By KATHRYN TRUE
For The Beachcomber
The verdant composition of Beth Tuttle’s garden is a vegetable symphony of flavors, shapes and textures. Where the dainty purple-and-green crunch of leaf amaranth might be the oboe of this photosynthetic orchestra, the spicy arugula is the piccolo. The leaf chard’s solid undertone plays French horn to the tanginess of Italian parsley’s violin.
Taken alone, each of these plants can be savored and appreciated for its individual character. Together they vibrate with an ovation’s worth of complementary flavors.
Each week Tuttle hand-harvests bucketfuls of mustard, cress, lettuce and endive — up to 20 different salad ingredients in all — to create Tramp Harbor Produce’s Gourmet Greens. The mix changes throughout the year as different plants come into season. Every unique bagful is topped with flowers — borage, calendula or, lately, the peppery punch of bright orange and yellow nasturtiums.
Tuttle tends about half an acre of land around her family’s sun-drenched home just up the hill from Portage. Formerly a donkey farm, it has the open-sky-feeling of a Montana ranch. She moved here eight years ago with her husband and two daughters, now 10 and 12, with the intention of gardening for her family.
“I was looking for something I could do with my kids around and I spent most of my time in the garden anyway,” said Tuttle, who didn’t consider selling her produce until she attended a UW Extension course on how to start an agriculture business a few years ago.
“I realized this kind of work was well suited to an adult with kids and other things going on,” she said. Tuttle looks forward to the Wednesday market, where she enjoys meeting her customers and getting to know other Island farmers.
Her popular greens mixes sell out early, so you’ve got to time your market visit accordingly. She does take occasional call-in orders but prefers not to hold items at the market. Tuttle sells other vegetables in season, including carrots, beets, cucumbers, potatoes, beans and peppers. And she’s known for a tiny, tart cucumber that looks like a grape-sized watermelon.
Though her business is just at the break-even stage, Tuttle touts the importance of non-monetary benefits.
“I get to work here, and we eat a lot of good, fresh food,” she said. “That’s a big benefit for me.”
Tuttle grew up on Mercer Island and in Issaquah, but only dabbled in growing things until she and her husband, Henry Haselton, bought their first home in West Seattle in 1993.
“I’d loved gardening for a long time, and it was exciting to finally have our own property,” she said. Though Tuttle also grew ornamental plants, she was more fulfilled by growing food.
“When you eat stuff out of your own garden or from the farmers market, it just tastes so good,” she said. “Non-gardeners often don’t realize how much work and care goes into making good food.”
Her latest experiments are in the area of micro greens — the first succulent leaves of plants such as arugula, cress, kohlrabi and amaranth, sold by the container.
“You can take them home and snip them onto a salad, or keep them growing for a while in your kitchen,” she explained.
Tuttle likes the nutritional benefits of just-harvested greens and the flavor and texture they add to her usual mix. “It’s like adding flowers,” she said.
She and Haselton also recently planted 200 wine grape vines, including Pinot noir and Siegerrebe, through an arrangement with Ron Irvine of Vashon Winery, who hopes to bottle an all-Vashon-grown vintage by getting more Islanders to grow grapes.
When asked the most challenging aspects of growing good food using organic methods, Tuttle smiled and asked, “Want a list? It’s the timing, figuring out what will be ripe when. I don’t know until the day beforehand.”
She also finds it hard to get it all done with kids at home, though her daughters, Maeve and June, help some with weeding and like selling with their mom at the Wednesday market.
Come winter, Tuttle continues growing food for her family and spends free time poring over her favorite seed catalogs: Territorial, FedCo and a small company in Oregon called Wild Garden Seeds. That’s where she found the seeds for her current favorite green: thirst-quenching, juicy quinoa — better known in these parts as a high-protein Andean grain. Tuttle admires not only the flavor, but its arrow-shaped leaves, attractive upright growing pattern, even how it moves in the wind.
It’s not only catalogue prose that inspires her planting choices. After finishing Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” last winter, she decided to grow asparagus, which features in the author’s gardening adventures.
In two years it will be ready for harvest, so look for Tramp Harbor Produce’s asparagus in the spring of 2010. If Tuttle’s harmonious greens are any indication, it will be worth the wait.
— This article, the fifth in a series featuring Island farmers who sell at Vashon’s Wednesday Market, was written with funding from the state Department of Agriculture through the Vashon Island Grower’s Association. Kathryn True is an Island writer.
