Since we’ll probably be here for two years (inshalla/God willing), the best thing I can do is make it feel like home. What makes me feel at home somewhere? Putting my hands in dirt and growing edible plants. Ever since we’ve lived in Oklahoma I have had a passion for vegetable gardening. I had a huge backyard there and devoured books on square foot gardening, raised beds, mulching and composting, trellising vining crops like cucumbers and melons, and four season gardening (extending the growing season with hot water bottles and bedsheets or cold frames).
The result of all that study was the garden of my dreams — 3 four foot wide beds that were twelve feet long. I grew long rows of baby lettuces that I would snip with scissors to have fresh salad every day, a green wire trellis covered with sugar snap peas, half a bed of purple, yellow, and green bush beans, rows of carrots, beets, swiss chard, and spinach, bushes of yellow and green squash, cucumbers and melons sprawling on an A-frame trellis (the key is to support the growing melons inside pantyhose slings), and half a bed full of corn. The other half held pumpkin plants that quickly overgrew their beds and crawled across the grass — we just mowed around them until pumpkin harvest was over.
In addition to the beds I had 8 huge tomato plants along the back fence — cherries, yellow pear, early reds, a variety called sungold that held orangey bite sized tomatoes, and sweet 100s that grew in bunches like grapes. Add in some pots of cilantro, parsley and rosemary and that covers most of it. And that was only a “temporary garden.” A few years later we pulled up our stakes (literally and figuratively) and headed down the road. I’ve never had the same sort of space to work with, but I’ve grown vegetables ever since. Whether it was a small bed that I dug alongside our house in VA (I couldn’t bring myself to actually eat anything from this garden since we’d been warned about lead, asbestos, and unknown chemicals in that housing area and I was pretty sure the ground was contaminated as well), or growing hot peppers at the edges of our lawn in 29 Palms, edible growing has been part of my life everywhere we’ve lived.
I put a few things in pots the other day (and posted a picture of it), but it wasn’t enough. I needed more dirt. Since I have a husband who is very supportive of my gardening efforts (and is the one who did all the heavy digging in the Oklahoma clay to create the original huge beds), we headed to the nursery together. Unfortunately we got sidetracked for a few minutes by a burning smell coming from the car as we pulled up.
It’s quite the man that can handle car repairs and babywearing at the same time.
(It turns out that the burning smell most likely was coming from a combination of the manure/fertilizer and burning tires in the area — but we do have an electrical issue in the car that is being worked on today).
Caleb holding my new “beds.” We bought a bunch of dirt (6 huge bags of it), a few more seeds and some flowering/vining plants and decorative ceramic pots to put them in. We barely fit it all in the car and we only had 2 kids with us.
We have this rooftop space that we want to turn into a garden/outdoor room.
Jasmine, Morning Glories, and this plant of unknown origin. The guy at the nursery didn’t speak much English so we would ask, “Flower?” And he would nod and either point at the color on something else or say the name if he knew it. This plant is supposed to have two-color flowers, but I don’t remember what colors. I’ll just have to wait and be surprised.
Carter planted sunflowers — I do veggies, he always plants sunflowers.
She kept trying to poke bean seeds into my carrot rows.
We have 2 plastic chairs right now, but eventually want to get some sort of outdoor couch
Tiny tomatoes
My beets and swiss chard have sprouted!
They are in the same family, so I won’t be able to tell which is which until they get bigger. And honestly, I’m not so sure I trust the labels on the locally produced seed bags anyway. What they called “psinish” was certainly not spinach seed — it looked more like wood shavings.
I’m betting that these are beets because of the red in the seed leaves . . . I’ll find out soon.
Micah’s not impressed with my gardening, but at least he’s not scared to go out on the roof anymore (I had to carry him up the stairs and out onto the roof yesterday, big heavy baby).
I think I might need a few more big pots . . . really. I was looking online for some more seeds and I found my favorite purple beans, a variety of faux-spinach that is supposed to do really well in the heat (real spinach likes cool, spring weather), a miniature red pepper that is supposed to be perfect for containers and a few new lettuce mixes that I haven’t tried before. So yeah, I’m out of dirt space, but I have 7 more seed packets on their way.
We’re hoping the vining plants grow up and distract from some of the pipes, A/C units and satellite dishes on the roof.
Waiting for it all to grow!