I grew up in a garden with my Mawmaw. I got to pick cucumbers because they are prickly, and she could have me do it. I may or may not have been a little miffed about that and thought why do this when you can get most things at the store without the cuts, prickles, burns from canning, you know all the things that make gardening and eating worthwhile food difficult. BUT, when I was mumbling under my breath about picking cucumbers, Mawmaw and PA (her long time boyfriend) were plowing with a mule and an old school plow, toting a bucket and a big laddle around the garden to water seeds as they were planted, and pitching "gu-anna" which came in 50 lb. bags and was pitched by hand onto the ground or into seed and plant holes. Took me until my 40s to realize that the 10-10-10 "gu-anna" was guano with a southern twang. Back then you turned the earth, you laid off rows,then you tottered through the soft soil to put seeds into holes in those rows and water in the hole, cover, and boom vegetable gardens that made so much your grandmother canned 100s of quarts of green beans, pickled beets, tomato juice, and my brother's favorite green tomatoes which were weird to me because, well, they were green, pickled, and had hot peppers in which still seems wrong, but I would try them now. My thinking things were weird may have more to do with me wanting to be 'above my raising' back then. I'm over that now.
I am over thinking that growing your own food is stupid and a waste of time. I'm over thinking that you can buy things just as easily as you can do them properly even though it is anything but easy to do. What used to amount to poking a hole with your finger, sticking a seed in it, watering the plants, and weeding seems a thing of the past. Gardening has become a Rubik's cube of redirection and endless frustration at something that used to be taken for granted as just a thing you did. Now it's like trying to figure out an event horizon of a black hole in equations to get a damned squash plant to live instead of what it used to be just as a rule, organic and nutritious and most of all abundant. A little rain, a hoe, and some sunshine and Bob's your uncle you fed families of extended family.
As I have said, been gardening my whole life either purposefully or gnashing teeth, sometimes both. Especially now. In the past 10 years I have gone from having such a beautiful garden the first year we moved to the house I sit in now to the Rubik's cubing I mentioned earlier. The first year we had so many squash and such that I fed my chickens (my biggest flock to date over 30) almost entirely out of the garden. This was not a great strategy for egg production but I saved a lot of money on feed. The egg production conundrum is a whole OTHER issue that I can write another piece about in itself. They next few years were not great because I was experimenting and my mom came to live with us and some of those years, I simply had my hands full with caring for my son and making sure she was taken care of properly. However, since my mom passed in 2016, I have had garden after garden with varying degrees of success. I used to be able to plant 1 squash plant and you could eat squash and give it away. I never grew to can my harvest until the past few years when I knew I could care for it. Enter the puzzling.
Corn has never been terribly easy to grow since deer and squirrels love it, but you could get enough to eat and freeze if you planted enough. Squash can be tricky because once squash bugs or borers take hold, all you can really do is yank and start over or try again later. I know some will say this that or the other, but I have done surgery trying to remove borers and sprayed and lost the battle every time, so this is MY experience. Tomatoes usually have been a gimme. If you have a few plants, you get tomatoes. Not this year. Knock wood, I have never had end rot or any of the things people normally talk about or you see prevention for at Lowe's. But this year...I created new beds with new compost and dirt, did them weedless gardening style (normally I have great luck with this process), I even planted icicle radishes around the squash as a companion and all was going well. Things were going swimmingly. My rhubarb was so big and beautiful that I was about to move the parsley beside it because it was under the umbrella of rhubarb that towered over everything except the zinnias. We were getting rain but not a terrible amount, and I mulched, AND I added drip irrigation. I watered only when it got so dry and we had no rain.
The rhubarb and the squash started to look rough. My once majestic, healthy plants began looking stressed. The rhubarb just got so bad I yanked it out of the ground and put into a pot because it had lived happily in one until I put it in the ground and it took off so well then petered out. I may have lost it, not even sure yet. I went from having a nearly 3 foot plant to a mound of nothing. The squash started having a fungal issue that is fungicide resistant (I use organic stuff but even the chemical stuff is said to not work). Tomatoes started to wilt and late wilt is also resistant to treatment. What fresh hell? What ever happened to poking a hole, dropping a seed, watering, and Bob's your uncle enough veggies to feed a small army?
We live in a time, in my humble opinion (or maybe not so humble), that requires a very different work intensive approach. We have to plant differently, shade gardens where we used to relish full sun, add compost that doesn't contain green or brown materials that have been treated with herbacides that even the heat of a compost pile won't get rid of, and generally try REALLY hard to do what my grandmother used to do with little effort other than the manual labor it took to weed and generally care for a garden (no small task to be sure, but still not this). What has happened? I have my theories and ideas which would sound as nutty as a Christmas fruit cake to many, but I will leave you to research and have a think on that for yourself. Something is most assuredly different. I for one do not think that carbon based life needs to think that climate change is the culprit at least not in the way it is presented to us. It's (my) 7th grade science that plants breath carbon dioxide and give us oxygen in return. WE and plants have a symbiotic relationship.
So, I am about to embark on 14 day Berkeley compost to try my hand at feeding the soil at my joint. I use permaculture with good results but that takes a minute sometimes. I will be thinking about how the sun moves across the sky and adding"zones" of drip irrigation. I have stopped fighting (for the most part) nature and am allowing things that are happy to simply be happy where they are and control them somewhat. My Black-eyed-Susans seem to have a mind of their own as well as the wild violets. I'm gonna roll with it and hold the line, sort of anyways. I crave juicy tomatoes from my own yard. I crave fresh vegetables without APEEL or doused in roundup throughout their growth. We have not, in my estimation, gotten better for such practices, and look around. The world is a hostile place. The weather is hostile. People are hostile. Soil is barren. Water is tainted. And you know what might go a long way to fixing a bunch of that? Sitting on the porch, snapping beans with your grandmother while it rains saying, "You know, we needed this."
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