In the Garden - Week 1

Note: We’ve had a garden for quite a while now, so there’s a lot to tell.  I plan to update the status of our plants weekly, each time giving a little of the backstory.  I'll also try to come up with a witty title for this series, which I haven't been able to do yet.  :-)

It hits you as you step outside, from the pleasant, controlled air conditioning into the world outside.  Sucking in hot sticky air, baked by radiant heat from the orb in the sky and the impervious blacktop below, it feels like summer is here to stay.  It’s 92 degrees outside, as if you need to quantify this, and supposedly feels like at least 96.  I head out to my car, not even considering the irony of where I’m headed in the midst of this early-season heat wave.

I’m sure it got hot in May when I was growing up, but I don’t remember that specifically.  Looking back, I recall summer vacation time, mid-July perhaps, where the grass was dry and crackly underfoot from lack of rain, and the sun was already oppressive by 10 in the morning, so you couldn’t even get outside early to avoid it.  We’d usually stay inside the air-conditioned house as long as we could until at last we couldn’t weasel out of it any longer and have to head outside to help in the garden.

We pretty much always had a garden growing up, and I never knew any different or presumed that we might not grow our own produce.  We lived in a typical suburban house in a standard subdivision lot, something like ¼ of an acre all told.  And out of that postage-stamp lot, with horrible clay soil, my Dad was somehow able to coax so much food..  Probably a quarter of the backyard was vegetable garden, with much of the rest of the space devoted to fruit trees and berry bushes.  Each year we’d have a bounty of tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, carrots, beans, chard, cucumbers, fruits and berries that kept us eating fresh food all summer long.

Honestly, though, I never much liked the garden back then.  I suppose I did enjoy the food we got from it, but doubt I even fully appreciated how good that was compared to what was available at the grocery store.  But I definitely hated the work involved.  I’ve always been pretty lazy, and having to toil in the middle of summer for something I wasn’t too interested in felt more like it was a punishment than what it really was, a way to help out the family.  I’d pull the weeds, or move the mulch, or help transplant, if my parents told me to, but I virtually always moped about it.

I guess a lot has changed in the past ten years or so that I’ve been out of the house.  Today is a damn awful weather day, muggy and unbearable.  And after lunch I was gladly leaving my climate-controlled office to make a quick run to tend our garden in the heat of the day.  To be fair, I still don’t like it when it feels like 100 degrees outside.  But going out there meant a respite from the monotony of being at my desk, and it was an opportunity to check in on the plants that I have helped grow, something I’m now very interested in and in fact, quite proud of.

The plants all looked fine today, though there was certainly a dry crust of soil at their bases.  I did a little digging down below the surface, and we seem to be retaining moisture fairly well.  But with temperatures like they are, it was a very good idea to do a little watering.  By time I got 5 watering cans poured out over our various crops, I had “wasted” half an hour and was sweating like crazy.  Time to head back to civilization, to cower once more in air-conditioned comfort and the routine of the office.  But I was glad to have spent a little time laboring in the heat of the day, for the sake of the garden.

Update 5/23 – All boxes but 4 are planted and growing.  Last night we picked the only two spinach leaves that were mature, plus one radish as a test to see how big they are.  The radishes are still small, and taste so strongly peppery.  I’m not sure if that mellows as they continue to grow, but they are very potent right now.  The spinach leaves we just munched as we walked out of the garden last night.  I like spinach a lot, but I have to say, I’ve never had spinach that was so sweet and fresh tasting as those leaves just-pinched off the plant.  If they continue to grow like they have, I’ll be very happy.