Thankfully, in the early hours of the morning, when the day still felt promising, the birds were at the feeder, and my phone was charging somewhere I couldn’t lazily grab it, there were books. Before the heat and tempers built, I’d find myself leafing through sumptuous garden focused books and reading recipes that turned my eggplants into baba ghanoush, and my chard into gratin.

And with no social media, politics, email quick-checks, or YouTube shorts to grab my attention away from the task at hand, I would find myself walking down to the kitchen garden with new purpose, dipping a watering can into a dwindling supply and doling out precious water to precious vegetables three years in the making.

My kitchen garden background: big ambitions

From rental digs to sloping lots, you can grow vegetables almost anywhere, with very little outlay; and I’ve certainly demonstrated this over the years. Fully renovating our current kitchen garden felt like a luxury, but stemmed from our desire to make it more manageable and useable – not only as a garden for vegetables, trial plants, and cutting flowers, but as a place to sit and experience the garden after a long day.

The project involved tearing down [now] rotten raised beds built eight years ago, leveling much of the 40x60 foot site surrounded by a picket fence, constructing a pre-fab greenhouse, building a retaining wall and rectangular pond, re-constructing raised beds with 4x4 posts, and building a 12x14 foot platform to sit within, but slightly above the scene.

Stone dust would make up the pathways, with more expensive pea gravel or granite dust to come along perhaps in a few years. And everything (including the fence) had to be painstakingly stained.

My kitchen garden reality: you’re on your own

Apart from a fantastic summer’s day when friends came to help put up the greenhouse; and a cold day in January when two others helped me ceremoniously plot the first lines of a geometric design; we did this work ourselves, in a wildly fluctuating lumber market, and with wildly fluctuating schedules.

To add more torture and time to the project, a flood in 2021 submerged the greenhouse panels in river water and greasy silt. Every 1cm channel of the double walled polycarbonate had to be cleaned with tiny bits of terry cloth shoved down the channels with a coat hanger, followed up with a stream from the power washer.

Thousands of them. And when I say "had to be cleaned," I don’t mean outsourced.

The last big push of construction happened in November by my husband while I was at a garden symposium far away and couldn’t object to the swearing coming, full-throated, from that part of the garden.

However, all that profanity culminated in a garden that was fully and intoxicatingly ready to plant this spring. And I planted with gusto. Arugula, kale, lettuces, broccoli, snap peas, spinach, mustards, and radishes emerged, filled our plates, filled our egos, and went over as the heat built.

Seed-reared cutting flowers and summer vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, carrots, beets, chard, beans, sour leaf, Malabar spinach, ginger, and summer squash took their place and quickly shifted into high gear as the temps continued to rise.

My kitchen garden angst: severe drought

But temperatures built. And rain, it did not come.

In new raised beds where soil beneath the bed is still compacted and untouched by years of pioneering tap roots, a tomato plant will dry up before you can say ‘Heinz.’ Those beds were fully reliant on hand watering with collected water, and the resident gardener’s mood. Mine wasn’t good.

Motivation was sorely needed beyond inch-deep social media reels and ad-strewn recipes that inevitably led me elsewhere. And thankfully I found it in the sumptuous pages of Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook that had been waiting for me to review it for another journal.

Newly excited, from there I pulled Christopher Lloyd’s Gardener Cook from the shelves, Deborah Madison’s classic The Greens Cookbook, and Marian Morash’s happy simple recipes and growing instructions in The Victory Garden Cookbook.

Even as the rest of the ornamental garden dried up around me, mornings with Roots by Diane Morgan and The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook by Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman had me watering my beets and carrots and surprisingly, looking forward into fall vegetables.

And the kitchen garden continued to flourish, and we continued – and continue – to eat.

These tomatoes brought to you by the printed word

Feeling uncomfortably empty when you finish another screen session, or rather, when it finally lets you go? Books allow us to fully own our time with them. They are opened, absorbed, and closed.

No one sets their soundtrack, voices, or pace, to your experience. No one effortlessly links you down another rabbit hole, or tries to take your money for yet another brand, product or can’t-live-without – even as they track your interest to populate the next round of scrolling.

The act of opening a book and turning its pages involves four of our five senses, and connects us to our past – even as its contents inspire our future.

If you’ve been turning solely to a screen for motivation, information, and inspiration in your gardening endeavors, it might just be the link you’re actually searching for.