and potatoes with stronger resistance. We will need to get better at recognizing late blight symptoms and acting swiftly. See usablight.org/. We will need to be more careful and not put any store-bought tomatoes in our compost piles.
Legend and other of the more resistant open-pollinated and hybrid varieties are very useful in breeding work to produce more varieties resistant to late blight in future. Carol lists the resistance level of 10 promising hybrids (including Mountain Magic which we grow on our farm, Jasper, Golden Sweet, Juliet, Defiant PhR, Plum Regal, Iron Lady, Mountain Merit, Ferline and Fantasio) and 19 OPs (in order of earliness: Red Pearl, Stupice, Slava, Matt’s Wild Cherry, Yellow Currant, Geranium Kiss, Legend, Pruden’s Purple, Quadro, Black Plum, Red Currant, Tigerella, Old Brooks, Black Krim, Brandywine, West Virginia 63, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Aunt Ginny’s Purple and Big Rainbow. At the end of the book, Carol tells us how to do this. It’s not that difficult.
I have long felt annoyed and frustrated by the carrots-love-tomatoes belief, so I got special pleasure from reading Carol’s amusing story of actually trying to make interplanting carrots and tomatoes work, despite different needs for temperature, soil texture, soil fertility, watering, plant spacing, mulch, fencing, and length of time occupying a garden bed. And then the competition for sunlight. I’m actually a practitioner of some interplanting (spinach and peas, lettuce and peanuts, cabbage and okra), saving space, work, and in some cases, mulch or rowcover. But the almost religious belief that certain crops “like” each other, despite lack of data and lots of practical impediments, drives me potty. Carol takes the time to explain which pairs of crops stand a chance of complementing each other, and to point us towards a study by R Fred Denison that showed that yields of the best intercrop combos were somewhat better than the lower-yielding of the pair as solo occupant of the space, but less than the higher-yielding of the pair was capable of. So don’t plant crops together hoping for increased yields.
Carol gives examples of intercropping that work for her. She sometimes plants her Eat-All Greens between alternate rows of corn (not sweet corn, which is quickly over), after the corn is up and has been cultivated twice. I’d guess that’s about 4 weeks after planting, the same age corn would be if sowing pole beans to grow up the corn stalks. The greens can grow fast enough in the shade of the corn to need no weeding, and the corn can be harvested from the alternate aisles without trampling the greens.
Carol names her “Perfect Polyculture” as Russian Hunger Gap kale (a tall, hardy Brassica napus, unlike the Hungry Gap kale I grew in England, which is an oleracea type), and vining winter squash. Initially an accident, the self-sown kale came up after she planted her squash. It grew rapidly, and timely harvesting of the kale nearest the squash was important to maintain enough space for the squash to thrive. Carol recommends her Candystick Dessert Delicata C.pepo fall squash; Sweet meat – Oregon Homestead C. maxima and fast-maturing Lofthouse Landrace Moschata C. moschata winter squashes. The Lofthouse squash is not sweet, so works well for soups and other savory dishes.
The chapter about the Eat-All Greens garden also has the title “Effortless Effort.” The idea is to broadcast seeds densely enough that no weeding is needed. Harvest when 10" – 16" tall by cutting the top 7" – 12" with a serrated knife, leaving the lower 3" – 4" of tougher stuff. Align the stems in the harvest tote or trug, to make chopping in the kitchen easier. Yields can be as high as 4.5 pounds per square yard (2.45 kg/sq m) in 8 weeks. The patch can be resown as many as three more times in the Willamette Valley climate. This is like a grown-up-tall version of growing baby salad mix, in that the entire tops of all the plants are harvested together. But salad mixes are cut small and may provide more than one cutting from the same plants. Eat-All Greens are usually harvested just once, then cleared., although it can work to harvest out the biggest plants, leaving others to grow bigger later in the increased space available.
Generally it’s best to grow just one type of Eat-All greens in one patch – mixes don’t do as well, because they grow at different rates to different heights. You can sow patches of different kinds right next to each other, and harvest whatever is ready. The Eat-All Greens system is a technique to perfect by practice. Spacing, timing, varieties – all can make or break your success. Timing will depend on your climate. Carol can sow in mid-March, harvest in mid-May and follow with a crop of tomatoes or squash. We tried Eat-All Greens outdoors in the fall (it seemed the best seasonal match for Virginia's climate). I wrote several blog posts about our success. Go to my website sustainablemarketfarming.com and put "Eat-All Greens in the search box.
