Gardens without borders - no limits

Some gardeners really know how to think outside the plot.

Rather than plant rows and rows of corn, tomatoes, beans and greens, some urban gardeners are growing vegetables and herbs anywhere and everywhere.

Some folks just don’t mow. They plant right in plain view, as if to say ‘Who says onions and garlic aren’t handsome plants?’ And they’re allowing vegetables and herbs in areas that were formerly off-limits — flower beds and fancy trellises.

What’s going on?

Gardeners say they’re growing what they want, where they want it, for a lot of reasons: they’re producing their favorite foods; it’s organic; it’s cheaper; and space is valuable.

In the Ak-Sar-Ben neighborhood, where bungalows and Tudor cottages sit on smallish lots, Patrick McGee uses his entire front yard to grow strawberries, herbs, onions, garlic, tomatoes, peppers, kale, collard greens, cucumbers and a variety of perennial herbs.

In the Dundee neighborhood, tall corn blends in with a thick stand of tall ornamental grasses on the front corner of Jennifer Wilson’s home. The corn flanks a kind of window-box ledge holding pots of geraniums, moss roses and marigolds. The home oozes cottage charm. And Wilson said most people never even notice the cornstalks near the front door.

McGee, 26, has been involved with a garden since he was a kid, even though it seemed “kind of a chore then.”

Now, this artist’s assistant who works with welding, lets his front yard serve as a free-form canvas.

His plant choices are mostly perennial edibles. Strawberries, for example, sprawl in an area that started small but now threatens to double in size. Onions and garlic, growing at the edge of the yard, will return, too. Raspberries hang from a two-year-old bush that’s waist-high.

McGee starts peppers and tomatoes, which are annuals, from seed, and generally only buys a replacement plant if weather knocks out one of his seedlings. This year, he has 19 tomato plants, including heirloom varieties.

Next to the tomatoes grow peppers, kale and collard greens, a kind of mixed green salad of a patch that borders the strawberries and a small patch of cucumbers.

He also does some rather fancy companion planting. Artemisia, or wormwood as it’s sometimes called, is an aromatic, shrubby plant, and a dandy insect-repellent, McGee said. Several varieties of this vigorous grower seal the edges of the garden. He said he has to pull about half of it to prevent the plant from taking over.

In the fourth year of this full-bore kind of gardening, McGee has changed his tune about it being a chore. Now it’s a kind of work of art — free-form.

Tomatoes, peppers and corn stalks fill a space about the size of side-by-side lawn chairs at each doorway of the Yale community of apartments near 34th and Lake Streets. Residents, mostly Karen refugees from Myanmar, planted a communal garden with initial help from the Omaha Community Foundation and City Sprouts. But they also have doorstep plots.

Jumoke Omojola, of City Sprouts, watched the gardens take shape from seed. The community garden was a basketball court with a broken up surface, but City Sprouts removed the asphalt and the residents took it from there, she said. They started planting.

What’s amazing, said Omojola, is how each apartment also has vegetables growing right next to the front door.

“Look at all that’s growing in a spot that’s about 4 by 5 feet,” she said.

Some of the plants, like a deep green leafy shrub called roselle, are popular ingredients in Thai cooking but difficult, if not impossible, to find in local markets. (Roselle is sometimes called sorrel, and adds a slightly sour taste to soups.)

With the help of an interpreter, one of the residents, Klerh Too, said seeds for plants like the roselle had to be ordered from Thailand.

But the plant is hardy. And almost every home has its own. Too called roselle “a soup spice, a seasoning, that makes you sweat.”

Blue corn won’t make you sweat, but it could be called unusual.

When Jennifer Wilson gave the prime real estate sunny corner of her house to cornstalks, she chose a blue corn that, when dried, will be used in decorative ways. The stalks will get another life around Halloween.

“I’ve done corn in the front at least the last three years,” Wilson said. “I really like corn. I think it’s beautiful. In back, we have strawberry popcorn, which we give as gifts.”

Normally, Wilson said, she has planters of herbs on either side of the front door. Sage and rosemary are her favorites for cooking, and she plants thyme among the geraniums.

Wilson, an art teacher at Skutt Catholic High School, said her small yard in the Dundee neighborhood is chock full of what she calls “the Nebraska standards.”

She grows coreopsis, bee balm, Husker red penstemon, lilies and sunflowers.

But a closer look shows that beans climb the sunflower stalks, and hot peppers grow among the coneflowers, daisies and hostas.

As for that corn growing in the front yard, Wilson said, an ice storm helped things along. It took out a shade tree and left sun-loving corn a better chance to grow tall and healthy.

Wilson said the edibles her family plants in front and backyard gardens have educational value, too. “Our kids are totally into it. They even harvest grapes from the alley” to make juice.

Contact the writer:

444-1059, rhonda.stansberry@owh.com

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