Assessing Brookside Gardens' First Year of Food

The hyacinth beans went nuts. The oval orange eggplants became so pest-ridden that they had to be pulled out. And by summer's end, there was no stopping the okra. 

So went the first year of Brookside Gardens' edible landscaping, one component of its three-year plan to focus its programs on food. 

"It was an interesting year," said Phil Normandy, who manages the horticultural displays at Brookside and gave a presentation Friday during the "Green Matters" symposium. He addressed the successes and failures of last year's food-related gardening projects and displays, which included extensive vegetable beds, a giant rice-growing planter, an arched trellis heavy with flowering bean vines, and separate beds for grains and plants such as stevia that are used as sweeteners.

"We're looking forward to trying it again," Normandy said. "And developing a taste for okra."

The next two years of Brookside's will be built in part on lessons learned during 2010, when the sweet potatoes took an eternity to bloom but then grew so abundantly that they spilled over onto sidewalks; the bok choy looked gorgeous and dramatic at first but faded as summer drew on; and the Brazilian oval orange eggplants proved to be an ideal food for flea beetles.

"We attracted the entire population of flea beetles in the state of Maryland," said Normandy, who has a degree in ornamental horticulture.

Pat Lynch, who educates area residents on cultivating garden spaces and managing sustainable landscapes as a University of Maryland extension "master gardener," suggested that Brookside make the information it gets from its hands-on vegetable growing experience available to the general public.

"One of the big problems is that new gardeners don't understand the challenges they are going to face," said Lynch, who attended the symposium. Row covers, for instance, can discourage flea beetles, a common eggplant pest. Normandy said Brookside could possibly disseminate practical gardening information by posting weekly garden updates on its web site during this year's growing season.

Some lessons weren't rooted in botany. For instance, Brookside visitors had strong reactions to the food plantings, many of them positive, said Normandy. While some people complained about the lack of flowers, many others were excited to see plants like rice, which they'd never seen before, or to observe plants that they'd seen in a country they'd visited, or where they'd grown up.

"We were really surprised at the response we got -- the emotional response -- of some people," he said. One of next year's plans is to organize edible plantings by region, so that visitors can learn about the types of food-producing plants that are grown in South Asia, Central America, Mexico, and other locations.

Iris Amdur, a consultant at GreenShape in Washington, D.C., who advises clients on creating environmentally friendly buildings and projects, said Brookside's edible landscaping is important because it teaches the public that environmentally sensitive design can involve more than simply selecting a few rows of ornamental plants that don't require much water.

"There's a higher level of biodiversity that can happen on these sites," she said. "You can make a center for the community. You can make a lively habitat."