Veni, Vidi, Rototilli
After much procrastination (heck, I could have done this a month ago here in CA,) I finally got the garden tilled today. There’s nothing like a freshly tilled plot–it’s all potential at the start, as the scholastics might say, devoid of weeds, with some new topsoil and fertilizer raked in. An unplanted garden is a place for (nearly) limitless veggie dreams. Two questions:
1. What are you planting this year? What do you hope for? I think, along with the usual tomatoes, zukes ‘n’ cukes, I’ll put in a row of sunflowers just because. In recent years I haven’t made good use of the corn I’ve grown, but you can’t go wrong with sunflowers, eh? They’re simple delight whether or not I ever do anything with the seeds.
2. What’s your gardening soundtrack? There’s the classic “Garden Song” that starts “inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow,” which is nice enough, though it has some puzzling lyrics. (“Pulling weeds, picking stones, we are made of dreams and bones. Need a place to call my own, ’cause the time is close at hand.” It’s a tad grim, as though the gardener expects to be, um, planted in his own plot. Or is it apocalyptic? Nah. Apocalyptic and gardening don’t mix…) As I struggled to get the tiller through the thick layer of grass and weeds, I hummed the Doors’ “Break on Through to the Other Side,” and ruminated that “The First Cut is the Deepest” definitely doesn’t apply to tilling. Got another good gardening/tilling/weeding song?
Anything by The Non-Rolling Stones and Stone Temple Pilot is good for gardening. ;)
in our backyard garden, we do most of the usuals you mentioned, but also eggplant (white and purple), red and green peppers, hot peppers, bok choy, tomatoes, watermelon, and various kinds of beans. We don’t have much luck with corn, so we stopped planting that several years ago. We always have a few sunflowers, too, just because they’re sunflowers. :)
As much as we enjoy our own garden, we enjoy the community garden we belong to even more. Community gardening is a great way to meet people. In our community garden, there are a number of small individual plots, but the centerpiece is a large plot (approx. 50′ x 50′) that everyone works jointly. All of the produce from that plot goes to a soup kitchen run by local churches and a synagogue. The gardening music is non-denominational. ;)
We bought a share in a CSA. We did it last year and it was very interesting because at least 25% of the vegetables were things we had never eaten and I had to go to Google images to try and figure out what they were. I like the “mystery’ vegetable experience and hope to get more things like that this year. A portion of the harvest from our CSA goes to a soup kitchen and other charities, too.
(Best weed song: Burn One Down by Ben Harper.)
We have fond memories of the community garden when we were students at Michigan State University. Most of my fellow garderners were, like me, spouses of foreign students. Most of them did not speak English, but managed to be encouraging anyway. I remember getting applause when I pulled out a zucchini that was about two feet long.
I went to perennial herbs and flowers some years back for the most part. My back won’t take much gardening. I do put some annuals in plots.
Margaret Atwood’s “After the Flood” contains various earth hymns by the fictional sect, God’s Gardeners. They’re both cheeky and charming. Orville Stoeber has set them to music, and you can hear clips here: http://www.amazon.com/Hymns-Gods-Gardeners-Lyrics-Flood/dp/B002OJGGJY
Not to be a kill-joy about rototilling, but tilling releases huge amounts of carbon. Many farmers are tryng to move to no-till planting. See Scientific American here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=combating-climate-change-farming-forestry
Of course, if you believe global warming is a left-wing myth, you’re all set!
I’ve just planted all flowers ….. calla lilies, nastertiums, poppies, hollyhocks, pink coneflowers, black-eyed susans. I tried sunflowers last year for the first time – the ones that are about 6 feet tall :)
Gardening music? Maybe Scarborough Fair.
Today at Mass there was a speech about ecology, the threat of global warming, earth day, and Catholicism. Weird.
When my knees allowed me to garden I used to grow herbs. I started in order to have fresh ones for cooking, but soon learned that they can make a very beautiful tiny garden. If you plant contrasting ones next to each other, and plan your plot carefully, the garden can have a richness like the best of miniature paintings.
But I sometimes threw in some small non-herbs. In recent years the nurseries have been selling pots of “muesli”, maybe half-a-dozen varieties of lettuces and such in one pot. They are quite different in feel from the herbs, and they offer very nice contrasts of shape, color, texture as well as a frou-frou, silly sort of feeling that herbs rarely have. They’re sort of the ditzy aunts of the family. I had as many as 70 species at a time.
I recommend such a garden especially for old folks because of its size. Mine was around 7 x 8 plus a few big pots, so it required less effort than flowers or veggie gardens. Elevate the soil — that way you don’t have so far to bend. The elevation is also good for the herbs, which generally require very good drainage. You’ll have lots left over for friends too.