Garden: The Back Story

I’m sure you are familiar with the phrase, ‘more money than sense’?  That appears to be my approach towards gardening.

In California I had picked my last apartment based on the fact that it had a patio, roughly as big as my one bedroom apartment’s livingroom, that got plenty of sun.  That was the extent of my gardening experience going into this.  I managed to successfully grow tomatoes, peas, peppers, herbs, and a few other random items in the abundant california sun in little containers from starts purchased at the local nursery.  Gardening is easy, right?

I love our animals, but when we first moved I was more excited by the prospect of having dirt, real dirt, than anything else.  I couldn’t wait to dig up swathes of it and plant to my heart’s content.  Since we moved in the winter I had to appease myself with a local CSA and began counting down the days until spring and the farmer’s markets began to open.  I bought numerous books on gardening including the well regarded Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades: The Complete Guide to Organic Gardening.  I attempted to pour over these books but they got so clinical and prescriptive that I abandoned most attempts to put their advice in to action.  I felt like gardening should just be in your blood… or something. 

I spent the winter pouring over the catalog at Seed Savers Exchange picking out every heirloom, organic seed that I fancied.  Through my snow crusted view, I was unphased.  I had ordered five kinds of corn, which can’t be planted together… oh.  I had ordered four kinds of melons, which are generally left to the experts to grow around here… oh.  My order arrived with a couple hundred dollar price tag and a large reality check.

When the weather started warming up I started making designs on where I was going to put my little garden and we purchased a walk-behind tiller and bags of organic compost.  Once warm enough we tilled up a roughly 15 by 20 foot patch in the middle of the backyard.  We didn’t bother removing the sod first because green stuff is good, right?

When the winter stretched on strangely, we got 4 inches of snow in April, I got paranoid and dismissed guidances about last frost dates and such things and ended up waiting until June to plant.  Eager to get started I purchased warming mats, grow lights, and seed trays and set about trying to start my wide variety of seeds in the protection of the garage.  Most of the seedlings did miserably being poorly suited.  A few did well enough, mostly tomatoes, and in an act of desperation I moved them in to the house and on to the kitchen counter.  Our kitchen has several large skylights and is closest to the woodstove and the remaining seedlings rocketed up towards the natural light.  I’ve since learned that technology (at least in the hand of an amateur) is no match for a warm kitchen and good ol’ sunlight. 

Eventually everything was transplanted to the garden, but in my overzealousness in all things gardening I had many more seedlings than I had space in my little garden.  Out came the containers and a trip to the garden store to purchase lots more potting soil to accomodate the overflow.

Our harvest the first year was acceptable but I supplemented my lack of planning by purchasing starts in several cases and didn’t utilize the garden space very well.  The summer was mild and had a delayed start which made it challenging for many staples (like tomatoes).  Late summer I decided to purchase a small greenhouse and a small heater for seed starting in the spring and managed to successfully pull some of my tomato plants through the fall and early winter and still get a moderate harvest.

I’ve since found the Seattle Tilth’s Maritime Northwest Garden Guide which is much more suited to my unstructured gardening approach with month by month guides on what to plant, varieties for the region, and what to focus on for the month.

I’ve learned a lot about pests, weed suppression, and what to plant already and have largely avoided any large investments in the garden my second year out.  I still need to learn better pest and disease maangemengt and how to better utilize space before we start identifying an area to build an expanded garden.