Stella’s community garden: A rough week
Sunday, July 06, 2008
As my three year old is fond of saying, I’m feeling crabby right now. I’m just being honest. It’s been a long week and I really didn’t want to deal with the garden tonight, but I knew I had to. I left the house after dinner armed with my gardening tools and my kneeling pad and set off for the garden. I consoled myself with thoughts of women in WWII tending their victory gardens while their husbands were away at war. At least my husband was just sitting at home nursing a stomachache and watching our kids. Sometimes it helps me to think about how much harder life would be for me if I were born pretty much anywhere else or at any other time in history. Sometimes. Sometimes it just makes me feel like a weakling and exacerbates my crabby mood. Luckily tonight it helped.
The garden was a virtual forest of weeds. Seriously. It is disheartening. I spent an hour and a half weeding tonight and I’m just over half done. I’m going to have to go back tomorrow night. My inner perfectionist hates this. I don’t like being bad at things, which makes the early stages of learning new things hard for me. I was one of those kids who never had to study for anything and still got the highest grade in the class on a test. My bratty inner child doesn’t like to have to work hard to get results. I can tell that gardening is going to be very good for me.
The good news is that my tomatoes, lettuce, leeks, carrots, peppers, summer squash, zucchini, lemon balm, cilantro and dill are all fine. The bad news is that my parsley, Thai basil, peas and possibly my ground cherries and cucumbers have been overrun by weeds. I say possibly with the cucumbers and ground cherries because I’m just not sure. I think I may know which plant is the ground cherry after looking it up, but there is a weed that looks similar to a cucumber plant that I found on the website Megan linked to in the comments of my last update. I think I’m going to rip everything I’m not sure of up and just get some plants at the farmer’s market or the local garden center. A lot of them are 50% off right now anyway. I think I’m going to just chalk this up as a learning experience.
The other good news is that I have a very nice plot neighbor named Konstantine. He introduced himself today and offered to water my plot if I need some help. He works in the building next to the garden and he knows that I have two little kids. He gave me his number so I can call him if I need help. I really appreciated his offer. It was just what I needed to feel better. Nothing makes me glow like meeting genuinely kind and helpful people. Now the trick will be getting past my reserved Minnesotan personality and actually asking for help when I need it.
This experience is turning out to be challenging in ways I didn’t expect. I think that’s really a good thing. I think this experiment will be a success even if all I manage to grow is myself.
(image by Sassy Gardener via flickr.)
Yes, Stella, gardening CAN be challenging and weeds make most gardeners crabby! But I think once you start harvesting those delicious, organic, grown-with-your-own-hands vegetables you’ll forget about what a pain in the butt weeds are. You’re doing great! Keep up the good work!
Gardening is constant during the summer months and is most difficult
in the beginning as all those tender plants demand weeding, like a newborn child in constant need of being suckled. My garden needs weeding and reading your piece reminds me of this. The upside is that if you persist at clubbing those weeds in the beginning, the plants will be off to a good start, leafing out and shading all the soil underneath them, cutting off sunlight to weed seeds just waiting to germinate!
One method that may reduce how much you weed:
try to weed in the morning on a day you know will be hot. As you weed, you don’t even need to remove them, just knock off any big chunks of soil from the roots, which the sun will hopefully scorch, yes, die evil weeds!! In this way all the weeds you kill and the weed seeds that you bring to the surface through cultivation will be killed.
Hey some weeds are also pretty tasty and nutritious: purslane, wood sorrel, chickweed, lamb’s quarters, to name a few.
I appreciate your honesty and perseverence in continuing your gardening project and look forward to future updates.
Thanks for the support guys! Victoria, I looked up photos of the weeds you mentioned and lambs quarters and purslane are the two main weeds I have in my garden! That’s great! At least I have useful weeds.
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