The Self-Sown Kitchen Garden
The garden at Seed Savers’ Exchange Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa
In late June of 2024 we visited Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa, home of Seed Savers' Exchange. Though I had been there several times before, it had been well over a decade since the last visit. The main display garden open to visitors, just outside of the Lillian Goldman Visitor Center, continues to be an excellent example of a small functional food-and-flowers kitchen garden, featuring useful attractive perennials alongside self-sown annuals and biennials with ample space for transplanted tomatoes and other summer crops. It is a “real" garden, one too rarely depicted in gardening books and magazines, which like to ruthlessly delineate flower gardens and vegetable gardens. Which is fair enough in a formal setting, but unrealistic for growers with limited space and lots of ambition.
Asparagus plants in late June, with beautiful and useful perennials that will bloom in succession over a long season.
As in most kitchen gardens of the Midwest, asparagus is abundant. The plants are big and bouffant by late June, festooned with immature seeds, and at Heritage Farm they are flanked by tall selections of Polygonum orientale, Joe Pye Weed and old fashioned hollyhocks, which will bloom later in summer and into autumn. Valuable flowering perennials like yarrow and chives, as well as striking foliage plants including Lamb's Ears and vivid cultivars of Penstemon digitalis like ‘Dark Towers’ or ‘Husker Red’, fill out this functional and floriferous bed. All of these plants will spread or self-sow politely over several years without intervention and are among the most hardy and adaptable plants, reliable in northern gardens from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Self-sown annual salad plants including lettuce and zebra mallow and heartsease and edible umbellifers like dill and fennel are here and there and everywhere in the garden. These plants make for easy spring foraging, attractive texture, and their flowers are beacons for pollinating insects. Tucked in amongst them are transplants of kale, collards and chard and colorful nasturtiums and marigolds, which will fill out the beds long after the spring salad plants are spent.
Self-sown lettuce, dill and zebra mallow with transplanted flowering annuals.
Self-sown lettuce with overwintered or self-sown fennel and milkweed(!) with transplanted marigolds.
Self-sown lettuce, heartsease and love-in-a-mist with transplanted collards.
Self-sown lettuce and dill with a couple self-sown amaranth and sunflower plants with transplanted kale and marigolds and way too much empty space.
One of the large interior beds is absolutely filled with carefully thinned volunteers of amaranth (very possibly Hopi Red Dye) and sunflower, and peppered with transplanted tomatoes and recently sown pole beans coming up beneath old trellises and teepees. By August this bed will be a marvel of edible architectural abundance, and an almost effortless ode to the gardens of pre-Columbian North America.
Carefully thinned volunteers of amaranth and sunflower. Notice the caged tomato and young pole bean plants sprouting beneath the support on the right.
Among the many magical quirks of this garden are the milkweed plants. Milkweed is a beautiful native perennial and an important plant for monarch butterflies, but can be a real bully in the vegetable garden where its underground rhizomes and wind-blown seeds quickly colonize moist fertile soil. At Heritage Farm they seem to have been strategically allowed to persist, in one instance amongst some peppermint! Though charming, we would not recommend this practice in the average kitchen garden! Keep your milkweed relegated to a mixed naturalistic planting far from the food gardens and your peppermint in a pot.
Milkweed in the peppermint! Plus self-sown borage and transplanted marigolds.