[MittleiderMethodGardening] Encouragement to First-Timer
Dear Renie,
Welcome to the gardening world. It's a world where the gardener is a
guest, and is not always in control of everything that goes on in that little microcosm. Is this your first year to garden? Do you have any pictures of your garden? Do you have any pets, any livestock, or do you live in the city, a town, the suburbs, or (there needs to be another name for the area outside the city that used to be the country but in the last ten years or so it has become an area of 2-9 acre building lots where the people are city folks with a little more land, and moved out there to turn their dogs loose to run....and think they should have a say about everything their neighbors do with *their* land. Particularly if they can somehow see it.) Or do you live in the real country where the nearest neighbor is at least a mile away?
The lay of the land you situate your garden on is important, too. How much sun does it get per day, and what kind of soil do you have?
Gardening is a lot of work, as you're learning. The beginning year is the most work for the least return. The beginning year you may jump in all excited and think you know how to garden but then you begin to find out that you maybe didn't ...in reality you are experiencing the learning curve that we all go through. We go through this with every new skill we learn, if you think about it. Learning to garden is simple but demands sweat equity. Gardening when we've put 5 or even ten years into it demands sweat equity, but by then it's not such a surprise.
Over the years I have spent a lot of money on my little bit of heaven on earth, but I've been here 20 years and I know what to expect. Weather is the unexpected thing we can't always plan on. This year we have barely been able to get even one garden planted due to taking the early dry day for granted and not getting my beds relocated and built before planting weather arrived. I may have to just do it anyway, and sacrifice that smooth planting bed just to be able to get the seeds growing in the ground.
If mold is your problem, then know that you need to keep lots of air
flow around the plants, and that means keeping plant spacing at a
maximum, and weeds at a minimum(or better yet, prune excess leaves and keep EVERYTHING off the ground - JK). I always encourage folks to garden wherever they have space. If it's shaded part or all of the day then they will have to be creative, and make sure all else is optimal, choose plants that prefer a bit of shade, and maybe even bring in a little more light by pruning trees and even looking for garden art with shiny surfaces...or what about a few mirrors!?? ;-) That's of course a bit extreme, but it illustrates the point that gardening and farming is an art, not a science. (That's the problem - it SHOULD be treated as a science and learn the LAWS that govern plant growth, such as LIGHT is #! - JK)
Lastly, are you getting all these exorbitant amounts of rain and high
humidity in between rainstorms?? We have not had this much rain since the rain seemed to stop forever in 2002 beginning with April Fool's Day. The news spoke of global warming as the reason for the droughts, even in the recent past they were doing shows on global warming citing reduced snowfall on mountaintops as evidence of global warming. I never accepted that 'theory'. Throughout recorded history there have been droughts and floods. They are cyclical.
To bring this back to what's a gardener to do, you just accept Mother Nature in all her glory, evil, and innocence and glory in it when it feels good, and hunker down when she doesn't make you feel so good. And plant every seed you can get your hands on, and as many varieties and types as you can get your hands on. If you read the files at the group site you saw an article about a woman in Canada that has been market gardening on one acre of her family farm for twenty years. She mentions planting a wide variety of garden produce as well as several varieties partly for customer choice, but also partly for insurance that she will actually have something succeed. Some of them will 'fail' but none of them are failures if you make sure you learn something from them. They're called 'learning curves'.
I hope this helps, it's meant to be encouraging. ;-)
Laura in PA
(Great post Laura! Please forgive me for disagreeing with you on a couple of points - JK)
Renie Markow wrote:
> I have to say, this is all a bit overwhelming and discouraging. We all spend so much money and time to grow our own food only to be attacked by bugs, slugs and various critters and spend triple what it would have cost to just go to farmers markets and buy our produce. Can we all learn something to do ahead of time in order to avoid this costly and heartbreaking result of loss of plants and produce??
> I now have copper strips down around my kale, lettuce, spinach and basil to prevent the slugs...a fence around my garden, bird netting around most every plant and I am still plagued with the white spots and eaten leaves. I can barely get to the plants due to all the protection around them and seems I will have to soon spray. It is getting so that it seems much more prudent to leave this to those who have mastered it and buy from local farm stands and accept they will have sprayed....but perhaps someone can offer some help and encouragement.
>
>
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment