One of my “quiet” hobbies is gardening.
I fell in love with Gardening in my 20′s, during a period where I was recovering from a “bad patch” — basically, I’d had a series of misfortunes that centered around my willingness to trust other people and be a little too self sacrificing. To distract me and keep me busy, I had a small yard to tend at the time.
I started off with an urge to plant strawberries. So I dug a small bed close in to the house and began reading up on gardening and watching what at the time were great shows on PBS. It took about a year, but I was hooked. Soon I was growing blackberries, corn, broccolli, brussels sprouts, jack onions, garlic, and tons and tons of mint (which is story in and of itself).
As ever, things change, and my fortunes improved, but I never lost the desire for fresh vegetables, and I remembered all the lessons I learned in gardening for the 7 or so years that I was able to do it. I got married, though, and life became hectic and gardening wasn’t something I could find time or space or reason enough to do.
Waaaay back in ’05, though, the itch hit again. I began coming up with odd ideas on how to garden, and doing more involved research on space wise gardening, as I’ve never the traditional row gardener, but I’ve always been a “victory gardener” by the same token. THis past year while I was in DC, I was thrilled to see that the idea of a victory garden is being preserved by the Smithsonian.
The last ifve years haven’t been too kind, but I have thought of various ways to create portable and useful gardens, even going to such extremes as fully designing one in 3D and planning out the seasonal rotation of crops for it. This particular one needs about 4 feet of space that gets good sun, but is reasonably adaptable to pretty much any decent patio, so even great for apartments and condo’s.
My current situation, though has been interesting, While helping to re-use and recycle some various “found” parts, in particular wood, for and around the work being done on flipping a house, I came across an old handmade waterbed frame. Made out of 11 inche wide, inch and some thick wood, it creates a perfect container outline, that is going to be, for now, the focus of my gardening effots, and the goal this year is to have one kick ass garden that provides enough vegetables to provide for myself and two other people.
This is a challenge, as I garden in Phoenix, Arizona. From May through August, pretty much every growing thing is seared by a mid-day sun that will burn away the growth buds and forces plants to struggle in ways that are just terrifying. If they were people, we would call it torture.
And so it is that on this day, January 23rd, 2010, I begin the task of talking about my garden. Structural and design stuff will be found in additional pages below this one, links to them can be found below.
I’ll be adding new categories, as well, to my list (this blog is category focused, not tag focused). General cool stuff on gardening will be under the garden category, of course.
Gardening tends to make me very reflective, and I apply a lot of basic ideas about gardening to other things in my life — gardening is just something that for people who love it is above and beyond anything else.
And so it starts. Armed with my trusty Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs and my Sunset Western Garden Book, I am embarking on a project that will be, I hope, feeding me in just a few short months…
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