Grow A Garden

It's a life affirming act, really. What could be a more optimistic human endeavor than to grow something, fully expecting a positive and beneficial outcome sometime in the future?

Gardens can be acres in size or just a couple of pots, hundreds of varieties or just some patio tomatos, a lifelong business or a few herbs on the windowsill, but there's really only one axiom. Grow the soil that will grow the plants that will feed you to start the cycle all over again. Treating the soil as a dead growth medium is a crime and will not work.

I recently moved from the NW and gardened for thirty years at three locations. Up there you could use a bunch of methods to easily get really great dirt - raised beds, rain covers, greenhouses, cover crops. Each time I moved I left gardens big and small with the richest loamy soil you could imagine. Healthy soil doesn't just grow healthy plants, it deters pests and disease and cuts down on the work you have to do, especially when the earthworms move in. Sad to say, at only one of the locations the people after us appreciated the soil and continued growing food.

I'm down in the SW now and it's a whole different ballgame. Where I'm at, working the ground is like planting a garden in a parking lot, literally. I had to buy a pickaxe to bust up the rock hard clay which then becomes pieces indistinguishable from the quantities of stones that you have to remove. It's also hot and oh so dry. Very, very few people here put in vegetable and fruit gardens and instead landscape. With lots of rocks.

The strategies had to change so instead of big raised beds I'm spot growing, carving a big enough of a bowl in the pavement for each plant. It's also necessary to run drip hoses because it's so dry everything needs a lot more moisture, and you have to put up wind fences But the axiom still applies, even here where we don't intend to stay very long - feed the soil. Some peat moss and mulch and fish fertilizer, along with kitchen compost, and I fully expect a bumper crop of delicious, healthy food. That is if the peccaries don't get it all first.