Humble Tips for Fellow Garden Beginners
After having unusually cold and snowy weather for a while, we broke out into an unusually warm and sunny weekend! I understand that a recent Tom Friedman column in the New York Times spoke of "Global Weirding" and I think he's right!
Winter really does feel like a creeping, quiet hibernation time when one is both a) a southerner who looks at the first snowfall each year and thinks to himself, "Huh...I wonder just what is this stuff??" and b) a day-dreaming newbie gardener almost ready to rip up the whole lawn and homestead his heart out. So today I got out and made the most of this break before the temperatures drop down a bit again in the coming days. It was long and hard work, but by the late afternoon I could sit my tired self down and celebrate a new garden bed running down the gentle south slope from our largest oak tree. Part of this evening was spent in devotions with a nursery catalogue, selecting candidates for the latest mini-ecosystem at our house.
This is now my fifth straight season of gardening and the third in the current residence. I have no doubt that I am still quite the beginner in this experience. But this has been enough time of reading and practice for me to learn a few things along the way that may be worth sharing, especially for friends who have also started to take up gardening as practice or at least as hypothesis. Maybe you know all this already or maybe this will be helpful. Either way, I'm going to keep typing.
1. You will not achieve your miracle garden overflowing with luscious vegetables, all-season long, in the first season. In fact, I haven't achieved anything close to that yet. Developing a good garden takes time, especially if you make the effort to pursue ecological harmony instead of the "easy" way out of Miracle Gro, fertilizer and pesticide. Gardening is perhaps ultimately about reaching a genuine sense of place so that your little hamlet of the natural world becomes "home" in a very true sense. You get to the good garden because you know your soil, your climate, your critters, your sun and your shade. And you don't know all of these things your first season, or your second. Moreover, just when you think you know them, something new is added to the mix. Creation is always flowing in the flux that the good Lord intended, so you can't become complacent. Observation is critical, and I should know because I'm not good at it. But once you have good knowledge of your garden place, both empirical and intuitive, then you have the baseline that helps you adjust readily to ever-changing circumstances.
Plus, good gardens create communities of plants (not zombiefied monocultures like on agribusiness farms) and it takes time to know what communities work each year (for annuals) or to establish strong communities year-over-year (for perennials). Sometimes you really just have to grow into a good garden. Again, I'm not there yet!
2. With good planning and principles in hand, a lot of the hard work comes up front but tapers off after that. This at least is true if one is trying to garden according to the permaculture ideal. In other words, it's back-breaking labor first to build those garden beds, plant those fruit trees, and so on. But once a pretty good garden has been established then it's supposed to be a matter of letting nature doing most of the work and then cooperating with that. If good soil has been formed, plants have been placed well, birds and bees and butterflies are showing up, and there's no severe drought, then you can have less of the hard labor and more of the sheer enjoyment. But this means ignoring a lot of "conventional" gardening - i.e., organizing plants in rows and tilling the soil each year. You'll find out that not only is this way of doing things ecologically irresponsible, it's also very tiring.
3. Don't get ambitious about feeding yourself and your family with your vegetable garden and expect to have other enjoyments or a job. Besides, self-sufficiency isn't a Christian virtue. Go the farmer's market or co-op grocery. Sign up for a share with a local CSA. I think a best practice is to look at your diet, look at what local farmers offer, and think about planting the missing ingredients, if possible. Don't think that your garden is the lifeline to survival if you lose your job, get slapped with heavy medical bills, or Western civilization collapses. A stable, sustainable garden will certainly help your resilience. But it won't keep you alive - especially if you don't have the space to grow the protein-rich stuff like grains or lots of potatoes. I should know - I have a lot that's nearly half an acre and, based on reading my copy of Small-Scale Grain Raising, we'd probably need to turn just about every inch of sunny lawn over to grain to have, in potential, enough survival bread for a good chunk of the year.
