Gardening is Not as Easy as They’d Like You to Believe

I suppose that’s not what you wanted to hear but I feel that it is my solemn duty to tell you the truth. I say this because I see a lot of articles online and in print that encourage anyone to grow food and they make is seem like it’s a walk in the park. This is a national travesty. People are being led down the primrose path and I’m afraid that unsuspecting people will jump on the bandwagon, have all sorts of problems and get soured on one of the most rewarding things a person can do in their life. These unscrupulous or just bad writers make it seem like all you have to do is get a little potting soil, plant the seeds, water, sit back and wait for the bounty. This is so far from the truth as to be laughable. I want you to know the truth so you can plan accordingly and then I’m sure you will still have problems, but they will be minimized and you won’t think it’s your fault and that you have a Black Thumb.

All my ancestors on both sides of the family had big gardens. They were Illinois farmers and hillbillies from the hills and valleys of Ohio, and they worked hard to put food on the table. They couldn’t pop by the grocery store if they ran out of something so they had to make do with what they had.  All of them grew big gardens and in keeping with tradition so did my mom and dad. I guess you could say gardening is in my genes. So, once I achieved adulthood, I took up gardening myself. I must say that I had an advantage because I started gardening in Iowa, land of fertile soil and abundant rain. However, Iowa is not perfect. So, I also learned a few things even then.

Back in the years of my first marriage, I grew broccoli for example. Once I had to go out of town for a while and I wasn’t really worried about my garden. Once I returned, I was horrified to see my broccoli completely covered in some kind of beetle. Inedible. My broccoli harvest was a bust. My dad grew towers of tomatoes on fine river bottom land and acres of squash on his little country property so why couldn’t I? Still and all I had not been forged in the crucible of garden challenges.  Iowa is about as easy on a gardener as it can get. The real learning was yet to come.

I moved to California and the hills of Berkeley looking out over the bay. This was when I first became aware of the advantage I had in Iowa. For one, the soil of the Berkeley hills had been graded for housing and was pretty much only heavy clay. If there had been any topsoil at all it was long gone under the bulldozer. This is when my education began in earnest and it began at the bottom literally.

1. You must have good soil and an adequate source of water. If I impress upon you one thing and one thing only it is you have to have what plants like to grow in. Think about what makes healthy people. If people only eat junk food and drink soda pop, they don’t grow up to be big and strong and are likely to be sick all the time. Plants are the same way. If they don’t get a good “diet” of essential nutrients from the soil and from water they won’t thrive and will be victims of predators (insects and microbes), won’t bear fruit and maybe even die.

The way you solve this problem is to not rush out, buy seedlings or seeds and plant straightaway. Here’s what you do: Test your soil first. Does it have a good balance of NPK (nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus). What is the consistency? Is it heavy clay (fine particles), sandy (large particles), or overabundant in organic matter (rotted or rotting plant matter? (People in jungles have this problem. Jungles actually have very poor soil because there aren’t minerals. Jungle soil is overabundant in plant matter and has very little minerals.) Depending on what the composition and nutrient balance your soil has (if it has a balance at all) tells you what you need to do to make it right.

If you have depleted soil like I found that I had when I moved to Arizona I had some choices to make. I wanted to get a harvest as soon as possible and adding compost – a good idea any day of the week – to improve my soil was going to take years to get the balance right. So, I made the investment of large amounts of already composted material that I could then mix with my native soil. This you can do. If you’re a purist then do it another way.

• Which brings me to my second admonishment: All your expenditures and investments are going to be up front. This is ideal. Of course, you can build as you go along but there will be frustrations if you delay the infrastructure. If you’re willing to deal with frustration and many hours of rehab then go right ahead.  You are oure own boss.

• Consider fencing against rabbits, squirrels, deer, gophers, birds and a myriad number of critters hiding in the bushes waiting for you to finish so they can help themselves. Once I decided to have a row of gorgeous sunflowers along the front of my house. I tilled the soil, planted, watered and in a few days up came the most gorgeous little sunflower sprouts. The next day I went out to enjoy my little beauties and lo and behold they were all gone! Slugs and snails had crept out from under the house and eaten them all off level with the ground.

Then there’s the other time I went out to my garden that was fully fenced only to see a buck deer munching away peacefully on my bibb lettuce. Buck deer eyeballs me. I eyeball buck deer. And then, from a complete standstill, he sprang over the 5-foot-tall wood fence into the neighbor’s yard. See ya sucka! I’ll be back later!

