Spring Gardening

When I was a kid, for quite a while whenever I was asked what I wanted to do I said I wanted to be a farmer. My parents told me what hard work it was but that didn't deter me. As it turns out, however, the realities of being a farmer are not at all what I wanted. I didn't really want to be a farmer, I just wanted to grow my own food. Though I wouldn't hear the term for quite a while longer, when I said I wanted to be a farmer what I meant was more along the lines of being a modern homesteader.

I don't actually consider myself a homesteader (is there a hard line on that, and if so what is it?) but I want to be more than just 'a gardener'. I've mentioned before that I'm trying to maximize efficient food production of my property, thinking over the long term. I've had gardens in the past but they were always kind of pathetic. We lived in an apartment, and then in my parents' house, so the garden space was never really mine. Sure, I could do what I wanted. But why would I want to spend so much time and effort to maintain someone else's yard?

This year, however, is different. One of the attractions of this house is that it had garden beds already put in for me. Not great, not what I ultimately want, but they're there and I can work with them. Six lovely raised beds. One even has trellises in place for peas and beans.

I planted a few crops last fall, mostly as an experiment to see what would grow over the winter and how well. Carrots, onions, lettuce, and spinach went in. Not all of it germinated, not even close. I had intended to make some low tunnels but pregnancy lethargy struck and it never happened. I'm still happy with what did grow, however. Spinach and lettuce both did pretty well, although it got incredibly bitter when the temperature dropped below freezing. I didn't mind so much as I don't crave salads in winter. That's soup season! Still, it was enough to gather a little bit occasionally, and now that it's spring the lettuce is getting sweeter and going gangbusters when most other people are just seeing the first few big leaves. It's enough that we've had some big salads where all of the greens were from the garden, plus lettuce for tacos and other meals. I've got so much I've been considering offering some up to my Buy Nothing group.

Not even all of my lettuce. I pick leaves
off the sides and it just keeps putting out more.

The carrots I started in the fall are also starting to get big. I'd been warned that carrots would grow, and they'd be nice and sweet thanks to all the cold weather over the winter, but they wouldn't get beyond baby carrot size. However, leaving them to grow means that now they're growing fairly well and should be ready to pick soon, well before spring-sown carrots have even put out their first true leaves in most cases.

The onions didn't germinate in the fall, probably because it was already too cold when I direct sowed them, but a few are popping up now. For this summer I got onion sets rather than seeds to grow from, and I expect I'll get a healthy crop of onions since they're already popping out of the ground. If all of them grow, I should have very close to 100 yellow onions and 100 red onions. Yes, we eat a lot of onions.

Since six raised beds still gives me limited growing space I transplanted the strawberries the previous owners had planted in one bed, plus a few from my mom's house, out front. They scorched last summer in the raised bed so I put them in an area that gets lots of sunlight but also some shade. Since onions can act as a pest deterrent, and they get along pretty well with strawberries, I inter-planted some of them among the strawberries. Soon I'll add a summer crop of lettuce and spinach, choosing the shadier spots so that they don't bolt quite as fast as they would in full sun. Or, that's the hope.

Carrots and lettuce!

Instead of buying plants, I generally buy and start my plants from seeds. This can be rather hit or miss, since sometimes a packet of seeds just won't grow well and there's a lot that can go wrong even if you have great seeds. This year I bought some seed starting pods in trays to make things easy on myself. It was a good decision, and most of my seeds germinated. I didn't actually expect them to do so well so, uh, I ended up with way too many seedlings. Oops? Knowing that I didn't have enough space for even half of my plants the only logical thing to do was...build more garden beds.

I had a raised bed that I'd made out of pallets with my dad last year. My brother brought it over for me and putting it back together was bittersweet, since it was the last project I'd done with my dad. It's really just a pile of free wood and screws leftover from other projects, but it means a lot to me. It's quite deep and will make an excellent tomato bed, since tomatoes have deep roots that need space, and I left three of the sides tall so the tomatoes won't even require a lot of cages.

