A Harvest of Knowledge

The autumnal equinox has come and gone.  The nights are getting longer and the days cooler.  Trees are dressed in their finest colors, and squirrels are busy gathering nuts.  It’s definitely Fall here in the northern part of the United States, and that means the end of the growing season.  Harvest time!  For our family it means the end of our first season of vegetable gardening, and what a season it has been!

We started in January with a question.  “ Wouldn't it be great if we could grow our own vegetables?”  We live in a city lot with four active children who like to run around the yard; we don’t have much room to spare.  We certainly don’t have the room for a long row-style garden.  Yet there was one unused square patch of grass off the back deck.  I wondered if we could grow vegetables in raised boxes.  That way we wouldn't have to dig up the grass or worry about where and how deep the sprinkler lines are buried.  I mentioned the idea to a friend, and she said “Oh, like square-foot gardening.”  Square-foot what?  I looked it up.  Yes, like square-foot gardening!  It’s a method by which one can grow 100% of the vegetables in 20% of the space, and it recommends doing so in raised beds.  The space we had to use would accommodate six 3’x6’ boxes.  Half of each box would be 12” deep to accommodate root vegetables, and the other half would be 6-8” deep.  My oldest son, Zac, found the size boxes we wanted in a catalog at a very reasonable price.  Best of all, the boxes could be put together with no tools.  In addition to raised boxes, square-foot gardening recommends growing vertical.  With some grid paper and careful thought, a trellis system was designed to maximize the spaces between the boxes and at the north end of the garden.  It was decided to use bamboo poles and a snap system to connect them.  The material orders were placed and the commitment began.

We learned that the best soil is made from scratch.  We’d never put much thought into what makes up soil until this project.  We started with vermiculite and peat moss, and then mixed in manure and compost.  Horse manure was first.  We learned that even fresh horse manure doesn't burn delicate seeds and plants.  In the days when horse-drawn buggies made deliveries to the house, horse manure was “garden gold.”  A housewife considered it a great day if the horse pooped in her yard.  She’d go get her shovel, scoop it up, and dump it on the vegetable garden for some of the biggest and tastiest produce in the neighborhood.  We also added rabbit and chicken manure.  Each kind of manure contributes a different nutritional value to the soil.  We also noticed that the kind of animal poop we should be putting on the garden is from herbivores.  Never did we expect to become poopologists from growing vegetables!  But, even when we thought we had the perfect soil mix, something went wrong.  Almost as soon as we put our tomato seedlings in the ground, they turned purple and started to wither.   Yikes!  Zac remembered seeing something in our reference book that looked like our purple plants.  Sure enough, there was a picture of a tomato plant that could have been taken from one of ours.  The problem was low phosphate.  The solution was to add rock phosphate.  Unfortunately we live hours from a major city, and we were not going to be able to acquire rock phosphate in our small town.  A neighbor told us that she always put eggs shells under her tomato plants, so we had eggs for lunch that day and every tomato plant had crushed eggs shells slipped under their beginning root systems.  An internet order and a tense few days to await delivery and the rock phosphate was added to every box.  Within days the tomato plants started to turn green again and perk up. 

The next question was, “What do we want to grow?”  There are as many theories on what to grow as there are people to write about them.  Some say grow what you can’t buy locally.  Others say grow what is more expensive in the grocery stores.  And yet others say grow only what you normally buy to eat.  So we had a family discussion and decided on a mix of things that we normally eat, things that we’d like to try, and then I added things that we should be including in our diet but can’t because they are not available locally.  We made a list of everything from tomatoes and hot and sweet peppers to five kinds of summer squash, two varieties of winter squash, four kinds of beans, three varieties of peas, beets, carrots, broccoli, kale, spinach, Swiss chard, strawberries, onions, various herbs, and an amazing squash called a tromboncino, which can be both a summer or winter squash and can only be found in an heirloom variety.  A friend was so encouraged by our endeavor that she gifted to us green onions and asparagus from her well established garden.   

