We’ve our first snow of the season which means I suppose that it’s about time that I wrote about the garden. Now that I’ve got a little distance on the matter, I mean.
I think I’ve made it clear that I’m not a natural gardener. I want to be a gardener. I like the idea of being a gardener. I read books about being a gardener. I read chapters one and two, which are about how wonderful it feels to raise one’s own food and then demonstrate how you can grow enough food in two square feet of space to feed a family of four once you know all the secret gardening handshakes and planting methods. I love chapters one and two. When I read chapters one and two I get preemptively drunk on excitement about how I am finally going to do this. I’m going to be a gardener!
Then I get to chapter three. Chapter three starts getting a bit detailed. Chapter three starts discussing things like soil composition, crop rotation and compost moisture and I’m hanging in there okay, I really am, until I get to the part about nitrogen levels. It’s the nitrogen levels that get me. As soon as I see it, I know I am doomed. Immediately after the nitrogen levels, the words start blurring together and I get very confused. Then I get frustrated and I usually start whining about how haaaaard it all iiiiiis. And that’s the end of that. I never make it chapter four and I never make it to the garden.
Back sometime this spring, I was whining this exact chapter three whine to my friend Amy, who happens to be a tremendous gardener. I got to the part about the nitrogen and how annoyed I was that this gardening thing was so hard and she started shaking her head. Then she flipped over a piece of paper (that may or may not have been an agenda for the meeting we were supposed to be paying attention to; I’ll never tell) and drew this:
Can you see that? The scan isn’t great. Basically, her gist is this: newspaper layer on the bottom, dirt/sand/compost mix in the middle, hay or seaweed mulch on top. Rocks and landscape fabric to keep it all contained. Then, the best part, “Stick plants in here.” And underneath: “This would be a very short book.” Indeed. (Most of the rest of that is about how to repel deer. Amy tried something called Deer Scram but now has a battery-powered electric fence, which she claims is really the only thing that works this side of a shotgun.) (I made up that last part.)
It’s the lifelong curse of an English major to forever find meaning and metaphor in the simplest of meeting doodles. So I brought that drawing home and immediately put it up on the side of the refrigerator. It became my garden inspiration. Whenever I got overwhelmed by nitrogen details, I would look at Amy’s drawing and say to myself, “Just stick the plants in the ground.” I looked at it when Michael and I cut down some trees to give our wooded lot more light. Enough light? It doesn’t matter, because all I’m going to do is stick plants in the ground. Did I lay out the garden correctly according to proper companion plant rules? Don’t care, stick plants in the ground. Am I supposed to be adding compost or mulch or something else? The plants won’t care, just stick them in the ground.
Shockingly, given this kind of tender love and concern, the garden didn’t do spectacularly. Some things did very well. The beans were plentiful. We ate patty pan squash multiple times a week for months. We hauled in nine pumpkins, the frozen innards of which are now fighting the half-a-pig for space in the chest freezer. Other things, not so much. The peas were skimpy because I stupidly planted the tomatoes in front of them. The carrots and beets were good but never sized up past tiny. The tomato plants were loaded with fruit, which stayed green for weeks. Once they finally turned, a couple rogue chickens that kept escaping made them a constant snack and then they got the blight. The broccoli never made it past a good idea.
In other words, it wasn’t a huge, embarrassing failure, but it didn’t challenge my perception of my gardening incompetence, either.
This fall, I decided to move the crocus and narcissus bulbs from their former bed. Due to some poor planning, I had planted them directly under the spot where our plow guy dumps all the snow from the driveway, and the resulting eight foot snowbank had an annoying tendency to not melt until July. So I decided to move them to another bed, one that Sam and I had excavated back in the spring, he using a spoon because I didn’t own a trowel. The kids and I dug the bulbs up from the snowbank bed, with Sam again using a spoon because I STILL haven’t bought a trowel, and relocated them to the new bed. It wasn’t an easy job. Despite having excavated a truckload of rocks during the original dig, I still struck plenty in my search for bulbs. I also struggled mightily with the narcissus bulbs, which I seemed capable of finding only by driving the shovel blade directly through their heart. Replanting them wasn’t much easier, especially since I had more bulbs than space and by the end had resorted to simply digging a trench (more rocks!), chucking bulbs in, and throwing some dirt on top. It was a scene that, just a short bit ago, would have had me swearing and fretting and complaining mightily. In fact, that pretty much was my reaction last fall when I put them in. Would they grow? Would they fail? Would I fail? Would my entire gardening future be undone by a bunch of crocus bulbs?
