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The visit to Medford Gardens was a soul-blooming experience
Photo by Rhonda NowakBonnie introduced her neighbor Austin Bangs to gardening when he was 7; now at 16, Austin is an avid gardener himself.
Photo by Rhonda NowakBonnie fills her backyard garden with a variety of food-producing and pollination-friendly plants.
Photo by Rhonda NowakBonnie makes her own compost in four plastic bins filled with shredded leaves, garden waste, and kitchen waste.
Photo by Rhonda Nowak Medford gardener Bonnie Patterson grows Interlaken and Concord grapes in a long arbor in her front yard.
Photo by Rhonda NowakBonnie is experimenting with a garden improvement by using apple cider vinegar to extract minerals from crushed eggshells.
Photo by Rhonda NowakBonnie Patterson shows off her ‘Frost’ peach tree; behind her is a tree neck.
“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls bloom. ”
– Marcel Proust, “Pleasure and Regret”, 1896
One of the joys of being out and about more today includes visiting other gardeners’ gardens again and sharing them with the readers of this column. Gardening is usually a lonely preoccupation, so it’s nice to change this routine up sometimes and see what other plant enthusiasts are doing in their grow space.
This was the thought a few days ago when I was visiting Bonnie and Relfe Patterson’s garden. They have lived in their home in southeast Medford since 1997 on a quarter acre lot, but Bonnie really started devoting her time and energy to gardening since she retired from her job as a physical therapist in 2014. At that time, she was participating in the OSU’s Master Gardener program. Since then, the Bonnie and Relfe landscape has been growing and developing.
“My goal for this property is to make it as self-sufficient as possible. I want it to be a food forest, ”said Bonnie. As I toured their gardens, I realized that Bonnie is well on the way to achieving this goal.
Bonnie showed me a raised bed on her front patio, where she was building a garden on a mound of twigs and twigs covered with soil and compost. She built a plant community with a small service tree (Amelanchier laevis, ‘Spring Flurry’) and a dwarf hinoki cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa), surrounded by ferns and a range of medicinal and pollination-friendly perennials, including Echinacea, Agastache and Heuchera.
Bonnie says she particularly likes the Echinaceas Powwow range, which is more compact than other sun hat varieties.
There is a beautiful vine arbor in Bonnie’s front yard which is currently covered with grapes of ripening seedless green Interlaken grapes and purple Concord grapes.
“The neighborhood is looking forward to harvest time,” Bonnie said with a smile. I could tell that she enjoys sharing her gardening bonus with others.
In fact, Bonnie’s gardener protégé came by with vegetables from his garden in hand during my visit. Austin Bangs has lived the neighborhood all his life and was just 7 years old when he ventured into Bonnie’s backyard one day. That visit had a huge impact on Austin, and now, at 16, he’s an avid gardener himself. He and Bonnie regularly exchange vegetables and gardening tips. (I see another garden visit in the near future.)
Bonnie’s back yard is filled with fruit trees, berry bushes and raised vegetable beds that are planted in polycultures. The vegetable patches are also hill mounds, which Bonnie said help hold in moisture in the beds in hot summer weather. She has an automatic drip system in all beds as well as in her container gardens to keep the watering constant.
Tires are attached to the raised beds in case a drape is needed, but Bonnie said she hasn’t had to protect her tomatoes, beans, and pumpkins so far. On the other hand, some trees and potted plants have suffered leaf spots from the burning rays of the sun.
“Every year I try to plant something new,” said Bonnie. This year she’s trying a ground cherry (Physalis pruinosa) that is smaller and sweeter than the tomatillos I know. Another unusual plant in Bonnie’s vegetable patches is a tree cabbage, a perennial brassica that can grow up to 3 meters tall. I learned that tree kale doesn’t contain oxalic acid, which makes some leafy vegetables bitter, so the leaves of tree kale taste sweet and nutty, similar to baby kale.
I was amazed at Bonnie’s very productive peach tree, a hardy variety called “Frost”. Even though Bonnie told me she only planted the tree last year, it is already producing an impressive harvest of beautiful peaches. What makes “frost” peach trees particularly successful in our area is their resistance to peach leaf curl, a common fungal disease. This is good news for organic gardeners like Bonnie who don’t spray fungicides or insecticides.
Bonnie has a beehive in her garden that an experienced beekeeper friend helps her maintain. Last winter all honeybees mysteriously died and Bonnie said she really saw a difference in the number of pollinators she had in her garden this spring. She hopes her pollination-friendly plants and the water sources she provides will help rebuild the beehive.
I learned that worker bees build large cells in the hive to create another colony to raise female larvae that are fed a special food called royal jelly. This diet produces a fertile queen bee rather than a sterile worker. The colony has only one queen bee who produces all the eggs, so the first queen bee to come out of her cell will kill the other larvae.
I was also intrigued by a small piece of lawn in Bonnie’s garden that she planted with an Ecology Lawn Mix, a mix of perennial ryegrass, fescue, strawberry and micro clover, wild English daisy, white yarrow, Roman chamomile and baby blue eyes. The lawn stays green all year round, does not need a lot of water and only needs to be mowed about once a month. In Bonnie’s garden, the green lawn does a good job of breaking up the vegetable patches and flower borders.
On the way out, Bonnie showed me her four compost bins, in which she makes all of her compost from shredded leaves, garden waste, and kitchen waste. She fills each container one after the other and occasionally turns the organic material with a hand hoe. She has found the plastic compost bins with lids and bottom flaps to work best for her.
I left Bonnie’s garden delighted with everything I had seen and heard during my visit. I think Marcel Proust would have called it a soul-blooming experience.
Rhonda Nowak is a gardener, teacher, and writer from Rogue Valley. Send her an email at Rnowak39@gmail.com. For more information on gardening, check out their podcasts and videos at https://mailtribune.com/podcasts/the-literary-gardener.
Share your garden story
I would like to talk to you about your garden and share your gardening story in an upcoming column. Send me an email at rnowak39@gmail.com.
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