Stone Soup! I remember that from my days of teaching pre-school! I loved that little story!
You guys are SO enthusiastic about this veggie gardening! I'm the thunderstorm on that parade!
For the first 5 years that I was married I tried to grow veggies...my mom had a HUGE garden when I was growing up in New York and I would fill my pockets with as many cherry tomatoes as I could stuff in on the way out to the school bus every morning! Mom made homemade pickles, canned all sorts of stuff and even sold her pumpkins to the General Store one fall!
I was determined to continue her tradition..
Twice a year I would buy ten 40lb bags of organic peat, ten 40lb bags of cow manure and 10 40lb bags of top soil (that's 1200 POUNDS of soil amending, twice a year!) and my husband would rent a little tiller and help me work it all into my plotted-out 'garden' where I would then lovingly plant my little rows of seeds and six-packs of starters... and wait and watch and water....I was an ORGANIC farmer, and even subscribed to Organic Gardening magazine and read it cover to cover every month! No chemicals for this girl, not in my garden!
To make what could be a 12 page story into a short post....between the bugs and birds, the diseases and fungus's, and the bugs, the droughts and the floods, and the bugs...Oh yeah, did I mention the BUGS??!! I tried for over 5 years (that's at least 10 tries), experimenting with every hint I could find...I surrounded my garden with marigolds, I mulched with hay, I gave up the 'organic' route a year or two in...I tried planting at different times, rotating crops, buying bigger 'starters', alternating years for some plants so the bugs would 'forget' where they were...
I did have a few successes...I have a photo somewhere of my little son sitting on the porch step holding a zucchini up that was almost as tall as he was (it was hiding under the mildew covered leaves until I couldn't miss it, and then it was almost too seedy to use!)...one Thanksgiving our mashed taters came straight out of the ground that morning...when I used my plastic lawn chairs as a trellis for my cukes, to keep them off the bug- and disease-ridden ground, one tiny little fella started to grow through the 'lattice' on the back of the chair and grew fat on either side of it, but had to be broken in half to get it out of the chair (I have a photo of that somewhere too)...I was SO excited to find a little (6 inch round) watermelon growing on the vine (draped over a 3 foot chicken wire fence to keep it off of the disease- and bug-ridden ground) one weekend, but thought I had gone crazy when I went back a little later to look at it again and there was nothing there! The dog we had at the time had found it too and somehow pulled it off the vine and was sitting on the back porch munching it like a steak bone!
There were failures too, besides just the watermelon-eating dog....I actually have video somewhere of a blue jay pecking at, and apparently eating, my tomatoes! A few pecks at each tomato, then on to the next till he had pecked holes into almost all of them! I almost had some celery ready to pick (just east of where I live are acres and acres of what used to be the 'celery fields', so I should be able to grow them, no problem...) I thought 'a few more days and I'm bringing them in the house'. The next morning I saw the signs of the rampaging elephants that had somehow gone through my yard during the night...each head? stalk? cluster? of celery was flattened to the ground in beautiful little circles, stomped flat by those marauding elephants! Cat nip was growing beautifully into a row of lush little mounds (about the time I discovered that my 2 cats just turned up their nose at the stuff) when all of a sudden, each morning, there was one less plant...not bug ridden, not lacey, not flattened...just gone! One by one, each morning...no signs of what disturbed them, no gaping hole where they had been...until they were ALL gone, and the only explanation I could ever come up with was a strange race of feline UFO's that patrolled my yard in the night (probably to scare away the elephants!).
When I added up the cost in time, bags of dirt, seeds and plants, and effort....well.....
I now have a single earthbox, that I grow herbs in....I buy all my veggies at the farmers market...and I enjoy fresh tomatoes immensely---- whenever I leave Florida!
Good luck all you die-hards! I'll stick to playing with my orchids!