After years of work, Carol identified 11 good Eat-All crops, from five plant families. You can read the qualities of a good Eat-All crop in her book and test others, but I recommend taking advantage of her experience rather than re-inventing the wheel.
Suitable greens include Green Wave mustard, Groninger kale, Tokyo Bekana, Spring Raab, several leaf radishes (Shunkyo Semi-Long, Saisai, Four Seasons, Hittorikun and Pearl Leaf) , several Chinese kales/gai lohns (Crispy Blue, South Sea, China Legend, Hybrid Blue Wonder, Hybrid Southern Blue, Green Lance Hybrid), three amaranths (All Red, although a bit slow-growing, Green Calaloo and Burgundy), Indian Spinach – Red Aztec Huauzontle, quinoa (choose a variety expected to grow well locally), pea shoots (Oregon Giant Sugar edible pod peas or Austrian Winter Field peas) and shungiku (oh no! Chrysanthemum greens, I just haven’t managed to learn to like those!).
Another of those gardening myths is exploded when Carol points out that we don’t necessarily get maximum nutrition out of greens when we eat them raw. Tables of vitamin C lost when greens are boiled and the water poured away are plain irrelevant if you steam your greens and use the liquid. Assays of nutrients present before and after cooking a food tell us nothing about what we actually absorb. All animals absorb nutrients better from starchy roots and tubers, meat and grains when they are cooked. That has been studied, but there is no information on cooked greens. Clearly raw greens are neither essential nor harmful in themselves. Unclear is whether the claim that raw greens are more nutritious than cooked ones has any basis in fact, or is just plain wrong. Interesting.
For those who don’t know, the Southern “mess o’ greens,” pronounced “messuhgreens,” is a generous serving of boiled greens, dressed with some scraps of bacon, bacon fat, salt, pepper and vinegar. Lemon juice can be used instead of vinegar; olive oil instead of bacon fat; olives or feta cheese instead of bacon. Eat-All Greens do well served this way.
Carol wrote about dried beans in The Resilient Gardner. In The Tao of Vegetable Gardening she writes about varieties suited for eating fresh. This chapter includes instructions for direct sowing of any large-seeded crop, and explains when trellises or plant supports are needed and what types there are. For short vining types of peas, and bush beans, she recommends close planting so that the community of plants is self-supporting. For peas, that’s seeds 1" – 1.5" apart in a wide row 4" – 8" across. Summer plantings of medium-vine peas can be planted with corn, in 8" round patches where a corn plant didn’t come up. Sadly for us, our summers are too hot for peas. Edible-podded peas provide much more food from the same space and the same amount of garden labor (and less kitchen labor) than shelling peas do. You need no longer confuse snow peas (flat pods, not sweet, harvested before peas develop much at all), sugar peas (flat pods but sweeter), and snap peas (round cross-section pods harvested after the peas develop full size). Oregon Giant Sugar is a flat sugar pod type, although it has fleshy succulent pods that can be harvested with fully developed peas. Carol calls this a “flat-snap” type. In England we grew “mangetout” peas, which according to Wikipedia can be either snow or snap peas, but according to the BBC must have flat pods and can be either snow or sugar peas. Thompson & Morgan classifies Oregon Sugar Pod as a mange-tout. Mange-tout is French for “Eat-All”, so they fit right in with Eat-All Greens.
There is a helpful sidebar on Presoaking Legume Seed Without Suffocating It. Presoaking seed can help germinate the seed by quickly providing enough water to swell the seed ready for germination. In cold weather this can save the seed from rotting before it germinates, in hot weather it can ensure there is enough water to get going. Seeds need oxygen while it is imbibing water, so use wide containers open to the air, use enough water but nor too much (ahh! experience), stir the seed occasionally while soaking, and possibly change the water. I soak pea and bean seed about 14 – 20 hours, unless I plan to pre-sprout, which takes a few days. Carol recommends 24 hour soaking at indoor temperatures, with the bigger beans like favas getting two days.
For those hoping to follow the Native American practice of growing pole beans on corn, Carol gives detailed instructions – there are so many ways to go wrong! I don’t grow field corn, so I didn’t take notes, but as always, I was very impressed with the helpful precision

