How not to garden

Jack Deatherage

"God bless the seeds his hands let fall,
For the farmer he must feed us all."
      - "The Farmer" Amelia E. Barr

(2/2021) Another warm season done gone by and me, once more, thanking farmers for all they do.

Seriously, the way I garden I'd starve to death if I wasn't allowed to eat but what I grew. I did manage to grow some colorful gladiolus, zinnias and marigolds, which would have looked nice if laid wherever the DW eventually decides to dump my corpse. Though her being generally of a practical bent, she'd likely bring the flowers into the house instead.

The Youth Garden, such as it is, was a boon to the nearest groundhog who happily devoured the tomatoes and lettuces I'd managed to plant before the drought set in. One melon vine survived my abandoning it and actually grew large enough to flower just before the first frost killed it off. Such was the straw bale youth garden this second year. Only a couple Dianthus survived in the bales- to bloom madly while I wasn't around to see the flowers. Of the two herb buckets we left there, both contained oregano plants which also survived without my help - a testament to life finding a way.

A quote attributed to Helmuth von Moltke the Elder - "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force" certainly applies to my way of gardening.

The first year's straw bales were expected to have rotted down by more than half. Instead, they are as nearly intact at the end of the second summer as they were the first! Though we got an early jump on this year's garden, health issues sprang up so's to limit the efforts we made to deal with the drought. By the time I realized the groundhog was hitting the garden much earlier than the previous summer it was too late to deal with that marauder and replant- the drought had settled in for the long haul.

Farmer Ed, up in York County, had sent me a web link to a financial advisor specializing in the Ag markets. The guy's forecast for the growing season sent me over the mountain to Lowes to buy food grade buckets for a container garden I'd been wanting to experiment with for years. I'm still not sure how I convinced the DW I knew what I was doing, but I hurried over to Countryside Gardens- east of Gettysburg- to buy several bags of professional potting soil before she came to her senses. (I'm beginning to question her cognitive abilities, again.)

Before the credit card bill showed up at the PO I got the DW to look at some gladiolus in one of our favorite online bulb catalogs. I showed her what I'd like to buy. She added a few "wants" and said, "If you plant several buckets of flowers to take up to Mom's you can place the order."

"Done!"

The bucket garden was a crapshoot from the beginning. We've got this waste of space in front of the house known as a sidewalk- an extra wide sidewalk. Like 3 or 4 times wider than it needs be, especially after the state added a foot or more to it after tearing out the old "too wide" walk. Beyond the sidewalk is blacktop that catches the morning sun along with the sidewalk and the bricks that front our house. By early afternoon the front of our house has become a heat sink overloading a small window AC at the back of the house that struggles to cool about 500 square feet of space more than it was designed for. My brilliant idea was to plant some type of vine that would grow up the brick wall and shade it a bit. For that I'd have to use containers.

Everything gardening wise is an experiment for me. (Drives the poor DW nuts it does.) Because of the heat radiating from brick wall, concrete sidewalk and blacktopped road I had to find out if anything could survive there, let alone thrive. I bought white buckets and wrapped them in aluminum foil to hopefully slow the sun's rays degrading the plastic and extending the buckets' life spans. I chose glads for the experiment because they originated in Africa, I think, and might tolerate hot, dry conditions. (Turns out the hybrids I tucked into the buckets aren't as tolerant as their parent stock might have been.)

Being in for a penny I went for the pound and sowed marigolds, zinnias, dill, basil and snapdragons among the buckets as well. Then, as much out of hubris as curiosity, I planted sunflower seeds in the last two buckets. Not just any sunflowers. Oh No. That would be too easy. I planted seeds sold by Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds as 'Mongolian Giant' because the plants can reach 14 feet in height. And how cool would that be growing out of a 5-gallon bucket?

The glads we took to the DW's mom grew and flowered nicely, as did the zinnias and marigolds I sowed along with them. Those in buckets in front of our house also grew and bloomed, though the heat stressed them so 6-legged pests showed up to do some minor damages.

Of the seeds I sowed the snapdragons were the only ones to crap out with barely a bloom. (I suspect overcrowding and shading more than heat as the cause of their failure.) The dill and basil weren't particularly happy in the constant heat either, though they survived to reach maturity. The sunflowers?

Ah the sunflowers.

"You can't grow sunflowers in buckets." An older fellow told me as he and his lady walked by one evening when the plants were only 5 feet tall.

"Well, we'll see." I smiled back at them. "The seed packet says they can grow to fourteen feet tall."

"Never going to happen in a bucket." He laughed as they moved along.

The fellow was almost correct. The taller of the two flowers only got a little over eleven feet tall and the other topped out around nine feet- "average" for the unstable cultivar. Still, we had to anchor the stalks to the wall as the rare storm blew the stalks and buckets over a couple of times. Next year's experiment will be a more stable variety of sunflower - possibly 'Titan', 'Mammoth Greystripe' or 'Paul Bunyan'.

While I'm a long way from giving up on a youth garden I am rethinking how to get kids gardening during the pandemic. I'm of a mind to plant the straw bale rows with flowers rather than vegetables. Given the number of groundhogs along that stretch of Creamery Road, and no way to get rid of them, growing plants the beasts don't eat makes the most sense.

Purchasing more 5-gallon buckets and enough potting soil to fill them is the off-season plan. Rebuilding the backyard garden and continuing the sidewalk garden experiment makes the most sense. Whether sufficient money can be put back and energy enough found to do the rebuilding remains to be seen.