Chronicles of a garden

I grew up in a big city.  I guess the neighborhood where I lived as a kid is technically the suburbs, but it still has a big city feel due to the very close proximity to the city.  Big buildings.  Lots of cars.  Fast pace of life.  When I got married, my husband and I moved to a different area in the same city, a part that is somewhat more urban and less suburban than the area in which I grew up.  We liked the area, had friends there, and at that time, I worked nearby.  Yes, it was fast paced, but it was really all I ever knew as home.

Fast forward a few years.  We were looking to move to New Jersey, but now we are specifically looking for a neighborhood that was very suburban.  What do I mean by that?  Little traffic, less overall congestion (not only cars but also buildings), a neighborhood that is easy to walk around, among other qualities.  But of utmost importance to us was a home with a big backyard.

Backyards are great places.  Kids can create their own makeshift baseball or football league (you only need 1 person on each team, right?).  Dogs can chase birds, tennis balls, squirrels, or even sunbathe.  I can grill on a full size grill, not only a tabletop model smaller than a half-sheet pan, which is all that fit on our apartment balcony.  Budding landscapers can go wild tending to a lawn, trimming hedges, seeding, weeding, and planting flowers.  But a backyard means I could finally try my hand at gardening.

I had not seriously tried gardening before.  I'd previously killed some potted flowers and herbs, to the point that I said my thumb was so brown it was black.  But there was an allure to caring for a vegetable garden that I could not shake.  I remember many years ago my mother grew tomatoes in pots, but I don't recall if it was difficult or if there was much of a yield.  My friend Serah had shown me growing plants in pots was not as hard as I would think, and I was at the same time awed, envious, and certain I could not do it.  Yet that voice in my head kept pushing me to try.

New Jersey is called "The Garden State" for a good reason.  Not only are there many farms within a very short drive (I'm talking less than 30 minutes from my home), but, at least in the area where I live, many people have vegetable gardens in their backyards.  I've seen everything from tomatoes and corn, two crops for which NJ is somewhat famous, to peppers, eggplant, squash, cucumbers, beans, kale, herbs and more.  Our local park has plots that people can rent for the season to have their own vegetable gardens.  A nearby college has a community garden run by volunteers as well as an agricultural department where students learn about farming; the school has a farmers market to sell some of what the volunteers and students grow, thus providing further funding for the program.

Seeing how pervasive local gardens are further fueled that aforementioned voice, which was now practically screaming at me to get moving.  Finally, in early June, I assembled my vegetable garden.  After speaking to several seasoned gardeners and doing quite a bit of research (both in print and online), I chose to plant in raised beds.  I bought a bed made of unfinished cedar, since it was recommended over plastic or other synthetic material beds.  The kit was easy to assemble by myself, though I did ask hubby for help with drilling the final screws (they needed to be inserted perfectly straight in order to hold the corners together without splitting the wood panels).  Other than lugging the 12 bags of dirt from the car to the backyard (mind you, each bag weighed 40 pounds!), the process of setting up the garden was fairly easy.  I bought some plants from the local hardware store, and some from the agricultural department of the nearby college.  At the end of the day, we had 4 varieties of tomatoes, 2 kinds of peppers, 1 potato plant, some eggplant, cucumbers, and parsley.  In an nearby part of the yard, I planted 2 blueberry bushes.  After adding some fencing to keep out my dog and other animals, and my garden was ready to go.

As someone now tending to a garden, I needed to make sure my plants had sufficient, but not excessive, water.  Initially, I asked hubby for the weather report each morning, since I knew he checked it each day.  After a few weeks of this, he downloaded the Weather Channel app to my phone so I could easily check the forecast myself.  No rain in today's forecast, go ahead and water as usual.  Flash flood warning for 3 pm, hold off and see if the rain comes before watering.