Water! Are you going to hand water whenever you need to? It might be every day depending on your climate so you might want to think about a drip system. Hand watering a half-acre of garden is not an easy task. If you live in a climate where there is abundant rain that will help but what about times when Mother Nature doesn’t produce on schedule?

Fencing: See aforementioned anecdotes. Think about what critters live in your area. If there’s deer you need to build your fences high and I mean HIGH. If there are gophers and you don’t want to trap and kill them, you need raised beds with wire bottoms. If there’s rabbits you need small hole chicken wire perimeter.

My least favorite part of gardening for all time: weeding. So how are you going to deal with it? If you’re thinking ahead, you lay out your garden with rows wide enough to get a wheelbarrow down the aisles. It’s very annoying to have to trundle everything from the gate to the beds by hand. It’s much easier to fill the wheelbarrow and wheel it to whatever area you’re working on. But wide aisles get filled with weeds if you don’t plan ahead. It’s bad enough to have to weed around the vegetables you’re growing without having to deal with aisles choked with weeds. I solved that problem by sheet mulching.  Sheet mulching is laying down corrugate boxes that have been opened to lay flat in one layer. Before I put down the corrugate, I water thoroughly. Then I put grass clippings, hay leavings, or straw on top of that. Earthworms are king in the garden, and they love the warm moist environment under there.

Insects and birds: what are you going to do about insects and birds? If you’ve got a really good healthy soil base the plants themselves can withstand a certain amount of insect predation. Hand picking tomato horn worms is satisfying, and chickens love these protein bits. If things really get out of control, there’s always Sevin but that’s the last resort. Birds are a different story. Please, NEVER use deer netting. Use deer netting only if you want to come out to your garden one day and find a beautiful blue bellied lizard or house finch entangled and dead in the netting. Find another way. It’s work – then again it’s a garden and gardens are synonymous with work – but wire cages around young plants work really well to keep the curve billed thrashers from digging up your tender babies looking for grubs. Once the plants get big enough the thrashers and other birds will – usually – leave them alone.

Now that we mention insects what about disease? My favorite is the powdery mildew that you’ll get on your Armenian cucumbers when it rains too much. My advice? Don’t let disease get out of hand. If you notice it nip it. Once you’ve got a full-blown case of anything it’s hard to eradicate.

Preserving and storing your bounty: nobody ever talks about this. Let’s say everything went well for you. Let’s say you got good nutritious soil and a drip watering system and now you’ve got towering tomatoes, carrots and beets coming out of your ears plus enough zucchini to feed an army. What do you do with all of it? I got a small chest freezer for the squash, corn, okra, and carrots. For the tomatoes I learned how to can. Then there’s always the compost pile. Every garden should have a corner dedicated to compost. Harboring the pile within the confines of a three-sided pallet structure is helpful but not necessary.  Not only can you put your kitchen scraps in there you can dump whatever produce you simply can’t deal with. Yes, it seems wasteful and don’t forget the neighbors who will gladly take free stuff off your hard-working hands. Usually with a big smile on their faces all the while never acknowledging what you had to do to get them those giant zucchini. They simply have no idea. But you do have an idea, and you get not a little satisfaction of being able to get in their good graces. Some people will advise you to take your produce to the nearby street corner or the farmers’ market, but who wants to schlep all the tables and boxes and produce and then have what little you brought wither in the sun because you don’t sell it all. At a pittance by the way considering all the work you put into it. Usually, you don’t even have enough to make it worth the effort because the naughty plants don’t mature at the same time so you’ve got 12 cucumbers that aren’t sellable after you give 12 to the neighbors.

Yeah, learn how to can. And get a chest freezer. Then you’ll have squash for soup mid-winter and tomatoes for sauce.

Is this enough to get you to throw in the towel? If yes, then I’ve done my job. You’ll save yourself a big headache and lots of money and time. But if it hasn’t then full steam and do your due diligence. Gardening is a blast if it’s done right. And it’s a blast even if it isn’t and you’re in it for the long haul. I’ve learned something new every season and it helps me refine my chops for next season. So, my dears, think about what I’ve said. I really do hope you decide to go for it. Then I want to hear all your horror stories and we can laugh.

Postscript: That was the bad news. Now here’s the good news: if you heed my warnings and build your garden like I told you, you may be saying to your family things like, “Well, we aren’t going hungry this winter. I just harvested 78 pounds of sweet potatoes.” It can happen and it does.