The vegetables I'm planting vary from year to year but I try to get the ones we eat the most and deliver the best return on my investment. This year I'm (hopefully) growing tomatoes, cabbage, green and purple string beans, shelling and sugar snap peas, butternut squash, carrots, lettuce, spinach, onions, celery, broccoli, potatoes, red and orange bell peppers, and Anaheim peppers. I might buy a zucchini start as well, or I might just get zucchini from friends when they inevitably declare zucchini overload.

For fruit I have quite a few strawberries, two (so far) new blueberry bushes, the cherry tree, and a rhubarb. (Is that a fruit? Whatever, we treat it like fruit.) I'm not expecting much fruit this year, since they take a while to get going. The cherry tree put out a grand total of nine blossoms and I would be seriously surprised if any of those translated into cherries. The blueberry bushes similarly won't produce much in the beginning, and rhubarb can't be harvested for at least the first year. But they're all perennials, so I'm not concerned.

I also have a few herbs. Thyme, rosemary and mint were already planted in the raised beds. Unfortunately, the mint was planted NOT in a container so now it's trying to take over everything. (Always plant mint in a pot here.) I bought basil, hoping that this will be the year I finally manage to grow amazing basil, as well as lemon balm and chamomile. I can grow my own teas! (Tisanes, technically.) The lemon balm, as a member of the mint family, has been planted in a pot so that it, too, does not begin to take over my yard. I may also add sage into the mix, but am content with what I have for now. I want to build an herb spiral but that will most likely be a project for next year.

The best of plans

Garden planning is really challenging work beyond just time, space, and money. It requires that I think in multiple dimensions. I don't want root crops right next to each other because then they'll be vying for the same space. Something should go between, hopefully. Similarly, I don't want to plant tall tomatoes in front of lower plants and shade them out. And will the squash vines crowd out the other plants?

Spring peas

Then there's the matter of nutrients. Will everything I'm planting together be good neighbors? Or will they be stealing nutrients from each other so that none of them grow really well? And soil requirements too! Blueberries only grow in very acidic soil, so what would go well with them? And how do I ensure the soil is acid enough?

As if that wasn't enough, you're not supposed to plant any crop in the same bed all the time because diseases can fester in the soil from one year to the next. If you don't give them their favorite plants to eat they'll go away, but it takes time. So crop rotation needs to be practiced and this needs to be done anew every year. Maybe someday I'll get my garden on a regular rotation but I honestly don't know of any gardeners who don't tinker from year to year, trying to make everything better.

When to plant different crops is yet another factor that requires careful planning. I love this website for all things gardening in the maritime Northwest. Not that I always follow it. I planted my winter squash seeds right along with everything else in March and then looked at April's to-dos and saw that I should have waited until mid-month. Oops. No harm done, though, and the seedlings are transplanted out. Two withered almost immediately but the rest are thriving, putting out new leaves after only a couple of days. It helps that we've had quite a few sunny, warm days recently.

What my garden plan looks like so far is this: three beds of mixed carrots, onions, spinach, and lettuce. One of those beds has the thyme and rosemary (and mint, but that's all over the place now). I have one bed of onions, broccoli, leeks, and cabbage. One bed has beans, squash, and peas. Two beds will have celery and tomatoes (which can't be planted out yet), and in the two beds I have yet to make I will have one potatoes + cabbage (+ beans?) bed, one broccoli + leeks. I also have two large planting buckets with potatoes.

Bucket of 'taters.

In the very front, along the fence, my wonderful spouse built two new raised beds. Those will be my blueberry beds, with rhubarb and (for this year at least) peppers. Since it's facing the sidewalk and I want it to be pretty I'm going to add gladiolus, tulip, and daffodil bulbs. (Tulips and daffodils can't be planted until the fall.) And my chamomile is planted under the cherry tree.

