First-time visitors to Sheila Dunn’s home in Weaverville are taken on what she laughingly refers to as “the forced march” over her “yard” on the steep hillsides of her property. Don’t protest. The woman is determined — you will see what she and Mother Nature have created over the past six years.
You’ll amble down the paved walkway covered with creeping thyme, past a stone bench surrounded by blueberry bushes that overlooks a patch of edible flowers and another patch of medicinal plants. There are so many butterflies the air is literally flittering with them.
You’ll continue under the trellis festooned with native muscadine vines, over the bridge to the Asian pear tree dripping with juicy fruit, past the electrified fence that protects her three bee hives, pass the waterfall in the back, then up to the deck that overlooks the property and from which hangs a vine bursting with small hardy kiwis.
The tour takes only about a half hour. But you’ll remember it for the rest of your life because you’ve never seen, never imagined, a yard like this. There’s not one blade of grass in the yard. If you can’t eat it, or use it to make healing potions, or if it doesn’t attract pollinators, you won’t find it here.
Except for eggs and goat milk she gets from a neighbor and meat and nuts and grains she buys at the tailgate market, almost everything Sheila eats, every day, all year long, comes from this garden. Her favorite activity in life is to “meander through the garden, picking up things to eat,” she says.
Though her energy seems astounding (“I love to weed,” she says, yanking several unwary intruders), Sheila calls herself a “lazy” gardener. That’s why practically all her plants are perennials. “I have more fun things to do on the weekend than walk around with a backpack of pesticide,” she says — so all her harmful pest critters are vanquished by friendly bugs in the garden, including her favorite, the parasitic wasps, who get rid of aphids and other unwanted pests. On one of her three walks around her property each day she checks to make sure her “good bugs” are happy and numerous.
Sheila’s harvests are abundant, but she doesn’t can the extra food. “Canning takes too much time and it’s not that tasty.” Instead she dries or freezes everything. She keeps two full freezers.
“And I love getting things for free,” she laughs. Sheila forages for mushrooms in the nearby forest and can bring home basketsful of mushrooms that would cost a small fortune in the market. She’s such an avid mushroom forager that she teaches others how to do it.
One reason Sheila plans and takes care of such a garden is simple — she loves to eat. “I’m an amazing cook,” she says. I read cookbooks like other people read novels.” She has three good meals a day, which include “a lot, a lot, of greens.” One of her favorites is sochan (Rudbeckia laciniata), a green-headed coneflower that the Cherokee also loved. Every Sunday she prepares her meals for the week, making chicken or veggie stock in which to cook each meal. “I also have lots of parties,” Sheila says. “Never a potluck at my house — you come, but I cook everything.”
Sheila learned how to create a perennial edible garden the old fashioned way — by herself. She devoured books and websites. Although now it takes only about two hours a day to take care of her garden, it took many hours of planning to reach that point of efficiency. “I work fast,” Sheila explains. “That’s because I’ve spent many hours researching and planning. I plan, plan, plan — everything.”
Though she favors native plants when possible, Sheila is not a native purist. She searches online to find plants from all over the world that will grow in our environment. She has clear priorities on what will go into her garden. The plant has to be nutritious and tasty. For example, big blueberries have become popular, “but they’re not as tasty as the smaller ones,” Sheila, says, so she’s eliminated the big-berried bushes. A plant also has to do well without pesticides. Last year, she had a beautiful peach tree, called Reliance, but without pesticides, the fruit was always getting brown rot — she had to cut it down.
Also, she feels, there’s no reason to grow a plant if it’s cheaper to buy in the supermarket. Thus she won’t go to the effort to grow cucumbers when she can buy them for pennies at the tailgate market. On the other hand, “Asian persimmons are $2.50 a piece packed in Styrofoam at the grocery store. For a $28 tree I get hundreds of them.” She gets expensive saffron from the bulb of one plant she ordered online.
She prefers plants that provide a big yield. Her hardy kiwis aren’t fuzzy and big like in the grocery store, but her vines give her several bushels. She’s a big booster of dwarf fruit trees — they take up less space and are easier to care for. Herbs are an essential part of the garden, for both cooking and medicinal purposes.
In addition to planning, Sheila attributes the abundance of her garden to composting. She composts all the fall leaves, and every possible compostable waste from the garden. She especially loves comfrey for its boost of nitrogen. Neighbors have been generous with their offerings of animal manure. Even the best compost requires planning, though — it took six months for her to prepare the earth to make it acidic enough for blueberries. And then she could grow cranberries and ligonberries underneath them so the effort paid off.
Sheila’s advice for perennial edible wannabes? “Plan, plan, plan. Raise your expectations about how much work will be involved starting and tending such a garden. Lower your expectations about how your plants will look compared to grocery store produce. Mistakes happen — be fearless about getting rid of what doesn’t work. Treasure your compost. Have lots of parties. And plan, plan, plan.”