Each day, I'd go outside to see if there were buds, the sign of produce yet to come.  Finally, about 6 weeks after planting, we had our first cucumber!  I cut it into slices and we all savored the clean, crisp Kirby, wrapped in its ever so slightly bitter, yet thin skin.  No waxy residue.  No slimy, past-its prime film.  Certainly no plastic wrapping.  Cucumber in its simplest, purest form.  The cucumbers kept growing, and one even grew within the small panes of the fencing.  At the point it was fully grown, we had to cut the cucumber in half just to get it out!  We enjoyed cucumbers in salads, on bagels, and as a simple snack.  We didn't get much of a yield (about 12 total, but only 1-2 at a time), but I'm confident that I could grow cucumbers again.

Cucumber vines wrapping around the fence

The eggplant were the next to ripen.  I had planted the black beauty variety, and its leaves are very large, so I didn't see the first blossoms right away.  They are white with a wisp of purple, making the flower almost lavender in color.   After the blossom comes the tiny beginnings of the eggplant, wrapped in the stem that once held the blossom.  The eggplant grows, more quickly than I might think, and before we knew it, we had small eggplants, ready to be picked.  That first eggplant made about 3 tablespoons of babaganouj, which we shared and savored the day it was picked.  I have a couple more that I'll be picking later today to go into a roasted vegetable topped polenta.  

As you can see in the picture above, we did get some Italian parsley, but just a little here and there.  For next year, I'll need to plant more and trim more often.  We also didn't get much in the way of peppers.  I have 1 orange pepper still growing, and we got 2 pepperoncini so far with one more on the way, which you can see in the picture to the right.  Based on what I've been reading, the yields overall would likely have been more had I planted earlier in the season, more like early April and not early June.  As one seasoned farmer put it, start germinating your seeds after New Years and put the plants in the ground after Easter.

Finally, the tomatoes.  I'm crazy about them, to be perfectly honest.  I planted 4 seedlings, and 3 produced fruit.  The one that did not was very close to the eggplant and cucumber plant roots, and likely couldn't get enough nutrients from the soil.  But even if I had planted 8, I could have used all the tomatoes they produced.  As with the other plants, June is a little late to be planting tomatoes (for this climate), so the yield has been limited.  We've gotten a few Romas and a few heirloom Brandywine, and a few of the other heirloom variety I got, the name for which escapes me at the moment.  Here are some photos of the (unripe) tomatoes.

 

I ask myself, what did I learn from the experience of this vegetable garden?  The first thing that comes to mind is connecting with nature.  Growing up in a big city, I didn't have too much interaction with farms except as something to visit on a trip, driving an hour or more from home to get there.  Now I have one in my backyard.  I have to think more about things like rainfall, when to feed my plants more, what does the soil look like, and so forth.  Last week I started a compost bin to recycle fruit and vegetable trimmings, grass clippings, leaves, eggshells and more, to get even better soil for next year.  Seeing a ten-inch earthworm in my garden exites, rather than disgusts me (though I'm not running to touch it), because I know it's naturally aerating the soil and feeding my plants.  As an aside, I also find I'm putting more in the recycling bin, probably because of all the reading I've been doing on environmentally friendly gardening and cooking.  Not a bad thing, for certain.

The other lesson I've learned from gardening is that I can push myself to try new things.  As I mentioned earlier, I both wanted to and was afraid of gardening.  In my research, I learned that most first-year gardens don't have much of a yield; knowing this, I prepared myself and had limited expectations for the garden.  Because of this, I'm thrilled with each pepper, eggplant, parsley leaf, cucumber, and tomato we've tasted.  The single, solitary potato we've had so far was lovingly diced, sauteed until slightly crisp with the tiniest amount of butter, placed in a tortilla with some scrambled eggs and salsa, and shared with hubby one morning for breakfast.  I appreciated that potato more than any other, because of the hard work that went into the garden overall, but also because that single potato, along with all its garden neighbors, represents that even when things are difficult, the outcome, however small and seemingly insignificant, means something to someone.  Most likely, that someone is myself.