How Does Your Garden Grow?

I'm posting a lot today. It's feast or famine with the posting, I guess. Monday is my day off, and I have either bad allergies or a cold plus residual travel exhaustion, so I am sitting around all day.

I was going back through my email earlier today and came across this video sent by my cousin-in-law Suzi from San Fransisco. Suzi is a teacher-gardener and this video is about the community gardens she helps to run in San Fran. If you have a few minutes, you should watch it; it's EXCELLENT. The video, and a question from Liz about our composter and rain barrel, have inspired me to finally write a post about our garden, something I've been meaning to do for a long time.

It all started with the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I bought the book in the Charlotte airport last June on the way home from Heather's graduation. It's about how a writer and her family move from the arid west to the Appalachian mountains to try to grow all of their own food for a year. Actually, they don't have to grow everything; they get some of it (sweeteners, flour, wine) locally. They define "locally" pretty strictly; I think it has to come from their own town. Each family member is allowed one sort of "free pass item" that they are allowed to buy from far away. (I think they choose coffee, spices, chocolate and dried fruit.) The book records the year as far as planting the garden, watching it grow, harvesting crops (and animals), and planning for the next year.

It's a fabulous book. It asks extremely important questions about our food. How many of us can say we know where our food comes from and how it was grown? Who planted and harvested it? How far did it travel to get to us? Who fed and raised our meat, and what were those animals fed? Kingsolver points out food facts that we may have forgotten or never known, such as when certain fruits and veggies are in season. For example, if you live in the Northern hemisphere and are eating asparagus in September or cherries in January, those items had to have come from very far away (or California, I guess). She talks about the problems all that traveling causes for food, not only environmentally in terms of the fuel for shipping it, but also in nutrient content and, most simply, taste.

The book made both Dean and I nearly desperate to start our own garden then and there. Both of us grew up around gardens. There's a reason so many of my poems contain garden imagery--helping someone in a garden was a regular part of my childhood. My great-grandmother, grandparents, aunts, uncles and parents all grew gardens. We picked beans, snapped them, and canned them. We washed silk off corn and cooked and froze it. My grandmother cut up a plate of cucumbers and tomatoes to go with almost every meal. People cooked corn, beans, squash, okra, and who knows what else in every imaginable way. No one visited anyone else or let any visitor leave without a bag of whatever produce was in season at the time. At the time, I took all this for granted, or disliked it. When I was young, I never was one to enjoy getting dirty and sweaty and itchy in a garden. But after I read Kingsolver's book, I was in despair about not having a garden. It seemed not only like I had lost a piece of who I was but that I was in real danger of forgetting or never knowing one of the most elemental pieces of knowledge possible: how to grow food to eat.

So we really wanted a garden, but we couldn't have one right then, because it was June and too late to start a garden. Also we had (have) a very, very small backyard. At the time it contained two large trees. We grumbled and worried and tried to be happy with the couple of cherry tomato plants we had grown on our porch.

From this point the story is really mostly Dean's. Fall came, and I put my garden wishes on the back burner while I taught and wrote and read poetry. But Dean kept thinking and reading, and talking to Luli a lot about gardening and what we might be able to do with our small space. With the permission of our landlord, he cut down the two trees in the yard (with a handsaw). By early winter, he'd read Grow Vegetables: Balconies, Roofs, Terraces and Square Foot Gardening. He'd used some Christmas gift money to buy a set of grow lights, seeds, and various books and garden tools. He'd read the farmer's almanac. He had a spreadsheet, a whole calendar filled in with garden tasks, and a plan.

Thus began my role as garden helper. (By the way, by this time I was busy with the primary role of baby grower.) Every weekend, even in the dead of winter, Dean had some garden tasks for us to complete. We planted seeds and put them under lights. We watered. Later we transplanted. We cleaned up in the yard. One weekend Jim and Luli came to help us build trellises and boxes for the square-foot boxes. (Well, okay, they helped Dean while I mostly laid on the couch.) In the early spring we planted, transplanted, and watered some more. Every morning at 5AM the lights in the next room would click on, and at 9PM they'd click off. (Yikes, and that memory reminds me of nausea.) And our garden grew and grew, even inside.

When it got warmer, we put plants outside for a few hours at a time so they could adjust to life away from their lights. We dealt with sunburned broccoli and wind-blown tomatoes. One by one it was time to put the plants outside (a part that always made me sad in a way that I think might be particular to mothers or parents). After some of the plants were finally in the ground, Dean devotedly ran outside in a hail storm to put sheets over the babies. (The storm stopped 3 minutes later.)

Since then, we've planted, weeded, clipped, staked and re-staked. We've coaxed baby peas up their trellises and been astounded by tomatillos that are taller than us. We've had a bumper crop of kale and mustard greens, but, sadly, no broccoli--it grew up strong but never flowered. Right now we are dealing with what we think is "early blight" and blossom-end rot on our tomato plants. Both are caused my excess moisture, and we have had a lot of rain. We have baby cucumbers and baby squash. The beans are flowering. Zinnias, marigolds, basil and dill are doing very well, and we have sunflowers coming soon. Yesterday we picked 5 beets (and today I am wondering what exactly to do with beets). The radishes that did quite well have gone to seed (we let them grow because their flowers are pretty).

I'm really amazed that we done so much with a garden in just a year. Like I said, most of the credit is Dean's, but we've both learned a lot. Obviously, we still but most of our food from other places. We try to buy what's in season from farmer's markets when we can (although my weird food issues have made that harder lately). It's been really nice to reclaim some of my heritage in the form of this tiny, wonderful city garden.