Gardening
I got started gardening in 1998. We lived in a condo in Norman, Oklahoma, with a little fenced in concrete patio. On that patio we had a five gallon bucket partly full of dirt. I don't recall why, just that one day when I was throwing out some potatoes that had sprouted in the pantry, I thought that I ought to see if I could plant one. I stuck it in the bucket and found some more dirt to throw on top of it, along with a couple dog turds for "fertilizer". It sat out there in the sun and heat over the summer, baking on the concrete. We'd water it from time to time. I don't recall if I was knowledgeable enough to put holes in the bottom of the bucket for drainage. The potato plant leafed out and grew well enough, I suppose. In the fall, I pulled it up to discover most of a dozen fist-sized potatoes. And the dog turds. Still there. Ick.
I was thrilled, though. Gardening was so easy! [insert ironic laugh here]
Next year we moved to St. Paul. It took a few years to get situated, but as I was so far away from friends and family, gardening became a slow-growing obsession while I was there. We had the tiniest lot with huge maple trees all around. I had part-sun at best and incredibly sandy soil. In my first year of buying stuff at the store and putting it in the ground, most everything died. Nothing I planted as seeds came up. I was perplexed. I hit the books. I found a gardening forum to join and lurk on. I started a compost pile. The next year, I had enough compost to spread around to half the garden, so I did. The other half was normal. Several plants survived to produce fruit - every one of them was in the compost area. Ah-hah!
I had figured something out. More compost!
I became a bit of a compost fanatic. For the next couple years, I steadily desodded most of the available lawn, conditioned the soil, put up trellises, cut back tree branches and even grew pumpkins and sunflowers out in the alley. The pumpkins were stolen when they came ripe, but that was okay with me - they were better ground cover than the weeds and at least someone enjoyed them. I still had things that died on me, but I rolled with it. I got smut on my corn. I ate the smut. Squirrels would dig up my seed. I got a live trap and ate the squirrels. I think I ate about twenty squirrels while in St. Paul. Green beans did really well. I'd give them away to the neighbors. Onions were boss. I had enough to last us all year until the next year's ripened (it helped that we didn't eat many, but I still had enough). I harvested several dozen acorn squash. I was da gardening bomb.
Then we moved to Oklahoma. Now you'd think that since I grew up here, I'd be good at gardening here. But no. I live in a new addition. The way they made it was to scrape all the topsoil off one side of the addition and push it over to the other side to level it. My house is on the side without topsoil. They covered up the dirt with bermuda, which is a wicked tough grass. It makes a nice lawn, but it's invasive into anywhere you clear it out from, and really hard to kill. Plus, if you strip it away, you're left with the topsoil-less substrata that not even the weeds want to grow on.
Nevertheless, I desodded flower beds around the house and amended the soil with what I could find. I bought a dump truck load of compost (this turned out to be a poor quality product - it wasn't "real" compost. It was like buying hamburger instead of ribeye). I bought a dump truck load of sandy loam to lighten and condition the soil. I got a similar amount of stall cleanings from a horse stable - horse poo and shavings. My best investment was the stall cleanings, by far. I can say that now, in retrospect, but at the time I didn't know. I set up my flower beds. I marked off my vegetable garden.
My first vegetable garden plan was to have raised beds using railroad ties, having 10-20 rectangles a couple railroad ties high, and filled with decent dirt. I'd just avoid the issue altogether of the native clay. Unfortunately, my ability to find people willing to move 80 pound railroad ties was pretty low, even though I did find where we could get the ties for free, if we'd just go pick them up. So I made a single bed to test the concept with what we'd gathered in our one and only trip. Good thing I did, as the raised bed was beloved by rats! The loose soil and protected environment was perfect for them to build burrows in, and then eat my seeds, or the sprouts. It was a very frustrating year, as I lost most of what I planted. I did not eat the rats. Though I thought about it.
The following year I tried amending the soil directly in my veggie plot area. The plants suffered a lot. Many died. They'd be green and healthy in the plastic pot from the store, but turn yellow, wilt and die a few days after planting. I believe this is because of the high acidity of the soil (I had it tested). I also discovered, once I had some plants survive, that Oklahoma is host to a LOT more bugs than St. Paul. Sunflowers which were bug free in St. Paul attracted no less than four different hideous menaces in Oklahoma: wasps that would chew the stems to suck the sap; caterpillars that would roll up the leaves to hide in them while munching on them; weevils that would poke holes in all parts of the plant; and ants that brought along their little aphid friends to feed on all the wounds incurred by the wasps and weevils. Sunflower plants that had towered to ten feet tall in Minnesota made it to four here before dying without flowering. Every single fricking one of them.
Last year, I planted some squash and melons. They take up a lot of space and are fairly low maintenance. The divorce was distracting me and work was high stress. Rats at the melons before they became ripe (with a few exceptions) and squash vine borers devastated the squash. I got a dozen or so squash out of the plants first. One thing that was nice to see was that I didn't have the 'instant death' phenomenon anymore. And the sunflowers, with careful management and better soil, flowered. They still only made it to about six feet tall, but that was good.
This year, I've planted asparagus. So far it looks like twenty plants might make it. They are a permanent fixture. You plant them and they'll produce (assuming they survive) for the next 10-15 years. You have to have quality soil to plant them in and I've been worked at that for some time now - four years. I've also planted radishes, which are my dinner tonight. A bit spicier than I like them, but I grew them, so I'm eating them. Today I went out with my grandfather to buy some expensive heirloom cherry tomatoes, a couple eggplants, some poblano peppers, and some tomatillos. I've also been working in my father's garden a lot. His soil is to die for. It is so perfect. It is so dark, so crumbly! It holds moisture so well and yet drains beautifully! ::sniff:: And the disturbing this is that he is only a quarter mile south from me, but on land that was never stripped and "landscaped" by the addition. So his dirt is what mine *should* have been.
Maybe this year we'll have a good year. Last year was awful. It was so hot the tomatoes and peppers couldn't pollinate and so dry for so long that my father stopped watering his garden, meaning he lost half his crops, like all but the first harvest of corn. He did keep his fruit trees and they're looking good this year. Mine are shaping up. I have twenty-two trees of different kinds (apricots, peaches, apples, pears, plums and cherries). Nothing fruited last year because the weather was too horrid. This year looks better - the peaches have fruits on them and so do a couple plum trees. Hard to tell with the cherries.
Tomorrow I'll finish planting the stuff I bought.