Year-round gardening Year-round gardening (March 18, 2005)

Artist offers cornucopia of ideas at Saturday seminar

By Carol Palinkas

For most of us, our back yards have little room for more than a patio table, barbecue and, maybe, a couple of tomato plants. A few shrubs may break the monotony of a small lawn.

For Adrienne Duncan, that space holds enough produce to feed an entire family year round. And she wants to show others how to do it too.

Duncan will teach a seminar March 26 on Spring Gardening Ideas at Common Ground in Palo Alto. Included in the class will be information on soil amendments, bio-intensive techniques and how to take advantage of mini climates.

The class is aimed at the rank beginner, the gardening novice who may have a small packet of seeds and no idea what to do with it. The focus will be on growing vegetables year round, although after a Tarot reading, Duncan has decided to add a little pizzazz to the seminar by including some thoughts on color.

Duncan is no stranger to vegetable farming. Her father, a truck farmer in upstate New York, gave Duncan her first plot when she was a young girl.

"At 5 years he gave me a piece of land the length of our back yard. ... And he said, 'When I see that as not planted, when I see the little flowers not blooming on that piece of land, it is no longer yours.' And it was like saying, oh, you get no more clothes to go to school in for the rest of your life. It was a big thing," she said.

Duncan was further influenced by her Aunt Elizabeth, who took her under her wing and taught her a thing or two about using warmer spots to grow more delicate plantings, a method she still uses.

With her aunt's encouragement, she would pore through seed catalogs. Allowing her one packet a year, her aunt taught her to choose wisely and to save her seeds from every planting.

A profound religious experience led Duncan to the arts. First she took numerous design classes at Foothill College, and then apprenticed herself to a Peninsula sculptor for eight years.

Realizing she needed more color in her life than sculpture could provide, she decided to take drawing lessons. She began with charcoal sketches on enormous pieces of butcher paper, her painting reflecting the bigness of her sculptures.

Her home is a testament to her abilities; her sculptures adorn the walls and tables, faces nestled in driftwood stare at you from the walls and a life-size shaman solemnly greets guests at the door.

On other walls rest her watercolors, redolent with mystique and metaphor, as well as lots and lots of color.

Wood nymphs appear in various places in the garden, front yard and throughout the house, a Palo Alto Eichler that Duncan fell in love with and bought when she saw the Philippine hardwood walls and an expanse of glass encompassing an entire wall overlooking the back yard.

Duncan herself is slightly reserved until she starts talking about her garden. Then her arms sweep across the table to point out various plantings, and off she goes. A small, slender 81-year-old, Duncan's vitality belies her age. From all appearances, bio-intensive gardening is very good for the health.

Around 20 years ago, Duncan found her current calling when her husband Gene told her that he wanted to take early retirement from Lockheed. A pure research scientist, he had issues with Lockheed's move toward missile manufacture and the Trident sub. The problem was that at 57, he was too young to collect Social Security.

Duncan stepped up her efforts to grow more in the back yard and began teaching adults as well as children.

That first year, the garden saved them $1,000 in grocery bills. A year after that, they saved $3,000.

Now, the fifth-of-an acre provides almost all their vegetables and fruits. They spend only $1,000 a year on groceries in total.

The garden at first glance doesn't pop out so much as sit there quietly. What may look like weeds to the untrained eye is really miner's lettuce, a wild variety that is so named because it was the first greenery to come up in January, when miners would be ready to trade gold for a little green.

Interspersed within the lettuce are poppies, and beyond that lie tomato stakes next to last year's corn stalks. The greenhouse on the right side of the yard holds the tomato seedlings, and in front of that is the double-dug bed, covered with tarp and ready for planting.

Boysenberries and raspberries creep along the fence, followed by a stand of sweet peas next to coco rose beans, coriander and dill. Green peppers from last year look somewhat forlorn, but having lasted the winter will sprout peppers much earlier than usual. Along one side lie the brassicas, broccoli and cauliflower, as well as Blue Lake beans and carrots.

Growing your own necessitates canning and preserving, and the shelves in the garage are covered with jars of tomatoes, applesauce, guava and pickles, with strands of dill and seeds lining the bottom, works of art in themselves. When one year's tomato crop is small, the canned goods from the year before will more than make up for it.

The freezer holds bags and bags of Bing cherries, containers of pumpkin, "skillet pies" all ready to thaw and bake, and some turkey. A lone bag of store-bought peas nestles in the door, a stranger in a land of home-grown veggies.

As Duncan gets older, her focus has moved more and more toward color and its place in the garden. No longer content with mere production, she ruminates on what kind of flowers will look good behind the sweet peas.

"When you're painting a water color, you're choosing the colors to tell something," she said as she pointed to one of her more colorful creations. "You see the white stars in the blue background are very effective. If I made that a gray sky or something else, it wouldn't tell my story.

"So if I'm going to plant coco rose beans, and they're going to grow up 8 feet, they're going to be a solid block of these beautiful leaves with pink pods -- I'm going to plant something that will go up tall that will accent, maybe hollyhock, maybe pink hollyhock, maybe a cream color hollyhock to go with the cream in the pod of the bean, which picks it up. Subtle as blazes, you know, if you know what you're doing, and you know your plant world and you know your color scheme."

Whether growing broccoli or visualizing a canvas composed of colorful vegetables and flowers, Duncan exudes enthusiasm. Over the years she has developed a following, with some students returning year after year, perhaps in the hope that some of Duncan's vitality will wear off on them.
Information:

What: Spring Gardening Ideas When: Saturday, March 26, 10:30 a.m. to noon Where: Common Ground, 559 College Ave., Palo Alto Cost: $19 Call: 493-6072 or visit www.commongroundinpaloalto.org

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