Why is growing food particularly important to you?
I wrote a column for the Washington Post for 15 years called “A Cook’s Garden,” and my latest book, A Life in the Garden (Timber Press), was somewhat inspired by that experience. I think it’s important as human beings on this planet that we have the ability to grow our own food—it’s something we should teach our kids at school. No one should be at the mercy of the industrial food supply.

Is early summer too late to start a garden?
At this point in the season, some people may have started their plants from seed and already have them in the ground, while others may not have even begun. It’s perfectly okay to prepare a bed now and start sowing things from scratch that might not produce until later in the summer or fall, or to go to your local nursery and buy some starts so that you can get a summer supply. The “summer garden” isn’t just something that magically appears in the summer and disappears when fall begins—it’s part of a continuum.

What’s unique about gardening in Maine?
The bad news is that we have a short season, especially where I am on the coast. We often don’t get our gardens going until later, because it can still be very cold in the spring, but the water and land heat up in the summer, and we hang onto that offshore warmth into the fall. On the plus side, it doesn’t get extremely hot, so Mainers can grow some very popular vegetables that people farther south can’t, like spinach and lettuce.

Do you have any tips for healthy soil?
Soil is everything. Not spraying it with any kind of pesticide, chemical, or poison is my number one piece of advice. Number two, and it’s just as important, is to have great soil, and the best way to do that is to put organic matter into it. Organic matter is full of nutrients, and it also gives the soil a better texture. At the farm, we use a com-post pile and shovel some of that into the garden to give it a fluffy, chocolate cake–like look and feel.

Barbara’s Picks for Beginner Gardeners

• “The easiest fruit would obviously be the blueberry, which is one of the only native foods Maine produces. We’ve had great success with the Berkeley blueberry variety.”
• “If you’re going to have just one tree in your yard, plant an apple tree. The ones that have worked best for us are the Spies, like Northern Spy, or Russets, such as a Golden Russet. They have a roughness that keeps them from getting chewed up by bugs.”
• “Root crops like carrots, potatoes, and beets do quite well in Maine. Beets are wonderful because you get the bottoms and the tops—you can serve them together or separately, but the whole plant is useful. You’ll keep your deep crop as far into the season as possible, but in the meantime, you can rob it of its greens.”
• “There’s nothing wrong with growing a row of heads of lettuce, but once you take that head, it’s gone. Come again lettuce, as it’s colloquially known, is great because you can harvest the outer leaves multiple times without losing the whole plant.”
• “The two herbs that are most important to me are basil and sage. I love lemon basil, which has small leaves and a slightly lemony taste. And sage, which grows in little bushes, is indestructible.”
• “Happy Rich is a real treasure. It’s a cross between an Asian crop called gai lan and regular old broccoli. It grows in little sprouts that you can keep clipping, and it’s incredibly versatile.”