I am not a farm person

I have never had much interest in growing things. I have never been successful in my efforts to cultivate flowers or house plants. What can I say? Plants just don’t like me. I think that maybe they can sense my dislike for their homes of mud and insects and choose to dislike me in return—the harder I try the faster my plants die.

So, when Tyler suggested that we plant a garden I secretly laughed inside. The only thing that I have ever been successful at growing is weeds. I told him that could be ‘fun’ but I really was not a farm person and proceeded to remind him of the sketchy relationship that I have with all forms of plant life. So that was the end of it no garden, no weeds, no dirt and, no ‘wild bugs’ to deal with.

Well the snow melted off, it started to warm up and Tyler again approached the garden subject. I found it funny that a man that refuses to eat almost all fruit and vegetables wanted a garden so badly. What was I to do? I gave in. We spoke to our landlord and made arrangements to use part of his back yard for the garden plot and I set the terms: Tyler was in charge of all the fertilizing (I wasn’t going to have anything to do with the manure)!

I didn’t realize how much work a garden would be: all the time that would be spent watering and weeding. We went on a week trip and found our garden over grown with weeds! Why is it that that weeds seem to grow 10 times faster than the plants that you actually wanted?! In addition all the weeds to be plucked from the ground I hadn’t realized, when I agreed to a garden, that I would have to talk a friend or family member into watering for us while we were on vacations and weekend trips. What a nuisance?

Much to my surprise it has been kind of fun planting and cultivating our garden—even though I was positive that we wouldn’t have any surviving plats by the end of the summer. I knew that if we wanted any of our plants to survive we had better plant a lot, and so we planted 15 different varieties of fruits and vegetables: 5 different kinds of tomatoes, yellow squash, zucchini, 2 varieties of cucumber, carrots, potatoes, peas, mint, basil, rosemary.

Much to my surprise we have had over half of our plants survive! This is huge progress for me, a real break-through! I am thrilled to share with you that we got 13 pods of peas before all of the pea plants died. The story unfortunately did not turn out as happy for the rosemary, lemon and other cucumbers which have complete died out. And we only lost half of the zucchini plant.

Luckily for us our landlord is a sweetheart and an experienced gardener. He has been very helpful and has probably done as much watering and weeding as Tyler and I have done—he may be a good part of the reason that any of our plants have survived.

There is a certain kind of satisfaction that comes from eating something you have grown. I can’t say that I have not been converted to the dirt and bugs lifestyle; I am still not a ‘farm person’ but I do have to say that this first experience in gardening has been a little more fun than I had anticipated.