How Does Your Garden Grow?

HERRRRR MEHR GERRRDDDD

 

Hi there!

READERS, HELLO!!  Hello, Readers, if you even still exist!  If you have not given up on me in the MONTHS is has taken to sit down and try and type out a single thing!  A love letter to you, from me, if you have not turned your back on me and my negligence!  Hello, a heartfelt if slightly manic HELLO from me to you!

It's fine!!
*gigglesnort*

Sooo many things.  I planned a wedding (fun!), got married (Fun!), we went on a honeymoon (FUN!!), and then went back to Family Camp (FfUuNNnNN!!!!), and are finally, FINALLY home!  Like, literally two hours ago.  The past month (ok, six months…) have been a little surreal and potentially disconcerting and some might say too much but it’s FINE, it’s all FINE, because now we are DONE and HOME and MORE WORDS IN ALL CAPS because this is in fact all REALLY, REALLY TOO MUCH. 

(Exhibit A: on the family vacation, my dad (we’ll call him “Dad”) asked me if I was coming to see them for Thanksgiving.  This is a perfectly reasonable question: every other year we do Thanksgiving with him and my step mom and my sis and all the step sisters and it’s been that way for like 15 years. 

This is our year to do that and he was just checking in and Thanksgiving is far away in November and when he asked me I almost burst into tears and was like, I CANNOT HANDLE YOUR OBSESSIVE NEED TO PLAN and that was not the most emotionally mature or fair reaction but also don’t talk to me about November right now, I am not in the best place for making plans.  It has all been a lot.)

It is all been good things, very good things, but also back to back and non-stop.  I have been on a lot of airplanes.  I haven't done laundry in like 45 days.  I just had to clean messy cat poops off the upstairs landing because we’ve been gone for yet another week and the monsters were apparently also feeling the stress.  

All I want to do is take a week off and be at home and do relaxing projects and be covered in cats.  Unfortunately, that is now WAY off the list because I’ve been gone so much from work that my next vacation day is never.   The last 35 days in particular have been a real flash-bang whirligig and I’m sure you don’t care that I’ve been so exhausted by doing so many wonderful and fancy things like a wedding and international travel and a ridiculous family vacation but HOLY JESUS I need it all to stop and I just want to make some pickles, bake some bread, and plant a garden.

And really, speaking of gardens, who brings a textbook about small scale commercial organic vegetable farming to read on a family vacation anyway?  Here’s a hint: it’s me.  Of course it is.

I have Cadillac garden-dreams on a
Datsun energy-to-water-and-weed budget.

And I read almost all of it!  I got through it til it got to things like advertising and building your own mobile farmer’s market stand and I decided we’re not there yet and I can pump the breaks.  Theoretically at least.  All of the paragraphs above sort of indicate that “break pumping” is out of character, but still.  We’re not starting a business here, it’s just…I have a lot of community garden plots to play with, and I want to see what I can do.  Which leads us to today’s topic: garden fraud, and too much produce.

So there’s a community garden two miles from my house that my little borough runs through the little city government.  A bunch of raised beds at the end of a dead-end road, some fruit trees around it, and an imposing fenced-in area that says WARNING: BEES on the side of it.  

I am VERY EXCITED about the bees,
and even harassed the beekeeper when
I finally ran into her.  Was she covered in bees
 at the time?


Maybe.

There’s even a high tunnel for winter crops, and water hoses, and little bleachers for classes or something.  I discovered this gem in the spring, and looked into how to get a plot.  There is another one around the corner, in the next little city, and it is a thriving garden that really pulls the community together, and plots cost like $35 for the year. 

Ours is not that garden.  It is newer, and almost unused—there’s like 35 4x8 foot raised beds, but when I went by it  mayyyyybe six had evidence that once, someone tried to grow something there.  Everything else was overgrown by weeds and I could find no signs that they had recently been in use—no volunteer garlic making a go of it after last year’s crop, no scrawny collards or doing-their-best carrots.  Just grass weeds and neglect.  Plots were free—well, technically the fees were “waived” for 2019, which I take as further evidence that no one is signing up for them.

Great! I thought.  I will transform this space, I thought. I will revitalize this community resource, I thought.   I will commit garden fraud, and get six plots when I’m only supposed to have two, and grow all my wedding flowers, I thought. 

 

I felt like this about it.

