I’ve spent a bit of time trying to convince people that, contrary to their personal bias, gardening/mini-farming is both easy AND lucrative. The example I used: I would say “sustenance farmer” and ask them what mental images come to mind.
Universally, these images were of hovels and dirty ramshackle huts, where sickly-thin parents work day and night to eek limp, unhealthy-looking vegetables from the ground, while undernourished kids play in the mud with broken toys. This image, I would tell people, is inaccurate as long as we use to proper methods for growing food. As the spring is leaving and summer is upon us, I’ve become increasingly aware that it’s not just a matter of techniques – it’s a matter of skill. The skill of gardening… a skill which I do not have. The images of a lush and overflowing garden I had envisioned at the start of this project have to meet the reality – my garden looks like a barren wasteland. Seriously, the desert has more growth than this.
three weeks since planting.
Here’s a close-up of two bell-pepper plants next to all my sprout-lings:
food
The only part that seems to be doing ok are my radishes and onion plants. The radishes, you might remember, I was suppose to harvest two weeks ago, but left them in because… well, there was nothing to harvest. Those strawberry plants you see are bouncing back after been nibbed down to stubs, but all the fruits are gone.
some life here in the wastelands
The most depressing part of all of it has to be my peas. At one point some of the sprouts were over six inches tall… but as you can see now, nothing is left of that legacy.
*cry*
I’m adding up all the things I’ve done wrong so far… and I think, at every decision I had to make, I made a wrong one. I had no budget to start with, so I could not afford a proper fence to keep the woodland creatures out – they alone have ruined the garden. I didn’t have mulch – but sometimes, I had too much grass clipping mulch and it killed some sprouts. I so several underestimated how long the project would take that more than half the seeds I own won’t be planted this year – it would take too long to dig the beds.
One of my biggest underlying assumptions about this project was that one didn’t have to find gardening fun and interesting in order to do it properly. That is, you could go about it like any other job and get decent results. I’m beginning to see that not only is this not the case, it’s quite the opposite – you really have to want it.
Honestly, gardening as an activity has never excited me – the applications of gardening/mini-farming, however, do. Does it make me a hypocrate to advocate so strongly for massive social change involving the re-emergence of the family farm, when I personally don’t like to farm that much? Maybe. But at least I’m really trying here. And when the time comes to recommend it to others, I can speak from a position of (some) experience, instead of a starry-eyed idealism based on numbers.
So what now? I know the mini-farm I had envisioned just two months ago will not come to pass – at least, not this year. I guess I’ll just keep ploughing forward, until either I stop or I find something better.
I spent nearly an hour trying to dig up and find out what's going on with the 30 potatoes I planted 4 weeks ago. No sign of them. Like how did I screw that up?
Don't give up! It's still only spring! True, you may not get the super abundant harvest you were hoping for, but a lot of stuff takes a while to mature, and some years are better than others for certain plants.
I think the way a person could go about gardening without full passion and get good results is probably if one had the money to have one of those raised beds with an ideal mix of soil – no digging, no fighting against clay that dries out quickly, then you'd just have to fend off the animals and water it! But those of us without that luxury have a lot of trial and error to go through!
I thought I learned a lot working at the Ecovillage last summer, and I DID, but trying out our own garden with my brother this year, I'm realizing there is also a whole lot I DON'T know because it was already done when I got there. heh. We'll see what happens.
I feel your pain! I'll be interested to hear how you feel about the whole thing in a couple of months.
From one of your YouTube videos, it looked like you just tore up some lawn and planted a garden. If that's the case, the problem is the soil. You need to incorporate a lot more organic matter if you want to grow food… lots and lots of compost.
Ron, first I don't think that your loss should deter you from the experiment of gardening. It's not about you being able to grow your own food as much as it is about seeding the ideas. Communities can sustain this – some of them will be able to grow like Steve More and his 10+ ft. sunflowers. Others of us will cause more damage
But I love the fact that you're working on it.
Now the one thing that I *do* know from having watched enough farming in my life – it's all about patience. When the earth decides to cooperate, she does so with a vengeance. My garden took just about 10 years before it got to the point of decent yield (which was last year). I think the earth is finally vaguely happy with me!
I've been trying to find a place that can provide a truckload of pesticide free manure around town. Know of any?
As in manure from organically raised animals? I have no idea. That might be a hard commodity to come by, as organic animal husbandry often involves the manure being spread on the pastures for fertilizer.
So for a backyard organic garden how should the soil be amended? We have a 20×50 foot garden that we "cut" out of our lawn last year. We got a truckload of manure mixed with straw, and we had great success last year. But I can already see that our soil needs a lot more work.
And sadly, I lost the phone number of the guy who delivered the manure.
Call Kevin Clingan (Klingan?). He's in the book and has sheep manure soil – the best!