Adventures in Gardening

What I love about my rental property here in Nowhere, Texas is that for the first time EVER in my life I have a huge amount of land that is dumpy enough that whatever I do will be an improvement upon it and there is no hyper-dictoral landlord leaning over my shoulder, or who is even present for that matter.

The garden is coming along famously - eight weeks into our time here and we have two raised beds enclosed in a shoddy but functional fence and one garden bed converted out of a horse trough. We are growing anything and everything, only letting seasonality play a minor role in what we grow. I mean, it's Texas! I think they only have two seasons, spring and summer, right?

At the same time as I am planting my first garden, I am reading The $64 Tomato, by William Alexander, who details the ups, downs, and financial woes of an ambitious gardener. Whereas I am not nearly on his scale of a 22-bed garden, I do see parts of my story written into many of the pages. (I hope it has a happy ending.)

Growing organically seems to mean feeding the bugs more than feeding us. I guess it takes a couple years to cultivate the kind of ecosystem that favors the bugs that don't eat every plant in sight, therefore I accept the fact that I may not actually get to eat very much of the organic vegetables that grow this year. So far we have lost 3 cucumber plants, watched many squash atrophy, and observed every okra leaf get nibbled smaller and smaller each day. For some reason the collards in the trough are fairing better than the fenced garden, but I'm sure its only a matter of time before a deer comes over and thanks us for putting the salad out at such a perfect grazing height for it.

William Alexander and I have both discovered that growing your own food is rarely cheaper than buying produce from the grocery store. However, harvesting the rare vegetable that the bugs and deer are kind enough to leave behind for us makes it all worth while.

Why? Because it is so easy in this age to become disconnected from where our food comes from and there is something so core to our human-ness about being able to provide nourishing food for ourselves and loved ones.