Oh Mother Nature, why do you hurt me so?

Posted by Kelsey in Gardening.

My garden has been flourishing all summer long. I have been staring at corn stalks taller than me, tomato plants dotted with red ripe tomatoes, full ripening squash laying under their large shady leaves, all of it, just waiting to be eaten. I’m fairly patient, and honestly with gardening, you have to be patient. I was waiting for the day that I would walk out to my garden and say “today’s the day to pick all of this stuff”. Unfortunately Mother Nature had a different plan for all that lovely food.

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Plan, Plan, Plant!

Posted by Kelsey in Gardening.

Planning is a key word for me when it comes to vegetable gardening. I spent a good part of December, January, and some of February thinking about and planning the garden to come this spring. I ordered lots of seed catalogues, browsed several websites, and had long talks with my dad about what should be done, and when to do it.

Since I was starting from scratch the first thing I had to think about was location. Location, Location, Location. It’s imperative that you chose the correct spot, your plants depend on it. Plants need sun to grow, and not just a little sun here and there for an hour a day; they need full sun. Which means anywhere from 6-8 hours of sun shining down on those little seed pods, heating them and drawing them up out of the dirt. They also need water, most vegetables and fruits contain a large percentage of water-a tomato is 95% water! If your plant lacks the proper amount of water, you probably won’t see anything worth eating once summer rolls around. Keeping the water source close to the garden ensures that you will have an easier time watering, which means you should be able to do it on a regular basis. If it’s a pain in the butt, you probably won’t do it.

So I looked around my yard, which is mainly tree covered. Overhanging trees are a garden’s arch enemy. I learned this last year when my tomato plants gave me absolutely nothing to eat. Take your time if you have to, scope out your yard or patio, see what areas remain sunny and warm throughout the day. I chose a spot on the empty lot that I own on the other side of my house. Not too many trees, open and flat, plenty of sunshine, not so water convenient, but I had no other option. I would just have to figure something out-water moves a little easier than the 200 year old maple trees in my yard. I understand that I have more room then some, but the same principles apply, find the sunniest spot you can, and hopefully the water is close.

Once you’ve got a spot, it’s time to prepare the soil. The spot that I had chosen was just a nice grassy area, so it had to turn into soil first. I decided to create a rather large garden, about 20 feet by 40 feet, but only do what you think you can manage. I have a full time job, a dog to love, a husband to socialize with, laundry to do, Sims to play, flowers to grow, and dinners to cook. Needless to say, I am never sitting around staring at the wall just LOOKING for something do. So I’m going to give you details on how I got my garden started, which you could do yourself, but I’m a busy woman.

At the advice of my father, I started looking through the classified ads in the newspaper at around March 1^st . I was looking for someone who was offering a rototilling service. A rototiller is a little machine that you can walk behind; it churns up the dirt and mixes it all together. I eventually found a man who was offering said service, and I gave him a call. I suggest that you get several quotes from different people, I was quoted $900 by someone, and eventually ended up paying about $150 when I finally found someone else. Let me also mention now that I am not rich, at all. You can also rent rototillers from equipment rental companies, and some mega home stores, just take a browse through the yellow pages or online. When the rototilling is done, you want to have soft soil that has a little height to it, something that looks like you could dig into it. Now you can also test your soil for PH levels and all the jazz, but I’ll just be real and say that I didn’t do that and I really don’t care to. If stuff didn’t grow then I might think about it, but I like to fly by the seat of my pants.

Here’s my dad, helping with the tilling!

Once the tilling was done.

Your next step is to decide what you want to grow, I figured this out over the winter, it gave me something to look forward to when it was snowing outside. I had recently read a book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (I strongly recommend this book) and after reading her chapter on hybrid seeds and big seed companies I decided to only grow Heirloom plants.

Heirloom plants are plant varieties that were grown back in a time when people weren’t so concerned with how round and symmetrical a tomato was, and they weren’t worried about how they would travel thousands of miles, or how long they would sit on a shelf. These are the vegetables and plants of yesteryear, back before 10 year old girls had boobs. There is no genetic modification with these types of plants, and that’s how I like it. They may no be the prettiest, but they are the tastiest and most nutritionally valuable, and quite honestly I don’t want a squash that some scientist has modified in any way, I want it how it was meant to be, tasty!

After deciding that I wanted to just grow heirloom varieties, I started thinking about what I would actually eat, there is no sense in growing something unless its going to be eaten, either by you, people that you live with, or your neighbors.

So here is what I’m growing:

• Brandywine tomatoes
• Church tomatoes
• Black krim tomatoes
• Red potatoes
• White potatoes
• Strawberries
• Zucchini
• Yellow Squash
• Spaghetti Squash
• Jalapeno peppers
• Yellow bell peppers
• Green bell peppers
• Connecticut field pumpkins
• Corn
• Beans
• Sunflowers
• Sweet Potatoes
• Lots of Herbs!

When you buy seeds they come with instructions for planting, and speaking as someone who never reads directions, read the directions! I didn’t read the directions on my strawberries and now they aren’t doing so well. So please, if only to avoid wasting money, read the planting instructions. Water the seeds after you plant them, and then pay attention to the weather-there is no sense in watering if it’s going to rain the next morning or overnight. Over watering can kill your plants so pay attention to how moist the soil looks and how green everything looks. Things will look sad for a few weeks, but once those seeds get going, you’re going to wonder what you were thinking with all that planting, or is that just me?

Garden Photos from early in the spring.

Planting Potatoes! You have to cut them in half when you plant them.

Once they start to sprout you have to hill dirt up around the stems, otherwise they fall over, and potatoes don’t like it when their stems fall over. We planted these in late march, by June I was digging them up periodically for dinner, oh they were good! I still have about 30 feet of them in the ground, I just dig them up as I need them, they will just continue to grow as I leave them in the ground.

