Eating fresh vegetables and fruit from your garden – one of the delights of summer in Canada.
James Glaves’ recent post When Times are Hard, Eat Your Yard , and a podcast I’m working on with David Tracey, about urban agriculture, have certainly fueled my on-going quest to convert more of my yard into edible space.
But I do understand that for some people, starting a garden, even a small one, can be intimidating.
I remember how tentative I was when I planted my first garden, so here are some thoughts to help you enjoy your new gardening adventure.
Lighten Up
I come from a long line of peasants, none of whom set the world of fire with their intellect. But man could they grow stuff.
For them, it was about survival, plain and simple. A garden was for growing food. What I learned from my peasant heritage is this: gardening isn’t hard, and it isn’t serious.
Forget all those codgers who spend hours talking about the finer points of gardening, and who’s plots look like something out of a magazine.
If that’s your bent, great, but that’s not what a garden has to look like. Experiment, and plant stuff that’s fun, and don’t worry if your rows aren’t straight.
There really isn’t any wrong way of growing food, so have a good time. I can assure you, whatever you bring in for dinner is going to look like a million bucks on your plate.
Organic. Organic. Organic.
There’s nothing hard about growing food organically. There’s no mystery about it, and there’s no magic about it. Sure you’ll have some challenges with bugs and weeds, but the internet is full of great ideas on how to solve those problems.
Whatever you grow will taste amazing.
Plus, organic gardening is super sexy. It’ll get you laid. Really.
Use Your Feet and Your Hands
My grandmothers always gardened barefoot. For one, washing your feet is way easier than cleaning those fancy sneakers. And if you’re about to crush a small plant underfoot, you’ll feel it before you do any damage.
Walking barefoot in dirt is just plain fun, and even though is sound totally flaky, it connects you to the earth. You’ll be able to feel how dry or damp it is, how squishy the soil feels, and you might even pull up the odd weed by crimping your toes around those rascals.
(Now, when I mentioned this to EB, she immediately put her Elmer the Safety Elephant hat on a said this could be dangerous. “Why?” I asked. “Well, there might be sharp things in there”. Ok, fair enough. We once had a lot of broken glass in one of our garden plots, so use your best judgment on this one)
Hand Job
Get a watering can and hand water your garden.
Hand watering accomplishes so many things that once you start, you’ll sell your sprinkler on Craiglist.
For one, there’s very little wasted water when you do it by hand. You’re in complete control of where it goes and how much goes there.
You’ll feel like a proper gardener, literally providing nourishment to your plants.
But mostly, hand watering ensures that you spend some quality time with the food you’re growing.
By walking up and down your rows with watering can in hand, what you’re really doing is observing. Observing what ? Well, everything that’s going on in your garden. What’s getting eaten by bugs, what’s taking off and what’s ready to be picked. And you’ll learn from all that observation, trust me. Plus, you’ll see those weeds before they become a problem.
And to be honest, hand watering doesn’t even take that long.
I’m a bit of a type A personality, so I speed water: I have 2 cans, and while I’m sprinkling with one, the other one is filling up.
(It was a real extravagance that I couldn’t afford today but my Haws long reach watering can is like an old friend. I’ve had it for over 20 years and it still looks like new.)
A Few Words about Weeds
A garden should be a place of relaxation as well as a supply of food. “But what about all that weeding?” says you.
Once your garden takes off, weeding is a thing of the past. You’ll have so much lovely stuff growing, the weeds won’t have anywhere to grow.
Until you get there, sure, you’ll need to do some weeding, but it’s not as big a deal as those old codgers make it out to be. Pull them by hand a few at a time (see Hand Job above), particularly after a rain when they’ll come up easily.
It’s incredibly therapeutic, the results are tangible and obvious, unlike almost everything else in our lives. I once survived a particularly difficult co-worker by calling out their name every time I pulled a weed.
What to do with those weeds ? After hand-picking weeds from their gardens, my grandmothers would toss the uprooted weeds on the path. I drop mine in clumps on the driveway or sidewalk, and let them dry up. Then I shake off the dirt, push it back into the garden, and throw the weeds into the compost.
Who You Calling a Hoe ?
My grandmothers had 2 garden implements. A small hoe and garden fork.
They used that hoe to plant, weed, hill potatoes, scare away crows, kill bugs & rodents and do just about whatever else is needed in the garden. The plainest, simplest un-sexiest hoe you can imagine really is the gardeners’ miracle tool. A small blade is better.
The fork was used to dig up potatoes, and in their large gardens, even wholesale uprooting of carrots and beets, but you’ll be pulling those by hand. The fork was also used to deep till the garden in the spring.
Read the Directions, Make a Mark, and Rotate
Pretty much all you need to know about tending your garden you can find on the seed packet. If it says 45 days to maturity, that’s what’s going to happen. If it says to sow 50 cm apart, that’s the thing to do. If it says full sun, you can bet whatever you’re planting won’t do well in the shade.
When you first plant your garden, make sure you put some markers to show where the rows are. One of EB’s friends recently Facebooked her to say she’d gone a little crazy weeding her new garden and had pulled up much of what she planted. It helps if there’s a little stick that marks your row, at least until the plant start to show themselves better.
I make a map on a piece of paper, writing down what I planted, the variety and when. I usually grow a few varieties of things like carrots and parsley, and I totally forget what they are immediately after planting. So now, when people come over and ask me important garden questions, like “What type of carrot is this ?”, instead of answering “good”, I can look it up on my map and answer them, proper like.
The map also helps your ‘next year’ garden. You want to rotate your plantings from year to year, so the map will ensure you don’t put that row of carrots where they were last year.
Famous From Door To Door
The best thing about having a garden is that you get to eat vegetables minutes after harvesting. One of my sons actually eats spinach right off the plant, it’s like butter and delicious, and tastes nothing like spinach we buy in the store.
But, unless you’ve got some incredible project management skills, chances are you’ll have too much of X or too much of Y at some point. If you’re so inclined freeze what you can, but what you’ll probably end up doing is learning to spread the wealth.
I pick when it’s ready, wash it, and what we aren’t going to be able to eat in the next few days, I walk around to our neighbours. Not only will they have a nice unexpected treat for dinner, they’ll think you’re a star “Do you know, his spinach is so good his kid eats it right out of the garden”.
Here are some pics from my garden taken today. Truth be told, my garden looks like crap, but it tastes good. And that’s the point. Click any picture to see bigger versions.
