Gardening is not something I consider to be one of my talents. At least not yet. Ask me about music or advertising and I am pretty knowledgable. But soil PH for different crops? I guess I could Google that…
Tomatoes, peppers and a few other things – with some help
Potato plant, in a tire “planter.” I never tire of potatoes.
Garden, May 2014, with tires for the potatoes. Photos © Dave Pierik
My wife and I keep telling each other that when we win the Lottery, I can become a gentleman farmer. I love gardening but I never have enough time and for the most part I barely keep the lawn mowed. I grew up in the suburbs and the city. I’ve led such an indoor life for the most part and I live in a world of ideas. But when I do get outside, and get my hands into the dirt it’s great. It is a wonderful stress reliever, and it feels like the opposite of the advertising and media world to just go outside and garden. I’m a novice at this point but we have a friends who are very knowledgeable gardeners. For a long time I considered myself to be kind of a black thumb, but I’ve learned a lot in the past couple of years.
Getting my knees dirty
The ripped up jeans I wear are great from protecting me from sunburns and bugs when I finally do get outside. This time of year especially, before I’ve built up any kind of resistance to the sun, I always wear a hat and usually a flannel over my T-shirt if it’s not too hot. One of the rips in my jeans snags on things when I walk past them and when I’m digging in the dirt my knee gets all dirty. Dirt I don’t mind.
Just a simple box garden and tires for potatoes.
So one of the things that I learned from our friend Jan is that you can plant potatoes, and put a tire around each plant. What is supposed to happen is that as the potato plant gets larger, you put another tire, and then another on top of that and you get a lot more potatoes, plus it offers some protection and keeps everything neatly in one place. I had not heard of this before but she has enough old tires over there, so we’re doing it, I guess she’s used the technique before and it works.
Gardening is still the #1 hobby in America I understand. There are thousands of products and ads out there, seed companies and books. It’s a big business. Think of all of the equipment that makes it easier, from weed eaters and rototillers down to stuff you wouldn’t think of like the electric drill for putting the boxes together, fertilizer and so many other things. When you factor in all of those other costs, growing food is probably not really more cost effective than the grocery store, at least not at first, and probably not if you garden on your own. But it feels great getting started and when you pool resources with some friends it’s less expensive and a lot easier to plant a garden, not to mention that it really is kind of fun.
Spring is the time to get out there and put veggie plants in the ground, but February and March are the months for planning, selecting and buying seeds and getting the starts started; a lot of people just go ahead and buy starts of course. Mid May in the Pacific Northwest is probably kind of a late start, but we’re past frost danger anyway. By fall I’m hoping we will have some yummy fresh tomatoes, potatoes and peppers and some other veggies.
It’s really cool knowing where at least some of your food is coming from. If all goes well, we will have enough extra tomatoes that we will be canning in the fall.
I also posted this at another WordPress site of mine, http://davepierik.com/wordpress/2014/05/gentleman-farmer/
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