Plot 79

The best advice I am ever going to give in this blog I will give right now, at its inception, and in the first sentence:  grow a food garden.  If you are poor, grow your own food.  If you do not trust the food-like substances sold to us, grow your own food.  If you are leery of relying upon the system’s continuing ability to produce and distribute what we need, grow your own food.  If you would rather not be forced to buy from companies you may not actually like, grow your own food.  If you see a need for increased autonomy and localized production in our future, grow your own food.  If you want to learn more about how to build and maintain a human-supporting ecosystem because you recognize this as integral to any hope of establishing colonies on the moon, Mars, and onwards, grow your own food.

That last one is maybe mostly just for me, but I mention it in case it might resonate with anyone else out there.  Hello, nerds!  I know, if we’re talking the moon and Mars, we need to talk about underground, and if we’re talking about underground, we need to talk about fungus.  But we’ll save the topic of mushrooms for another day, only partly because I have not yet been as successful as I would like growing them.

SO!  Yes, grow your own food.  Stellar recommendation!  Now we get to the details, and that’s where things get hairy, at least for me.  I live in an apartment that has no balcony and is none too sunny (and contains a cat besides), and for whatever reason I am not permitted to tear up my landlord’s yard.

Also, I have a black thumb.

But, enough with the whining.  What must be done shall be done!  For a landless serf such as myself, the options I am currently aware of are:

grow stuff in containers on windowsills (or grow stuff that does not need even windowsill-level light, such as aforementioned mushrooms)

grow stuff under lights

guerrilla garden

sharecrop or otherwise borrow the use of someone else’s land (with their permission)

start a container garden on the roof

get yourself an allotment in a community garden

I have dipped my toe into 1, 2, and 6.  I started container growing last summer, and this is my first year with an actual normal outdoor garden plot, courtesy of the splendid Peterson Garden Project.  (I’m at Global Garden.)

To get a general idea of what community gardens are near you, you might start here.

Anyway, a few introductory words about my thirty-two square feet of fight the system!

This is what the plot looked like in April, when the garden opened.  You can see it is a raised bed, which makes my life simpler in more ways than I can count.  You can also see happy relics from the previous tenant!  Some trellising, some stakes, some radicchio, and some onions.

This is what it looks like in early June:

The onions are still there (albeit a bit storm-knocked), although the radicchio is gone.  The radicchio grew exceedingly fast, and I harvested a few of its leaves (the ones with red in them, which the Internet PROMISED me meant they’d been frost-nipped and were therefore less bitter) to sauté and then plop in soup.  But then we had some hot days, and it bolted.  (To bolt, for those of you who, like me, are as innocent as an unhatched egg of horticultural knowledge, is when a plant suddenly shoots up very tall and generates its seeds…often getting bitter in the process, as to which, why?  You’d think it’d be happy!  Anyway, heat can provoke this reaction.)  And it was getting beyond huge.  So out it went, and I have not yet filled those interesting two squares of vacancy left behind, although I have plans for them, because I do like to scheme.

This brings up an interesting subject:  squares.  Everything is all laid out in a grid.  Everything is also embarrassingly hyper-labeled, but I promise you that there is NO way I can remember what was even supposed to go where if I do not write it down.  In a location right in front of my face.  So, the square issue.  This is what the PGP folks recommend we do, use a form of intensive cultivation (we don’t have that much space, after all) called square-foot gardening.  The basic idea is that you plant in squares, not rows, and so can plant more densely and efficiently.

There are all sorts of rules of thumb like one square can host four bush beans, but even a cursory amble through the interwebs reveals all sorts of people having all sorts of successes and failures with all sorts of numbers of various plants in their square feet.  This was probably crazy ambitious of me, but when I laid out my garden plan (which I have already deviated from), I used a combination of square-foot and companion planting techniques.  The idea behind companion planting is that some plants are good neighbors that help each other thrive, by bringing in good bugs or warding off bad ones, improving the soil, providing useful ground-cover, etc. etc.  (Also, some plants are bad for each other and should be kept apart.)  So, for example, I have an oregano plant by a butternut squash and a basil next to a tomato, and so on.  That trashes the square-foot calculations beyond even the inherent uncertainty, so, you know, I’ll just take it as it comes.

One of the first complicating factors that I discovered with the fussy and delicate tableau I created for my original garden plan is that a lot of seeds are little, and even if I was very careful in watering them (which I probably wasn’t), wind and rain do whatever, whenever, and however they feel – what I am getting at is that some of these seedlings that come up are doing so a ways over from where I planted them, especially the herbs.

Also, because a lot of seedlings look pretty similar in the newborn phase, I have absolutely no idea what some of these guys are.  They might also be volunteers that I did not plant at all, either weeds (which I have seen some of) or lettuce (which I have seen a LOT of – at first I was pulling it out, and then I realized, wait, it’s lettuce, I can EAT this, that was kind of the whole IDEA…).  And, some of the things I planted also died, by bug (grr) or weather or just because.  So, in a few short weeks, I have had more than one salutary lesson on my inability to overcontrol things!  Plants will busily figure stuff out and do all kinds of work on their own.  Some stuff is surviving, growing, and even looking kind of happy, so I will follow its lead.  Self-correcting systems are the kind of systems that work best for me.