By Emily Williams-Robertshaw
Spring is typically an exciting time for Karen Mitchell, a longtime Birmingham Botanical Garden and Aldridge Gardens volunteer and local master gardener.
This year, she was glad that the BBG’s Spring Plant Sale persevered, but going virtual isn’t the same as meeting in person.
Mitchell’s duties for the annual sale are to pick out the varieties of vegetable plants that will be sold at the event. Her preparations begin when she orders all of the seed in January each year.
Selling a vegetable plant online just isn’t the same for Mitchell. She prefers meeting people and having a discussion. People want to know how to treat their new plant so it not only thrives, but it also yields food.
“I miss these events because I just love talking to people about plants and gardening,” Mitchell said.
She has been able to tide herself over by providing gardening information to the community through virtual events.
Recently she worked with Trinity United Methodist Church to provide advice on starting your own vegetable garden. On June 4 at noon, she’ll present her “Hydrangeas 101” program for the Homewood Public Library.
One of Mitchell’s best pieces of advice for new gardeners is not to put too much pressure on yourself.
“I’m a master gardener,” she said. “You know what that means? I’ve killed many more plants than you have.”
The distinction is set out by the American Horticulture Society after someone completes intensive training in horticulture. Those who obtain the distinction then volunteer their time in their community as lecturers and garden creators, they conduct research and meet other guidelines.
“When you go through master gardener training, you come out an inch deep and a mile wide,” Mitchell said. “It’s a survey course and then you get ideas of places that you like to focus on. Some people pick Japanese maples or hydrangeas.”
Passionate About Vegetables
Mitchell found that one of her passions is growing vegetables. Perhaps it was in her DNA, having come from a long line of people who tilled their own soil.
“My mother’s parents were coal miners in East Tennessee and they had a big garden plot,” Mitchell said. “They fed their 10 kids out of it. They had a lot of their own crops, corn, beans and a hog that they would butcher.”
Mitchell’s paternal grandparents gardened as well.
When she was growing up, her family had only an acre, but Mitchell remembers her parents plowed up some of it to plant a garden.
“I remember mother telling me, ‘Go up to the garden and get me a pepper,’ or, ‘Go up to the garden and get me a green tomato,” Mitchell said.
As a mother raising her own children, there didn’t seem to be a need to till a big space in her Tanglewood yard in Vestavia Hills.
In fact, she’s only been a master gardener for about a decade. There just wasn’t enough time before that.
“Especially for young families, don’t beat yourself up about this,” she said. “I didn’t have time until my kids got older, and I didn’t become a master gardener until I retired. And I started small.”
According to Mitchell, when she was raising her children, the idea of growing your own vegetables wasn’t as accessible as it is today. Creating raised beds to avoid tilling the yard and treating existing soil weren’t popular ideas.
It wasn’t until the ‘80s and ‘90s, when retired engineer and American gardener Mel Bartholomew introduced his commercial-gardening-turned-accessible method “Square Foot Gardening,” that the idea of raised beds became widely popular.
“With a raised bed, you don’t have to worry about changing the soil, you can just start fresh,” Mitchell said.
Folks with enough yard space and good light could consider starting their own garden.
One of Mitchell’s great resources is the Alabama Cooperative Extension Services site, a cooperative of Auburn University and the University of Alabama A&M. The program provides an enormous amount of information on lawn and gardening that anyone can access.
It recently started a video series under its Grow More, Give More initiative that breaks down everything you need to know to get your garden started.
“They have short videos on everything: gardening in containers, raised bed gardening, building a raised bed, heirloom vegetables, freezing your vegetables. It’s a ton of resources for people who want to get started,” Mitchell said.
The Gardening Trinity
Mitchell’s advice for folks starting out is to consider the three necessities of gardening: sunshine, soil and water.
“You can control the soil with a raised bed or a pot,” she said. “You can control the water. The sunshine is hard to control.”
When Mitchell first started working as a master gardener, she was working with the Hand in Hand Learning Center at United Ability to create a teaching garden with a good friend, the late Dr. Gary Edwards.
“I planted the same transplants out there in full sun in a raised bed that I had in Vestavia, but I’m on a sloping lot and I kept my original trees,” Mitchell said. “I don’t get the full 6 to 8 hours of sun. I maybe get 4 to 5.
“The difference in the gardens was amazing,” Mitchell said. “The sun makes the biggest difference.”
This is why Mitchell suggests folks start small with some container gardening. It also is a space saver for people who are downsizing or living in apartments because you can easily move the plant around to control the amount of sunlight it gets.
Some great plants to start with, Mitchell said, are transplants. Growing from seed is very time consuming.
“I’ve grown squash from seed and I’ve grown cucumbers from seed, but the tomatoes especially I like the transplants. I don’t want to have to grow my own,” she said.
The best place to purchase transplants is at a local nursery, she added.
Her favorite plants to start out with are tomatoes, peppers and maybe a jalapeño.
“We usually talk to kids about making a salsa garden,” she said. “You’ll plant a jalapeño, maybe some Roma tomatoes, which are less juicy and can be cut up into salsa.”
She said to be mindful about delving into cilantro. She tried for a while thinking that it was a hot weather plant. Former Birmingham Botanical Gardens CEO Fred Spicer kindly let her know that cilantro does grow in Central America, but in the cool mountain areas.
Mitchell pointed out that summer is the perfect time to plant species that love the warmth.
“A lot of times you will see tomato transplants in March,” she said. “Well, they’re just going to sit there in that cold ground because they like warmth.”
It’s tomato time. Other great hot weather plants include okra, eggplant and other squashes.
“Steer clear of lettuces,” Mitchell said. That’s a spring or fall endeavor.
Mitchell noted that she has found herself delving more into companion planting, which lends itself to container gardening.
“Basil likes to be planted with tomatoes, just like it likes to be eaten with tomatoes,” she said.
“Eggplant will get what you call a flea beetle, which is just these little tiny beetles that eat holes in the leaves and hop like fleas,” she said. “Mint repels it. So, now I plant my eggplant on either side of a big pot of mint.
Serenity
For Mitchell, choosing to garden vegetables isn’t about saving money. It’s about the experience.
“It’s the freshness and the fun of watching it grow,” she said.
She loves to grow bush beans and green beans for her table.
“I enjoy having the fresh green beans,” she said.
According to Mitchell, it takes about $25 to grow one tomato, so it isn’t about the money.
“Part of having a garden is that you want to go out there and scout it and see what’s going on because you can often catch trouble before it’s too far along,” she said. “You always have to be sure you have some good water supply.”
Gardening has given her a great outlet to get outdoors and spend time in a serene endeavor.
“On Mother’s Day, my daughter took the kids to her house for the day and I spent a lovely afternoon planting my window boxes with red, white and blue ornamentals,” she said.
She’s been a part of a study on how gardening enhances physical wellbeing.
“I’m a two-time cancer survivor as well,” she said. “I participated in the pilot program, Harvest for Health, where they paired a master gardener with a cancer survivor.”
The study was conducted at UAB, funded by the National Cancer Institute and the Alabama Cooperative Extension Services. The at-home gardening intervention program not only looked at how the activity enhanced food intake for cancer survivors, but how gardening enhanced physical activity, quality of life and physical function.
