Posted by Janet Harriett on Aug.11, 2010

I like to garden. Every year, keep vigilant watch for the first sign of winter’s end so I can plant spinach, lettuce and snap peas, then watch for the last frosts so I can plant the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash and delicate herbs. And that doesn’t even get into the orchard or the berry garden, where I grow apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, grapes, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, elderberries and currants.

My veggie patch may be bigger than my first dorm room, but it doesn’t look like those pretty magazine spreads featuring gardens full of lush plants. Not even close. Back in the cool-weather veggie season, it looked like this:

Veggie gardening meets real life. Photo: Janet Harriett

There are naked spots among the spinach, and I’m telling myself it must have been a bad year for peas given how many didn’t come up. The poppies there are less of an aesthetic choice than a surrender to the fact that there were poppies there before I made this my veggie patch, and they’re not going anywhere no matter how hard I try. One of these days, I’m going to transplant that clump of catnip and get a load of gravel for what I affectionately call “the moat,” which again is less aesthetics and more for drainage. That spot in the yard gets the best sun exposure and is right out the kitchen door, but it gets a bit boggy when the rain hits.

That photo was back in April, though, right after a marathon weeding session. To be honest, that’s about as good as the veggie garden ever looks. I’m not even going to post a picture of what it looks like now. The most vigorous tomato vines are the ones I assigned, based on past performance, to the flimsiest supports, so branches are all over what passes for paths.

I went through a few days ago and pulled most of the crabgrass, which somehow managed to get knee-high among the pepper plants when I had to pay attention to meeting a deadline for a few days. I think I only yanked out one pepper in that weeding session. The basil never did get planted, and the oregano bolted  while I was on deadline, too. A thistle at the edge is getting so big I’m going to need to dig it out.

Garden magazine gardens don’t use old cardboard boxes and broken-apart shipping pallets to make pathways, and their fences are straight and tight. They don’t show the shadows of so many failed garden experiments, like when I was expanding this from a narrow flower bed to its current size using carpet scraps to smother the lawn (note to those folks who advocated old carpeting to smother lawn: crabgrass grows straight through carpet. I don’t know how, but it does).

My garden might not be picture-perfect, and I’m beyond overjoyed that it’s in a spot of the yard where the electric meter reader is the only person who sees it besides me, but what it lacks in aesthetics, it more than makes up for in yummy produce. I spotted my first baby eggplant today, among the sluggy things that keep gnawing the leaves, and I’ve been getting the most delicious purple calabash tomatoes for more than a week now. Gardening may not always be pretty, especially for those of us who are hobbyist gardeners and not professional farmers, but it’s just as delicious.

Share

Posted under Home Environment, Organic Garden.