Gardening 101

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).

Eventually the garden will be mulched and laid out so that all I have to do is dig a few holes each season to plant seeds or transplants. I won’t have to start from scratch every year. I’ve done this before. Still, I’m a little overwhelmed by the combination of the potential I have for garden space and the lack of time I have to turn it into a real garden. It is nothing short of a long-term project, and I have to remember to treat it that way. In the mean time, I do actually have some food growing. We’re already eating greens, lettuce, carrots, turnips, potatoes, onions and garlic from the garden. Soon we will have beans, lots of beans, and eventually tomatoes, squash, melons, corn, eggplant, okra and peppers. We also have apple, fig and pear trees and blackberry and raspberry bushes in the very early stages. We won’t get all of our vegetables and fruit from the garden this year or probably next year, but it’s a goal. Like last year, I should be able to can some tomatoes and pickles and freeze other veggies for the winter months, and I will have a fall garden this year to continue picking from. I need to learn to celebrate what I have, rather than pine over what I haven’t been able to do.

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