My father grew up on a farm, in a place and time when people didn’t go to the store for things they could produce themselves. He planted a big garden every year, out of which we canned and preserved enough to keep us in tomatoes, green beans and corn through the winter. He planted our three acres or so of property from one end to the other with fruit trees, grape and scuppernong arbors, blueberry bushes, and even a fig tree in its own mini-greenhouse to protect it from the relative cold of an Appalachian winter. He had grown up in middle Georgia, a full agricultural zone south, and he liked figs. He could grow anything, pretty much.
I on the other hand am one of those people who really really want to have a green thumb and really really don’t. I diligently helped my father with the garden as a child but despite his best efforts I am a notable slayer of plants. Every year I start out full of enthusiasm and overconfidence; I plot how I am going to grow ALL my food, and put it up for the winter, like we did when I was a child, and I will be self-sufficient and super-organic. Every year, my garden dries up or is eaten by bugs or some other calamity befalls, and I am woebegone.
I am nothing if not persistent. Some would say obstinate. At any rate, I have a friend who has a permaculture design certificate and a blog, and it occurred to me to ask the Gardinatrix for help. She gave excellent advice, including the suggestion to start small.
I double dug a 4 x 4 foot plot for a postage stamp garden and was bemused. It was so little. I didn’t follow her directions for what to plant to the letter, mainly because people I knew heard I was trying to garden again and plied me with butterbeans. Some of the things I planted didn’t grow well, or were eaten by creatures other than me, and got replaced. But eventually…
Those are cucumber vines in the foreground, supported by stakes someone gave me and the legs of old panty hose. Behind them you can see a tomato plant, fennel, dill, and a hint of collards. There’s also lettuce, carrots, and some butterbeans and okra just getting started good.
The two-liter bottle is there on purpose as an irrigation system; you fill the bottle with water and then poke holes in it with a pin. The water trickles out very slowly; it helps keep the sandy soil here from drying out too quickly.
I am ludicrously proud of my tiny patch of food. Every so often I call up one of my friends and exclaim “It hasn’t died yet!” I drag visitors into the back yard to admire it. The small scale makes it doable; I have a heavy work load when school in session and if this project had required a lot of supervision and work earlier in the spring it just wouldn’t have happened. I spent part of two days digging and another day planting and then mostly left it alone for a while. I don’t feed myself entirely out of it, but I do get a salad or some veggies for another dish almost every day. Between my little garden and the local farmer’s market, the bulk of my diet this summer originates within fifty miles of where I live…and a significant portion comes from my own back yard.
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