Why Garden?

I am wondering tonight as cats and man sleep about the WHY?

I've been reading various books on gardening lately.  They range from literary memoir to "how to" non-fiction.  Some of the writers write about their gardens as a way to create a healthy connection to food and the world for their children, some tell of making a connection to their ancestors with memories of the garden of a beloved grandmother or father.  Some are political:  growing your own food is some small attack on the big food growing corporations.  Some are environmental:  by committing to slow food, you can cut down the environmental impact of the petroleum it takes to get out of season food to your table.  I know people who garden out of financial necessity and people who garden for the meditative nature of it.

I'm not sure why I started gardening.  I had to write a letter to get that 5x12 piece of dirt I now call my garden.  And I wrote my heart out to get it.  I let flow lots of flowery things about the environment, organic food, being a country girl etc.  I knew that it rivaled the best of my English major BS of years gone by....

But, I left out one thing  - too personal to share - although, I'm not sure I still feel the same now which is:  Nature is where I find God.  I haven't had a lot of luck in churches or religious organizations.  I don't really hold the bible up to be much more than a literary recipe about how one, in general, might live ones life.  Yet, I believe in God.  And sometimes when the breeze is just the right temperature and blowing in just the right direction along the skin of your arm, it feels like an embrace from some Higher Power.   So, secretly, this was the reason I wanted that garden plot. 

And in those first few weeks, as I sat in the garden by myself watching the miracles of it in front of me, I thought it was all that I needed.

But, as I planted and harvested, failed and succeeded, battled insects both good and bad, I reported each event to my Squeeze.  He urged me to take pictures, he tried foods he didn't really like just to please me, exclaimed "wow" when I would bring home a haul no matter how big or small - always with that pitch of his voice that makes me weak.  And he didn't laugh at my potatoes the size of a penny which we ate with shrimp forks.  Or at least he laughed with me rather than at me.  Generally, he made me feel proud that each day I cared for and nurtured this little garden plot.

For me, the garden had become about SHARING.  It was my garden for sure, but love had led me to it, to Long Beach.  The Squeeze would visit occasionally to give his bike a hose down or to take an evening walk with me hand-in-hand, to picnic, or just to answer the question for himself, "how does your garden grow?"

What gave me the pleasure, as it turned out, was to share the garden with him; or rather the fruits of my labor.  It had gone from a solitary endeavor between me and God, to one that was about me and him.  I grew things I knew he liked.  I felt proud to share with him the bounty whether in a pie, a stir fry, or included in a Sunday dinner while we watched football in the winter.  I grew vegetables to make him his childhood favorite:  stuffed cabbage.   I tracked down his sister-in-law to pass along his Mom's recipe.  I was feeding my family with the things I had grown.  

But, somewhere a crack has formed and my Squeeze no longer wants to be my Squeeze.  The heartache is beyond words.  In the wake of this announcement, I found myself staring at my garden wondering "why bother".  The joy of sharing the play-by-play had suddenly been stolen from me.  I looked at what was already growing there and felt a loneliness at the thought of harvesting and eating these things by myself. 

And at this very moment I have 8 very, very small cabbages that I have grown from seed begging for life on my windowsill.  I water them, for it would be cruel not to, but they have stunted on me.  They have stopped growing.  I fear they know my hesitation of what I will feel when they are fully grown and ready to be harvested.

Now, in the middle of a heartache, in the middle of the loss of love that I followed to this garden, I don't feel God.  I feel lost.  

There are many decisions to make and the garden will be, no doubt, a piece of it.  What piece, I don't know.  For the moment I am trying to find the lesson in this:

Is it that the garden has taught me that I want to nourish a family?  My family, in whatever form that takes: one man, two cats. 

Or maybe what this is illustrating is that I am so pathetic that I need others to validate me: that I must still learn that growing a cabbage just to grow a cabbage for myself should be satisfying enough.   Can it be both? 

Perhaps it is neither.   But, my beet seeds are soaking tonight so the garden still tugs at me either way.