I'm currently in the process of setting up  some of the low tunnels I wanted to make in the fall but didn't. We don't have anywhere very good to set seedlings, nowhere for them to get enough light, without it being a total pain in the butt. However, celery and tomatoes still need more warmth at night than nature will provide. Enter the low tunnel. I bought ten foot lengths of PVC pipe, some brackets, and clamps to help hold the plastic down in the wind. The plastic I'm using for now is leftover painter's plastic, which we bought when HusbandX was removing the asbestos ceiling downstairs. It's very light and thin so it's not the greatest, but it does let a lot of light in. It will also contain moisture, so I won't have to water those beds as much at night until the plastic comes off completely. (It gets opened on sunny, hot days right now so that the seedlings don't scorch.) Since it's so thin, for now I've got a few water jugs in with the plants to act as thermal mass. They absorb the daylight heat and then throw it off at night, which should help keep the temperature swings to a minimum. Seems to be working well enough so far. The first bed I did this in, the one with celery and tomatoes, also gets the most sunlight each day, to maximize the amount of warmth and light these heat-loving crops get.

One completed low tunnel, with some of my starts.
I have clamps to hold down the plastic when it's windy.

Before autumn comes I plan to have at least two other beds with low tunnels over them, to keep plants going a bit longer in the autumn and to give fall-started plants a running start.

Weeds, weeds, and more weeds

All this and I haven't done any major landscaping. Phew. I know that what I have isn't going to be a permanent setup. What we have in the back is going to eventually be re-done, not least because we have bindweed under almost all of the beds. It's awful, and I'm already sick of pulling it out of my raised beds. It grows super fast so if I miss even a day of weeding I come back to dozens of new shoots popping up. It cares nothing for the ground cloth the previous owners put under the raised beds. You know the scene in Stranger Things when Hopper goes underground and finds out how extensive that creepy plant is? That's exactly what it's like to find bindweed in your garden. I moved all of the dirt in one of the beds around to dig up as much of the bindweed as I could, pulling up the ground cloth to get the roots, and it just keeps coming back. You pull on one tiny sprout and find a four-foot root that attaches to several other sprouts, which leads to even more roots and more sprouts. Ugh. The same corner where the bindweed flourishes also has blackberries and English ivy, all invasive and annoying as hell. I'm not sure that anything can get rid of these weeds except perhaps chickens, but my spouse has nixed that idea. For now. (Probably wise.)

In the meantime, to combat this and other weed problems, in the new beds I'm making a half-assed attempt at lasagna/hugelkultur beds. I laid down cardboard, then sticks, then a bit of unfinished compost or charred logs from backyard fires with friends, then the finished compost/soil mixture I bought. (It ended up being $30 for two yards, thanks to a friend with a senior discount and a truck. That's roughly 2 tons of compost, for those who don't understand the yardage system.) The sticks (brush we cleared because it was massively overgrown) will decompose very slowly, replenishing nutrients over a long time, while the unfinished compost will break down very quickly to add lots of nutrients from the start. We'll see how it goes but I've had good luck with even my half-assed attempts in the past. The bindweed has been growing around the newest bed but not up through it (yet) so that is promising.

Baby butternut squash

One of the best ways to combat weeds is to crowd them out by planting a variety of things. In permaculture there is the idea of building more like a forest canopy, with many levels. ("Guilds".) Big trees, smaller trees, large shrubs and bushes, smaller ones, plants, ground cover, root crops. If I have a big item, what can I plant around it as ground cover to keep weeds away? Can it do anything else for the plants around it, like attract beneficial insects or draw up nutrients from the soil? My knowledge of this is still in its infancy but I'm trying to incorporate it whenever I can. I'd rather not spend all of my time in the garden constantly weeding when I can get other plants to do some of the work for me.

