Garden 2020: When crisis inspires gardening

In times of crisis, people return to gardening. It happened in WWI and WWII with Victory Gardens, and it's happening this year with the current pandemic. Seed stores are selling out, and potting soil can't be found anywhere. The uncertainty of not knowing if the grocery store will have what we need when we visit, coupled with an urge to do SOMETHING when we feel as if the whole world is falling apart, seems to whisper to us the memories of our grandparents' yards - with their raspberry hedge bursting with juicy treasure, and neat rows of squash just waiting for the Thanksgiving table.

Gardening is known to be therapeutic. It has been proven to help reduce anxiety and depression, reduces stress, and can lower blood pressure. When special tools and care is taken, it can help keep fingers and wrists limber to slow the progression of arthritis, and it counts as low-impact exercise. Even if you yielded nothing else... wouldn't that be enough incentive to start a garden this year?

This is our 14th year of urban container gardening. Because I'm being asked a LOT of questions right now from people on multiple continents about our garden and how we do what we do... I wanted to start this year's gardening posts by sharing where we began. Because yes, our garden may look like we know what we're doing NOW... but it took us a LOOOONG time, and years of trials and errors to get here. Please, ask away. If I can help even one person avoid some of the mistakes we learned the hard way... that would absolutely make my day!


This is what our garden looked like near the end of the season, in 2007. The first photo is the "south half" and you can see: tomatoes that aren't planted deep enough and barely produced, pumpkins that never fruited, (though they did make a beautiful arbor!) and carrots that were tinier than a baby's pinkie and bitter when we finally picked them.

The second photo is the "north half" and here are: pumpkins that didn't get enough light and never grew, herbs that produced too MUCH and bolted before we could use them, and - honestly I've forgotten what we tried in the orange and black pots... it might have been peppers, or possibly salad greens. *shrugs* Whatever it was, however, you can clearly see that by August they had barely done a thing.

I want to share this because I've heard a few friends say that they lost interest in gardening when their first year didn't look like our 10th... 12th... 13th...

Please, don't compare and DON'T give up! This is where we started. This is what our first year looked like, and it has taken us 14 years of learning, failure, and slowly saving up to acquire some of the more pricey tools that we now have in our little oasis. Small space gardening IS worth it... but it takes time and patience. Two tomato plants in 5-gallon buckets and a pair of favorite herbs would be better than where we began. Start small. Learn slowly. And add one or two things each year.

For our garden this year, we are needing to make allowances as we may not be able to purchase our precious herbs. Life will go on, and we will plant what we can. We might have extra salad greens where the herbs would normally grow. Adaptations will be made, or we'll do without. But our 2020 oasis has begun.

Here is a quick sneak-peek at our 8'x16" deck garden as it sits mostly dormant, awaiting our Memorial Day planting this morning.