We always had a garden when I was growing up. Evenings, my Dad would issue orders from his kitchen kingdom, and I would take the bent metal colander and go foraging, gathering whatever he commanded - lettuce, carrots, broccoli and tomatoes from the garden, or sprigs of mint, basil, oregano, and parsley from the pots perched on our rickety wooden front steps. Everyone around where we lived grew vegetable gardens, and I took this small chore and others, like weeding, as a matter of course. I didn't particularly like gardening, and I didn't particularly pay any attention to it. It was something everyone did, along with washing dishes, hauling and splitting firewood, canning preserves, maintaining ailing infested Datsun pick-ups, and raising various scraggily goats and chickens.
Now, of course, I wish I would have paid more attention. I wish I would have paid more attention to a lot of things that were taken for granted in my community...if I had, I might have learned how to work on a car, or cook decent Indian food, or make wine, or garden.
With Liberty Garden I am realizing exactly how much I did not pay attention to the basic building blocks of gardening. The main thing I have learned by process of trial-and-error is this: gardening is all about soil.
Now, you'd think I would have realized this when my parents forced me, at age eight, to spend at least one day every summer shoveling chicken shit. You'd think I would have realized this when I was forced to haul immense buckets of compost on a daily basis. You'd think I would have realized this when I earned almost 40 credits in the history of agriculture in Mexico, Russian, and the American south.
Ah, no.
In observing Liberty Garden I have noted that all of the plants that were planted in proper garden beds are flourishing and beautiful, while the seedlings I stuck in crude holes I cleared in the lawn are languishing sadly.
On the advice of woof's mother, I have been watering these pathetic specimens> with water from woof's fish tanks, and have also added fish emulsion to the surrounding soil, but it may be too little too late.
Next year.
This large, ugly rat skulks in the west end of the raised bed and reminds me not to step on the asparagus. If only the cilantro was so lucky.
This jerk hangs out in the pea trellis. If I catch him, I'm throwing him out on Market Street with hope that a hipster on a motor-scooter runs him over. If morning glories are garden variety zombies, squirrels are garden variety pirates.
I found this little mouse while digging up morning glories. She lives in the rock garden now, and keeps an eye on the catnip for me. It seems to work.
