7 Years of Gardening Woes

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

Japanese proverb

Boy, have I been humbled by gardening. Really humbled. No amount of hard work will make a garden grow if you don’t know what you’re doing. You might be lucky for a time or have all the conditions just right at your place. But at some point, knowledge is necessary. My experiences with garden failure almost put me in a state of underconfidence like nothing else in life.

Not one with any previous experience before moving here, I was excited to dive in the dirt and grow everything possible.

Ha! Not so, grasshopper. I’ve learned every hard way there is.

First off, we live under a canopy of trees, so sunlight only hits our garden for fours hours at most in the summer. Meanwhile, our neighbors without trees overhanging them bathe in sunshine all day long.

• 

Also, we have a constant tinkling of evergreen needles raining down and carpeting the ground, giving a difficult acidic tinge to the plot.

Our first year, we had the garden built by Ron and Kyle Griffin, who trucked in a load of fresh soil to cover the rocky terrain. Almost everything we planted grew. Big. Plants like rainbow chard that we realized we didn’t even relish lasted years.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

The next summer was still rewarding but noticeably more so-so.

• 

Then reality began to set in. No matter what I planted, not much grew. I bought seed packet after seed packet. I realized a painfully long while after planting season that nothing came up because of the birds. They had all sat in the tree branches above me, claiming which seeds they wanted to dig up the minute I walked back in the house.

Then it was the snails and slugs. I tried bowls of cheap beer placed here and there on the ground to attract them, but none of them went for it. They must prefer the expensive stuff. Not one to use pesticides or want to kill things, I reluctantly bought Sluggo but couldn’t bring myself to use it more than once. The few plants that popped out of the ground were eaten before they ever had a chance, a slime trail and nibbled edges as evidence of those mollusks’ quiet presence in the night.

• 

I kept thinking, ‘If I were in Africa and had no spending money, no nursery, no option to buy a bag of soil down the street, what would I do?’ I refused to buy soil, fertilizer, etc. There had to be some way to get a garden going on hard work and resourcefulness. All of the great gardeners out there couldn’t be great because they spent gobs of money buying every last thing, could they? Was it a garden secret I had yet to happen upon? Was it a technique I was ignorant of? Were my prayers not fervent enough? I even painted a sign dedicating the garden to God.

• 

We watched Paul Gautschi’s incredible Back to Eden garden documentary. I read his book about putting down gobs of wood chips that will ready the soil over time for amazing growth. We visited his property in Sequim for a tour, and were amazed at the unreal bounty we saw and tasted.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Back in my garden now full of wood chips, nothing grew at all over time. I’m not sure if I ever took photos – there was nothing to show. I eventually had to dig all of the wood chips out and start over with raised beds I constructed out of abandoned wood at the hardware store.

I bought soil. Just enough to fill the raised beds partway. I knew nothing of the differences between potting soil, compost, manure, mushroom compost, and top soil, so I bought what was organic and hoped I wouldn’t need much again once I somehow got it going.

• 

Plants only grew for a few months, then gave up in mid-summer right when you’d think they should be bursting and flourishing.

I may not have wanted to spend money, but all that happened for the next few years was money spent and nothing to show for it. I gave in and bought starts that were stronger than sprouts but they never grew any bigger. I started seeds inside and transplanted them in warmer weather, only to watch growth stop once put outside.

• 

• 

After the last two years of growing absolutely zilch, I stopped putting all of my time and sweat and muscle and squatting knees into it. I stopped watering. I stopped doing it all. It made me feel bad, and I visited the garden very little. All of that hard work, all of those exhausted nights falling into bed, all of that muscle used and then fed on lame, store-bought food.

All those years, we had been putting our food waste into a pile by the garden which never grew in height. We assume we’ve been feeding rats and deer for an awfully long time now, but it was frustrating that I couldn’t even keep a compost pile going.

In a last-ditch effort, I clumped all of the herbs on one side of the garden – they were the only ones thriving all along – and I brought in some sad apple and pear trees to live in the planter boxes, away from the dry, nutrient-parched plots they had been struggling in out in the forest. I figured I’d at least maintain a little mini orchard and have some fruit for the family in the fall.

I gave up for the most part, resigned to grow some measly lettuce and kale plants that refused to rise more than a foot off the ground. We munched about 60 sugar snap peas, and that was about it for our summer bounty this year. I perused and nibbled from Colleen Stewart’s Public School garden and Alex Wolf’s Christian School garden throughout the summer, soaking in the beauty and loving eating something off the land.

• 

• 

A gleaner at heart, I am. But I didn’t want to become a permanent taker. I still had a glimmer in me of wanting to foster edible abundance and pass it on. Of wanting my children to walk through our own garden and munch to their hearts’ content. I’m not one to give up fully. Not one to lose hope permanently.

When my husband gently suggested that perhaps he could take over the garden next year, something changed in me. A good kind of pressure. A last chance to figure this thing out, or else! Pressure to produce results or be ousted can be a good thing. He’d never really oust me; I just know he’d probably figure out how to make it work since he figures out how to do everything well, so I turned it into a challenge for myself or else relinquish the garden to him next spring.

Something finally hit me. Seven years of really hard work had amounted to nothing, so how much harder could it be to gain some knowledge about soil? Did I need to have a degree? An internship at Bullock’s Permaculture Homestead? It amazed me to watch how Alex transformed the grassy soccer field in front of Orcas Christian School into a thriving food forest – in less than a year! (Sorry, Alex, I know you like anonymity, but it was amazing!) If it was possible, then certainly there was some basic soil knowledge I could surely attain, right?

• 

I went to the library website and put eight books on hold – soil, permaculture, Northwest gardening, you name it. I’ve been reading and reading them, writing notes in my journal.

• 

• 

I realized I had neglected the dirt’s composition all along. Years of longing for the key to growing food with the resources already on my land rather than with the resources in my wallet had finally brought me to the motherload of concepts – it’s not about growing plants, it’s about creating viable soil.

Over the past week, I have been working all day long every day to create systems that will completely change our garden’s viability, if done correctly and left to work their miracles over the fall and winter months.

Colleen gave me a bunch of fava bean seeds in order to plant a green manure crop and resurrect my soil. I watched a lot of YouTube videos on how favas pull up the nutrients down under the soil and then, if you cut them before they flower and either work the stalks in the dirt or lay them right on top of the garden, they decompose and give their nutrients back to the top layers of soil. They also protect the surface of the garden as a living mulch, and then as a cut mulch.

• 

• 

• 

I got free pallets from the hardware store and built a cold composting area that won’t include food waste that rats and deer love.

• 

I awkwardly “rolled” our duck house that I built years ago over to the garden to become a food scrap hot composter that wildlife can’t get into.

• 

I bought a bag of lime to sprinkle over all growing areas to balance the pH of the soil and offset the acidity.

• 

• 

After laborious research of the proper way to do lasagna sheet-mulching, I collected cardboard, manure, grass clippings, cabbage leaves and weeds, and seaweed from the beach two days ago when it was pouring outside.

• 

• 

• 

I lasagna-layered two areas of our property to healthify the soil underneath so that by spring, I can transplant the fruit trees and grow lots of comfrey plants for the compost. I still don’t even know if it’s done perfectly, so hopefully there is no perfect.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Why put so much work into creating healthy areas for plants that I plan to cut down and throw in the compost? In learning that compost bins need greens (nitrogen, like plants) and browns (carbon, like leaves), I also learned that comfrey is an amazing green “activator” for composts, and if I always have fresh supplies of it, I’ll have a constant supply of wonderful compost to put in the garden in order to grow food.

I got permission to dig up existing comfrey plants on an island property in order to take them apart, break pieces off their roots to propagate them, and plant them in about 30 different places near the compost, the garden, the house, and in the forest. They should be bounteous by spring. They can spread easily, so hopefully they don’t completely overtake us.

• 

• 

• 

I learned about leaf mold and its amazing properties for helping soil and providing nutrition to plants, and I realized that my husband’s years of leaf piles built higher every fall around the property are like gold for the compost. I dug out wheelbarrows full of leaves and layered them in the lasagna-mulched rows, and prepared for my virgin run of composting in my various bins. If I could at the very least always have comfrey and leaves, I’d be able to keep my compost systems going.

• 

• 

• 

• 

I heavily researched worm bins and bought the Cadillac of vermicomposters called the hungry bin. Worm castings are some of the best compost around, and worms can tolerate our temperate weather here pretty well. I could have just gotten a plastic crate or two to save money, but this system is as easy as it gets and I know enough about myself that I don’t want to fiddle much with worm bins in the middle of cold, rainy winters. The live worms arrived in the mail yesterday so I put together the hungry bin, put in the worms, and topped it with food scraps.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

High winds have blown apples and pears all over the ground around town, so I naturally had to gather those as well while out on my treasure hunt a few days ago. Last night we had a very low-nutrition, high-appeal dinner: apple and pear slices bound for a huge cobbler and homemade donut holes. My little silent celebration that my composting systems are now set up.

• 

• 

I still don’t know if everything’s going to pan out; I’m a little too accustomed to failure at this point. But I’m really hopeful again. I may never grow rows of tomatoes glistening in 12 hours of sun or gobs of cucumbers hanging off vines, but I can accept that. I may be jealous of you folks with sunshine-y properties, but I can only work with what I have.

I can dream again, plotting new garden designs in my journal about the beautiful placement of realistic edibles we may finally get to eat. I hope someday I’ll have enough to share them with you!

Fall seven times, stand up eight.

Japanese proverb

And yes, God, please bless the garden.

• 

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and future…”

Jeremiah 29:11

If you’d like more knowledge, Alex highly recommends the book Gaia’s Garden. I’ve also found that The Zero-Mile Diet, based on a garden in nearby British Columbia and available here at our library (well, I have it right now) is really good.