Some Days I Need to Write it Down: July 2011

I tried having a compost pile for a while but it really didn't work for me. I put it at the back of my yard in a place where I couldn't see it, because it's ugly and I wanted it in a place where people couldn't see it. But there wasn't any way for it to get water there unless I did it by hand with a hose every day and that was never going to happen. Plus I had to to turn it and that was awkward and I just didn't ever really do anything with it. So every thing just sat here and dried out and didn't decompose.

So I got the bright idea to start just burying the kitchen scraps in the garden. I figured I'd just bury stuff in one half of the garden and plant in the other and then maybe switch each year or something. At least the compost was getting water so I was pretty sure it would decompose and I don't really mind turning over the garden so this seemed like a good solution.

But I was wrong. It wasn't just a good solution. It was one of the most brilliant things I've ever done in my entire life!!!!!

This year I planted in my garden: tomatoes, peas, beans, brussels sprouts, onions and garlic. That's 6 things that would have taken up about 10% of the garden.

However, this is what my garden looks like:

And these are the things that are currently growing in my garden:

Casaba Melon (or maybe those are different melons I'm not sure)

Pumpkin

Spaghetti Squash (with an inexplicably green bottoms)

Basil

Tomatoes

Cucumbers

Butternut Squash

lots of normal Spaghetti Squash

Watermelon

An Apple Tree

An Peach Tree

Onions

Lettuce (gone to seed)

Giant Sunflowers

Potatoes

Everything that I did not plant (the overwhelming majority of my garden) grew there either from the seeds of things I planted last year or the seeds of things we ate that got buried in the garden.

Throughout the spring I went out to my garden several times a week and found a scene similar to this.

Since the sprouts of melons, squash and cucumbers all look the same, I never knew what was sprouting. So I just thinned down each patch leaving one or two that looked particularly healthy and let it grow. The result as a very good reflection of what we have eaten in the last year (or in the case of the cucumbers, things that I bought and then forgot to eat before they went soft and I threw them in the compost sack). The peach and apple tree should probably be moved from the garden but I'm wondering if they won't actually be good for shade in the heat of the summer. I'm still pondering.

And the tomatoes are fantastically more productive than they have ever been in all my years of attempting to garden. I've had promising tomato plants before, but not of them have ever made good on their promise before this year. Which I'm convinced is because they actually had good soil to grow in for the first time.