Looking back
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when my love of backyard gardening began. I can recall running my hands over the chive plant in the little courtyard garden of my childhood home, thinking it looked like funny spiky hair, snipping a bunch for dinner and smelling the pungent green tang of it, I remember marveling at the beautiful onion-scented purple flowers and the fact that it came back year after year, seemingly by magic. I remember rummaging for bush beans and the thrill of spotting one camouflaged amongst the green vines and leaves of the same hue. This love of growing, green things manifests itself in more ways than just gardening. One of my favorite pastimes has always been exploring garden centers, experiencing the joy of stepping into a greenhouse in winter, and smelling dirt and life when all the gardens outdoors are blanketed under snow, asleep. I have aspirations of cultivating an indoor jungle – my husband often has to hold me back from acquiring more houseplants, though he’s just as keen as I am! Whenever I have the opportunity to travel the first thing I notice is the different and unique flora. On vacation as a kid, I would coerce my parents into taking me to a local bookstore for a regional field guide that I could use to identify plants and trees while we were there. Few people know that I actually wanted to be an arborist growing up, until an adult told me that a large part of that job includes tree removal (cut down trees?! Gasp!) and I decided it wasn’t for me. Instead, I’ve found joy in cultivating indoors and out as a passion rather than an occupation. I have just always loved plants, they just amaze me.
Let me take you back in time on a little tour of each of my gardens…
2017 – the learning year
In 2017, I grew my very own first vegetable garden, and while it started out strong, I encountered some major challenges and setbacks. Leggy seedlings, weeds, and gophers, OH MY! I won’t tell the whole story here, but after this garden was mowed down by a family of gophers, I gave up. I didn’t even want to turn my eyes toward the vegetable patch, I was so upset! However, even in the face of major adversity, nature will out, and I was given a small harvest. I’m nothing if not tenacious, and knew that I would garden again.
2018 – the no-garden year
With the frustration of my first garden still fresh, plus buying a house, AND learning that I was pregnant with our first daughter, I skipped creating a garden altogether in 2018. We had a lovely little basil plant and lots of dreams.
2019 – the year of gorgeous mint
In February 2019, I had a little baby …but no garden infrastructure! I was ready to start again, but what with having a newborn and going back to work in May, I was struggling to juggle it all and despite attempting a container/barrel garden with some beautiful, hardy seedlings from our friends at Stalk and Pistil, basically only succeeded in growing a very healthy barrel of mint. C’est la vie!
2020 – the year it really began
Maybe inspired by our past garden failures, my husband and I were determined to keep growing (see what I did there?) so he built the most beautiful raised garden beds in the fall of 2019 that I couldn’t wait to plant in the following season.
That following season was, of course: 2020 (that infamous year!) When COVID “hit” in March, it was a difficult time in many ways, but our little family was so fortunate. I continued to work remotely and my company didn’t miss a beat. My husband and his team were furloughed (except for 1 day a week) at full pay from April-June. During that time, he went to town on a bunch of projects around the house including filling the raised beds with massive amounts of topsoil and compost (we didn’t know about hügelkultur yet!) and building a gorgeous rustic wood and wire fence around the backyard, enclosing the gardens.
Our vegetables thrived in 2020. They had deep beds to spread their roots, rich, fluffy compost, and lots of staking, pruning, and tending. Come harvest time, everything tasted amazing. If I hadn’t fully embraced gardening as a key part of my life (in truth, my soul) yet, 2020 clinched it.
2021 – the year of many varieties
Throughout the winter of 2020/2021, I told my husband countless times that I just couldn’t wait for the gardening season to begin. That dormant winter season felt painfully long and I longed to sink my hands in the dirt, plant out, and watch my vining, thriving, plants do their thing. I poured over seed catalogs, found new varieties to try (french breakfast radishes!), and decided which favorites to grow again (midnight pear tomatoes!) I started seeds in March, indoors, on a heat mat, and under grow lights. My seedlings were a little leggy but transplanted well for the most part (my onions died the day after transplanting and my eggplants never fully thrived). I added some lovely bagged Maine-made compost to the beds in preparation for their new inhabitants, and I was ready to go.
All in all, 2021 was a good year. I harvested some delicious little broccoli heads, some succulent mini eggplants, and a sweet hot pepper variety that rocked our worlds. Our tomato plants grew to the top of their 6-foot stakes and then continued vining all the way back down to the ground. The harvest was incredible. In August, we learned that our family was growing by another tiny human and I looked forward to raising our May baby in the garden the following year.
2022 – the year of depleted soil (and energy!)
The 2022 garden season started on a wild foot. When I would normally be planning the garden and starting seedlings, I was preparing for maternity leave and giving birth. I told my husband that we needed to buy most of our seedlings, and he would need to start and tend the rest. By the end of March and April, I was heavily pregnant and tapped out! He grew some beautiful seedlings and we purchased the majority of the tomatoes. We kept it pretty simple – nothing too wild, although I did try planting beets for the first time. We added some very subpar compost to the beds that we picked up from the nearest home improvement store.
Our second daughter, Isla, was born in early May. She spent some of her earliest days in her wrap strapped to my chest, in her car seat, or just held in my arms while I transplanted, watered, and weeded. She was happy to watch the trees sway and the fat bumble bees pollinate the early blooms. I got an incredibly late start on the beets, radishes, and lettuces which would have preferred a colder start. We had lush leaves, but the roots of some were teeny tiny at best, while most were spindly and nonexistent. All in all, the harvest was decent but we had more pests and diseases than before, particularly blossom end rot, and powdery mildew, and the flavor was either bitter or just lacking. Our soil needed to be revived.
Looking ahead to the garden of 2023…
This brings us to today. The first day of spring, 2023. This winter, I’ve been learning how to improve yields, reduce pests and diseases, water less, and make my vegetables taste better. Everything I have learned points to the fact that we need to improve our soil. We need to give back to the dirt that has been providing for us now for 3 years with very little attention, much less rejuvenation. I made the classic novice mistake of feeding my plants but not feeding my soil. I have spent countless hours in recent months watching videos, reading books, and being a sponge of knowledge for everything related to creating healthy soil. My research has repeatedly brought me back to the importance of creating your own compost, and no-dig/no-till gardening methods. I will be employing these methods in my garden this year and will pass along all of my successes and failures learning experiences here.
Gardening forces us to embrace the chaos, the failures, and the things that are outside of our control.
Favorite things.
To me, the most beautiful thing about gardening is that no year is perfect. Gardening forces us to embrace the chaos, the failures, and the things that are outside of our control. Sometimes, a pest will annihilate an entire plant (or crop) in the blink of an eye, sometimes, you’ll limp a plant along all season for a tiny yield. Now, you could view this as wasted seedlings, space, and time, but I choose to view it as an opportunity to learn, adapt, and do better in the future. The garden allows us to escape into our own little world, a microcosm of our own making. Every year, we are given the gift of watching an entire organism emerge and explode with life and bounty from a tiny little speck of a seed, and that is something I will never take for granted. My gardens, each and everyone, every year, will never cease to amaze me and make me yearn to experience the next one.
Happy gardening, friends.
