Written and photographed by Kevin West
The ideal garden—whether it’s your first or your twentieth—spreads light effort over narrow ground, leaving you the energy and spirit to enjoy being among your plants. The fragrance of tomato leaves, the bouquet beauty of Swiss chard, the reach of a pea tendril as it stretches toward the trellis with a toddler’s confidence. Those are the pleasures of a garden. Allow yourself the serenity to enjoy them. Grant yourself permission to plant less than you could.
The impulse to create a first garden might be satisfied by a few terra-cotta pots or a single four-by-eight-foot raised bed. At most, stake out a modest piece of yard. A ten-foot-square garden won’t let you grow everything, but it will let you grow a lot, certainly enough to improve many meals.
Elizabeth Keen of Indian Line Farm crystallized a new and useful perspective for me. Do not plant a garden based on space, she advised. The limiting factor in every gardener’s life is time, so create a garden that respects your most precious commodity. “How many hours do you have to dedicate to your garden?” she said as we sat on upturned buckets beneath a shade tree. “Putting a few plants in the ground is the easy part.”
For a sense of scale: A container garden of four or five pots will take an hour or two to put together and maybe ten minutes a day to keep going. A raised bed of 4 feet by 8 feet or a 10 × 10-foot garden plot can be installed in a day and tended in 20 to 40 minutes daily. A larger in-ground garden of 400 square feet will produce a substantial and varied harvest for a family throughout the growing season, with surplus for the freezer or root cellar, but it will soak up entire weekends and require an hour or more of daily tending and watering. Beyond 1,000 square feet lies the demands of self-sufficiency, a topic for another book.
I grow vegetables on land owned by my neighbors Del and Christine Martin. The plot had been their garden. After I moved to town in 2016, Del invited me to help harvest potatoes in return for all I could eat. Over several seasons, as we became friends, I weaseled my way into his garden and progressively took it over. Now, in return for a share of the crops, the garden is “mine.” Del teases me that I’m a gardener who doesn’t have a garden.
We are an odd duo out there. Del loves hijinks, machinery, efficiencies of scale, and high-speed work. I am earnest and enjoy hand tools, fussy small projects, and interrupting my work to admire the day. I’ve shifted our/my garden away from diesel-driven horsepower to beer-fueled manpower and have diversified the crops we grow. For his part, Del handles vital infrastructure. He put up an 8-foot deer fence to protect our main growing plot, 60 feet by 78 feet, and devised an elaborate irrigation system. Across the driveway from the main plot, an unfenced parcel provides space for the few crops deer like less than we do—the witchy nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers), stinking alliums (onions, garlic, shallots), and prickly cucurbits (summer and winter squash). You’ll find recipes incorporating those ingredients here—and many more in The Cook’s Garden, which comes out in August.
Smoky Eggplant Dip
Makes 2 ½ cups
Smoke is an adaptable ingredient. It can boldly frame the fatty grandeur of whole-hog BBQ or subtly waft through other flavors and disappear. I once had a dish of raw fish at Jua, a wood-fired Korean restaurant in New York, so delicately smoked that it seemed the chef had merely thought of fire. Wherever there is smoke, the elemental cooking technique always flickers in the background, a culinary echo of the fatted calf and the hecatombs of the Greeks, who sent up meaty incense to their hungry gods.
In the vegetable kingdom, eggplant is exalted through fire. Cook one whole until the thing looks ruined, burnt beyond eating, and the pulp will absorb fire’s essence. Olive oil and tahini, the soul of baba ghanoush, establish a direction. The hidden charm is a grated clove of new garlic—especially the Rocambole varieties, such as exquisite Spanish Roja, or the purple-stripe types, including Persian Star and Chesnok Red.
Serve eggplant dip with grilled bread or an array of sliced raw vegetables, as in the photograph opposite, along with marinated sumac onions and whole-leaf herbs. Fold the same ingredients into a hot pita with sliced pickled beets and salty feta for a superb garden sandwich.