Since I'm not a farmer, I also don't have to obey the same rules. I don't need to plant everything in a straight line because it's not going to be harvested by machine. If it makes sense to plant a few onions around a lettuce plant, or to put one cabbage in the middle of my broccoli because that's where it fits, I can do that. I'm not constrained in the same ways so I can maximize my use of space to make it more efficient and to help keep weeds out. #winning

More than a garden, more than a yard

As I move forward with planning out my yard and my Perfect Garden I'm trying to think of it more as an ecosystem than anything else. I want to grow as much of my own food as I can, yes, but to do that requires more than just plants and soil and light and water. I also need insects to act as pollinators and defenders. It's a certain thing in the NW that slugs will come after my plants, and I want to attract things that will take care of them for me. If I want to attract pollinators that means I need to have a healthy mix of non-food-producing flowers as well, hence the bulbs I'm going to plant along with my blueberries. But plants aren't the only thing, either. I want to have a few bee houses around, and at some point we will likely have honeybees. My brother-in-law gave us his beehives, and all I need to do is get over my fear of bee stings first. Maybe take a class about beekeeping....

This lilac is one of my favorite plants that came with
the house. Visible right outside the dining room, it attracts
lots of birds and bees, plus it both smells and looks lovely.

If I'm attracting insects then I'm also attracting birds. And this is a wonderful thing! Birds will also help eat the bugs I don't want (mosquitoes) and can act as pollinators. I'm not going to be setting out bird feeders, as they can introduce invasive plants or spread weeds and help invasive birds. If I plant bird-attracting foliage, however, it will help the local species. I'm conscious of what in and around our yard is attractive to birds, particularly hummingbirds. We saw quite a few last summer and fall and I want to keep seeing them.

It's not a project for this year but I want to get a bat house or two. Bats are just sort of awesome to watch, and they eat mosquitoes. Plus, their poop can be used as yet another wonderful natural fertilizer for the garden.

When we moved down from Alaska I mourned the fact that I wouldn't get to see as much wildlife. And it's true, I don't. When I do it's certainly not as big or quite as wild. But it is there. When I went to my book club recently, in a busy neighborhood around dinnertime, as I was getting the baby out of the car I heard a noise and looked up to see a coyote racing away. It was surprising but also sort of heartening, in a way. I want to live in a place where wildlife is still intertwined with humanity. I want to know that we haven't driven it all out, and in fact I want to draw more of it in. I do draw the line (ants in the house are no good, Seattle rats can go to hell) but having a variety of animals and insects is overall a good thing.

Leaving some spaces wild, with native plants,
is a good thing. It can be beautiful too.

Do it for the children!

As annoying as it can be, I'm also trying to incorporate my children in the gardening process as much as I can. The Munchkin helped me plant seeds (especially the peas and squash) and they've both been coming outside with me as I work in the garden. The day we got the compost was a banner day for our older girl, who had a blast playing in the dirt. ("Helping.") There's only so much I want a four-year-old to do--only so much she can do--and even some of that has had me gritting my teeth. However, watching the process of plants growing is not only fascinating and a great learning experience, it also helps kids eat better. I'll take a few crushed seedlings to have a kid who enjoys vegetables, thanks.

More than trying to help, my Munchkin spends her time in the garden observing things. She had a "pet" pill bug the other day and it's a treat to find worms or caterpillars. I have a minor internal panic attack every time she picks up a spider but I'm trying not to show her that. We discuss what these bugs eat and what they do, we talk about the birds that eat the bugs. Having a kid who enjoys being out in nature means having a kid who will want to take care of it. That is priceless.

Why bother?

When I started writing this post it was just starting to come out that a bunch of romaine lettuce was infected with e. coli. This has since turned deadly. (If you haven't heard about this yet, throw out your romaine lettuce.) Sadly, this sort of thing has become normal in our food chain. Every year there are dozens of outbreaks of illness which can be traced back to a breakdown of the food system as a whole. Frequently, as it now has with this latest outbreak, these illnesses turn deadly. I'd rather not risk death for my family with every bite. And no food, it seems, is safe.

