by Dennis L. Divine
I was born with the gardening bug. When I was three years old in 1972, I told my mother that we needed to convert our entire front lawn into a vegetable garden. Mom dismissed that idea as silly. One didn’t dare do that to a residential lawn in a nice neighborhood then—leading me to deadpan, “Okay, but don’t blame me if we starve.”
Even at that tender age, I was, however, apparently perceptive of a broader undercurrent. The back-to-the-earth movement was in full swing, with hippies embracing sustainability and a lot of interest with moving here to the Ozarks. DDT had been recently pulled off the market, necessitating an interest in chemical-free gardening. Magazine shelves in stores prominently featured The Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening. New stories routinely talked about combatting world hunger and the threat of a “population bomb.” Tillers and garden tractors had become commonplace for residential use. Serendipitously, I found myself in midst of a gardening renaissance as a young boy, and that influenced me for life.
Just as when I was very young, I still grow frustrated with gardening’s limits and realities. The garden layout is one case in point. For example, the ”square foot” notion of gardening is a bit oversimplistic; since a garden spot may actually be “spots” by necessity. There comes the frustrating realization that you can’t necessarily utilize every inch you have; for example, few gardeners can be fortunate enough to have rock-free ground uninhibited by shade, tree roots, or manmade obstructions. And you can potentially have a good garden space but then realize that it’s an eighth of a mile from the nearest water source. And there’s the problem with having too large of a garden: nothing gets accomplished.
My main garden spot is a section that’s about 20 feet wide and 30 feet long, more or less—scalable to my fluctuating ambitions within a given year. It’s tied to two sections of garden hose connected together and attached my home’s back hydrant. And this spot is convenient for bringing wheelbarrow loads of mulch from the driveway without being arduous. I can get in there with my trusty Planet Jr. wheel hoe after tilling to dig my rows and keep it weeded.
But my ground has challenges for cultivation. I believe it had once likely been prairie along a tributary (there are pebbles polished by running water). It later became cornfield my paternal grandfather rented/farmed with a moldboard plow and draft mules during the Dust Bowl, then alternating between pasture and hayfield for the next half-century afterward. There’s some rich soil, but most of it tops hardpan clay and a sneaky water table. The result in heavy rains is a soil with the gooey consistency of toothpaste–not quite perilous the quicksand of “Gilligan’s Island” quality but bedeviling nonetheless. (In one cringe-worthy instance, a backhoe became buried up to its axles while I was attempting to dig a second pond in a perpetually-boggy spot, necessitating a tow truck to winch it out. The muddy rut afterward resembled a battlefield trench in WWI Europe.)
Experts advise adding organic amendments, which my ground readily gobbles. I’ve used multiple bouts of straw, leaves, manure, greensand, compost, wood chips, cottonseed hulls, gypsum, and many truckloads of soil to no lasting effect. All of that soil-building material disappears after a few rains, swallowed whole; perhaps there is lost treasure under there too, booby-trapped like Oak Island. In general, it’s easier for me to concentrate organic matter in smaller spots than larger areas, giving better conditions lasting at least a growing season.
One area (larger than I’d like) that’s off-limits for anything but lawn is the septic tank’s leach field—that’s kept strictly as unobstructed lawn. The last thing I need there are tree roots causing problems with vulnerable lateral lines, and it obviously isn’t suitable for any vegetable gardening. Elsewhere, I’ve learned the perils of invasive plantings; mint and trumpet vine are two choices I regret for planting where nothing else really thrived. (Mint, as attractive as it is, is just this side of kudzu when it comes to taking over.) Wild plums and sassafras were other good intentions of mine that soon turned from standalone plantings to impenetrable thickets.
I’ve recently began attempting raised beds, at least on a limited scale. While taking some labor to set up, they offer the ability to get past shortcomings that your ground may face, such as drainage and soil quality. A raised bed is also a paradigm shift to old-school gardening: instead of gardening in wasteful rows that follow a certain geometry, you now plant in tighter clusters. This makes tasks such as watering and weeding easier.
So, as I ponder how to maximize my garden space, my dreams are tempered by the notions of weeding and watering all of that in the summer heat. As I’ve found out, gardening is indeed a great way to humble yourself.
Dennis L. Divine is a technical writer in the aerospace/defense industry. He homesteads in the Ozarks just outside Joplin, Missouri. He has chickens, waterfowl, and ambitions on scaling up his gardening.
photo credit: CJ, Unsplash