I was right about the garden fraud—technically, I have my two plots, and so does “Andy”, and also his son, bringing the household total to six—but wrong about successfully cultivating all my own wedding flowers.  There was a whole adventure around carefully planning my approach, selecting the flower seeds I wanted, starting them inside before the last frost date, planting them out, watering them, etc.  I did the thing, but the thing (as literally everyone predicted all along the way) did not work out.   Now—like, right now—I have three plots of lovely flowers thriving and being beautiful (in a garden two miles from where I can see them), but the wedding was in May and me and a friend instead raided an abandoned lot next to a church and we got wedding flowers out of the ditch and they were fine.  It was lovely; no one walks away from a wedding being like, “Well it was a good party, but did you see those boutonnieres?  They must be mortified.”

Wedding flower theft: a story in pictures

Et Voila! Wedding time!

Now I have all these garden plots and like….if you dig into the annals of this blog, you know it all started on Forever Farm.  I worked on a big organic farm for a year and I. Loved. It.  Farming is deeply satisfying to me, it checks all my boxes: projects, tangible results, physical exertion, making things, being able to look back on your day and your week and your season and your year and being like, look what I DID, what I MADE, and it’s hard to overstate the satisfaction for me of creating such a useful thing as FOOD.  And now I have alllll these garden plots….

I really do highly recommend this book.

So, I read a textbook.  I recommend it.  But here are a couple of things I am now painfully aware of.  The trick to good plants is good soil.  We are not smarter than the soil.  It has been working its system out since the actual dawn of life on Earth, and we only sort of understand it.  Our best bet is giving the soil what it needs, then letting it soil well, and getting out of the way.  (Yes, there are things we know help, and things that make it better—like add compost!—but mostly you do that so that it can do what it does best.  It’s like throwing ingredients into a kitchen with a millennia-old chef, and then later, there’s delicious food.)

My soil isn’t great.  In some plots it seems better than others, but in the worst plots it’s just super-compacted red clay that exhausted me digging six regular holes to plant some eggplants I got at Home Depot.  I googled “hardpan” and it seems right.  No topsoil, bad drainage.  It’s bad soil.  

I will also be planting too much squash,
which never stops producing,
even when everything else has given up in the heat
and you have decided you hate squash,
things that rhyme with squash,
and bananas because they look like squash.

I AM VERY GOOD AT THIS.

Also, what am I going to do with six plants worth of eggplant? I don’t want that much eggplant.  We grew one eggplant plant at the house last season and ate none of it.  We don’t really eat eggplant, and it doesn’t freeze.  I know, Reader.  But man, I want to GROW that much eggplant. I want to grow SO MUCH eggplant.

In another plot I have now put in like 20 seeds for black eyed peas.  Assuming they germinate and I actually build a trellis, I will have one million black eyed peas.  Also, and this is particularly fun, they all get ripe at the same time and then they're done.  So I will have one million peas (and pea pods to shuck) all at the same time.  I am very good at this.

On the better plots it was more diggable but like…I did no testing to know how good or bad the actual dirt is.  For the record you can get free soil testing done by digging up a
bit of dirt and sending it to your local extension agent.  I did not do this.  I assumed it was probably mostly fine, or at least fixable, and that is a sentiment I still have even knowing some of my soil is garbage and having recently read a textbook on how fixing specific, different soil problems is helped tremendously by specific, different approaches.  It’s going to be fine. 

Look…I’m going to do things to make it better (like plant deep rooting cover crops that break up the hard pan and fix nitrogen!  See, I was paying attention to the book!).  Any better is better than no better.  And I don’t know if you, my sweet still-hanging-on Reader, has been paying attention, but good enough is good enough for me.  As my friend “Jen” said recently: anything worth doing is worth doing half assed.  

Good enough is good enough for me!

Sounds like not what your high school counselor told you, right?  But here’s the thing: if it matters at all, then any small step you take towards it matters.  It is okay if you don’t have it in you to do it all.  You can do some, even crappy-some, and it is better than none, because it matters.  

(My dentist once got me to admit I didn’t floss, and she was like: look, it’s best to floss three times a day.  But if you do it once a week, that’s still 52 more times a year than you are doing.  And if you had done that, you wouldn’t be looking at a root canal.  So like…maybe, once a week or so, give it a try.  It’s not best but it’s still better.  She changed my flossing life.)  

It is fair to say I am comfortable with—even inspired by—this worldview. 

So I sat down with my organic gardening textbook, and started to make plans around all the veggies I want to grow on my crappy soil in a garden plot I barely have rights to, and now I am so excited to go set up cover crops and green manure and a crop rotation and there is a horse farm nearby, can I get some of that nitrogen-rich horse manure? I bet I can.  

This is kind of a multi-year plan, and I struggled to even go water the flowers for my wedding, and I know this.  So we'll see if it works out.  If not, the worst I did was try, and improved some soil a little bit for the next people who care more than me.  I got six plots to fill, a plan, and an activity that requires me to be close to home.  I think it’s a win.

Ima get that horse poop.