S12:E13. 3.29.2025

John Coykendall on Starting a Spring Garden and Planning for Tomato Sandwiches

Today, we are setting the table with the spring garden and planning for tomato sandwiches. My guest is Master Gardener, seed, and story saver John Coykendall. We discuss when to put our plants out, a word about the last frost in East TN, ways of planting, and the best seeds to select for our future Tomato sandwiches. In the second half of the show, John discusses rotating crops and adding nutrition to our garden soil – practicing good stewardship. He also discusses how to grow our crops to avoid cross-pollination and what happens when the varieties cross. I also ask him about how to save tomato and cucumber seeds when the season is over.

John is also an artist and has a pile of journals in which he has written stories in the dialect of people he writes about, along with pencil drawings on the pages of those journals that reflect the stories he writes. There may be a drawing of a method of root vegetable storage under a pile of straw and dirt to stay fresh through the winter from back in the early part of the 20th C. He might have a drawing of a structure that used to stand on his farm in Bybee, TN. Landscapes of places he has visited, drawings of root vegetables and seeds…all sorts of interesting drawings and recordings of people’s lives, wisdom, and dialect. I have added some pictures of John and his drawings from his journals seen in this post.

John and Christina Melton got together and had a book about John's work that is available for purchase: https://lsupress.org/9780807170366/preserving-our-roots/

A source for seeds that are referenced in this podcast is: https://seedsavers.org/

A book recommendation John mentions in the podcast Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/seed-to-seed/?srsltid=AfmBOoobFaiigL4eOodiTgA0WZbyie5zOx1cBFPyoeLZVWptCgNcwSZC