Today I met a lovely woman who discovered that I am starting a farm.
She, like many people with whom I have discussed gardening over the years, detailed her failed attempts at growing food and said, in discouragement, that she had given up for now. I guess I made most of my failures when I was too poor to invest much money or time in the project.
I also grew up around the garden. I KNEW I could grow plants, because I had seen every relative in my family do it. I might not have the same “green thumb” my grandmothers had, but I could put a seed in the soil, and, if I did what I was supposed to, have a plant arise at the other end.
In my mind, it was sort of like cleaning the house or cooking dinner: if you have no other option, you will succeed.
Of course, most of us don’t HAVE to grow food anymore. The grocery store or the farmers market waits for us. I am starting this farm on the premise that there are people out there who don’t want to grow their own food but would rather buy it from me.
But many of us still want to grow food even though we don’t have to. Bringing in dinner from the yard is satisfying to our core: it must activate some ancient memory of hunter-gathering or just the first garden our ancestors scratched into the soil.
So when I spoke to this lady, I told her briefly what I will say in more detail here: you just have to keep trying.
I may appear to be a successful gardener/farmer because of luck, a “green thumb,” some sort of plant intelligence, or hard work. I guess it is a combination of all those things, because I can’t eliminate any one of them from my formation.
Yes, I did grow up in a family where my parents remembered the prospect of going hungry or eating limited diets if the garden did not produce. This put a sense of urgency into their gardening plans. I would not have gone hungry if my parents’ garden did not produce, but I think we all kind of forgot that we could buy corn, beans, and tomatoes at the grocery store if our garden didn’t make it.
I will have to share with you sometime the essay I wrote in carefully inked cursive, splotched with white-out when needed to cover my mistakes, in 1986, on “Why Water Conservation is Important.” I found it yesterday when unpacking boxes from our move. That summer, during a drought, our well went dry and we dammed up the creek and pumped irrigation water into a tank with which we watered the garden.
The grocery store could have provided us with food, and the public water line ran by our house, so we could tap into it, but I don’t think I realized any of this as a 12-year-old. We all struggled to keep the garden alive. My sister and I thought it was great fun to be told by our parents to go build a dam in the creek for a real purpose instead of just for play.
My parents were both schoolteachers; I do not want you to think I grew up in some sort of rural poverty where our very existence depended on the production of our garden. But their good health as children depended on the garden, and that sense of urgency is not easily erased. My parents were born on the end of the Great Depression, and the mindset that you cannot rely on the government or society to take care of you was also deeply ingrained in their (and my) psyche. Gardening was not a hobby in my family; it was a given.
When I, as an adult, began gardening, I did not start from scratch, and I was not afraid. It does amaze me at how many people are terrified that they will incur some heavenly wrath if they kill the tomato plant. Tomato plants are not puppies, nor yet are they baby humans. If they die, they become compost. End of story. They have no soul and they do not experience pain.
Decide to begin your garden, purchase seeds or plants, make a good effort to learn about them, and start the garden. If you kill them, oh well. View the investment in plants and seeds in the same way you would the money spent on a nice meal out, a manicure if you are so inclined, or seeing a movie.
All are fleeting, relatively inexpensive forms of entertainment. They cost about the same amount of money it would take to start a garden. Unlike the above pursuits, though, you have at least engaged in some exercise during the pursuit of the activity, and the gardening experience, even if it dies quickly, will last longer than any other pursuits.
To have the best chance of succeeding in your garden, start small. In April, when the stores are filled with beautiful plants, the temperature is only 70, and you have forgotten the misery of August, it is easy to purchase and to set out far more plants than you can manage.
I prefer to grow plants in the ground because they are more forgiving of neglectful watering than if they are in pots. Preparing garden soil does require a bit of work, though. You might want to search for lasagna gardening, straw bale gardening, or pursue the typical method of garden bed preparation when you till or dig the soil and add compost.
Good plants to grow in pots are lettuce and carrots in the spring, and tomatoes and peppers in the summer. Buy a large pot, fill it with potting soil (not topsoil) put in your plants, and you have an instant garden. Consistent, but not excessive, watering is imperative.
Most vegetable plants need full sun, but, especially if they are in pots, most are happy with morning sun throughout the morning that turns to shade by about 1-2 pm in South Carolina’s climate. Do not put a pot of vegetables out on your concrete patio in full sun all day long and expect them to be happy in July, especially if you forget to water them for a couple of days.
Start your garden this spring, and if you kill everything, try to figure out what you did wrong, and fix it next time. Usually the culprits are over-or underwatering, too much or too little sun, and plants that are too crowded.