Gardening on the scale I’ve set for myself at this new place
is a completely different experience from what I’m used to. It feels like I’m
learning all over again from the beginning.
I’ve been tending a garden of some kind for most of my life. The summer before my sophomore year in college, I put a couple of tomato plants on a sunny corner
of my parents' house and enjoyed watching them grow. The first house Joan and I lived
in together had a large wooded area behind a decent-sized back yard. I put a
small vegetable garden at the back of the yard and planted flowers everywhere I
could around the house. No matter how many times I’ve done it, watching a seed
I’ve put in the ground sprout and turn into a tiny plant that grows up to
produce food amazes me. I get excited every time I see the tiny shoots that
prove that the seed-planting thing actually works. Every spring I have to call
Joan out to the garden and point to tiny leaves and say “that’s going to be a
[fill in vegetable variety here]”.
Each year, I think, I increased the size of that vegetable
garden, adding more and more variety. I wasn’t feeding us a lot, and I wasn’t
saving us any money, but I loved watching the seeds and small seedlings grow
into food-producing plants or colorful flowers. We even tried a small patch of
strawberries (we let the weeds steal that from us) and a few blackberry bushes
(they got out of control to the point that we couldn’t reach the berries inside
the thorny branches and the birds got most of the fruit). I found a pile of
bricks next to an old shed and built a patio by just digging the grass off the
ground and placing bricks around in patterns and then planted flowers and
vegetables around the patio. Sure I had to pull weeds from between the bricks
every year, but I kinda liked it that way. All of this in a rented house.
When we bought a house and moved to East Point, my next door
neighbor and best friend offered her back yard for my garden since mine was too
shady. There was already an area surrounded by 4x4 lumber but covered with the
same “grass” in our yards. We started that garden by painstakingly digging up
every inch of weeds and grass, shaking the soil out of the roots to keep as
much topsoil as possible. It’s an area about 10 feet by 4 feet where I was able
to grow tomatoes, beans, squash and cucumbers and occasionally something else.
I’ve always been excited by the variety of plants I could grow, not producing a
great quantity of anything. Over the years in that house I got more ambitious
and started digging up more area, branching out to my front yard and her front
yard. When the house across the street stood vacant for a while, I even
considered using that yard. Little by little each year I planted more
vegetables and flowers and even a fruit tree.
Now here we are, on three acres of land with an area about
of about a quarter to a third of an acre that gets enough sun to garden. Before
we even moved in I dug up a patch and planted the first garlic and onions I’d
ever tried. My goal here was, and is, to produce as much of our food as
possible. Three small goats provide us with milk and a flock of chickens, ducks
and guineas give us eggs (if sometimes begrudgingly). But I’m starting a new garden from scratch, and it’s
the largest garden I’ve ever worked with (and yes, I still have a full-time
job).
We bought a tiller and ambitiously tilled two large areas
that we fenced off to keep the animals out. Rather than work to build the soil
first, I had to start planting. We have lots of fertilizer from the poultry,
the goats and a wormery, and I am Instant Gratification Girl (my super power?).
A garden isn’t a garden if I can’t be watching something grow, so I have to
plant it now. Of course, I don’t have time to plant the whole area and put down
the mulch and compost it needs to keep it fertile and keep the weeds down. It’s
mid-June and less than half of the area available to plant has anything besides
weeds growing in it. The rest looks pretty much like it did before we tilled,
covered in dandelions, tall grasses and other native weeds. If anything, the
weeds are doing better than before we tilled.
I have a basket full of seeds that haven’t been planted, and
plans drawn up for what I’d like both garden areas to look like. What I don’t
have is the time to haul mulch, dig holes, build trellises and tomato cages,
and plant seeds. I have tiny tomato plants started on the screened porch that
aren’t big enough to plant yet, so I bought plants to put in the ground. I have
sweet potato slips and cucumber seedlings flourishing next to the tiny tomato
seedlings that I also don’t have time to plant. I keep reminding myself that we have
a long growing season, and there is still time. I also remind myself that I
don’t have to do it all this year. Most of the seeds I haven’t planted will be
viable next summer. The space that isn’t planted yet can be used for a fall
garden, for which I already have the seeds. Joan is doing everything she can to
keep the fences up (goats consider fences mere suggestions) and build things
like a chicken coop, goat house, compost bin, hay manger, duck pond and more (so you can see her plate is full).
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