September 1, 2010
How Does Your Garden Grow?
My first “adult” garden came about in graduate school years ago. A garden seemed like a good idea as well as a nutritious boost to an always-thin food budget.
We were living in a small house on Allen Street near the Purdue basketball arena, and right outside our back door was a small mixture of some previous tenant’s flowers and the current tenant’s (us) weeds. The patch was maybe four feet by six feet and on the east side of the house. It got plenty of sun. I knew tomatoes liked that.
So I planted thirty-six plants.
What hurt most in retrospect was not so much the survival savagery I thrust those little guys into, along with their subsequent wilting deaths. Rather, we were pretty much right on campus, and a busy part of the campus, so I envisioned all manner of knowing souls walking past that pitiful patch and snickering: botanists, horticulturists, and just plain (if knowledgeable) gardeners.
Rule Number One: A garden can humiliate you quicker than a scornful lover.
Fast forward to another time and a hillside garden in Pennsylvania. I had learned some lessons. I’d been talking to people. I’d been reading up on proper gardening practices. I was not, however, quite “there” yet.
So I planted sweet corn and tomatoes in a nice shady spot beneath a small stand of pine trees. Believe it or not, it grew (a little). I even had some ears on the stalks that must have been fairly decent because the deer seemed to enjoy them. They didn’t enjoy the tomatoes, however, because there were none.
Rule Number Two: A garden should be sunny. Garden plants really like sunshine, you idiot.
As I said above, I’d been reading, apparently, finally, enough. The next year I cleared out a twenty by thirty foot patch of ground in the sunny center of the yard, fenced it, and filled it with eight, four foot by six foot raised bed gardens that I leveled because the garden was on a hillside and I didn’t want my plants getting dizzy. I planted tomatoes, beans, peppers, Swiss chard, onions, carrots, and peas. I weeded, I mulched, I watered, I trimmed, and I even picked bugs off of plants. I worked it this time. Oh boy did I ever.
The crop was magnificent.
Rule Number Three: The success of a garden is in direct proportion to how much work you put into it. The labor you put into all that free food, however, will be roughly equal to a year’s salary.
Other gardens followed this one with the most challenging one coming when we lived in Maine for a number of years. As one might expect, the growing season is short there, so the ever-present tomato patch was installed on the south side of the house in a spot that got a lot of sun. The plants thrived, grew green and bushy, sent forth nice tomatoes that … remained green as August, year after year, turned chilly. Over the course of a couple of years we enjoyed a few ripe tomatoes and also learned there really isn’t a whole lot you can do with green tomatoes that’s very satisfying. I had an idea, though.
I’d always wanted to grow strawberries but had never had the patience to plant that first crop which will yield nothing until the second year. Strawberries, however, are a cool weather crop so I made the leap. That second year we had strawberries for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We gave away strawberries. We made pies and even learned to preserve some.
Rule Number Four: In Maine, buy tomatoes in the store.
My love affair with tomatoes continues even though I don’t do a whole lot of gardening these days. It’s gotten to be a little boring and, besides, the one truly sunny spot I have for a patch is moody and truculent. I grow great bushes that bear little fruit. The plants, too, have a tendency to selectively die, much in the manner that a diabetic might lose the occasional limb.
Enter the canna lily. The canna is a hardy sort of garden soldier with a definite independent streak. Give it some water and moderate sun and it will grow two or three feet tall with bright red spiky flowers (these are mine – there are over twenty different varieties) and great, broad dark green leaves. Put it in my sunny and cranky tomato patch, however, and those soldiers are ready to conquer the world. This year – see the picture above – some of them are nearing ten feet tall.
That’s huge for a plant that’s considered big under normal circumstances. I’ve had many people ask me how I get them to grow so tall. What do I do to the soil? Do I fertilize? Do I feed them something special? Do I whisper incantations at certain moments under a full moon?
No, I reply, I do nothing special. I just plant them in a spot where, every other year, I send tomatoes to die.
G. K. Wuori © 2010
Photo by the author