Now that we had made our growing selections, “Could we could grow heirloom vegetables so that we could harvest seeds and sustain our garden?“  Yes we could, but that meant starting almost everything from seed.  We quickly learned that the number of days until harvest marked on the package doesn't include germination time, and yet germination time can be faster with heated seed trays.  Zac and I spent a cold March afternoon tucking seeds into our heated seed trays.  We were having what I thought was a conversation on miracles that was unrelated to seeds when Zac held up a tiny seed, and said, “Yes, Mom it really is a miracle.”  “What do you mean, Zac.”   “It really is a miracle that we’ll be eating vegetables and fruit in August that come from plants that grow from these tiny seeds.”  It was one of the speechless Mommy moments that reinforced that if we had just one something to eat out of the garden, the lesson would not be wasted.   When it was time to plant seeds directly in the garden, we had a little homeschooling biology fun.  We planted the beans in the garden, and we planted some in a jar.  We took a piece of black construction paper and wound it inside a clear glass jar, and then we placed a bean seed between the jar and the paper.  We filled the jar with water just until the paper absorbed all the water.  The boys made their hypothesis as to which would appear first, the shoots or the roots.  When the shoots appeared in our jar seeds, they were also appearing in the garden. We had a sneak peek at what was happening underground by watching our jar.

If we were going to the trouble of growing heirloom seeds, “Could we grow an organic garden?”  When we transplanted seedlings into peat pots, the plants were fed fish emulsion.  A stinky process, but one the plants apparently loved.  In our history lessons we had learned that Squanto taught the pilgrims to plant their corn kernels with a fish.  Squanto’s advice began to take on reality as we watched our young plants grow green and healthy with fish emulsion.  For bug control, we companion planted.  Sage was planted with carrots to discourage carrot flies, borage to repel tomato horn worms, nasturtium for squash bugs and whiteflies, and marigolds to protect beans and squash from beetles and eggplant and tomatoes from harmful nematodes.  As the garden began to grow, we began to see these pretty little white butterflies.  I wasn't so sure that they were as harmless as they were pretty.  Turns out they were cabbage moths and the cute little green inch worms that they produced were wreaking havoc on our broccoli and kale.  A solution of diluted soap sprayed on the plants in the early morning and hand picking the worms off the plants kept the damage in check.  Another weapon in our arsenal was the ladybug.  We bought a ladybug hatchery and ordered the larvae.  Good thing too because if I’d seen ladybug larvae in the garden I would have thought they were ugly enough to be the bad guys.  We watched the larvae go through their lifecycle and develop into ten pink ladybugs.  The best thing about their color was that they were easy to spot among the foliage once released into the garden.  But, as the summer progressed and the bad bugs became more prevalent, we had to move on to stronger tactics.  The next release of ladybugs was an order of more than 1,500 that were turned out in batches over a three day period.  It was a little like sending out the troops in shifts.  The mass ladybug releases coincided with hanging packets of lacewing eggs on the trellises and the application of beneficial nematodes into the soil.  Within only a few days there was a noticeable improvement in all the plants, but especially the squash.  New green leaves began sprouting from what had been yellowing plants.  The beneficial nematodes were waging war on the bad larvae in the soil that was damaging root structures.  I compared the release of the nematodes to faith.  Nematodes are microscopic.  We can’t see them unless we look at them under a microscope, but we can see the evidence of what they do.  In early September we had cucumber beetles, despite that we didn't grow cucumbers.  They had multiplied so quickly that they were virtually swarming.  They decimated the beans within days and were even attacking both the sweet and hot peppers, varieties that are supposed to be bug resistant.   I finally relented and sprayed the entire garden with neem oil. Neem oil is an organic product.  Its only side effect is that it can be harmful to bees, which are the very creatures that we were relying on for pollination.  The lavender planted in the flower beds near the garden attracted the bees. But it was either the beetles or the bees, and the beetles far outnumbered the bees.  One application was enough to stem the tide of destruction and reduce the beetle population to something more equitable in the bug battle that waged under the leaves and in the soil.    

Was all the planning and effort worth the results?  Oh, yes.  All summer we had the best tasting and freshest fruits, vegetables, and herbs on our table.  We ate what was in season and planned our meals around what was available in the garden.  My baby daughter had her first taste of strawberry fresh from the plant.  My older children ate sugar snap peas right off the vines.  They loved them so much that I had to show them to wait until the pods were as long as the palm of their hand and as big around as their thumb.   Patience isn't a strong suit for my 5 year old.  He’d pull the pods off and then measure them.  “It’s big enough Mom,” he’d call out.  “Well, that’s a good thing,” I’d chuckle as I’d watch him stuff it in his mouth.  Many of the plants produced abundantly and we have stocked our freezers with tomatoes, leafy greens, squash, and peppers to enjoy during the winter.  We discovered some new favorites and learned a lot about botany along the way. 

In late August, Zac was helping me dice tomatoes and I asked him if he remembered our conversation in March about miracles.  “Sure do,” he smiled as he popped a juicy tomato into his mouth.  It was a lesson we’ll be happy to live again next year.