It's a jungle out there

Late April and still manageable

I have never gardened before.

When I was 12 I watered my mother's garden one summer when she was feeling ambitious and we were living on 11 acres of woods. The garden was a 15 minute walk away from the house uphill through the woods and required thousands of yards of hose and large barrels. It was the most terrible job ever. Almost as bad as being assigned to pick up sticks in the woods which was another favorite of hers. At least that job was in the shade. (She recently told me she only made me do this ridiculous job because I read too much, I think I'll just sign Lola up for soccer.)

I learned nothing from this experience with gardening other than how to use aloe vera after being sunburned.



Yet, I've always fancied myself a gardener. Since my very first rental, fresh out of the dorms, I have asked if I could put in a garden and though I've always been answered in the affirmative I've never actually put in the effort.

The squash jungle

When I bought a condo with my ex-husband I decided I was going to container garden. After a lot of reading I had a very successful herb garden but none of the other plants ever made it. The next season all of the herbs died too. It could have been because I forgot to water them.

A divorce, remarriage, and multiple rentals later I have finally put in the work. I decided to try square foot gardening because it's all about cramming in as much as possible in a small space. I decided on raised beds because I was scared of the soil and it seemed like a pain in the ass to have it tested and amend it properly.  Basically, I'm just plunging into it head first because I never was going to be completely prepared by just reading the books. So now I have one box with a few mystery plants because I wasn't careful enough when planting and they got a bit mixed up. So my painstakingly drawn grid on graph paper doesn't seem to actually match. I can't tell what plants they are, but they are definitely not the same ones next to each other and the spinach, which I can identify, is where I supposedly planted the eggplant.

My little helper

My squash plants have basically taken over everything. After a quick google search told me I should have given them much more than 1 square foot -woops- I found someone who swears that zucchini, at least, can be pruned and staked to only take up 1 square foot.

Well, that was good enough for me! I marched out and got some sturdy new stakes and set to work staking my zucchini, straight neck squash, pattypan, and winter squashes. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that squash has little prickly stickers all over the stems and I am not fond of gardening in gloves. After many ouches and a long whiny session of tweezing them out of my fingers I have re-evaluated my position. It may be difficult to maneuver and tie a stem to a stake with gloves on, but it is much more pleasing than to have to deal with tiny slivers of killer squash embedded in my fingertips.

So happy to be trusted with the sprayer!

Regardless of the looming failure of the squash, and one box that seems to be killing all of the transplants that I lovingly transferred from my green house- it's worth it. I have fresh salad greens every few days, plenty of kale for kale chips, 6 pea pods, and what looks like it'll eventually be a bumper crop of tomatoes. Also, I think its important for Lola to know where food comes from and to appreciate being able to eat something that she's grown.

She may not eat lettuce when it's on her plate, but she'll haphazardly rip pieces of it out of the garden and chew on it with a zeal usually only reserved for ice cream or frosting. I can only hope the broccoli survives so she eventually starts eating that too.