Gardening has always been important to both sides of my family, and it was a big part of summers when I was growing up. Dad’s family comes from rural West Virginia, and Mom’s comes from small-town Austria and Romania, so gardening was always an integral part of how they got their food. When we were growing up, Mom and Dad made a big garden with a raised bed that took up a big chunk of the back yard- but that was nothing compared to the entire half of the backyard that my grandparents’ garden extended. So gardens (or more realistically, the yummy fresh fruits and veggies) were a pretty big deal to us kids.
Since I live in an apartment today, I don’t have a backyard in which to garden- and it seems that the screen on out patio is coarse enough to let in pesty insects, but fine enough to keep out their predators. Onions grow pretty well, but that’s about it. We also have the issue of a ravenous herbivore who is excellent at finding and uprooting vegetation. So everything has to be kept at above bunny-level.
But last month, a new opportunity came up-and we now have a plot at the UCF Arboretum’s community garden. They have an “adopt-a-plot” program that lets community members use part of their garden, which has a deer fence and sprinkler system- both of which are really important, given its location. The arboretum provides tools, compost and mulch, and most importantly, advice from the staff members.
The plot that Yan and I are responsible for was previously used by someone else, so it had quite a few things growing in it already- including a lot of weeds. A lot of the plants were in bad shape or weren’t things we were interested in (the eggplant was both). But we’re keeping a few things, to see how it goes.
The first thing we did was weed, and mulch an access path. Then we aerated the dirt, and added some new dirt to even out the beds. Finally, we added a layer of compost to the top.
I’m going to try to remember to take photos and post them, but I haven’t been good at it so far. These photos are from yesterday. I planted some seeds last Thursday, and some of them are already sprouting as of Sunday. That’s always fun to see.
So we’ll see how this goes. We picked fast-growing plants so that we can hopefully avoid complications from possible freezes and harvest something early. We’re both pretty excited about getting fresh veggies out of this, and it’ll be fun to see how things do.
