And then when I was a young wife and mother I had a small plot in our backyard with onions and tomatoes. How groovy of me. Hey, it was the early 70's. Somewhere in my belongings is a picture of Jarrad as a 9 month old sitting upright on a blanket in front of the garden while I did some weeding. Even in the years that I was a single mother without a permanent place to call home, I would pick up an inexpensive plant here and there. Something about nurturing and watering a living plant has always been satisfying to me.
The last couple of homes Joel and I owned in Florida became constant experiments (much to Joel's consternation) plotting our landscape using edible foods instead of ornamentals. After one particularly frosty winter when we lost our palm trees I replaced them with edible plants. Our backyard was filled with blueberry bushes, a huge lichee nut tree, a fig tree and I had raised beds with all our vegetables growing in them.
Now that we live on a for-real live farm I can plow up some dirt just about anywhere I please and plant whatever my heart desires. The first spring we were here I went crazy and had a huge garden.....can't remember exactly how big it was now but it was somewhere in the ballpark of 52'X72'. Yup, that's a lot of square footage to weed. And let me tell you it was overwhelming.
I planted 35 tomato plants, 3-22' rows of potatoes, and a wide row of corn. There were carrots, red beets, cabbage, broccoli, leeks, onions, melons, cantaloupe, acorn squash, and pumpkins. And don't forget the zucchini and cucumbers that overtook several rows. But I couldn't keep up with the weeding. And I probably only harvested 60% of what actually grew because I was so overwhelmed. So much of that first garden spoiled before I ever got around to harvesting it. There was just too much to do that first year.
That all took place before we had our kitchen in place, so I was canning and freezing veggies with folding tables as a work surface. Our kitchen cabinets arrived later on in October that year after the garden went dormant. But I sure did "put up" a lot of food that summer even with the limitations we faced that year. Then we got the alpacas and their pasture went in where the garden used to be.
So now I have the much smaller potager garden up closer to the house. Initially I divided it into 3 equal sections. Blueberry bushes on the left third along with an asparagus bed. This third of the garden is pretty much on auto pilot. The berry bushes get weeded every few weeks and I continue to amend their soil with coffee grounds that I bury around their roots. The asparagus simply come up every spring without fail and all I have to do is cut off the luscious spears to serve up for dinner.
The middle section of the potager(pronounced po/tah/zha) is loaded with strawberries. I kinda overplanted that section without realizing how much they would spread. Anybody want some strawberry plants? When I bought the skinny root bundles 3 years ago I had no idea that there were so many plants in each bundle. And since I am not one to waste anything I planted each and every one of them. Yup, all 110 of them. Giggle......let me tell you, we have strawberries every spring!
The right third of the potager has all my herbs and the flowers I grow to dehydrate for teas that I drink all winter. There is also a huge rhubarb plant and some flowers just for fun. The far right hand side of the garden is flanked by thornless blackberry bushes that are producing a bumper crop this season.
Many of the plants in this garden are perennials....meaning they come back year after year with little or no care. I like that. Makes sense to me to let Mother Nature do some of the work. For example, the asparagus come back each spring without fail, and the strawberries, blueberries and blackberries produce no matter what I do. Even some of the herbs return to their appointed spot without any help from me, as does the rhubarb and a few volunteer flowers.
So, what's the big deal? How hard is it to maintain this little plot? I have one area in the "tea" garden that is becoming overrun with weeds and I have procrastinated on cleaning it up for weeks now. You know why? I hate the heat and humidity. Yup, there I said it. I don't mind the work, but I can't stand the heat. Is it wrong of me to be dreaming of fall already? Sigh......But seriously, what kind of gardener hates the heat??? Me!
Don't "real" gardeners love standing for hours out in the sun, baking their backs while they toil bent over the plants they have nurtured from little seedlings? Don't "real" gardeners take pride in presenting a well manicured garden to anyone who happens to wander over to view it? I like the part where the garden looks pristine, I'm just not so thrilled about the part where I have to do all the weeding to keep it that way.
And to think Joel and I placed 3 huge sheets of black plastic (we're killing the grass before planting this fall) over another large area beside the potager in preparation for adding onto the garden. I know! How crazy is that if I don't want to weed what I already have to take care of? But I love the plants. I love harvesting our own food. It thrills me to see a watermelon developing on the vine and to know that the broccoli I grew will stock our freezer.
So I guess I'll just have to weed when I can and maybe not be such a perfectionist about the weedy part of my life. Yup. That sounds good to me. Because I sure do love opening up a home canned jar of my tomatoes as I prepare our dinner on a cold winter January evening. And the addition of three raised beds this year (like the one above) have made it a bit easier to work with the plants without having to do so much bending over....which is tough when you have a bulging disc as I do in my lower back.
The Reluctant Weeder-in-Chief,
Debbie
