My Garden

Any outdoor activity usually depends on the weather. So does gardening. Yesterday I tilled my garden. The sun was shining and it didn’t rain. And the winds were not too strong, either. We have willows on our property. They are nice but the branches are soft and they break with every strong wind we have. One of the first chores for us in Spring is to collect all the fallen branches from the property. We always pile them up in the garden and burn them. This can only be done when it is not windy or raining. Last week the weather was favorable and we managed to burn the collected branches. It always is a huge fire. After that I can start my work on the garden.

It was twenty years ago when I announced to my family that I was going to have a garden. They looked at me as if I had just told them I lost all my marbles, that I had gone completely bonkers.

“What do you mean you’ll have a garden?” one of my sons asked.

“A garden,” I said, “you know…growing vegetables like tomatoes, carrots, lettuce and other stuff.”

Then they all laughed. I can still see the pity in their eyes.

“You can’t have a garden,” my wife said. “Do you have any idea how much time it takes to have a garden? You don’t have the time. Besides, you know nothing about gardening.”

She was right. It was all true. I didn’t really have the time. I was still working at the time, and swamped with work in my electrical business, which meant working long hours.

We had just finished building our house. The property had no landscaping. We had no grass, just one-meter-high thistles growing all around us, no trees, no flowerbeds. Nothing. It was all still in the planning stage. And that’s why I decided now was the time to start a garden. Before I began seeding the grass I needed to have everything laid out, like flowerbeds, patios, etc. So if I wanted to have a garden, I had to make sure I didn’t seed that spot with grass.

“Busy people always find time to tackle another project,” I told them.

So I staked out my garden. I made it approximately 30 by 30 ft square. Big enough for all the stuff I wanted to grow.

It wasn’t easy to keep up with everything, but we managed to seed our grass, put in flowerbeds, and plant hundreds of trees. The property (about one acre) needed to be tilled to get rid of the thistles, so I bought a Honda tiller. It cost big bucks but it did the trick, and it is still coming in handy with my garden every Spring and every Fall. And it sure beats turning the soil with a spade, the way my dad did.

Most of the work was done on weekends and evenings. I remember riding my garden tractor until past 10 pm every night. All my neighbors were doing the same thing, so noise wasn’t a concern. We were all new to the area. This area was new. It had been farmland before it was divided into lots. This all meant there weren’t any trees, shrubs, or any grass anywhere. We all worked hard to make our properties looking nice.

Pretty much everyone had a garden then. Now most don’t have one anymore; I’m one of the few who still does gardening. It is a lot of work and you have to enjoy it.

Well, I do, and I don’t mind the work, especially now that I’m retired. It is fun and so much joy to plant and seed and watch everything grow. There is nothing more satisfying than picking the first tomatoes from the vine. And they taste so much better than the tomatoes you buy in the store. Picking beans is a joyful experience and I wonder every year how so many beans can be produced from just one small bean in such a short time.

When I started I didn’t know much about how to grow vegetables, actually I knew nothing. So I bought a book about gardening. I couldn’t find any information on the internet, because I didn’t have a computer and there was no internet, not twenty years ago. When I say there was no internet I mean nothing like the way it is these days where everyone and his dog has a computer and wastes most of their time cruising the internet, looking for something or just writing a blog, the way I’m doing right now. (And you who is reading this ^_^)

The book I bought was written by Dick Raymond. It is called: The Joy of Gardening.

It is my gardening bible and I still use it as my reference book to this day. Every Spring I look through it to brush up on my gardening knowledge. I’ve learned a few things over the years and I’ve developed my own methods, but it is always good to go back to basics.

If you’d like to read more about how I prepare and plant my garden click here: Gardening for Fun

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