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I've always enjoyed nurturing plants. In college, I had garden-enthusiast landlords who allowed me to till a small plot. In graduate school, I was pretty much limited to what I could do in pots, until I found out that Fermilab has a community garden. For a fee of $5, lab users lease a 20'x40' plot and have access to irrigation, mowers, tillers, wheelbarrows, and all the horse manure they can shovel. In 2004 we took ownership of a poorly-tended plot. Last year, we added an abandoned plot to the south. If nobody claims the plot to the north, which laid fallow last summer, we'll probably take that one too. As it is, we have more than double the square footage in our garden as we do in our home.
Gardening is something of an adventure, as well as a puzzle. Two years ago we had more zucchini than we could give away, last year, the same number of plants produced 2 fruits. All our winter squash died, and for the second year in a row, our corn was destroyed by corn rootworm beetles. We got a few pods of peas, but we shared our plants with some kind of furry nibbler. The few carrots we grew were stunted, pale and bitter. Our main eating plants were beans, potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes. We've refined our seed list to include pepper varieties for northern climates, lettuces and carrots that are easier to plant, and exotic varieties of tomatoes. We've given up on corn, skipped the potatoes (store-bought taste just as good) and decided to go exclusively pole-beans (picking the bush beans gave me a rash).
We had better success with the flowers. A couple plantings failed, but I spent most of the summer cutting flowers and making arrangements. Our most surprising success was a "volunteer" sunflower that reached 15' before toppling under its own weight. My favorite flowers were the daffodils, dahlias, and celosia. All three made excellent cutting flowers. The daffodils were so fragrant that they overpowered the scent of the chives I cut at the same time.
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The outline is the footprint of our garden, the shaded area the footprint of our condo.
Josh and the 15' sunflower.
Narcissus Manly
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