Green Scene

Cultivating the Oktoberfest Garden

Plant for the next Oktoberfest or use your excess for homemade wine

When Oktoberfest  ends in a few weeks, what better thing to do than turn your attention to the autumn harvest, but don’t just make it any harvest—make it one to impress, sowing for next year’s celebration of revelry and brew. All it involves are a few select herbs, vegetables and fruit to make the home-grown cocktail happen.

For herbs, consider planting thyme and mint, the go-to garnishes in mojitos, juleps, gin and tonics and other mixed drinks. Mint adds refreshing pungency to drinks, and its medicinal properties can keep an upset stomach at bay. Both can be planted indoors, and once seeds germinate (10 to 15 days for mint and 21 to 30 days for thyme), you can transplant the herbs outdoors, giving each plant one square foot of soil for optimal growth.

The two most commonly used vegetables in cocktails are cucumbers and celery. Late spring or summer is the optimal time to plant cucumbers, and celery requires a steady supply or rich soil mixed with organic compost and direct sun in order to thrive, spaced six to eight inches apart. Expect initial harvests in late spring.

Lemons and limes are standard ingredients in many drinks and a must for home-grown wines. Your best bet for cultivating fruit is by buying a tree from the nursery. When temperatures dip below 30 degrees, cover the plant with a blanket or bring it inside until the weather warms.

If you have excess fruit hanging around the garden post-harvest and preserving, you can bottle it and create your own green brew. Home-grown country wines cut down on the energy required to bottle and transport each bottle, plus you control what ingredients goes go into this steady supply of cheap, chemical-free, organic wines. Andy Hamilton of the Ecologist offers two great recipes for marrow and pear wines on the magazine’s website. Creating your own wine requires just water, yeast, yeast nutrients, citric acids, grape juice concentrate, and tannin powder, a couple of fermentation buckets, and a siphon to transfer the wine to other vessels. The wines need four to six months to develop, but once the whole process completes, you have a product that’s good for up to a year.

What are you waiting for? Get your garden game on.