4. If you're serious about a resilient, sustainable vegetable garden, don't buy the super-cheap seed packets at the box stores. Suppose you wanted to save the seeds from your bell pepper you got at Lowe's and plant them next year? Good luck with that one. Almost all the seeds in the stores are hybrids and so their descendants will not return "true to type" but start deviating into unpredicable varieties from which they were bred, which will span the range of edibility (or lack thereof). If you want to save seeds, buy heirloom varieties from places like Seed Savers Exchange. You'll be promoting biodiversity and preserving all kinds of endangered tastes and colors that have been pushed aside by agribusiness uniformity. And you can do this at the same time as you save yourself money and enhance your resilience - who knew? Keep in mind, though, that you need to either plant a LOT of a variety to keep the gene pool broad and healthy, or get involved in the actual exchanging part of groups like SSE.
5. Compost, compost, compost. It's the miracle drug of gardening. Don't even think of skimping on this part. And upgrade to composting with worms! I haven't done this yet, but everything tells me I need to get on board soon so my plants can get a really super hit of the good stuff.
6. Don't make the garden just about you. As suggested above, the birds, bees and butterflies are your friends. Birds eat bugs, especially a lot of the ones you don't want around. Bees and butterflies make a lot of plant sex happen, which will be good if you're planting heirloom varieties and want to save seed. So be sure to build so-called "ornamental" beds, or beds that mix food crops and those with other purposes. Get plants that flower, bear fruit that you may care little about eating, or that are known for generating seed that birds love.
7. Go native! A lot of the plants that are even at your friendly, local garden center are exotic species that may look pretty but are not best suited for your region. They may be poisonous to certain animals or invasive species that destabilize natural habitats. Or they may just need more attention to grow well in places foreign to their evolved dispositions. Even non-native species that serve some useful purposes are out-done by the home team. For example, we bought a butterfly bush last year to do you can guess what. But the butterfly bush, while pretty and helpful in attracting butterflies to feed, has a distinct limitation. Butterflies here in the eastern US will not lay their eggs on the butterfly bush. But there are pretty, native plants that offer food and suitable circumstances for hatching and larval development. Why settle for less?
8. Don't ignore your garden in August because it's hot. This brings us full circle back to number one. Don't stop thinking about your garden in January either. It is a practice of constant observation, reflection and action. Make this a year-round commitment or just stick to growing a potted tomato plant on your porch each summer.
For what it's worthy, these are my thoughts on what fellow beginners should know as they set out. Feel free to share what you think are other important bits of advice.
Winter really does feel like a creeping, quiet hibernation time when one is both a) a southerner who looks at the first snowfall each year and thinks to himself, "Huh...I wonder just what is this stuff??" and b) a day-dreaming newbie gardener almost ready to rip up the whole lawn and homestead his heart out. So today I got out and made the most of this break before the temperatures drop down a bit again in the coming days. It was long and hard work, but by the late afternoon I could sit my tired self down and celebrate a new garden bed running down the gentle south slope from our largest oak tree. Part of this evening was spent in devotions with a nursery catalogue, selecting candidates for the latest mini-ecosystem at our house.
This is now my fifth straight season of gardening and the third in the current residence. I have no doubt that I am still quite the beginner in this experience. But this has been enough time of reading and practice for me to learn a few things along the way that may be worth sharing, especially for friends who have also started to take up gardening as practice or at least as hypothesis. Maybe you know all this already or maybe this will be helpful. Either way, I'm going to keep typing.
1. You will not achieve your miracle garden overflowing with luscious vegetables, all-season long, in the first season. In fact, I haven't achieved anything close to that yet. Developing a good garden takes time, especially if you make the effort to pursue ecological harmony instead of the "easy" way out of Miracle Gro, fertilizer and pesticide. Gardening is perhaps ultimately about reaching a genuine sense of place so that your little hamlet of the natural world becomes "home" in a very true sense. You get to the good garden because you know your soil, your climate, your critters, your sun and your shade. And you don't know all of these things your first season, or your second. Moreover, just when you think you know them, something new is added to the mix. Creation is always flowing in the flux that the good Lord intended, so you can't become complacent. Observation is critical, and I should know because I'm not good at it. But once you have good knowledge of your garden place, both empirical and intuitive, then you have the baseline that helps you adjust readily to ever-changing circumstances.
Plus, good gardens create communities of plants (not zombiefied monocultures like on agribusiness farms) and it takes time to know what communities work each year (for annuals) or to establish strong communities year-over-year (for perennials). Sometimes you really just have to grow into a good garden. Again, I'm not there yet!