But this time I wasn’t worried. I was sticking the plants in the dirt and something would happen. It might not be what I intended to happen. It might not be what I wanted to happen. But something would, indeed, happen. I’m okay with that.
I may be becoming a gardener after all.
This is such a relief after I exhausted myself tonight reading blogs by people who hand-distress their beehives to look like aged leather and construct 6,000 sq ft barns out of plumbing supplies they have lying around the house. You are destined for garden greatness and Imma buy you a trowel for christmas, see if I don’t.
The people who build their houses completely out of scrap make me want to stab something. I have built a house. We did a lot of scavenging. If we had built entirely from scrap, we’d still have a toilet and a couple pieces of plywood sitting in an empty field.
Hate those people.
I need to take Amy’s advice too. Am a terrible gardener. We grew strawberries, peas and basil this year. Everything else flopped spectacularly. Ah well, that’s what next year’s for.
That’s my gardening motto: “Next year!”
I am making ooey gooey love eyes at this post.
I can totally relate. Oh, I want to be a gardener, I do! But sometimes it is hard. And things don’t come out right and I end up with too few tomatoes and too many jalepenos.
But you have inspired me to just stick something in the ground. (But first I have to buy dirt. Nothing grows in clay. Sigh)
I am getting much better at this gardening thing, mostly by leaving the plethora of books I own on the subject on the bookshelf and winging it. I do want to start a compost pile, but it intimidates me to the point that it is still a want and not a fact two years later. I did start a worm bin though and that is going well.
The compost wormhole is a serious one. Ignore all the compost people. They are crazy. Throw stuff in a pile; it will rot. Shovel around in it once in a while and it will rot faster. The rest of it is just “nitrogen in the soil” details and you can deal with it later.
I always thought we were doing a good job with our backyard garden and compost pile until I visited some gardens tended to by master gardeners. ahem. Boy did I feel silly after that. Still, we get a lot of good stuff out of that weed-infested garden of ours that feeds us for a good portion of the year. LIke you, once things get all technical and chemical-oriented, I’m lost.
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I’m lucky. I’m married to a women who could grow a cactus in a fish pond or an pine in the desert; she’s unreal. She was busy last weekend bringing in stuff from her veggie garden right before a record snowfall for October (that record snowfall was following a record year for rain fall since records were kept in the 1880’s, and there are still two months left for this year. 😦 She can’t wait to move up there and try out her green thumb. I have a feeling that I will be spending a great deal of my retirement erecting deer fences.
Anyway, checked out your friend Amy’s website, very interesting with great artwork Gonna send that link to my wife, she will really enjoy the gardening stuff but not the bee keeping (she’s deathly allergic to bee stings).
Patty Pan squash, all right!! I love Patty Pan and that has all but disappeared from around here, can’t wait to get up there to start enjoying it once again (10 more months until retirement but who’s counting). 🙂
Friend, You are gardening. You are a gardener. Say it with me: I am a gardener.
You plant, you make mistakes, you move things around and see what works — that is how you garden. Trust me, I have a master gardener living on one side of me, and an even better-than-master gardener. They are always planting, moving around and planting some more. You can read all the books in the world, but you really can’t learn about gardening until you “stick plants in the ground.”
That said, I will be copying the graphic. Vegetable gardens intimidate me. The graphic is lovely.
I think Amy has the right idea here. So many gardening books make gardening so complicated. I worry less about the nitrogen levels, and just apply aged horse manure (since I have a never ending supply of it here) to my garden. It’s full of nitrogen, but it has to age a minimum of 6 months so the nitrogen can “cool”. Let me guess, I just confused you more!
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