Mulch

(One of my fava bean seedling mulched with straw and peach tree leaves after the rainstorm)

Until I started gardening, I only knew mulch as those ugly cedar chips that suburbanites used in their landscaping around their no-stress bushes.  No offense, of course, meant to any suburbanites who may currently have said cedar chips in their landscaping. 

What I've learned about mulch since I got my 5x12 plot of organic dirt is that it is a BIG topic.  The "types" of mulch cover a broad spectrum, there are websites devoted to it,  and it's apparently important enough that you can find "mulch calculators" ala mortgage, bank loan, and currency exchange calculators.  So you KNOW it's important when it gets its own calculator.

Generally speaking, mulch is (usually) some sort of organic material that is used around plants to keep the moisture in, protect the roots from the cold (and critters), keep weeds at bay, and regulate ground temperature.  But, mulch can also be used to keep a garden bed stable and warm in between plantings, too.   It is a noun (as in the material) and a verb (as in "to mulch" your garden). 

Now, mulch also can be non-organic: a plastic covering, chemically treated "wood chips", or the latest HGTV craze - recycled tires that have been ground up into strange looking black, rubbery chips.  I'm all for the green makeover, but this just feels, well, not very green.  Ironic, even.  

When I first started gardening, I was afraid of the mulch.  I was afraid if I used the straw provided for us by the garden that I would smother the seeds and they wouldn't germinate.  Or, gasp, it would look ugly!  In my fear and vanity, I left my garden open and vulnerable to not only the elements but to the wild animals. 

I've come a long way since then.  Ugly be damned if it gives me good nourishing cabbage!  Ugly be damned if it keeps the local cats from using my garden like a big litter box or if it deters the raccoons (okay, nothing deters the raccoons).  Ugly be damned if it gives my garden a fighting chance in weather like we've had the past week: almost freezing nights, cold hard rain, and WindWindWind.

Now, you can over-mulch, too.  There are lists of ugly named fungus' that can fester in your mulch if you've over-protected your seedlings.  Not only are they capable of infecting your plants, but they can attack the roots and fruit of the plant.  They can, in short, suffocate your plant.  I realized today as I found the most beautiful form of mushroom growing near my volunteer sunflowers that when I had transplanted them along the garden edge, I had over mulched them.  I believe I can save the situation, but I feel bad that these lovely sunflowers that had decided to grow of their own accord were at risk before they could reach the 10 or 12 feet their ancestors had before them this summer. 

In fact, what I've learned is that with mulch, it is a matter of balance. 

Just like a healthy garden, we humans need a bit of mulch, too.  We need to protect our roots, maintain a stable internal temperature reading, and keep at bay those things or people who will try to impede on our growth and steal our nutrients.  We need mulch in the form of discernment about what comes in close to us and when we may need to lay fallow and rejuvenate.   We need some amount of this to protect ourselves so that we can flourish, grow, create - and in turn give nourishment to others - just like my lovely and giving vegetable plantings.

In the past, I've had a tendency to over-mulch myself or surround myself with the equivalent of ground up tires.  I felt compelled to protect my heart, my ego, my erroneous visions of myself.  In over-protecting myself, I suffocated and denied my roots what they needed to take a firm hold of the earth so I could reach for the sun like my gigantic, graceful sunflowers.  I've had a hard time learning the difference between laying fallow to restore and smothering myself in withdrawl.

Yet, in trying to correct myself from over-mulching, I fear at times I have not mulched enough.  I find myself often giving up my own nutrients to others rather than protecting them so that I can flourish and bear fruit like my endlessly producing zucchini plant this summer.  Sigh.  Maybe I need to invest in a mulch calculator.

This is a balance we must all reach to have a healthy and fruitful life.  I know my journey into mulching, both in my garden and for myself, will be a long and winding one.  I will make mistakes, over-correct, and hopefully occasionally get it right. 

My plants are counting on it....

Gardening takes some faith....

if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.  (Matthew 12:20)

Okay, these are beet seeds, but you get the idea.  Maybe mustard seeds are even smaller.  I don't know, I haven't grown mustard yet.

