Gardening partnership

Throughout the summer, I will profile local vegetable gardeners to show how others grow their own food. Recently, Liberty Lake residents Jane and Mark Bitz invited me to come see their garden.

Having grown their own vegetables for more than 25 years, they have established a solid gardening partnership. Mark Bitz is in charge of composting, turning over the soil in the spring and putting the garden to bed for the winter. Jane Bitz says she is “the planner and the planter.”

The Bitzes have gardened organically for many years although Jane Bitz admits it has been a learning process. They compost kitchen scraps, grass clippings and leaves, something Mark Bitz believes is “such an amazing process but it’s why our garden is so productive every year.”

The insects they encounter include slugs, leaf miners and cabbage loopers, although Jane Bitz says the slugs are the most troublesome. “I either hand-pick them or sprinkle diatomaceous earth around the plants I need to protect because it’s an irritant to them. To be an organic gardener, I know I have to be monitoring the garden regularly, but I also have accepted that if insects damage a crop, that’s OK.”

Their garden consists of nine 4-by-8-foot beds. This year, they are growing tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, carrots, beans, peas, broccoli, lettuce, squash and herbs. In addition to using the produce for cooking, they put up salsa, freeze tomato sauce and pesto, and dry herbs and peppers.

“People think you can’t grow hot peppers here, but you can,” Mark Bitz says. “The Garden Salsa peppers are just deadly when dried,” which he says is easy to do by hanging them in the kitchen.

Jane Bitz enjoys growing unusual varieties of vegetables. For example, she chose Ropreco Roma and Black Zebra tomatoes, Corno di Toro and Bulgarian Carrot peppers. Another crop that not all gardeners grow is arugula, which Mark Bitz says “has been a great discovery for us.” He also insists on growing his favorite striped Italian zucchini for its buttery flavor and plenty of basil because “we make a lot of pesto. Lettuce Leaf basil is the secret to making great pesto,” he says.

One of their favorite crops is salad greens. Jane Bitz collects different types of lettuce seeds and grows them in small blocks. She uses a shade cloth so she can grow them all summer long. “One of our greatest pleasures is to go out to the garden with scissors and snip salad greens.” She harvests individual leaves rather than a whole plant at a time so they will have successive pickings. After the first picking, she cuts the leaves about three inches from the ground to avoid damaging immature leaves.

This winter, she purchased a large cold frame so they could start their salad greens earlier. She planted them March 12 and even though the cold frame “got snowed on a lot,” she’s pleased with how it worked. “The biggest challenge was the amount of time it took for the seeds to germinate and get growing.”

When asked what the most daunting aspect of gardening is, Jane Bitz says, “More than anything, it’s having time for everything. It’s also just the timing of it all: you can plant too soon or miss harvesting a vegetable when it’s at its peak” as a result of their busy schedules.

Despite that, she feels “the best food you can eat is what comes out of the garden. I really like the quality of what I get from it.”