Daniel Gasteiger

I grew up in Ithaca, New York, a small city that is home to Cornell University and Ithaca College. As a kid, I "helped" my mother plant marigolds, and she helped me plant radishes. Seeing the radishes sprout and develop those little red balls was a rush… but kind of silly because I didn’t care for radishes, and I don’t think anyone else in my family did either.

My dad maintained about four rhubarb plants in the back corner of the yard, and I enjoyed the spring ritual of pulling the red stalks, cutting off the giant leaves, and cooking the stalks into sauce. I loved eating rhubarb sauce–I still do.

When I and my brothers outgrew the sandbox in our back yard, my dad tossed the box and planted tomatoes in the sand. I quite despised tomatoes, so I had no love for his plants.

My bedroom became a greenhouse as I developed two compulsions:

• I loved to start plants from cuttings… particularly plants that started themselves such as Mother of Thousands and Jade Trees.

• I hated to see a potted plant die in the pot because someone had tossed it aside.

In the meantime, my parents bought a farm where my mother established an enormous vegetable garden; it was large enough that she had the neighbor visit each spring with a tractor to turn the soil over and then disk it smooth. We raised horses, so each spring before the plow arrived, we dug enough manure and straw out of the barn to pile several inches deep over the entire garden. Without the benefit of composting, this raw manure promoted intensely rigorous growth; my mom’s vegetables thrived.

As if the vegetable garden wasn’t enough, my dad planted several fruit trees. I remember an apple tree that had five varieties of apples grafted onto a single root stock… and there was a less impressive peach tree.

With all the produce, of course there was canning and freezing. My mom did most of that work, though we all participated. As tennis season began, we’d cap strawberries or pit cherries while watching tournaments on TV. I picked wild black raspberries and made jelly several times in my mom’s kitchen; I also made plum preserves. This in the days when a few layers of paraffin was the prescription for sealing a jelly jar against bacteria and mold.

When I finished college and moved to Boston, I withdrew from gardening and growing houseplants. But eventually I married and we bought a house with a yard. I made a feeble effort to grow vegetables there, but our neighbor was a cement company that illegally dumped tons of unused cement on the other side of the wall; I guess our soil was so basic that it singed away young roots as they emerged from their seeds.

When my wife and I reproduced, we agreed to go rural. We settled in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania and bought a house on a third of an acre. The yard came with a raised-bed garden 14′ on a side, and five fruit trees: a pear tree, a peach tree, and three apple trees. There were also a few blueberry bushes growing in a hedge along one border of the yard.

Over sixteen years in Lewisburg, I’ve grown tomatoes, beans, peas, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, peppers, butternut squash, pumpkins, neck pumpkins, carrots, lettuce, spinach, rhubarb, broccoli, asparagus, and various herbs: basil, sage, cilantro, rosemary, oregano, parsley, dill, and thyme. I’ve also helped care for blueberries and raspberries. I re-domesticated our five fruit trees (they’d gone quite wild), and have even grafted from one of them to the other–getting a tree that used to produce ugly green apples to produce almost exclusively tasty red apples.

Between my small kitchen garden and the largest farmers’ market in Pennsylvania (less than a mile away every Wednesday), I can, freeze, and dehydrate a lot of produce. Canning is a year-round obsession: I buy in bulk when produce is cheap, and preserve to create products I’d otherwise buy at a grocery store. With the exception of an occasional batch of fermented vegetables that went bad, my home-preserved produce is consistently better than commercially-processed. In fact, home-preserved produce is sometimes so much better that it’s a different food from what you dig out of a store-bought can or shake loose from a store-bought box.

While I hope you read Yes, You Can! I also encourage you to find me online. I enjoy interacting with gardeners, foodies, and food-preservers on Twitter and Facebook, and I write several blogs about gardening, cooking, and preserving produce. It’s a very supportive community; please join in.

Find me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/cityslipper

Visit my blogs:

http://www.smallkitchengarden.net

http://www.homekitchengarden.com

http://www.fooddryer.net