40 Feet of Potatoes!

This was my first planting of tomatoes, these are Brandywine and Church varieties. You put the cage around them for when they get larger, otherwise they fall over, and your tomatoes get all nasty on the ground.

Just an FYI, tomatoes and potatoes can be grown in buckets or barrels on a deck or patio that gets plenty of light!

My Basil, Oregano, and Parsley. I tend to grow herbs in containers on my deck, that way when I’m cooking I can easily pop outside to gather some for dinner.

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My heart is shaped like a tomato…

Posted by Kelsey in Gardening.

When I was asked to start writing about my gardening escapades I felt some real insecurity. I’m not a writer, in fact I told Katie (the editor-in-chief) that I would preface my first entry with my favorite saying about myself;

“I can’t spell, I can’t grammerate, and I make up my own words”

That pretty much defines who I am, even when it doesn’t involve writing.

Since I’m not a writer I was immediately plagued with the thought of where to start, what is the most appropriate way to jump into this huge topic, what should I talk about first? So I figured there is no better place to start than where it all started, with my father.

I grew up in the suburbs where all the houses looked the same. Within that suburban landscape was my home, a home that looked just like all the others, a home that sat on a small piece of land just like every other neighbor within arm’s reach. The only thing that set us apart from all of our neighbors was that the small piece of land that our nondescript house resided on didn’t go to waste. Growing up with a person like my father probably set me up for my interest in gardening and whole foods. When my mother said that she needed a tomato, she ran out back, not to the grocery store.

My father has grown and still grows most of his produce on a piece of land that isn’t even measured in acreage but in square feet, and yet there is still room to let my dog run on weeknight visits and plenty of lawn left to mow. With proper planning and some patience, and of course years of experience, my father has grown a long list of things that we have either eaten, tried to eat, or looked at with questioning glances. As a child and young adult I had the luxury of knowing exactly where most of my produce came from.

When I finished high school I ended up moving to Orlando Florida with my boyfriend (now my husband) to attend college. This move would prove to be a rude awakening when it came to my food culture. I grew up picking tomatoes off the vine; I now found myself staring into the pale red flesh of a rock hard “tomato” under the florescent lights of an Albertson’s Grocery store, struggling with the fact that I was about to pay a ridiculous amount of money for something that I wasn’t even sure was edible. Even worse, there were people buying those tomatoes that had no clue what that tomato should be.

I have a big place in my heart for a good tomato, so please don’t hold it against me if I focus on that. There were other atrocities as well, grapes that were all brown and soft, squash that tasted like cardboard boxes sprinkled with brown sugar, onions that smelled like onions but tasted like nothing, green beans that were soggy and limp; this list could go on for another page if I let it. But the point is that I was staring into the face of what the large part of America thought was a tomato. Little did they know what they were holding in their hands wasn’t even close.

Like most college students, I didn’t have an excess of money and I was living in an apartment with nothing nearby that resembled grass. I honestly had no real knowledge of gardening, whether I had the space or not. I spent about 4 years living in Florida, eating like most of the United States, processed foods, milk from who knows where, and produce from Mexico that has been cross bred for travel endurance, not for flavor or nutritional value. This type of eating took its toll on me. I started having the worst case of acne I could have ever imagined, my cheeks actually hurt if I smiled at times, that’s how crazy my face got! I gained about 60lbs when I moved away from home; I instantly had stomach problems, and the fact that my stomach wasn’t fitting into my pants was the easy one to deal with. Needless to say, this switch to mainstream produce and boxed foods had some negative effects on my body, my mind, and my self esteem.

After living in Florida for about 2 years longer then I would have liked, my boyfriend and I moved back to Maryland, where I had grown up, where we had met and fell in love, and where my body liked to be. Upon moving back, Justin and I were about 2 months away from our wedding. We were hoping to buy a home, and my parents were generous enough to allow us to move in with them while we prepared for these huge changes. I was instantly back into the safe arms of my mother’s cooking and my father’s vegetables. My skin was slowly healing, with a little help from Proactiv, my weight was slowly dropping, and I mean slowly, and my mood was stable (aside from wedding planning and home buying). I was finally seeing a glimmer of sunshine in the distance of what had been a 4 year rain storm. I was having the realization that you most certainly are what you eat. I consciously saw these changes in myself and realized that I was never going to do to my body what I had done to it in Florida.

While we were house hunting Justin insisted on having some room to move, he wanted some land, God Bless him! He also eventually admitted that he wanted to be able to pee outside? (That question mark is appropriately placed, I grammerated that on purpose.) Justin grew up in military bases all over Europe and eventually settled in Florida for his adolescence. Moving away from Florida when I was finished with school was pretty hard on him, but he was a complete gem about moving back to Maryland. So I refrained from arguing with him or talking to him about how long it was going to take him to mow the lawn. If my new husband wanted some land, he was getting some land, and honestly rural settings pull on my heart strings. We eventually purchased a farm house that was built in 1870 set on a piece of land that is a little under 1 acre. Now that’s not a lot of land compared to most farm standards nowadays, but in comparison to what he and I both grew up with, this was a large chunk of God’s country.

We have now lived in our house for about 2 years. Last year was a failed attempt at creating a successful garden, due mostly to me not being patient and improper plant locations (those need sunlight to grow, did you know?).

So when I was asked to write about my gardening I was completely excited, because this year is my first real attempt at a garden that has been planned. So I will be documenting my steps along the way. I’ll post pictures and things that I learn, as well as some insight that my father may provide since he’s helping me this time around. Although I have a large plot of land for gardening, I beg you to keep in mind that my father has done much more with much less.

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