Nevertheless, it takes a tremendous amount of faith to grow a garden.  It takes a tremendous amount of faith to plant a mustard seed and believe that it will grow to be a large tree upon which birds will alight and sing among its branches.  Although, as I understand it, a mustard tree is actually an enormous bush.  Oh well, the birds would look lovely singing among the yellow buds, too.

This season I tried to grow most everything from seed.  I sowed cabbage, broccoli, watercress, beets, spinach, various lettuces, bok choy, onions, garlic, carrots, and fava beans as well as ome flowers including Chinese lanterns.  But, this is risky.  there is no guarantee that I will be rewarded for my faith in these seeds.  For instance, while my cabbage seeds appear to be going gangbusters, my celery simply won't cooperate.

Some days I don't have a lot of confidence in myself - and as gardening is my newest attempt to grow as a human being, I'm particularly uncertain in this arena.  For instance, I don't know which kind of onions I planted: long day or short day.  I don't even know what kind of day I live in.  Some days seem REALLY long, but I'm not sure that the onions would feel the same way.  I don't know if I amended my soil correctly with the "green manure", otherwise known as white clover.  Even though I turned it back into the dirt, it seems to be growing where my carrots are supposed to be starting to pop their little green tops up now.

Not unlike the seeds I planted, I know that without a nutrient rich environment, the correct amount of light, and some companion plants, I won't flourish.  I know I'm not of the cactus variety - able to grow with the least of it - little water, little food, and no companions within my needled reach.

Or maybe I'm more like the broccoli seeds I potted carefully over a month ago.  I lamented to my "Squeeze" that these seeds had not popped their little heads through after a week.  He told me to have some patience.  And after much worrying, I read the package and realized that there was nothing wrong with them other than they had a long germination period of 5-17 days.  Right, so me and the broccoli seeds have that going for us.  I seem to be long germinating, too.  And every time I get close to being ready to greet the world as a fully formed broccoli plant, I mean human, I seem to have a set back and have to start all over again.  Just like my broccoli seeds when I left them to their own devices during a business trip.  They died from a lack of water and it's now round two on the windowsill.  Maybe the seeds don't have a lot of faith in me.

So, on I go each day with faith that is just about as small as a mustard seed.  Eh, maybe even smaller like the celery seeds that won't come up.  But, the promise (at least of the garden) is that it will be all I need if I'm patient enough, attentive enough, and loving enough.

The beginning...

I moved to Long Beach a year and a half ago to follow love... only 25 miles from where I'd been for 17 years, but a world apart.  I worried that while my jazz musician "squeeze" was out playing gigs, I'd be left a little lost in our vast loft without local friends.  But, as fate would have it we moved into a fantastic building with very "social" folks (read there is a lot of wine drinking happening in the building!).  And within a month my neighbor Kristin had introduced me to our community garden just three blocks away.  I had a hobby!  I had a friend!  I had a 5x12 plot of dirt!

I'm a country girl.  My friend's families were farmers and while my family wasn't, I had two horses of my own.  Being near nature is essential to my well being.  I hadn't realized after years of city living, though, how essential until I started to dig in the dirt.

Being a country girl, however, doesn't mean I know how to grow anything.  All attempts at our home to have a garden during my childhood only resulted in well fed deer!  But, memories of my Uncle Al's home garden began to take shape as I explored the various plantings: the taste of fresh peas right out of the pod,  red juicy tomatoes off the vine and the smell of marigolds surrounding them came flooding back.

What I didn't expect as I wandered through the other gardeners' plots was that I was being thrust into a full on existential crisis:  who was I?  Was I someone that wanted order: a practical garden with well marked, straight lines of vegetables organized by size and planted as directed for depth and space?  Was I someone that wanted fancy:  things thrown together more for the eye than the table, fanciful plants and flowers pushed willingly or not willingly into a 5x12 plot of dirt?  Was I someone that wanted ease:  cactus that could just be enjoyed on a rest after a bike ride to the garden but no digging or continual planting involved?

Don't ask me the answer... I'm trying to find out.

So, before I begin this blog in earnest, it seems I should get you up to date on the two seasons of "crops" I planted and the changes along the way: