The Year of No Zero Days – Garden Edition

Disclaimer: This is not a tutorial. There are no “here are 5 steps to gardening.” Nope.

I came home one day from work (well, from actually being in the school building) and found a little green bean peeking out from the chicken wire I tried to nicely place around the garden bed. I felt such a childlike elation it made me think that I shouldn’t have waited so long to have a garden.

After all, we’ve been able to live in a single-family house for almost 10 years (“This is my own private domicile and I will not be harassed”). I’ve told myself I don’t have a green thumb, I can’t grow anything, etc etc. The truth is I’ve never made the time to have a garden.

I’ve been religiously, I mean religiously, following homesteading and gardening channels on YouTube (Garden Answer, Planterina, Simple Living Alaska, Elliot Homestead). It wasn’t until I actually made the decision to build a garden bed and tend to some late summer-early fall veggies that I realized that farming/homesteading is neither cheap nor not time-consuming.

After we built our patio, I used many reclaimed bricks left over to build a simple but rustic-looking garden bed, kind of raised, kind of built into a hill. I used two simple items – bricks and construction adhesive. Plus some leftover sand from the patio leveling adventure to put under the bottom layer. With ten bags of top soil later and a few trips to Home Depot, I ended up with this:

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I knew I had to get this done no later than the first of August so I could plant a few veggies & herbs before it got too late. I think I finally planted everything the first full week of August.

This I considered the “soft opening” of my garden. I didn’t want to put too much pressure on myself, and I had waited too long for spring/summer crops.

Today I harvested the first green beans, organic Blue Lake variety. I vaguely remember picking beans when we had a small garden growing up, and I know how to snap them. We probably canned them.

I’m pumped. And I love this one-handled yellow colander I found at the thrift store. Like, it made my day to get in there and harvest the ones that were ready. I’m pretty sure I planted the seeds too close together because it’s a veritable jungle. But I have food that I grew myself.

I also have some Sumter cucumbers, carrots, and cilantro growing. I’m proud of the fact that I know my cilantro is now taking off because it’s getting cooler outside. And that it’s good to harvest a lot of things right before the frost because they’ll store more sugars. It’s a heck of a lot more than I knew a few weeks ago.

But then again, I’ve been wondering as I’ve taken so well to plants and gardening and working outside, how much of this inclination is genetic. After all, on my dad’s side of the family, we were farmers going all the way back to when my ancestors came across the ocean and settled in New York. Maybe it explains why I look lovingly on tall yellowing corn, or appreciate how the wind blows over the soybeans at the height of summer. Or how I get so damn excited to realize that even I can grow simple vegetables.