Garden Update

We joke in this house that I have a bit of a black thumb.  I have a history of killing plants.  Over winter, I was talking to Knut about how I was dreading this year’s gardening season, which surprised him.  I love fresh grown food.  I do enjoy many aspects of the garden.  It’s just…when you’re married to a farmer…there’s just so much pressure.  My garden always has masses of weeds in it.  I remember how terribly teased I was the first time I planted seeds and gasp! my rows came up crooked.  Farmers don’t like crooked rows.  It was a major moment where my “city” shone through.  Our garden is right off of our gravel driveway, and all the farm’s semi trucks, and several farm vendors drive past it throughout the gardening year.  The pressure to make it “farm worthy” was just too much.  I just began to loathe it. It got to the point that Knut wasn’t even allowed to mention weeds, or anything negative at all in the garden without me bursting into tears.  And believe me, there was plenty to point out.  Remember I have a knack for killing plants.  Except weeds, that is.  I’m great at growing those.  I’m a pro.

It was during those cold winter conversations when Knut gave me such freedom this year.  I think he saw I was ready to throw in the towel to gardening in general because it had lost all joy.  This year, we’re doing it my way.  If I want to plant the rows in squiggly lines, as long as it gives me joy than do it.  If I want to experiment with a new gardening style, then seize the day.  Just do it.  Try new things, new varieties, be fine with failure.  Enjoy the journey.  His encouragement brought lots of change this year.

We planned to move the garden to a different location, for a bit more privacy, but more importantly, to get the garden out of the whipping wind.  Knut suspected that the soil in our garden was quite nutrient deficient and that’s why there were certain crops I just couldn’t get to survive.  This lower garden had been repeatedly tilled, and I would like to move to a mulch/no-till garden in the future.  In fact, I was able to move some of this garden to the mulch style of gardening and so far I’m loving it.  So the plan was to cut into the grass up near the chicken coop a new gardening space in more French style beds, with a “companion gardening” twist to it.  Companion gardening, I read, was planting certain crops together that benefit each other.  It allows for denser spacing, and therefore, less weeding.  Sounds good.

The “old garden” I’m slowly turning into my garden for perennial crops like strawberries, raspberries, and this spring I planted several cutting flower bulbs.  Those 3 crops should take over the garden within a few years, but in the meantime, we planted several of our “old” crops down there because the garden we dug up by the coop was smaller than I expected, and I could use a bit more space.

What was funny was that last year the garden pretty much went to seed as my back and neck were throbbing from my injury and I just couldn’t keep up.  This spring, close to 15 tomato plants came up in their location from last year.  I know we should have dug them up.  I don’t need 15 more tomato plants. 6 is a good number for me, and that’s what I bought.  Knut left them there, though, and said we can just swim in tomatoes.  Surprisingly, I’m totally fine with that.  “Whatever dude.”  That’s my mantra to this year’s garden.  He’s uncertain whether or not they’ll even produce tomatoes, but I don’t see why not.  If anything, they’re deterring weeds, and doing their duty there so far.

We normally don’t plant potatoes, but this year we have 3 big rows of them.  Again, we needed to put something in the empty space that the perennials would grow into to protect from weeds, and this will be a special treat.  I do love garden potatoes, but Knut tends to struggle with his weight a bunch when I serve them, so I rarely do.  I’m not sure how his ski season will go if I serve him all these potatoes.  People might be getting them for Christmas or something.

The big thing that has helped this year is that Knut has been much more on top of the weeding than I have ever been.  Maybe it had something to do with the frustrations of machinery not working when it was supposed to this spring, and waiting for things to get fixed.  He was just out there a lot, and the garden looks better than it ever has.

He even wanted to add his own experiment to our new garden, which looks kind of crazy this year.  I’m certainly taking note as to which of these new gardening techniques I like and which I don’t!  He had seen on one farm tomato plants staked by having supports run above them, and had their heavy limbs tied up for support.  He wanted to try it, and I said, “why not?”  This is where I planted the tomatoes that I bought for this year.  The tomatoes that came up randomly in the old garden will be staked the old way.  So it’s basically the new garden is turning into our very uncontrolled experiment garden where we’re trying out every gardening technique we’ve ever wanted to all at the same time.  It’s a blast.  I love being a gardening rebel.