2. With good planning and principles in hand, a lot of the hard work comes up front but tapers off after that. This at least is true if one is trying to garden according to the permaculture ideal. In other words, it's back-breaking labor first to build those garden beds, plant those fruit trees, and so on. But once a pretty good garden has been established then it's supposed to be a matter of letting nature doing most of the work and then cooperating with that. If good soil has been formed, plants have been placed well, birds and bees and butterflies are showing up, and there's no severe drought, then you can have less of the hard labor and more of the sheer enjoyment. But this means ignoring a lot of "conventional" gardening - i.e., organizing plants in rows and tilling the soil each year. You'll find out that not only is this way of doing things ecologically irresponsible, it's also very tiring.
3. Don't get ambitious about feeding yourself and your family with your vegetable garden and expect to have other enjoyments or a job. Besides, self-sufficiency isn't a Christian virtue. Go the farmer's market or co-op grocery. Sign up for a share with a local CSA. I think a best practice is to look at your diet, look at what local farmers offer, and think about planting the missing ingredients, if possible. Don't think that your garden is the lifeline to survival if you lose your job, get slapped with heavy medical bills, or Western civilization collapses. A stable, sustainable garden will certainly help your resilience. But it won't keep you alive - especially if you don't have the space to grow the protein-rich stuff like grains or lots of potatoes. I should know - I have a lot that's nearly half an acre and, based on reading my copy of Small-Scale Grain Raising, we'd probably need to turn just about every inch of sunny lawn over to grain to have, in potential, enough survival bread for a good chunk of the year.
4. If you're serious about a resilient, sustainable vegetable garden, don't buy the super-cheap seed packets at the box stores. Suppose you wanted to save the seeds from your bell pepper you got at Lowe's and plant them next year? Good luck with that one. Almost all the seeds in the stores are hybrids and so their descendants will not return "true to type" but start deviating into unpredicable varieties from which they were bred, which will span the range of edibility (or lack thereof). If you want to save seeds, buy heirloom varieties from places like Seed Savers Exchange. You'll be promoting biodiversity and preserving all kinds of endangered tastes and colors that have been pushed aside by agribusiness uniformity. And you can do this at the same time as you save yourself money and enhance your resilience - who knew? Keep in mind, though, that you need to either plant a LOT of a variety to keep the gene pool broad and healthy, or get involved in the actual exchanging part of groups like SSE.
5. Compost, compost, compost. It's the miracle drug of gardening. Don't even think of skimping on this part. And upgrade to composting with worms! I haven't done this yet, but everything tells me I need to get on board soon so my plants can get a really super hit of the good stuff.
6. Don't make the garden just about you. As suggested above, the birds, bees and butterflies are your friends. Birds eat bugs, especially a lot of the ones you don't want around. Bees and butterflies make a lot of plant sex happen, which will be good if you're planting heirloom varieties and want to save seed. So be sure to build so-called "ornamental" beds, or beds that mix food crops and those with other purposes. Get plants that flower, bear fruit that you may care little about eating, or that are known for generating seed that birds love.
7. Go native! A lot of the plants that are even at your friendly, local garden center are exotic species that may look pretty but are not best suited for your region. They may be poisonous to certain animals or invasive species that destabilize natural habitats. Or they may just need more attention to grow well in places foreign to their evolved dispositions. Even non-native species that serve some useful purposes are out-done by the home team. For example, we bought a butterfly bush last year to do you can guess what. But the butterfly bush, while pretty and helpful in attracting butterflies to feed, has a distinct limitation. Butterflies here in the eastern US will not lay their eggs on the butterfly bush. But there are pretty, native plants that offer food and suitable circumstances for hatching and larval development. Why settle for less?
8. Don't ignore your garden in August because it's hot. This brings us full circle back to number one. Don't stop thinking about your garden in January either. It is a practice of constant observation, reflection and action. Make this a year-round commitment or just stick to growing a potted tomato plant on your porch each summer.
For what it's worthy, these are my thoughts on what fellow beginners should know as they set out. Feel free to share what you think are other important bits of advice.
Labels: Discipleship, The Pleasures of Life