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you enjoy reading good gardening prose, philosophy, and like some meat with your flowers, I would recommend this book for you. I found some great information, good prose, but a little too much philosophy for my tastes.

I read gardening books for meaty how-to information. I also enjoy side stories, but that is not my main interest. I have two of Carol Deppe's earlier books (How to grow your own vegetable varieties, first edition; and The Resilient Gardener) and both have interesting stories, but are on my shelf for the practical information that I have not found in other readings about gardening. I am an experienced gardener, and a biologist, so I want to learn things I haven't read in your average gardening books. Carol provides that in spades, with the added spice of her down-home way of explaining things.

There seems to be a good amount of overlap of information in the three books I have read, so what I wanted to see is whether "The Tao of Vegetable Gardening" has enough original information to warrant purchasing the book to add to my reference collection.

The slant of this book is very much in line with the title, as she starts each chapter with a Taoist quote and/or story. Cutsie, but not appealing to me since I don't wish to follow Taoist philosophy. The chapter titles reflect the pseudo-philosophical nature as well: First three chapters titled "Honoring..."followed by three different themes. Then connected themes such as: "Non-doing; Beginning-Tomatoes; Nurturing-Weeding; Non-knowing-Squash". For me, this is still a little more focus on philosophy rather than gardening practicality.

There is, however, some very interesting material that expands on the previous two books. The section on squash has the story of her efforts to breed an open pollinated size/ thickness improvement on the flesh of her favorite Delicata squash. Very interesting to me as she expands some on the genetics of squash breeding. But overall, I found the section on squash in "The Resilient Gardener" to be more informative.

The best sections in this book are the sections on greens, her version being the "eat-all" green garden. Very informative and not covered in "Resilient". Also her coverage of tools, especially hoes, including pictures of how to hold and use two varieties of hoe so as to minimize pain if you have a bad back.

There is no information on dry beans, she refers readers to "Resilient" for that, and that book does have the most in-depth coverage of growing, harvesting, storing and cooking dry beans that I have come across.

So will I buy this book or just check it out from the library once a year? It has useful information that I might like to remind myself of, but I won't purchase this book unless I find a used version for less than $10. (Price is based on my restricted budget, not on the value of the information.)

[Christie Bane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really excited about this book, and then really disappointed by it. I am a beginning gardener who has no idea how growing plants really works. I didn't even know that you could breed plants. This book is meant for someone other than the novice gardener. Familiarity with all sorts of plant terminology is assumed, and seldom explained. (I don't know what a hybrid is, or an heirloom, or a landrace, for example.)

I also never really got how the Taoist philosophy tied in to the gardening bit. I mean, I like the little stories that started each chapter, but I never saw the connection between them and the subject matter of the chapter -- the gardening.

One last complaint -- I did not like the layout of the book. Those two columns per page were tedious and made me feel like the book was taking forever.

I didn't even get one star of enjoyment out of this book, but I rated it two stars because I do recognize that someone with more experience probably would have enjoyed it more than I did.

[Gail Richmond · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I liked about this book were the stories and quotes about gardening as well as the personalized take on gardens and working in them. Written in anecdotes, this is less a guide than it is a philosophy of why to garden and experiences to avoid as well as tips and tricks that may prove helpful. The author has some very strong opinions on seeds, types of plants for various purposes, soil and how to make the most of soil, seasons, sun, shade, water, and physical work—weeding, planting, starter plants, etc.

[Emile · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like Carol Deppe's writing, and experimental approach to things. It feels a bit like this book and her "Resiliant Gardener" book are two books worth of material split up the wrong way? Still interesting and worth reading.

[Hester · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is different from any other book I have ever read. It doesn't just talk about gardening, it talks about the psychology of gardening. Deppe translated passages of the Tao Te Ching and uses these to illuminate the way we garden. The prose is clear, and the humor is dry.

She approaches gardening philosophically. This led her to an intriguing technique, "Grow-all greens," which I look forward to trying. It grows cooking greens that don't need to processed as laboriously.

I decided to try her favorite pea variety, "Oregon Giant Sugar," which is utterly fabulous. I am giving her favorite tomato, stupice, a shot in our back yard. She claims it bears fruit in shade.

Her cooking suggestions were not my cup of tea, but will appeal to many. I am not interested in seed saving, but her discussion on plant genetics was fascinating. Probably because she actually is a geneticist.

All in all, I learned a lot of useful stuff from a book aimed at a different type of climate. I will probably reread parts of it in the years to come. Highly recommended.

[Victoria Goddard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I would actually prefer to give this book 4.5 stars, just because it isn't *quite* as good as The Resilient Gardener, but it was full of wonderful gardening tips and thoughts, recipes, and ideas. I particularly liked the connection to Taoist philosophy and the author's own translations of several Taoist stories and texts. I think I would have liked a bit more of that, actually! I will certainly be putting some of these ideas and recommendations into practice once the snow melts, though!

[Ashleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I became a huge fan of Carol Deppe after happening across a copy of "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties" - why I picked that book up off the library shelf I can't really say, vegetable breeding was not something I was looking to do at the time. In The Tao she delivers more great advice about how to grow food, but more precious (and a reason why folks who don't even plan to garden may want to give this a read) are her anecdotes about life, history, and the role of food production in civilizations.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book because I enjoy Deppe's conversational educational style and also because there was something in the press about eat-all greens. The eat-all greens section was great and I'm going to focus on that next gardening season. And there was a ton of other advice packed into these pages. You will never look at your hoe the same way again.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carol Deppe's work is great as always. Always interesting, never repetitive.
I felt like the book had little or nothing to do with the practice of tao except for the chapter headings, but since that was not the reason I picked up the book, that did not matter to me in the least.

[Justin]

More philosophy than technique. Could be good for others but didn't cover what I expected well (minimalist gardening techniques)