2 cups roasted eggplant pulp (see below), from 2 (1-pound) eggplants
1 clove garlic, grated on a Microplane
1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley
¼ teaspoon Aleppo pepper flakes
2 tablespoons tahini
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling
Grilled bread rubbed with garlic or sliced raw vegetables, for serving
- Mash the eggplant pulp with a fork. Add the garlic, parsley, Aleppo, tahini, salt, and lemon juice and beat vigorously, as if beating eggs, until smooth. (Alternatively, pulse the ingredients in a blender.) Whisk in the olive oil in a stream until the mixture is fluffy. Taste and adjust the seasonings.
- Transfer to a serving dish. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with Aleppo. Serve with grilled bread or raw vegetables. Leftovers will keep in the refrigerator for 3 days.
To Roast Eggplant: Prick an unblemished whole Italian eggplant with a fork in several places. Place directly over a gas burner, on a hot grill, or under a broiler. Turn occasionally until charred all over and collapsing, 20 to 40 minutes total cooking time, depending on size. Transfer to a covered bowl or wrap with aluminum foil. (Alternatively, wrap whole eggplants in aluminum foil and bake on the top rack of a 400°F oven until very soft, 30 to 45 minutes.) When the cooked eggplant is cool enough to handle, rub off the charred skin. Scrape stuck bits with the dull edge of a knife, or wipe with paper towels, but don’t rinse. Drain pulp in a colander for 30 minutes. It doesn’t look very promising at this stage, but the pulp is ready to use.
Curried Peaches, Tomatoes, and Cucumbers
Serves 6 to 8
Some summer dishes are not so much cooked as cut up. This salad, for one. It’s made from heirloom tomatoes, which ripen with Del’s peaches, during the same peak season when green Genovese basil and dream-dark opal basil signal to each other from across the garden and trellised cucumbers drape like baroque festoons. Combine everything on a serving platter, and the result is a flashy first course for nearly any summer meal. I’d put it on the table alongside thin-crust onion pizza and juicy grilled skewers. Or I’d not cook at all and instead crowd the buffet with sliced prosciutto, a country terrine, olives, bread, whole-stem parsley, salad, a few naked lettuce greens, shaved summer squash, and bottles of rosé.
1 ½ teaspoons curry powder
½ teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more to taste
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 pounds medium cucumbers, cut into 1/4-inch rounds
1 pound yellow peaches, peeled and cut into chunky wedges
½ cup lightly packed fresh basil leaves, mixed green and purple
1 pound Brandywine or other heirloom tomatoes, in large chunks
- In a small bowl, whisk together the curry powder, salt, and lemon juice. Stream in the olive oil, whisking constantly.
- In a large bowl, combine the cucumbers, peaches, and basil. Pour in the dressing and toss to coat. Transfer to a serving platter.
- Place the tomatoes in the same bowl and swirl them around until they are coated with the residual juices. Lightly season with more salt to taste. Tuck the tomatoes around the edge of the serving platter.
Zucchini Casserole
My father, who is a lazy cook, achieves superb results with this easy mixed-squash casserole when he has an abundance of summer vegetables. It is full of flavor and an eyeful at the table.
Slice 2 pounds of zucchini or mixed summer squash into ¼-inch-thick rounds or lengthwise into planks. Combine in a large bowl with ¾ pound sliced Roma tomatoes, ½ pound cubed fresh mozzarella cheese, and ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil. Add several chopped cloves of garlic, several tablespoons of chopped parsley and chopped chives, a dozen large basil leaves, ½ teaspoon dried savory or thyme, and 1 teaspoon fine sea salt. Toss everything to combine. Spread the mixture into a lightly oiled 13-inch casserole or other baking dish. Cover with foil and bake in a 350°F oven for 30 minutes. Uncover and use a spatula to press the top layers into the juices. Continue baking uncovered until the juices are reduced and the squash very tender, about 30 minutes longer. If you like, throw a handful of grated hard cheese over the top to brown when you remove the foil.
Adapted from The Cook’s Garden © 2025 by Kevin West. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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