Out in the Garden

In the Beginning / New Beginning

The beginning of my interest in vegetable gardening was back in 1992. Recently married, we were living in an apartment. I grew up in the country but always took the greatness of that for granted. One day at the Public Library a book caught my eye from Rodale press about organic gardening and intensive gardening techniques. It so intrigued me! You mean you don't have to plant vegetables in long rows and weed with a hoe for hours in the hot sun? You don't have to spread chemical fertilizer at every planting? You can put more than one vegetable in the same space and train some veggies to grow up trellises instead of sprawling all over the ground? These were revolutionary new ideas to me - and I wanted to give them a try!

That first year my mom and step-dad let me have a quarter of the land where we used to have tobacco. They grew their garden on the other 3/4. I arranged my crops in tightly spaced beds. They planted traditional rows. There wasn't much rain that summer and my little plot faired much better then their side because it was easier to water and the plants shaded out the weed competition. At the end of the summer I got twice as much produce from my part as she did on her part and my area was 3 times smaller!

I went on to learn more and more about French intensive techniques, organic gardening, square foot gardening, and companion planting. We moved to a sub-division house with a small backyard and continued producing good gardens for many years. We then moved again in 1999 back to the country. We only have 1 acre, but we try to make the best of it. For some reason, even with landing back in the country, I fell away from gardening for the past few years.... Until Now! This season will be the new beginning, and I will record the whole process.

I never could find that original book available for purchase, but I collected many other books and magazines about organic gardening. Recently my loving wife bought and put together a new bookshelf just for my old books. We unpacked them from the boxes in storage and now they are back where they belong - ready to be used again! So I thought it would be appropriate for my first blog picture to be one honoring these wonderful books.

This weekend we worked in the garden quite a bit and took pictures of it all. In my next post I will detail how we've prepared the yard and garden for this growing season. We already have strawberries, broccoli, onions, spinach and lettuce growing. I will update you on how well or not-so-well they are doing next time too.

I am very excited to begin the gardening season as well as this new blog!