Enough salad for six adults and a preschooler.
I hardly made a dent in the garden.
Salad: 3 types of lettuce, goat cheese, and dried apricots.

Then there's the fact that homegrown food not only tastes better, it also has more nutrients. The food we grow at home is just better for us than what we can buy at a supermarket. I've wondered many times if the obesity epidemic is caused as much by nutritionally deficient food as it is by anything else. I don't believe that a whole nation of people suddenly decided to gorge themselves into ill-health and that it's a moral or self-control issue. When you have people who are simultaneously malnourished and overweight, the problem is not with them but with their food. More likely, people are eating more because their bodies are demanding more real sustenance than they're getting from the crappy food.

I don't just blame the over-processing of food, however, but the fruits and vegetables which have been bred to travel long distances, rather than for taste or nutrition. I've been purchasing more heirloom varieties of seeds and every variety I've tried so far has been one worth keeping. You can't get them at big box stores, however, because there's not as much profit to be made. And that, right there, is the essence of the problem with food in this country. It's not sustenance, it's a product. This is what we all need to live, yet companies are throwing out patents for ingredients, processes, even the DNA. Everyone's looking for how they can get you to stuff yourself even more, to eat yourself to death so they can make a buck. It's stupid, crazy, and sickening. I want no part of it when I stop to think about it.

Chamomile under my cherry tree.
Spread, baby!

When I garden I also get to control what goes on my food, and growing organically at home is often cheaper because you're just not buying and using pesticides or strange fertilizers. I use compost, which can be made for essentially no cost and bought for very little if sourced by the yard, and that's about all you need for most plants if you also use crop rotation and companion planting.* The startup costs of a garden can be somewhat steep depending on how you do it but the payoff is forever.

My long-term goal is to have most of our yearly vegetable intake, and quite a bit of our fruit intake, come from our garden. Maybe one day I'll even talk my spouse into letting me keep chickens, to further close the loop (chickens eat kitchen scraps, poop out fertilizer, and they make breakfast!) and to produce even more of our food. (Will that be the point at which I cross the line into homesteader territory?) This all seems like an arbitrary goal and in some ways it is. I'm not measuring my veggies by weight, as some people have done, to see how many pounds of produce I can grow. I'm not even writing it down. I am trying to eat at least a little something from the garden each day now that it's producing so much. (Mostly lettuce still but yesterday the Munchkin and I shared a carrot.) Depending on how my chamomile and lemon balm grow and how the low tunnels do and how much I'm able to preserve, I might even be able to extend this goal to the entire year. That would be amazing. But for now, I'm content with a carrot or a salad here and there and I'll see where the summer takes me. I've got many more years of gardening ahead, during which I know I'll get better and grow more.

Finally...

I don't think I have a 'green thumb'. I have so much enthusiasm for growing things until the point at which I don't. Or, I get scattered and lose sight of something crucial. For instance, my new lavender plant is in the kitchen reviving. I got so into making the low tunnels and digging out the bindweed that I forgot about the lavender. Unplanted, it scorched in the hot weather we've been having. It looks like it will survive (pro tip: set wilted plants in a pan of water so it soaks up through the roots--far more efficient than top-down watering) but if I hadn't noticed it until tomorrow it would have been a goner. I'm sure I'll lose a few plants this summer due to neglect. What I know is not intuitive, it's thanks to extensive reading about gardening, farming, and homesteading. That is, I read everything I can about those who know more and do better than I likely ever will. It is despite myself that I manage to make the garden worthwhile, and still it's enjoyable. It forces me outside and it's relaxing. No wonder gardeners live longer.



*My blueberries have special fertilizer to enhance the soil's acidity. However, I'm also looking at natural ways of doing so. Adding coffee grounds, pine needles, peat, and even putting a tablespoon or two of white vinegar in a full watering can are all ways to help acidify the soil.