Dilettante Gardener

Dilettante gardener

High mowing organic seed packets spread across the table top, the pictures on the packets shine with anticipation. I think I can hear an insistent whisper “Plant me, plant me, plant me” coming from within. The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible waits calmly in the willow magazine rack by our “grandfather” chair, edging its spine out above the other magazines and books – it wants to be noticed, as I pass by it chants “Pull me out, pull me out.” Many of our friends have started seeds already, that’s the April activity here. I still may. My intentions are there, but the flesh is weak. So many other dazzling little distractions. Let’s face it, I’m an inveterate dilettante when it comes to gardening. I balk at the planning it entails, the prep work, and I don’t know if I could ever be one to take the temperature of the soil, keep soil journals, ph level charts, graphs, autographed pictures of Wendell Berry nearby. I say this possibly to get my balking reluctance out of my system and then I’ll go and do it. Maybe that’s the purpose of this particular installment of my blog. I like the idea of gardening. I know I’m a hard worker. I can be very committed. And for the past few years we have had a garden – haphazard, random, but weeded, watched over, watered. And I’ve/we’ve absorbed and put into action good advice from our neighbor Royce, namely to mound rather than burrow our rows. This practice is taken to even greater lengths in the Vegetable Gardener’s Bible. So I feel behind – especially when it comes to things like tomatoes and onions, but – but – but

Enough already, here are my aims and goals for the garden this year:

Raised beds 3’ by 15’ up in the garden area. Approximately 18” high, filled with compost and top soil, built with hemlock, tiered in rows to correct the slope of our garden and cut back on weeding. The rows inbetween the raised beds will have newspaper and straw

There may be square raised beds, mini-towers, among the flower garden just outside the kitchen windows where herbs and other things – lettuces perhaps – may thrive and be in proximity to cooking.

Plant an asparagus bed.

Plant a garlic bed in the fall.

Cover our replanted blueberry bushes with netting.

Get tomatoes and onions in planting trays and pots inside before the end of April.

Plant a whole bunch of thyme on our “bad soil” bank

That’s good. That's a starter.

Okay, some quick embarrassing admissions: Last year we had an excellent green bean crop, but I neglected to pick them, most of them. They dried on the vine. I didn’t think they’d be so bountiful. Silly, silly.

As an experiment, we added very little fertilizer/compost to our garden last year and the yield was pure. Sugar snap peas and pumpkins thrived, as well as some parsnips and carrots and radishes – and those beans I let dry to a crisp – but other than that, no go.

Alright, I'm purging my system. I'm up for a fun challenge. I'm in it for the whole ride.