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| A Runaway Garden |
I'm an avid gardener. Have been all my life, but I presently have a serious problem with my gardening practices and with my gardens. They are both, completely out of control.
We moved here in 1999. The place was a beautiful 3 1/2 acre farmette with a small barn, a machine shed, a house and garage and a couple more outbuildings. All of them were very old and in need of minor to major repairs. Along with the old buildings there were several established flower and vegetable gardens and an orchard that badly needed tending. The entire place was overgrown with weeds as tall and as deeply rooted as small trees. As a caveat to the weed fields we found out that the soil was a heavy clay. It took us two good years to clear and clean, prune and plant, and learn. The learning part was the hardest. Clay soil and an old farm we learned, were going to be a lot... a lot of work.
My partner and I both worked at towns nearby. My son lived in another town and my daughter worked and was going to school full time. The amount of land that we had was not large. We had very limited access to the necessary element of time but we felt that we had enough energy to develop our plot of happiness into a self-sustaining piece of gold. Foolish, I know. Well, I know that now.
So What did we Learn?
It's been eleven years and we're still here and there are days when we seriously wonder why. Throughout those years we made many improvements to the grounds and added some of our own plantings, but overall we kept most of the gardens as they were. Meaning, we didn't enlarge them, move them, or use them for purposes other than how they were originally designed. We dealt with the clay as best we knew how, by adding compost and mulch and plowing that all in. Clay is hard to garden and it compacts easily, but it's full of nutrients and minerals. If you can get it to give those up to the garden plants, you will have a garden that is lush and productive. In a hard compacted clay, the soil structure can be especially prohibitive to the microscopic organisms. An imbalance of these creatures can give the edge to your garden weeds. Weeds are cunning and conniving. Given an inch and they'll take your garden. I did not know this yet so, slowly, year after year, the gardens became more unruly, I saw more and stronger rooted weeds and more disease and pests in my vegetables and herbs.
Hard Decisions
The day of reckoning came for me on the day that I stepped through the kitchen garden gate and could not find a safe place to walk. Two months prior, I broke my arm. Falling and safety was now a priority and the garden was no longer safe to walk in. I broke my arm from a fall in august, just as harvest was due to begin. I had a large garden full of fruits and vegetables, grapes to bring in, and trees full of apples to pick and put up. I was unable to do any of that. Only a week after the surgery I returned to work, putting in long hours for a software conversion. Between the intense pain and the work hours, there was little left for the gardens. Everything outgrew its space. Tomatoes started rotting on the vines from not being picked in time and the pathways had all but disappeared. The gardens looked just like the day we moved in; weedy and overgrown. That day, my love for gardening withered away. So I quit.
Well, I cut way back. Instead of 20 large garden plots and 3 vegetable gardens, I put in 3 small vegetable plots in only one garden and started putting down rubber mats (recycled from a trucking company) to suffocate any and all growth in the areas that I was not working. For the most part that worked but plants like quack grass and mints, love to send their roots underneath dark and lightless cover, so the war did not end.
In the months that followed, I did some deep gardening soul-searching and realized that I was going about this gardening thing all wrong. I was waging a war and gaining no quarter. I was doing whatever I could (without resorting to chemicals) to get immediate affects - dead weeds. I was not getting to the real problem and I did not have a plan, much less a backup plan. A very old story came to mind, the story from the book The Bhagavad Gita. The main character, Arjuna, was placed on a journey. A journey that was necessary and would have a very rewarding end. Arjuna was a novice, but was not a quitter. He started out with a single-minded purpose but no plan and he had not done research on what hurdles he would encounter before he got to his goal. He needed to learn some valuable lessons along the way before he could achieve that end. Many of the lessons were harsh and life changing. Many times he thought to quit. However, along the way he found out that it was not the end where his rewards would be great, but it was journey itself.
The Journey
I started very much like Arjuna did. I went to war with no plan and no knowledge. I was not seeking to find peace, but just an end to that war. Things have changed now. I have had time to step back and see more of the greater picture. I now seek peace with my gardens, not war with the weeds and I have realized that I must have a good plan. I need to know the peaceful aspects of my gardens and learn how to build them up and support them. You see, a war never ends, but peace will go on forever so long as we sustain it. Like Arjuna, I want to find the value in my journey. If I reach an end, though gardening is a forever job, it will be when I step through the garden gate one day, and see a garden that is alive and lives well with all it's neighbors. I may be able some day to do this, to walk through the gate to peacefully sit on a bench alongside a slowly trickling fall of water, or under a peach tree heavy with fruit and meditate on the journey that I have been through.
2011
We are just days away from the bells of a new year. It will soon be 2011. I have a plan to make, I have research to do, I have seeds to start and gardens that await. I look out my window now at the dead weeds in the garden and smile. This past year I took some time and now I am ready to start on the new journey. With this in mind dear reader, I will take my garden writings to a new blog, one dedicated to documenting the failures and successes, the tears and the wonder of gardening anew. I am creating a new blog just for this and within a couple of weeks will have it up and running. I will still be writing for Jetta Broom, never fear, but I hope that you will also join me on the new blog site - Feel Good Gardening - to watch and be a part of this adventure. Maybe you'll see something that I don't, and can volunteer a hint or write an article. By this we will all gain. So, see you again soon in 2011 - here at Jetta Broom and at Feel Good Gardening.
Peace - Marlene
