Homegrown Veggies: When Ambition Outraces Experience
By Suzette Martinez Standring
Local gardeners are gearing up to plant homegrown produce and my daughter and her husband have prepared their first-ever veggie patch. Enthusiasm has raced ahead of experience in these two former city slickers.
“Come see what Joseph did in the yard!” said Star.
And indeed, there was a square of newly tilled earth. Three stakes stood in the center ready to support future crops. Their veggie patch was the size of a kitchen tabletop for two.
“Fantastic! What are you planting?” I asked.
“Onions, carrots, tomatoes and summer squash,” she said proudly.
“All in that spot?”
Star looked surprised. “What? Too much?”
Apparently, all the seeds from four different vegetable packets had been sown, and somehow they overlooked the “growth” part of the process, which I now explained.
We stared at a tiny plot now seeded to the hilt.
“What should we do?” she asked.
The thought of myself as the sage old Farmer in the Dell made me chuckle. My mistakes were way worse when I began my own foray into vegetable gardening thirteen years ago. A tendency to “think big” was my downfall.
In Connecticut my Inner Farmer broke out big-time when we moved into a house on a quarter-acre lot, enormous compared to the postage-stamp-sized plots I grew up with in San Francisco. What does one do with so much land? Obviously, you plant crops.
So I bought a rototiller and was plowing up the dirt directly below our sundeck when my husband came home. Horrified at the disappearing lawn, David demanded, “What are you doing!?”
“I’m growing vegetables,” I yelled over the roar of the tiller.
Like I was a policeman driving toward the scene of a sudden car crash, David waved me down. “Stop! Stop!” he screamed.
For a host of reasons having to do with aesthetics, maintenance and loss of property values, he convinced me not to return our quarter-acre fully into farmland.
Good thing he showed up when he did or I would have furrowed the front lawn for corn.
Well, you learn from doing and sometimes you learn you’ve done too much, like Star and Joseph’s crowded little vegetable patch. So when she asked me for a solution, options reeled through my mind. Cull like crazy when shoots appear. Or plough up your entire backyard to accommodate all the seedlings. Or start over and replant with two (three, tops) potted tomato plants.
But it’s not always about the final result. You can’t reap if you don’t sow and one is made better for trying. So what if seedlings sprout up like a hedge in your first attempt? It’s not like falling into an abyss and I could see that Star and Joe were excited to scale the heady summit of homegrown vegetables. Let’s not discourage anyone at base camp.
Instead of solutions, I opted to share hope on the journey.
“Star, it’s all good. Something will definitely grow. Let’s just see what happens.”
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Email: suzmar@comcast.net
Posted: June 1, 2009
